Gonji: Red Blade from the East (36 page)

Swinging upside down from a gibbet erected next to the bell tower were the two bandits who had apparently taken the rap for Gonji the night before. Two free company guards stood watch over the tasteless symbolic display that greeted the mourners. Pushing aside Wilf’s warning hand, Gonji strode across the street, the guards wary of his square-shouldered, bold approach.

When he raised a hand in greeting, they tensed, but Gonji only smiled. They carried swords, but no pistols.

The gibbet creaked under the gently swaying burden of the two corpses, lashed by their feet, arms hanging limply as if in perverse joy. The whites of their eyes bulged like eggshells. The gunshot wounds had dried to maroon streaks. Flies buzzed around the dangling carcasses. The pair had been dressed for travel. Above them a sign had been nailed, indecipherable to Gonji.

“These the troublemakers from last night?” Gonji asked in German.

“Two of them,” the taller mercenary answered cautiously.

“Good work.”

Gonji rejoined the wide-eyed Wilf on the chapel steps. “Close your mouth, friend. You’re making a spectacle of us.”

Wilf relaxed.

“Are they locals?” Gonji asked.

“Strangers,” Wilf replied, shaking his head.

Gonji nodded, feeling somewhat safer and a trifle unburdened of his guilt.
Could I really be so fortunate
, he wondered, to have my impetuous screw-up covered by those highwaymen? Hell, not quite—
“Two of them,”
the guards had said....

Wilf started up the chapel steps, but Gonji hesitated.

“Come on,” Wilf urged. “It’ll do you good.”

Gonji looked sheepish. “Isn’t there a curse or something?” Rarely had he been invited inside a Christian church. But Wilf simply waved him up the steps and continued inside.

Gonji stood respectfully still in the vestibule as Wilf confronted the supine forms before the altar. He watched with his usual confusion the contradictory mourning with which Christians dispatched their loved ones to heaven. As Wilf returned he noticed an old couple seated in a rear pew and moved in to whisper to them. Gonji glanced around the nave, saw the lovely paintings of spiritual subjects—some unfinished—gracing its walls. He heard a clatter and a petulant outburst of
tsk
ing and whispering from the ceiling. There on a scaffold lay a smallish man, covered with paint splotches, his hair bound with a scarf. He had been painting a section of an angel’s wing but was now seemingly scolding the angel for declining to cooperate.

Wilf rejoined him. “Genya’s parents,” he said when they had remounted, nodding to the chapel. His gloom could have sent a wedding party scurrying for cover.

Gonji plucked an apple from a saddlebag, took a bite. “Worried about your girlfriend, eh?”

“Do you think they’ll...hurt her?”

“I have no doubt of it.” Then, seeing Wilf’s pained expression, he quickly regretted the coldly smug sound of the reply. “I mean...some girls are strong in these matters—she’s a strong girl,
neh
?”

“She...has some experience,” Wilf advanced tentatively, then added in a rush, “but she’s not the harlot my father would have you believe. I mean that—I know that. You know, the way only a man who would know...would know.”

Gonji chortled. “So papa smith disapproves because his son isn’t catching his worth in feminine virtue!”

“He and some of the prigs around town. They don’t forget little incidents. Then in their minds they make up bigger things—Genya was an early bloomer, you see. She had her pursuers. Then lately it was this pinhead farmer named Dobroczy who was my rival for her favor.” He shrugged. “She likes playing the game, and I suppose she’s got enough going for her that she deserves it. But she’s not the runaround Papa thinks. She’s a hard worker, level-headed....” His voice trailed off as he looked dreamily toward the castle.

“What would
you
do? I mean, if Genya were yours?”

Gonji chewed thoughtfully on the apple, eyes becoming chips of flint-sparked steel. “I’d go there,” he said simply, “and get her back—or die trying, if that was my karma.”

Wilfred’s jaw dropped. He stared at him, tipped between incredulity and wonder.

