by T. C. Rypel
They had been recreating this cyclic scene all night.
Their rehearsals had not prepared them for the reality that invaded their sanctum. A surly voice, speaking German:
“Ho-ho! Look what we have here—”
Greta muffled her scream with the back of a hand. The two brigands eased into the loft, glancing about warily to be sure there was no one else present. One of them held a primed pistol; the other, a blood-crusted rapier.
“—two little pigeons, snug in their nest!” The mercenary removed his kettle hat and tossed it on a cedar chest. The guild hall’s upper loft was used for storage of unsold goods. Cabinets and wardrobes were strewn about the place.
Jiri’s stomach fluttered with terror. Greta clung to him, trembling, as he eased her toward an armoire.
“Now you hold it right there, boy.” The pistol jerked in emphasis. Jiri froze. The bandit undid his jack and heaved an exhausted breath. “You don’t want any trouble in your little perch, do you? Move away from her.”
Jiri shook his head, eyes gleaming.
“Know what I think?” the other soldier said archly. “I think we got a fighter on our hands. Now step away from her, boy, and I’ll give you a fight.” He twirled the rapier point. Jiri’s slender broadsword was still sheathed on his back.
Jiri and Greta began circling away from them as the pair approached slowly, menacingly. An uneasy ballet.
“Move away from her!”
“No!” Greta shrieked, madly leaping at the pistol-wielder when he was within arm’s length. She latched onto his pistol arm and wrestled it for dear life.
“You little bitch!”
The pistol barked off an errant shot, and the brigand slammed the yelping Greta down, tussling with her as she clawed and beat at him wildly.
Jiri’s knees buckled, but he recovered at once to see his beloved in danger. His broadsword flashed up and out and he twisted away, as the rapier darted out at him, missing by inches.
“A two-handed man, eh?” his opponent jeered when Jiri came to quaking engagement. “Let’s see you stop a modern fencer—come on, boy—let’s see what you’ve got—”
Jiri was hard pressed to defend against the slimmer blade’s stinging attacks, giving ground, backing toward the window. He tried to remember everything Gonji had taught—anything he’d taught—then tried to empty his mind as he’d been advised. Under fire, none of it made any sense. He heard Greta’s shrill cry and a tearing of fabric. He growled and roared a kiyai, trying to press an attack against the impossibly long blade as his man laughed at his impassioned effort.
And then the other man screamed horribly and rolled out from behind the cedar chest. Greta’s poniard, the blade she had learned to use in the catacombs and carried strapped to her thigh, was embedded in his blood-spurting lower spine. Greta covered her mouth to see what she’d done and then kicked backward on the floor, eye bulging.
Jiri’s opponent reacted with shock, suddenly looking trapped. The young bushi whipped his blade through a flashy series of baffling blade exercises, growling with the gyrations, as he’d seen Gonji do so many times. The bandit backed two steps, then chanced a lunge that Jiri parried almost by accident.
His wrist-twisting riposte cut the man’s upper arm to the bone in a gush of streaming redness. With a strangled cry, the Frankish highwayman dropped his rapier, grabbed his arm, and backpedaled from the loft and out to the stairs.
Breathing hard, Jiri leaped after him, shouting down from the landing hysterically. “Go on—get out—if you come back, there’s more—I’ll—I’ll kill you next time—”
He ran back into the loft and slammed the door, pushing a heavy chest in front of it. Then he dropped on his knees beside Greta, who stared at the corpse in abject horror.
Jiri looked at the dark, wet stain on his blade.
“I sliced open his arm,” he rasped in awe, his valor vindicated.
“I killed a person!” Greta wailed in horror.
They clung to each other for a long time, quaking.
“Jiri,” she said at length, “Jiri, it’s all wrong. I didn’t know it would be like this. We’re going to die, I know it—”
“No, we’re not,” he assured in an effort at comforting her. They listened to the sounds of gunfire and bowshot, galloping and shouting and screaming, for an unmarked interval.
