by T. C. Rypel
Gloomy over his lot and necessarily wary—he still carried enough Wunderknechten gold to tempt a blind hermit—Orozco discreetly searched the seedy waterfront inns for someone who might lead him to Armand Perigor.
He would sidle into the raucous din of a lamplit auberge and ease through the two-pronged assaults of braying laughter and blaring off-key sea chanties. Bellying up to the bar amidst clouds of pungent blue smoke lilting from pipes of a dozen lands, Orozco would order ale and engage the conversation of the brightest-looking boor within earshot.
“I’m looking for a man they call Le Corbeau—”
“Hey—Gingras! This scarecrow’s lookin’ for a crow!”
“Might that be a Spanish crow, Spagnole?”
Whereupon, Orozco would join into the laughter and back-slapping of his new-found compadres. By the third inn, the joke had already grown staler than the tobacco smoke that clung to his every inhalation. By the fourth, Orozco had already backed out of one at gunpoint and been punched in the face at another because a drunken lout had thought he’d called the man’s woman something rather worse than corbeau.
Dialect was, among other things, proving a problem.
Orozco left the waterfront for a somewhat less seamy area of Collioure, noting that he was watched suspiciously by troops garrisoned at the old twelfth-century fortification overlooking the sea. He had by now decided that if this odd quest was to claim him in some ignoble fashion, at least he would keep the Wunderknechten gold from winding up as some bandit’s spoil.
He buried it on the outskirts of town.
One night as he strolled near the docks, uncertain of what to do next, he was accosted by a woman of obvious intent.
“Hey, Spaniard,” she called out in a husky voice, “I hear you’re looking for crow.”
Orozco knit his brows in amusement. He eyed her lengthwise. She was not unattractive, though her face was a bit too broad. Sloe-eyed, with short auburn hair, and rather statuesque. But much too self-assured, in these environs, to be without hidden accomplices.
“Not that kind of crow,” he replied, scratching his beard casually as he cast licking glances toward the huddled warehouses on the shadowy pier.
“How do you know until you try?” she asked seductively.
Orozco sniffed and walked on. Clopping hoofbeats sounded in a nearby lane. Two soldiers on patrol. He watched them until they were out of sight, and when he peered back over his shoulder, the woman was gone.
Two nights later he encountered the same trollop in a different quarter of town. This time she was clad in shirt and jack, dark breeches and high black riding boots, topped by a feathered slouch hat. She crouched in the doorway of a millinery shop.
“Well…the Spaniard who hunts crow.”
He was naturally suspicious but curious. “Nice hat,” he said for openers. “Did you steal it in there?”
She laughed coarsely. “Care to try again? There won’t be any patrols by here for the next half hour.”
“I told you I wasn’t interested in your wares. Eh…that’s not completely accurate. What I mean is that right now—”
She drew a pistol from behind her, aiming it at Orozco’s face as she slid to her feet, back braced against the shop. “And I’m not selling anything, unless I like the ring of both your words and your money—I wouldn’t do that.”
His eyes must have betrayed that he’d been toying with the notion of going for his own pistol. But her hand was steady and her gaze never flinched. She’d have to be taken with cunning.
Orozco smiled calmly. “Your move, then.”
“Tell me how much it’s worth to you to find Le Corbeau—and why.”
“Not all that much,” Orozco replied, gesturing for emphasis. “He’s just a friend. I’m looking him up, that’s all. I’ve a proposition for him.”
The woman eased the pistol barrel forward, leveling it at his heart now. “Corbeau has no Spaniard friends.”
She bobbed her head. Three men dropped into the street from the roofs and the arch above a nearby crossing lane. Surrounding Sergeant Orozco, they closed in, sleek wheel-lock barrels poised to spit leaden death.
“Now, Spaniard,” the woman said menacingly, “you’re going to tell me your business here while you empty your pockets. The pistol first.”
