by T. C. Rypel
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As the summer heat slowly permeated the land above, causing the dungeon stones to swelter and the mold to prosper on the slimy upper reaches of the cells, something new altered Gonji’s stoic existence.
Valentina came into his life.
The cell opposite his had been unoccupied for a space of days following the execution of the murderer who had suffered therein.
One morning Sergeant Morales’ face appeared at the grating ahead of the noisy party that wrestled the squalling woman into the cell across from Gonji.
“You’ll like this,” Morales told him. “Something to write about, eh?” He fluttered his eyebrows rakishly.
Gonji scratched absently as he watched the spectacle. He had never heard such vulgarity from a woman.
“Scum-ridden bastards! I’ll rip your cojones from between your bowed legs and feed them to you! Come on—one at a time! I’ll send you all writhing into hellfire agonies! Your shriveled members will rot away with the plague, you goddamn—!”
A swing of the iron-clad door batted her down onto her rump. Then the portal was swiftly locked. A nailed hand clawed through the grating at a guard whose scratched face bore evidence of her spirit.
“Meet La Strega—The Witch,” Morales told Gonji.
“Valentina de Corsia is my name,” she railed, “and don’t you forget it, cabron! Though witch I am, as you’ll all soon see. For you, there’ll be no resisting my spells. You’ll each come lusting after me in the night, and then my curse will destroy you! Bloody bastards! A plague on thee, blackguards! A thousand plagues of pain and misery on all you macho limp-dicks!”
She noticed Gonji looking at her through the grating. “Dramatic, no? I always wanted to be an actress.” She tipped her head back and laughed coarsely, her humor dissipating a second later. “Well, what the hell are you staring at, slant-eyes? You want something to stare at?”
She tore open the bodice of her soiled dress, struggling with it like a bedlamite before removing the entire garment and throwing it at the wall of her cell. She propped something against her door and stood up on it. Tearing off her nether garments, she displayed her ample bosom.
“How about it, Man of Cathay—a double helping of delight, no? Even you will find a way to break out of your cell and get at me, and then you’ll be pox-ridden like the rest of them.”
“All right, La Strega,” Morales interrupted, “put this on.” He screaked open her rusty cell door and threw at her one of the black robes decorated with red devils and the flames of Hades. “Now you really have something to write about,” he told Gonji.
The samurai kept staring at his new neighbor, hoping that what he felt in his loins wasn’t mirrored on his face. He had seen no woman for months, though he had heard the sounds of women prisoners in agony, but their subhuman wailings had helped him keep his thoughts from carnal pleasures; he needed no additional torture to remind him of how cleanly he had been severed from the mainstream of life. But now he would have to readjust, and it would not be easy. His shrunken stomach felt hollow, and his innards flared with the heat of desire such that he began to tremble. His breath soughed through his nose in short gasps. He watched her toss her long, tousled black hair over the cowl of the robe. Her eyes were wild and dark; the kohl that had colored their sultry lids, smeared from her rough treatment by the guards. A small trickle of blood issued from her nose. She wiped it roughly on a sleeve as she peered out into the corridor again.
“You’re probably right,” Gonji found himself saying without thinking, “though I don’t know how I’ll manage it.”
She looked at him dimly a moment till comprehension dawned, and a sour twist came to her rouged lips. “Save it. It’s not you that I want. You’ve enough trouble already.”
Gonji pondered her words awhile, and, still unable to take his eyes off her, he engaged her again. “What have they charged you with?”
She shrilled a harsh laugh. “Impersonating the king—what the hell do you care?” Then her tone changed almost at once. “Sorry. We may need each other to keep from going loco in here. Seduction and witchcraft—what did you expect? That’s most of the women in these shit-crusted dungeons, I suppose—seduction and witchcraft. Only they caught me too late—” She had raised her voice to a bellow. “Your captain of artillery knows my curse, knaves, and there is no saving him!”
