Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (11 page)

Kyu-jutsu
—the art of the bow—returned its demanding skills more grudgingly due to the localized damage incurred in the chest wound. The powerful pulls required to deploy the shafts of the mighty English longbow came hard to Gonji’s traumatized muscle. His response was to work even harder, to launch more arrows daily in a progressive outreach for Zen perfection that saw him at last exceed the thousand arrows per day he had shot as a youthful archer in Japan.

After supper he could be seen in the hills again, working with a variety of weapons. Urging his black mare, Nichi, through myriad battlefield gyrations that caused the curious to wonder what demons drove this strange halfbreed. And what enemies he anticipated meeting.

Gonji’s effort inevitably carried him beyond the limit of his body’s waxing endurance, and he fell victim to a severe ague that laid him low for a week, restricted his assiduous workouts. He recovered, and then relapsed, his fever more serious this time. His friends at last were forced to steer him into curtailing all activity until he was fully recovered, by refusing to assist him.

Seeing the concern and genuine affection in their well-considered advice, he complied. But when he was back on his cat-quick feet again, he redoubled all efforts in a way that caused even his seasoned allies to wonder at the power of his steely will.

As for strangers who looked on during those days of splintering wood, blood-chilling
kiyai,
and steel flashing bright and molten in the sun’s dying rays, there could be no mistaking their thoughts: Surely this man was possessed of an unsavory spirit of vengefulness.

The time came for Gonji’s company to leave Ostia with the hearth-fire memories of their sojourn. Their welcome had in fact long since turned to vinegar. Buey, in unbridled rage over the shooting of Gonji, had broken the neck of the boy who had done the deed—a lad much favored by the seafarers who had taken him as an apprentice. With the death of his brother under Gonji’s command in Burgundy, the boy had been left without family. Now, friends aroused by Buey’s vindictive act of violence had begun to cry out for justice. The Ox was always accompanied by at least one other member of their company, though the local
sbirri,
unsettled by Father Sebastio’s impressive letters of transit from Rome and unwilling to become entangled with the legendary samurai’s influence, had dismissed any case against Buey.

So local tolerance of the company’s presence had soured withal. And yet ironically, no one was more upset by the boy’s unseemly demise than Buey. He was a veteran warrior who had come to terms easily with the situational ethics of killing, many times in the past. But now the strain and guilt over this boy’s murder showed in every crack and fissure of his broad face, in the slumping of Buey’s erstwhile blocky shoulders. For in the harsh light of reason, there was no rationalizing his brutal act.

Gonji breathed a deep sigh of relief to be leaving Ostia, as they pulled out one dreary, fogbound morning. He rode beside Father Jan, warily watching the silent forms that leaned in porticos, or peered from upper windows with hostile eyes that bid them good riddance. Orozco cantered just behind them, waving to an occasional good-natured well-wisher—
compadres
he’d courted in the wine-sloshing, ribald nights in the
osterias.

The samurai patted Nichi’s raven-wing mane. “I’ve had swifter mounts and stronger,” he said, “but none so mean spirited.”

“You call
that
something to
boast
of?” Orozco called out from behind.

Gonji laughed heartily, for he did indeed, his former bond with the feisty mare renewing, growing deeper with each passing day.

“Dare I ask where we’re headed?” Father Sebastio ventured.

“Duty—Roma,” Gonji replied, eyes twinkling. But there was more to their sparkle than simple merriment or the yearning for good fellowship on the road.

Sebastio swallowed. “And then…
Dai Nihon?”

Japan.

The priest’s inquiry was shot through with hopefulness, and a pall gradually descended over the band when word drifted through their number that Gonji had not answered. For lately he had begun to murmur a name that filled them all with a mixture of wrath and terror—
Balaerik,
the evil
donado
who had twisted the Church into persecuting Gonji and his terrible ally, the werewolf Simon Sardonis.

And Balaerik, to the best of their knowledge, was still at large in Spain, where the price of return for some of them was the hangman’s noose.

PART TWO

Decisions at the Crossroads

“To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind”—
Byron

CHAPTER ONE

The couple thrashed under the hedge in volcanic rapture. Even had they not been so engaged, their senses would have been ill equipped to mark the fast, stealthy approach of the interloper.

Soundless, unrevealed by the glimmer of the cloud-frothed crescent moon, Simon Sardonis swept along with the summer breeze to lurk among the thickets of the serene
bocage,
only the harmless denizens of the fields noting his passage.

