by T. C. Rypel
And on nights when he could not empty his mind of thought, when his misery leered and mocked like some tangible horror looming at his shoulder, he would give way to self-pity and indulge in maudlin memories.
I am once again, he brooded, the most miserable of men. My karma is an unendurable burden. Honorable giri—duty—is denied me. I have neither home nor kin—for surely old Todo has by now surrendered his life out of shame for his wayward firstborn! I have forsaken my father’s noble heritage, and in the land of my mother I am shunned as a barbarian, as alien as she was in Dai Nihon. And Reiko—how does she fare? What does she look like, these days? Does she mourn her lost husband, my ignoble half-brother? Or for me? More likely for her lost honor in having failed to kill me. Best for all if I had allowed it to happen. Iye. No. That’s not what I feel. Even honorable impulses escape me now. Yet there must be a reason for my having survived on this strange, endless trek. No. No reason. Karma. That is all. Emeric—good old Emeric, the warrior-poet. Him, with his ever-present sketchbook of scribbled notions and maxims and odd scraps of wisdom. What was it he used to say about evil? About the way it showed its strength only where it was opposed, attacking only where it was threatened? He would probe me for details of my travels, try to make sense of it all—first by astrology, predicting, so he said, my future karma—constructing his lunatic maps of my meandering journey, eliminating events he deemed meaningless—fool! Brilliant, faithful fool! Connecting points on the map, displaying for me the geometric shapes that rule my karma—lunacy! Beware the star, Gonji-san. The star is not a favorable omen. The star. The diamond…diamond—the Archmage Domingo’s diamond-fortress configuration. Old castles. No one knows whence they came. None could claim their raising. Gibberish. Nonsense… Paille. Alain Paille. King of Nonsense, from Vedun. On whom does he unload the burden of his genius these days? If he still lives. Strange. His grandiose Deathwind of Vedun epic—never had time to read it. All the time I need now. Time. Darkness. Tora… So sorry, old friend, but I could not be with you at the last because I was a fool—such a fool, convinced of his importance and posturing so pridefully; the Conquistador—Conquistador, they call me, the taunting bastards!—hai, he was taken so easily, and he allowed you to die like some common beast and that you were not. That you surely were not… My daisho. The Sagami, honored weapon of countless generations of noble heroes. Gone. Plundered by some filthy Spaniard. Dozo—please, forgive me, fathers of my father. I shall insist that they bring me my ko-dachi, and I shall keep on insisting until they realize that it would indeed be an exotic entertainment for them to witness the seppuku of an honorable samurai. Hai, it shall be so. Death shall follow dishonor. Death. Death with dignity. Death-wind—shi-kaze—and Simon… Simon Sardonis. Arigato. Arigato, faithless friend and ally.
You, more than myself, are responsible for my self-loathing.
* * * *
The days passed and dragged into weeks. Each day that he languished in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Gonji added a new ritual to his regimen. However slight—the addition of a new movement to a martial-arts kata; or laborious—the painstaking chipping, into the stone wall of his cell, of a kana ideogram that mocked some tormentor, each new day’s addition lent fresh meaning to the new life he was forced to adapt to, breaking the spell of the tedium, helping steel his senses against the endless round of mockery and torture and sadistic treatment, helping fortify his concentration, blocking the constant wail of prisoners in pain and the scratching of the rats within the walls.
He would ponder things as newly amazing—if commonplace—as the symmetry of his hands and things as eternally sublime as the anger of the storm kami. New thoughts occurred to him, new associations of apparently disparate ideas. To his morning ritual of asking permission to commit seppuku he later added a daily request for writing materials. Both were always denied. The former with revulsion, the latter with mundane annoyance or a jest belittling his considerable education that he found increasingly irritating, though he maintained his dignity through it all.
When he began to notice how his poor—and occasionally rancid—diet had begun to attenuate his physique, he attempted to work still harder at the exercise the confines of his cell would permit. He improved himself to a noticeable degree, then seemed to reach a plateau he could not raise.
