Читать книгу Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds - T.C. Rypel - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

As soon as Gonji crossed the bridge over the Segre River, he experienced something of a second—if secondary—homecoming. The windswept snowy plains of Aragon were a sight that stirred familiar memories. He knew this place, knew its people, its lore and legendry, its monsters and magics.

He felt control and wariness in equal measure. Weakness here would surely usher one to madness or death or grim fates unsuitable to such rational description. But neither would it serve one to proceed with fatuous overconfidence.

Thus, when he happened upon the body of a slain Spanish lancer, the samurai bowed somberly in deference to whatever valor the man had expended in his duty, and then appropriated the lancer’s razor-edged halberd, to supplant the one he had lost in the harsh mountain passes.

Gonji left behind lands of Reformation strife, where it best availed him to remain neutral in his commitment, for a country ruled by the Roman Church. Here, faith in Iasu was sometimes strong, sometimes corrupted by fervent perversity of design, and always countered by faith in the formless Dark Power, here personified in Satan.

Christian symbology was employed with uncertain power in certain circumstances. Where its power did not obtain, the warrior was left to his own resources: the might of his sword arm, the strength of his courage, the depth of his experience.

Tora’s hooves thumped easily across the crusted, barren plain as they departed the river road for the less traveled southwest track Gonji sought. Gaining it at mid-morn, Gonji soon encountered a small caravan of traders bound for Barcelona. These hucksters took a dim view of this singular foreign warrior with his formidable array of weaponry. Gonji doffed his eye-slitted sallet and bowed, engaging them in curt conversation. They cast many an edgy glance at his pistols, wicked halberd, and matched set of swords before considering selling him the few provisions he requested.

The tinkle of his gold and the advantage of their numbers had just about won them over when a leathery-faced old duffer pointed out the wooden crucifix tied about Tora’s neck.

“Sacrilege,” the merchant declared.

“How do you know what my horse believes?” Gonji queried archly. The jest was lost on them. “In truth, I believe the power of Iasu this cross declares will ward off the evil ones. I can think of no simpler, more direct way of showing vampires and werewolves not to waste their time on me.”

They sold him the few meager goods he asked for, charging prices that reflected their low esteem and drawing the line at the black powder he needed for his pistols.

“Whatever your business,” one of them told him in parting, “mind that you steer well clear of the Valley of Barbaso.”

“Hai. Domo arigato,” Gonji replied, to their befuddlement. He bowed and rode on, with their gun barrels quietly leveled at him until he was nearly out of sight.

Later that same morning, a band of mounted hunters sold him a sinew bowstring for a fee that caused him to wince—the only change of expression he’d shown them, though their bows had been aimed at his breast for an uneasy while.

They further offered to help him string the difficult three-man longbow for an additional charge. While Gonji had long since developed a bending method for stringing the great longbow unaided—though it was tricky—their mild jeering at his claim aroused his competitive instinct. So Gonji instead proposed a display of his skill in exchange for their free assistance.

As they scoffed and wagered among themselves the distance by which he’d miss the proposed target, the samurai nocked a thirteen-fist war arrow, rotated the bow over his head and through the half-arc of a kyu-jutsu draw, and skewered the trunk of a cork oak later estimated at two hundred and seventy-five yards away.

The impressed hunters threw in a scrap of advice along with the free stringing:

“Marksman or not, swing wide of the Valley of Barbaso, amigo.”

“Hai, arigato.”

* * * *

Gonji entered the valley that cradled the town of Barbaso a little after midday. Plenty of time, he assured himself, to reach the town before nightfall.

But as he made the gradual descent into the valley, he soon became aware of the subtle change in atmosphere, some mystical sense stirring within him, warning him to remain on his guard. The terrain became more rugged, the snow mat broken in many places by protruding roots and overgrown with brush. There were virtually no forests south of the mountains, yet the evergreen oaks grew thickly enough here to qualify as such. The lush bower blotted the sun’s weak rays and absorbed the wind. It was cold and still, save for the distant chirruping of an occasional bird. The snow piled higher as Gonji progressed, though the valley floor should have been spared to a greater degree. The air seemed unaccountably thick and hazy, the trail ahead obscured. Now and again the samurai sensed movement on the periphery of his vision, but when he looked nothing came into view.