Gonji listened to her expend her rage for a time, at last growing weary of it. But before he moved back to his daily habits, he remembered something.
“By the way, senorita,” he said to La Strega, “I am not from Cathay. I am samurai, from Dai Nihon—Japan.”
“Is that so?” she responded archly. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Si,” he replied evenly. “It is.”
Her eyes flickered ever so slightly, but she said nothing. Gonji quietly moved to his mat, where he sat cross-legged, for a long time, with his writing materials. But he scribed nothing as the morning hours dragged by achingly.
* * * *
The evening shift arrived and tilted with Valentina as had the morning sentries. Gonji smiled in spite of himself to hear the endlessly inventive outpourings seasoned with her viper’s tongue. He heard the guards combat her imprecations with curses of their own, or loud prayers and promises of perdition. Then there was a noisy din as her meal tray slammed into a wall.
The samurai went to the grating.
“You’ll have a taste of the rack for that, evil wench,” a spattered soldier was saying.
“Up your ass, you son of a swine and a bitch!”
“Is that possible?” Gonji asked in amusement.
“Same to you, senor sa-moo-rai,” she retorted.
“It was probably just as well that you declined your dinner. Let me tell you something. Only the morning shift can be trusted with a meal.”
“Oh, gracias, senor,” Valentina said, affecting a dainty curtsy. “What business is it of yours? There’s nothing this scum can foul my food with that I haven’t handled before.”
Laughter issued from a couple of the other cells, as Gonji turned away, annoyed and vaguely disgusted. But she halted him.
“Hey, listen.” Her voice was lower now, sincere. “When I say I’ll curse the men in here, I don’t mean you who are captive. Just these strutting bastards who think they rule the world. The ones who think they can have their way with any woman. What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. Call me Gonji.”
“Gon-shee—what does it mean?”
“It’s my given name. Since we’re equals in this hellhole, you may call me Gonji-san. Or if you like, since you’ve recognized that I’m superior to these barbarians, you may call me Gonji-sama.”
“It remains to be seen whether you’re superior, my dear,” she said suggestively.
He chortled. “Gonji-san, then. I take it you’ve had a lifetime of grief from the soldier class, neh?”
Valentina sighed bitterly. “Since I was thirteen. When my Milanese mother died of the plague. I inherited her irresistible Italian charms. Well, you didn’t think I blossomed like this yesterday, did you? I was a waif of the streets when I was thirteen. The brutes used to take their pleasure with me. Sometimes I could live with it. Other times…Finally I learned to hate what I’d become. And them, for having done it to me. I prayed, but there was no deliverance. So I began to curse them and curse them until one day Satan gave me power over them. Now I am on the attack! I take them, writhing in torment, to their graves. Of course it takes time, but they all die. I am on a crusade, you see. I intend to send every man I hate to a plague-ridden death by my touch. I bequeath my curse with every pleasure they take of me, and I’ve bedded my share, mind you.”
Gonji felt a sympathetic pang. His lips parted twice before he spoke. “You have…the disease of t
he Gauls?”
“What are you talking about?” she roared. “What I have is power—the dark power they fear!”
“Only the power that’s destroying half this filthy continent.”
“Disease of Gauls,” she repeated disdainfully. “What do you know?”
She lowered her head to the grating, and when she spoke again, her voice was muffled. “Do they have it in your land?”
“Rarely. Only since the Spaniards came. Of course, they blame the Dutch, and the Dutch blame the Portuguese and the English. Lately, I think, they’ve all formed a truce and selected the Gauls as the culprits.”
“Can your people drive the evil spirit away?” she asked in a voice suddenly plaintive but devoid of hope.
“Iye. So sorry. All they can do is drive the Yoroppan traders away.”
“I’ve tried sarsaparilla. It’s supposed to help, you know. Hell, I’m awash in the stuff. Shit, piss, and hellfire! What do I care? My crusade continues, that’s all!”
