Gonji: Red Blade from the East (14 page)

“Let me tell you somethin’, whipper. You better get no big ideas around here. Ambition’s the biggest killer o’ young hotheads with this army—remember that. I seen a lot, I have. Don’t go crossin’ that Navárez; he’s a mean sonofabitch. And the Field Commander o’ the free companies, well, I ain’t never seen such a brute. He’d pick you up and twist you till yer innards popped, he would. That’s a fact. Ben-Draba, that’s his name. Ben-Draba. Big, arrogant bastard. Likes to rough up new recruits, playful-like. So playful that sometimes they don’t get up again.
Sí
, he’d like you, all right! And then there’s Julian—
Captain
Julian Kel’Tekeli, Commander o’ the 1st—”

Gonji listened to the popping and crackling fire that punctuated Jocko’s words. He felt slightly better, the spreading warmth of the wine, the broth, the pulsing blaze cleansing the racking ague. And the old man’s harangue, intended to dissuade him from further involvement with the strange army of Akryllon, was having quite the opposite effect. He was more intrigued than ever.

“—that swaggerin’ whores’n! I hear you’re good, sonny, but don’t go matchin’ swords with
that
devil.”

This sort of comparison before the fact, this reputation blustering—which Gonji had come to call “penis-fencing”—was all part of a European game he had played many times before and had long since grown weary of. It no longer seduced him to enter the lists, but it did still arouse his competitive spirit, which frequently brought trouble and, he was sure, would one day see him dead. But with trouble came attention, and the wild Western child part of him, the part he could usually control but not dismiss, craved attention.

“Listen, sonny,” Jocko said, “just what is it yer lookin’ for here anyway?”

The question caught Gonji off-guard. He sipped reflectively at the white wine. A wistful sadness appeared on his face, and he bared his soul.

“Honorable duty. Maybe a good friend to help pass the time. And a name, something that’s—what’s so damn funny?”

With the first few words Jocko had begun to cackle in a high pitch, and by the end his mirth had swelled to knee-slapping proportions.

“Honorable duty!”
the handler jeered, all joviality abruptly gone. “Who you kiddin’? The only honorable duty in this land, whipper, is the duty that fills yer honorable
pockets.
And nobody makes friends around here, and
you
sure got a funny way o’ tryin’!”

A knot of anger twisted Gonji’s belly to hear voiced the very cynicism that had corroded his own soul for years.
Nobody has to tell me that
, he thought. The restless spirit of a gregarious Nordic mother pulls me one way; the discipline of a coldly dignified, oh-so-proper father strangles my every impulse—who in hell
am
I? I sit in a wasteland somewhere in the middle where no one can approach, or cares to. No, that’s not so. I’ve had friends. There are those who care. It’s difficult,
hai
, but that’s karma. I try too hard, perhaps. I just try—too—hard. I know the pleasing things to say and do, I plan my actions, then I come in contact with someone and it’s as if I’m hearing and seeing someone else working through me. Three heartbeats later, swords flash....

“What else did you say?” Jocko was asking.

“Huh?”

“You were sayin’ what you were lookin’ for—uh, after duty and friends,” the old derelict minced.

Ahhh.
Hai
, the other. The mocking, haunting thing.

“Did you ever hear the name
Deathwind
?” Gonji asked evenly, watching Jocko over the lid of his tankard.

Jocko scratched his head. “Mmm. What’s that, some kinda plague?”

Gonji laughed aloud.

“Ye gods!” he cried, coughing and wheezing. “I hope, with all my heart, that’s not what it is. I should’ve known better than—How about the name Grejkill, a man who’s...not a man, not quite, or something, who stalks the northern lands? It may be the same thing.”

“Grejkill, eh? I dunno. Maybe, maybe.... But did
you
ever hear o’ the giant two-headed lion that—?”