Some things deceitfully operate on the edge of the senses, Gonji-san. That is the purpose of this phase of our training…

The inscrutable ninja master had been right as always: Gonji was instinctively aware of the insidious power that took predatory note of his presence.

The trail thinned, mounded up over a scrub-tangled knoll, then dropped steeply toward a gloomy hollow. Here the barren beech and poplar trees clustered densely under a dwarfing stand of ice-drooping green oaks. At the entrance of the hollow stood two enormous boulders, flanking the trail, looming before him like the lifeless eyes of some granite colossus. From what source they had tumbled, no man could say.

When sorcery opens the way, worlds may tip and spill, one into another…

Gonji halted a moment and scanned the trail ahead. Nodding and squaring himself in the saddle, he clucked Tora into an easy trot, wrestling with the reins against his steed’s skittishness. When they reached those massive guardian stones, Gonji yanked back on the reins and swept his halberd out of its moorings. Catching it up smartly under the crook of his right arm, he arced its deadly edge across the top of the stone where the evil eyes had peered at him hungrily seconds before.

Tora whinnied and stamped as sparks showered over the boulder, and the huge form launched over their heads with a fearsome bellow. An incredibly round and fat demon bounded down behind them on the trail, swelled rapidly to an even greater girth, and bounced straight up into the shuddering lower boughs of an evergreen before landing again between the boulders, with a tremendous thud!

Gonji fought to control his mount as he leveled the halberd threateningly and peered with narrow-eyed disbelief at the bizarre apparition. Settling Tora and stretching up boldly on his saddle, he studied the hissing creature, which sucked great howling breaths through a mouth that seemed capable of expanding without limit.

Stubby arms and legs jutted comically from a body the size of a coach. Its head was as round as its body, jammed atop plump shoulders with economy—no space wasted on a neck. The head was hairless; the ears, beet red and pointed like the leaves of a lilac; and the face was dominated by that elastic mouth, as supple as a snake. Its nose was a tiny scallop between two beady yellow eyes which Gonji could not help comparing to his own in their angularity. The creature, too, seemed to take note of the similarity when the samurai doffed his sallet and proffered a shallow bow.

“You remind me of me, funny man,” the demon said in a peculiar high voice. “What land spit you from its shores?”

Gonji rankled but remained expressionless. “I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara, son of the daimyo Sabatake Todohiro of Dai Nihon, the Land of the Gods.”

The creature laughed derisively. “The Land of the Gods!” it mimicked. “Well you’re in my land now. I’m Bulba, and these are my boulders. That’s my tree over there. And you’re riding on my trail.”

“I’m riding on the snow,” Gonji countered with mixed pique and amusement. The obese demon’s wheezing punctuated his words with keening whistles between the syllables.

“The snow’s mine, too!”

Gonji leaned forward over Tora’s withers. “The snow belongs to the kami of the sky. It’s his carpet for—”

“Bah!” Bulba scoffed, waving a flabby arm. “That’s empty theosophical piffle! Whatever falls out of his pockets—”

A loaf of finger jerked upward out of a porky fist.

“—and lands in my territory—”

And then downwards, though barely below the horizontal.

“—becomes mine!”

Gonji replaced the sallet on his head in martial threat. “Nevertheless, my path lies through your land. Now will you remove your great bulk, or will I have to prod you out of the way?”

Bulba’s ears deepened in their redness. He sucked in air until it seemed his eyes would pop and, swelling until he was nearly wedged between the great stones, he blew such a blast of wind down into the snow before him that Gonji and Tora were engulfed in a blinding squall that took a minute to settle back to earth.

Gonji brushed the snow from his beard and caked garb with firm, even strokes. Tora snorted and tossed his head, flicking his ears as he chomped at the bit. All the while the wheezing fat creature cackled in high mirth.

“Do that again, my fat landlocked flounder,” Gonji warned, “and I’ll burst you such that your entrails will festoon the woods for acres.”

“Oh—Si?! I’ll bowl you and your stupid horse so flat your sky god will think you’re a new continent!”

“Ahh, so desu ka? Is that so? Take one more deep breath and I’ll plant so many shafts in your blobby hide that you will—”

“Mande usted? What did you say?”

“—that you will look like a burr.”

