Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  Now the hunt had begun for fair. He’d galloped after it endlessly across the snowy plain, twisting and turning, rushing it time and again, discovering that the spear he’d fashioned was a poor substitute for a proper lance in the sport of pigsticking. And, sadly, that Tora’s old wounds and the ravages of time had slowed the staunch warhorse as he’d long suspected.

  But they’d pressed on, driven as much by pride as by hunger. Twice more he’d raked the boar with spear and the katana’s vicious edge. Then, unexpectedly, as if at last understanding its advantage, the boar had turned and charged. For an instant Gonji had thought of the Dark Company, whether they had been as surprised to see him turn as he was to see the wily animal bear down on him. Then the boar’s lancing tusks had caused Tora to lurch backward, throwing Gonji to the ground. Only the snow had kept the samurai’s tailbone from taking up residence in his empty belly.

  Now he knelt on one knee in the snow before the wild boar’s lair, with the Sagami leaning on his right shoulder. This would end the way it should have started.

  “Stupid beast,” he spat at Tora, fifty yards off. “Doddering old drayhorse! You’re home now. Can’t you show some pride in your native land?” His backside ached with every move.

  A golden sunset shadowed the snowy wasteland, sketching the absurd churned-up ruin his hunt had made of acres of virgin snow. He hoped no enemy had observed any part of it.

  With a snort of challenge, the boar plunged at him from the gathering shadows.

  Roaring at its tormentor, angling its eight-inch tusks for a rending blow, it surged through the sluicing white mist, its breath pluming hotly.

  Gonji feinted, twisted out of its path, and struck it across the shoulder. The deep cut spilled redness onto the snow in the animal’s drunken three-legged progress.

  The boar charged Tora in a wild, bellowing rage. The chestnut stallion whinnied and bolted. Gonji swore and sprinted after the injured prey, watched it circle back almost lazily toward the lair. Then it stopped, fixed him in its black, hate-filled eyes, and roared after him again in raging pain.

  The samurai raised his blade high over his right shoulder, hands spread along the hilt, fingers caressing the sharkskin in a grip that almost looked slack. He struck the wounded boar a blow across the hindquarters, downing it. A rapid double slash—

  Gonji shouted to the twilight sky to join him in his hard-won triumph. His mother’s Nordic ebullience came through in a brief impromptu dance of victory. He quickly composed himself and set to finding wood, his mouth watering.

  But his prayer of thanks to the kami of good fortune was premature.

  Hurrying to secure what seemed good kindling, he hastily prepared a campsite in a hollow at the base of the cuesta. Defying caution, he built a blazing fire and warmed himself briefly, savoring the tantalizing feast to come.

  Moving out into the moonlight to relieve Tora of his burden and settle him for the night, Gonji realized his mistake too late. He saw the danger light in Tora’s eyes, the fear in the horse’s tossing head, before he heard the sifting wind of the horror’s descent on his camp.

  He froze an instant when he saw it. The pirouetting of its great wings caused him to believe himself under wyvern attack again. But this creature was smaller, more birdlike than the acid-spewing flying dragon. It dovetailed downward in an impossible air ballet, scarcely moving its wings, until it hovered a foot above the carcass of the boar.

  Calling out to Gonji in a mewling, yammering singsong voice filled with sentient taunting, it grasped the great bulk of the boar—well over a yard in length—and flapped laboriously upward. Its taloned feet and clawed humanoid hands clutched while its powerful wings beat against gravity. Slowly it rose, making steady progress toward its roost atop the cliff overlooking the crackling fire.

  “Iye,” Gonji breathed, eyes filled with the vision of the departing carcass, the prize so dearly won.

  “Noooooo!”

  Gonji drew the Sagami as he ran through the crunching snow, yielding it impotently in his right hand. By the time he stood beneath the lofting creature, his katana in pointless low middle guard, it was already cresting the cliff. He watched it disappear over the edge with an anguish that a lifetime’s discipline could not keep from his face.

  Above, the bird-thing peered over the brink, its supple beak emitting a mocking warble. Its piercing, intelligent eyes gleamed with self-satisfaction and cunning. It made a swift motion in the moonlight.

