by Rypel, T. C.
He laughed mirthlessly.
Nothing matches this Europe for horrors, he mused. But if the evil is great, then so must be the good...somewhere. The needs, always the needs. Companionship. Brothers of the sword. Love that doesn’t die. Friends—true friends. And duty, sacred duty—the only worthwhile duty here is to oneself. It seems nothing can be shared as inviolate for very long. All is shattered. But that is karma, neh? So here I am, a poor victim of self-mockery, pursuing my silly quest, a quest in name only by now—if indeed it was ever anything more. Where are all those priests, Buddhist, Christian, some I never even heard of before, who have put me on my way, eh? And what next on my tortuous trail? Vedun. Ah, Vedun. The storied city nestled on a cliff in the mountains. Wonderful. More sullen faces, more distrust, more cold steel raised in threat—hai, and mine is colder still, neh?
“And what say you, spirits of my fathers?” he asked of the indifferent night. I go on, as always I go on. I seek what is not, glory in the moment, and damned be tomorrow! Twice cursed past and thrice ahead! When my time comes, then that is karma, but I’ll strive to end it on my terms. Hai, that is good.
And as sleep overtook him, Gonji’s mind succumbed to the futile urge to try to divine those things that lay ahead on his course, for this was surely preferable to dwelling on his present state of stoical misery.
His last waking thought was of the name. The name of that evasive thing whose trail he dogged, the name that had captivated his fancy and enticed him with its very perversity:
Deathwind.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the spectacle of a lifetime.
A thousand knights under the wind-snapped banners of Hapsburg Austria thundered across the floor of the valley, pounding over littered corpses as they pursued a broken enemy. The stench of blood and death lofted on the rising heat waves. Gonji leaned forward with keen interest, an anxious hand massaging the Sagami’s hilt. Tora shuffled nervously on the brink of the escarpment as his master edged him closer for a better look.
The samurai’s pulse raced. He wiped the sweat from his brow with an impatient motion, flicking his tongue across a beaded lip. His neck wounds ached, but he paid them no heed. Howls of bloodlust and the clanging din of naked steel issued from the battlefield. The silver glint of arrows and arbalest bolts raked the air. Sporadic gunfire cracked in Gonji’s ears, puffs of ignited powder belching in advance of the echoing bursts.
Eyes like living coals, salt-burned neck craning for a better view, Gonji assessed the clash. The battle must have raged since almost dawn. The mercenary army had taken a beating. Already at the far end of the valley, the priests who directed the knights had erected a great command tent, a huge flag bearing the Christian cross rippling overhead.
At the extreme opposite end of the valley, to the east, the retreating mercenaries scurried up the myriad trails that led back into the hills. Charging knights lanced the stragglers, dropped them with bow and musket fire, or beheaded them as they ran them down. Hemmed-in pockets of mercenaries fought fiercely against the outnumbering Austrian troops at various points on the field. The leading edge of the fleeing mercenaries was already lost among the grassy knolls and thick forests to the east, and far ahead of them—perhaps miles away—Gonji could mark through the shimmering haze a massed party that poured into the forest like a sinuous spotted serpent.
Curious—such a division in a retreating force was unusual. And mercenaries seldom exhibited such devotion—to cover a retreat so lustily. The thought was cut short. Somewhere over the horizon a large dark shape momentarily loomed above the line of mountain peaks, then dipped out of sight again.
“What the—! What the hell was that, Tora, eh?”
But the charge had passed him by, and Gonji wheeled Tora to follow it along the cliff ledge. Several hundred yards onward the woods encroached to the brink, and he was forced to plunge into a stand of pine for a half mile or so, losing sight of the valley. He cursed petulantly as Tora’s pace was slowed by the dense underbrush. His mind whirled; this was the first armed clash he had seen in weeks, and it aroused his fighting instincts.
He spurred Tora through a gauntlet of slapping pine boughs and snaring thickets, finally emerging in a sun-baked clearing. The precipice again lay bare against the mountain vista for a space of a few hundred yards. Beyond, it sloped gently toward the eastern end of the valley, where the cliffs broke to permit descent.