“I’ll swallow your horse’s head!”

“And the shaft of my halberd with it.”

“You puny little mortal—sniff—I’ll—sniff-sniff…” Bulba’s tiny nose kept wrinkling in Gonji’s direction. “Sweets,” he said, his yellow eyes widening. “You have sweets!”

From the tone in his voice, one might have guessed that he’d been betrayed by a friend. Gonji smiled coyly and nodded.

“Give them to me at once!”

The samurai shook his head slowly. “First remove your…considerable self from my path.”

“Bah!” Bulba bounded atop the boulder on Gonji’s right again—the maneuver astonishing, as though his blubber were composed of air pockets—and settled his corpulence on the crest, where it sagged again like melting tallow. He made a gesture with his useless arms that approximated crossing them over his chest. There he sat sulking while Gonji fished a packet from the bag of provisions he’d purchased from the traders.

“Eat hearty, buta kao—pig face.” The samurai tossed the demon the packet and rode past him, through the boulder gateway.

“Taffy!” Bulba cried at his departing back. “All I ever get is taffy. Next time you pass through here you best be carrying those French confections—with the soft cen—”

His words deteriorated into a gooey mumble, and Gonji trotted on into the hollow with the matter of the wind elemental receding from his concern.

The experienced warrior learned to deal variously with the challenges in his way. Sometimes the path of least resistance to one’s goal was through might of arm, sometimes through strength of spirit. Other times again…

Gonji could only stand in awe of the endless wonder of the world. And only one raised in Shinto and disciplined to Zen seemed properly suited in spirit to marvel at its profound mystery.

He traveled without encounter for a time, negotiating the rugged track of the hollow, which narrowed after a while into little more than a foreboding ravine. But this soon widened on the left hand again, the trees thinning, and the land once more assuming the forlorn face of the Spanish wilderness with which Gonji was familiar. On the right, for as far as the eye could see, a stretch of low mesa bordered the valley, curving sharply into gorges and canyons which the samurai studiously avoided. Approaching one, he was nevertheless attracted by the sound of running water, the splash of a cataract. A branching of the river must feed a minor falls, he thought, as he swung by warily for a look.

Even through cold air, he caught the harsh scent of the giant before he saw it.

Knowing that he must have been heard by now, and accepting that it had been a mistake to ride so boldly near the tableland, Gonji stoically turned into the grotto to confront the great brute.

A thrill of shock coursed Gonji’s spine, and his belly turned over, to see this creature. It was clearly the most awesome giant he’d ever encountered, albeit he’d seen few: They were a vanishing race.

The giant grunted at him from where it squatted near the icy pool formed by the cataract. It was ruddy, black-bearded, and burly. Even in its crouch its head would top three acrobats in shoulder-stand. It was clad in a patchwork of wildly mismatched hides and cloaks and plate armor—the latter, he knew only too well, torn from the crushed bodies of men who’d attacked it.

But they were generally a docile race, not given to attacking men without provocation. By the look of him, this giant either had met with his share of fools or was easily provoked.

“Good day to you, Sir Giant,” Gonji said, bowing elaborately from the saddle.

But the giant had noticed Gonji wincing from the stench of his enormous body. He curled his lip indignantly.

“Good day yourself, mite. Just keep your squirmy little body over there, and quit screwing up your face like that. It’s too damn cold for an Anakim to bathe.”

“Forgive me, por favor, but can you tell me whether I’m on a proper course for Barbaso?”

The giant rose to his full breathtaking height. “You’re no Spaniard,” he said in a menacing voice. “But I’d judge you know damn well there’s nothing else in this valley.”

The samurai did indeed, and he had asked only in an effort at small talk, to display his bravery in light of the rather uneven angle of eye contact between them.

“So what is your business here? Have you come to seek employment with the Master?”

“The Master?”

“Hah, but you’re a dumb one, eh?” the giant bellowed. “This valley belongs to the Archmage Domingo Malaga y Colicos, and those who journey here are either his servants or his enemies. There can be no other.”

Gonji scratched his stubbly beard pensively. “The one who calls himself Domingo Negro—Black Sunday?”

“Hah-hah—si! A name to strike terror in the hearts of all goodly church militants, eh?”

“Hai,” Gonji agreed, “but why would so powerful a giant as yourself be concerned with the strife of men?”

