Читать книгу Gonji: Red Blade from the East - T. C. Rypel - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

It was the spectacle of a lifetime.

A thousand knights under the wind-snapped banners of Hapsburg Austria thundered across the floor of the valley, pounding over littered corpses as they pursued a broken enemy. The stench of blood and death lofted on the rising heat waves. Gonji leaned forward with keen interest, an anxious hand massaging the Sagami’s hilt. Tora shuffled nervously on the brink of the escarpment as his master edged him closer for a better look.

The samurai’s pulse raced. He wiped the sweat from his brow with an impatient motion, flicking his tongue across a beaded lip. His neck wounds ached, but he paid them no heed. Howls of bloodlust and the clanging din of naked steel issued from the battlefield. The silver glint of arrows and arbalest bolts raked the air. Sporadic gunfire cracked in Gonji’s ears, puffs of ignited powder belching in advance of the echoing bursts.

Eyes like living coals, salt-burned neck craning for a better view, Gonji assessed the clash. The battle must have raged since almost dawn. The mercenary army had taken a beating. Already at the far end of the valley, the priests who directed the knights had erected a great command tent, a huge flag bearing the Christian cross rippling overhead.

At the extreme opposite end of the valley, to the east, the retreating mercenaries scurried up the myriad trails that led back into the hills. Charging knights lanced the stragglers, dropped them with bow and musket fire, or beheaded them as they ran them down. Hemmed-in pockets of mercenaries fought fiercely against the outnumbering Austrian troops at various points on the field. The leading edge of the fleeing mercenaries was already lost among the grassy knolls and thick forests to the east, and far ahead of them—perhaps miles away—Gonji could mark through the shimmering haze a massed party that poured into the forest like a sinuous spotted serpent.

Curious—such a division in a retreating force was unusual. And mercenaries seldom exhibited such devotion—to cover a retreat so lustily. The thought was cut short. Somewhere over the horizon a large dark shape momentarily loomed above the line of mountain peaks, then dipped out of sight again.

“What the—! What the hell was that, Tora, eh?”

But the charge had passed him by, and Gonji wheeled Tora to follow it along the cliff ledge. Several hundred yards onward the woods encroached to the brink, and he was forced to plunge into a stand of pine for a half mile or so, losing sight of the valley. He cursed petulantly as Tora’s pace was slowed by the dense underbrush. His mind whirled; this was the first armed clash he had seen in weeks, and it aroused his fighting instincts.

He spurred Tora through a gauntlet of slapping pine boughs and snaring thickets, finally emerging in a sun-baked clearing. The precipice again lay bare against the mountain vista for a space of a few hundred yards. Beyond, it sloped gently toward the eastern end of the valley, where the cliffs broke to permit descent.

Gonji trotted to the edge of the escarpment and reined in. Below, the main body of knights had ceased pursuit and was falling back toward the command center, columns occasionally splintering off to lend aid in rooting out straggling mercenaries. Voices crying out in command or anguish and the rumble of hoofbeats now supplanted the din of combat. It was over. Gonji slapped his leg and cursed, shaking his head. He had arrived too late. The fighting itch prickled deeply as he considered a course of action.

Then a pistol shot exploded somewhere beneath him, followed by another. Harsh cries rolled up the cliff face, punctuated by an occasional scream. He leaped off Tora and leaned over the ledge for a better look. A hundred yards to the east a band of mercenaries was trapped in a shallow, dusty canyon by a mixed company of Austrian cavalry and infantry. A single rank of lightly armored horsemen blocked the canyon exit, shields raised before them to deflect arrows and pistol balls. To their rear, longbows and arbalests launched volley after volley into the cornered bunch, who scrambled for cover behind horses, rocks, and brush. Their return fire served only to prolong the agony.

Steeds dropped, kicking and screaming, under the Austrians’ insistent fire. Here and there a man would panic and scrabble uselessly up the crumbling shale prison wall, only to be bristled like a burr by a hail of arrows. At these the Austrians roared their approval, reveling in the thrill of an impromptu pheasant-shoot.

A squad of infantry, some with crossbows, had flanked the mercenaries on the slope beneath Gonji—their one possible avenue to escape. These approached the ragged company’s desperate position, cautious only for the trapped men’s pistol fire. The last strands of the spider’s snare were immobilizing the fly for the kill.