Cloaked in dark breeches and shirt and leather hunter’s jerkin, his features concealed by a drooping slouch hat, he crouched behind a wild berry bush. Arranging the crossed axe and broadsword more comfortably in his wide belt, he submitted to the roiling of his aching belly with a few berries. Scowling to hear the sounds of passion a few scant yards away, he shouted down by angry thought the blandishments of the energumen, its foul urgings that he join in the couple’s ecstasies. He spat out the chewed berries in abrupt self-denial.

As usual, he avoided thinking of Claire until the demon spirit had been banished to its curling place deep within their arena of cohabitation. When he was satisfied that the lovers’ passion had been spent, he rose and bounded over the hedge to confront them like some vindictive god of moral censure.

The woman emitted a strained outcry, grabbing at her discarded petticoat and holding it about her defensively.

“Dammit!” Her paramour lunged for a pistol. Simon’s stamping foot drove his wrist into the moist earth, causing him to grunt in pain.

“Make another sound and you die,” Simon rumbled, low and menacing. They stared at him, wide-eyed, glancing from the imposing figure he cut to the bright edge of the exposed axe-head.

“Woman,” he said when their compliance was clear, “hie yourself to that tall run of hedge down there. Get dressed. And sit. Until I call for you. Quietly.” The woman’s eyes flicked from Simon to her lover. She hurried off, pausing to scoop up garments dropped in her haste.

“What’s this all about?” the man demanded anxiously, rubbing at his sore wrist.

“I’ll ask the questions,” Simon replied somberly. He removed his slouch hat with a sweeping movement. “Do you know me?”

The man’s eyes strained at their sockets. His breath came in short gulps. “But surely—surely you’re one of—” He stared fixedly into Simon’s backswept silvery eyes.
“Non,
you’re—” He exhaled raspingly. “O Great Beast—!”

“Oui.
You’ve been seeking me. Are you an
avant-courier?
A scout? Does it please you now to know that your boasting about discovering my whereabouts has led to this?”

“But you’re—you’re their
brother,”
the man breathed, panting now in atavistic terror.

“Am I?”

“I work for them faithfully, you know. That I do. You wouldn’t harm a faithful servant. I know now why your family is at odds with you, but I—I—” He went for his jack, but Simon’s threatening stride forward froze him. “See—see the device blazoning my jack—your family crest—I’m only a hireling, I tell you. I know nothing of why you feud. The words I spoke—words spewed from a wine cup—”

“Silence,” Simon commanded sharply, hissing to see the hated crest of the Farouche Clan—a silver-eyed black wolf, rampant-regardant on a red field. “Your ignorance is grounded in satanic deceit. You know, or suppose, well enough why I oppose them. Tell me, did they promise you immortality? And how many innocents did you help them kill to secure the witchery that would empower them? Did they also tell you that immortality is not the same as invulnerability?”

Simon glowered down at him, and the man lurched for his pistol. The piece was hardly in his clammy grasp before the lupine curse-bearer was atop him, slamming him down, bursting the breath from his lungs. Simon’s left hand clutched the man’s throat, squeezed. His hand, though attenuated by months of hardship, was rigid against the brigand’s frenzied flailings. His right hand locked about the pistol-bearing wrist.

“Give me one—good—reason why I shouldn’t claw out your heart and feed it to you—”

The man’s eyes bulged, his face draining of color, then gradually turning a sickly hue. He lurched and strained, almost dislodging Simon in his throes.

“Non
—your actions earn you no quarter—”

There was a final surge of death-defiance, and the man lay still. Simon sharply withdrew his clawed hand from the livid marks about the crushed throat.

He gasped and bolted to his feet, glancing about him. Felt his face, his ears—the protrusion of his jaws and the exaggerated pointing of his ears receded slowly as his rage was spent. The old desert mufti had been right: He
could
at least partially control the transmutations into the wolfish body. He had worked at that control for some time now, enraging the tormenting spirit within him, whose feral form it was.

But he had to be careful. There was a corollary to unleashing the Beast without the moon’s mystical power. Extreme violent emotion now occasionally precipitated transformation, and that was bad. His enemies might thus be drawn to him, by scent or sorcery or even some unknown sense based in their kinship to the creature.

