Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (4 page)

Disembarking in France, Gonji found still more sinister problems awaiting him. The company was received with great fanfare by a French contingent of the Knights of Wonder. To his horror, the samurai learned that their purpose had preceded them, compromising any hope of silent, secret entry into the golden werewolf’s deadly cause.

Angered by the bitter irony of it all—he had once longed for the celebrity that now confounded his way—Gonji nonetheless allowed himself to be feted by the French chapter of tolerance-seekers who named him their champion.

* * * *

The outdoor festival honoring the celebrated oriental warrior had been held in the sprawling square of St. Pons, near the southern end of the Cevennes Mountain range. The regional adherents of the Knights of Wonder movement had gathered in force, represented even by some of the French light cavalry troop garrisoned in the city.

An all-day conference, replete with food and drink, benediction and song, was presided over by a local
cure,
a middle-aged priest who had embraced the peaceful coexistence precepts of the Wunderknechten. Heady aromas spiced the air. The converse of a thousand voices and the clamor of footfalls and hoofbeats, jangling traces and jostling bodies, were dampened by the whip and whine of the icy mistral. Good cheer mingled with the chatter of ongoing disputes, most of which the samurai had been expected to settle.

Gonji accepted their hospitality with gratitude, but he declined their suggestion that he address the audience en masse and tried to avoid becoming involved in their trivial arguments over details of Knights of Wonder attitudes. He was, for instance, unwilling to mediate their disagreement over the charges of the Wunderknechten crest—the third such he had seen. This one, designed by an artist from Gascony, featured a white cross over a red sunset, inset with stars and all-seeing eyes, the central device cupped in a huge hand, and underscored by a crossed sword-and-palm-frond.

Gonji winced and shook his head when he viewed it.

“The vain efforts men make,” he had declared, “to objectify their wonder at the mysteries of life. Always trouble,
neh?
Wonder is internal, shared with nature on a personal basis.”

The artist had stalked off in a huff.

Other focuses of contention were far more potentially destructive to the movement’s unity. There was a faction that spoke of militating against those who refused to accept the tolerance principle central to the movement. Gonji refused even to comment upon that absurdity, so amazed was he at its fatuousness.

Their penchant for stubbornly segregating themselves into Catholic Knights and Huguenot Knights led to their posing bizarre hypothetical questions regarding the movement’s political and social standards, most of which Gonji sidestepped, to no one’s satisfaction. And when maneuvered into declaring his belief in the separation of clergy and state—with leadership being conceded to the ruling family—he alienated many among both the devoutly religious and the democratically disposed revolutionary thinkers. Only the soldiery’s esteem was boosted by his attitudes toward selfless duty and loyalty.

Gonji was largely bewildered by the wayward evolutionary offshoots certain of his cherished beliefs had sprouted. He took perverse gratification in but one fact that emerged amidst the Wonder Knights’ diffuse fervor: The name of Vedun—storied Carpathian city that had been ravaged by steel and flame, netherworld beast, and valiant militia defense against an outnumbering horde—had become legend, a feared symbol and a rallying cry to freedom-lovers. This the samurai found hauntingly quaint and deeply nostalgic.

Thus lost in maudlin reminiscence, Gonji had failed to take note of the threat until the gleaming-eyed fanatic had approached to within ten paces and drawn a bead with his long-barreled pistol.

The bearded young man screamed something at him in a dialect he didn’t know, only the words “infidel” and “Satan” intelligible to him. Before anyone could stop him, the shot was fired, but the ball missed Gonji.

The crowd pressed in and disarmed the assassin. Buey bounded over a table and charged the man, felling him with a mighty blow.

Gonji watched and listened and wondered, almost dreamlike, amidst the din and surge of protective bodies that ringed him in. He felt strangely detached from the spectacle, as if he had had no part in it. His spirit withdrew again, feeling the need to flee this mystique that had grown about him, unbidden.

“I’m weary of this,” he’d said to no one in particular.

“Weary of what?” Orozco had replied. “You’re an old hand at dodging assassins’ bullets by now.”