“You’d go there—”

“That’s right.”

“—all by yourself—”

“
Hai
, if need be.”

“—and attack a whole army?”

“Sure, there are ways,” Gonji said haughtily, shifting in the saddle. A speculative look dawned as he considered his bravado. Could he do such a thing? Of course! He shrugged and dismissed the matter.

“Of course,” he added, “the girl would have to be pretty special, and I’ve met only one like that.” His gaze wandered skyward.

“Tell me about yours,” Wilf said.

“Eh?”

“Your...‘special’ girl.”

“Some other time,
neh
?”

Gonji was distracted by a disturbance at the postern gate: An assistant driver on a grain wagon flew through the air and sprawled on the ground. A leather-jerkined mercenary leaped atop him and threatened to crush his skull. Others gathered around expectantly. From the center of it all emerged Captain Julian Kel’Tekeli, the mercenary leader, bedecked in full military regalia. The captain stepped to his splendid black charger, spoke to it, and then mounted with the stylishness of a soldier on review.

Gonji snorted.
Hope you slip your stirrup, fall off, and break your ass.
Gonji punctuated the thought by breaking wind. Actually, Gonji himself lived by precision movement, took pride in it, enjoyed showing it off in its place. But Julian’s oh-so-proper gallantry was insufferable. The art was in the disguise—making it all look simple.

He saw Wilf’s telltale look of unease as he watched the mercenaries and decided it was time for a lesson.

* * * *

Wilfred felt the cold sweat rise in beads on his forehead, the clamminess of his hands that accompanied the claustrophobic fear that he’d never felt in his city before. The mercenaries were everywhere, constantly threatening by their looks and actions. He strove to remember the lessons in strategy Gonji had been teaching him: how Klann’s army seemed undermanned, judging by the troop disposition; how they pushed their weight around just enough to keep the city intimidated; how a quick revolutionary strike might paralyze them, as they well knew, if they didn’t maintain this aura of fear. He wiped his hands on his breeches.

“Here,” Gonji said, handing him the spare sword slung in his saddle.

“Huh?” Wilf accepted the blade uncertainly.

“Mount it in your belt. Time for more training—no-no, not like that, with the cutting edge
upward.
That’s a
katana
, meant to be drawn from sky to ground.”

Wilf’s heart began to pound. “What now?”

“I want to ride out onto the plateau and see the lay of the land. Our path takes us through the center of those brigands at the gate.”

Swallowing back the coppery tang of fear, Wilf asked, “Can’t we just ride out the west gate and avoid trouble?”

Gonji frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re right here at the postern. Besides, what would my horse think?”

Wilf couldn’t even summon a smile. He clutched the reins to stop his hands from shaking. “All right,” he said, steeling himself, “let’s go for it.”

“That’s the spirit, Wilfred-san. Ride tall and proud. Show them no fear. Just follow my lead and let me do any talking.”

Wilf prayed earnestly for courage, hoped Gonji knew as much about these mercenaries’ ways as he claimed.

They trotted toward the bunch grouped around the postern on horseback. One of the soldiers spoke with Old Gort the gatekeeper. Then the adventurers began to notice the pair of riders approaching.

“I see guns,” Wilf observed.

“If they’re not loaded and primed and their wheel locks spannered tight, then they’re just decorations. At least one is a matchlock. Useless—unless he clunks you in the head with it!”

They clopped to within twenty feet, the soldiers making no effort to move out of the way. There were nervous titters and uncertain looks among the mercenaries.

Gonji slapped his sword hilt with his left hand, raised the hand in a broad gesture of greeting, and grinned magnanimously. Then he spurred Tora through their midst, the horses parting, Gonji brushing the haunches of one. Wilf sat square in the saddle and followed with a nod to a mercenary.

“Hey-hey, slopehead!” the boldest mercenary at last called out when they were past. There was braying laughter among his comrades.

