Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (10 page)

Their pursuers ceased to follow at that point, laughing keeningly at their departing backs, calling out tauntingly.

Gonji could not tell how many men had lived to retreat with him, only barely accepting the fact that it
had been
a retreat, still clutching at ragged, wrathful thoughts of ordering yet another about-face, a doomed charge into those gloating, hideous visages.

But that was impossible. All he knew—all any of those tortured, plodding bladesmen knew—was that the killing had stopped. The screams were dying in their ears as they fled.

And at that moment, there in that charnel snow canyon, surcease of the horror was all that mattered.

* * * *

Nightmares…

The ghastly death-march southward, back along their former swaggering track…

* * * *

More cunning now, more drawn from secret corridors of unknown terror, were the onslaughts at their departing backs.

The canyon of snow became a frozen tundra they could not outrun but only plod and slog through with heads hung low and bodies too weakened to offer defense. Frozen ghosts on horseback, they drifted southward. Stragglers, broken warriors, speaking nothing, caring not to gaze into one another’s ice-crusted faces.

Gonji found that Orozco was alive, and his heart was briefly lightened. At least four of Perigor’s troop also chugged along at their ponderous gait through the haunch-deep crusted snow.

But their relief in living allies was fleeting. Doubling back along the bloody, corpse-strewn trail only focused them as targets, toys for the amusement of supernatural assailants.

Night swept down from the sky in an impossible swirling gray fog. Black shapes moved within it, stark shadows with menacing substance, watching, waiting. At last working their demon-spawned evil.

Flying shapes, bulky and vermin-furred, began to strafe the survivors from above. At first they merely antagonized with their piercing titters as they soared overhead. Then they would single out a horseman who had strayed from the rest and arc down to buffet him with their wings and formless limbs. Finally one man reined in his steed, halted its endless plodding, signaling his own doom. Once stopped, a horse could no longer find strength and courage enough to resume its plunging at the relentless tundra.

The fogbound horrors swarmed him. His voice cried out in French, hurling oaths as he swung a weapon overhead with pathetically useless strokes. Horse and rider crashed sideways into the snow bank, which seemed to open and engulf him. There was no helping him. His fellows angled their complaining mounts toward him, cursing, threatening in cracked and strained voices. The warrior, mired to the shoulders in reddening snow, was seized and borne off by the flying demons, his wretched struggles a distant, smoky-gray silhouette.

It was his screaming that went down hardest.

“My wife! O Jesus God Almighty!
My wife
—
don’t tell her it was like this…
”

“Oh, Christ—”

It was Buey whose furious kicking at his lathered steed at last brought him near to the place where the creatures had brought the screaming man to ground, to work their evil on his tormented body and soul before bearing him off. The Ox called out a challenge, and a hulking gray shape that had lingered behind rose straight up into the air and curled through the curtain of mist above Buey, to swoop and engage him.

Gonji kicked his steed and twisted at the reins, with great effort finally steering the recalcitrant destrier in Buey’s direction. Snow swirled up into his eyes, obscuring his vision. He strained to see Buey and the strafing monster.

Hearing the Spaniard’s curse, Gonji searched for a weapon, blinking as if out of a dream, to see the naked blade of the Sagami sheathed in his broad belt. Cold comfort—The bared edge of his heat-tempered soul sang free. The samurai winced to see the blood that caked his garb, his horse’s flanks. He saw a fleeting glimpse of the strange broken nettles hooked into his greatcoat in spots. Remembered briefly engaging an enemy with clawed hands backed with thorny, curved barbs, then…

He saw Buey’s sidewise lurch in the saddle. And the broken shaft of a halberd suddenly snapping upward in the huge soldier’s grasp. The shriek of alarm—the dark spill into the snow between them—the skewed flight of the monster as it plunged straight for Gonji in its pain-maddened flight—

Gonji’s
katana
rasped free in a two-handed clench. He saw the eyeless visage of something like a mole. A shrew. Bulbous bat-ears. Gaping jaws full of pointed teeth that were stained dark.

He slashed hard, twice, eyes clenching shut. He felt the thudding weight that knocked him off his horse. Heard the muffled wail as he fell through the snow-crust, a coppery smell in his nostrils—

A grisly, snowbound grave began filling up around him.

Gonji heard a pounding impact in the snow not far off as he fought to the surface of the small avalanche that churned over him. Gasping, he instinctively raised the Sagami to high guard, then cast about for orientation.