Gonji trotted to the edge of the escarpment and reined in. Below, the main body of knights had ceased pursuit and was falling back toward the command center, columns occasionally splintering off to lend aid in rooting out straggling mercenaries. Voices crying out in command or anguish and the rumble of hoofbeats now supplanted the din of combat. It was over. Gonji slapped his leg and cursed, shaking his head. He had arrived too late. The fighting itch prickled deeply as he considered a course of action.
Then a pistol shot exploded somewhere beneath him, followed by another. Harsh cries rolled up the cliff face, punctuated by an occasional scream. He leaped off Tora and leaned over the ledge for a better look. A hundred yards to the east a band of mercenaries was trapped in a shallow, dusty canyon by a mixed company of Austrian cavalry and infantry. A single rank of lightly armored horsemen blocked the canyon exit, shields raised before them to deflect arrows and pistol balls. To their rear, longbows and arbalests launched volley after volley into the cornered bunch, who scrambled for cover behind horses, rocks, and brush. Their return fire served only to prolong the agony.
Steeds dropped, kicking and screaming, under the Austrians’ insistent fire. Here and there a man would panic and scrabble uselessly up the crumbling shale prison wall, only to be bristled like a burr by a hail of arrows. At these the Austrians roared their approval, reveling in the thrill of an impromptu pheasant-shoot.
A squad of infantry, some with crossbows, had flanked the mercenaries on the slope beneath Gonji—their one possible avenue to escape. These approached the ragged company’s desperate position, cautious only for the trapped men’s pistol fire. The last strands of the spider’s snare were immobilizing the fly for the kill.
Gonji absently hummed a battle hymn he had heard while he watched with gritted teeth. The heat of battle readiness swelled in his gut.
“Time to earn a living, Tora.”
He leaped astride the charger and seated his swords comfortably, glancing along the cliff to calculate the swiftest path.
“Which side do we choose this time, eh? Eeyahhh!” They galloped off, the question hanging in the humid air, as unintelligible to the horse as its answer was obvious to the man.
There was no choice here. He had run up against Hapsburg power before. To them he was an infidel, a heathen savage. They would no sooner have him among their number than they would invite a plague into their camp.
But mercenary armies always welcomed another skilled warrior, and there was always stolen gold aplenty waiting to reward the stout bladesman. Gonji had learned to abide the guilt, the samurai’s hatred for the crass life of the mercenary, for it was only by the hiring out of his battle savvy that he had been able to survive these long years in barbarian Europe. But this life had fixed him as ronin—masterless samurai. Knowledge of this unspeakable outrage would, he knew, cause his father to take his own life out of shame. Indeed, Gonji himself should have long since committed seppuku, the ritual suicide!
The sun peaked in the burnished blue of the sky as Gonji strove to strangle off his thoughts. He began to concentrate. A plan, a battle tactic.
Tora’s hide glistened with a light film of sweat as he loped easily sidewise down the breakneck slope, sensing the urgency that gripped his master. The noonday swelter washed over Gonji in undulating waves. As he approached the rear of the flanking footmen’s position, the trees thinned. Little cover here, but he had to get closer.
Lightly quitting the saddle, he unhitched his bow and quiver. Stringing the bow in a single adroit, powerful motion, he left the stallion in a place of relative safety a
nd scampered down to the edge of the tree line, a scant fifty yards from the backs of the nearest of the creeping foot soldiers.
His eyes flashed brightly, squinted against the glare. A bawling cry rose from the mercenary leader, his oath clipped by the sharp report of his pistol. A knight’s mount shrilled and toppled on the canyon floor, sending its rider crashing to earth. Two more pistol shots split the air. A bowman at the canyon mouth clutched his chest and fell. A fusillade of arrows whickered into the canyon. Cries of warning. A mercenary shrieked in mortal agony, writhing and tearing at the wooden death spindling his torso.
Gonji riveted his gaze on the breach in the knights’ line created by the fallen horse in the canyon. He checked the squad of footmen below him; he hadn’t been spotted. He took two deep breaths and nocked an arrow, drew back mightily on the bow, his left side braced against a foot-thick larch. He rotated the bow overhead and down into line.
