Gonji: Deathwind of Vedun: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Three
Page 45
Monetto shrugged it off and let it be.
There was one broad, still area in the outer ward, the place where the werewolf lay, comatose, breathing with a labored, animal-gurgling sound that prickled the spines of those who heard. Neither man nor beast would approach the supine form.
Gonji told Monetto what to do.
“All right, you people—you men there,” Aldo said, “you’ve just been conscripted again. One more duty, and then you’re free to go.” He instructed them to build a litter with which to carry off Simon.
Regrettably forced to guide them under threat of the axe, Monetto saw them through the dismantling of a wagon which could not pass the rubble. But even under Aldo’s threat, none would take up the burden of the now trembling and moaning Beast.
Gonji strode up to them and drew the Sagami. “This is a man,” he bellowed. “He’s given his life, accursed though it is, to save your miserable asses. Pick him up!”
Quailing under the threat, they crossed themselves, rolled the severely wounded golden beast onto the litter, and hefted it, grunting as one under the weight.
Wilf had become conscious. Limping, with Genya’s aid he moved up with Gonji to join the grim procession that followed the litter-borne wolf-man out of the destroyed castle.
“He really was the Deathwind,” Wilf declared.
“Mmm.” Gonji’s lips twisted, and he became glumly taciturn as they made their way out and over the stone-filled moat, the litter bearers in awe of their rasping, bloody, and burned charge. They babbled in quaking voices that wondered in multiple languages:
Of what use could such a monster possibly be, especially in its present state?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
They made their way into the hills, setting up a camp. Monetto retrieved their horses and a few animals for slaughtering and eating from among the straying flocks and herds. Servants were put to work tending fires and preparing food, but some sent off for water or forage disappeared.
They set Simon apart in a glade, out of sight. They ate, tended their wounds, and slept under canopies in the clear light of a cool day. When they awoke, they found that more castle servants had departed for Austria, though many remained, pondering their futures in glum counsel.
Simon Sardonis had indeed transformed back into a naked figure of a wretchedly crushed man. He remained comatose, and Monetto shook his head bleakly over Simon’s chances for survival. Genya summoned her courage and treated his many and varied wounds as best she knew how, though she wept with frustration at the task and threw her hands up at last over the worst. The blackened flesh from the many burns seemed untreatable, though she tried every provincial remedy any in their camp suggested. There seemed to be no hope. Just when she thought she had the bleeding stopped, night fell. She scurried away, gasping; the writhing agony of the shocking new transformation caused the wounds to bleed again.
Yet Gonji took hope. He noted that the werewolf seemed somehow stronger, now, than it had the night before. Simon’s incredible recuperative powers were soon evinced in the swift receding of the burns; already most of the fur had grown back where the Hell-Hound had scorched it.
The lycanthrope remained feverish and unconscious for two days and nights, the sun and moon revealing to the astonished onlookers the unbelievable agony of the changes from man to wolf and back, each change again laying open the wounds. But every day he drew stronger and the wounds receded. And with each nightly transmutation, the kamikaze—the divine wind—grew in force.
* * * *
A light breeze ruffled the yellow blossoms of the furze in the cool evening shadows. Autumn approached swiftly on the heels of the rainy season. Uncounted days had passed for the encampment, the survivors’ numbers dwindling as people drifted off, most for the vague promise of the Austrian settlement that was far from a surety.
One pine-whispery night, Wilf crept up behind Gonji, who sat cross-legged, quietly contemplating the edge of his wakizashi.
“Not still thinking about seppuku, are you?” the smith whispered behind him. He knelt beside the oriental, an impish smile perking the corners of his mouth. “You know, between problems of faith and my not believing you deserve suicide, I don’t think I can assist you. Then you might make the bad cut...and you’d be writhing around on the ground, embarrassing yourself, and then Genya would get nauseous, and—”
“All-recht, smart ass,” Gonji said, sheathing the short sword, “you’ve made your point. Quit now before your other arm gets broken. So now what do you have in mind—for your future?”