One day as he worked through the vigorous kata whose daily extension had become his dungeon calendar, two burly guards burst into his cell out of frustrated hostility—for he had refused to acknowledge their presence, though they taunted him incessantly and pelted him with stones and fecal matter.
After a ferocious battle in the tight space of the cell, Gonji left his attackers writhing in pain. Other guards on the scene fired two warning shots to which he paid no heed, quitting the cell to take them on empty-handed. In his weakened state—his nose was broken for the second time—he was soon overpowered and thrown back into the cell.
Pain-maddened fellow prisoners cheered and screamed from their own cells—on whose behalf Gonji could not tell—when he was later led to the torture chambers for a session under the lash.
He was unable to lie on his back for a week afterwards; yet he agonizingly pushed himself through his daily regimen. But his battered condition forced him to abbreviate it. His discipline now necessarily became less vigorous. And he marked the passage of time from the Day of the Lash with compositions of waka poetry.
His requests for writing materials were still refused daily, and he committed each new day’s waka to memory, repeating it silently until it duly took its place beside its brothers.
* * * *
There were three shifts of guards on duty in the dungeons.
Those who came late in the afternoon and stayed till midnight were the worst. These were the brutes who had beaten and flayed him, and it was only by supreme exercise of concentration that he was enabled to blockade their presence from his daily struggle for dignified existence. They would occasionally wrestle him out of his cell to lead him on tours of the torture chambers, elaborately demonstrating the rack, or the iron maiden, or some other such fiendish device, on an unfortunate prisoner.
Gonji quickly learned to stop fighting them and go along willingly; the beatings he suffered were pointless, and it was clear that they were under orders not to kill him. The torture demonstrations were presumably intended to terrorize him, and it was with some small satisfaction that he realized their frustration at his expressionless acceptance of the horrors he witnessed.
They briefly tried a new tack to unnerve him: the torture of anticipation. They would tie him into the rack and stretch him to barely tolerable levels before releasing him. Or the torturer would sear his flesh superficially with red-hot irons, but never in a vital spot or on the face, where it would show. And the samurai would antagonize his tormentor by complimenting him on the subtlety of his touch. Once they even forced him to witness a condemned thief being drawn and quartered—his arms and legs were lashed to four horses who were then driven off in opposing directions, dismembering him in a wretched display of blood and bone and shredded sinew. Gonji himself was then similarly tied, taunted with the imminent threat of his own sectioning and ultimately released with an offhand jest about his being too dimwitted to comprehend their power over him.
They ceased these measures at length, bored with his lack of cooperation and failure to plead for his life. It was clear that he was being temporarily spared by higher authorities. But to what purpose, he could only guess.
The accusations the soldiers heaped on him were amazing in their mad irony, and Gonji experienced the dawning of a change in his thinking. He was becoming stubbornly perverse in his desire to remain alive long enough to set records straight, whatever the cost. And although he had long since abandoned all hope of escaping the Inquisition alive, he was determined to find an honorable way to die.
On his terms. And, if possible, by his own hand.
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br /> The second shift of tormenting dungeon guards—those who worked through the night—were the superstitious bunch. These soldiers, by dint of their eerie duty of watching over the moaning and screaming denizens of the sleepless dark, constantly performed rituals of prayer and application of holy water and other sacramentals, crossing themselves repeatedly whenever their sweating faces appeared at the window grating of prisoners’ cells. Gonji found their self-righteous spiritual posturing insufferable at first, but he soon learned to ignore them.
The third shift—the morning complement under a sergeant named Morales—were the only guards who exhibited a measure of humanity. These grimly and silently went about their duty, and Gonji gradually learned to trust the sad-eyed Morales. He, it was, who alone among the guards was given to greeting prisoners in the dungeon block, inquiring after their condition. It was Morales who courteously, though negatively, fielded Gonji’s daily requests for his seppuku sword and writing materials.
