Gonji: Red Blade from the East (11 page)

* * * *

“Those are the lucky ones.”

Navárez waved at the scattered bodies of the monks who had raised staffs and axes and knives against the invaders.

“The sheep that grew claws—they’re the fortunate.”

He was probably right, Gonji reflected, watching as pleading monks were herded like cattle into one corner of the ward. Tora absorbed his tension, pawing at the ground. Gonji was queasy in the saddle. Part of it came with the ague, the mucous-laden sinuses, watering eyes, aching body; part was rooted in his uneasiness about the fate of the monks. Priests were of a separate caste from warriors and warranted exemption from battle, especially here in Europe where they too often died at cowardly hands. His brooding anger was about equally divided between the mercenaries for such treatment of priests and the priests themselves for spurning the dignity to die fighting. At least some had. But these others—?

Stupid. Like sheep they’d allowed easy capture and, like sheep, they would die. But the thought brought no consolation.

Two bandits dashed, yelping, out of the entrance of the keep just ahead of belching flames and black smoke. A late afternoon breeze whipped the curling firelicks as they caught on the oaken doors. A handful of monks had taken refuge in the keep and barricaded themselves into an upper floor, but Navárez had had storage rooms and sleeping chambers fired, and lapping orange tongues now glowed in the grillwork of the ground floor windows.

A face appeared in an upper story, eyes bulging with terrible understanding.

Gonji wondered what purpose this served, this stupid waste of lives and time. Was Klann avenging his heavy losses to the Church army? Foolish and pointless petulance, that. Did these priests have something he wanted? Highly unlikely. There was surely no gold to be had here; the monks lived an austere life, surviving on what they could raise themselves.

Navárez approached with the ever-present Esteban, and Gonji made no effort to mask his disgust.

“You don’t like this sort of thing, eh?” Navárez said.

Gonji watched as several coils of rope were produced. The bastards were going to hang them.

“No.”

“Well, maybe if you have no stomach for it, you would be better off with some other army, no?”

Esteban flashed his jackass grin, and added, “I think maybe he’s afraid their ghosts will find him in the night, eh?”

Gonji said nothing, just stared as some of the priests began a group prayer in cracked voices while the stoop-shouldered old abbot and the tall snowy-maned priest Gonji had seen outside the walls tried to extract a reason from their captors. A few began to sob.

Navárez pointed. “Go get them started in the orchard. The small trees at the edge.” Esteban trotted off, calling out orders. The captain leaned closer to Gonji.

“You think I like killing priests? You think I like—”

“I don’t give a damn what you like,” Gonji snapped.

“I follow orders!” the captain bellowed. Then, lowering to a whisper, he continued, “And you would be wise to do the same, without questioning, without thinking about your...heathen ways, whatever those may be. Klann is my liege lord, the Lord King of any who ride with this company. You remember that and you forget your feelings”—he sat upright in the saddle—“or you ride off. Now.”

They glowered at each other. Gonji could think of nothing to say in his confused and shapeless anger at having fallen in with these dregs. The man was right—duty was duty. But here in this accursed land, Gonji had come to doubt even
such
cherished beliefs.

“I don’t like you,” Navárez said with breathy uncertainty, seemingly both regretting the words and glad they were spoken. “I don’t like your beliefs, and I don’t like
you.
And I don’t like you thinking I owe you anything for what happened back there. Do we understand each other?”

Gonji nodded and smiled wryly. He was rather surprised by this frankness but pleased with it as well.

“Tonight we chant the sorcerer’s invocation. At the darkest hour. By then you will either be one of us or...maybe you’ll be dead.”

Navárez wheeled and bolted off, motioning for Gonji to join the mounted party at the orchard. After an interval the samurai clopped off to the fragrant grove, his curiosity nudged as the first few monks were raised on the walls and lashed tightly, rather than hanged. Thick inky smoke fumed from the keep, and the pale, gaping monks in the upper story grating were appealing for mercy. Their tortured prayers wafted skyward.

Gonji joined a group, including Julio and the two Mongols, who were denuding fruit trees and nearby oaks as far up as blades and axes would reach. Some men stuffed both their saddle pouches and their mouths with the luscious fruits. Then several monks were led to the grove as thunder boomed in the mountains. Helpless to do anything else, Gonji assisted in binding the priests to the trees in a rude mass crucifixion.

An hour later Gonji sat with the rest of the column at the edge of the valley and could only wonder at the purpose of all this. The isolated Carpathian monastery, its central keep a pillar of roiling flames, had become a bizarre perversion of religious devotion. Priests dangled from trees and gates; they were lashed to embrasures and sconces, some supported by leaning beams; in one place on the southern bailey wall, a string of four monks looked like paper doll cutouts attached by hands and feet. Some prayed in silence. Some whimpered; some cried out loudly for God to prove His existence and spare them or screamed for deliverance at any price, only to be chastened by others.

It would take them a long time to die like that.

“Vamos!”
Navárez called at last. “We must be far from here by sunset.”

On Navárez’ command the company pounded away from the wretched scene and into the hills, but not before Gonji caught sight of a horror that would plague his dreams for many nights hence: the maddened monks in the upper story of the blazing keep had somehow torn free a window grating and were leaping to the ground far below, their bodies aflame like human pitch.

CHAPTER FIVE

The company climbed up into the twisting mountain passes again, emerging between two frosted peaks to clatter down a steep trail at breakneck speed. This emptied onto the main road they had traveled earlier, and they galloped along as if in full charge. Behind them the sun had already gone molten in a brooding leaden horizon, and the vast expanse of spear-point pine peaks to their right ruffled before a gathering storm.