“Aren’t you interested in your other blade?” Wilf asked.
Gonji turned to see Wilf ritualistically holding before him the now-repaired Sagami. “Yoi!”
In response to Gonji’s ongoing sadness over the fierce nick in the storied katana’s edge, Wilf had prevailed upon him to trust the smith with an attempt at reworking it on the castle’s livery forge. And with Monetto’s assistance and his good right arm, Wilf had spent several days fusing it with new folded steel, and firing and cooling, pounding and polishing and sharpening, to Gonji’s specifications, until that vicious edge now bore a sleek keenness whose gleam alone, viewed at the appropriate angle, might slice an observer’s eyeball.
“Very nice,” the samurai conceded, with a bow. “Yet...still a slight dip, if you observe closely. Gomen nasai—very sorry, but...this magnificent edge, I fear, is forever marked by Western flaw. Like my own samurai spirit....”
“My father might have done better,” Wilf said quietly, and they observed a moment’s silence in Garth’s honor.
“But you never answered, about your immediate plans—” Gonji began.
Before Wilf could respond, Genya and Monetto pounded up on horseback, returning from the encampment of the Llorm and the Akryllonian survivors, where they had been helping daily with the sick and injured, and kindling hope for the future. The Akryllonians, still behaving clannishly and seemingly bearing secret hopes, were yet in sorrow over their lost heritage and dreading the assimilation of their blood and legacy by the European culture they were now left with. Gonji knew their woe, keenly appreciating the problem.
“Well, back among the lepers, we are,” Monetto joked. “Say—I know you. Aren’t you the Red Blade from the East?” Genya laughed, a high, merry tinkling sound that always brought them cheer.
Gonji sighed as they dismounted. “Hai.” He waxed contemplative again. “Why do you suppose I only mark my passing with the sword? I can do other things. I’m an educated man. I can sing songs, compose poetry, yet—
“I need to know, people: Why did all this happen? Why are so many dead? Am I to blame, as so many have said—Eddings, Dr. Verrico?”
“Maybe you think yourself too important,” Wilf reflected. “We all die eventually. All these poor people might have died anyway, if you hadn’t passed through. Maybe sooner, maybe more of them. It’s probably just as the prophetess said. But you saved many.”
“I just can’t help feeling like a harbinger of Death. Or like Death itself....”
Monetto passed wineskins around. “Try this stuff—it’s from the castle cellars—”
“You know,” Gonji went on, “I used to have a real grasp of things, a system that made sense, a true set of beliefs a man could live by. Now I live by the headlong rush my needs push me into, neh?”
“Not true,” Monetto said airily.
“Hmm?”
“You stopped here, didn’t you? Helped us with our needs.”
Gonji chortled sadly and nodded.
“Genya and I will be leaving tomorrow,” Wilf announced.
“Me, too, I suppose,” Monetto added. “Sylva’s going to be crazy with worry, if none of those servants found her with my messages.”
Gonji looked mildly disappointed when he addressed Wilf, as he’d received the answer to his earlier query. “So...we’re not riding off in search of adventure, then? I entertained such glorious visions,” he said airily, smiling as if it were purely a jest.
“We can go along with Gonji, Wilf. I don’t care where we go, so long as we’re together. I suppose I could learn to use the sword very well.” They laughed and grunted approvingly when she drew Spine-cleaver at Wilf’s side and executed a few passes.
But Wilf’s melancholy shifted their mood. “I thought warfare was noble and glorious.” He shook his head. “It...wasn’t as I expected....”
“Such things are attendant on battles that yield a victor,” Gonji explained. “There was no victor here.”
Monetto tsked and tossed his head in disagreement.
“Nein, you’re wrong,” Wilf said. “Genya and I are together.”
They all embraced warmly, feeling the sudden need of it, and some of Gonji’s gloom dispersed.
“What will you do, then?” Wilf asked him.
Gonji scratched his stubbled jaw. “I’m not sure. I’ll need time to think, to meditate. Perhaps I’ll go back to the Land of the Gods. This past two months have set my mind reeling; so much has happened.... I’ll need to sort through the experiences here. I hardly know who or what I am anymore.” He blurted a laugh. “I wish Paille were here to read back to me the record of it all.”