Orozco cursed to himself. He felt like a callow recruit. In the next instant he’d made his decision. He moved to comply, two fingers of his right hand going gingerly to the pistol grip at his belt. As he tossed his pistol into the street, Orozco’s left hand shot out and snared the woman’s gun barrel. He twisted it skyward sharply, lunged forward to grab her for a shield against her cronies.
Her knee snapped up and slammed Orozco in the groin. His breath burst from his lungs, and he doubled over, losing his grip on her gun, expecting the searing impact of a lead ball in his back.
He peered up and she smacked him in the jaw with the slim barrel of the wheel-lock. White pinpoints flared across his vision. He saw her lips move but heard no sound. The gun barrel arced toward his skull. Blackness engulfed him.
When he recovered consciousness, Orozco found himself bound hand and foot. He was in a small, stuffy room, lying on the floor. The woman sat before him, straddling a chair, her arms resting on its back. She smiled to hear him groan.
“Well—that was stimulating, wasn’t it?”
“Bitch!” Orozco growled.
“I could have blown your ugly head off, asshole.”
“Go to hell.” The sergeant’s head throbbed relentlessly as he struggled into a seated position. The woman’s friends stirred slightly to see him move but remained in the shadows of the single taper that lit the room.
“Now,” she said, “do you want to tell me who you really are, and why you seek Le Corbeau?”
“Orozco,” he answered groggily. “Carlos Orozco. Like I said before, Corbeau and I are friends—”
She made a scoffing sound.
“—we spent a winter together in Burgundy once, not so long ago.”
Her expression froze. “What? You—are you from the Japonais? Gonji?”
His head sagged in a heavy nod, and he winced at the pain.
“Why in hell didn’t you say so?”
Orozco fumed. “They said to mention The Crow in Collioure, not Gonji. Mierda! Nobody said anything about having to fight some hellion wench to find him.”
She waxed pensive but still watched him suspiciously. “Then—then you’ll be looking for Perigor, too. Christ! Why didn’t you say you were from the samurai?”
“Oh—oui, I should have gone to the auberge and announced that I was a friend of probably the most wanted man in all Europe, eh?”
She smiled at his accent, then eyed the others. “What do you think? Do we trust him?” Mixed mutters came in response, but the consensus was non.
She chuckled dryly. “You’ll have to forgive my friends. Only by caution do they stay alive. I’m Genevieve Giguere. You can call me Jenny.”
“That’s not what I’ll call you when you let me out of this. Now let me out of this!”
“Patience. Healthy suspicion is what keeps me alive, too. If you are who you say you are, then you’re only a short, uncomfortable ride from your goal. But if not—if we’re followed—” She drew a knifing hand across her throat.
They gagged the cursing Orozco and wrapped him tightly in sailcloth. He was dragged out into a misty night and thrown onto the back of a dray, then covered with heaps of straw.
The jostling ride over the rain-rutted track did wonders for his pounding head.
* * * *
Le Corbeau lounged in the verdant pasture at the edge of the village, watching the sheep graze in the placid twilight. He drank in the rich scents of pine and wildflowers and churned earth from the early
harvest. He was barefoot, clad only in sleeveless shirt and breeches, still sweating lightly from a run at the first fireflies of dusk with the village children. He held one that crawled over his hand, unhurried, blooming now and again with its magical glow.
Corbeau wondered whether the true explanation of the firefly’s wonderful light was anything akin to the fanciful tale he’d spun for the children.
As night descended with a moist breath of rain in the mistral wind, he was alerted to the sound of an approaching dray. Saw Jenny Giguere at the head of the small escort contingent. Le Corbeau leapt to his feet and trotted toward them, a few children emerging from a stoop and falling in behind him in gleeful chase again.
Jenny cast him a salute and motioned for the men to unleash whatever it was that struggled against the sides of the rickety dray. Corbeau lofted a child up into his arms, peering at Giguere quizzically.
When the gag was removed, Orozco emitted a harsh stream of invective in mixed Spanish and French. Corbeau ordered all the children to fall back from the wagon.