Gonji absently hummed a battle hymn he had heard while he watched with gritted teeth. The heat of battle readiness swelled in his gut.

“Time to earn a living, Tora.”

He leaped astride the charger and seated his swords comfortably, glancing along the cliff to calculate the swiftest path.

“Which side do we choose this time, eh? Eeyahhh!” They galloped off, the question hanging in the humid air, as unintelligible to the horse as its answer was obvious to the man.

There was no choice here. He had run up against Hapsburg power before. To them he was an infidel, a heathen savage. They would no sooner have him among their number than they would invite a plague into their camp.

But mercenary armies always welcomed another skilled warrior, and there was always stolen gold aplenty waiting to reward the stout bladesman. Gonji had learned to abide the guilt, the samurai’s hatred for the crass life of the mercenary, for it was only by the hiring out of his battle savvy that he had been able to survive these long years in barbarian Europe. But this life had fixed him as ronin—masterless samurai. Knowledge of this unspeakable outrage would, he knew, cause his father to take his own life out of shame. Indeed, Gonji himself should have long since committed seppuku, the ritual suicide!

The sun peaked in the burnished blue of the sky as Gonji strove to strangle off his thoughts. He began to concentrate. A plan, a battle tactic.

Tora’s hide glistened with a light film of sweat as he loped easily sidewise down the breakneck slope, sensing the urgency that gripped his master. The noonday swelter washed over Gonji in undulating waves. As he approached the rear of the flanking footmen’s position, the trees thinned. Little cover here, but he had to get closer.

Lightly quitting the saddle, he unhitched his bow and quiver. Stringing the bow in a single adroit, powerful motion, he left the stallion in a place of relative safety and scampered down to the edge of the tree line, a scant fifty yards from the backs of the nearest of the creeping foot soldiers.

His eyes flashed brightly, squinted against the glare. A bawling cry rose from the mercenary leader, his oath clipped by the sharp report of his pistol. A knight’s mount shrilled and toppled on the canyon floor, sending its rider crashing to earth. Two more pistol shots split the air. A bowman at the canyon mouth clutched his chest and fell. A fusillade of arrows whickered into the canyon. Cries of warning. A mercenary shrieked in mortal agony, writhing and tearing at the wooden death spindling his torso.

Gonji riveted his gaze on the breach in the knights’ line created by the fallen horse in the canyon. He checked the squad of footmen below him; he hadn’t been spotted. He took two deep breaths and nocked an arrow, drew back mightily on the bow, his left side braced against a foot-thick larch. He rotated the bow overhead and down into line.

Breathe. Hold. Feel. Fire.

A difficult shot—he was nearly parallel to the cavalry rank. The shaft arced sleekly, slammed through a knight’s arm, bit into the ribcage. The shocked rider spurred his horse and was thrown backward, his foot locking in the stirrup as the beast broke ranks and dragged his metallic ruin through the canyon.

“Still got it, eh, Gonji-san?” Gonji’s jaw was set with battle fervor. He glanced over the field; still hadn’t been noticed. Good. He turned his attention on the foot soldiers farther down the slope. Perhaps a dozen. But how many bows?

As if in answer four of them rose in unison and fired their clacking arbalests at a mercenary clawing up the far canyon wall. Two bolts shattered flesh and bone. A wild pistol shot from the mercenaries zanged into the packed earth between the foot soldiers and Gonji, who flattened in alarm, indignant.

He grimaced. Damned fools! I’m trying to help you!

The Austrian commander clumped to the head of the cavalry rank, sword raised, and shouted orders. The footmen to the rear of the cavalry massed for an attack. Then a pistol ball crashed into the commander’s steed, unhorsing him. Confusion reigned.

Time to clear the path.

Gonji emptied his quiver and laid out the shafts for rapid firing. He dropped to one knee and seated an arrow, braced, fired. A flanking crossbowman seventy-five yards downslope was skewered squarely through the back. The others froze, stared.

Before they could react, another lay thrashing at their feet, a crimson shaft protruding from his ribs. Ten sallets whirled, their wearers wide-eyed. A third man was knocked cleanly off his feet by the impact of a great cloth-yard shaft that clove his surcoat and breastplate.

