Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  “No more putting us on parade, eh, Salguero? Listen, muchachos, how about we close the door so I can be alone with…mi capitan for a few momentos, no?”

  The sentries smiled cunningly, as Buey set the tray on a stool and rubbed the knuckles of one fist. Eyeing Salguero portentously, one of them shut and locked the heavy oaken portal.

  Buey smiled at the captain under raised eyebrows. Salguero rose to meet his challenge, fists clenched.

  “You bastard,” the captain whispered coarsely.

  “Uh-uh—first see what I’ve brought you to eat.”

  Buey swept aside the top linen cloth to display a steaming meal and flask on one half of the tray. Casting a quick glance to the window, he plucked the edge of the linen beneath it.

  “Sergeant Orozco fixed this for you himself—and something special for dessert—”

  Buey wrenched the cloth aside. Two pistols lay on one side of the tray. The big lancer grinned impishly, and Salguero backed away a step in confusion, ran his fingers through his hair.

  “What—?”

  “You see, capitan, Orozco and me, we been thinking. It’s not so good here no more. We did our best, but some…higher authorities, well, they just don’t seem to appreciate us. Orozco’s got this wild idea about maybe one more action before we retire to someplace quiet. Something to do with Port-Bou. If you’ll lead us…”

  Salguero could scarcely believe his ears. The madness of what they suggested had occurred to him many times, but never had he voiced it.

  “How many men? How many sympathetic?” he asked in a rush of emotion.

  “That’s touchy. We know better who not to trust. But maybe eight from the patrol and another dozen who stayed here are good.”

  Salguero shook his head. “A score of men. We’ve got to get past the flower of de la Vega’s regiment.”

  “We have a good escape plan. Leave that to us. Just be ready to travel at ten bells of evening. What about the witch? Do we warn her of Nunez’s siege?”

  Salguero paced a moment, rubbing his neck thoughtfully. “No. She’ll have to deal with it herself. Maybe she’s watching through her magic viewing room. I’m sorry that we may have taken her off her guard, but I do have enough loyalty left to Spain and the Holy Office that I can’t bring myself to drive them into a deathtrap. Let God Himself decide the outcome of this power struggle. What about Gonji? I can’t leave him to the Inquisition.”

  “Ai-ieeee,” Buey fretted, scowling, “he’s well guarded. But we’ve taken him into account. Don’t worry—now, up with your fists.”

  “Que?”

  “I can’t hit a man who doesn’t at least expect it.”

  Buey hit him with a short, straight left that snapped back the captain’s head and brought blood to his lips instantly. Salguero dazedly rubbed his mouth, streaking his hand and face. Buey took him by the shoulders and, with an indulgent look, forced him into a seat on the floor. The Ox strode to the door and pounded it with a meaty fist.

  “I always wanted to do that,” he said to the sniggering sentries as he indicated the downed Salguero.

  He clapped one of them on the back with a playful blow that knocked off the soldier’s pot helmet.

  * * * *

  Gonji sat cross-legged in the dank, coal-black cellar; a cold, night-blooming lotus, radiating hostility.

  For a time after his capture he had gone inert, beginning the meditative process he knew he needed to facilitate the healing of his battered body, to reestablish control of his spiritual being. Then anger had inflamed his innards as pain broke his concentration. He hated the Spaniards—soldier and civilian alike—for what they had done to him. He hated their Church for what it intended to do. But most of all he loathed himself for his stupidity, for having so easily allowed himself to be taken. Experience, courage, and skill had seen him through the adventures of a lifetime almost unscathed. Now he had permitted himself to be ignobly captured in a snare any callow young samurai would have avoided.

  He recalled his flashing thoughts at the time: He wished not to involve Salguero, who might have come to his defense if he had initiated a fight. But that had been foolish; the captain was in no better circumstances. Better that Gonji should have died honorably, a fighting man to the last. Failing that, he might have slit his own belly rather than be ridden down in his flight like some mindless game animal.