  The boar’s genitals dropped in the trampled snow beside Gonji.

  * * * *

  The campfire tinged the area with sultry hues. Before its glare knelt the samurai, all thought dispersed by his deep meditation. His shadow loomed large against the base of the steep cuesta at his back. Before him lay the sheathed Sagami, storied sword of uncounted legends.

  His methodical ritual ablutions completed, he dressed, retied his topknot just so, and lashed his daisho—the matched set of long and short swords—to his back with the harness he’d used since Vedun. He placed his tanto in his boot, then carefully sifted through his remaining black powder, obtaining what seemed enough dry charge to load both pistols. These he loaded and spannered, fixing them at last inside his obi. Then he rose and grimly eyed the roost above, where his tormentor whooped and nattered.

  It peered down at him, scuffed the ground with a hind claw. A piece of the boar’s entrails dropped straight at Gonji. The samurai batted it aside with a swift circular block.

  He tied around his forehead the hachi-maki—the headband of resolution. All the while, barbed thoughts dropped into his mind. Leaden ingots of karma, dragging down one’s soul, Gonji-san…

  He was a fool, a rabbit, a bumbling failure. His ancestors turned their faces in shame. Old Todo would order him to commit seppuku at once, if he found him incapable of protecting even his own victuals. His hated half-brother Tatsuya—hai, even dead Tatsuya must laugh from the world unknown: See the blonde tigress’ cub—even the birds mock his skill!

  The merest trace of a smile perked Gonji’s lips. He banished thought, clearing his mind for the encounter to come. Calmer now in his determination, where once the anticipation of single combat had filled him with the eager fury of an inferno.

  The wonder of life’s vicissitudes.

  On his left hand he wore a spiked gauntlet—the nekode—as an aid in scaling, after the fashion taught by the old ninja master who had secretly befriended an artless young samurai against his father’s wishes. Then, emptying his mind and allowing the karumi-jutsu climbing technique full sway, he began to ascend the slick wall of the cuesta.

  Digging and scraping, Gonji utilized the nooks in the almost sheer cliff face. The nekode gouged chinks where there had been none. He used his fingers and toes for purchase, clinging like a spider, teeth gritting with the effort. He fought off the numbing chill, flexing and relaxing muscle groups in turn, shifting his weight, feeling out the easiest advance upward, testing and probing, lightening his body as the time-honored, almost mystical method had taught.

  The first three yards came easy. Five. But how high to the nest? Fifteen—eighteen yards?

  Wygyll.

  All at once, as the monster bird took note of him with a quizzical shriek of disbelief, Gonji remembered its name. Not the name it would be called here in Spain. That one he could not recollect. It was the English name he remembered. The English, he had heard, had their names for everything. Things they knew well; things they would not admit to believing in.

  This creature was a member of an old race, older than man. Scavengers who roosted on cliffs and ledges.

  Wygyll. The wygyll’s aerie. Forty feet above.

  Something stinking and moist landed on his shoulder. Some part of the boar’s viscera. He shrugged it off. Soft crumbling sounds descended past his position. Then a rock cracked him on the skull, scintillas of s
tarlight lacing the momentary blackness of his vision.

  “Cholera!” he swore, his favorite European imprecation having the venting effect it sometimes manifested. He shook his head to clear it, sure that he had been cut. His skull throbbed at the point where it swelled.

  Above—the soughing of wingbeats as the wygyll lofted from its perch. Gonji steeled himself, wary but relaxed.

  Must maintain the hold, he told himself. What was their favorite technique? Ah—four claws extended; clamp with the hind, rake with the fore. A simple attack pattern that could leave an ox in shredded ruin.

  In his peripheral vision he could see the fifteen-foot wingspread looping lazily about the area, tipping gently at the extremities of its flight path to sail into a graceful figure eight knotted behind the clinging samurai’s unprotected back.

  Without warning the air ballet ended. With a war cry more penetrating than the teeth of the wind, the wygyll dove. Wings trimmed, talons tensed for a strike.