The giant sighed deeply, his rancid breath causing Gonji to hold his own until it had passed. “Self-preservation, little man. In this valley you choose sides or you perish.”

“I’m not interested in choosing allegiances right now,” Gonji said. “I have my personal duty to follow. This valley is the shortest route to—”

“Then you are The Enemy!” the giant roared, catching up a huge staff carved from oak. “Give me a reason I shouldn’t grind your crackly little body into the snow right now.”

“I’ll give you several,” Gonji responded defiantly, fighting Tora’s backstepping. “First, you’d not find me easy to catch, if I would run. But I wouldn’t. I don’t fear death like some dishonorable knight you’d find groveling under a bush. And man-stings are most unpleasant. They open wounds that attract demons which cause fester and swelling, sometimes fever and death. And I bear many stings. And besides, like you, I’m only an outcast, with no land to call my own anymore. I would say that binds us in a sort of brotherhood. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The giant grunted. “Loco, as well as squirmy and stupid. But I suppose that’s one shape valor comes in. It got you this far. Listen, you wouldn’t consider trading that horse for safe conduct as far as Barbaso, would you? Game grows scarce, and I haven’t eaten a good horse in—” He stopped when he saw Gonji’s negative tensing. “Begone with you, then.”

Gonji swung Tora about, but as he was about to exit the grotto, he half-turned again.

“Giant—have you seen many wonders hereabouts?”

The prodigious warrior’s expression segued from blankness to disbelief to uproarious mirth. He slapped his great thigh, and the echo caused snow to shower from the rock walls of the grotto.

His laughter rang to the skies as he spoke. “Any wonders! Haaaahhh! You’re the pick of the litter, tiny hombre! Just keep riding.” He shook his head from side to side, sat down with a great whump, and leaned back on his tree trunk arms. “Just keep on riding.”

Gonji sniffed, unsure whether he was being ridiculed. He shrugged and continued on his way, the giant’s booming voice pealing behind him until the mesa had shrunken to a crooked step that at last blended with the surrounding terrain.

“…he meets a son of Anak, and he asks…”

Gonji was intrigued. The giants were a discerning and aloof race, not given to dabbling in the affairs of men without good reason. And this sorcerer who called himself Black Sunday—by all accounts his reputation had always had it that he plied wizardry and white magic. And for giants to ally themselves with any form of witchcraft was rare.

He stopped and dismounted, relieved his bladder in the snow. Feeling hungry, he tarried awhile on the broad plain that must mark the center of the valley floor. Hills rose humpbacked with snow on either immediate horizon, but he could still easily make out the cloud-crowned Pyrenees to the north.

As he munched a piece of dried beef and fed Tora a few handfuls of meal, the samurai pondered again the epoch-making mystical revival in Europe, trying to make sense of it, some discernible cosmic pattern. Something was happening on this continent. The world seemed burdened by a heavy karmic legacy from times past. Multifarious forces struggled for supremacy, and Gonji had run afoul of more than his share. They seemed to take a keen interest in him. And now, it seemed he would be facing them alone…again.

And how fared Simon Sardonis these days? he wondered as he remounted.

“Cholera,” he swore under his breath, implementing a favorite Polish expletive of an old comrade, descriptive of a disease that produced unsavory effects.

His mood lightened as he patted his steed’s shoulder. “Do you know, Tora, what that giant had in mind for you?” Tora seemed unconcerned as they broke into a canter across the crisp plain.

It could not be far to Barbaso, and there was no losing the way, even given Gonji’s sometimes poor sense of direction. Barbaso—and perhaps some answers to a few questions before he proceeded to Zaragoza.

* * * *

Twilight gloom descended with the fierce north wind, and still Gonji had not seen the rooftops of Barbaso. The trees began to gather into pairs, the pairs begetting copses, and soon Gonji pulled up before yet another misplaced wood. Here he felt a dawning fear, a sense of isolation and vulnerability. A presence of things wholly unknown. Certain of the trees and scrubs were of varieties he had never seen before, and the wind seemed to swirl and howl from out of the wood, daring the adventurer with its dangerous allure.

He would find a suitable spot, he decided, gather what kindling he could, and make camp for the night. Progressing farther seemed foolish, although Barbaso might lie a scant three hundred yards beyond the wood. He was weary and in no mood to run any gauntlet fixed by haunters of the night.

