Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  The early descent of a dreary Mediterranean winter did not help matters. The gray mantle of sky seemed to press lower each day. The stiff northern breezes churned the sea foam into a cold, rolling froth that spanked the galley southward, plunging and knifing with a queasy monotony. Even Gonji, who had much experience with the indomitable sea, found himself struggling with nausea for several days, though he knew that in his case the problem was based in his illness and injury.

  He encouraged the others with the reminder of two things: The wind that tossed them with such perverse jollity saved them the chore of rowing, and they were seriously understaffed. Also, though they kept constant anxious vigil for the appearance of Spanish sails—and soon those of Turks or Barbary pirates—in the first week the only vessel they caught sight of was a harmless merchant ship fighting its way to the north.

  * * * *

  A week at sea enhanced camaraderie among the diverse band. There were seventy-seven on board, and someone idly reckoned that they had set a new nautical standard by gathering people of no less than nine different nationalities aboard the same ship. To which Orozco jovially appended: “Nine national origins—yet not a single national allegiance left on board; thirty-nine different ideas of what lies beyond the grave; and seventy-nine speculations as to what lies ahead in Africa—besides the grave itself.” When asked why the discrepancy in the latter figure by his chuckling audience, the sergeant advanced that he had at least three premonitions himself, each one worse than the last.

  And despite similar misgivings shared by all of them, their spirits ran high. Even Pablo Cardenas had thrown over his sullen mood and stoically accepted things as they were. He’d become cordial with Gonji, more friendly with some of the Spanish renegades—particularly Orozco, whom everyone liked, and he lived on the heartfelt hope that he’d eventually be reunited with his family in Spain.

  Valentina seemed to revel in their peculiar circumstances. She took regular shifts on watch, helped the men quite capably with tasks of the worst drudgery, and delighted in the respect and importance she was thusly accorded by the other women on board, who numbered fourteen in all. She engineered everyone’s adjustment to the makeshift modes of privacy necessary in the tight quartering and mixed company. Her frankness and earthy humor went a long way toward alleviating time-wasting embarrassment and fixing the limits and standards of decorum. And yet she mustered enough creative femininity to appoint the stern cabin in a way that even the most delicate of the women found satisfactory, though some of them still shied from her: Her salty tongue was a match for any man’s, and few dared challenge her to an exchange of insults. Only Orozco never resisted a verbal bout.

  Gonji was pleased that they’d been able to rescue her from the stake. Valentina had brought them a badly needed vivaciousness, and she thumbed her nose at the road ahead in a fashion that caused the men in the band to plumb the depths of their own untested intrepidness out of shame.

  The wayward woman of the streets had found a niche, and in the bond she’d formed with Orozco—though he was much her senior—Gonji hoped she’d found still more.

  Buey’s imposing presence did much toward keeping the grumblers in line, and the samurai valued the man’s varied fighting skills, which might be pushed to their limit on some dread morrow.

  Corsini and his wild Neapolitan bunch were a tonic to Gonji’s ailing spirits. Responding to his old sword-brother’s repeated blandishments, Gonji one day eschewed his carefully maintained dignity for a tilt at the rum cask. A score of men and three women sat below decks exchanging apocryphal tales of the road and drinking to stout health and the continued union of all their parts.

  “Avaunt, blades that would dismember me! Avaunt, monsters who would devour my stinking innards!” LoPresti was shouting above the clamor, fisting an uncharged pistol. Michelangelo LoPresti was one of Corsini’s mercenary band. A short, muscular brigand with a broad, smiling face and curly black hair, LoPresti was ever festooned with an array of weaponry that made him look top-heavy. The noise he made when he moved into battle had caused Corsini to nickname him “Klank.”

