Father Robles’ cheeks reddened. “
Si
? Well then tell me,
por favor
,
what pagan ideas you would bring us that would solve our complex problems, that would—would rescue us from the darkness of sin and evil.”
“What do I believe?”
“
Si
.”
Gonji smiled and clasped his hands. “I’m not sure what my…rather eclectic code encompasses anymore. At times I find myself believing almost nothing. There are wonders in existence that neither your theology—nor your science, Cardenas—can hope to explain. Others whose delicate beauty are destroyed in the explanation of the mystery. Have you, since your return from your university,
Senor
Cardenas, discussed with Father Robles the continuing controversy over the movement of the sun?”
The two both reddened now.
“Or will you cross swords over this mystery,” the samurai pressed, “at a later date? Perhaps when the army has cleared the warlock’s power from your lives,
neh
?
I believe there is room enough for all manner of contemplation. Contemplation requires so little space,
neh
? Observe. Meditate on your observations. And the true works of evil will not be able to disguise themselves from you.”
The priest splayed his hands on the table.
“And you,
senor,
have accorded us a perfect example of the workings of the Devil. Your simplistic views are an invitation to chaos. Obscurantism is the Devil’s ale.”
Gonji pondered the term. It was the first time he’d heard it used. It would not be the last.
“If my beliefs give you offense,” he said at length, “then you have two choices: Give me space, or kill me.” A hush settled over the room, dispersed when Orozco coughed and Anita seized the opportunity to refill their goblets. Father Robles clapped a hand over his, checking her almost too late.
“I wonder,” Gonji added, “which one Iasu would choose.”
Father Robles sat still as an ice field before cracking an unexpected, if joyless, smile. “Very clever. I shall, of course, give you the space you request. It isn’t often that I break bread with strangers of exotic persuasions, and I must allow that you’re an interesting
hombre
,
if an irreverent one. The captain trusts you; so I suppose that’s endorsement enough.”
Salguero hid his struggle against a grin behind his goblet. “You’ll have to forgive me, Padre, but I knew it would come to this. Gonji is a longtime critic of certain of Holy Mother Church’s eh…postures, shall we say?”
“Don’t apologize,” the priest replied, relaxing again. “He found a way into this valley, and no travelers have done that for many weeks now.
Quiza—
maybe he’ll be the one to show you how to beat this wicked sorcerer who opposes us. I may even grant him my blessing when he leaves, provided he spreads none of his heathen ideas in this already dirty little town.”
His tone was lighthearted, but Anita, who ever evaded his eyes at all costs, slipped from the room. Gonji bowed shallowly to the priest, who nodded in return.
“Why
have
you come to Barbaso?” Cardenas asked.
“
Si
,
tell us what horrors you’ve seen along the way.” Orozco shrugged defensively to see the scowl Salguero shot him.
“No, it’s all right,” Gonji said. “I just wished to take the shortest route to Zaragoza, and Barbaso is the only town of appreciable size on the way. I needed supplies, and some companionship, I don’t mind admitting—”
The captain laughed and smoothed the tendrils of his mustache. “You
have
changed—admitting to human weakness like that!”
“Although I had no idea who I’d find here, thank the Great Kami that you and Orozco here are still in fighting shape. And that’s it. I’ve never had much luck with villages, and Barbaso was it, if my map’s to be trusted.”
“You’re not serious about seeing Cervera, though.”
Gonji looked pained. “I must, Hernando. I must clear the air between us, explain the truth of what happened to Theresa. It will be one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.”
Gloom descended on the captain. He leaned back with folded arms and stared at his boots. “He’ll kill you, Gonji. You know, I was instructed to do so myself.”
“It would have been your duty.”
They shared a look of pained camaraderie. And then Gonji broke it, affecting an arch air. “So old King Philip has gone to his ancestors. I should have known. So old by now. And Philip the Third straddles the dais of power.”
“Do you think he’s forgotten his father’s favor of you? He never liked you much, you know.”
Gonji smiled thinly. “
Hai
,
to say the least.”
“And as far as who holds the lever of power these days in Spain, I’m afraid you’re even more luckless there than if it
were
Philip the Pup. Most of the administrative strength is in the hands of Prime Minister Rojas—Duke de Lerma, do you recall? The Hammer of the Inquisition?”