Gonji fired at the last arbalester, missed, and a crossbow quarrel thunked into the larch, splintering bark in all directions. Gonji ducked behind the slim bole and nocked another arrow as the footmen clawed up the slope, low to the ground, howling epithets.

Then Gonji saw Tora, not twenty yards up the hill, nosing toward him curiously.

“Get out of here, dummy!” he cried, waving the animal back. “You want to get killed?”

The samurai spun into the open, bobbed tantalizingly to draw the crossbow’s fire. He launched an arrow that split a shin, the soldier flinging his mace wildly in rage and pain. Gonji rolled behind the tree.

“Tora—move!”

A bolt crunched into the ground at Tora’s hooves, erupting stones and clumped earth. Tora got the message and peevishly hopped up the hill at a lazy pace.

The footmen were almost upon him. One more shot and he’d have to quit the tree’s cover. He nocked, pulled, drew a breath.

Stepping out on the opposite side, he met the crossbowman’s eyes, dared his hand. Thirty yards or less separated the two archers. A dirk whizzed by Gonji’s left leg; he paid it no heed, blanked out the imprecations of the raging swordsmen.

The crossbowman aimed deliberately—too deliberately. Gonji’s cloth-yard arrow tore through his breastplate, rent half-a-length deep in flesh and bone, wrenching him backward and deflecting his bolt harmlessly into the sky.

Gonji cast away the longbow and drew his swords, a scowl of defiance twisting his features as he regarded the seven puffing footmen like a treed predator. They slowed, yammered to each other in a Germanic dialect unknown to him, then began to spread in a flanking movement.

The three centermost swordsmen charged. Gonji leaped to his right and skipped laterally along the hill to neutralize their line and isolate an end. The advantage was his as long as he could string them out and strike downward.

Then a hail of whistling pinpoints bristled the sky. Gonji flattened, choked on a mouthful of dust as shafts chunked into the hard earth, one nestling a heart’s width from his ear. The nearest soldier screamed and dropped, pierced through the neck by his own army’s errant shot.

Six.

The squad of bowmen below readied for another upslope volley, but before they could launch, Gonji scrambled to his feet and closed with his foes, slamming down the first and engaging the second with twin arcing blades in a breathless instant.

Glinting silver-yellow—blue sparks and the krang! of steel—a blink, a gasping rush of spent breath—

The swordsman slashed, cut empty air as Gonji slipped the blow. The Austrian re-cocked his arm for another strike, and the samurai lunged forward, bound his opponent’s blade in mid-arc with the short sword and ripped the Sagami through dead center of the white cross emblazoned on his surcoat.

The shocking moment of death. Dead before the gasp of despair had escaped the small “o” formed by the mouth. Before the red gout had splashed to earth.

Gonji had leaped back and begun circling again. Eyes alight with cold cunning, his hypnotic, patterned movement momentarily keeping his foes at bay.

The four remaining soldiers spread out to a respectful distance, grunting with contempt. Their squad leader dead, one among them assumed command and cautiously directed them to surround the samurai in a box. Low, nervous chatter. At a word the four unfastened their sword-belts and flung them down in a jangling clatter of hasps and sheathed dirks. As one they slung their bucklers on their forearms and leveled stout steel at Gonji’s coiled stance. Here was a strangely frightening new enemy, different both physically and in fencing style. He was a twin-fanged animal, all teeth and claws and primitive speed and strength.

Each swordsman swallowed back the coppery tang of fear and advanced a tentative step.

Gonji didn’t need to understand their language to catch the meaning of the Austrians’ oaths and imprecations. They were afraid, afraid to die when, in the final analysis, all that they were, all that they had ever hoped to be, had ushered them to this moment. And so they swore their oaths and spat their anger, thinking to freeze the blood in his veins when their own was tinged with frost.

He was wary. Four swordsmen should drop a single man with ease and usually did; but in battle no victories are taken for granted. And misdirected force has a weakening effect, each man relying on the strength of another, relaxing his own.

The warriors edged nearer. All were oblivious to the clamor on the battlefield below.

The senses work faster than the thews, Oguni always said. Let them work hand in hand. Sense movement with the feet. Smell the enemy’s courage—or lack of it!—in his sweat. The metal in the blade may be tasted in the air before it reaches its target....