He had not advanced far in his quest of a campsite when he became certain that he was being followed. The nape of his neck prickled time and again as he scoured the periphery from the corners of his eyes. Once, on impulse, he wheeled and nocked an arrow in one swift movement, only to find nothing lurking with gaping jaws; no track in the failing light but his own.

But he fancied that he heard a muffled chatter of mocking laughter. Anger roiled in his breast as he continued on his way, waxing resolved now to find Barbaso by the glimmer of its lamplights.

So intent was he on furtive side glances that he nearly made a fatal error. Mounting a rise in the trail bordered by thick brush and evergreen, he caught the hint of lightning movement just ahead of Tora’s warning snort—too late to veer.

Snake, was his first thought, but almost at once he knew differently. The snaring vine creepers coiled about Tora’s forelegs, more following from the brush—thick, elastic brown tentacles—as the halberd came up and slashed down to the right—up, over Tora’s crest—down hard on the left— Once again to either side as the horse whinnied and fought its way backward.

Green splotches now discolored the pole-arm’s vicious edge.

Gonji listened to the clacking of reeds in the deadly plant’s base. Whether they communicated pain or anger he could not tell.

He calmed Tora and steered him wide under the trees to examine the predatory plant from safe vantage, a grimace frozen on his face.

It was the luna carnivora, a popular sorcerer’s snare. It grew in mated pairs, one on either side of the path, waiting in ambush behind concealing trees. Its endlessly elongating tendrils could squeeze the life from a bull, and once immobilized, the prey was slowly flayed and eaten via adhesive tongues that tore flesh in thin strips. A hideous death. The death of an insect.

Gonji hawked and spat bile from his throat. He viewed the reposing creatures with an ambivalent fixation. The hidden sides of the tree trunks were decorated with skulls, human and animal; the waving plants themselves, adorned with tinkling bones. It was said that in the base of the bole of each luna carnivora were set two pairs of eyes so chilling to the soul that meeting their gaze would cause one to feel revulsion in being looked upon ’til the end of his days. Eyes that made one curse his own power of sight.

Gonji resisted the urge and pushed on. But he was certain that he had heard that restrained laughter again.

The wood was an eerie place. The moon seemed huge and leering above the trees, and a fine gossamer mist seemed to trail in pinwheels from its dully glowing rim. But the samurai rode with confidence: He had yet to encounter any magic he could not fathom, nor any fabulous beast he dared not confront. But he did begin to wonder in what state of siege—or worse—he might find Barbaso.

The woods thinned again, and the trail conjoined with a broader road. The surrounding area looked as though it must have been under cultivation, a curving ladle of land ridged with furrows of snow. The farms of Barbaso. Farther down the road, bordered by tangled shrubs and a short, broken picket fence, was a country cemetery.

Gonji stopped here and strained up and outward from the saddle, his piercing dark eyes penetrating the moonglow. Several distant graves showed evidence of having been disturbed. Frozen earth had been churned up and strewn amidst the snow. An ill omen in any land.

Craning his neck to scan the road ahead, he proceeded through the pale golden glow of the moon’s silent scrutiny. Something drew is gradual, wary attention, as he approached it in curiosity.

The glimmer of colored lights bloomed on the snow, once on either hand, before the fire-blossom ring of blue and orange suddenly appeared in fullness, garish in its iridescence. A lovely, doleful young woman sat upon the snow within the imprisoning ring. Her eyes reflected resignation, then a disinterested acknowledgment of the passing warrior.

Gonji’s own stoic countenance matched hers in its disinterest, and as he was about to pass, her head tilted in curiosity.

“What battle do you flee from?” she asked in a melodic voice.

“Many,” Gonji answered curtly.

“I’m so cold and so lonely,” she said mournfully. “Will you not end my imprisonment?”

The samurai reached into his sewn-in kimono pocket but found no silver, so he swept an arrow from his saddle-bound quiver, loaded his bow, and casually fired a passing shot that skewered her porcelain breast. The arrowhead protruded bloodlessly from between the faery-maiden’s shoulder blades. She snarled and tore it from her ensorceled flesh, then easily snapped it in two.