All the adventurers seemed more intense than ever, their actions fired with immediacy. Frantic, maddened men.

Once or twice Gonji fancied that he heard keening shrieks in the mountains, shrills that could have come from no bird he knew. His face felt flushed and his eyes glazed over with rising fever, but he was more concerned now about tonight. Where were they heading? What would he do about the invocation? Would they meet the elusive Klann and his sorcerer?

He was sure of one thing: He was about full up with this troop of gutter scum and the senseless mop-up and revenge duty that seemed their sole purpose.

They rumbled east for nearly an hour, seemingly pursued by the approaching storm. Lightning arced in the gathering darkness; thunder pealed as the gods roared down on the tiny world of men. They passed a cluster of wagons, nomadic locals dressed in florid garb, whose hostile stares followed them until they disappeared down the road. They were deep in the Hungarian marches, and every massed group was a potential enemy. But they encountered no military parties, and just as the first heavy droplets of rain fell, the 3rd Free Company’s fine remnant loped up through a rocky delve and crunched down a shale-and-bramble ravine that led into another wooded and fog-shrouded valley.

Beyond and below the slopes of the oak-dappled valley, on a flat table of land, bristled a thick pine forest, like the plush carpet of a titan king. The treetops were streaked with an unnatural light. For a time Gonji couldn’t locate the strange light source in the slanting rain and bouncing motion of the ride. He blinked back the droplets on his eyelids and searched the skies. There, peeking furtively around a blue mountain summit, was the impossibly huge orb of the full moon, somehow pulsing its dirty yellow glimmer through the matted thunderheads, as if it were descending to earth. Cringing beneath it in the distance, glimpsed through cracks in the fog, were patchwork thatches of cultivated earth. A town or village.

Something came to Gonji against his wishes, a story told by a one-legged bowyer he had met in Austria. In his youth the man had run with a bandit horde that ravaged these mountains. Bold they were, and fearless. The story was told of a secret valley where dwelt an ancient race of things that were not quite men. Travelers blundering into its mysterious fastness were eerily enslaved in a way not conceived by any human overseer. Few believed the legend. But the bowyer recalled having ridden into a misty valley with his band and later stumbling out alone on a lathered steed, bewildered, and with no memory of the valley or the fate of his companions. Nor could he remember why he now rode with a very neatly cauterized leg stump....

Gonji shuddered and coughed wetly.

The troop sloshed to a halt on a treacherous lookout point, and Navárez indicated their destination. Below, pinpricks of lamplight marked the layout of a peasant village. Beyond the farmland spread miles of low rolling hills and dense forest that gradually swept upward into the mountains again at a point due east, where the bluish white caps, limned in moonlight, looked impassable. This valley appeared to be the scoop of a great curving bowl cut out of the Transylvanian Alps.

“We take that,” the captain announced, “and we hold it until we get further orders,
amigos.
Then tonight we can hold a feast in the king’s honor, eh?”

A rippling laugh swept the company.

“There must be women in the village—it’s been a long time on the trail,” someone said, a chorus of lusty assents answering in several languages.

“And food—
good
food!”

“And wine—maybe Tokay wine!”

“
Cállate!
Shut up, before we alert them, eh?” Navárez cautioned. “Mute anything you carry that clanks. We leave our horses in the woods down there and take it on foot. No talk, no noise. No quarter for any who resist. And most important,
no one
must escape the village,
entender
? All right, let’s go—quietly.”

Gonji covered his mouth and tried to hold back the cough that broke thickly in his chest. Navárez looked back at him speculatively, but Gonji avoided his eyes and squared his shoulders, snuffling back mucous and hawking and spitting once. He could feel the eyes on him, so he affected a rough-and-ready bulldog mask and gazed around the company with manly elan.

Always the virile show,
neh
?

Bunched far too closely for a descent in the dark, the company jostled one another dangerously on the incline. Then a horse slipped in the mud and tossed its rider in a heap, barrel-rolling down the ravine with a fierce whinnying. Navárez cursed at the fallen mercenary, who was unhurt. But the horse had broken a leg, and its anguished cries numbed the troop with fear of compromise until one man bounded down, sword in hand, and ended the beast’s misery.

They dismounted at the edge of the wood and scrambled up a rise. The rain increased in intensity, aiding their effort at stealth as they flanked out in a long ragged rank. The furtive moon dipped behind the trees, and between the darkness and the steady rustling of rain in the dense foliage, one could only trust blindly that the hulking shadow at his side meant no ill. A fine place for a murder.

You will either be one of us or...maybe you’ll be dead.

Heavy and sopping, Gonji’s sandals and
tabi
, his thick socks, were clung with sticky needles and mud. Several times he stifled sneezes. The footing was spongy from centuries of rotted pine needles. Overhead an owl complained loudly, indignant at either their passing or his rain-slicked coat.

They emerged from the wood and flattened in the mushy grass of a clearing within sight of the village. Dull lamplight sprayed softly through the mist, and a dog barked in the lanes, out of view. The shadows between the huts were still. Here and there a blade slithered out in an impatient fist.

By now Gonji was beyond feeling any pity for the plight of these villagers. Between the brutalization of the past few days and the damnable illness, all the feelings he had left were willingly given over to the blandishments of self-pity.
Cholera
, he thought, if I weren’t so damn run-down, I’d probably be curious about what the main body’s up to right now. They must be onto something big. The only military sense this village foray makes is to stifle an alert to the head man of this territory. We must be near his castle, and other mercenary companies must be on missions like this all over the mountains. Great
kami
, I’d like to be heading up some massed line charge right now! Karma. Anyway, that’s foolish. I’m sick as a cur, and I need some rest. This business should be finished simply enough....