Gonji rotated slowly. A panorama of anxious eyes, bobbing blades and bucklers. The continuous snaking of his slender swords left no spot uncovered. He emptied his mind and gave free rein to his reflexes. The heavy blades advanced another pace, arms trembling with their weight. Their heft told a great deal, dictated technique and strategy. Boorish insults issued at Gonji from under brows dotted with moisture in the heat. Gonji blinked back the salt burn.

From somewhere, the burst of a hundred muskets. Nerve ends flared. A soldier bellowed hoarsely.

And sprang.

* * * *

On the valley floor Francisco Navárez shouted desperately at his remaining men. The mercenary troop was cut to vulture feed, the handful left screaming madly against certain death. A final volley of pistol shots raked the cavalry line before them, throwing the knights into disarray. The critical moment.

Half the Austrian troops watched the drama on the hillside, briefly ignoring the doomed bunch in the ravine. Navárez fired his pistol and flung it aside, lurching out from behind the carcass of his horse and wrestling astride another screaming animal. With a wave he directed any left alive to follow him up the dusty slope in a frenzied dash for life.

A swarm of arrows dropped men to his right and left as he clenched teeth and eyes, clinging low, cursing deep within his chest. He spurred the frothing animal upward at a stumbling gait. His last impression of the valley was a terrifying glimpse of a musket company advancing on the double. He had no way of knowing whether any survivors followed, hugging tightly, as he was, the neck of the shuddering horse that clumped over churning shale as if through dream-mist. A roaring bellow preceded the first fusillade of gunshots.

Then, the thuck! of torn flesh and a scream of shock and pain. The horse fell from under him. Navárez plummeted head first over the dying animal’s crest and cracked his chin on the baked shale, stunning him. He crawled forward a few feet, raised up on hands and knees. A searing pain shot through his leg. Two horsemen plunged past him as he collapsed. Then another. Heedless to his weakly raised appeal for help.

Desperate. Strangled by the certainty of death.

His eyes refocused, and a hundred yards to the right through a veil of dust and swelter, he witnessed an act of magick: A circle of swordsmen, blades flung to heaven, died in the space of a breath by a flash of silver sorcery.

* * * *

The chilling thunder of the muskets nearly cost Gonji his life.

His parry was slow and imprecise, and the harrowing pass at his ribs lost him positional advantage. But then urgency electrified practiced reflexes. A flick of his left wrist slapped the attacker full in the face with the seppuku blade, sending him spinning, whining in pain.

Gonji spun into a crouch against the hacking whiz above his head and caught the blow hilt-tight on the killing sword, enabling him to throw the second man backward on leg power alone. A low whirling parry-slash deep inside a third downward cut ripped open an attacker’s belly. The man lurched forward with a ghastly moan, clutching his abdomen, as the samurai’s licking swords hammered back two blades with an outward spread of his arms and crashed into the two men’s sides with the crossing return. One foe yanked sword and buckler into the sky in mortal agony, but the second’s hauberk had withstood the slash of the short sword. The Austrian stumbled back a pace, righted and charged, howling ferociously. Gonji’s leaping turn away from the plunging sword landed him a scant six inches from the spearing lunge of the leader, whose ugly red welt now ballooned the left side of his face.

For a frozen instant of time, the samurai was a dead man. Knifing steel poised to skewer back and belly. But such a slice of life would beckon only a fool to bet the odds.

Gonji never stopped moving, executing a quicksilver spinning pass. The first whistling slice of the Sagami sang cleanly through the welted man’s steel, casting the broken end skyward. The short sword’s backswing deflected the rear lunge, and like a fan blade Gonji continued around with the longer katana, slicing through mail and flesh. A blind stab delivered under his armpit—and the leader’s mouth gaped, behind him.

He still clutched the broken sword as he died in his tracks.

And Gonji was off at the run, a downed warrior’s moaning receding in his ears. He waved the scattered mercenaries up the hill with a broad gesture, calling for them to cling close to their saddles.

Another volley of musket shot. Gonji pulled the ground to him and hugged as musket balls pattered around him like hailstones. Feeling no searing wound, he scrabbled to his feet and drove himself toward the low line of tree cover above. Somewhere nearby, Tora must be waiting. He still carried his swords in grimy fists.

