Fortress of Lost Worlds (31 page)

He suddenly realized that he was being childishly jealous, chiding himself and dismissing the foolish feeling. Simon was now apprehensively relating their present situation—the messengers who had been dispatched to set blockades against them; how some had never made it to their destinations (gasps of horror, pilgrims crossing themselves—though his actions had been on their behalf!); that at least one patrol tracking them would not return.

And then the grim faces of some of the Spanish soldiers in the camp, whose mixed feelings about the news could not be disguised, caused Simon to seize up. He pulled away from Salguero, locking eyes with Gonji.

They moved toward each other, bowing. Gonji’s first words came in the form of a mildly sarcastic jest: “Have you forgotten what I taught you about the need for a horse? I see you’re walking again.”

Simon’s visage twisted scornfully. “You’re in typically caustic form. I left my mount on the plains. I could not persuade it to wait while I—” His tongue could not pronounce the words.

“So sorry. A bad joke,” Gonji admitted. “I am glad to see you.”

“You can save your humor and your gratitude for later,” Simon said in his low, rasping voice. “For now, you can find me an obscure wagon to lie in, and keep these people away from me. I need sleep badly. Ride hard today for the Jucar. Wake me just after noon. You’ll have to fight your way over the bridge across the river. We’ll talk before the sun sets. Is there a surgeon along?”

Gonji shook his head sadly as he gazed into the man’s pearly eyes. Fractured redness strained them. He looked dazed. And when Gonji looked down to where Simon withdrew a bloody hand from inside his shirt, he gritted his teeth.

Simon began to tremble from the effect of the pistol wound.

“Then…” the lycanthrope said haltingly, “then send me someone with a steady hand and a sharp knife.”

A steely-nerved trooper who had dug more than one pistol ball from a comrade’s hide attended to Simon that day. Visibly shaken by the experience, he could only repeat again and again how Simon had lain awake during the entire grisly procedure. And more disturbing, how the wound had shown signs of nascent healing only an hour after the ball had been removed.

* * * *

More refugees joined them on the road that day: Jews, closet Reformers, Moriscos. Jacob Neriah’s caravan was now mixed in with a mass lemming-like movement of escapees from the Inquisition’s clutches. Gonji fostered grave misgivings as to what it would all come to.

“How many ships?” he asked old Jacob as the sun ascended to its apex.

Neriah raised two fingers, casting him a sidelong glance.

They encountered their first serious resistance when they reached the bridge over the Jucar River. A patrol of five Spanish lancers halted the caravan and began suspiciously questioning Jacob, all the while eyeing the ominous Simon Sardonis, who rode at Jacob’s side, looking distressed by his wounds. Neriah produced legitimate papers of transit and had just about convinced the patrol to allow them through when one of the lancers began routinely checking the wagons.

When he reached the dray driven by the innocently cloaked and hooded Gonji, the vigilant trooper peered more closely and registered alarm at the Oriental’s presence. He kicked his steed up close to the smiling samurai, who greeted him calmly, while averting his face.

But Corsini, who had joined the band out of his debt to Gonji as well as an idealistic sense of Gonji’s divine mission, pulled his pistol and blasted a hole in the nearby patrol commander’s forehead. Horses screamed and reared, and a short, frantic engagement ensued. The three soldiers with the commander were felled in close-quarter combat, one taken down by a springing Simon and the other two overwhelmed by the mercenary escort.

The soldier at Gonji’s dray drew his rapier. Gonji pulled the Sagami from its concealment beside him and beat the slim blade aside. Just as the samurai engaged his opponent, another pistol shot dropped the lancer from the saddle.

Before the excitement died down, Buey pounded up to Corsini and leaped to belt him off his mount with a savage backhand blow.

“Neapolitan bastard!” the Ox growled. “We could have gone by without bloodshed.”

Some of Corsini’s companions began to move to his aid, and a violent argument broke out, finally mediated by Gonji.

“No more pistols,” the samurai warned, “and no more fighting unless I give the order or initiate it myself. I, or Captain Salguero. Children are with us, and those shots were probably heard for miles.”

“Are we or are we
not
on a holy mission?” Corsini grumbled as he wiped the blood from his mouth. His friends grunted supportively.

“What kind of crusade are
you
on, Napoli?” another renegade under Salguero challenged.

“We kill no more soldiers unless it is absolutely necessary,” Captain Salguero ordered. “It is
my
responsibility to decide when any of my former
compadres
must die. Simon has
said
that no messengers made it this far to the east.”

“And what did
he
do in order to prevent them?” Corsini accused, pointing at the lycanthrope. But when he saw the look in Simon’s eye, Corsini swallowed and dropped the matter, remounting and swinging off with his band of free companions to cross the bridge.