The daytime contingent was the only one from whom the samurai would take a meal, for although he knew his body was shriveling and gradually losing strength, he had come to suspect that the evening crew were tampering with his meals. This, despite the fact that the food was already frequently rancid.
It was Sergeant Morales who began increasing Gonji’s daily water ration when he noticed the samurai’s habit of trying to maintain a futile semblance of dignity by using a portion of his water to wash his tattered garments and lave his body.
The effort was in vain. As winter turned to spring, the samurai noted with helpless disdain that he had contracted lice.
* * * *
On one night of the full moon during spring, soldiers burst into Gonji’s cell as he drifted off to sleep. They roused him, and a priest accompanying them gestured to two wide-eyed novices who bore robes of widely varied colors.
“Choose one, witch,” the priest declared.
Gonji rose languidly and examined the garments. One was bright yellow with a blood-red crucifix on both front and back. The other was black and emblazoned with red flames and glowering devils.
Gonji smiled as he selected the black one, donning it over his breechcloth.
“As one might expect,” the priest intoned sardonically.
“My father’s regimental color,” Gonji replied. “And the device is interestingly crafted.”
A musketeer raised the stock of his weapon as if he would cuff him, but Gonji skipped out of range and cocked his fist. He relaxed at once as pistols were aimed in his direction.
Then he was led up and out of the dungeons for the first time in weeks. Exhilaration swept through him as he smelled the clean, fresh air of spring, reveling in the chill night breeze. They took him to the top of the High Office’s walls, where he was lashed to a battlement of the Alcazar a hundred feet above the city square. Two sentries stood with shields angled before him on either side, presumably to prevent his being shot from below.
A bearded friar in brown habit stood in the embrasure next to him. “Call to him,” he said. “Call out to Simon, your familiar, that he may deliver you. You have your chance now. Test your dark power against that of the Church.”
Gonji locked eyes with the donado, who seemed of sinister familiarity, though Gonji was certain he’d never seen the man before.
“You call to him,” the samurai responded. “He has a keen taste for monks.”
The friar hissed at him through clenched teeth and moved away.
All through the night Gonji listened to the jeers from the streets below. Now and again an arrow would whizz by or a rock would clatter against the granite ramparts. Always a disturbance would follow as soldiers parted the growing, antlike crowd in the streets.
“A gargoyle!” someone shouted. “They’ve raised a new gargoyle on the battlements!”
The cry was taken up by others, and it was thus that Gonji was greeted during his full-moon exposures in the succeeding months, though he cared little. For those stimulating, life-affirming exposures above the city were chief among the paltry few things that lifted him out of his brooding introspections, that assured him that he was yet among the living.
* * * *
“Ohayo, Morarei-san.”
“Buenos dias, senor samurai,” Sergeant Morales replied.
They bowed to each other, and Gonji smiled as the soldier proffered his morning meal and a ewer of water. The remainder of their morning ritual followed in due course.
“So sorry, but I must respectfully repeat my request for my seppuku sword.”
The sergeant sighed indulgently. “And I, senor, am so sorry to remind you again that suicide is a great sin. The greatest of all sins, some say. It will keep you out of Heaven. But your persistence is wearing me down. If I could get at those swords, then perhaps I would.”
“Then I must repeat my—”
Morales’s eyes twinkled as he halted him with a wave of his hand. “No, save your breath. They still forbid you to have writing materials, as well. As a matter of thorny fact, my anus is about this much wider since the last time I relayed your request. They say that with pen and paper you might inscribe some spell to drive us all mad, you understand? Eh, like those figures you’ve etched into the wall over there. Oh, and—I’ve been officially forbidden to speak with you. They say your spells are already clouding my thinking. I’m behaving most unsoldierly.”
Morales grinned impishly.
“Arigato, senor,” Gonji said, bowing curtly, “for the troubles you’ve taken on my behalf.”