Out of the corner of his eye Gonji caught sight of a swash of filthy color groping over the treacherous shale. A mercenary. Hurt. With a quick backward glance he gauged his chances of aiding the man while yet escaping. Not good. Mounted knights with lances had begun their ponderous ascent, followed by footmen, pikes and swordpoints marking their long line. A field of bright escutcheons dotted the base of the hill.

Oh, what the hell....

Growling with every stride, Gonji loped across the hillside. Arrows sprouted suddenly from ground and trees like a magically sown crop. Two mercenaries yelped and dropped from their saddles. A horse tumbled past toward the ravine, kicking and shrieking. The oppressive heat began to take effect, Gonji feeling as if he were in the body of a heavier man.

He reached the crawling man, sheathed the seppuku sword, and clamped a hand on his shoulder. With a fierce outcry the mercenary lurched onto his back, and Gonji found himself triangulated by a pair of flinty-black eyes and the point of a dirk. He threw up a fending hand and cocked the katana in defiance.

“Hey—alto! Alto! I’m here to help!” Gonji gambled on Spanish. His guess was correct.

The Spaniard’s pearly teeth gritted against his pain, and rheumy eyes glowered at the samurai feverishly. The swarthy face was streaked with grime, a crimson trickle issuing from beneath a bandanna like tattered fabric. A thick red wetness drenched his upper leg from the furrow a musket ball had gouged through the thigh. He was trembling. His curled lips relaxed, and he drew a labored breath.

“So then help—idiot!” he roared under flaring nostrils.

Gonji put up his sword and stooped to raise Navárez. The muskets exploded again, a torrent of lead ripping into the hill as they hit the ground.

Gonji swore through pursed lips. “That’s three, amigo. Too much luck for me. Now we climb or the next round drops us both, neh?”

The Spaniard groaned with the effort to rise. Gonji grabbed his arm and yanked him up, shouldering him as best he could and churning uphill.

But they had lost far too much time. It was all over now but for the crash of a bullet or the arrival of the cavalry that could be heard chunkering to their rear, hurling challenges to halt.

A horse whinnied just behind them. Gonji hurled Navárez forward with all his strength, sending him sprawling in a cursing heap. He pulled his blade, ready for desperate engagement.

Gonji faced the vanguard of the cavalry advance. The knight at the point grimly bore down on him, leveling his lance at Gonji’s chest. The samurai pulled the dirk from his thigh strap, timed the awkward stride, hurled—

The blade struck chain mail at a bad angle, snapping in half. But the force of the missile and the horseman’s flinch caused him to lose his seating. He rolled off his mount, jangling to earth and tumbling back under the hooves of his comrades.

Then, a small burst of gunfire. Not the muskets; these shots had come from above. Navárez’ survivors were giving cover fire.

The knights pulled up and scanned the forest. Another volley. A knight wrenched in the saddle, fell heavily from his mount. Two or three nearby steeds lurched back, throwing their riders. Cries of caution and metallic clangor—

Gonji wasted no time. He scrambled up the hill to where Navárez had groped ahead and then half-pushed, half-pulled the man to where Tora snorted and pawed the mossy fieldstone at his hooves. He hoisted Navárez into the saddle and led Tora the rest of the way up the hill on foot, all the while scolding the animal for its having foolishly followed him down the hill.

“What’s the matter with you, eh, dummy?” he called over his shoulder in Japanese. “You’re in a big hurry to die, is that it? Stupid beast! You’d like to see me walk through this godforsaken country, wouldn’t you?”

Tora, for his part, was too accustomed to these outbursts to be concerned. He said nothing.

Cresting the hill, Gonji halted them and peered below. The shouts of the cavalry could still be heard, but he saw nothing. The chase had seemingly been abandoned.

Comforted, Gonji took several deep breaths to settle himself and clear his head. Then he wiped the grime from his face with a kimono sleeve, seated his swords very properly in his thick sash, stretched his frame to the six feet he could almost reach in well-soled sandals, and strode up to the Spaniard.

He looked just about as fit for inspection as any unshaven, tangle-maned samurai with a threadbare kimono could look.

Navárez didn’t look up from the task of wrapping his injured leg as Gonji stepped near and bowed formally.

