by Rypel, T. C.
Gonji sated his empty belly with fish and ale, which he consumed languidly on a stone bench near the stalls. The bell tower sounded ten bells, and the shallower timbre of the chapel bell called some to a worship service.
A few of the people Gonji had met at Michael Benedetto’s house the night of the memorable boxing matches passed by and greeted him. Among these were Stefan Berenyi and Nikolai Nagy—he couldn’t recall which man was which, followed shortly by Monetto, the biller; and Gerhard, the hunter and fletcher, a longbow slung over his back. They carried between them a large sack of small game that evinced the latter’s prowess with the bow. Monetto steered them toward Gonji and began to make small talk, but they resumed their course to the stalls at Gerhard’s insistence. His concern over the freshness of the game precipitated the usual argument between them that could be heard long after they had departed.
Then Gonji thought he spotted a blonde head that might have belonged to Lydia Benedetto. He craned his neck to peer into the crowd, but from the spot he watched there emerged two Llorm footmen, who suspiciously returned his gaze. He rose then, his thoughts turning to military concerns...in a manner of speaking.
Let’s see what’s on their minds.
He took Tora by the reins and walked down an alley. Turning into the first intersection, he waited. The pack that followed him approached his vantage a minute later, whispering and muting their stealthy steps.
“Eeyah!” Gonji cried, leaping out at them, his scabbarded Sagami’s pommel pointing into their midst.
The children screamed as one and stumbled backward. Then they laughed with relief, and Eduardo, their leader, came forward, flashing a hand in greeting.
“All right, you scamps,” Gonji said sternly, “what do you want with me?”
A tiny girl clung to the back of Eduardo’s breeches, regarding Gonji with big terrified eyes as the boy spoke.
“We just wanted to see what you were getting into. My papa says that where you go trouble will follow. I didn’t want to miss anything.”
“So?” Gonji replied, affecting petulance. “And he was right, neh? Look what’s followed me.” He waved a hand over them, and they tittered.
“You look molto buono with your new clothes,” Eduardo said, appending a hand gesture that Gonji took to mean youthful approval.
“Arigato,” Gonji replied. “Now that I have your seal I can proceed with confidence.” He watched with raised eyebrows and folded arms as the boy walked around him appraisingly, the little girl traipsing behind like a shadow.
“Is that your sister?”
“No, that’s Tiva. She has no mother, and I get paid for watching her.”
“Do you do a good job?” Gonji bent toward the girl and spoke gently. “Does Eduardo watch out for you?”
The boys all laughed. “She doesn’t speak Italian,” someone said.
She was the most adorable child in Gonji’s recent memory and could scarcely have been more than four. When he reached down to lift her up, her large brown eyes seemed to engulf her face. She held a half-eaten roll in one sticky fist.
Eduardo translated what Gonji had asked.
“Nah!” she said in a tiny, piping voice. The boys laughed again.
“He doesn’t, eh?” Gonji said. “Well, we’ll see about that.”
“She says no to everything,” Eduardo explained.
Tiva offered Gonji a bite of the roll, and he pantomimed a full belly, but she persisted. He bowed and smiled, taking a small mouthful. “Domo, little blossom.”
He set her down. “You boys take care of her or—” He raised a threatening fist. “Now be off with you.”
“When are you going to teach me the sword? You promised,” Eduardo pleaded.
“I did no such thing,” Gonji said. “I said we’d have to take it up with your father sometime. What would a ragamuffin like you do with a sword anyway?”
“Kill the soldiers who killed Signor Koski,” Eduardo said matter-of-factly, bending to lace a shoe.
The simple poignancy of the statement stung Gonji. “Why would you do that?”
“Because Signora Koski’s been crying all the time since he died.”
Gonji worked his lower jaw thoughtfully, recalling the dead man, struck down by mercenaries on the day of the city’s occupation. “Doesn’t your father teach you that killing is evil?”
“Usually. But he’s not sure anymore.”
Gonji snapped his fingers. “Begone with you now. And watch out for the little one, hear?”