  Gonji willed his thews to relax. He inched up another span. Felt the rush of the approaching marauder. Sensed the closing distance between them. He drew a pistol smoothly, cocked it, turned outward from the wall, maintaining a three-point grip—

  But it was coming on at too indirect a tangent. He knew he was firing from so oblique an angle that he threatened his own precarious hold with the recoil.

  The wygyll did not recognize the menace the firearm posed. It swooped in with searching talons eager to rake and tear.

  Gonji fired—splfszzzz.

  “Sonofabitch—cholera!”

  He gathered his senses at once, even as the wygyll cried out in terror of the misfired pistol’s spluttering powder. His right hand flung off the useless piece and went to the hilt of the Sagami at his shoulder. But the wygyll’s fear of the harmless pyrotechnic caused it to swerve into an ungainly tumble. Feathers fluttered off its wings from the violent directional change.

  The flying predator soared from side to side of the broad cirque valley, whether gathering speed or wrath, Gonji could not tell. It strafed Tora once, twice, the valiant steed’s hooves lashing up to ward it off.

  Gonji used the opportunity to gain another yard. He was working on the second before he caught sight of the cunning beast’s next intention. Farther along the base of the cliff lay a large chunk of sodden log. This the wygyll descended upon with a vengeance, dragging and clawing it from the ground’s frozen clench. Screeching once at the samurai, it went clumsily airborne with its burden, quickly growing accustomed to the weight, in its rage.

  Gonji’s eyes widened. He took an uncertain reach upward, then one step back. The creature lofted to his level, then higher, still rising on its mighty wings. When it had reached the escarpment, it hovered above the helpless would-be invader of its realm.

  Gonji experienced an expanded moment of terror as the log fell heavily toward him. An instant’s fatuous thought that he might somehow leap around the plummeting missile that filled his vision—

  And he was leaping off the wall in breathless frustration, losing his hard-won ground. He landed catlike in the snow, tumbling into a shock-absorbing roll, shoring up his determination before he had come to rest. The bounding log hit him in the back.

  The wygyll flew overhead, shrilling at him in ridicule as he gathered his weapons and breath. He glanced at the second pistol, thrust it back into his obi, and regained the cliff base with a running leap. Paying no heed to the enemy, he scrabbled up the wall, using the earlier chinks. The ascent was easier this time, and he reached his last handhold in seconds.

  When he paused to get a fix on the wygyll, all he saw were sapphire stars and the moon’s crooked golden grin.

  Uh-oh. Something new, neh?

  Swift and silent, the creature pushed itself over the edge directly above him to lance down like a shaft from a siege catapult, clutching at full arm’s length—the sharpened sapling Gonji himself had honed into a spear.

  The katana snicked out of the back harness as the wygyll dead-dropped straight at Gonji’s face. The samurai swung outward and to the right at the last instant, clinging by the nekode and the toes of his left foot. He struck the beast’s weapon a sharp blow as it passed by, deflecting its lethal course. The wygyll shrilled and soared into a tight loop, boring down through the air at him again in seconds. But as it braked with a counter-flap to avoid hitting the rocky wall, Gonji’s blade snapped up, parrying the spear. He completed the circle with a wrist-twisting riposte—a soft thwack—a burst of feathers—

  The creature keened a high whining note. Blood spilled from the shallow slice along its convex rib cage. It released the spear and twirled off in a contorted flight pattern, maddened by its pain.

  Gonji gained a narrow rock shelf halfway up the cuesta. He clawed his way up still higher, reached the shelf with his feet, nerve ends prickling with his desperate desire not to be dislodged again now that his goal was so near. He thrust the naked katana blade through his obi. Fought the rock, the gnawing wind and bitter cold, his stiffening sinews—

  Five yards left.

  The wygyll swooped and screamed at him. He slipped his grip with one boot, nearly lost his purchase. Pausing to regain his hold and steady himself, he realized that he was momentarily helpless to fend off the bird-thing. It saw, and knew, and flapped down at him. Its powerful talons cut the air eagerly as the distance closed.