Simon sought out the woman, found her obediently seated under a wild shrub. Her arms encircled her drawn-up knees, and she stared blankly into the distance, as if stoical in the light of inexorable destiny. She was attractive, even as Simon had gathered from his surreptitious observation of her unseemly activities. Her long blond hair lay in gentle waves across her shoulders. Her lips were full and ruby red, drawn downward in a perpetual pout that lent her the cast of a self-pitying, if willing, victim. The cheerless depths of her aquamarine eyes were both fetching in their languor and repelling in their emptiness. They’d examined life’s options and found them wanting.

“Is he dead?” she asked with surprising indifference.

Simon pondered the evil inhumanity the Farouche Clan had inculcated in these people before he nodded in reply. He felt a sharp pang of remorse over his own savagery, dispelled at once by the mockery of the demon spirit. He smothered its thoughts. The woman was speaking again.

“I won’t ask why,” she said softly. “You’re the lords of this province. Will you kill me now, too?”

Simon brushed it aside with a wry expression. “What’s your name?” he asked mechanically, annoyed to be recognized for his resemblance to the evil family, though it eased the burden of explanation.

“Faye,” she responded, her curiosity perked for the first time. “Faye Labossiere. Why do you ask? Am I to be
your
woman now?”

“You have a husband,” he said scornfully.

She chortled glumly.
“Oui,
and what of that?”

“Why do you dally with these vermin? That was the third man I’ve seen you with in this wood.”

Faye shrugged, uncertain of where he was leading. “Life is full of sorrow. We do what we must to fill up the days. Why do you question me like this? I’ve broken no laws. Your brother the sheriff himself once happened upon me when I—”

“And where was it that you last saw…my ‘brother’ the sheriff?” Simon rolled his shoulders, dark emotion coiling and uncoiling inside him. He half-turned away from her so that the moonlight would not reveal what was in his eyes.

“I—I speak of a night some weeks ago.”

“Oh. You are, are you not, from Lamorisse?” He trembled slightly.

“Oui.”

“I will ask you something now, and you will answer me truthfully—I will know if you lie. And then when you’ve answered, you will return to your husband, and forget everything about this night—your meeting with me, all that you’ve seen and heard and said, that mercenary who lies dead. You will forget it all, as it is not your concern but only that of the Farouche Clan. If you dare breathe any of this to any other soul, I shall come to you in the night and kill you. Do you understand?”

“Oui,
milord,” Faye breathed fearfully.

“Tell me what you know of the present whereabouts of the woman named Claire Dejordy.”

Faye swallowed, her eyes flashing as she sifted through her thoughts, her memories. “I…all that I know—truthfully, I swear—is that she vanished from Lamorisse. Weeks—
months
ago, now, it must be. That is all I know. I swear it.”

Simon absorbed her words with a sense of finality, of doom, of mounting vengefulness. It must be true. So carefully had he searched, choosing his informants, confronting them with the menace of his presence, charging them under pain of grisly death…Each had told him the same thing. There was no discernible reason for them to lie. Indeed, they’d been eager to cooperate with a
Farouche.

Claire Dejordy was gone.

Simon ground his teeth, not hearing the woman as she spoke again. Cajoling words, entreating him to leave her unharmed.

He dismissed her angrily, watching her hurry off along the hedgerows, casting terrified looks over her hood-mantled shoulder. He heard—felt—apprehended the taunting laughter of the energumen again. It dared not assail thoughts of Claire; something about her—Simon’s love for her—caused it to wither, muted its mockery.

But now the imprisoned soul was at once rejoicing in Simon’s despair and—more despicably by far—
sharing
in his yearning for his lost love.

He cursed and slapped himself stingingly across the face, knowing well the creature’s loathing of discomfort. Then he knelt and, drawing a dirk from his boot, performed the act of mortification that his companions found so unsettling. He began to cut himself. On the arms, on the face. Pausing before each keen, cleansing jab of the knife’s point to relish the dreadful, helpless agony of the demon spirit. Its hatred of pain drove it deep inside; it dwindled into the nuclear fastness of their joint being to which it always repaired, giving him surcease of its presence until such time as it could stand no more the bitter loneliness of its nameless state.

He would be free of it for a mercifully long time, he knew. For though he was ravenously hungry, he would fast until he could stand no more, until his ribs protruded from withered skin. Keeping the demon too weakened to beg or to curse or taunt. Then, when he must replenish his strength with food, he would wash it down with a river of wine, as had become his wont.

