Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two (31 page)

Well
, she thought,
whatever the hell did that mean?

* * * *

Gonji stormed off, feeling awkward and stupid. He had felt the need to say something to her, to banish the tension between them, and as so often happened in such circumstances, what childishly passed his lips had certainly not escaped from his brain.
Damn her, anyway
, he thought.
She looks bewitching, even in that billowy tunic. What an asinine thing to—

Not far away, a small group of pikemen labored at performing a series of patterned movements against an imaginary opponent. Klaus chose that moment to stumble and sprawl on his face. There followed a few snickers among the trainees, but they were quickly belayed out of deference to Gonji’s empathy with Klaus as a social outcast.

It was the silly, pointless, derisive sound behind him that needled Gonji’s ill humor, caused his shoulders to bunch up, froze him in his tracks. He turned with terrible deliberation, like a death’s-head in darkness.

Spine-cleaver whined out of its scabbard.

* * * *

“Look at the monkey-man,” Boris said from his seat next to Strom on the great boulder, “trying to move in on Michael’s wife—uh-oh!
Tsk-tsk
—he didn’t like something she said. Must’ve turned him down.”

“Shhh!” Strom cautioned. “Cut it out. He’ll hear.”

“Ahhhh, he doesn’t understand Russian. Anyway, your father’s here—oooh! Look at Klaus, the big jackass! Hee-heeee!”

Strom pulled out his reed pipe and trilled a merry little melody that underscored Klaus’s oafishness and embarrassed effort at rising. He stopped abruptly and gaped to see Gonji draw the
katana
, to catch the irrational sparkle in the samurai’s dark angular eyes.

A gurgle escaped Strom’s constricted throat. He heard Boris scream beside him. Gonji charged them at the run, arm extended rigidly behind him, that awful, gleaming blade pointing at the cavern ceiling. Together they scrambled down from the boulder and hurtled for the tunnel to the chapel.

“Strom Gundersen!” Gonji cried, surging after them.

There were shouts behind him, his name breaking from a dozen points in the training ground. He ran until he reached the egress, heard their yelps echoing in the dim lamplight of the upward-twisting tunnel. Then he turned back, the
katana
still gripped beside and behind him in a striking posture.

“Let him go,” Gonji yelled in German at the crowd that pressed in, murmuring, “and let him and that rat-faced friend of his stay away from here until they’re ready to come back as militiamen.
Look
at this place—do you people think this is a game? Your life or death is being planned here. Is that what you want—spectators watching you fall and bleed and die up there when the time comes? And then pipe funny little tunes for your departing soul? Then you don’t need me.”

Rationality returned to Gonji, and composure crept back into his features. He put up Spine-cleaver. Seeing his wrath abate, some of the leaders and his friends moved closer.

“Calm yourself, Gonji,” Flavio urged.

“Diplomacy, my friend,” Milorad added. “You needn’t—”

“Calm myself,” Gonji parroted. “That’s usually not a problem. But look at this. It’s a circus, and I have no desire to lead a troupe of performers. At least not before an audience, until the performers are ready. I want all people who have no business here away from the training ground during practice sessions. We have everyone here except the hawkers and shopkeepers. Why not just move them all down here and abandon the city to Klann? There’s scarcely a face I know in Vedun that isn’t here already, except for Phlegor and his idiot followers. And what have
they
been up to the past week?”

“You have no cause to revile the city like that,” Michael asserted.

“Haven’t I—?”

“The people have done all you’ve demanded of them,” Lorenz added, “and more, I dare say.”

Garth stood behind him, silent, rather ruffled to have had a son threatened. He seemed uncertain of Gonji.

Gonji scowled. Then Tralayn glided through the parting crowd and stood before him, her lips pursed. She nodded. “Gonji is right to be angry. There must be no more nonsense, and we must redouble our efforts.”

“Aye!” the voice of Paille cried from the crowd.

Wilf and Monetto and Jiri and some of Gonji’s other supporters ringed him in and started to speak and to pledge their renewed efforts, but he pushed through them and stalked off toward the tunnel to the valley exit. They watched, whispering, as he marched past Lydia, who stood alone with raised eyebrows and downcast eyes; and then past Klaus, who scrambled up from his lonely seat on the ground to see Gonji approach and said, “
Es tut mir leid, Lehrer
—I mean
‘sensei.’
I’m sorry.” But the samurai ignored him and strode into the tunnel. There was mild alarm among some that he might abandon them, but those who knew him better knew that he’d return. For he had left Tora behind...and lashed to his saddle, the Sagami.

Gonji needed to be alone for a space. He was tired. Tired of them, sick of their faces, their attitudes. He needed relief from the stifling atmosphere of the cavern. Needed to uncoil his knotted stomach. That had been very bad, losing composure like that.
The Western child part of
me again
, neh?
Karma.

He sat cross-legged in a quiet glade for a time and meditated, Spine-cleaver lying sheathed along his right side, arms on knees, hands hanging open limply, eyes focused on a point in the distance before him.

Back at the cavern the training resumed, sedate and serious. No one so much as cracked a smile for the remainder of the session, not even Berenyi. So ended the first week of the training.

And through it all the traitor had been there. Watching. Recording every detail....

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gonji stepped up the training’s intensity and complexity.

More controlled fighting was done with steel weapons. Techniques became more specified and involved. Squads were selected. Actual battle plans were laid, objectives defined. Potential killing grounds were studied via Paille’s detailed miniature of Vedun. Those less adroit with weapons were organized into harassing squads which would rush the deadly spiked-steel calthrops and barrier planks into place in alleys and courtyards. Then archers and pole-armed footmen would descend on them like maddened hornets.