Thumbing his chin, Gonji grew pensive. “Ahh,
so desu ka
?
Is that right?” He shook his head somberly. “Out of the Devil’s hand and into his mouth, so it seems.”
“I must take exception with that remark, sir,” Father Robles grated.
“So sorry. I was referring to my own situation—”
“Were you?” Salguero cut in.
“It’s a damned good picture of the way things have been,” Sergeant Orozco added, growling into his goblet.
“It might well describe the command prerogative in general,” Salguero continued, drowning out the sergeant’s muttering. He spoke to Gonji but all the while looked at the fidgeting priest. “Taxes ruin us, the Turks loom at every port the English don’t raid, and what does the cub king do? He oppresses the
Moriscos
,
our own countrymen—and Christians at that!—between observations of endless feasts and hypocritical pious rites that—”
“Such talk is heresy!” Father Robles railed.
“
Si,
and
more
!”
the captain shouted, half rising from his seat. “
Treason—I
speak treason, Padre.” He turned to Gonji, an almost imploring look wrinkling his brow. “They gave away my hometown,
Kyooshi
. Gave it to the French out of a gutless fear they called political expediency. Now my family lives under blasted
francés
oppression while I sit here and die a slow and hopeless death. While I watch my proud company decimated and turned to sniveling scum. They’re besotted and spiritless. Those the warlock doesn’t destroy this filthy town drains.”
Robles made a censuring noise but said nothing. Salguero leaned against the table edge, his bitterness permeating the atmosphere of the
comedor
, his harsh words having drawn Anita back to the doorway. She stood at the jamb, aiming a look of contempt at her late paramour. Sergeant Orozco, now well into his cups, slumped back in his seat and kept nodding his head heavily in sullen agreement. Pablo Cardenas worked his jaw silently, rearranging the scraps on his plate with a knife.
“So what will you do,
senchoo
?” Gonji inquired gently. “You still have your duty.”
“Duty!” Salguero spat, reclaiming his composure almost at once. “What
can
I do?” He sat back down.
Gonji cleared his throat and drew himself straight and tall in his chair. “You know, I still have to pass Castle Malaguer when I leave the valley. This business has stoked my curiosity. There are certain questions I would have an answer to. And you may need a tour guide to steer you through this sorcerer’s gauntlet.”
The captain’s eyes glowed. “
Kyooshi
? Are you saying what I think?”
Gonji folded his arms, his eyes narrowing. “There is one thing that troubles me about this place, this town. Before I give aid here, I want to know something. Why have I seen no children since I arrived here?”
They looked from one to the other uncertainly.
“They’ve been kept indoors, protected, since this war against Domingo Negro began,” Cardenas explained.
Father Robles elaborated. “It’s never safe, day or night, in Barbaso. The innocents—”
“I don’t understand what you’re driving at, Gonji,” Salguero said.
“I want to see children of this town,” the samurai demanded.
“I assure you we have them,” the solicitor said. “I have two of my own.”
“Bring them here. Or, if you prefer, we can go to your home. But I want to see them for myself.”
They groused and debated the necessity and reason for the samurai’s strange request, but at last Cardenas complied, bringing his children, a boy and girl who looked tousled from interrupted sleep but bright-eyed with apprehension. An armed escort led them into the manse’s parlor.
Gonji made gentle small talk with them, told them brief tales of his youth in Japan, and presented them each with a confection for their trouble. His quiet manner set them at ease, but the other adults were discomfited by this mystery, for they could see how he seemed to study the children, looking them over carefully and probing them with odd questions, seeded throughout the entertaining patter that soon had the children entranced.
When the children had been led back home, Gonji sat before the parlor’s roaring hearth and poured himself another ale. His somber expression warded away the others’ curious glances. They discussed the lancers’ campaign against the warlock until Cardenas returned.
“Would you mind telling me,” he said, shrugging off his greatcoat, “why my children had to be disturbed from their sleep and dragged out into the cold night air?”
Gonji stared into the blazing fire. “They’re very fine young ones. They seem ruddy enough—and well loved.”
“
Muchos gracias
,”
Cardenas replied, his words laced with sarcasm.