“Hey-hey, shit-for-brains!” Gonji replied over his shoulder in Japanese, still grinning. They cantered past the gatehouse, through the portcullis, emerging into the sunlight again. They headed down the road toward the sprawling cultivated land in the plateau’s sunken center.

Wilf breathed a sigh of relief. They had brazened their way through, and he felt a surge of confidence. “Not so bad,” he ventured.

Gonji only smiled.

* * * *

They rode north along the tortuous paved road that gradually ascended to Castle Lenska, reining in at last when the magnificent spectacle of the fortification loomed in full view.

“How did your baron ever lose that?” Gonji breathed in awe. Then he scowled. Into the scene crawled one salient reason for the successful siege. There, perched now on a massive drum tower, was the wyvern. It sat with wings folded, lazily watching the world of men beneath it.

“I’m going to get a better look at that place soon,” the samurai said. He swerved Tora back along the road.

Wilf experienced a flooding of hope. This strange oriental warrior possessed the gift of inspiring such feelings. For the first time since the invasion, Wilf began to believe that he would see Genya freed.

They sat in the pine-boughed hills for a long time, watching the workers in the furrowed fields which stretched nearly to the sloped banks of the river. Others plucked the bounty from neatly rectangular orchard blocks. Behind them, flocks and herds grazed in the hills. In the distance the Little Roar, a tributary of the mighty Olt River, surged across the plateau, its seething white foam disappearing abruptly at the rim of the cataract. And as Wilf panned slowly around the silvery caps of the Carpathian range that rimmed the territory with its great hooked tail, he decided that the vista was a close brush with paradise. He had listened to Lorenz’s tales of the world’s wondrous places, yet nothing had sounded so appealing as what they enjoyed here.

The day grew middle-aged, its hot fury tempering to balmy warmth, its fierce blues mellowing, the shadows gaining length and depth. As the first farmers quit the fields, Gonji and Wilf remounted and angled down to the cobbled road to join their procession back to Vedun.

* * * *

At the smith shop Garth labored shirtless over the ruddy glare of the forge, his great hairy chest sweat-matted, his back burnished to a summer’s-end bronze. He proffered a curt greeting, shot Wilf an unpleasant look when he saw the
katana
, but said nothing. Then he shut down the forge, wiped off, and donned a sleeveless jerkin and a soft, well-worn cap.

“Something brewing at the square,” he said and set off on foot without further clarification.

Wilf returned the sword to Gonji. “It’ll save trouble.” He went inside the house to fetch them an ale.

Gonji walked across to the corral, leaned on the rail and watched passers-by with disinterest, fingering his thickening beard growth and pondering his next move.

And then he saw her—the lovely raven-haired girl from the night before.

She walked along the road carrying a bundle before her, her stern-visaged mother at her side. When she saw Gonji she froze, her large eyes widening, a rosy hue brushing her cheeks. Gonji smiled, raised his hand in tentative greeting, and would have bowed; but the girl’s mother pursed her lips and unceremoniously dragged her off the way they had come.

Wilf emerged from the house with two flagons of warm ale.

“Wilf!
Kommen hier—schnell!
”

Wilf hurried across, sloshing ale on himself, but he never heard Gonji’s question completed.

“Who is that—?”

The huge alarm tocsin in the bell tower at the square had begun its dreadful clangor.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Oyez! Oyez!” Ladislas, the town crier, called out, now reading the edict in a third language. “Whereas, insurrectionists in the city of Vedun have been guilty of murder most foul and sundry disruptions against the occupying force of King Klann the Invincible: Field Commander Ben-Draba challenges any and all such rebels to declare themselves and surrender peaceably. In accordance with the law’s Field-of-Mars leniency provision, said guilty parties may gain their freedom in single combat against the Field Commander, the selected contest to be freestyle boxing. Failing the surrender of the guilty, all citizens claiming grievance against the Royalist Army of Akryllon may step forward and seek satisfaction.”