Dangerous skills were introduced: rider against footman; pikeman against rider.... In the latter clash Hildegarde proved outstanding. Strong, intrepid, and with an aggressive abandon born of years of hearing exaggerated tales of the toughness of the male hide, she soon became a fearsome sight with a pole-axe to any rider bearing down on her. Garth was at last forced to caution her against ferocity when she had caused two severe gashes through leather jerkins and spilled a rider so hard that he had broken an arm.

And now the injuries, too, increased in proportion to the intensity of training. The elderly surgeon, Dr. Verrico, and his aides were kept busy, stitching and splinting.

* * * *

“Butchers!” the doctor growled in Gonji’s ear. “Every one of you—Klann and all his vermin included!” Verrico jabbed his needle a bit harder than necessary into Gonji’s side for emphasis. The samurai’s nearly healed duel wound had split in a fall from a broken scaffold.

“Easy there, old fool!” Gonji chided. “What kind of healer increases a victim’s pain?” He gritted his teeth and pursed his lips, accepting it stoically.

Verrico grunted irascibly. “What kind of man sets himself up as a victim?”

* * * *

“Would you have hurt Strom?” Garth whispered thinly, watching Gonji work.

Gonji paused and regarded him, smiling.
“Nein, mein Freund,”
he answered softly, “just frightened him a bit.”

Garth nodded, satisfied. Under Dr. Verrico’s direction the militia learned methods of aiding the wounded in the field. Gonji was in the process of splinting Garth’s leg. Other wounds were described, the treatments broached.

Gonji caught the murmur of fear that rippled through the audience and began to extemporize in his inimitable fashion:

“The human body, you see, is like this piece of leather—” With his sword he poked at the cuirass of a man seated in the front row. Almost at once Gonji’s German was rendered by translators into half a dozen languages. “It has to be beaten and tanned, cured before it reaches its final toughness. That’s how wounds are—that’s the positive end they serve. When they’re treated, when the skin grows back together, then it’s stronger than it was before. The more healed wounds, the tougher the man....”

There were skeptical looks among the more educated, but mostly rapt attention. Gonji assumed an expression of smug conviction and mentally patted himself on the back for this fine bit of prevarication. Hell, it might even be true—that knife-long jagged scar along his shoulder blade, while itching like a column of chigger bites sometimes, certainly was twice as thick as the surrounding skin....

Then, while on the subject of wounds, Gonji launched into his recitation of where he had acquired his various body scars, omitting the shoulder scar with its poignant memories.

* * * *

Dobroczy leaned over to Pete Foristek and whispered out of the corner of his mouth: “Listen to him. He thinks he’s St. Paul the apostle....”

* * * *

After the wound treatment business, a number of new pieces of armament began to turn up on the training ground: shields and bucklers, cuirasses and half-armors, legharnesses, pauldrons and vambraces, helms with buffes and low-cut visors. The militiamen of Vedun had decided to hedge their bets by providing every possible advantage against suffering the wounds they’d heard described.

The leaders encouraged them, instructing them in the best cross between maneuverability and protection, given the nature of their enemy. And while Gonji used no shield himself, he showed how some, particularly the concave target-type shields, might even ward off pistol balls. The next day the already overwrought metal founders were inundated with orders for target shields, more than they could possibly deliver before the spring. But the overwhelming majority still wore only what oddments of armor they could cobble together, it being expensive and in short supply.

* * * *

Even the children of Vedun did their part.

On nights when Gonji slept in the city, he would creep by darkness to the Gundersens’ or Paille’s, avoiding the room he had taken at Wojcik’s Haven on the north side of town, then join with the workers going to their morning shifts and the militiamen heading for the training session. Linking up with Eduardo and the other children, the samurai would sometimes play with them, mug for them, perform martial arts
kata
to their yelping delight. Mercenaries from the garrison at the converted granary nearby would be drawn irresistibly, and trainees slipping into Tralayn’s home to descend to the catacombs did so unheeded.

Gonji knew he was playing with fire. Julian would by now be desperate to have some further intelligence from him and was likely fuming over Gonji’s dropping out of sight. Periodically soldiers would try to signal him that they wished to speak in private, and he enjoyed their exasperation when he would return their winks with bold gestures of greeting as he tumbled with the children. He knew he’d have to check in with Julian soon, but it would be on his terms.

During these play sessions Gonji grew increasingly fond of little Tiva. For her would be reserved the longest rides aboard the samurai’s back and the gentlest tosses into the air. Her widowed father was an archer in the militia, a rather withdrawn, heavy-hearted man who had never overcome the death of his wife in birthing Tiva. Although the notion disturbed his sense of justice, Gonji resolved in the back of his mind to try to preserve the man’s life. For Tiva’s sake. The adorable urchin awakened in him previously untapped yearnings for fatherhood.

* * * *

They were in Tralayn’s house, and once again Gonji was transfixed by the sight of the great weapons slung over her mantel.

“Where did you get those?” he asked.

She clasped her hands in front of her and watched Gonji as she spoke, a hidden mirth flickering in her luminous green eyes. “They were found in the empty city when the pilgrims first settled here. For now they’re only ornaments, awaiting...the warrior who can use them.”

“They’ll be waiting a while, I’d wager,” he said, scratching his head. “I tried to lift one of them once.”

Tralayn smiled in a way Gonji didn’t like, as if she were appraising a child’s fumbling ways.

“I’ve been out to see Simon Sardonis again,” she said, Gonji’s features perking with interest at the mention of the mystery man’s name, “to try to enlist his aid for our purpose—”

“And?”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately he was gone.”

“For good?” Gonji inquired.