Jiri moved to the window and peeked out. Klann’s large reinforcement detachment fired across the overflowing culvert at a running band of rebels. He gasped to see the enemy’s numbers.
Then Greta was beside him, wide-eyed to view it all. “I don’t want to die without knowing love, Jiri. There’s so much we’ll never do. Never see. Hold me. Let’s never leave this place. They—they won’t find us here....”
They lay together in the darkness, distraught and afraid. Listening to the sounds of battle and the rush of river water through the flooded streets below their window onto Hell. Clinging fast, sharing each other’s warmth, they surrendered to the bleak promise of imminent young death.
In the midst of death and darkness, they dispelled their confused fears, making love for the first time.
At length Jiri drew up on an elbow, gazed vapidly at the corpse of the man Greta had slain. Shaking his head with abrupt resolve, he rose.
“Come on,” he said with quiet determination.
“What?” she asked uncertainly, wincing and turning away from the sight of the dead brigand.
“We’re leaving.”
Jiri obtained a coil of rope and, drawing the reluctant girl by the hand, removed the barrier and cautiously descended the stairs. They emerged into the street behind the guild hall, found a wandering horse, and rode double toward the eastern rise of the girdling wall, thanking God that they encountered no resistance. They offered not a word to the frantic citizens who questioned them as they passed.
Splashing through the flooded trench and gaining the wall, they climbed to the allure and secured the rope to a crenellation. Greta placed her arms about his neck and laid her head on his broad back for comfort. Before he lowered them outside the walls, Jiri took a last look at the only home they’d ever known.
“I’ve got to take care of Greta now,” he said, as if Vedun itself had demanded a parting rationale. “I’m just not ready...just not a warrior yet. I’ll be back. Someday I’ll be back.”
They dropped into the head-high water of the drainage moat and dragged themselves onto the soaked ground. Heading for the bridge over the Little Roar, they plucked fruit that remained after the harvest and pressed on, leaving certain death behind them for uncertain life ahead.
* * * *
The battered bushi in Gonji’s band fought their way into the central city, men dropping out along the way to check into their homes with promises that they would return, few fulfilling them. Many rode wounded in the saddle, but there was nothing that could be done for them save for bracing pulls at skins of water or heady drink, or crude efforts at self-bandaging.
They reached the central culvert, which had overflowed the retaining wall. Water from the swollen river rushed past, driving rubble and floating corpses through the broad street. The only passage was close by the structures that faced the culvert.
Anton pounded up to them, a mixture of relief and wrath contorting his features. “It’s about goddamn time!” he swore at Gonji. “Look at them—”
His handful of fighting men reeled in their saddles, exhausted. They had finished their heavy task, blocking or destroying what bridges they could, buying time in slowing the coming pursuit.
“They’re out on their feet, for Christ’s sake! Is there anything else you want from them before they drop?”
“They’ve got to be alive to feel exhausted,” Gonji observed.
Anton sneered at the samurai’s philosophizing. “Well, what now?” he growled, throwing up his hands. He fought his steed’s peevish stamping in the rumbling water.
Klann’s reinforcement troop poured across the flooded street beyond the
culvert. The king fanned out his crossbowmen, calling out orders from between the personal guards who held shields before him. A gallery of Klann crests spread across their field of view.
“Jesus,” someone muttered, “we’re going to be trapped here—they’ll be at the west gate—” A few men broke ranks and sped off.
Wilf hurled imprecations at their backs. “Damn you, cowards.”
Gonji ordered them into the cover of the next street as fusillades of quarrels arced sleekly down on them. Garth was the last to move, staring over the rushing cataract at Klann a moment before galloping off.
The soldiers had begun to ford the culvert, slow going. But some were moving off in search of unblocked spans, of which there were several.
“Not much time,” Gonji assessed. “Let’s get the rest of the people evacuated. No one left behind—come on.”