The staccato patter of the rain tattooed the canopy, slapped and streamed off the sides and roofs of the village huts as Gonji slumped back into his melancholy.
All human striving is useless and stupid.
And I must be the whipping boy of the gods,
neh
? It could have been different—

“—so it wouldn’t let us pass till we made it a gift, y’know, a kinda sacrifice. Well, we was hardy lads, so we drew our swords—here, I gotta show ya old Kingslayer. It’s right over here—”

—I might’ve weathered it all, let it blow over. I’d be liege lord of all the Kenjo when Old Todo passed on. Hell, he’ll never die. And anyway I’m not fit to rule in his place. He’s the greatest
daimyo
in all Japan, and the others were right.
Hai
, it’s no good, only pure Japanese can rule a clan. It’s in the breeding, that must be it. I honor my mother’s spirit with all my soul, but—And I could still never have Reiko. Reiko.... By all the awesome mysteries, I can scarcely remember her face—

“—so we was done in, pilgrim. I don’t know
when
I ever been so worn out, beaten up, and screwed over than that time. Well, hell, this wench hadn’t been nothin’ but a whole lotta pain in the ass, so we gave in. We pushed her out to this beastie, and he commenced to—”

—I’ll weather this miserable ague, then I’ll have one more go at life, at meaningful existence on this godforsaken continent. Then—then—

“Hey, whipper, you listenin’ to me? God damn! You wanna swap legends or you just gonna sit there daydreamin’ and spillin’ that good wine all over the place?”

Gonji sloshed the nearly empty tankard aright as he heaved up achingly on one elbow. He had moved too suddenly, and his head began to pound so that he squinted against the throb.

“Sorry, very sorry—unhh—” He pushed himself into a cross-legged position and wrapped a blanket around himself. “I did want to ask you...something more of King Klann. Have you ridden long with him?”

Jocko grunted and belched, spat out the chaw of meat, pointed at it with the rusty cutlass he called Kingslayer.

“Ain’t fit fer saddle leather. Sure, I been with ‘im off and on fer years.”

“Off and on?”

“Don’t like the sea, whipper. I ain’t no soggy-assed sailor. When they take to ship and go chasin’ after that fairy island, me and Angelo just wave
bona fortuna
and wait fer word that they’re back—tails between their legs, as usual. Besides, Angelo gets to heavin’ on the high seas—”

“Then it’s true about Klann’s island kingdom?”

“Guess so,” Jocko replied with a shrug. “
He
thinks so anyway. Gonna make all these pirates filthy rich when he finds his kingdom—that’s if any of ’em are still alive by that time! They say he found it once. That was a bad time, pilgrim, bad. I seen ’em when the ships docked—what was left of ’em. This island, it’s supposed to be lousy with sorcerers and wizards and God only knows what other hell-bait. They come back lookin’ like....” He shuddered and stared at the plinking rain pools. “Bad time. They was talkin’ like men had been butchered by things outta nightmares, burned and charred like twigs right in their tracks—ughh! So it took a long time fer Klann to raise another mercenary army after word spread. Just the Llorm stuck with ‘im fer a while. Guess they have since before anybody can remember—you believe any o’ what I’m tellin’ ya, sonny?”

Gonji shrugged. “No, I suppose not.”

“Good. That’s real smart. Don’t pay to think about it too much. Makes it kinda hard to sleep, I’ll tell ya.”

“But you’ve stuck with him all this time, you and these others?”

“
I
have, sure,” Jocko said, “but most o’ the rest o’ these bandits are pretty new. What I said about the island, hell that goes back a long way now. But that all blows by, and pretty soon Klann raises enough gold to court more soldiers-of-fortune—always plenty o’ them around.
Your
kind, no? Young fellahs lookin’ to make an easy fortune off their shiny swords?”

Gonji rankled and threw him a scornful look, but there was certainly no ready argument to refute the observation.

“So we ride into one city, sack it, pay the boys, blame the local bandits. Hit another town, steal the gold, set
them
on a ghost hunt—on and on, buildin’ up the army as we go. The boys are happy, the pay’s good, and usually Klann’s got a real faithful following by the time he thinks he’s ready to take to ship again. All fer the greater glory o’ the king, no?” He raised his tankard in salute.

