by Rypel, T. C.
Navárez pointed. “Go get them started in the orchard. The small trees at the edge.” Esteban trotted off, calling out orders. The captain leaned closer to Gonji.
“You think I like killing priests? You think I like—”
“I don’t give a damn what you like,” Gonji snapped.
“I follow orders!” the captain bellowed. Then, lowering to a whisper, he continued, “And you would be wise to do the same, without questioning, without thinking about your...heathen ways, whatever those may be. Klann is my liege lord, the Lord King of any who ride with this company. You remember that and you forget your feelings”—he sat upright in the saddle—“or you ride off. Now.”
They glowered at each other. Gonji could think of nothing to say in his confused and shapeless anger at having fallen in with these dregs. The man was right—duty was duty. But here in this accursed land, Gonji had come to doubt even such cherished beliefs.
“I don’t like you,” Navárez said with breathy uncertainty, seemingly both regretting the words and glad they were spoken. “I don’t like your beliefs, and I don’t like you. And I don’t like you thinking I owe you anything for what happened back there. Do we understand each other?”
Gonji nodded and smiled wryly. He was rather surprised by this frankness but pleased with it as well.
“Tonight we chant the sorcerer’s invocation. At the darkest hour. By then you will either be one of us or...maybe you’ll be dead.”
Navárez wheeled and bolted off, motioning for Gonji to join the mounted party at the orchard. After an interval the samurai clopped off to the fragrant grove, his curiosity nudged as the first few monks were raised on the walls and lashed tightly, rather than hanged. Thick inky smoke fumed from the keep, and the pale, gaping monks in the upper story grating were appealing for mercy. Their tortured prayers wafted skyward.
Gonji joined a group, including Julio and the two Mongols, who were denuding fruit trees and nearby oaks as far up as blades and axes would reach. Some men stuffed both their saddle pouches and their mouths with the luscious fruits. Then several monks were led to the grove as thunder boomed in the mountains. Helpless to do anything else, Gonji assisted in binding the priests to the trees in a rude mass crucifixion.
An hour later Gonji sat with the rest of the column at the edge of the valley and could only wonder at the purpose of all this. The isolated Carpathian monastery, its central keep a pillar of roiling flames, had become a bizarre perversion of religious devotion. Priests dangled from trees and gates; they were lashed to embrasures and sconces, some supported by leaning beams; in one place on the southern bailey wall, a string of four monks looked like paper doll cutouts attached by hands and feet. Some prayed in silence. Some whimpered; some cried out loudly for God to prove His existence and spare them or screamed for deliverance at any price, only to be chastened by others.
It would take them a long time to die like that.
“Vamos!” Navárez called at last. “We must be far from here by sunset.”
On Navárez’ command the company pounded away from the wretched scene and into the hills, but not before Gonji caught sight of a horror that would plague his dreams for many nights hence: the maddened monks in the upper story of the blazing keep had somehow torn free a window grating and were leaping to the ground far below, their bodies aflame like human pitch.
CHAPTER FIVE
The company climbed up into the twisting mountain passes again, emerging between two frosted peaks to clatter down a steep trail at breakneck speed. This emptied onto the main road they had traveled earlier, and they galloped along as if in full charge. Behind them the sun had already gone molten in a brooding leaden horizon, and the vast expanse of spear-point pine peaks to their right ruffled before a gathering storm.
All the adventurers seemed more intense than ever, their actions fired with immediacy. Frantic, maddened men.
Once or twice Gonji fancied that he heard keening shrieks in the mountains, shrills that could have come from no bird he knew. His face felt flushed and his eyes glazed over with rising fever, but he was more concerned now about tonight. Where were they heading? What would he do about the invocation? Would they meet the elusive Klann and his sorcerer?
He was sure of one thing: He was about full up with this troop of gutter scum and the senseless mop-up and revenge duty that seemed their sole purpose.