When the piercingly cold night descended, he quietly extricated himself from the tumult, gathered his few close friends, and sent the cursing Buey off in search of a few bottles of good French wine while he and the others planned to sequester themselves in an upper room of a poor-quarter hostel. Orozco again began sputtering about special armor. The others growled in frustrated anger over the incident. Gonji declined to speak of it. His sullen mood had spread through the band by the time Buey returned.

But before any hearth had been brought to blazing or any wine uncorked, swords had crossed in that singularly unexpected way Gonji had long since come to expect.

* * * *

“You will dismount and surrender your weapons at once, monsieur,” the cavalry lieutenant was saying as the samurai and his small party turned a corner and arrived in the torchlit cobbled lane below the hostel.

But Gonji and his band were not the ones being addressed. They halted and watched the confrontation.

The lieutenant’s French cavalry troop had been attracted by a disturbance—the rasping and clangor of drawn weapons among a motley party of bickering brigands.

“You and all your companions, at once,” the lieutenant repeated.

The leader of the band of nine mounted warriors padded his steed forward three paces and reined in firmly. “I have said, Lieutenant, we shall not. But,
s’il vous plait,
you may introduce me to the gentleman we have ridden so far to meet. I believe he approaches.”

The leader indicated Gonji, still somewhat distant.

“Bandit!” the cavalry commander shouted. “The only acquaintance you’ll make in St. Pons is that of the prison.” The officer glanced back at his troops, who outnumbered the outlaw party better than two-to-one. “Now, for the last time—”

“Pardon, Lieutenant,” Gonji interrupted, clopping up and stopping at the left end of the massed confrontation. Gonji’s companions flanked him on both sides, fingering their belted weapons edgily. Now a crowd of citizens began to gather, bearing lamps and flambeaux, whispering anxiously. The samurai lightly rested his left hand on the pommel of his
katana.

“You’d be well advised to steer clear of this business, monsieur,” the officer of cavalry advised him sharply.

Gonji peered up at him closely, his expression defiant. He’d been drawn to the streets by two things: his intuition that this commotion concerned him personally and a curiosity as to just how much influence he wielded in his exalted position.

He looked the strangers over, his swift, casual glance revealing much to his practiced eye. These nine were rugged adventurers who had seen much action and ridden together a long time. As
cavaliers en corps,
they were impressively disciplined, their battle-scarred steeds holding fast, their line spread for skirmish against the outnumbering cavalry.

No war-dog among them offered reply to the French knights’ threat; their valor was admirable. All wore Flemish burgonet helms, but beyond that their armament varied widely. They sported brigandines, jacks, and cavalry cuirasses. Some carried broadswords slung on their backs; others, lighter blades at their belts. All displayed at least one pistol. There were two muskets and two polearms sprouting up from their ranks, and one broad-backed rogue carried an enormous double-edged broadaxe of a sort that had long been out of fashion. Men still displaying such weapons usually had known combat against extra-human foes, foes that yielded only to hardy steel in a forthright grasp. Some of their horses’ heads were armored with
chanfrons.
Some saddles were of the common riding variety; others, war saddles with cantle-and-bow faced with steel plates. But all of them were festooned with powder flasks on the same side.

A slow smile spread over the lead brigand’s face to see Gonji’s canny inspection of his men. It was a handsome face, in its way. Piercing dark eyes flashed over high cheekbones. His mouth was sharply delineated over a cleft chin, and his tall wiry frame sat proudly astride a nickering destrier. He swept off his burgonet and bowed to Gonji.

“There can be no mistaking your identity, monsieur…Red Blade of the East.”

“This man is a bandit, sir, a highwayman,” the lieutenant advised Gonji.

“Ah, so desu ka?”
the samurai replied. “If so, he seems to have left his cunning on the trail.”

The bandit chuckled. “We are free companions. Something I think the samurai understands, if his legend be true. Like the others here at this…fashionable conference, we’ve been drawn by Gonji’s fame to discuss the prospect of becoming, eh—Wonder Knights, is it? As such, kind sirs, we had hoped to be granted temporary amnesty—in the name of Wunderknechten brotherhood, as it were. Now, have we a truce?”