The Spaniards watched them, still muttering with hostility. It would remain a sore point between the Spanish and Italian contingents, and in the subsequent days, refugees began to segregate themselves into hostile factions, along ethnic lines.

Gonji took note of this divisiveness with a sense of ill omen.

* * * *

Simon took a meal with Gonji early that evening, watching the sun press near the horizon, his mood plummeting with it.

“What would you have done with that patrol?” Simon asked him, out of earshot of the others. “Sooner or later the tension will get to someone again. Too many families in danger here. Cardenas over there—” Simon pointed at the solicitor from Barbaso, seated against a wagon wheel fifty feet away, reading from a small tattered book.

Gonji inhaled sonorously. “I don’t think Cardenas would start trouble. He’s an intelligent man. He wants to return to his family. I’ve promised to let him go when we reach the sea, and that seems satisfactory to him. I don’t know what to do about trouble. We must fight, I suppose. We can’t haul prisoners with us. By the way,” he continued, smiling, “nice of you to drop by for my execution. I was afraid you’d miss it.”

Simon dismissed the droll remark with a curled lip.

“It seems we’re linked again,” Gonji said, “by a third party.”

“How so?”

“This Balaerik, this…manipulative priest, or sorcerer, who used the Inquisition’s mad fanaticism to try to trap you—I was the bait, you see. He’s taken a special interest in destroying both of us. Or me, anyway. I don’t know why. Your devotion to the Church may be compromised a bit when I tell you this: Are you aware that whatever secret faction is conspiring to kill us, for whatever reason, actually went so far as to place an evil Pope in Roma for a short time?”

Simon’s reply surprised Gonji. “I suppose it can happen. Evil is powerful. But now they’ll be on their guard against such blasphemy ever occurring again. Don’t look so pleased with yourself. The Church is still the guardian of the Word of God.”

Gonji shrugged in half-agreement. “Do you know, Balaerik said he bore you a message from your father.”

“He is not my father.”

Simon’s outburst caused heads to turn in their direction. He reddened and lowered his voice at once. “Don’t
ever
call that monster my father.”

“So sorry,
mon ami
,
the possessing spirit’s father, then.”

“The
possessed
spirit’s father.
I
am not an
energumen
. I
host
one.”

Gonji’s brow knit in confusion. “Wait—there is a
third
spirit within you?
Wakarimasen—
I don’t understand.
Sprechen Sie Deutsch, bitte
.”

They changed from French to High German, a language with which Gonji was far more conversant.

“It’s something like that,” Simon explained. “The shape-shifting sorcerer Grimmolech used his foul sorcery to somehow place his
son’s
possessed spirit into the body of the Killing Beast. It’s possessed by something evil, to be sure, as is its father. Perhaps their entire family line…”

“But Grimmolech is essentially human? Not a demon, as you’ve claimed before?”

“One and the same nonetheless,” Simon responded, brimming with hatred. “Some sort of…high priest of evil power. Magic. Sorcery.”

“It’s getting bad, Simon,” Gonji said gravely. “Something must be done. And you’ve got to stop avoiding me. Somehow we are linked in this. Spiritually, cosmically. Too many wise men claim so. We must form an alliance against this…conspiracy that gives us no peace. Learn its intentions. Destroy it. I saw things in your native France since we last met. Whole towns are being swayed to supernatural evil. A visionary woman I met—she reminded me a bit of Tralayn—she told me of a…conjoining of evil forces that seek to control our world by using strange gateways into others. Other
worlds…
concurrent with our own. I’ve seen examples of the truth of her words.”

Simon was shaking his head. “It would be a mistake for us to be trapped together.”

“Stop playing the tortured loner! I want to know what’s behind all this,” Gonji argued. “What threat we pose to them. Do you know that a
dead man
returned from the Dark Lands to testify against me in Toledo? He spewed foul lies that connected me with a horrid cult I battled against—
vampires
who preyed on children, in Pont-Rouge.”

“I said it would be a mistake,” Simon repeated, “but it
may
be necessary to do as you say. For a time, perhaps. I, too, have seen evidence of what you say. And I came looking for you—to solicit your help.”

Gonji thought he detected a surprising note of
fear
in the man’s pearl-lustered eyes, for the first time ever in their association. But then he decided it must be the sun, now resting on the western horizon, which inspired it.

“I’ll explain when there’s time,” Simon added. “I’ll help you get these people to the ships, then I’ll explain. Don’t speak more of me, if they ask.” He rose to leave, compelled by the first stirrings of painful transformation. For because he had killed on the night of the full moon, he was doomed to the painful nightly reversions into the werewolf, until that moon had been supplanted by the next. Yet he still pathetically insisted that no companions take undue note of his tragic life, as if none of it were real.