“Strange,” Gonji observed. “All very strange. That’s no life for the doddering old man he must be now. You’d think he would’ve just seized one of these little provinces and—”

“Ideas don’t get old, whipper,” Jocko said, a curious edge in his tone. He seemed to be measuring Gonji for some bold pronouncement.

Gonji sipped, waited. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” came the whispered reply, the old man leaning close on the cutlass, “I ain’t seen him in
years.
I don’t think anybody else here
ever
has—’cept maybe Navárez.”

Gonji’s brow furrowed. “And yet this army stays together, unified. They fight a running war against every force they meet, die savagely, plunder freely, and rally behind some mysterious leader who never shows his face?” He shook his head solemnly. “Uh-uh, doesn’t make sense at all.”

“The Llorm and the free company captains keep things runnin’ real smooth-like. You don’t ask any questions around here. But I’m gonna tell ya somethin’—why, I don’t know to save my soul—but I’m gonna tell ya anyway. And you take care to keep this to yerself, hear?” Gonji nodded, leaned forward.

“The last time I seen him,” Jocko whispered, “I don’t recall how many years back, but it was before Navárez—I don’t think I was supposed to, ya know what I mean? I was kinda pokin’ my nose around where I shouldn’t have, and I seen the king. At least they was treatin’ ‘im like the king, whoever he was, because
it wasn’t the same king I seen before.
The whole army was stayin’ at this villa down in Italia, just feastin’ and takin’ a breather before movin’ on. Now word spread that somethin’ happened to the king, and after that nobody in the free companies saw him again except fer far-off glimpses. But
I
saw him, and I tell ya it wasn’t Klann, not the Klann I knew.”

He sat back and expansively swilled the wine till he drained it off. Then he clambered over to refill it.

Gonji made small circles with his tankard, gazing deeply into the swirling liquid as he considered this. Angelo shuffled, perturbed by a new burst of thunder. The fire hissed as the wind changed direction and a fine spray laced the licking flames. Jocko sat down again and clicked his jagged brown teeth pensively.

“So your king is...,” Gonji began, fabricating as he spoke, “just someone’s idea of a king. A figurehead. A wild idea carried on by the magician and the commanders. Someone’s dream of empire that’ll last as long as there’s gold to feed it.”

Jocko snorted. “Think so? Some say that. Some say he’s a notion, just like you said. A notion that drives men to kill and conquer. But then there’s others who say he’s a
lot
of men...or one man who can change what he was.”

Gonji snapped alert. “What—?”

“Ever hear the legend about a king who’s cursed to wander the world forever, a king who never dies, just keeps roamin’ with army after army, an army that breeds just to follow ‘im from one generation to the next?”

Silence. Gonji sat stroking his chin reflectively, thinking again of the half-remembered tale.

“Hai,”
he said, “I’ve heard.” He offered the man a skeptical sidelong glance.

Jocko produced a file and began to scrape at the verdigris-encrusted hilt of the cutlass, which was in less need of repair than the notched and pitted blade. He ignored the samurai for a space, then stopped at his work.

“Well, don’t go lookin’ at me like that! You expect me to make a damn fool o’ myself by tellin’ ya Klann’s that king? I ain’t no old peasant woman!” He resumed scraping. Then: “He’d be lucky, though, wouldn’t he? Never dyin’? Luckier than us, eh, whipper? Whaddaya say?”

“No,” Gonji said curtly, “he wouldn’t be.”

“Hah! Yer smarter’n ya look!” he blared, a scowl of distaste etched on his countenance. “He’d be just about the unluckiest bastard that ever squatted, I claim.”

Gonji smiled ever so slightly, a sudden respect kindled in him at the handler’s gruff trailside wisdom. He lay on his side and forced a breath through his stuffed nose.

“So a dream of empire—and a steady flow of stolen gold—keeps this army running,
neh
? That, and the powers of an erratic sorcerer. If he can do what you said, I’d think this Klann would’ve conquered
some
kingdom by now, even with this puny army of his.”