  Now he was without his daisho. He could not even atone for his shame with seppuku.

  And just as painfully, he was without Tora.

  The gallant animal had long inspired deep affection, had been his lone companion on the road and in battle, more often than not. An inexplicable bond had existed between them. And Gonji had let him die without even being able to deliver the mercy stroke himself.

  The dull pain of anguish mingled with the more poignant agonies his body suffered. His hands were bound behind him at the wrists, and his arms were lashed tightly about his sides. Fettered as he was, he could not tell whether any of his battered ribs were broken, but he could not twist his torso without sharp pain. His face felt tight and sticky with caked blood, and he believed his nose was broken. His left eye was swollen completely shut. His head throbbed maddeningly.

  He spat out blood from his throat as he considered the irony of his state. Yesterday he had been master of his destiny. He had been witness to intriguing new wonders, had entertained tantalizing new hopes and factors in the puzzling equation of his itinerant life. The abrupt and complete turnabout of his karma had shocked his entire system. Now, despite his stoical training, he could not accept the change in his fortunes. He could not reconcile himself to his bleak situation. The darkness served up illusions. He kept imagining that he was in the world of dreams. Soon—soon he would awaken, his swords at his side, Tora nickering at his shoulder.

  But each time he tried to convince himself of the nightmare he occupied, to awaken himself from its horrors, the sweating, puffy face of the guard would appear in greasy torchlight at the tiny door grating above the stair.

  “Witch!” the soldier kept growling at him. “Your foul sorcery can’t free you now, can it? Garlic hangs from the lintel, and the cross of Christ seals the door.”

  All through the day his tormenting warden checked and rechecked him infuriatingly. Mocking him with self-righteous vitriol, ever crossing himself in a fashion Gonji found insufferable, as though the samurai were one of the walking undead.

  Troopers brought him food and water, setting it at the top of the stairs at gunpoint, and then crowding about the grating to watch him and taunt him.

  They did not untie his hands, and evidently they expected to revel in the spectacle of their prisoner worrying at his meal like a dog. Gonji said nothing and left the meal untouched.

  “Mapache,” one sentry said as he gathered up the uneaten food. “What those colonists across the sea call raccoona! An evil raccoona—that’s what you look like! They said you could transform yourself into an animal.”

  Gonji eyed him balefully, but inside he was warmed by a burst of perverse humor. Both his eyes must be blackened, like those of a scavenging animal he had heard of in the Americas. That’s what the guard had meant. His buried sense of humor emerged to rescue his sanity. They could not break his spirit with their taunts.

  From that point on Gonji began to use the guards’ presence as a practice device for his own powers of concentration; he gradually blocked both their sight and sound from his consciousness, as surely as if they were walled away by successive layers of cotton batting.

  In the early evening, Colonel Nunez arrived under heavy personal guard with the intention of questioning the samurai. Finding Gonji in a state of meditation, the impatient officer employed every device he knew, from coaxing to outrageous threat, to gain his attention. It was not until he cocked his fist for a blow to the head that the colonel
snapped Gonji from his reverie. He never delivered the intended blow: The samurai’s mask of sheer defiance warded him back, sending him off muttering words of impotent rage and promises of Inquisition terrors to come. Gonji felt a swell of pride over the small triumph.

  As he sat in the enshrouding blackness of the second night, listening to the shouting and gunfire in the streets above, he intuited that he was somehow involved, but he felt less a principal than a detached observer, expecting nothing, whatever the meaning and outcome of the fighting. It was much later that he would hear of the action of Captain Salguero and his faithful command.

  When the din had ended, Gonji’s guard peered through the grating, strained face glowing redly beside the cresset torch. “Monster, devil—your witchery twists the senses of the king’s own subjects!”

  Gonji had mustered enough social grace to extend him the courtesy of an angry glower.