Breathe. Hold. Feel. Fire.
A difficult shot—he was nearly parallel to the cavalry rank. The shaft arced sleekly, slammed through a knight’s arm, bit into the ribcage. The shocked rider spurred his horse and was thrown backward, his foot locking in the stirrup as the beast broke ranks and dragged his metallic ruin through the canyon.
“Still got it, eh, Gonji-san?” Gonji’s jaw was set with battle fervor. He glanced over the field; still hadn’t been noticed. Good. He turned his attention on the foot soldiers farther down the slope. Perhaps a dozen. But how many bows?
As if in answer four of them rose in unison and fired their clacking arbalests at a mercenary clawing up the far canyon wall. Two bolts shattered flesh and bone. A wild pistol shot from the mercenaries zanged into the packed earth between the foot soldiers and Gonji, who flattened in alarm, indignant.
He grimaced. Damned fools! I’m trying to help you!
The Austrian commander clumped to the head of the cavalry rank, sword raised, and shouted orders. The footmen to the rear of the cavalry massed for an attack. Then a pistol ball crashed into the commander’s steed, unhorsing him. Confusion reigned.
Time to clear the path.
Gonji emptied his quiver and laid out the shafts for rapid firing. He dropped to one knee and seated an arrow, braced, fired. A flanking crossbowman seventy-five yards downslope was skewered squarely through the back. The others froze, stared.
Before they could react, another lay thrashing at their feet, a crimson shaft protruding from his ribs. Ten sallets whirled, their wearers wide-eyed. A third man was knocked cleanly off his feet by the impact of a great cloth-yard shaft that clove his surcoat and breastplate.
Gonji fired at the last arbalester, missed, and a crossbow quarrel thunked into the larch, splintering bark in all directions. Gonji ducked behind the slim bole and nocked another arrow as the footmen clawed up the slope, low to the ground, howling epithets.
Then Gonji saw Tora, not twenty yards up the hill, nosing toward him curiously.
“Get out of here, dummy!” he cried, waving the animal back. “You want to get killed?”
The samurai spun into the open, bobbed tantalizingly to draw the crossbow’s fire. He launched an arrow that split a shin, the soldier flinging his mace wildly in rage and pain. Gonji rolled behind the tree.
“Tora—move!”
A bolt crunched into the ground at Tora’s hooves, erupting stones and clumped earth. Tora got the message and peevishly hopped up the hill at a lazy pace.
The footmen were almost upon him. One more shot and he’d have to quit the tree’s cover. He nocked, pulled, drew a breath.
Stepping out on the opposite side, he met the crossbowman’s eyes, dared his hand. Thirty yards or less separated the two archers. A dirk whizzed by Gonji’s left leg; he paid it no heed, blanked out the imprecations of the raging swordsmen.
The crossbowman aimed deliberately—too deliberately. Gonji’s cloth-yard arrow tore through his breastplate, rent half-a-length deep in flesh and bone, wrenching him backward and deflecting his bolt harmlessly into the sky.
Gonji cast away the longbow and drew his swords, a scowl of defiance twisting his features as he regarded the seven puffing footmen like a treed predator. They slowed, yammered to each other in a Germanic dialect unknown to him, then began to spread in a flanking movement.
The three centermost swordsmen charged. Gonji leaped to his right and skipped laterally along the hill to neutralize their line and isolate an end. The advantage was his as long as he could string them out and strike downward.
Then a hail of whistling pinpoints bristled the sky. Gonji flattened, choked on a mouthful of dust as shafts chunked into the hard earth, one nestling a heart’s width from his ear. The nearest soldier screamed and dropped, pierced through the neck by his own army’s errant shot.
Six.
The squad of bowmen below readied for another upslope volley, but before they could launch, Gonji scrambled to his feet and closed with his foes, slamming down the first and engaging the second with twin arcing blades in a breathless instant.
