Gonji: Red Blade from the East (12 page)

And it would have been, but for Gonji’s perverse nature.

Across the field they charged in silence, muting the clink of armament. Gonji saw Julio next to him, trying to keep pace. Even in his weakened state Gonji’s competitive spirit made him run harder through the muck. He ran in a crouch, grinning, hand on sword hilt, gradually pulling away from the puffing and panting Spaniard.

Gonji rounded a corner at one end of the village as two dogs broke into an uproar at the intruders, shattering the carefully wrought silence. Voices shouted in the huts. Frightened faces peered through cracks and windows.

A dozen free companions, adrenaline pumping, slipped and flopped on their bellies and rumps in the rain- and wind-lashed street, bawling challenges at the village for want of an outlet; no resistance was being raised. From the center of the street Navárez yelled for the magistrate to appear. He was trying his third language when a snarling dog leapt at him from behind, seizing a jawful of trouser and buttock. The hobbling captain went down under its lunge, yelping furiously.

The absurdity of it all presently struck Gonji, and he leaned forward on a fence post and laughed in spite of himself.

All at once the village went mad with sloshing feet and shrieking peasants. People poured from their homes and crisscrossed the main street in their confusion. Some carried crude weapons. Many froze in stride on seeing the brandished pistols and swords. Two guns cracked, and an axe-wielding defender spun down in the mud. Screams and shouts pierced the rain rattle.

The door of the end hut burst open on Gonji’s left, and he drew the Sagami and pointed at the lead man. A burly peasant with hate in his eyes and a staff in his fists. Behind him cowered his wife and small son; a bit nearer the front, an older son who was a compact copy of his father.

“Back,” Gonji warned. “Back inside and you won’t be harmed.”

The man held his ground for a moment, regarding the sword in Gonji’s dripping two-handed clench. He apprehended the meaning, if not the language.

Without warning Julio appeared and circled to the peasant’s right, slowly twirling his cutlass. He grinned his murderous intent.

“That’s a staff, not a gun, fool,” Gonji said in low threat. “You’re not needed here.”

Julio bridled. “Let’s see you take him yourself, then,
master
swordsman.”

“Get away from me. Take your sniveling show of toughness elsewhere.”

“I’ll see you
dead
, barbarian swine!” With that the swarthy brigand loped off, howling an epithet.

Gonji suppressed his creeping rage and motioned for the peasant family to move back inside their home. The older son, wielding an axe and affecting a show of spoiling for a fight, muttered bitterly in his own language. Tears of desperation clung in the corners of his eyes. Gonji shook his head in warning. The father resolutely raised an arm to hold back his son, then moved his family indoors with a curious look toward the samurai.

Gonji nodded sympathetically. Then he turned and ran toward the chaos in the center of the village.

Harsh commands rang out. Villagers clung to one another. Expectant. Terrified. Mewling sobs here and there. Repetitious prayers and signs of the cross. Disturbed animals bawled and brayed, clucked and snorted.

Gonji arrived at the square in time to see a Mongol slice the arm off of a shrieking farmer whose club was still fisted in the severed arm. Ghastly screams. Gonji’s brow darkened at the sight. There was no need for this; it was over.

He had seen enough here. Mopping the rain and fever-sweat from his face, he turned and stalked back the way he had come, waving his sword menacingly at peasants who peeked from cracks or cringed outside dwellings.

Passing the carcass of the dog that had attacked Navárez, which now lay gutted in an inky moonlit pool, he heard a child’s scream from behind a cluster of rickety barns and stables. There followed a woman’s muffled scream and the clash of metal on metal.

Gonji broke into a sprint, shortcutted through the barnyard. Stinging raindrops lashed his face as he leaped over a wooden rail and into a pen of snorting, scattering pigs. Then, over the other side, past squawking hen coops and a livery. Around a corner into a pitch-black alleyway. Shouts approached behind him in the darkness. He skidded around the corner into a quagmire path before a sagging canopy—

He stared wide-eyed. Sucked in a ragged breath. His thoughts were a whirling montage, a fevered moonlight fantasy: Swordplay—howls of terror—the bandit—an overmatched peasant—the trembling woman—two—three?—sobbing little ones....