“Exactly what are you implying?” Father Robles asked.
“One day,” Gonji replied, unmoving before the crackling fire. “One day I’ll explain.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Buey swung his huge fist in a hard right cross that might have shattered a helmet visor. The little Jappo ducked the blow and darted a straight, short punch at his midsection.
The man the other lancers called
The Ox
took the shot full in his hard belly with a snarling grunt. He leered down at his smaller opponent in a broad display of unconcern with the other’s blows. But the last roundhouse kick to his ribs had hurt.
This
hombre
could kick.
Buey had fought the best of the accursed French
savate
foot-fighters and beaten them all insensible, but this Oriental’s kick-boxing was faster, more deadly, and far more varied in its attack.
Buey closed on him with a bullish charge, roaring intimidatingly and lashing out with a furious series of punches. The Jappo backed off with a quick-stamping retreat, fending his punishing swings with open-handed deflecting blocks. Buey afforded him no opening, and when he sensed another rib kick coming, he raised his knee sharply.
Their legs thudded off each other. The Jappo dropped his hands to steady his balance, and Buey bounced a glancing shot off the side of his head. But he failed to follow it up quickly enough—the Oriental’s sharp punch snapped his head back. He tasted blood in his mouth, felt the warm trickle in his mustache.
Growling, he came on with a rush of emotion, the barracks crowd, shuffling and pushing out of the combatants’ way, pleading with Buey to finish this arrogant meddler. Buey executed a leaping front kick aimed at decapitating Gonji, but at the top of his kick he realized his mistake. In the air, vulnerable, he watched helplessly as the Oriental dropped low and spun. His sweeping kick knocked Buey’s pivot leg out from under him.
Landing hard on the barracks floor, he raised his arms across his face as the Jappo leapt astride him.
But a whomping kick in the back knocked Gonji into a headfirst roll. Buey could hear the breath hiss from the other’s clenched teeth and sensed an advantage. Pushing to his feet, he came at the Jappo with flailing ham fists, his knees pumping defensively to ward off any kicks, seasoning his experienced attack with well-aimed snap-kicks.
His frustration drove him to insensate fury. His blows alternated between landing ineffectually and striking air. Another kick, this one returning pain for his effort as the Oriental blocked his ankle with a hard and fast knife-hand.
Another sharp pain in a knee, then an ankle—the other ankle—
The Jappo had initiated a lightning hit-and-run attack with low side snap-kicks, targeting his shins.
Buey’s glances flicked down at his opponent’s panther-quick feet. He raised a knee against a kick. Suddenly the samurai was high in the air. His two-legged dropkick caught Buey full in the upper chest. He stumbled backward, breathless, and sat down heavily on his behind.
But the Oriental had landed badly, wincing from the pain. He must have injured an ankle. Buey pushed himself up again and came on with rotating fists, his shoulders squared with determination. The samurai had altered his stance to favor the sore leg.
They exchanged a rapid round of punches, the soldiers
oohing
and bellowing with excitement. It would all end swiftly now.
Buey cuffed the Jappo with a short left. The samurai dropped back a step, cocked his injured leg, began snapping out with it, re-cocking, feinting high and low jabs. Then—
A quick straight front kick hit Buey just above the groin. His arm dropped reflexively. A curling left roundhouse kick blasted him in his already inflamed ribs. Breath
whoofed
from his lungs. The samurai changed legs again—he’d been bluffing—the right came round and cracked into Buey’s rib cage on the other side. A feint with a low kick—
A staggering wheel-kick crashed into Buey’s jaw, strangling his hooting supporters down to gasps. He heard whispers through cotton ticking, saw harsh scintillas in a blur of taper light. Dazed, he took a backward stumbling step. And landed hard on the floor again, his arms extended behind him, palms flat.
Layers of gauze lifted from his vision. The samurai stood before him, gathering his breath, hands on hips.
“
No
mas
?” the Jappo asked softly.
Rage and adrenaline coursed along with the blood that pounded in Buey’s temples. He staggered to his feet, spat out a tooth, and came on. As he closed with the swaggering samurai, he saw Montoya raise a stool behind the tough little bastard and poise it for a blow.
Buey waded in quickly.
