by T. C. Rypel
At one shoulder of Simon’s cloak, a great rent appeared as if the fabric were shredded by the claw of an invisible presence.
“I’ll be—I’ll be at the catacombs...first—” Gonji said, backing away.
“Non, monsieur—wait—” Simon’s harsh voice again. “The scrawl—read the letters—on the ground.” He pointed at the body of Strom again, then fell face first, racked by convulsions.
Cautiously, distractedly, Gonji knelt again and checked the ground around the body. Near where Strom’s head had lain, there were letters gouged into the ground. Two of them, the shepherd’s reed pipe still protruding from the second. The first was an M. But Strom had died before he had completed the second. Or had he? It was either an I or an incomplete letter. The start of a lower curve suggested a U or an O.
MI—Michael? There were also three Mikloses and a Miskiewicz Gonji knew in the militia.
MO or MU—?
“Get away from me—now.” Simon’s voice was a barely articulate growl. “If I can,” he gasped, “I’ll signal....”
“And if not?” Gonji snapped, wide-eyed.
Simon hurtled into the forest on all fours, groaning like a bull fiddle.
“Block those tunnels—!”
The words came to Gonji’s ears like the ominous voices one sometimes imagined in the crackle of a lonely campfire.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The small band of bushi, mostly weaponless now, who had boldly appointed themselves personal bodyguards to Michael, Lydia, Milorad, and Anna, led the remaining city leaders back to the Benedettos’ house.
When the doors and windows had been secured and they had waited sufficiently long enough to be sure there would be no search of the premises, they descended to the cellar and rearmed from the weapons cache secreted there.
Lydia clasped her hands before her and sighed to see the fortress her home had become.
“Well,” Michael told her as he loaded and primed two pistols, “Klann’s troops seem convinced it’s over.”
“Isn’t it?” she said airily and without conviction. Michael ignored her, and she busied herself by straightening the room.
“They say Simon came back. He’s with us now,” the new council Elder went on. “He and Gonji made a great show of leaving the city, to confound the enemy. But they’ll be back later. This time—this time we win.”
“Can anyone really win?” she needled him. Their eyes met. She smiled at him, a trembling smile. “I was proud of you, somehow, when you spoke to Klann. So strong, so defiant. I almost really can envision you in one of those Llorm surcoats. Except for your crutch.”
“I’ll never wear the crest of Klann. No one here will. You know that.”
“I know,” she said. “You’ll all die first.”
She followed him into the kitchen, where he peered through the curtains. Producing a brush, she began to work at her hair, numbly and mechanically. “When they’ve come back and...done what they’re going to do, do you really think we’ll be able to ride away from here?”
The question surprised him. “You will, anyway.”
“Oh, so you’re going to stay behind? Go down with your men? Very noble.”
“You know, you really are like my mother,” he said, leaning both hands on a sill. “The way only she could be, at those times when it seemed terribly important to her to grind my father into meal.”
“I know—bitchy.”
Again he was mildly surprised. He turned and looked deep into her pale blue eyes.
“It’s because I love you, Michael,” she said simply. “And I don’t want to see you die.”
He snorted. “It’s because you want to be right. Always so very right.”
She came close and placed her hands lightly on his damp back. “Will you concede,” she asked gently, “that I was at least partially right? That you had it in your power to prevent all this?”
“I don’t know whether anyone could have prevented it,” he replied reflectively. “Anyone who would have wished to.” He thought a moment, adding: “I thought you didn’t want to flee Vedun.”
“Of course I don’t—didn’t. It seems there’s no other way now. I want our child to live. And not in flight.”
“So you can tell it how its father made sausage of his talents and ambitions, despite the predictions of his mentors?”
She drew back. “Our child will know what a great man his father was. Of course,” she added softly, “it would be nice if you’d be there to tell him yourself....”
He took her hand and pulled her close. They held each other a moment, silently, sharing each other’s warmth. At length Lydia set about preparing a light meal.