An instant in which to act—

“Julioooo!”

Gonji’s fierce cry startled the bandit but not enough to stay his arcing cutlass. It bit deeply into his opponent’s frantically warding left arm. The man whined in pain, his face twisted grotesquely.

Julio glared defiantly through the rain, cursing at Gonji. The villager weakly lifted the short, pitted sword with which he was trying to defend his family. From his multitude of cuts, it seemed that Julio must have been toying with him, enjoying the sport of bleeding a man dry in front of his wife and children. The woman puled, clutching the two smaller ones, shaking her head insensately, hiding their faces from the scene.

A hacking sob caught in Gonji’s throat. It was all catching up with him—too much, too fast—the agony, the insult, the sickness, gnawing at his insides, dissolving his harmony....

The Western half—the damned Western part of me
—

His stomach flared with nausea as voices called from near the animal pens. The villager reeled from blood loss. Children whimpered. The wife yammered hysterically. Rain. Fever. Gonji nearly toppled as the rage swelled in his brain. Thought fled; impulse reigned. Julio’s eyes glowed volcanically. A cat’s eyes. A devil’s.

The samurai’s war cry rent the night:

“Sadowaraaaaa!”

Julio staggered back three paces, awed by the ferocious sword-high charge. For an instant his reactions rose to his defense. In the next instant he was dead.

Footsteps pounded down the alley. Cries of alarm.

Gonji stormed at the wounded villager, the Sagami in two-handed low guard. The man’s wife whined something, and he imposed himself between his family and the threatening bandit. His grimace carried pain and confusion. He held forth his wavering blade, but Gonji swatted it aside urgently.

“Go!” Gonji tried in High German, heart hammering.

Tears streamed down the man’s face. He raised for a strike.

“Get
out
of here!” Blood thrummed in Gonji’s temples. The woman screamed something.
By all that’s sacred!

“Please!”
He had somehow found the Hungarian word.

But the villager swung, his last look the hollow-eyed contortion of a man embraced by death.

Conditioned reflex replied.

Pistols exploded to Gonji’s rear. Keening wails burst both inside and outside Gonji’s head as the villager was ripped and torn like a stuffed target.

But Gonji’s blade had struck him first.

Cold, slanting rain. Muddy pools ran thick and dark with spreading crimson. Gonji couldn’t move. His first thought, once reason returned, was that he was dead. He had no feeling below his neck, and his head felt impossibly huge, floating, disembodied. He was leaning forward on the Sagami, its point stuck in the mud—something he would never have done willingly. He strove to breathe evenly, to master the muscles of his face. It was unseemly for anyone to witness a samurai’s frozen mask of horror. He was going to vomit.

Someone grunted. The villager’s kin were huddled in pathetic mourning, flinging themselves on the motionless form. Gonji couldn’t look at them.

Why did the fool fight?

Navárez came around in front of him, and Gonji found the coordination to push himself aright, though he doubted he could walk a pace without collapsing. Tension squeezed wherever his nerves had regained touch.

At this moment he knew he was finished. Karma. Honor would be his. He worked his fingers around the hilt of the
seppuku
sword.

Looking over his shoulder cautiously, Gonji saw the sneering Esteban and two others, pistols still smoking. But one man was angrily knocking the damp charge from his priming pan. The rain was taking its toll.

“This peasant, he was very good with the sword, no?” Navárez said in amusement. “It took two—
two
of our company to kill him. That does not speak so well for us, does it?” He chortled, and the others took it up.

Gonji’s queasiness began to lift in the moment’s cold urgency. Nerves and muscles reawakened. But a racking chill coursed through him.