They rumbled east for nearly an hour, seemingly pursued by the approaching storm. Lightning arced in the gathering darkness; thunder pealed as the gods roared down on the tiny world of men. They passed a cluster of wagons, nomadic locals dressed in florid garb, whose hostile stares followed them until they disappeared down the road. They were deep in the Hungarian marches, and every massed group was a potential enemy. But they encountered no military parties, and just as the first heavy droplets of rain fell, the 3rd Free Company’s fine remnant loped up through a rocky delve and crunched down a shale-and-bramble ravine that led into another wooded and fog-shrouded valley.
Beyond and below the slopes of the oak-dappled valley, on a flat table of land, bristled a thick pine forest, like the plush carpet of a titan king. The treetops were streaked with an unnatural light. For a time Gonji couldn’t locate the strange light source in the slanting rain and bouncing motion of the ride. He blinked back the droplets on his eyelids and searched the skies. There, peeking furtively around a blue mountain summit, was the impossibly huge orb of the full moon, somehow pulsing its dirty yellow glimmer through the matted thunderheads, as if it were descending to earth. Cringing beneath it in the distance, glimpsed through cracks in the fog, were patchwork thatches of cultivated earth. A town or village.
Something came to Gonji against his wishes, a story told by a one-legged bowyer he had met in Austria. In his youth the man had run with a bandit horde that ravaged these mountains. Bold they were, and fearless. The story was told of a secret valley where dwelt an ancient race of things that were not quite men. Travelers blundering into its mysterious fastness were eerily enslaved in a way not conceived by any human overseer. Few believed the legend. But the bowyer recalled having ridden into a misty valley with his band and later stumbling out alone on a lathered steed, bewildered, and with no memory of the valley or the fate of his companions. Nor could he remember why he now rode with a very neatly cauterized leg stump....
Gonji shuddered and coughed wetly.
The troop sloshed to a halt on a treacherous lookout point, and Navárez indicated their destination. Below, pinpricks of lamplight marked the layout of a peasant village. Beyond the farmland spread miles of low rolling hills and dense forest that gradually swept upward into the mountains again at a point due east, where the bluish white caps, limned in moonlight, looked impassable. This valley appeared to be the scoop of a great curving bowl cut out of the Transylvanian Alps.
“We take that,” the captain announced, “and we hold it until we get further orders, amigos. Then tonight we can hold a feast in the king’s honor, eh?”
A rippling laugh swept the company.
“There must be women in the village—it’s been a long time on the trail,” someone said, a chorus of lusty assents answering in several languages.
“And food—good food!”
“And wine—maybe Tokay wine!”
“Cállate! Shut up, before we alert them, eh?” Navárez cautioned. “Mute anything you carry that clanks. We leave our horses in the woods down there and take it on foot. No talk, no noise. No quarter for any who resist. And most important, no one must escape the village, entender? All right, let’s go—quietly.”
Gonji covered his mouth and tried to hold back the cough that broke thickly in his chest. Navárez looked back at him speculatively, but Gonji avoided his eyes and squared his shoulders, snuffling back mucous and hawking and spitting once. He could feel the eyes on him, so he affected a rough-and-ready bulldog mask and gazed around the company with manly elan.
Always the virile show, neh?
Bunched far too
closely for a descent in the dark, the company jostled one another dangerously on the incline. Then a horse slipped in the mud and tossed its rider in a heap, barrel-rolling down the ravine with a fierce whinnying. Navárez cursed at the fallen mercenary, who was unhurt. But the horse had broken a leg, and its anguished cries numbed the troop with fear of compromise until one man bounded down, sword in hand, and ended the beast’s misery.
They dismounted at the edge of the wood and scrambled up a rise. The rain increased in intensity, aiding their effort at stealth as they flanked out in a long ragged rank. The furtive moon dipped behind the trees, and between the darkness and the steady rustling of rain in the dense foliage, one could only trust blindly that the hulking shadow at his side meant no ill. A fine place for a murder.
You will either be one of us or...maybe you’ll be dead.
Heavy and sopping, Gonji’s sandals and tabi, his thick socks, were clung with sticky needles and mud. Several times he stifled sneezes. The footing was spongy from centuries of rotted pine needles. Overhead an owl complained loudly, indignant at either their passing or his rain-slicked coat.