Michael gazed through the shutter into the lowering sky, where the full moon blazed in triumph.
* * * *
Aldo Monetto set his children to playing a game in their bedchamber, after putting their confused fears to rest regarding the fighting and screaming outside that troubled them. He kissed them all with a prayerful desperation none of them would be old enough to understand for some time. Gently refusing their request for the “Papa the Jester” performance he sometimes did for them, Monetto joined his wife, Sylva, in the kitchen for a brief, quiet time.
Then he scaled the attic ladder, to find Gerhard sullenly observing the street below, through a vent.
“Kind of quiet out there now, eh?” Monetto said.
To which the archer grunted, shifting, his face beset with angry creases.
“Maybe you ought to check in at Michael’s, or Flavio’s—” Monetto began, but his friend interrupted him gruffly.
“Why don’t you go out there and check in?”
“Hey, I’m sorry. You think I won’t? I just thought—”
“Sure,” Gerhard said wryly, “send the guy with no family to worry about. That makes sense—”
“That’s not what I meant, asshole. Anyway, you’re part of this family, aren’t—”
“I did my part today. Now I’d like to lie back and let somebody else get their hands bloodied.”
“Oh, so I didn’t get bloody enough for you, eh?” Monetto fumed. “What the hell do you think I was doing up on that wall—?”
The heraldic cry from the rooftops in the northern quarter smothered their bickering.
“Men of Vedun, behold the sign! Your Deliverer is at hand. You shall know the Death Angel by his works!”
Soldiers passing in the streets below, recognizing the voice, belly-laughed and called out in mocking encouragement and mimicry. Some slugged from wineskins, secure, now, in their reinforced numbers.
“Beware the Angel of Death....!”
Monetto shook his head, eyes crinkling with disbelief. “That Paille—Amazing, eh? Karl, what’s bothering you?”
“That’s a stupid question, nicht wahr?”
“You’ve just been...strange lately.”
Gerhard frowned. “Can’t imagine why. Nothing strange happening in Vedun.”
“All-recht, forget it,” Monetto snapped. He drew away from the attic shutter, clambered back to the ladder. “Think I’ll go out and see what Paille’s drinking....”
* * * *
“Anybody heard what happened to Stefan yet?” Nick Nagy whispered louder than the others.
The newly arrived messenger shook his head.
“At least you’re safe from his insults, Nick,” someone offered by way of a distracting jest.
“That’s true, that’s true,” the old cavalryman jokingly agreed, the pain in his face belying his words.
The Hussars were scattered all over the city, many out of touch with the leaders’ plans. Some had abandoned their mounts in courtyards and alleys and fled on foot. Others, like the fifteen with Nagy, crouched in the gloom of a barn near the south wall, awaiting some word of action that they could trust. Their weapons at the ready, they sat with their weary steeds in nervous vigilance. When the soldiers finally came, they would wish they had instead stumbled into a vipers’ nest. Tense chatter fil
led the air with vapor and speculation:
“So Gonji’s left the city?”
“Just a diversion, they say—”
“No news at all of what the war council will do?”
A warrior snorted. “Probably none of them left alive.”
“Michael and Milorad are. I know that. They went before Klann.”
“The devil, you say?”
“Then they’re probably dead by now, too.”
“Hey, Nick—I think Magda’s staying with the Kolodyis.”
“That’s good,” their leader rasped above the others’ low whispers.
“And your wife’s at the chapel, Victor.”
“Thank God.”
“If we don’t hear something by ten bells, I’m getting out of here—”
“You’re not going anywhere,” a stern voice shot from the darkness.
With a sound that clawed along their spines, the double doors suddenly creaked open. The posted sentries raised and pulled their bows—the click of pistols being cocked—
Two bushi peeked in, holding up staving hands. “Hey, hold your fire!”
“Any of you men seen Berenyi?” Nagy asked, scrambling toward them.