  “What is this ‘avaunt’ shit, Klank?” Del Gaudio asked jokingly. “What are we, limp-wristed Francais now? With all due respect to you limp-wristed Francais here,” he appended, evoking a rum-soaked round of laughter from the crowd. Another adventurer from Naples, Del Gaudio was a tall, wiry man in his mid-forties with thinning hair, wild dark eyes, and a penchant for keeping a straight face even in the highest mirth. His other penchant—unbridled lust—had seen him take a nodding interest in Valentina, though she fended his innuendos skillfully, and he generally kept his interest in check as it became known that she was Gonji’s woman. Del Gaudio could only shake his head in bewilderment over the samurai’s overt display of indifference toward her.

  “All right, all right, everybody shut up,” Corsini was saying, waving a hand vigorously, “and I’ll tell you how I met this man—” Here he indicated Gonji, who sat back slowly, eyes brimming with the warmth of both the rum and the memories. “And how Luigi Leone here lost his eye!”

  Luigi swore as the crowd roared its approval of the tale to come. The little man’s surname was not Leone. That had been provided by Gonji, when they had shared the deadly adventure whose recounting now stilled the crowd in the wave-tossed hold of the galley. Luigi had been perpetually anxious about the depth of his courage. Gonji had often enjoined him to think of himself as a lion—leone.

  The bizarre event, now some eight years in the past, involved the liberation of the people of a valley in the Schwarzwald from the unholy thrall of their feudal lords—a clan of vampires. Corsini’s tale was laced with nostalgic appeals to the ideals of those not-so-distant days, and to the contradictory aspect of the good money their mercenary company had earned. Most poignantly, with respect for the staunch friends who had died such grisly deaths in that campaign.

  By the story’s end, the crowd was breathless, deeply saddened. Gonji’s jawbones worked tautly in his cheeks as he ground his teeth and stared into his cup. Luigi kept rubbing at his eye patch, the symbol of the proof of his courage, which had earned him for all time the nickname Leone.

  And at the end, by way of dramatic punctuation, Corsini opened his shirt and displayed the marks of the vampires’ fangs on his neck and torso. Gasps of shock, as he explained that the scarred flesh around the raised pits of the bite marks were caused when Gonji burned away the Evil, purging the wounds with firebrand and holy water, even as Corsini was himself fighting the samurai off, transforming into one of the undead.

  Gonji felt his head swimming with the memories, averting his eyes from the others that sought him out in wonder. He returned the thanks and the toast Corsini tearfully offered him.

  “Monsters,” Klank LoPresti grunted. “People don’t believe in ’em anymore. Only those of us who’ve lost buona amici—”

  Simon Sardonis, seated at the stairs, rose quietly and climbed to the deck, pushing past Cardenas.

  A pall blanketed the crowd, broken by a few whispers.

  “You talk too much, LoPresti,” Corsini said.

  Gonji pushed up onto his feet and refilled his cup, then another. He moved up the stairs after Simon.

  “Seems like a good idea,” Cardenas observed as he passed. “We may need him.”

  “He needs us, too,” Gonji said, narrow-eyed, “whether he wants to accept it or not.”

  Gonji found Simon at the prow guardrail.

  “Let it drop,” Simon said without looking back at him. “I’m beyond being offended by drunken faux pas.”

  “Why don’t you rejoin us below, then?” the samurai asked. Simon shook his head to see the extended cup. “Another hour,” Gonji went on, judging to see the lowering sun, “and you may need this. Did you ever try a good—”

  “When I want your quaint diagnosis of my needs, I’ll ask for it,” Si
mon snapped.

  “Speak German, bitte,” Gonji replied. “I’m afraid I didn’t understand you—again.” He still held out the cup of rum.

  Simon eyed him peevishly, then grabbed the cup out of his hand, sloshing rum over the rail. “All right, monsieur le samurai, I can play at being—human, just as you sometimes can.” He tipped his head back and slugged at the rum.

  “Good,” Gonji said, smiling.

  “Lower the dinghy. It’s my time.”

  The samurai bowed shallowly to him, watching him amble off toward the deck. But stopping on a companionway, Simon turned and cast him a skewed glance.

  “Do you think you could…burn me with firebrand and holy water, should the need arise?”

  Gonji stared at him evenly. “Hai.”