  Not long after, Pablo Cardenas’ face had appeared at the portal, staring down for a long time with an expression that was unreadable. Gonji could only wonder what was on the man’s mind, for the solicitor had said at length, “I’m sorry, senor. I don’t know why, but I am.” And then he was gone.

  * * * *

  At midnight, the maverick lancer Montoya was brought to Gonji’s cell. He shuffled down the stairs sullenly, probing the floor-seated prisoner with surly glances. Evidently a prisoner, he was not bound as the samurai was, and Gonji found something suspicious in the look he exchanged with the harpy warden.

  Gonji extended his legs flat on the floor and executed an easy series of rolling stretches to unkink his thews. Montoya snorted as he watched, then began to prattle insultingly, strutting around the cell like a wildcat spoiling for a fight.

  Gonji ignored the boorish soldier’s voice, concentrating instead on the pattern and sound of his movements as he settled in a crouch with eyes closed to slits and chin lolling on his chest, as if he would drift off to sleep in the manner of a crane.

  When he heard the knife softly withdrawn from Montoya’s boot, he did not react. Nor did he show any cognizance of the man’s stealthy footfalls. It was when he felt the parting of air before the knifing lunge that he sprang to his feet and whirled out of the way. Urgency galvanized his aching body.

  “Come on! Come on, you Jappo devil!” Montoya snarled, circling warily, watching Gonji’s deadly feet.

  The samurai wasted no motion, and hard black eyes locked onto the Spaniard’s own gleaming orbs through the dim glow of the telltale portal torch. He could feel the guard watching above, the instigator of the attack.

  Montoya feinted time and again, dropping his blade point in anticipation of the blocking kick that never came.

  Suddenly Gonji stamped forward, causing Montoya to backstep rapidly until he was almost against a wall. A diversionary high kick drew the blade up to eye level, then Gonji’s darting side snap kick caught Montoya in the ankle, throwing him off balance. A swift crescent kick batted the knife out of his grasp. It clanked against the back wall. Montoya froze.

  “God damn you,” the soldier growled in a strained voice.

  He brought up his hands, but Gonji’s hard front kick to the groin brought him to his knees, moaning in pain. A left roundhouse cuffed him beside the ear, his jaws clacking. Gonji continued his rotation, a whopping right spinning-heel kick belting him slackly onto his side in the darkness.

  The only sound was the creaking of the door hinges as the sentry descended with pistol half-hammered. Gonji met his mad gaze with the unleashed fury of the fight still reflecting from his own.

  “You think manipulating my death can save your quivering soul?” the samurai bellowed, struggling for control of his radiating anger. “Finish it, then.”

  More guards appeared at the top of the stairs, weapons drawn. The warden looked to them, then back to Gonji.

  “You—you’re Satan himself!”

  The warden motioned for Montoya to be carried off.

  “Did you offer him his freedom?” Gonji asked icily.

  “Silence, diablo!”

  The warden backed up the stairs, still leveling his pistol. Gonji moved to the back wall and saw something.

  “Muchacho,” he called up to the departing soldier. Gonji toed the forgotten knife, grinning mirthlessly. He kicked it sharply to the base of the stairs.

  The warden blanched at his oversight, warned Gonji back, and quickly retrieved the weapon. Col. Nunez arrived, then, amidst a flurry of harsh verbal exchanges, taking the warden to task for the execution attempt. Evidently, it had not been ordered by Nunez. So others must have taken it upon themselves to gild their souls by eliminating the “evil” of this mysterious oriental warrior.

  Gonji began to apprehend the conflict in high places over how to deal with the problem of the legendary Red Blade from the East.

  * * * *

  The detachment escorting Gonji to Toledo assembled early the next day.

  The samurai was thrown roughly into a thick-barred ox-cart, bound hand and foot now, bundled in a cloak against the weather’s ravages. He wrestled with the grimace that strove to twist his face at every movement, so fierce were his multiple pains now.

  The column trundled him past the great siege cannon, past the mounted companies preparing to assault Castle Malaguer.