They emerged from the wood and flattened in the mushy grass of a clearing within sight of the village. Dull lamplight sprayed softly through the mist, and a dog barked in the lanes, out of view. The shadows between the huts were still. Here and there a blade slithered out in an impatient fist.
By now Gonji was beyond feeling any pity for the plight of these villagers. Between the brutalization of the past few days and the damnable illness, all the feelings he had left were willingly given over to the blandishments of self-pity. Cholera, he thought, if I weren’t so damn run-down, I’d probably be curious about what the main body’s up to right now. They must be onto something big. The only military sense this village foray makes is to stifle an alert to the head man of this territory. We must be near his castle, and other mercenary companies must be on missions like this all over the mountains. Great kami, I’d like to be heading up some massed line charge right now! Karma. Anyway, that’s foolish. I’m sick as a cur, and I need some rest. This business should be finished simply enough....
And it would have been, but for Gonji’s perverse nature.
Across the field they charged in silence, muting the clink of armament. Gonji saw Julio next to him, trying to keep pace. Even in his weakened state Gonji’s competitive spirit made him run harder through the muck. He ran in a crouch, grinning, hand on sword hilt, gradually pulling away from the puffing and panting Spaniard.
Gonji rounded a corner at one end of the village as two dogs broke into an uproar at the intruders, shattering the carefully wrought silence. Voices shouted in the huts. Frightened faces peered through cracks and windows.
A dozen free companions, adrenaline pumping, slipped and flopped on their bellies and rumps in the rain- and wind-lashed street, bawling challenges at the village for want of an outlet; no resistance was being raised. From the center of the street Navárez yelled for the magistrate to appear. He was trying his third language when a snarling dog leapt at him from behind, seizing a jawful of trouser and buttock. The hobbling captain went down under its lunge, yelping furiously.
The absurdity of it all presently struck Gonji, and he leaned forward on a fence post and laughed in spite of himself.
All at once the village went mad with sloshing feet and shrieking peasants. People poured from their homes and crisscrossed the main street in their confusion. Some carried crude weapons. Many froze in stride on seeing the brandished pistols and swords. Two guns cracked, and an axe-wielding defender spun down in the mud. Screams and shouts pierced the rain rattle.
The door of the end hut burst open on Gonji’s left, and he drew the Sagami and pointed at the lead man. A burly peasant with hate in his eyes and a staff in his fists. Behind him cowered his wife and small son; a bit nearer the front, an older son who was a compact copy of his father.
“Back,” Gonji warned. “Back inside and you won’t be harmed.”
The man held his ground for a moment, regarding the sword in Gonji’s dripping two-handed clench. He apprehended the meaning, if not the language.
Without warning Julio appeared and circled to the peasant’s right, slowly twirling his cutlass. He grinned his murderous intent.
“That’s a staff, not a gun, fool,” Gonji said in low threat. “You’re not needed here.”
Julio bridled. “Let’s see you take him yourself, then, master swordsman.”
“Get away from me. Take your sniveling show of toughness elsewhere.”
“I’ll see you dead, barbarian swine!” With that the swarthy brigand loped off, howling an epithet.
Gonji suppressed his creeping rage and motioned for the peasant family to move back inside their home. The older son, wielding an axe and affecting a show of spoiling for a fight, muttered bitterly in his own language. Tears of desperation clung in the corners of his eyes. Gonji shook his head in warning. The father resolutely raised an arm to hold back his son, then moved his family indoors with a curious look toward the samurai.
Gonji nodded sympathetically. Then he turned and ran toward the chaos in the center of the village.
Harsh commands rang out. Villagers clung to one another. Expectant. Terrified. Mewling sobs here and there. Repetitious prayers and signs of the cross. Disturbed animals bawled and brayed, clucked and snorted.
Gonji arrived at the square in time to see a Mongol slice the arm off of a shrieking farmer whose club was still fisted in the severed arm. Ghastly screams. Gonji’s brow darkened at the sight. There was no need for this; it was over.