“There’s one other thing about this,” Simon noted, watching the murky red orb of the sun sag lower. “I’ve learned that knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece have been set after you. It’s an order of impeccable honor and spiritual devotion. I’ll not harm any of them. They actually remind me of you, in their exalted sense of duty.” He cast the samurai a nervous, feral grin, as close to a gesture of humor as Simon could ever muster.

Gonji cocked an eyebrow. “Wait—the sea—what about when we reach the sea? How will we—”

Simon shook it off, backing away into the gathering twilight. “You’ll take to ship; I’ll go overland. What else can we do?”

“
Iye—
that won’t do. You see… I’m not going to Austria. I must sail to the Barbary States.”

“To
Africa
?
What in God’s name
for
?”

“Later. I’ll explain later.”

Simon was trembling now. “I’ll
never
board a ship. You know it’s madness to expect—
adieu
!”

“Simon,” Gonji rasped after him in a whisper, “what will you be about this night?”

“I’ll
prowl
.”

Then he was bounding astride a skittish horse and kicking it hard across the savannahs, dwindling into the distance. The horse, Gonji knew, would soon abandon him in terror.

The samurai morosely ambled over to Cardenas, who had been watching the two of them.

“What are you reading?” Gonji inquired, not sure why, since he cared little.

“Bacon… Francis Bacon,” Cardenas replied airily, and thumbing to a particular page, he quoted without looking: “‘I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.’”

Gonji stiffened, chilled by the sudden quiet touch at his elbow. It was Valentina, proffering him a cup of rum. He accepted it with thanks and tipped it at Cardenas, who tentatively held up his own goblet in reply.

“To the stroke of death,” Gonji toasted.

The three of them exchanged small talk awhile, Gonji wary of the brightness of the starry autumn night. Cognizant of the brooding posture of the former Spanish troopers, who drank in lament of the countrymen they’d been forced to fight.

To Gonji, it seemed they could not depart Spain soon enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

So stealthy was the night attack on the dozing sentries outposted to the north of the camp that only one of them was able to squeeze off a warning shot before they were overcome.

The shot galvanized the camp. Strangled cries were hushed, and women and children were herded into and under wagons for safety as the first musket enfilade raked their left flank. One man was hit, and before the dazed fighting men could assemble, another volley spattered the encampment, felling another mercenary and a dray horse.

Gonji belted his swords and leapt astride the black mare, encountering Salguero as he clung low and checked the priming pan of a pistol.

“Patrol?” Gonji advanced.

“Musket company,” the captain corrected. “Probably down from Cuenca.”

“We’ve got to hit them, Hernando,” the samurai said. “Too many innocent people in danger.”

Salguero moistened his lips and nodded resignedly in agreement. “They can outrange our pistols.”

“Not our bows,” the samurai reminded, leaping down off the horse again and calling the fighting men to assemble on foot. He caught up a longbow and quiver of shafts as another volley ripped into the camp. Someone shrieked inside a wagon, struck by the fire.

“See the flashes?” Salguero called out. “Two hundred yards.”

“I make it a hundred seventy-five,” Gonji judged.

They split the archers and crossbowmen into three squads and set out, firing in rotating volleys, each squad scrambling ahead after their fusillade, running low in the darkness as they reloaded. The arbalesters trailed the archers because of the longer reloading time. Arrows and bolts
whickering
across the starlit sky, they advanced like the beak and wings of a swooping hawk.

Now the musketeers, seeing their tactic, stood to fire in concentration on one wing at a time. The left flank of bowmen took note too late, firing simultaneously with the Spanish troopers. Two men of the six renegades dropped, one of them crying out repeatedly in anguish, his screams terrible to hear in the darkness.

But Gonji’s squad at the center of the counterattack leapt up as if to fire, dropped to the ground when they saw the muskets come to bead, and scrabbled back up after the discharge to fire at will, as they dispersed to form two smaller wings. The outcries of the skewered musketeers testified to their success.

Now the freedom fighters came on at the dead run, sweat glistening on anxious visages, as they dared the deadly gunfire. They were near enough to see the frantic reloading of the muskets by moonlight. The next gun volley felled two more free companions and one of Salguero’s rebel lancers, but a like number of musketeers spun down from the impact of quarrels and war arrows.

Loaded pistols came out in the hands of the charging defenders, trained on the musketeer position, their distance from the attackers down to a hundred yards. Still the musket company held its ground, their commander spreading their line to minimize the effect of the counter-fire.

