Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (9 page)

“Si.”

“You’re both loco,” Orozco said, his lips twisted in revulsion over the recent memories he strove to suppress. “He’s dead. Face it,
sensei
—Simon Sardonis is among
them
now, and may God grant that he knows the peace of
death.”

“Iye,”
Gonji breathed sharply in reply, “I would know it if he were. He lives. And I made him a promise.”

Sebastio clucked behind them. “So now what?” he asked impatiently. “Do we forestall the Holy Father again? May I remind you, Gonji-san, that you have an obligation—
giri.
Your audience with His Holiness may lead to his understanding of the aims of the Wunderknechten movement. Already nearly every major sectarian hierarchy has spoken out against it in ignorant fear. Whether you like it or not, you’ve affected a great many people’s thinking in your widespread travels. God in Heaven, some of them even believe the Knights to be some sort of insidious military threat perpetrated by Japan itself! You
must
appear before the pope to set things straight.”

“If I can,” the samurai replied wryly.

“If they don’t remove your oriental head on sight,” Orozco added.

“Oh, that’s rubbish, Carlos,” the priest said, dismissing it with a swipe. “They are uneasy about Gonji while there are souls to be persuaded in the Japans. He has nothing to fear here.”

“I can’t say I’m much interested in this wayward, many-headed movement anymore,” Gonji said with a sigh.

Sebastio began to sputter querulously.

“I only want one thing right now,” Buey growled. “Something evil that I can recognize for what it is. That I can see and smell so that my belly churns again like it did in Burgundy. Something I can grab in these two hands and rend and tear until it is no more…” His teeth ground stridently.

Dogs barked in the courtyard, and voices harshly commanded them to silence.

“I shall see His Holiness, the pope,” Gonji said resolutely, “as I have promised, Kuma-san. Beyond that I can promise you nothing. I am weary of promises I’m hard put to keep.”

“Why don’t you suggest to Pope Innocent that he raise a Crusade against the Farouche Clan?” Orozco suggested. “I won’t go back there again with less than five regiments behind me.”

“Ridiculous!” Father Jan Sebastio declared. “Think what you are suggesting—that the Holy Roman Empire invade France! All for the sake of a…” He turned away from Gonji’s look.

“A werewolf,” the samurai finished.

Orozco hawked derisively. “Do you know how silly it sounds to fret over the politics of one lousy continent once one has seen the things
we’ve
seen? Evil conspirators duck back in their holes into strange phantom worlds and laugh at our piddling strife, while here we sit, cutting each other’s throats.” He spat into a bed of morning glories. “I left my loyalty to national pride in Toledo.
I’ll
never be a damned fool patriot again. Not after what we saw in Africa. Not after what they’ve done to Gonji.”

“Nevertheless,” Father Sebastio said, “we are, like it or not, bound by the politics and laws and social systems of this petty world, my cosmic-minded friend. And we are—some of us—still Christians. If there are, as you say, worlds within worlds—if all you experienced was not some nefarious trick of the Deceiver—then every world will have had its own sacred revelation. I must maintain that anchor of faith for the sake of my sanity. Have you forsaken what you once believed in?”

Orozco tussled with the thought for a time. “No,” he answered humbly, resignedly.

“That is good,” Sebastio said gently.

“But I’m damned if I know how it all fits together,” the renegade sergeant of lancers grumbled.

“And some of us,” Sebastio went on, reengaging Gonji’s attention, “are still
Wunderknechten
—a noble cause, if a disorganized one.”

“A cause,
hai,
that is what I need again,” Gonji replied without taking the bait. “Meaningful duty. An idealistic quest born of ignorant innocence, unsullied by any concern over what European’s honor I offend—”

The priest
tsked. “
You’ll forgive me, but that is pompous and self-pitying nonsense, young
ronin.
I’ve heard many things that have made me swell with pride in accounts of your actions—lives saved, people influenced to respect their fellows. You’ve even performed a Christian act or two, if my informants be silver-tongued.” A gleam crept into Sebastio’s eye.

But Gonji grew sullen, ignoring him. “What have I done in the bitter years here? Where has my journey led me? I could have been a much-respected warlord in
Dai Nihon.
I might have sired offspring to keep my father’s line quick through his firstborn. Instead I chose to dishonor him, to quest after a perverse destiny. I sought the Deathwind and perhaps found that I am he. What have I done of lasting significance?”

The others began to remonstrate with him, each in his way. Sebastio took a compassionate tack. Buey, an impatient one, stoked by his own boorish mood. And Sergeant Orozco resorted to weary humor.