* * * *
Gonji had been forced to fight Buey. After two days of futile attempts to instill discipline in Salguero’s dissipated First Catalonian Lancers, he’d decided there was no other way.
Taunts and insults, poor efforts and intentional incompetence had greeted his endeavors to train the company for all-out engagement with the warlock’s powers. Fighting the champion around whom the soldiers rallied was the last recourse—short of killing one of them—at Gonji’s disposal by which he might win their respect. Apparently it had worked. They now set about their training in more businesslike fashion. But it had not been easy: Buey had possessed a surprising quickness to go with one of the hardest punches the samurai had ever suffered. One blow had rung his skull and left him with a headache for hours after the fight. And the poor landing after the jump-kick had hampered the healing of his already tender ankle.
In the sober aftermath of his victory, Gonji could not be sure what Buey’s anger and shame might bode for the future. But at least The Ox had proven himself a man of some honor:
He’d stopped the nefarious Montoya from crushing Gonji’s skull, grabbing the stool from the trooper’s hands and knocking him out with one meaty punch.
* * * *
As soon as Gonji had hired on as Salguero’s military adviser, he’d implemented a program of discipline and training at arms that immediately proved unpopular with the lancer company. He’d set them to rectifying their shiftless habits—from tending to personal cleanliness and unkempt uniforms to purging their rancid barracks; from setting the disgraceful stables aright to oiling and polishing their weapons.
The weapons training was undertaken with sullen skepticism as to its value: Of what use were swords and bows to the trooper equipped with the modern accoutrements of war—muskets and pistols? Gonji’s arguments concerning the long-range and rapid-fire advantages of bow and arbalest, as well as the close-range and mystical dependability of forthright steel in certain circumstances, were dismissed with snickers.
He nonetheless had pushed them through the training until his patience with their wayward attitudes had run out and he’d been forced to win their grudging respect and fear by taking on their champion.
Following the fight with Buey, Gonji succeeded in gaining their attention. They worked harder with their dusted-off bows, and both the samurai and his former mates took a nostalgic satisfaction in the mounted archery and fencing drills. Gonji, for his part, felt the creeping indifference and raw survivalism of the past weeks lifting before a renewed sense of duty and purpose. He threw himself into his leadership responsibilities lustily, though in quiet personal moments he was given to spates of melancholia: Bittersweet memories of the training of Vedun’s valiant militia troubled his sleep, made him mindful of the spiritual vacuity of the present tactical pursuits. He was glad, in these moments, for the presence of his old friend Captain Salguero and the wry wit of the loyal Sergeant Orozco.
The lancers proved to be quite capable marksmen with their pistols and arquebuses, and they took easily to the technique of alternating firing lines. But powder supplies were running low, and little could be wasted in the training. Similarly, many of them showed an aptitude for mounted archery; they were skilled horsemen, and some quickly learned to hit moving targets at considerable distances while in full gallop. However, arrows and crossbow quarrels, too, were in short supply, and Barbaso’s querulous fletcher grumbled incessantly at being pressed into working overtime at producing them. Gonji discovered with frustration that the more the man and his apprentices were pushed, the poorer the quality of their work became. As a youth in Japan, Gonji recalled, he had become accustomed to firing a thousand arrows daily during
kyu-jutsu
training; on a good day the troopers in Barbaso were fortunate to be able to launch two dozen.
Close combat training with sword and axe and halberd was unpopular from the outset. Less favored still, after a lancer’s shoulder was unhinged in a mounted pole-arm training accident.
Discipline and fighting ability increased rapidly as the days passed. A sudden warm spell graced the land, invigorating the lancers, making them mindful of the coming spring thaw. They worked still harder.
Some, though, were a constant problem, particularly the faction led by the insidious Montoya, who were ever lacking in sincerity and responded neither to coddling nor strictness. Montoya himself boasted the personality of an arrogant jackal and spent more time in the stockade than on duty. It was with vindictive satisfaction that Gonji received the news of Montoya’s ultimate removal from action: Ostensibly relieved of duty because he was ill, Montoya was discovered in the cellar of a private home, irretrievably drunk and in the embrace of a woman. The incorrigible trooper was detained pending a proper court martial for malingering and dereliction of duty. And it was only by virtue of Captain Salguero’s mercy that he was spared field execution, given the present dire circumstances. Divested of his malignant influence, even Montoya’s cronies now reluctantly displayed a fresh vigor in the training.