  Simon rumbled out a low laugh. “I think you’re probably the one who could, if it comes to that.”

  “Would that stop you?”

  “Nein,” Simon replied. “I am not a vampire.” He began to climb the creaking steps again, but Gonji halted him.

  “What’s on your mind, Simon?”

  The accursed warrior’s face twisted.

  “The full of the moon.”

  He bounded over a rail and descended to the deck. Gonji called out to the men on duty to lower the dinghy for Simon’s lonely anguish. Then he saw Ahmed Il-Mohar crouched under the crowned roof of a gun port, tapping the fuse of a cannon with an unlit taper. The dark-skinned Morisco smiled enigmatically and made a small gesture at him.

  Gonji abruptly felt uneasy in the way he always did to see Ahmed’s complacent smile. He wondered what was on the Morisco’s mind.

  * * * *

  “What is it?”

  The renegade lancer on stern watch shook his head slowly. “It’s very small, whatever it is. Doesn’t seem to threaten us. It’s just sitting there.”

  “Not sitting,” his partner corrected. “Keeping pace with us.”

  “I don’t see how,” the lancer replied. “The sails are furled.”

  “How long has it been there?” Gonji asked.

  “About an hour.”

  “An hour?” Gonji grated. “Why wasn’t I told sooner?”

  The lancer shrugged. “Sergeant Orozco—he said not to awaken you unless we were certain of danger.”

  The werewolf growled deep and sonorously in the dinghy below them, drifting to starboard. Gonji peered down. The small boat bobbed like a toy at the end of its long mooring line.

  “Was it bad tonight—for him?” the samurai asked earnestly.

  “Si, senor, for awhile, I think. Then—he came out from under the canopy—and laughed at me.” The soldier’s brow crinkled anxiously as he searched Gonji’s eyes.

  “Laughed at you?”

  Another doglike growl from the boat. Gonji saw a glint of huge fangs as Simon opened his gaping jaws to full extension and hissed up at him in the moon’s straying rays. A man’s head might be bitten off in those jaws, with room to spare.

  “Simon,” Gonji whispered, “are you all right?”

  Something gleamed in the werewolf’s taloned hand. There was a strident creaking sound as of a metallic vessel being crushed. Then Simon hurled the object up onto the deck.

  The second watchman retrieved it: It was the rum goblet, twisted now into formless scrap.

  Another gurgling half-bark from the dinghy, and one of the men laughed breathily. “Your friend lobis homem—I think he is drunk, senor!”

  “No,” Gonji rasped sharply. “He had only one cup of—” His attention was drawn to the tiny boat illumined by the cloud-bound glow of the waxing moon.

  “Simon,” he called down, pointing out to sea.

  The lycanthrope turned slowly to see where Gonji indicated, and it seemed to the samurai that his grotesque friend sported what could only be described as a canine grin. Simon crawled to one side of the dinghy as he peered at the small shape. The dinghy listed to starboard such that the watchers aboard the galley thought it would capsize. Then—

  Simon drew back, his wolf’s head and humanoid shoulders striving up toward the sky as he howled at the moon. His keening note diminished to a long-drawn baying.

  “Jesus-Maria—”

  Much of the crew was awakened, pounding feet clattering on deck in response. Some of the rudely startled women in the stern cabin began to scream hysterically despite Valentina’s efforts at calming them. Half of them moved below decks, refusing to sleep so near the werewolf’s nocturnal station again.

  * * * *

  When Gonji arose in the morning, it was to see Simon hovering over him in the dim ship’s hold.

  “Never again,” he said firmly.

  Gonji groaned and rolled upright, beginning his stretching regimen. “Hai—what was that all about last night? Everyone thought you’d turned on us.”

  “Don’t make light of it.”

  “Were you…drunk?”

  His swept-back silver eyes blinked rapidly, and he seemed to consider his answer carefully. “I…I think so. It was very strange. I think it put the thing—the energumen—the possessed spirit I host—it put it to sleep?” He seemed dazzled, like one discovering for the first time something wonderful, yet commonplace and not a little embarrassing.