Thus had Simon’s life become—an endless round of perverse actions designed to anguish the creature, though they were in tantalizing proximity to its own kin.

Sniffing into the wind, Simon caught the scent of the approaching party long before he heard them. A cavalry column, it seemed. The useless knights of Duke Cordell de Plancy—impotent in the thrall of the dark powers that had seized control—riding in escort of a fiacre.

He took to shadow as the party approached. Noting that he had caught sight of several predatory animals during the night, he decided it best that he take to horse and return to the higher ground of the mountain foothills.

Even the hawks and jackals could be suspected of unholy converse with the demons that haunted Burgundy.

* * * *

Simon Sardonis had fought his way through the hellish winter gauntlet that had claimed most of the samurai’s company. Disappointed, betrayed by their cowardly retreat at first, he had come to his senses and realized that Gonji would return.
Must
return. The samurai’s deep-seated perception of duty as a divinely compelling force would see to that.

And thus fortified, Simon survived. He was unsure of how, having taken many wounds in the combat, at last accepting with horror that he had been allowed to survive, granted a sadistic reprieve until such time as the demon-father Grimmolech would ensnare and confront him.

He lived as a fugitive in his own homeland, amid the plains and foothills of his violated, saintly mother and murdered father. He took his living from the land by fang and talon and goodly steel, keeping to the realm of shadow. His unearthly skills and instincts, the cunning of a lifetime’s evasion of the powers of evil, served him well.

By stages he renewed his acquaintance with the Burgundy of his monastic youth as well as that of the previous year. The year of Claire. He immersed himself in the fell atmosphere of the province, knowing that his nemesis, Grimmolech, and the demon’s wicked sons, were likewise aware of
him.
They seemed unhurried about their pursuit, raising no general alarm. It was almost as if they expected him to surrender willingly. To submit to their wish to have their nameless kin, which he bore like a canker, delivered into unholy alliance with them.

His chief concern was for Claire’s safety. It was unthinkable that her importance to him might be discovered. The terror of that thought shaped his nightmares during the remaining weeks of the alien winter that had been conjured in Burgundy. He knew he dared not approach Lamorisse until he was certain of his situation.

He traced the energumen’s brothers by their workings. A simple matter, as it happened, in view of the ease with which they’d taken over all affairs of state: The boorish Serge was now marshal of the entire central plain; the wily Rene, minister of commerce, whose shape-shifting ability in the full of the moon and penchant for terrorism rivaled those of Grimmolech himself, was feared by all who had need of the forest roads; Lyle, a shire-reeve—whose true name, Simon knew, was
Belial
—lurked in the forests of the Alpine regions, ever surrounded by his cohort of predatory beasts, himself the most predatory of the lot; Roman had become chief tax assessor and special delegate to the duke, but his primary concern was the refinement of the black arts of his father; and the lustful Blaise, whose carnal appetites and amazing animal magnetism had cast him as a prodigious seducer and a being of indomitable will, had insinuated himself into the palace at Dijon itself. He had somehow conspired to marry the Marchioness Aimee, daughter of the Grand Seigneur de Plancy.

It was with considerable satisfaction that Simon recalled the eye-gouging stroke he had delivered Blaise Farouche only the year before.

Simon lived an ascetic life, denying himself all comforts, fasting, spending days and nights in prayerful meditation, exposing himself to extremes of cold. His intent was three-fold: He would purify his body and thereby sharpen his senses for the conflict to come; he would mortify himself to atone for his sins; and he would confound and torment the energumen, that parasitic being within him, who tortured his own bitter life.

For a long time after his carefully structured seclusion had begun, Simon tried not to think of Claire Dejordy, fearing that the energumen might somehow convey knowledge of her to its fellows or that his thoughts themselves might mystically wend their way to the evil wardens of this troubled land.

It was when the lycanthropic spirit discovered Simon’s wish and began to call out Claire’s name while he slept, or while he performed indelicate bodily functions, that the accursed fugitive enhanced his mortifications with the practice of self-inflicted wounds.

As he adjusted to his severe, hermetic life and went about his clandestine observations in Burgundy, Simon also was forced to deal with the ever-present specter of the full-moon transformations. By the end of his second week in the province, the moon was nearing her ripeness, and he had yet to find suitable refuge wherein he might be safely removed from any human lives the night the demon held full sway.