“Good questing,” Gonji said, moving away from the door, as the guards grumbled at them. He begin his evening meditation, which always seemed to unsettle the guard shift.
* * * *
He lay in a cold sweat, the darkness an almost palpable thing as he drifted in and out of nightmare-haunted sleep.
Huge, leering faces sprouted unseemly appendages that grasped after him, never giving ground, though he ran and ran and arced his sword at them with all the pent-up fury of his long imprisonment.
Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara…
He rode astride Tora again, exhilarated, leaping chasms as if borne on invisible wings, monstrous predators strafing him with gnashing teeth—leaping another gorge inset with the chattering heads of slain enemies who mocked him with their immortality.
Red Blade from the East—
He jolted upright, raising a fending knife hand. He heard only the smothering silence, then the soft moaning from another cell. No murmuring from the guards.
Then—the whispering voice from the cell across the corridor:
“Hurry, Gonji-san, there isn’t much time.”
He rushed to the door grating and peered out, saw Valentina’s anxious face but no warden about.
“They’re asleep,” she said, “but we don’t know for how long. We must speak.”
“What is it, Tina-san?” For so he had come to call her.
“Don’t call me Valentina. Call me Domingo.”
Gonji’s breath rasped as he gathered his reeling thoughts. “Domingo? The witch Domingo Negro?!” And gazing deep into her transformed eyes, he recognized the truth of it. “Yoi! Can you—can you get us out of here?”
She shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid not, mi amigo, though I wish it were so. It’s amusing, you see—they strive so hard to ensnare witches, and now they’ve caught a real one. But not for long—and this one came willingly. It’s a shame I had to sacrifice this troubled woman to get in here, but she was my best chance. They were going to arrest her anyway, I believe, and the cohabitation subjects must be entered through some imperfection. Some physical weakness: Paco’s simple mind; Valentina’s disease—there must be an avenue.”
Gonji was shaking his head. “Wakarimasen—no entiende—I don’t understand. You’re here now. You had the power to get here. Haven’t you some power left to distort space, create a doorway in this wall like with your magic hedge?”
The witch’s eyes closed with finality. “Impossible. This region is firmly fixed in this sphere.”
Gonji’s head bowed. “Then why in hell have you come?” he asked hotly, gloomily. Then, remembering: “How did the assault fare? Obviously you overmatched the Spaniards.”
“Why ‘obviously’?” she countered. “Do you know whence I’ve come? Facile assumptions are dangerous when one is dealing with sorcery.”
The samurai felt a peculiar unease. He looked deeply into her expressive dark eyes. There he found a languid resignation. His mouth opened to speak, but she continued:
“They destroyed it all, Gonji-san. Evil power aided them, and I was foolishly complacent. They obliterated the result of generations of life-affirming earth magic. And they destroyed me with it. And my sons.”
“But how?”
“How they did it is not so important as why. That’s why I’ve come to you. As to how I’ve come—” She made a low gurgling sound. “I’m not sure, embarrassingly enough. Only believe me when I say that I’ve been given time enough to roam the land of the living apart from my riven body so that I might see things as they are. And, I believe, to set you upon a new course. The agents of the Evil Unknown are strong here, and they’ve singled you out for discredit and terrible doom. Somehow, you must identify them. Stop them. Somehow…you are very important as an agent of change in this interspheric system.”
“How? Why?” Gonji replied haltingly, befuddled by it all. “And why should I care what evil overtakes Yoroppa, after the many painful years I’ve spent here?”
“Because it is…your duty.”
“Duty?” Gonji’s eyes narrowed in bewilderment. “Explain, por favor.”
“You’ve spread your influence far and wide on this continent, if unwittingly. You have friends and supporters you may not even be aware of. And it is not merely Europe that is affected. The Evil Unknown recognizes no boundaries. And Gonji—perhaps the dread Akryllon you’ve inquired about yet exists, and its power is presently allied with the side of evil.” She eerily waxed rhapsodic. “That power must be broken, for the good of all sentient races! I speak not of the mundane wickedness born of twisted purpose that you see here in this land. I warn you of the silent, deadly, grasping tide of evil that seeks to pervert and control and crush until there is nothing left of freedom in all creation! It seeks you out! Will you run from it?”