  Gonji pulled the second pistol. With practiced flexibility he twisted outward and fired at the onrushing creature. He barked an expletive that was drowned out by the cracking report as the wheel-lock belched smoke and flame. The wygyll shrieked a caterwauling note over and over as the pistol ball tore through a wing with a cascade of gray-white feathers. The samurai was forgotten as it struggled to regain its failing power of flight.

  Gonji discarded the spent pistol. Shivering as he pulled and dragged himself upward along the craggy higher reaches of the cliff, he at last secured the brink with the spiked nekode.

  Bobbing and fluttering through the air with the erratic course of a butterfly, the wygyll attacked him with a hail of ear-piercing cries and its pummeling wingbeats. Injured though it was, the creature now fought for the aerie-home it had been so confident of a short while before.

  But Gonji, too, had won his territorial objective. With a mighty push he lurched over the edge and onto the cliff. He caught a glimpse of a huge wattled structure and the riven carcass of the boar. Then the powerful talons sank into his back, seizing garment and skin in equal measure. He yelped a pained outcry as he was lifted off the rock. For a saucer-eyed instant he viewed the long drop, the flash of his campfire, no ground to cushion him for a long way. Then he snatched the wiry forearm at his shoulder and held on with the dynamic strength of self-preservation. The squawking beast strove to drop him, but the other fore-claw became entangled in his sword harness, and one hind talon was snared in the fabric of his short kimono. The other clawed his back, and Gonji roared in pain and stabbed upward with the Sagami repeatedly, finding a soft spot behind the chitinous beak and jamming home the deadly point.

  Screaming and twisting in the air, unable to control its burden any longer, the wygyll spiraled back over the aerie on the cliff-top. Another backlash of the gleaming katana caused it to tear free of their mutually tangled grip.

  Gonji dropped onto the cliff and rolled, losing the Sagami in the snow. He drew his ko-dachi and raised it in high guard. The wygyll stalked him now with bounding half-flight strides, flapping and crying out in frenzy at this raider of its domain. In great pain and weakening fast, the creature darted in and out with its snapping beak. But Gonji’s short sword deftly held it at bay, clashing and slapping at the wygyll’s waning attack. A crimson tracery of blood marked the creature’s track in the snow.

  Gonji found the katana, poised it for the kill. But something stopped him. Small twittering sounds emanated from the nearb
y wattle-work structure—more a thatched hut for humankind than any roost for beasts of the air—behind him.

  The wygyll’s nestlings, squalling in fear.

  Seeing his notice of its young, the wygyll charged him with its remaining energy, throwing its life into the breech in their defense. But Gonji merely beat it back with a series of double-bladed parries. It came on once more, with the same result. The wygyll fell back, studied his eyes with its own keenly intelligent gaze.

  It was a quarter of an hour or so before the samurai made his intent clear. With a noble bow of its head, the creature hunched its battered wings in a gesture that bespoke resignation. It lurched past him to hunker down before its hutch, where it proceeded to work at its manifold wounds.

  As Gonji watched it, the bushido principle of the warrior’s tenderness permeated him. He felt profound sympathy for this forlorn creature, now that he recalled its full legend.

  “I can fight, it’s true,” Gonji told the oddly attentive creature, “but I’ll never be the hunter you once were. And now I fear that, thanks to me, you’ll neither be hunting nor fighting for a good long time.”

  The nestlings—two of them—crawled from the hutch out of their vestigial responsiveness to human speech. They reminded Gonji of nothing so much as the tiny winged Cupids—albeit with soft beaks where their mouths ought to be—he’d seen represented in art. They ran to their father with teetering steps and, one under either furled wing, huddled close to him in affectionate innocence.

  * * * *

  An hour later Gonji sat before his blazing fire at the base of the cliff, feeling a curious mixture of anticipation, satisfying fatigue, and formless anger.

  He poked at the roasting portion of boar with a stick. The remainder of the chunk he had taken, perhaps three days’ worth, was already packed into a saddlebag. He laved his cuts and abrasions as he mulled over the sad lore of the wygyll, as he had heard it told.