“Don’t you worry about Berenyi, you old fart,” came Stefan’s familiar voice. He limped in, wet and rumpled but apparently in one piece. The wrap on his injured hand hung in tatters. He was unarmed.
“Well, it’s about time you’d report in,” Nagy carped, masking his relief. “What the hell’s the matter with you, riding off on your own like that? When you have a tactical plan, you follow it.”
The backslapping welcome of men who took profound comfort in the living faces of comrades drowned him out.
“I’ve seen Michael,” Berenyi said. “We’re to wait for Gonji and that Simon character to spread the word...somehow. Then we hit Klann’s troops again.”
“Jesu Christi—”
“Did you bring anything to drink, Stefan?”
“What the hell do I look like? Somebody send for Gutch.”
“Stefan,” Nagy called, “what happened to Vlad?”
Berenyi seemed thunderstruck. “He—he went down....”
“What happened?”
“Just...gone.” Berenyi moved away from them, then, slumping down in the straw with exhaustion and an emotional wave of overwhelming misery.
* * * *
The sentry sat dozing on a boulder behind the spearhead-bristled redoubt in the northern hill tunnel entrance.
“Shi-kaze—”
Startled, he raised the pistol from his lap and fired, the recoil rolling him backward off the rock. The lead ball struck the top of Gonji’s sallet with a sharp whanging sound. The samurai fell back slowly, dreamlike, landing with a heavy thud on his tailbone.
The echoing report brought the sentry’s partner at the run, arbalest readied to unleash a deadly bolt.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God—that’s Gonji!”
Screams and shouts of alarm wafted mutedly into the tunnel from the main cavern. Galioto scrambled in with two other men, just as the sentries cautiously approached the downed sensei.
“He—he shot Gonji!” the second sentry cried.
“Oh, Jesus—Gonji!” Galioto swore, moving up shakily.
The samurai waved them back and peeled off the sallet gingerly, looking dazed. Saying nary a word, he shuffled into the cavern, hollow-eyed, carrying the creased sallet, breathing in shallow gulps until he was certain he was truly unhurt.
He felt his head. A tender spot, knotting up. Behind him: accusations and recriminations. A man weeping.
Walking into one of the main catacomb chambers, he surveyed the sobering panorama, strolling with a throbbing skull. There were hundreds watching him, some calling out his name hopefully, or in apprehension. Women, children, the aged and infirm—Hundreds. Yet still not all the city’s non-combatants.
Gonji ambled to a water trough and washed his face. As if the pistol shot had been a signal, his other injuries came back with nagging mindfulness: He laved the grime from the cut on his hand; rinsed his mouth where he had bitten himself in the horse fall the previous night.
“Oh God, Gonji,” Galioto muttered behind him, face contorted with worry. “I don’t know what to say to you to—”
“Forget it.”
“I knew I should have stationed myself in the tunnel. I knew there—”
“How are the people faring?” the samurai asked, in a blanketing voice that cautioned an end to Galioto’s wearisome fretting.
“They’re afraid,” the dairyman whispered, swallowing. “I can’t blame them. Gonji, what’s happening in the city? There’s been no word.”
Gonji recounted the battle and the powder-keg situation in Vedun.
“Oh, no,” Galioto breathed as he listened. “You can’t—you can’t spare me any more men down here?”
The samurai shook his head sadly. “We’re thinned too much up there as it is...too damned much.”
“But what—?” Galioto had begun to gripe in a whining voice. He composed himself and spoke more conspiratorially when he saw the anxious faces that peered at them in the torchlight. “What will happen to us down here, if...if the worst happens up there? What if we never get word to evacuate? If the wagons never roll? If we’re sealed off down here—?”
“Then...,” Gonji said firmly, staring out over the heads of the innocents to where the blackened carcass of the great worm crumbled back into the earth that had cradled its misbegotten spawning, “then you’ll just have to fight your way out. Go south, on foot, if need be. Rush these people to the mountain passes, then westward to Austria. Find them sanctuary...somehow.” Gonji studied the man’s face, saw the panic creeping into his eyes.