Eduardo bowed, too fast and too deeply, like a bird pecking at seed, and the other boys snickered. Gonji shook his head, corrected him, and sent them packing with a wink to Tiva, who waved her fingers.
He thought about the boy’s words as he watched them run down the lane. He’s not sure.... Indecision and lack of resolve would be a crippling problem if these people wound up in an armed revolt. Klann wouldn’t be shackled by Christian principles. He shook his head. Ah well, the mercenaries have backed off considerably since Ben-Draba was beaten to death by...hai.... He smiled thinly. Our other mystery man....
He leapt astride Tora and rode back into the main street, resolving to check in with Flavio.
Gonji was determined to treat his position as bodyguard to Council Elder Flavio with dignity and seriousness, although he knew that the hiring had been prompted by his own cajoling and Flavio’s desire to dispense the city’s debt to the samurai for having retrieved the body of Mark Benedetto. Yet bodyguard he was, and he would deport himself as a bodyguard. He had promised not to dog the Elder’s steps but had made a point of checking on his well-being from time to time.
He was clattering along easily toward the Ministry building on the Street of Hope when he was halted by the cry of a pedestrian on his left.
“Ho, there! A word with you, monsieur!” came the stentorian voice in ringing French.
Gonji pulled up and looked over. It was Alain Paille, the flamboyant and eccentric artist-poet whose revolutionary pronouncements since Klann’s arrival had caused the city no end of discomfiture and the occupying troops no little amusement. He was thin, dark, and willowy, with piercing blue eyes, a sketchy shadow of beard, and an unruly mane that no comb had furrowed in recent days. His paint-stained apron evidenced his current commission: an illustration in progress on the ceiling of Vedun’s chapel. In his hand he carried a furled paper.
“Behold the Liberator!” he shouted, wide-eyed, stopping in front of Tora. “He of whom ballades will be sung!”
Gonji glanced about self-consciously. Few had taken special notice of Paille, from whom such outbursts had long been expected. He was, as it happened, Vedun’s best-known tippler. Those who had heard now watched Gonji for a reaction.
Gonji cleared his throat. “Ja, well—what can I do for you?” He had ignored the French, spoke instead in High German.
“I’ve been seeking you. We must speak. I believe we share a dream. You do speak French, don’t you?”
“I speak French...of a sort,” Gonji replied. “But it gives me trouble. It’s a language I—” He groped for an appropriate word, came up with one.
“‘Disdain?’” Paille repeated with surprise. “But you mustn’t! All men of intellect and breeding speak French! I’ve been inquiring after you, and I believe you are such a man. Yours is simply a problem of pronunciation. But be at ease—we shall correct that. Do speak French, s’il vous plait.”
“I don’t please,” Gonji said with a wry look, “but I’ll speak it. What’s your business?”
“I think a drink is in order first. Shall we hie us to the auberge?” Paille pointed the paper toward the nearest inn, Wojcik’s Haven.
“Not now. I’ve business at the Ministry.”
“Wonderful! So have I,” Paille said, waving the handbill. “We can talk as we walk, oui?”
“Oui...wonderful,” Gonji said softly, glancing at passersby who were listening in on the conversation.
He dismounted and led Tora by the reins. He had bee
n in a mood to ride alone, frankly hoping to encounter the swaggering Captain Julian Kel’Tekeli, to show him that Gonji was just as capable as he of affecting a display of cleanliness, polish, and poise. But now he stoically accepted the way karma had of laying low the proud....
“I am Alain Paille,” the artist boomed, “a painter, poet, and balladeer, chronicler of the times and tides of men, and soldier of freedom par excellence. And you are—no-no, don’t tell me—you are Gonji Sabatake, master of fighting arts from the fabled orient, dispossessed son of Japan’s mightiest warlord—”
Gonji winced and rubbed an itching eye, blew a long, impatient breath. Behind him, Tora nickered and bobbed his head.
“—champion of égalité and freedom, fated participant in the coming battle that will secure democracy from the strangling grip of monarchy and aristocracy—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Gonji groaned. They were tramping through a steep-walled lane, and Paille’s words echoed from one end to the other of its tunneling course. “Hold on, monsieur poète. Very sorry, but that’s a terribly mixed bag of facts and fancies. And listen, don’t you ever speak in anything but that blaring herald’s voice?”