Wilf grumbled behind him as they rode, fighting small skirmishes, men dropping by ones and twos. “We blew it—the timing—we were too slow. We should have ridden out an hour ago, into the hills. Let the relief column pass us by—attacked the castle while it was undermanned!”
Gonji reined in, wheeled and faced him. “All-recht, so you’re right! So I failed you, too—you needn’t feel special. There are plenty of dead people here who’d say I failed them more than you.”
They glared at each other, and another warrior rode between them, gesturing placatingly. “Hey—we couldn’t do anything about the castle. Look at us. How many are we? There’s no use torturing yourselves. There’s our enemy—across the water—”
“Ja,” Wilf agreed despondently, “how many are we?”
A pistol’s report from a side lane snapped them out of it. The sizzle of the ball raked the air past Gonji’s ear. Tora lurched, and he fought the steed for control. They scanned the lane, saw isolated wagons bounding by, toward the west. It took a moment to identify the defiant figure, clad in black, seated astride a mare with smoking wheel-lock. It was William Eddings. He made no effort to flee but only sat his horse, leveling hate-filled eyes at the samurai.
“Grab that man!”
“Eddings—have you lost your mind?”
Two men rode up to him, swords bared. Gonji cantered up, grimacing at the Englishman, who held his steely gaze.
Gonji had seen such loathing before. His men waited for an order.
“Take his pistol,” the samurai said quietly. Eddings began yammering and sobbing, his spite clear, though Gonji could understand almost nothing of the language.
“He says he’ll do it again when he gets the chance,” was all one of the men would offer by way of translation. He tried to reason with Eddings but was shouted down by the irrational sundrier.
“Well?” another bushi asked.
“They’re coming across!”
They charged off in escort of the wagons without another word, separated now from the main body. Gathering stray militiamen as they went—including a few of Nagy and Berenyi’s Hussars, picking up screaming evacuees, they fought broken parties of mercenaries who were ever less eager to skirmish. Content to pick them off as they clattered by. Outbreaks of pillaging and burning could be seen as the occupation troops sensed the rout, the general breakdown in order.
The bushi could do nothing about it. Escape was of paramount concern. They fell grimly, silently, past the fear of death.
As they sprang and bounced over the carnage and debris in the shattered city, dragging aboard the wounded, they let loose the dead to make room for the living. Gonji watched his friend Garth alternately clash with ferocity and mete out kindness to the unfortunate. He repeatedly stopped them, to aid the wounded and the lost. Gonji was overwhelmed by his strength both physically and spiritually, his mercy and humanity.
Some of the Hussars’ horses, driven beyond all limits of endurance, dropped dead in their tracks. Fallen men doubled up with friends when no riderless mounts could be had.
Gonji shouted a warning to a man up the street who struggled with the weight of a wounded compatriot. A mercenary behind the smashed counter of an open-fronted lorimer’s shop fired his pistol, downing the militiaman with a cowardly shot. Both men fell.
Outraged, Gonji stormed inside the shop aboard Tora, taking the reloading bandit by surprise and dashing his brains into gory exposure with an arc of the Sagami. Another brigand ran from the rear of the shop for the relative safety of the street. A poisoned ninja dart caught him in the side. And then Gonji jumped Tora over the wrecked counter and back out to rejoin his ragged command. He fought with a spate of uncontrollable rage when he viewed, in a passing wagon, the young boy Eduardo, holding a sword over the form of his wounded father.
Occasional confusion over identity aided their flight. Once Miklos Zarek rode laughing from a side lane, having sent a free companion troop back east on the trail of a phantom rebel band. But the gauntlet continued to tighten as they pressed their wild ride, Llorm dragoons beginning to appear in the distance along crossing avenues, having forded the flood.
The west gate was in sight. A wounded rider, pressing at his ragged side, saluted Gonji and blurted the news that a large troop of dragoons was on its way around the walls to block the west gate.
“We’ll never make it through,” an armed, mounted woman cried out.
They spurred onward, teeth clenched and swords flailing.