He had seen enough here. Mopping the rain and fever-sweat from his face, he turned and stalked back the way he had come, waving his sword menacingly at peasants who peeked from cracks or cringed outside dwellings.
Passing the carcass of the dog that had attacked Navárez, which now lay gutted in an inky moonlit pool, he heard a child’s scream from behind a cluster of rickety barns and stables. There followed a woman’s muffled scream and the clash of metal on metal.
Gonji broke into a sprint, shortcutted through the barnyard. Stinging raindrops lashed his face as he leaped over a wooden rail and into a pen of snorting, scattering pigs. Then, over the other side, past squawking hen coops and a livery. Around a corner into a pitch-black alleyway. Shouts approached behind him in the darkness. He skidded around the corner into a quagmire path before a sagging canopy—
He stared wide-eyed. Sucked in a ragged breath. His thoughts were a whirling montage, a fevered moonlight fantasy: Swordplay—howls of terror—the bandit—an overmatched peasant—the trembling woman—two—three?—sobbing little ones....
An instant in which to act—
“Julioooo!”
Gonji’s fierce cry startled the bandit but not enough to stay his arcing cutlass. It bit deeply into his opponent’s frantically warding left arm. The man whined in pain, his face twisted grotesquely.
Julio glared defiantly through the rain, cursing at Gonji. The villager weakly lifted the short, pitted sword with which he was trying to defend his family. From his multitude of cuts, it seemed that Julio must have been toying with him, enjoying the sport of bleeding a man dry in front of his wife and children. The woman puled, clutching the two smaller ones, shaking her head insensately, hiding their faces from the scene.
A hacking sob caught in Gonji’s throat. It was all catching up with him—too much, too fast—the agony, the insult, the sickness, gnawing at his insides, dissolving his harmony....
The Western half—the damned Western part of me—
His stomach flared with nausea as voices called from near the animal pens. The villager reeled from blood loss. Children whimpered. The wife yammered hysterically. Rain. Fever. Gonji nearly toppled as the rage swelled in his brain. Thought fled; impulse reigned. Julio’s eyes glowed volcanically. A cat’s eyes. A devil’s.
The samurai’s war cry rent the night:
“Sadowaraaaaa!”
Julio s
taggered back three paces, awed by the ferocious sword-high charge. For an instant his reactions rose to his defense. In the next instant he was dead.
Footsteps pounded down the alley. Cries of alarm.
Gonji stormed at the wounded villager, the Sagami in two-handed low guard. The man’s wife whined something, and he imposed himself between his family and the threatening bandit. His grimace carried pain and confusion. He held forth his wavering blade, but Gonji swatted it aside urgently.
“Go!” Gonji tried in High German, heart hammering.
Tears streamed down the man’s face. He raised for a strike.
“Get out of here!” Blood thrummed in Gonji’s temples. The woman screamed something. By all that’s sacred!
“Please!” He had somehow found the Hungarian word.
But the villager swung, his last look the hollow-eyed contortion of a man embraced by death.
Conditioned reflex replied.
Pistols exploded to Gonji’s rear. Keening wails burst both inside and outside Gonji’s head as the villager was ripped and torn like a stuffed target.
But Gonji’s blade had struck him first.
Cold, slanting rain. Muddy pools ran thick and dark with spreading crimson. Gonji couldn’t move. His first thought, once reason returned, was that he was dead. He had no feeling below his neck, and his head felt impossibly huge, floating, disembodied. He was leaning forward on the Sagami, its point stuck in the mud—something he would never have done willingly. He strove to breathe evenly, to master the muscles of his face. It was unseemly for anyone to witness a samurai’s frozen mask of horror. He was going to vomit.
Someone grunted. The villager’s kin were huddled in pathetic mourning, flinging themselves on the motionless form. Gonji couldn’t look at them.
Why did the fool fight?
Navárez came around in front of him, and Gonji found the coordination to push himself aright, though he doubted he could walk a pace without collapsing. Tension squeezed wherever his nerves had regained touch.