The hideous beast lay thrashing in the snow behind him, spurting its noxious lifeblood. His horse, wildly galvanized to feel its burden lifted, had begun to surge away without him, laboring hard through the snows. He cursed and called its name, heard his own name called once or twice from mist-shrouded figures nearby. Scrabbling and digging through the path his horse had frantically beat, he regained its flank and fought astride though the gray destrier bucked and whinnied for fair, determined to dislodge him once and for all.

He searched out Buey’s figure, found him still among the living, caught a glimpse of Brett Jarret, nodding repeatedly just to his right and rear, clouds of desperate breath puffing about the French highwayman, amidst a fresh snow-swirl.

Buey made a tortuous path through virgin crust to anchor with them for strength. Just then they heard the pitiful wailing of Dalbert, the loquacious adventurer from St. Pons.

He was a barely recognizable figure in the veil of vaporous air to their left. It was not the flying vermin that had gotten him but something else. The dark shapes, their eyes glowing as pale and green as some well-avoided mold clinging to a wizard’s curing vat.

Dalbert’s screams sang of untold torture, his pleading both trenchant and vexing to Gonji in a way only a samurai could understand. It was dishonorable to allow one’s enemies such satisfaction and insulting to the warriors who were given to hear. Yet he felt sympathy for the man, who had survived so much only to suffer—what?

“Jesus-God,” Brett swore, “what are they doing to him?”

“Riding
him,” came Buey’s confused, tearful voice.

Dalbert had ceased to scream. And it seemed as though one of the demons had mounted his back, enveloped him in its foul caress.

“Gonji,” sounded a voice much like Dalbert’s, though distorted, reverberating in a way that made the flesh crawl.

“Gonjiiiiiii! You
did this to me, Gonji! Why did you let this happen to me? They want
you
now…They want
yoooooouuu!”

Gonji raised the Sagami again, in impotent fury, as his mount stumbled, righted itself. More survivors gathered near, huddling together, weapons fisted in frozen hands, prepared for some awful final attack as predators howled in the distance.

He saw Corbeau. And Perigor. One-eyed Leone. Orozco. Two more French brigands. An Italian mercenary. One of Sergeant Villiers’ charges, bleeding from chest and leg. They drew courage from one another, fused their wills with glances of grim determination. And pressed on.

But Simon Sardonis was not among them.

In bewildered defiance, Gonji blared upward into the swarming fog: “Simon! I’ll be back, Simon!”

And then he remembered. The turning. The beginning of the retreat. Minutes—
hours
ago? Simon had been there, urging them to fight on. Simon had said something to him then. Words whose meaning had been jumbled by the constant ebb and flow of the ferocious struggle.

Forget me,
Simon had said.
You shall find only the corpse of the great golden wolf.
Shi-kaze—
Deathwind, samurai…

“Give me something to kill!” Buey was shouting, head snapping about in search of a focus for his hatred, halberd whizzing at nothing. Its broken shaft shook in his grasp. “
Come on
, you filthy bastards! Come at us warm and living, or dead and twisted—I don’t give a shit!
God,
grant me something to
kill
—”

* * * *

Nightmares…

And the nauseating tang of blood…

* * * *

“He’s leaking again
—
where’s that goddamn barber-surgeon?”

Orozco…Carlo-san…

“What in God’s holy name did you see there, you poor wretches?”

Kuma-san…

* * * *

Spring came to Ostia in balmy drafts. Smothering warmth would hold the seaport city in a thrall of lethargy for days on end. Abruptly, the blistering sirocco would lash the sea inland in slanting sheets, dashing the languorous spell of comfort and security.

It was the rain that Gonji liked the best. It suited his entrenched mood and lent an atmosphere that imparted new depths to his meditations.

Always in the evening, when Gonji’s meditation was at its end, the boy would come and bring him his meal, keeping respectful silence until sure of his welcome. Then he would ply Gonji for more tales of the quest. Of the many roads to high adventure.

Then, one night, the boy unexpectedly inquired about that tragic venture of the Wunderknechten into the haunted province in the French Alps.

Gonji was taken aback. The subject had been taboo among the survivors who had accompanied him back across the sea. But somehow, he thought, the boy’s innocent curiosity might prove a potent emetic. At some point, they would have to reopen the wound again.

And so he did.