Gonji’s jaw tightened, his neck arching to hear her calculated challenge. “What can I do from here?”
“I cannot say. You are held in check here by the poised balances of several powerful interests. Some good, some misguided…some, clearly new outgrowths of the arms of the Evil Unknown. But you must learn what you can while imprisoned here and, when you’ve judged the time is right, you must free yourself somehow and go to Africa.”
“Africa? What—?”
“Remember the diamond—the display of spheres in my Tower of Gramarye—the diamond’s shape tightens, becomes more symmetrical. They who control the fortresses where the angles intersect control the nexus of worlds and the territories within. You have shattered evil’s power at the eastern point—Vedun. I have lost the western to them in my folly. The northern point is contended eternally in a mountain fastness by powers you would not understand. Nor do I, to be quite frank. But the southern point, that which lies in the trackless desert of Algiers, is the anchor. You must close that gateway, lest evil win control of the diamond and hold sway over its gateways, to strike out as it pleases against all worlds that touch those portals. And Gonji-san, you will need help to do it.”
Gonji gazed at her with furrowed brow, mystified. “What help?”
“The gatekeeper’s, of course,” she said cryptically. “The one who has concealed the secret of the southern point. There must be one, as there is at each gateway.”
“Gatekeeper…? How did you learn this secret?” Gonji puzzled. “And if you did, why don’t you know more of this evil conspiracy you speak of? You’re just one more of the scholars and seers and priests who have bedeviled me since—”
“Mmmm.” She smiled and waved a finger in a gesture that cautioned against further inquiry. “Any more I could say would be speculation. I do not wish to lead you falsely. I know of this gateway the same way you will know it when you find it. Now quiet… I must perform a final act of conjury—my presence here grows tenuous. I trust this poor child has all her fingers intact—si, she wil
l do fine.”
Gonji could see little of the esoteric spell the witch worked. He heard a soft muttering or chanting, repetitious and in some language unknown to him. Saw her hands—Valentina’s hands—ply the air now and again.
There was a sudden incandescence in the other cell, accompanied by a sound as of wind rushing through a thrust-open door that was as abruptly closed. Then the witch-possessed Valentina appeared at the grating again.
She held up the wygyll’s medallion.
“The one I bore?” the samurai asked with wonder.
“The same. You’ll need this. I can’t tell you why, or they may torture it out of you—now don’t give me that indignant look. They’ve spared you the worst so far, it seems. We’ll just conceal this on the senorita—about as safe a place as I can imagine right now—and you’ll just have to take her along when you decide to leave.”
“This is madness!” Gonji railed, lowering his voice to a whisper at once when he heard the broken snoring of a guard. “Why can’t you help me further? If you drew that thing with your power, then why can’t you send me my swords? Or a goddamn pistol?”
She sighed and shook her head. “My presence here in this sphere is at an end. Even now I feel the relentless pull of the long silver cord that draws my spirit to the Great Revelation, the answer to the eternal mysteries—mercy me! I hope it isn’t all revealed in one soggy lump! Ah, well…remember, samurai, that the things you do may yet affect even me in my realm to come. Who can say?
“Do you recall that I—as Paco—once told you that neutrality was impossible? I failed to heed my own warning. That was my tragic failing. These are times of choosing. You must choose sides and fight. Even as you have before, however bleak those outcomes. Your greatest duty is somehow yet to come. The powers who would choose good are confused, fighting amongst themselves. They need the clean edge of your objective vision, Gonji. Perhaps you, of all warriors on all spheres, are best suited to expose the conspiracy of Evil that destroys order in these scattered worlds. Destroy it, before it holds all possible worlds in its thrall!”