The townsfolk took a dim view of Gonji’s importance. He knew their thinking, for it was mirrored in their eyes, and he’d suffered it many times before: How could an inferior—and a heathen at that—be entrusted with a military advisership whose actions might decide Barbaso’s future? He heard secondhand that Father Robles was spreading discord among the town leaders over Salguero’s trust in this oriental killer with the reputation of a cold-blooded fiend.
Anita, the spoiled daughter of the late magistrate and Salguero’s erstwhile paramour, had taken up with Ferrugia, the ostler who tended the lancers’ horses. She never failed to be about the stables when the steeds were being retired for the day. Always ravishingly attired and scented—in a fashion that was almost pathetically comic in the earthy environment of the stables—and suggestively sidling up to the blushing Ferrugia, she would aim cold stares at the captain and at Gonji. The soldiery found her an amusing object of desire and took to calling her The Minx.
The solicitor Pablo Cardenas was an enigmatic figure. He said little and betrayed less by his actions, but he seemed ever present during the training, and Gonji fancied that he could always feel the man’s critical stare at his back. And in that respect Cardenas was much like the general citizenry.
They were an indolent lot, it occurred to Gonji. They grumbled endlessly about dwindling winter stores, the long absence from Barbaso of chapmen and merchant caravans, and the terrifying oppression of the warlock who called himself Black Sunday. But they seemed curiously content, he had decided, if apprehensive.
Something troubled Gonji. These people were quite possibly not telling all they knew of the warlock’s works and intent. It made no sense for the warlock to attack them, for it seemed he had nothing to gain. And their vituperative rebuff of Gonji’s curiosity—their dismissal of his question as meaningless on the grounds that evil never needed a rationale for its slitherings—satisfied him not at all.
They distrusted him, as he did them. But as far as he could tell, they hadn’t yet sold their humanity or their souls. Or those of their children. Not like that town near Avignon, where he had waited too long to act upon his suspicions.
And as for the Archmage Domingo Malaga y Colicos, he remained a mysterious presence, hovering over the territory and inspiring nightmares. Yet during the two weeks of tactical and weapons training, there were but two supernatural incidents.
Once, after a morning hunting party had come running back, shaken and empty-handed, the midday sky turned as dark as the ocean’s unplumbed depths. A hollow, mocking laughter rang out in the sky, diminishing gradually as the sun burned away the darkness.
The second occurrence was more deadly.
During a practice cavalry skirmish on the plains to the west of the town, Gonji saw his first glimpse of the hideous wailing banshee who brought the trembling death. Upon seeing the unfurling of the banshee’s ghostly cloak, which spread across the width of the valley, the troop ignored Gonji’s shouted order to stand their ground and broke for town in mass panic. Gonji remembered something of this apparition’s meaning, but when he saw the cold fury in the banshee’s fathomless, hungry eyes, when he smelled her graveyard stench and felt the sudden nakedness of his companions’ abandonment, his confidence was shattered.
He, too, fled her icy gray clutch and her blood-freezing wail, cursing all the while.
When they were huddled in the stables, breathless and sweating, Gonji berated them for having run, angrier with himself than with the troopers. He roared at them to overwhelm the nagging voice of his own guilt. He recounted the banshee’s lore, asking why they had panicked and why they now felt safe; further, explaining what they must do when, surely, they must meet her gaze again.
And he knew that he must prove by example the truth of what he claimed, if truth it was.
Two men and their mounts were overtaken by the banshee that day. Her hand had touched them, tainted them with her curse, knelling their premature doom. Their quivering agony had seemed interminable, abated later by paralysis. And at long last, death.
A woman looked into the eyes of one of the dead men, and what she saw there drove her to hysterics.
It was the imprint of the banshee’s face.
* * * *
“Remember,” Gonji shouted to the marshaled column of thirty lancers, their horses shuddering and snorting in the chill morning air, “this is a military expedition,
si
,
but not a siege force. If attacked, we defend ourselves, but we do not initiate attack. If possible, I want to talk with this warlock, reason with him, if he’s a reasonable man.”