  “That’s good, neh?”

  “Non, au contraire—it’s very dangerous. You see, the Beast—it—I—seemed to lose control of it. Not in a savage way. Not so that it would climb the rope and rip your filthy little yellow heart out. It’s just that I couldn’t make it speak. I could only growl.”

  “And howl,” Gonji reminded archly.

  “Oui,” Simon allowed sheepishly.

  “One cup of rum—very poor control, neh?” Gonji needled. “No samurai would lose his faculties so eas—”

  “I seem to remember a samurai in Vedun who got so drunk he had to be rolled down the street in a pickle barrel to save his heathen ass—uhh…so they said.”

  Gonji was about to take up the gauntlet when Orozco hobbled halfway down the ladder, calling as he clambered. “Gonji—get up here. Hurry.”

  “What?”

  They followed the sergeant up to the deck to find the entire ship’s complement at the port rail.

  “Cholera,” Gonji breathed. “The little ship from last night?”

  “Not unless it sprouted one helluva hull—”

  “That’s a galleass,” a mercenary declared. “A goddamned galleass!”

  The huge warship was unmistakably tacking in their direction.

  “Six—seven hundred men on a ship like that?” Orozco was speculating with awe.

  “The Golden Fleece Knights—catching up with us so soon?” Gonji wondered aloud.

  Panic began to spread through the ship.

  “Well, what now?” Cardenas asked as he moved up to them, his face lined with fear.

  “Big cannon balls, I’d imagine,” Gonji ventured quietly.

  “We’re going to take them, no?” Corsini asked, eyes aflame with the flicker of anticipated conflict. “We tack around and take them.”

  “Are you crazy?” someone was shouting. “Our five guns against—what? Eighty?”

  “We’re fighting a righteous battle, aren’t we?” Corsini challenged. “Look what God’s seen us through so far.”

  “We’re not fighting it like lunatics,” Gonji cautioned. “That’s why we’re still alive. Simon?”

  “What?” He looked as if he’d just been accused.

  “Isn’t there something you can do?”

  Simon’s angular face warped as if he’d been addressed by a lunatic. “We outrun them, that’s what we do,” he said.

  “Impossible,” Orozco said, shaking his head and scowling. He began charging his pistols.

&n
bsp; Simon was backing away, eyes flickering as the samurai approached him imploringly.

  “Orozco’s right,” Gonji said. “We can’t outrun them.”

  “So we put our backs into the oars. That plus the sails will—”

  “Think, man, think what you’re saying,” Gonji argued, his voice rising.

  “Three-hundred-fifty rowers on that vessel,” Orozco observed, gazing across the waves.

  “Get our rowers to their stations,” Gonji told Orozco. “Every man to an oar. Don’t—let them—panic. Simon—”

  “I’ll take my place at the oars like the others—”

  “Simon—”

  “What else can I do? Tell me what you want.”

  People began looking toward them fretfully now. The undermanned rowers put their backs into the hopeless task, the women taking up places alongside the men.

  “Will you help me control these people?” Gonji said through clenched teeth.

  “What is it you want of me? That I should swim out there and kill as many of them as I can until they destroy me? What do you think I am, some kind of murdering monster?” When he realized what he’d said, he turned his back on Gonji and stalked to an unattended oar. Its shaft creaked in the oarlock as he began to row.

  Gonji took up the oar behind him.

  “Simon—the storm,” he whispered as they rowed.

  The first booming of the pursuing ship’s mighty guns tore shrieks of terror from the rowers. One ball crashed into the sea off the port bow, sending water cascading over the rails and scuppers.

  “Remember when you raised that wind over Vedun,” Gonji went on, “when you first came to the militia in the catacombs? You frightened our enemies then—”

  “I told you I have no control over that. It’s the will of God, or more likely His whim.”

  “Maybe it’s his will, but it’s still your mood that inspires it—your anger, your pride—something.”