But the samurai was unmoved.

“I leave with this thought alone: I’ve only been accepted and fondly remembered here when I’ve killed so that others may live. When I am most Japanese and least European,
then
am I appreciated. Such is your need in Europe: a strong sword arm to support your own failed efforts. And mine is growing weary, may the
kami
of war forgive me…”

They passed two stern, unflinching guards in scoured Milanese armor and burgonets. The pair uncrossed their polearms so that the party might enter under the
baldacchino.
The canopy led into a wing of the palace sequestered for their use. Luigi Leone lay curled on a parlor sofa, snoring, his eye patch askew.

Gonji looked to the mustached sergeant. “You’ve been to the
osteria.
What are they saying about us?”

“Hmm,” Orozco intoned, a crooked smile on his face. “God bless the tipplers in their bleary cups! The inns have cast us in bronze. We’re legendary phantasms in our own aimless days.”

“Drunks are drunks,” Buey shot back, scowling. “Only an asshole takes anything they say to bed with him.”

Orozco shifted his eyebrows, sat down heavily in a velvet chair. “Ah, but they’ve—”

“What about France?” Gonji interrupted. “What are they saying about France?” He eyed the pair gravely.

Father Sebastio sighed and excused himself, departing for his bedchamber.

Orozco leaned toward Gonji and Buey and spoke more seriously. “Your elusive efforts at detachment from the Knights of Wonder have only deepened your mystique, you know. They—”

“What about
France?”

“To hell with France,” the sergeant railed. “Some say you’re still there, fighting demons. Some aren’t so kind.”

“Some call you a madman,” Buey added, his lower jaw working. “And even worse—”

“Shut up, Buey,” Orozco said.

“Ah, so desu ka?”
Gonji replied, seating himself cross-legged on the floor. He threw off the cloak and laid his
daisho
before him. “What else?”

“It’s all bullshit,” Orozco fumed.

“Some say you’re a
coward,”
Buey said in a low voice, staring at him as if issuing a challenge. “That we’re all cowards. That we ran from our own shadows. From phantoms that still laugh about us in the Cevennes Mountains…”

Gonji stared at his sheathed blades, expressionless. No one made a sound for a time.

“Whatever came up against us in those god-cursed mountains,” Orozco said at last, “it was not a trick of shadows…”

“Perhaps a trick nonetheless,” Gonji said softly, waxing reflective. He began stroking his stubbled chin, working at controlling his breathing, seeking his
wa,
a harmony of spirit he had not known in an uncomfortably long time.

Buey poured himself a goblet of wine and drank as he studied an
alto rilievo
on the wall that depicted a knight slaying a demon of Hell in the form of a dragon. He ran a beefy hand along the sculpture as if committing its every contour to memory. “In Savona…they have an oak tree. Big one. Split asunder…like as not by a bolt from the sky. Some say it was
your sword
that did it. The Wonder Knights, you know. They believe you can do just about anything with that angry curved sword…”

Gonji reached out and picked up the Sagami, slowly easing its gleaming length from the sheath. “I did it all wrong,” he said as if addressing the
katana
itself. “I left heart and soul behind me and led those fledgling warriors to their doom. A shell of a leader. I served well the purpose of our foes, you see. Karma. Karma that I must bear. Evil makes no such mistakes. You must be strong to combat evil. Strong as you can be. But there is always skill and courage and desire enough, somewhere within. Does not even your own Holy Scripture declare that evil cannot challenge one beyond his capacity to defend himself, though death be the price? And death is as light as a feather…

“So I was wrong, Carlo-san. And so are you, when you say we need regiments to return to Burgundy. We need but a few who can be counted upon. Or perhaps only one…They want Simon alive, among them. They want me alone…suffering; all who would call me friend, dead. And so they shall have me…alone.”

He returned the Sagami to its dark nestling place.

“Then…we’re going back?” Buey asked tentatively, eyes alight.

“First things first,” Gonji evaded. “One duty at a time. Tomorrow, we look at horses…”

Buey peered at Orozco, who glanced up from under a heavy brow.

Gonji’s last violent act in France had been the destruction of the gray destrier that had served him ignobly at the Place of Lost Hope.

* * * *

Nightmares…

Attacking him again in violent tableaux of guilt and horrible death.

Fever-sweat
—
roiling smears of cascading color and sound
—
an awesome weight on his chest, a battering ram, driving him downward, downward to the Pit…

* * * *

The Mount of Lost Hope.