“Diablo! Puha! Demon-bitch! Wench!”
Corbeau listened in wonder, eyes flickering with recognition before he saw the face. “I’d know that terrible pronunciation anywhere! Sergeant Carlos Orozco—why have you come here?”
“Parler francais comme une vache espagnole,” Jenny muttered. “To murder the French language.”
“What?” Orozco snapped.
“Never mind. Did Gonji send you?” Corbeau pressed.
Untied now but seated until circulation could return to his hands and feet, Orozco rubbed at them as he related news of the quest into Burgundy. Corbeau dismissed the children and lent Orozco his full attention, eyes aglow with fervid battle-flames, for the French highwaymen under Perigor had taken the bitter retreat as hard as had Gonji’s band.
Jenny Giguere tossed Orozco his sword and pistol, two daggers and a stiletto. One at a time, making him stretch painfully for each.
Orozco checked his weapons sullenly, replacing them on his person. He ambled up close to Jenny, squinting in anger, one eye twitching like the lid of a stew pot. He cocked an arm over his head sharply, the pistol butt poised to crush her skull.
“I ought to let you have it good,” he grated through clenched teeth.
“Easy, Carlos,” Corbeau said. “She’s a hellcat.”
Jenny extended her hand to Orozco. “Bygones, eh? I hope I didn’t injure your privates back there.”
Low laughter rumbled up from the other men.
“Never mind my privates,” Orozco replied, sniffing back his embarrassment. “I should have known you were one of Perigor’s men.”
“Merci,” Jenny said with a curtsy and a swoop of her slouch hat. “That I am. But I’m also more woman than you could handle, old man.”
“That’s something we’ll have to put to the test at a later date.”
“All right,” Corbeau said, steering their attention his way. “To business.” He sent two men after Perigor and gestured for Orozco to follow him to the village.
“Henri!” he called to a boy watching them from where he tended his flock. “La piece de campagne, mon artilleur!”
The boy’s face lit up, and he raced toward the village, leaving his staff behind him.
“Your boy?” Orozco asked. Corbeau shook his head no. “Your village?” Again The Crow responded negatively. “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“I sort of…take care of them,” Corbeau said a bit sheepishly.
“More than that,” Jenny Giguere added. “You’ll find he’s the village patriarch.”
Corbeau shrugged. “One can steal only so much for oneself, I think. And my intentions aren’t altogether altruistic—I get back from this village at least as much as I invest. Look around you. This is my pastoral retreat. Nothing ill touches me here. It’s rather like…a piece of lost Arcadia, eh? That peaceful place you and Gonji have spoken of.” He smiled and punctuated the association with a nod of satisfaction.
They entered a grain storage barn, Orozco casting Corbeau a puzzled look to see the boy, Henri, seated atop something huge and bulky, covered over with a large tarpaulin.
“Henri, here, is my able gunner,” the Crow said. “Show him, Henri.”
The boy swung down and dragged the tarpaulin with him. Orozco gasped to see the great barrel of an enormous cannon. When the cover was completely removed, the rest of the armament stood open to view in neat array—piled cannon balls, powder kegs, and a formidable-looking item of equipment Orozco had never seen the like of before.
“A multiple-barrel musket,” Corbeau explained, running a hand lovingly over the bank of juxtaposed musket barrels atop their sturdy field stand. “My own improvement on the royal gunmaker’s invention. Tested and passed. The latest in field ordnance.”
“What’s all this going to cost?” Orozco wondered.
“Nothing. Tell Gonji he can keep his Templar money. This one is our treat. We lost good friends to that army of the dead.”
They shook hands.
“I’ll tell Armand Perigor the word is given,” Corbeau said, eyes twinkling. “We knew Gonji would be back.”
“Does she go along?” the sergeant asked gruffly, tipping his head toward Jenny Giguere.