They could see the bushi who vainly tried to hold the wall above the gate, under fire of Llorm crossbows now as they readied for a charge of mercenary swordsmen along the allure. The lead men met. A slashing madman at the head of the bushi fought like a demon, pressing the adventurers back.
As they neared, someone identified him:
“Paille—it’s that crazy Paille!”
When they hit the gate, the wagons rumbled through, water cascading up from the spinning wheels. They came under attack at once, the married militiamen fighting it back gamely, their desperate need firing them. Tragically fallen men strove with their last breaths to cover the evacuees’ escape. Women and children huddled tightly in the beds of the wagons.
A cheer went up as an armored wagon bounded along the wall from the north, the men within it blasting and launching from every gunloop at their thinning pursuit.
But now a new menace: Tumo, bowling up from the south, maddened with pain and rage, spinning and smashing with flayed and bloody barrel fists. A few desperate bushi engaged the cretin giant with bow and pike.
“The blasted beast won’t die,” Gonji fumed. “Get these people out!”
Paille fell atop the walls, and they could see Monetto come up close behind him. He stayed the killing blow intended for Paille with a disemboweling axe-cut. The attacker’s head was severed with the next roaring, berserker arc.
“Cover Aldo,” Garth shouted below, archers firing up at the retreating mercenaries. “Let these innocents go, you barbarians!” the mighty smith roared.
Monetto lowered Paille to waiting hands below. Gonji pounded up and dismounted.
The artist’s chest leaked blood, but he was clawing out something from under his jack.
“What the hell were you trying to prove, Paille?” Gonji asked.
“Never mind that,” the eccentric poet gasped. “Look what they’ve done...in their ignorance....” He pulled out the thick sheaf of Deathwind of Vedun manuscript. It was pierced and bloody now. He cradled his wounded masterpiece. “This is what they think...of a great work....”
“Damn thing saved your life, Paille,” Nick Nagy called out from horseback, reining in behind them.
“I told you you should have called it Red Blade from the East,” Gonji recalled.
“Arghh—I don’t believe in your infidel omens.” His breath rasped.
“Don’t let them forget the valor you saw here, Paille,” Gonji said with an edge in his voice, as they carried the artist-poet to a wagon. “Write of brave men who battled beasts out of nightmare.”
“I shall write of—of courageous souls...who fought for freedom. Not of monsters...lest
rational men think me mad.”
The wagon team pounded away under a frantic lashing by the fear-maddened driver.
Tumo blared a challenge and threw a dead horse at his attackers, stooping to seize a crawling man and rend him before their eyes. The armored wagon, waved up by Garth, rolled forward to tilt with it. An enfilade of arquebus and pistol fire from within staggered the cretin giant, striking vital areas in his damaged armor. Tumo bawled a great cry of rage and terror and loped off to lick his wounds.
The wagons were gone, all save the last armored coach. And the remaining bushi were pincered by troops from inside the city and without.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gonji cried. Monetto dropped to the street with his two surviving men. The samurai himself found his body so ached that it took two tries to roll aboard Tora and join their flight.
With the sounds of pillaging and burning behind them, attacking troops hitting them from side and rear, and the certain knowledge that there may yet be people left helpless in their wake, they made their bitter escape, feeling no relief. Feeling nothing but the blind urge to survive.
They continued to fall as they splashed westward along the road, running game now for the archers who trailed close behind. The armored coach caught fire, and those who rode in escort of it fell back from the rolling fireball it became. Some of the team that manned its armament still trapped inside, it plunged over the hillside to explode in the southern valley.
Gonji halted and turned at the thunderous report, mounted men flying past. Anton and Nagy were the last in the column, and they slowed to urge him on for his life. But the pursuing troops had yanked to a jostling stop.
The howling of the werewolf wafted on the wind from some indeterminate distance down the old Roman road to the west.
The samurai cursed to himself to see the belching smoke and flames that roiled up from the city. Wheeling back, he saw the knotted clump of men waiting for him, Wilf breaking forward from their center.