“I’m Gonji Sabatake, and you—”

At that moment two riders galloped toward them out of the pine-shroud. Gonji seized the Sagami’s hilt but relaxed almost immediately. The lead rider yanked to a halt and grinned a toothy grin at Navárez, his large dark eyes flicking from the Spaniard to Gonji. He held a horse in tether.

Spanish pirates, Gonji thought.

A glance at these two plumbed up vivid memories of the seafaring rogues of the Spanish Main. Both Navárez and the first rider were bedecked in the florid tastelessness of their decadent profession, from their lurid bandannas and opulent gold earrings down to their magnificent leather riding boots—wrenched, no doubt, from the refined feet of murdered gentry.

But what in the name of the Seven Devils were they doing so far from home? so deeply landlocked? and pitted against Holy Mother Church, with whom, in these territories, they’d best be sided if they ran afoul of Magyars or Turks?

The second rider pulled even with the flashy Spaniard and introduced further confusion. For here was a tall gaunt Aryan bandit whose ragged-brimmed slouch hat could scarcely conceal his patently fair features; the classic portrait of a northern backroad highwayman, his presence was as incongruous among these freebooters as a wolf would be among sharks.

Looking to Navárez, Gonji noted the dark shadow that etched the Spaniard’s features. Fine needles of tension prickled the air, and the second pirate’s grin faded. Without a greeting he wheeled abruptly and gestured to the north, and the two new arrivals galloped off the way they had come, leaving the spare horse behind.

“Julio-o-o-ooo!”

Navárez’ cry went unanswered, an ugly grimace settling over his battle-scarred face. His fist clawed at his wide leather belt, found empty air where once had hung his cutlass, lost in the valley conflict. He nodded gravely, a nod that marked some inner resolve.

Gonji cleared his throat, then spoke again.

“I say, amigo, I’m Gonji Sabatake, and I think we—”

“Agua,” the Spaniard grunted. “I see you have some.” He snatched the water skin from Gonji’s saddle and tipped his head back to slosh the liquid down his throat. Then he freely laved his face until his chin dripped like the jaws of a surfacing sea beast.

“Agua,” Gonji muttered low. “Help yourself.” He eased the water skin away from him and, before taking a pull, said, “You can thank me later.”

The Spaniard stared at him a moment and at last broke into a wide grin, chuckled softly, and then barked out a long throaty laugh that lasted until the burning pain of the leg wound again caught up with him. He massaged the area around the gunshot. Then he motioned to Gonji to board Tora and himself crawled onto the other horse, a groan accompanying the effort.

They looked back down the hill to where disembodied shouts and hoofbeats and sporadic gunfire could be heard in the distance.

“Vamos,” Navárez said. “Let’s go.”

They picked their way along the savage trail, which was little more than a rain-rutted footpath. The piquant scent of pine oozed in the late afternoon swelter. Stinging insects, maddened by the humidity, launched in droves after the great loping human-animal clumps that pounded through their sanctuary.

As they rode deeper into the wood, the trail took an upward drift. Watershed country. A merciful damp-cool breeze chilled them under sweat-drenched clothing. Here and there a renegade golden sunbeam broke through the entwining pine-shield above and strobed them with dull heat. Now and again they ambled uncertainly over lumpy root fingers and tangled scrub, or slipped on treacherous smooth-worn stone iced with gray-green furry moss.

They rode in silence for a long while. Then the Spaniard dropped his steed into step with Gonji’s.

“Francisco Navárez,” he growled, as if to say the name should have been obvious all along. “Where are you riding, bárbaro?”

Gonji rankled at the insult. Few things needled him as much as being called a barbarian on this foul continent. He considered a particularly choice Spanish barb.

“I’m told that—”

“I know, I know—you’re Gon-shee Sa-ba-ta-keee, corregir? Right?” Navárez cut in.

“That’s right, amigo, now tell me—what is so fine a buccaneer as yourself doing so far from the ripe shipping lanes? And what does one do around here to set a full papist army yapping at his behind? Especially so deep into territory that must be Magyar or Turk?”

“In this army,” the Spaniard bellowed, “one finds himself in many unusual circumstances. Most of which requiring a certain skill with the sword. You have such a skill perhaps?”