When he had finished, his story having found form in the words of merciful gallantry such tales must, out of necessity, be couched in, he found that he
had
indeed
experienced something of a catharsis. A fine film of sweat had broken out, his palms cold and moist, his throat dry. But he relaxed into a sense of purging, his guilt diffused.

The boy, a helmsman’s mate of about fifteen, poured him wine. He’d grown pale and somber during the telling of the tale, and Gonji was glad that he’d spared the lad any effort at objectifying the details that filled his nightmares.

The boy brought him his covered tray and, lifting the lid, said, “You left my brother to be feasted on by devils. You’re evil, and you belong in
Hell—”

The boy grabbed the pistol from behind the tray’s lifted lid. The gun’s heavy report echoed in the small room. Gonji’s pistol-proof cuirass shattered on impact. Imploded. Shards of steel lodged in his chest.

Gonji knew staggering pain. Vertigo, as he bowled over. The door crashed in under Buey’s battering shoulder. An outcry—another—

Then burning blackness…

* * * *

Bright faces and happy banter greeted Gonji’s first lucid moments since he’d been shot. His companions alternated between giving thanks, jostling one another to dispel their pent-up anxiety and nervous tension, and filling him in on the latest news.

Gonji, for his part, was glad to see those who were still among the living. But his attention span was short, and he still seemed bewildered to be conscious, his senses focusing again, slowly, weakly.

He took a sip of water from Father Jan Sebastio and caught sight of Luigi Leone’s red-rimmed good eye. “You’re always so emotional, Leone-san,” the samurai said in a parched voice, the others laughing and nudging the raw-boned Italian brigand.

“I never said I wanted to be a bloody samurai,” Luigi replied, evoking more mirth.

“I dreamed…about the witch, Domingo Negro,” Gonji rambled, his companions nonetheless listening intently. “How is Nichiyoobi?” he thought to ask, the association at once dredging up memories of the black mare he had named after the witch.

“Spiteful as ever,” Orozco said, smiling toothily, his long mustache twitching.

Gonji’s face flashed sudden pain, then softened to a placid set as he found a more comfortable position. He nodded gingerly. “Perhaps the witch came from the netherworld to aid me in my distress.”

Sebastio grunted bluffly. “You know I can’t sanction talk like that, Gonji-san. More likely it was the prayers of those who love you—”

“Or the masses Father Jan celebrated every day in your name,” Luigi added.

“Kuma-san,” Gonji asked of the priest, his brow knitting, “did we ever send anyone to look after the well-being of Pablo Cardenas’ family?”

They looked uneasily from one to the other. Gonji was obviously still only tenuously in touch with reality, with time. His mention of the solicitor from Spain whose life had been lost in the battle at the mystical fortress in Africa was an irrational stroke.

“Of course,” Sebastio answered. “Months ago.”

Gonji bobbed his head, satisfied. Then he turned his attention to Orozco. “I hope, Carlo-san, I’ll never again hear you mention that damned pistol-proof armor.” He tried to laugh, wound up coughing wetly and taking another sip of water.

Orozco shook his head morosely. “No. But that damned thing probably saved your life—you know that.”

“Hai.
But better a clean, swift death, if ever I’m shot like that again. I want no lingering death. No…teetering on the scales of the
kami
of fortune.” He pondered something a moment. “Kuma-san, did you commit my spirit into the hands of Iasu while I lay helpless to defend myself?”

Sebastio arched an eyebrow, for Gonji’s reproach had been tinged with undisguised amusement.

“Si
—like it or not, you’re a baptized Catholic now. Your father needn’t know.” The priest smiled beguilingly.

Gonji sighed raspingly.
“Domo arigato.
I suppose one can use whatever protection he can get in this mad land. This mad cosmos…”

But now his attention was attracted to Buey, who alone among them seemed beyond cheer, though generally grateful that Gonji had survived the assassination attempt.

* * * *

The ensuing weeks were spent in a dogged effort at recovering strength, which Gonji directed into vigorous exercise. The others were amazed at the samurai’s grim determination to regain his martial skills. He worked his body endlessly, scratching and clawing for every fresh increment of stamina. Running, stretching, resistance training, and sparring occupied his mornings. Afternoons would find Gonji practicing
kata
alone with his deadly swords in the hills, working at the complex techniques of the Katori
ryu;
then dueling with wooden
bokken
against one, then two, and finally as many as
six
fencers. Gradually, none were able to score a touch through the maelstrom of his lightning strokes.