Paille looked wounded. “Anger, pain, frustration, humiliation—these things are ne’er articulated by the calm and soft voice! But you are right, of course; we must be circumspect. The ears of the enemy are all about us.”
He leaned close and laid a finger across his lips with a conspiratorial suspiration, and Gonji caught a full blast of the artist’s midday pick-me-up. Wine. And a humble vintage.
“Oui, that’s best,” Gonji agreed, relieved. “Now...I’m not sure I understood all this—May we have continued in Spanish?” Gonji stumbled over the words.
“May we continue, not ‘May we have continued’,” Paille corrected. He sighed. “But, sí, Spanish then, the cutthroats’ language.... Such a shame. French is so elegant. My brother Guy, he always said that it sings to the ear, and Guy should know—he has only one ear, or still had the last I heard. But no matter—”
“Your brother Guy, who has only one ear...,” Gonji repeated blankly. But Paille had already launched into a summation of what he had said before.
Gonji shook his head. “Equality? Democracy? Peasants aren’t fit to rule themselves. There must always be a ruling class to guide them. And a soldiering class to preserve order.”
“Hmm. You’re allowing your politics and training to stand in the way of your destiny. But it is a fact, señor, that divine right of kings and governing power by virtue of birth to a privileged class are dying concepts. And it is a further truth that men are equals at birth and as such must be free to choose their own political order.”
Gonji kicked a stone out of his path. “Is that so? And who has discerned these ‘truths’?”
Paille looked surprised. “Why, I have, of course!”
Gonji smiled. “Ah, so you are another prophet, like this Tralayn?”
“Nooo! I am a visionary, not a soothsayer,” Paille qualified. “My vision is of an ideal, an earthly, temporal one. Not an ideal muddled by vague religious sentiment—oh! thank heaven my brother can’t hear me speak like this—”
“Your brother Guy, the one with only one ear—?”
“No-no, my brother David, the one who smiles like a nibbling rabbit—he’s a writer, an apologist of Holy Mother Church—”
Gonji looked confused. “Your brother David who—”
“No, I’m not a sleepy Christian like most who live here,” the artist continued. “They choose to cower in wait of a divine Deliverer and wouldn’t recognize one unless he came in a blinding light and on wings of a dove. I think they expect that the Christ has reserved His second coming for the plight of Vedun.”
“You don’t believe in Iasu, then—the Christ, the god of the West?” Gonji asked.
“Oh, He is there—somewhere, I suppose,” Paille replied. “He seems to play a hide-and-seek game with humanity, and currently it is His turn to hide. That’s why it is my duty as a visionary to shake these people out of their apathy and fatalism. But I fear my esprit and panache are misinterpreted. They believe me to be....” He shrugged.
“A madman,” Gonji finished.
Paille scowled. “The ugly lot of genius,” he snarled. “You understand the Christian doctrines? Those that would proscribe violence even when one’s way of life is threatened?”
“That, I have trouble understanding,” Gonji replied thoughtfully. “But I’ve traveled in the West a long time, and before that I was a student of Christian priests in Dai Nihon—in Japan. I have found that their beliefs are as reasonable as any other in explaining some of the horrors I’ve encountered...the supernatural things....”
“Hah! I’ve yet to encounter anything that can’t be explained by reason,” Paille asserted. “The natural employed perversely—illusion—the uneducated are easily baffled—these are the ways that—”
Gonji was shaking his head. “So sorry, señor, but I only partly agree. There are things in the world that confound moral explanation even as they demand it. I believe that nothing natural can be wrong—although like you I know that the natural can certainly be put to wrongful use. I feel no compulsion to explain the wonders and mysteries of nature, uh—” He rubbed his forehead, trying to remember something. Then he smiled, remembering, and translated the poem into Latin, in which language it best retained the beauty of the Japanese:
‘Unknown to me what dwelleth here:
Tears flow from my sense of unworthiness and gratitude’
“That best sums up my attitude toward the unknowable wonders of nature,” Gonji said.