“Ahh!” Morales dismissed it with an impatient gesture. “You don’t belong in this wretched place. I’ve met more than one trooper who’s served with you in the past. Almost to a man they swear to your valor and sense of honor. And what a man of honor believes in his own heart is his own affair, as far as I’m concerned. Just so you don’t try to subvert my children with your filthy Eastern ways! Here, now, eat hearty and quickly—you’ve a visitor this morning.”
Gonji complied, though he tried to check his alacrity with a facade of unconcern. He was consumed with curiosity.
Gonji studied the face of the man who peered through the grating a half an hour later. Deep, warm eyes, penetrating in their intensity, engaged Gonji’s. The visitor had a strong, prominent nose and a sharply chiseled chin accentuated by the neat trim of his beard. He was fiftyish and graying, but he exuded the youthful vigor of a probing intellect.
“Senor?” Gonji said.
“Forgive me,” the other apologized, “I forget my manners, but you are indeed an astonishing man to look upon. I am Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. I do not presume that you have heard of me. I am a scribbler of popular fictions—no! Their critic! I am an iconoclast, in my way, shattering the masses’ notions of how they should be entertained. Ever attempting to uplift them even as I distract them.”
“A magician, then,” Gonji said with some amusement. “You should be imprisoned here with me.”
Cervantes laughed, but immediately assumed a sympathetic expression. “Si, but this is deplorable, is it not? I’m afraid they live in dreadful fear of you. Would that we might meet under better circumstances. Have they made it unbearable?” His eyes glistened moistly, sincerity welling up from the depths of his soul.
Gonji’s eyes narrowed. “It is what my life has become. All of life serves up some burden that must be borne, Cervantes. Cervantes…” he repeated thoughtfully. “I do know your name. Haven’t you been a correspondent of the mad poet Paille?”
Cervantes’s eyebrows raised. “Alain Paille? Hah! Don’t tell me you’re an acquaintance of that lunatic!”
“It seems so.”
“I haven’t heard from him in some time. He wrote me about his town’s having come under siege by dragons and witches. Sent me, in fact, portions of an extravagantly imaginative in-progress epic he’s
composing to commemorate the siege. Can you believe it?! Life is never flamboyant enough for Paille. He must embroider it with—but surely you’re not the Red Blade who is the central focus of these events in—where was it?—Vedun? In Rumania?”
Gonji’s lips were pressed into a thin line. He knew not whether to laugh or cry. “How could I be? I’m surely not flamboyant enough to be this hero who—what?—tilted with a cretin giant? Attacked a wyvern alone with bow and arrow? Perhaps…led defenders against a monster worm in the catacombs beneath the city itself?”
Cervantes’s droll tone became serious. “You are the one. The Oriental who partakes in an adventurous quest after something called the Deathwind. The one who’s spoken of the idiocy of European life, of the blindness to wonders untold. Tell me, senor, in your questing, have you found the secret of what you seek? What is this Deathwind? I must know what lies at the end of the quest for one such as yourself. I have myself undertaken a lengthy work concerned with the idealist’s quest after the substance of his dreams. Tell me what you have learned, por favor.”
Gonji wasn’t sure whether to be honored or insulted. But the philosopher in him rose to the challenge. “All right, amigo. I’ll tell you what my quest has brought me. The end of knowledge, the ephemeral nature of life, the mockery of fate. These things I’ve been rewarded with in my quest.”
They spoke at length, Cervantes drawing Gonji out, cajoling him to elaborate on his specific adventures. All the while the writer lent his arrested attention.
“Do you really believe all the things you relate,” Cervantes finally asked, “truly happened?”
Gonji pondered the question before answering. “What does it matter? Whether they were real or illusion, I now bear their consequences. All of life seems a great, shifting illusion. It’s very strange, you know. Some say that I should recant the loom of lies that’s woven my very life. Others, that I’m guilty of causing the incredible events I’ve survived. Only I, who am favored by the truth, say that it ought to be forgotten, for the meaningless illusion it is, the ephemera of moments.”