Monetto laughed heartily. “Then you’d know less than you do now! Anyway, you’d be old and gray before you finished!”
Their shared mirth cheered them considerably.
“We’ll be moving on to find Genya’s parents, then,” Wilf said at length. “Join up with the Benedettos. Who knows? Maybe come back to Vedun and start all over.”
Gonji became serious. “Then you’d best police your horizons. Fortified peace—that’s what you must seek.”
“I sure miss Papa,” Wilf said wistfully. “And Strom. And, I guess, even Lorenz in his way. He was my brother, neh?”
“No less your brother than Tatsuya was mine. Yet no less an antagonist, for being a brother.”
A brooding settled over Wilf as he stood with a grunt over his slowly healing leg. “Genya,” he said solemnly, “if you ever failed to love any of our children, I think I’d kill you.” He snapped out of it to see their expressions and hear Genya’s protest. Wilf sighed. “I hope that’s the last violent statement I’ll ever have to make.”
“Then I know,” Gonji replied softly, “that we’ll not be off soldiering together....”
The night passed and morning dawned, cloudy and gray with the promise of rain. The leaves had begun to quit the trees.
Simon surprised everyone by coming down to their morning cooking fire, from his solitary camp, clothed in a dead man’s garb, sullen and laconic. He made brief farewells to Wilf, Genya, and Aldo when they at last mounted to leave, taking their effusive gratitude in stride, and then he again moved away to be alone.
“Come back here in a year or two,” Wilf told Gonji, “and I think you may find us all back in Vedun. Living our lives as Flavio would have wished. The Carpathians feel clean—smell the air! The evil is gone for good from these mountains.”
Gonji smiled thinly. “For now. It must replenish itself.”
“Why don’t you come with us, Gonji?” Genya asked. “The people would love to have you.”
“Sure,” Monetto agreed, “in a year’s time everyone will be wearing their hair like that!” He pointed at Gonji’s topknot, a twinkle in his eye.
The samurai shook his head as he stood before them, thumbs hooked into his obi. He rolled his aching shoulders, tested his ribs.
“I’d wager Helena will be waiting for you,” Wilf added.
Gonji made a thoughtful sound. “I’ll give that tempting thought some consideration. But don’t forget that it wouldn’t be easy—I’m a barbarian, remember?” None of them had ever heard him refer to himself by the insult before. “At least...to your people,” he qualified.
“Goodbye, Gunnar!”
They exchanged a hearty laugh and more reluctant farewells. Gonji watched them ride off until they were out of sight in the hills to the west, angling south for the Roman road.
He was left alone. Alone with Simon Sardonis.
EPILOGUE
Now that he was strong enough to move about under his own power, Simon’s first act was to remove himself farther from Gonji’s camp. Thus to be alone at dusk and dawn during the bestial agonies of the humiliating transformations to and from the great golden wolf. He’d been mortified that some had seen that shameful sorcery while he’d been comatose with his wounds.
“None may witness my torment,” he explained, “save the God who has ordained it.”
It seemed to Gonji that the shaky camaraderie they had established in Vedun had disintegrated with the completion of their objectives. Simon was as sulky and irascible as he had been on their first meeting, sharing Gonji’s food and fire only grudgingly; his companionship, sullenly. His wounds were healing with amazing speed, scar tissue performing the saving closures Genya could not maintain. He began to wax resolute again, a far-off look in his eye. He waved aside all Gonji’s suggestions of a joint course of action for them.
“I could help you find this ‘demon-father’ Grimmolech—”
“Non, I must go alone.”
Gonji pondered. “What will you do on the Night of Chains—when there are no chains?”
“I’ll manage,” Simon replied in irritation. “I’ll go off somewhere where no living thing moves.”
“Not a bad idea,” Gonji agreed. “I heard my mother speak once of a northern land where the sun shines for half the year. Of course, it’s night for the other half, but maybe you’d find that without the moonlight—”
“I said non!”