“That’s quite lovely,” Paille observed. “Did you compose it?”
“No, I’m not that profound a poet. It’s ancient. My father taught it to me, and his father to him—”
“But—” Paille began.
“But,” Gonji interjected, stopping his disagreement short of utterance, “there are those things that demand explanation by their, um, un-nature.”
“Unnatural quality, you mean.”
“Hai, arigato—yes, thank you. What do you make of this flying dragon, the wyvern? What possible purpose could it serve in any natural order?”
“It exists,” Paille said, “and so we must conclude that it does serve some presently unknown function in the order of the cosmos. Or, quite probably, it is at least part illusion, or the product of natural power as yet harnessed only by the rare few adepts among us. There must be a natural explanation, else all rational order crumbles and there is chaos. Nothing of the sane and mundane in the world could be counted on, even as it has been for untold ages.”
Gonji pondered this. Illusion.... He thought of the fantastic events he had lived through. Of vampires and dragons and beasts of fable that had crossed his path these many years. Can I have imagined that these things were what they were? Have I been self-deluded, misinterpreting every frightful event, recasting every gnome as a giant in flawed memory, even as shadow casts the shapes of things as they are not?
Iye. No, I have seen truly. Even if it is only I who have seen the truth, whatever that truth might ultimately mean.
The thought vaguely pleased his sense of unfulfilled destiny.
Gonji laughed breathily and changed Tora’s reins to his other hand. “Excuse me, por favor, but...knowing alone what I know of the wyvern, I must say that to call him illusion is fully the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all week.” Paille looked offended but said nothing. The samurai then recalled Lydia Benedetto’s similar reduction of the supernatural to the inexplicably natural. What a difference a change in speakers made.
They were nearing the Llorm garrison, and soldiers passing by sneered to see the familiar artist, some jeering openly at him.
“Now don’t be starting any trouble,” Gonji found himself advising in a curious reversal of his usual position. He halted Paille halfway through the delivery of an obscene gesture. “So you don’t believe in the existence of things that are p
urely of evil use, yet you ply your craft in churches—I’ve seen your work, by the way, and it’s very good.”
Paille brightened. “You think so? Merci, monsieur le samurai! But, oh, since these paintings of chapel ceilings became all the rage they’ve cost artists nothing but stiff necks and aching shoulders and arms. Then one must work under poor light and with inadequate equipment—Ah, but I see that I’ve slipped back into French again. Eh, may I continue?”
“Oui,” said Gonji patiently. “As Guy’s ear would have it.”
“Merci beaucoup. But I was saying that there are more portentous matters to concern myself with now than chapel ceilings. Oh, yes indeed, for here in this place, at this time, begins the struggle that will make men forever free of the yoke of monarchy. And you shall be the one to lead it.”
“Now wait a moment, Paille,” Gonji said, stopping and facing the Frenchman. Tora nudged his shoulder as he spoke. “Don’t be including me in any of your dreams. I’ve already explained how I feel about your...politicals—”
“Politics.”
“—whatever, and I make my own decisions about what I become involved in. Besides, this talk is madness, out here in the open like this. You’re every bit as crazy as they say.”
Paille’s eyes shone. “Oui, crazy enough to recognize destiny’s beckoning call, to see the coming jacquérie—the peasant revolution—that will begin in this insignificant place, among these humble mountains, and will echo down the corridors of time. And men will hail these days, for I shall record their moment, and they shall not be forgotten.”
Gonji rubbed the back of his neck, and a gurgling sound rumbled in his throat. They began walking again.
“You’ve taken up your predestined place already, you know,” Paille said in a quiet voice.
“How so?”
“Well, the fight at the square, for one. Quite an inspiration to the people. And now you’ve become Flavio’s bodyguard. A stranger, no? Bodyguard to the chief magistrate? And then I’ve heard other things...whispered.”
Gonji’s skin prickled. “Such as?”
Paille moved closer and said out of the corner of his mouth: “They’re saying you killed several bandits single-handedly while trying to rescue Michael’s brother. You’ve become the hero of the masses in a span of days.”