Glinting silver-yellow—blue sparks and the krang! of steel—a blink, a gasping rush of spent breath—
The swordsman slashed, cut empty air as Gonji slipped the blow. The Austrian re-cocked his arm for another strike, and the samurai lunged forward, bound his opponent’s blade in mid-arc with the short sword and ripped the Sagami through dead center of the white cross emblazoned on his surcoat.
The shocking moment of death. Dead before the gasp of despair had escaped the small “o” formed by the mouth. Before the red gout had splashed to earth.
Gonji had leaped back and begun circling again. Eyes alight with cold cunning, his hypnotic, patterned movement momentarily keeping his foes at bay.
The four remaining soldiers spread out to a respectful distance, grunting with contempt. Their squad leader dead, one among them assumed command and cautiously directed them to surround the samurai in a box. Low, nervous chatter. At a word the four unfastened their sword-belts and flung them down in a jangling clatter of hasps and sheathed dirks. As one they slung their bucklers on their forearms and leveled stout steel at Gonji’s coiled stance. Here was a strangely frightening new enemy, different both physically and in fencing style. He was a twin-fanged animal, all teeth and claws and primitive speed and strength.
Each swordsman swallowed back the coppery tang of fear and advanced a tentative step.
Gonji didn’t need to understand their language to catch the meaning of the Austrians’ oaths and imprecations. They were afraid, afraid to die when, in the final analysis, all that they were, all that they had ever hoped to be, had ushered them to this moment. And so they swore their oaths and spat their anger, thinking to freeze the blood in his veins when their own was tinged with frost.
He was wary. Four swordsmen should drop a single man with ease and usually did; but in battle no victories are taken for granted. And misdirected force has a weakening effect, each man relying on the strength of another, relaxing his own.
The warriors edged nearer. All were oblivious to the clamor on the battlefield below.
The senses work faster than the thews, Oguni always said. Let them work hand in hand. Sense movement with the feet. Smell the enemy’s courage—or lack of it!—in his sweat. The metal in the blade may be tasted in the air before it reaches its target....
Gonji rotated slowly. A panorama of anxious eyes, bobbing blades and bucklers. The continuous snaking of his slender swords left no spot uncovered. He emptied his mind and gave free rein to his reflexes. The heavy blades advanced another pace, arms trembling with their weight. Their heft told a great deal, dictated technique and strategy. Boorish insults issued at Gonji from under brows dotted with moisture in the heat. Gonji blinked back the salt burn.
From somewhere, the burst of a hundred muskets. Nerve ends flared. A soldier bellowed hoarsely.
And sprang.
* * * *
On the valley floor Francisco Navárez shouted desperately at his remaining men. The mercenary tro
op was cut to vulture feed, the handful left screaming madly against certain death. A final volley of pistol shots raked the cavalry line before them, throwing the knights into disarray. The critical moment.
Half the Austrian troops watched the drama on the hillside, briefly ignoring the doomed bunch in the ravine. Navárez fired his pistol and flung it aside, lurching out from behind the carcass of his horse and wrestling astride another screaming animal. With a wave he directed any left alive to follow him up the dusty slope in a frenzied dash for life.
A swarm of arrows dropped men to his right and left as he clenched teeth and eyes, clinging low, cursing deep within his chest. He spurred the frothing animal upward at a stumbling gait. His last impression of the valley was a terrifying glimpse of a musket company advancing on the double. He had no way of knowing whether any survivors followed, hugging tightly, as he was, the neck of the shuddering horse that clumped over churning shale as if through dream-mist. A roaring bellow preceded the first fusillade of gunshots.
Then, the thuck! of torn flesh and a scream of shock and pain. The horse fell from under him. Navárez plummeted head first over the dying animal’s crest and cracked his chin on the baked shale, stunning him. He crawled forward a few feet, raised up on hands and knees. A searing pain shot through his leg. Two horsemen plunged past him as he collapsed. Then another. Heedless to his weakly raised appeal for help.
Desperate. Strangled by the certainty of death.
His eyes refocused, and a hundred yards to the right through a veil of dust and swelter, he witnessed an act of magick: A circle of swordsmen, blades flung to heaven, died in the space of a breath by a flash of silver sorcery.