“I have interests to protect here,” she answered for herself, “but I’ll be here…if you come back. In case you’re still looking for a tussle.”
Orozco hawked and spat, strutting out of the barn behind a mask of affected disdain.
* * * *
The sergeant sat mounted beside Brett Jarret, Normand Gareau, and Le Corbeau. A few brigands he’d never seen before also gathered, armed for a siege, under a livery shop canopy across the street from the Dragon Scale Inn. Even the local soldiery had parted to allow the band’s leader, Armand Perigor, to pass as he came in out of the gentle rain.
Orozco was amazed at the influence Perigor exerted over the territory: it seemed that all the right palms had been greased—they’d even be enjoying a military escort for a goodly distance such that none would question the powerful ordnance they carried and transported by wagon.
He listened to Perigor’s commanding voice in the now quiet inn as Corbeau and the others snickered and bobbed their heads:
“You want action and gold?” Perigor was saying. “Then flaunt your valor. Let’s see the proof-marks on your breastplates and the scars on your sweet faces. Our legendary samurai comrade once again requires our aid…”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Gonji’s whirlwind crossing of the Alpine passes left both him and his valiant black mare Nichiyoobi haggard and fatigued. But once the western slopes were left behind, there was no time to rest, to recoup lost strength.
The myriad menaces of oppressed Burgundy immediately made themselves apparent.
On his first night in the province, searching out a village on the maps which might afford him sanctuary, the samurai was drawn by a cacophony of human screams and unnatural sounds wafting up from a shallow valley between two sparsely treed hills. Cresting a knoll, he scowled to witness the scene below: Two haunters of night, borne on pointed black wings, were assaulting a lonely farmhouse. The house appeared to be on fire.
Gonji steered Nichi into the valley as he calculated the best approach. Unlimbering his longbow, he brought the steed to a halt and dismounted at about three-hundred yards. The creatures squalled and flapped madly as they beat at the front and back doors with some sort of bludgeons. Gonji could hear children’s voices, shrill with terror, within the house, and the desperate bellowing of a man.
The monsters’ hovering kept them fairly stable in his aim. He nocked, rotated through an overhead Zen draw, and fired. His first shaft missed high, slanting over the creature at the front of the farmhouse. The second did likewise, this time passing over the
second bat-winged horror. And the latter creature took note of the war arrow’s errant hiss. It squawked in warning. By the time its fellow had taken heed and searched out the human attacker, a fourteen-fist clothyard shaft had whistled down from the sky to rip through its wing, shredding it.
It wailed and launched into a tipsy flight, gaining height with great difficulty. The pair seemed to converse in the sky above the corral, where two horses stamped and bucked. Gonji readied for the impending strafing attack that never came. The hideous creatures, rather reminiscent of the stone gargoyles set atop church ramparts, chose to decline, beating a petulant, squalling northwestern retreat.
Gonji realized what this might bode as he watched them disappear into a cloud-mounted night sky.
He took to the saddle and pounded down to the farmhouse. Saw that the fire within had diminished, likely under control now, though inky smoke belched from a window on the far side. He called out to the people within. No reply came. He tried another dialect, uncertain, cursing the French language that always caused him such trouble.
Again no response. He dismounted and thumped on the front door. It burst open, and a man launched out at him behind a pruning hook on a long pole. Gonji swore and parried it aside with the hilt of his katana, not drawing the weapon in his eagerness to display friendly intent.
It was several minutes before he could cajole the family outside, calm them, and make some sense of their caterwauling. The farmer’s wife and young son were unreachable, crying and babbling incoherently. The man himself and his daughter, who was about thirteen and bore the longest mane of hair he had ever seen, soon were settled enough to attempt a lucid exchange of information.
The dialect was nigh impossible to follow, but the samurai was able to piece together the story that these “bat-men” had come to scare the children, ostensibly because of something the Wunderknechten had done. They’d killed a wolf, or something like a wolf, that was the property of the Farouche. Now no children were safe. That was their punishment.