Gonji smiled slightly, his gaze fixed on the trail ahead. He said nothing.

“Ah, but of course you do, sí. I did not imagine, did I, all those bodies dropping on the hillside, like lightning striking, no? Snick-snick—” He made a few quick passes in the air with an imaginary sword. “Bravo, bárbaro, muy bueno! Very good! No pistols, no body armor, and yet you jump right into a fight. I like that.”

“I don’t like guns. Not a very honorable weapon, eh?” Gonji said with a shrug. “Armor? Sometimes. I just don’t happen to own any right now. Anyway, the trick is not to get hit, neh?”

Navárez laughed heartily. “You are, no doubt, seeking to employ your skill?”

“That depends.”

“Don’t let the lack of pretty uniforms mislead you, bárbaro. We’re a unified army, whatever we look like. His chest swelled with a breath befitting a heraldic pronouncement. “I am Captain of the 3rd Free Company, Royalist Force of the Isle of Akryllon.”

Gonji blinked.

Captain? he thought. Royalist Force? Now what the hell is this mangy dog trying to hand me? Great. Another lousy renegade bunch formed in uprising, with a title for every enlistee down to the third hind flea of the last straggling nag.

Gonji’s spirit sagged, and he sighed resignedly. “Who did you say your king was? Not a Magyar, was he?”

“Did I say? I think not.” A calculated pause. “We fight for King Klann the Invincible, son of the deposed king of Akryllon. We fight a wandering war, adding troops as we can, plundering for our survival. Sometimes at sea, sometimes on land. One day we’ll help him take back what is his, and we’ll all be richly rewarded. Until then, he takes good care of us.” He paused, and a distant, wistful look crossed his face. “He saved me from the belly of a shipful of condemned men. At sea I’m his third-in-command.”

Gonji strained to recall something. A legend, a fireside tale. Something.

“When we find Akryllon, we’ll tear it from the devils who hold it. Then—”

“When you find it?”

“Sí,” Navárez replied, “this isle is never in the same place twice—it’s enchanted. Lorded over by sorcerers.”

Gonji waxed grim as the trail took a gently up-winding eastern hitch and a capricious breeze began to buffet them. Evening was drawing near. Gone was his earlier mirth as the samurai tried in vain to remember where he had heard such a story before. A wandering king, a sorcerous island....

Of course, Gonji wasn’t fool enough to embrace any such romantic tale without proof. Of sorceries, those which could be proven, there were few. Horrors, yes. Things that assailed the unsuspecting, shapes that haunted sleep—these existed aplenty. Experience attested to that. But magick was dying. As people clustered together in ever larger cities, more of that which was native to the spirit was lost, spurned, despised. And magick had become a lost art, something whispered about, disbelieved.

And for that reason, all the more deadly where it was to be found. And something about this....

“What did your king do to upset the Austrian priests enough to declare war on you?”

“We...sacked their treasury. In Bratislava.”

Gonji whistled thinly. “That would make them mad enough,” he said archly. “So what’s King Klann’s next move?”

Gonji saw Navárez’ neck muscles tighten, as if he were struggling with something.

“We’re going up there,” he said at length, gesturing to the jagged, snow-capped mountains to the east. “The Transylvanian Alps. To winter in, build our numbers. Prepare for a return to the sea.”

Gonji pondered this. It was late summer. Absurd to think of wintering in at such an early date. And in those mountains? Lunacy. He must be lying. Unless, that is, there was something Klann wanted up there.

Vedun?

“By all accounts,” Gonji said, reasoning out loud, “those mountains mark the pivotal point of territory contested by three great powers. Now why would a foreign king with a small army want to place himself right in the middle of—”

“Hey, bárbaro,” Navárez knifed in with a tone suggesting caution in such idle speculations, “if the King says we go up there to die, then that’s what we do.”

Most unusual, Gonji thought. A sense of duty, commitment, to something other than gold alone?

Gonji was intrigued. Moreover, he was probing a raw nerve—a favorite sport. He needled it anew.

“No amount of gold will send mercenaries happily to their deaths. How does Klann keep these free companions faithful? What power does he use?”

“There are powers beyond simple wealth, bárbaro, that men can draw strength from,” he answered cryptically.

Gonji turned this over briefly, filed it away.