“What if there’s another monster? That one’s mate, or—”
“I have every confidence in your fighting ability, your passion to survive.”
Galioto blanched. “I—why? Why us? Why does it have to be us?” His lips trembled, and he shut his eyes, turning away. “I keep thinking how Pete Foristek died—why us?”
Gonji spoke with arresting calm. “Because you’re here. And no one else. Just you.... And it’s your duty.” He saw the resignation that gradually deadened the evacuation leader’s near hysteria. Galioto hugged himself tightly, then thrust forward his jaw and nodded resolutely.
The samurai smiled and clasped his hand. He flicked his head in the direction of the tunnels.
“Have bonfires built at the redoubts—”
“Wha-a-a-t?”
Gonji held up a stifling hand. “Set them ablaze and keep them burning all night.”
“But why?”
“Because your lives—their lives—may depend on it. When you get word from the surface that it’s safe to move, douse them and get these people to wherever the messengers tell you.”
“What about the rest?” Galioto pleaded. “There must be hundreds up there yet who—”
“We’ll get them down here,” Gonji assured, “or out through the gates. Something.”
They exchanged well wishes, and Gonji went to the vestibule chamber, where he found Paille, tipping a wine bottle between efforts at catching his breath.
“I see you’ve been busy,” the samurai said, surprising him. Paille choked on his wine, and several people cleared out of the samurai’s path.
“What has happened to shi-kaze?” the artist snarled in a fierce whisper. “The bushi have all gone to shivering in their warrens. The evacuation wagons still sit under guard at the wagonage, the Provender, Wojcik’s—”
“Steady yourself, Paille.”
The wild-eyed aesthete bridled but clammed up as another noisy group of refugees hurried in from the chapel tunnel.
“Well, at least they’re still coming,” Gonji said.
“You think I’m drunk?” Paille bawled. “That’s what they think, as well. The soldiers. But Paille’s done his patriotic duty.” He held up a sheaf of papers, his in-progress Deathwind of Vedun epic. “No jej
une chronicle, this. Listen to me—they’ve left that mooncalf giant at the square, but half the Llorm detachment’s been pulled outside the walls. Seems they’re very concerned about you and Simon trying to return—”
“Then it worked,” the samurai said with tight-jawed satisfaction.
“Humph! Not for fear of you so much as for Simon. That’s the value of a good Frenchman. It takes half an army to watch him.”
Gonji spat and grabbed the wine bottle out of Paille’s hand, taking a swig. “Rather good wine, for you.”
Paille ignored the insult. “Gutch trotted out his best for tonight.”
“Those wagons of yours—I must admit, they’re a marvel.”
The artist snorted and retrieved the bottle. “Oui, and now, thanks to your brave bushi, they’re full of occupation troops.”
“We’ll get them back.” Gonji remembered something and reached inside his breastplate and tunic. He gave Paille the sweat-soaked but still legible fold of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Remember the poem? My death waka?”
Paille took it reluctantly. “So it’s come to that.” It was a glum statement. “What would you have me do with it?”
“See to it that it’s inscribed on my tomb.” He shrugged. “The place that marks my body, my memorial, whatever—whatever these people decide to do.”
Paille scowled. “Probably won’t be anyone left alive to remember you. But I’ll keep it. I’ll add to it your sonnet by Shakespeare, and the snatch of Cervantes you never let me read.”
“That’s good,” Gonji said, rubbing the sore spot on his skull. “The kami of good fortune sometimes withdraws her smile without warning.”
Paille waxed sullen, introspective, and they parted without another word.
Gonji ascended alone through the tunnel up to Tralayn’s house, and then out through a window. As he donned the dented sallet and sneaked along the spattering streets, the thought suddenly occurred how very much the helm resembled the war helmets he’d worn in Japan many years past. And how many warriors in helms such as these might rally to his side in these perilous times....
...if he were only in Dai Nihon?