The lieutenant scowled in disbelief. “You must be mad, scoundrel! Unbuckle your weapons and dismount—all of you.” He gestured to the French troopers, and they began to fan out, flanking the outnumbered highwaymen. Some of them drew pistols and leveled them at the brigands from behind their mounts’ crests.

Gonji dismounted and strode between the lines of horsemen, Orozco and Buey also dropping from horse to walk beside and slightly behind him.

“So sorry, lieutenant,” Gonji said, “but I would hear more of this…pilgrim’s appeal.”

The officer cast about indignantly, then raised a staying hand to his men. Gonji bowed to the lieutenant.

“Who are you?” he asked the bandit leader.

“I am Armand Perigor—” The name was echoed in whispers among the folk who had begun to crowd around now, all wondering whether Gonji was again threatened. “—swordsman, adventurer, and—” Perigor laughed softly “—fellow wonder-seeker, I believe, monsieur. You’ll pardon me if I speak bluntly. My men and I have grown weary of bowing to the winds of change, of serving questionable masters. We’ve killed Huguenots for papist gold and Catholics for Huguenot silver. Now we’ve heard that you say, ‘Spill only the blood of those who threaten the land.’ Some…mysterious powers who would control us, rob us of our humanity, from beyond our world. Makes a crazy kind of sense, I suppose, given certain things we’ve seen and scarcely believed. But I must know who we throw in our lot with. They say you dodged a lead ball this evening from a pistol fired by an unsteady hand. They say it didn’t miss by much. But that is the way of the gun,
n’est-ce pas?
It lacks surety, the proof of gallantry of both assailant and victim. Not so with the sword—”

Perigor snicked out his rapier. There was a shuffling in the French cavalry ranks, weapons hefted menacingly. But the nine rogues held their ground and glared back coldly at the troopers. Perigor grinned and bobbed his head.

“Think he could squeeze any more teeth into that smile of his?” Orozco whispered behind Gonji.

“I’d like to squeeze a few
out,”
Buey growled in reply.

Perigor dropped down from the saddle and faced Gonji.

“So,
monsieur le samurai,”
he said. “
Escrimer
—to fight with the sword—is the only test of a man’s mettle I can trust. If I am to ally myself with your noble cause, then I must know whether I can trust what I’ve heard of that formidable-looking blade of yours. A touch-duel, then, if it please you.”

He saluted Gonji with his blade and then brought it to
en garde.

The samurai smiled thinly and bowed, the Sagami rasping out of its sheath as shouts and stamping hooves sounded all about them.

The clink of armament—the cocking of pistols—

Gonji blocked aside Buey’s clamping hand at his shoulder. Waving to the French knights to make room, he bowed shallowly to Perigor, brought up his katana in both hands, and came to middle guard.

They engaged blades for a long, motionless moment, eyes locked, gauging each other’s confidence. Clouds of icy breath issued from the tensely rapt crowd.

“No—it must be stopped!” a shrill male voice called from the ring of torches at the front edge of the encircling throng of citizens.

But at that instant Perigor sallied forth with his long, slim blade, and the fray was on. The adventurer shot a series of stinging lunges at the legendary samurai fencer, testing his defense of each quadrant, and each time Gonji batted the rapier aside with a tight circular parry.

Gonji backed two paces. Three. Then with a sudden burst of panther-quick motion, he turned the duel’s line of motion, assuming the attack with a blurring sequence of slashes and cuts, two-handed lunges too fast for the eyes of many onlookers to follow, abrupt one-handed releases ending in cobra-dart sword-licks issuing from strangely contorted positions.

Perigor slipped his blows and beat back attacks seemingly in instants of certain defeat. He riposted crisply, deeply, Gonji’s own wrist-twisting parries at the brink of being blooded tearing gasps from the crowd. None save their closest companions had ever seen such a matched pair of fencers as these.

Sweating faces, gaping with excitement, shone in the firelight as the ring of torches altered its shape like some amorphous night-dwelling thing, to afford the combatants room along the street. The shifting eye of the communal mass twinkled with the glinting blades at its center. As the tense minutes passed, the entire spectacle slowly drifted fifty feet down the lane. The duelists were given ready space, their eyes seeing nothing but each other. Their blades clashed and clacked, sparks showering in the keening din.