They rode on without speaking for a time. Birds flitted among the towering pine peaks, and an occasional hare or deer would bound off, alarmed at their passing. And once, beneath a single morose willow that seemed to be on trial before an implacable pine jury, Gonji saw something black and serpentine slither by in the thatched weeds.

Navárez pointed at the several swords Gonji carried.

“What are you, a blade merchant?”

“Blade merchant,” Gonji echoed. “Has a nice ring to it. No, I just favor the style blade I grew up with, so I keep a spare. The ornamental sword was a present from my mother, and I suppose I’d best hide it away before it gets...lost, neh?”

Navárez sneered. Gonji couldn’t help staring. When the Spaniard sneered, his drooping mustache, with the frazzled black tuft under his nose, looked like a tarantula in relief.

Just then a peal of thunder boomed over the mountains, heralding a spidery branching of heat lightning that fractured the sky overhead and blazed for an oddly long time. It seemed as if the purpling sky might crack and fall in shards, and the jagged outline, to Gonji’s imagination, described an evil, hungry shape. An ominous thunderhead had mounted the northern peaks.

A rider pounded toward them on a midnight mare with white markings. As he pulled up and greeted Navárez with a harsh laugh, Gonji noted that the mare looked no more like a horse than did her master.

Still another luridly appointed Spaniard—and by now Tora must be feeling quite at home, for Gonji had acquired the steed in Spain—whose salient feature was the most obtrusive set of splay teeth the samurai had ever seen. The result was a perpetual grin, counterpointed by the gaping hole left by a missing bicuspid, that set one’s tongue running over his own teeth in comparison. The rest of the features on the long, shovel-jawed face seemed present as only a weak excuse to call it a face at all. One eye stayed permanently half closed and unblinking, the result of an angry scar, and the man rode with a spotted bandanna clenched in one hand with which he repeatedly mopped his sweating brow.

“This is Señor Sabatake, Esteban,” Navárez said. There was casual sarcasm in his voice, the kind a hard-nosed leader adopts when among his men. “He hauled my stern out of trouble back there. He has a good sword arm that he may wish to employ with us, is that so, bárbaro?”

Esteban chuckled in a way Gonji didn’t like. But he said nothing, made them wait.

Navárez’ eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward in the saddle. “This army of King Klann, it rides under the protection of a sorcerer—te entiendo? Understand? Can you pledge your faith in his power and your life to the king’s cause?”

Gonji cocked an eyebrow, momentarily speechless. His thoughts raced, a jumble of variables in an equation that made no sense.

“Black sorcery?”

“Who can say what color is sorcery, eh?” the pirate railed. “Sorcery is power, and power is all that matters in this world. Forget what you think you believe, and be prepared to believe in the impossible. If you can do that, then you can ride with us. Adios.”

With a final oppressive laugh from Esteban, the two pirates wheeled and clumped off into the forest.

Well, what now? Gonji wondered. It sounded like a deadly combination—bandits like that tapped into some lode of sorcerous power. There must be something to it. Men simply weren’t so unabashedly frank about the supernatural without good reason.

But a fat lot of good their sorcerer had done them: From where Gonji sat it appeared that Klann’s army had been raked over pretty well by the Austrian troops. Yet the city they attacked—the seat of the bishopric, a long ride behind—had impressed him as well fortified, the treasury impregnable to anything short of a fully appointed siege force. Klann had stormed it and apparently made off with a hefty plunder. Sorcery or not, the main body of this wandering army must be of respectable size. But what were they up to now, here in the mountains? Could the vampires that had attacked him be sinister agencies of this sorcerer? If so, one might certainly be better off with them than against them.

Sided with vampires—Yeeee gods, what madness!

What will be the next turn on your merry trail, Gonji-san? By all the spirits who ply men’s lives, I’d give an arm for the counsel of just one good friend!

But Gonji was far too intrigued now to obey the tugging of his instincts and leave this strange army to its devices. Pathetically low on money, human companionship, and raisons d’être, Gonji determined his course with a blithe peal of laughter and a hearty shout. He patted the Sagami in a gesture of trust to whatever kami guided its blade and spurred Tora after the Spaniards.

Even the most loathsome companions and deadliest of escapades would be welcome, it seemed, to a man slowly dying of emptiness.