“Good karma to you,” Gonji said lightly, his eyes back on the road ahead.

“Bastard!” she shouted. “So you know of me? Only a coward may see us, do you know that?”

“I don’t know about that,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “But only a coward would be attracted to your so carefully affected innocence.”

She hissed at his back, but he offered not so much as another glance, riding on almost apathetically, bored with what the Dark Powers had made of their local grave-robbing. If this common faery-ring maiden were the worst the ruptured graves offered, he need not concern himself with them.

But again—black sorcery in this territory. The Archmage of Malaguer he’d heard of was not given to dabbling in the dread art of necromancy.

He halted Tora and turned when he heard the high-pitched cackling approaching fast behind him. A small figure raced on foot over the snows, bearing a staff and swinging something round his head as he neared the faery ring. The hooting maniac hurled a rock from a slingshot that struck the evil apparition full in the face, bursting her eyeball to oozing ruin. She hissed at him as her hand darted out and snatched the rock out of the air on the rebound. She railed at him in a language Gonji didn’t know and threw the rock back. But it flared into white-hot scintillas as it passed over the glowing blossoms, disintegrating at once in the frosty air. The wildly laughing little man ran up close to the ring and, turning, began kicking snow back at the faery like some frenzied rooster. The cascading snow turned to steam when it struck the deadly barrier.

The samurai’s hand gripped the Sagami’s hilt as the lunatic ran up to him, laugh crinkles radiating from his black eyes. He was about thirty, too lightly dressed, and sported a ridiculously long cowl that made him look like a jester.

“I like that!” he was shouting, his words punctuated with breathless laughter. “I like your spunk. I may be able to use that. Come on, come see what’s up ahead. Let’s see how you’ll deal with that—”

And with that he ran on up the road, chattering incoherently.

“Hold it,” Gonji commanded, but he was forced to trot up alongside the strange fellow before he could engage him again.

“Who are you?”

The little man laughed sharply and gasped for breath as he ran, speaking in gulps. “Who am I? Oh no, senor, I don’t fall for that. You can…you can call me Luna Invierno—Winter Moon, eh? Hee-hee! I never give…my real name…you may be…a sorcerer, no?”

And he was right, of course. Some sorcerers gained power over a man merely by the use of his true name.

“All right, Moon,” he said. “What’s your business?”

“My business? Hee-hee! I’m a scavenger. A thief. Living off what the land will yield. Taking what it won’t.”

“And how is it that you manage to survive—with no horse, no sword—?”

“I’ll match my staff against your sword anytime,” he replied petulantly, “and my sling against your bow.”

“Is that so?”

“And I know my share of magical protections.”

Gonji shook his head. “The Archmage of this valley offers little challenge, it seems. The faery-ring maidens hardly require much—”

“Bah, they’re not his! This Domingo Negro—he’s a mean one. Doesn’t bother with minor spells and snares.”

“Then there are other powers present here?”

Moon fluttered his lips with a finger, issuing a sound intended as ominous portent. “Many powers vie here. I thought you knew what you were doing.”

Gonji bridled. “Never mind. What’s your business? What do you want with me?”

“I aim to rob Black Sunday’s Garden of Miracles. And you’re going to help—if you’ve got the cojones for it. But come—see—what—lies—next!” His stamping footfalls underscored each word as he sprinted ahead toward a right bend in the road.

“I’m not—” Gonji reined in, face contorted with aggravation at the little ferret’s insolence. He kicked Tora into a canter and came abreast of the strange little man, about to remonstrate, when he spotted the tower of the windmill around the bend.

The sky had grown darker, a filmy vapor streaking it with ephemeral tendrils, delicate patterns now discernible where the mist passed near the moon’s disc.

“See here!” Moon shouted, gesturing toward the windmill as it came fully into view in a small clearing, near a farmhouse. Gonji tried to shush him, but to no avail. “Look what he’s done—he doesn’t fool around, does he?”

And then the samurai saw. His lips curled at the sight. The windmill was flanked by huge barren oaks. And both the naked branches and the gently tilting vanes of the windmill were festooned with the bodies of Spanish troops.

Better that they had been dead than in their present state. For they hung like silkworms, paralyzed and suspended in dark, translucent cocoons; murmuring like the mindless possessed, seemingly no longer human.