Gonji scowled, weary of the ensorcelled man’s moodiness. “Does the taste of blood ever leave your mouth?” His endeavor was intended as a spiteful dig. It had sunk deep.
“Never,” Simon hissed, stalking off into the forest. Gonji felt remorse. He had heard the man choke back a sob.
The next day they broke camp and prepared to part ways. Simon loaded satchels onto a skittish tethered steed.
Gonji moved up behind him quietly, hands behind his back. He studied the man, wondering if this parting was all his life had come to, the culmination of his quest.
“What a waste of good lives back there, neh?” he said.
“Oui,” Simon agreed without looking back.
“Garth...what a splendid samurai he would have made...Flavio, gentle, sincere, wise...Tralayn, with the fiery determination of a small volcano...Hildegarde....”
“Father Dobret,” Simon added, patting the horse gently.
“Hai—all good people. Simon...are you the Deathwind they speak of in so many lands?”
He stopped and turned. “That...may be what men call me in their distorted effort at understanding.”
Gonji nodded. “That’s all the answer I can ask for.”
“What will you do now?”
Gonji shrugged. “I’m thinking about going back to Dai Nihon. My quest seems ended, though its worth escapes me. I’ll go back, take what is rightly mine. There’s a good life to be had there, once I assume my heritage. Take a wife, consorts, produce heirs....” He paused to study the effect his words had on the other, cringing within, at those remarks that he knew were gilded lies.
Simon cleared his throat. “That’s good. Do it. My quest continues.” He untied the nervous horse and eased up into the saddle. When he had gained it and brought the animal under control, he smiled at the samurai with those silvery eyes. “Look—I’m riding. Something I can thank you for getting me to even try. How does it feel to have stabbed in the dark and come up with a piece of truth?”
Gonji bowed to him, a bit mincingly.
Then Simon looked uneasy, embarrassed. “Look, I—I do appreciate your keeping me alive. You and the others. I might not have pulled through—”
“I only did it so that you could be killed properly, when it is your karma.”
Simon started. “Well...merci. And bonjour.”
&
nbsp; “Sayonara. Away with you.” Gonji turned and squared his shoulders as he strutted off toward his belongings. But Simon called out at his back:
“You’re a brave warrior, monsieur le samurai—and a passing good friend. But consider that you may be...the Deathwind who so fascinates you.”
Gonji turned slowly, but Simon had yanked the reins and clucked his steed off at a canter.
He stood for a time, the wind ruffling his hair and clothing, watching Simon ride away toward the mountain passes in the northwest. Then he loaded his things on a pack horse and climbed aboard Tora, patting the nickering stallion affectionately. He looked longingly to the East, and the faraway land of his birth; to the West, and the track of the caravan.
Then, his jaw clicking, he kicked off to the north at an easy gait, following in Simon’s spoor.
CHARACTER INDEX
Alain Paille, an artist and poet; Vedun’s antic genius
Aldo Monetto, a biller; friend of Karl Gerhard
Anna Vargo, wife of Flavio’s counselor Milorad
Anton, the Gray Knight, last retainer of Baron Rorka
Anton Torok, a lorimer
Baron Ernst Christophe Rorka, deposed baron of the province
Ben-Draba, King Klann’s Field Commander
Boris Kamarovsky, a wood craftsman; friend of Strom Gundersen
Captain Sianno, a Llorm officer under King Klann
Danko, a tanner
Eduardo, young leader of a band of street urchins
Esteban, second-in-command of King Klann’s 3rd Free Company
Father Dobret, itinerant priest; confidant of Simon Sardonis
Flavio, Council Elder of Vedun
Francisco Navarez, Captain of the 3rd Free Company
Galioto, a farmer and dairy stockman
Garth Gundersen, chief blacksmith of Vedun
General Gorkin, King Klann’s castellan
Genya, servant at Castle Lenska; beloved of Wilfred Gundersen
Giacomo Battaglia (Jocko), cook for the 3rd Free Company