Simon had been right. They should have braved winter in the Alps and entered Burgundy from the east, whatever the cost, whatever the peril. For the French borders of Burgundy belonged to the Farouche Clan. They, and their other-worldly minions.

It was not any winter known to humankind that had descended on Burgundy that year. Some dreadful realm had been transposed with Burgundy, exchanged its ungodly arctic fastness with the picturesque charm of a hard but bearable Alpine winter.

Men froze in their saddles, their whining plaint swallowed by exhaustion and hunger. Some dropped in death and were lifted again, quickly, dispiritedly, only to be plunged back into the mounding snows and be abandoned at last, out of military expediency—hands now too cold to struggle with their grisly burden and hearts too numb to care.

Others disappeared from the rear of the column or from flanking positions only to return mysteriously later—rigid corpses lashed to their maddened steeds. Some without eyes; others, bereft of heads or limbs, such that the grisly events engendered spates of insensate whining that
something
must be using those parts to create some monstrous effigy of a man…

* * * *

The mountains crowded before him again in the great arena of his vindictive spirit, their slopes awash in blood-soaked drifts…

“Gooooon-jiiiii! He comes! Gooon-ji comes! We must prepare for him…make his faithful allies welcome!”

* * * *

The cold sheared through their wraps, and the buffeting wind swirled the impenetrable blizzard about them like the rising walls of a whitened tomb. Still, they were dimly aware that a path of sorts was left them. They were being herded like mindless game beasts toward the slaughter that was not long in coming.

They beat at themselves to stave the icy clutch of the gale and squeezed bundled hands about weapon hilts, praying that their frozen thews would not fail them. The wolves began to howl maniacally, hungrily, from all directions, and the wind shrilled its laughter at their pathetic efforts and failing courage.

Men lost heart, and lives followed in due course.

In the first quicksilver engagement, the snow canyon was splashed and mottled with gore, and still the lifeblood exploded from their fellows.

Gonji and Simon Sardonis swore and bellowed and commanded them to hold fast under pain of death, their threats hollow, ironic, unheeded by ears filled with the slashing and rending sounds of mortal agony. Mounts fell, and men were buried in the carnage. Weapons shattered in the cold amidst the occasional forlorn report of a working pistol.

Simon’s horse went down as the ensorceled warrior took a toll of the savage assailants with broadsword and battle-axe. Gonji strove to keep Simon in sight, even as the samurai whirled the razor-edged steel of his twin blades, to right and left, at monstrous, hurtling forms that pounded and tore, snarled and snapped and ripped open savage wounds in lurid arcs of crimson, amidst the screaming.

Gonji soon lost cognizance of Simon in the throes of his own survival frenzy.

The wolves abruptly withdrew, dragging off their hard-won prey in viselike jaws. The remnant of the troop staggered about, some unhorsed, some astride shrilling mounts, mad-eyed and seeking direction. Simon urged them onward over oaths and screams and the pleas of the mutilated and the dying.

Gonji began to count heads, recognized several comforting faces—Buey, Jarret, Perigor, Leone—

And then they were under attack again, their enemies humanoid this time, if not assuredly
human.
Creatures armored in steel and bone and hide, hoisting staffs bearing terrible symbols, fell upon them with sword and
guisarme,
axe and flail. The creatures’ awful bellowing bloodlust numbed their souls and set their teeth on edge. Their horses reared and cowered on their haunches in the attackers’ first shrieking wave.

The company fought on the run, lurching and bolting over mounds of corpses and men and animals and things that were not quite either. Bodies of men were heaped among those of dwarves—sere forms of what must surely have been the reanimated dead—stout, burly, hairy brutes that were more ape than man—gnarled and ugly haunters of the dark, who were no less fearsome when staked in death by valiant polearm thrusts.

And then they were put to rout, the Company of Lost Hope—crashing against one another as they wheeled their steeds and bounded back again over the killing grounds they had won, fighting all the while in the gore-streaked, bloody snowdrifts. Their foes ringed them in on all sides, the elements aiding the creatures as they burst forth from tunnels in the snow or leapt out of piled liches. Ghastly forms leered and lanced out with blood-soaked, flesh-encrusted weapons, belly-cutting mounts and rending adventurers’ legs. Torment before death…

The maddened destrier threw Gonji into the snow. The horse bucked and stamped at him in its panic as he tried to catch up the reins. He split open two attackers with growling, scythelike strokes of his blades before narrowly gaining the saddle again, only to be thrown by the horse twice more before he had reached the area of red ruin where the wolves had descended on them.