  The rumbling cart’s jostling ride would do nothing to expedite his healing.

  His last impression of Barbaso was of an outbreak of shouts and arguments in the street as he passed by. He saw citizens at odds with soldiers over something. He cared not what. He heard shouting about “dignity—at least let him ride with dignity—he’s no animal—”

  Dignity.

  Gonji earnestly longed for his swords again, feeling empty, devoid of his freedom of choice, without them. As the last buildings rolled past his view and the gates of Barbaso diminished behind him, Gonji’s thoughts turned to death.

  PART TWO

  Death Be Undone

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A strange, multifarious council assembled in Toledo to deal with the problem of the oriental barbarian. They met in austere lamplit chambers, debating deep into the night the disposition of the notorious warrior.

  Prelates of the High Office occupied the table on the dais, presided over by the interim Grand Inquisitor, Bishop Ignazio Izquierdo. The remainder of the assemblage was composed of a shifting membership from among the clergy, the military, and the nobility. Toledo had become a hotbed of activity, daily arrivals and departures of notable figures now the norm, such that high protocol and guarded circumlocution were the standing orders of the day.

  “This Wunderknecht movement, as they’ve come to call it,” General de la Vega was saying, “quietly, insidiously eats at the underside of the military power structure of Europe, in these threatening times. By their very name—Knights of Wonder—they proclaim themselves as elitist, lording over all other men, and militant in their attitude—”

  An elderly priest, a scholar of the Hall of Records, interrupted him: “Dispenseme usted, senor—excuse me, but I believe their use of the word wonder refers to their vague awe at the sublime wonders of creation. Their specific tenets bear careful study before a precise mandate—”

  “Por favor, indulge me, Padre,” another officer piped in, “but time is always an enemy. If you’ll forgive me, theological study has never been noted for its speed and efficiency of pursuit.”

  “Eternal concerns,” the priest retorted, “are not bound by temporal considerations. This is a thorny issue.”

  “Thorny and urgent,” the officer replied, annoyed, but backing off at once to see the eyebrows he’d raised among the gathered august leaders.

  The representative of the adelantado of Leon rose. “Your Eminence, holy friars, nobles, and gentlemen—His Excellency the Governor appreciates the touchiness of this mat
ter of the oriental barbarian and his misguided followers. But it must be pointed out that he is reputed to be the son of a powerful warlord in his homeland. Japan has proven a rich source of new trade. We’ve all, I think, benefitted by the inroads the Portuguese have made with this…regrettably pagan culture. And, I hasten to add, Holy Mother Church has seen considerable spread in her influence among the Japanese. They are becoming Catholicized in spite of themselves, one might say. And a nation’s strength grows by more than might of arms, if our valiant fighting men will forgive me.”

  The military contingent sputtered and fumed.

  General de la Vega voiced their objection. “And so you suggest we let this…son of a monkey general roam free to erode our strength from within, with his ideas, eh?”

  The representative from Leon turned to Bishop Izquierdo. “What does His Eminence the Grand Inquisitor find the more pressing issue—that of politics and economy or, with all due respect, the…well-founded alarm of the military establishment?”

  Izquierdo cleared his throat. “Well, honored members, there is much to be said for both concerns. We must extend our commercial interests; the military must see to our defense. But this is the Office of Inquisition. The integrity of the faith must be our primary pursuit here.”

  His voice trailed off, and the bishop seemed to shrink behind the table in the uncomfortable silence that followed his noncommittal and pointless recapitulation of the debate.

  The Duke of Lerma rose and leaned forward on the table. He seemed bored by the proceedings. A distinguished-looking man who exuded self-confidence, he was the chief secular authority behind the Inquisition. “Gentlemen,” he began languidly, “I fail to understand the conflict here. This is our home territory. Here we are sovereign over any invading power, regardless of its origin. What is all this fuss over a simple warlock or witch or whatever he is? Just turn him over for auto-da-fe.”