“But,
amigos
, one of them was a coward anyway, no?” He kicked Julio’s mud-streaked corpse. “
Vaya con Diablos
, pox-ridden scum!”

Navárez squelched through the ooze to the supine body of the villager. His family sprawled atop him in a sobbing heap.

“A very fine stroke. Clean.”

Gonji ground his teeth in disgust. The Spaniard then regarded the fallen man’s rusty sword, toeing it carefully. He peered up sidelong at Gonji. There was no blood on the blade, and both knew that it wasn’t because it had been washed away by the rain.

Gonji tensed, eyes narrowed.

“It’s done now,” Navárez said airily, “and I’m rid of a nuisance. Now I’m cold and hungry and Jocko should be along with the wagons soon. Tonight we feast and relax before we rise for the invocation. The magician will need our help. Meanwhile, let us see what hospitality we can find here,
mi amigos
.”

Esteban brayed. “I think I’ve seen an inn or two I’d like to try out, Franco!”

The pack laughed and retreated through the alleyway toward the main street. Then Navárez called as he followed them, low and seething: “Riemann, what happened there?” This was the tall, lean Aryan who had been a friend of Julio and was a member of the Mongol clique.

“Wet powder,
mi capitán
,” Gonji heard Riemann say.

Navárez grunted. “Stupid of you to let that happen, no?”

“Sí, mi capitán.”

“Ahhh, we’ll be plagued with this until the storm blows itself out....”

Their voices diminished until they were eclipsed by the moaning winds and pattering, slapping droplets. And Gonji was left alone in front of the blacksmith pavilion with its mournfully drooping canopy. Alone with the shuddering, bereaved family of the man he had just killed.

And a thought came: Of what consequence was the pistol that had failed to fire?

Unless, of course, the ball had been intended for him.

CHAPTER SIX

Pain is good. Yes, that is very so.

It is karma. It is a most apt purge of poisons and a strengthening of the flesh which the warrior must learn to endure. The tanning of the hide; the forging of stout steel. A discipline. A necessary discomfort. The down cycle of life’s pleasure/pain vicissitudes. The body can stand a tremendous onslaught of pain before it has surfeit, and as long as one is able to grit his teeth and say, Still another measure, and still another!—he is yet pain’s master.

Well
, thought Gonji, shaking his head at the piping of this philosophical satyr,
what the hell
else can I make of it?

The rain slanted steadily across his field of view. He lay shivering, swathed in horse blankets before a roaring blaze under the smith-shop canopy. As usual, perversity and conviction for its own sake had seen him eschew the relative comfort of a peasant hut; he refused to recline unbidden in someone’s home. Worse, the shame of his malady hung heavily on him. He was far too embarrassed to let the amused eyes of the wastrels see him like this.

So he bundled his raging fever against the elements and lay exposed like a turtle before a stampede in the village back lane. He exchanged blank stares with the crumbling masonry of the low encircling wall that stuttered around the village perimeter.

“Dumb!”

The coarse appraisal came from Jocko, who had just brought his grating presence back from the livery. The mercenaries’ horses had joined the villagers’ own in the long, low slouch-roofed stables, and the old burr of a handler had tended their feeding and wipe-down. He proffered Gonji a snarl as he passed and entered the smith shop. Another fire crackled in the forge inside.

“
Really
dumb!” he roared as he half-turned in the archway. Gonji closed his eyes and willed him to turn to stone.

The musty smell of damp hay assailed Gonji’s nostrils as he sucked in a deep breath. His nasal passages reclogged at once. Perhaps it was just as well. He wished for the purgative effect of a good heave. His soul moaned. At this moment he fancied himself the most forlorn of men. What must I have done in some previous life to bring such karma on myself? What would Old Todo say if he saw me like this? Ohhh, forget that! I shudder just to think of it. And Kojimura—faithful friend. What’s he doing right now? Probably running at the head of some mighty regiment. I’d like to seethat big grin of his, hear just one clever poem, one ribald joke. Great and true friend—