A blast of sizzling pellets whistled past. Gonji exhaled a sharp breath, standing firm and relaxing himself, as he arced through a powerful draw and sighted on the commander. His shot hissed away, the samurai following its sleek trajectory.

Too high,
he decided. Then—

The commander’s head looked as though it was suddenly snapped off his shoulders, and he was knocked off his feet. Shouts of victory broke from the bowmen when they saw. The musketeers began to fall back now, and the refugee band descended on them with a vengeance, pistols igniting like fireflies over the plain.

Gonji nodded with satisfaction. It had been his third try at the commander. The dungeon sojourn had cost him dearly. Raking out the Sagami, he tossed away the bow and hurtled forward with the others.

There was another brief exchange of mostly erratic gunfire, then an engagement of clashing steel, some of the Spanish company fleeing in panic.

“Buey,” Gonji shouted to the sword-wielding giant, “can’t let any of them escape.”

The Ox nodded and took two men with him in pursuit of the retreating troopers, who tried to take to horse.

And then Gonji was in the midst of the fray. Two swordsmen came at him as one. He sprinted into the pincering charge, then stamped to a halt, his feint drawing them off balance. His lightning, scythe-like strokes batted both blades aside, the return blows ripping through both men’s midsections before the singing parries had left their ears.

He continued on at the run, coming to engagement with the lunging figure-eight whirl of a sizzling rapier point. The Spanish swordsman clenched his teeth, his face contorting with exertion as he strove to use his blade’s length advantage to hold the samurai at bay. They clashed twice, both feinting a disengagement to open a line of attack. Again—sparks showering the frigid darkness.

The Spaniard lunged deep—

Gonji dropped to one knee and released his left hand to rake overhead with his right. He unhinged the other’s sword arm at the wrist, the clenched rapier tossing through the air in the severed hand as the man howled. Blood spurted onto Gonji’s jerkin, across his cheek, as his passing two-handed plunge finished the opponent.

Then someone in a Spanish jack was bounding up from the rear, hefting two pistols. Gonji’s breath hissed as he spun and came to middle guard.

“
God—
damn it, don’t you swing that thing at me!”

It was Sergeant Orozco, running with an ungainly limp, snarling at him. Gonji breathed a sigh of relief and waved him on.

“You’re gonna kill me yet before you have to pay me back my silver, eh?” Orozco was bellowing. He fired at an onrushing trooper, downing him. Then he kept on hobbling after Buey’s band.

A pikeman withdrew his gory spike point from a dead mercenary and brought it up at Gonji. The samurai stumbled back, raising his blade into engagement. He tripped over the body of a musketeer, seeing the deadly pike descend at his face as he fell.

He heard shouts and a shot in the expanded moment as he tried to roll out of range of the razor-edged pike. The plunging blade tore through the top of his right shoulder, and he emitted a sharp outcry of pain, swinging his
katana
wildly behind him, clacking against the wooden haft.

Then he was scrabbling on his knees, slapping at the blood seeping from his rent jerkin, pushing up onto his feet. Backing, swatting at the oncoming pike again, wiping a bloody hand on his breeches.

The pikeman sensed a kill. Lunging—stabbing—weaving his angry weapon through space warmed by Gonji’s retreating form.

The samurai recovered his senses, his
ko-dachi—
the short blade used in
seppuku,
the ritual suicide—snicking out of its sheath. Teeth gritted in defiance, he brought his twin blades into counterattack, knowing the ferocious potential of the well-trained pikeman.

He caught a lunge in an X-block, driving the pike’s spear point into the ground. Slipped the next lunge, his shoulder wound burning painfully. Caught another thrust and drove the pike-point down harder, leaping back as the weapon tore up from the ground in a frenzied slice aimed at his groin. The pikeman lost his pot helmet in the hard, jerking motion.

Another darting lunge. Gonji caught it and turned it aside this time, a quick, circular lick of his short sword notching the haft of the pike. A swift horizontal slash across eye level caused the pikeman to jerk backward. Gonji slid the
katana
along the pike and plunged it into the warrior’s belly. His following slash of the
ko-dachi
ripped through the man’s throat.

The
katana
had penetrated so deeply that Gonji was pulled along as the Spaniard fell onto his back. A hard tug freed the gleaming blade. Gonji glanced around him.

It was over, for the most part. His comrades stood about, catching their breaths, nodding to Gonji as they leaned on bows and dropped to their knees.

Shots split the darkness, tiny firelicks spitting in the northern distance. Gonji waved for them to follow.

When they had gone about fifty yards, they encountered Buey’s pursuing party—all intact, including the grimacing Sergeant Orozco, who clearly had returned to combat too soon on his wounded leg.

A rumbling of approaching horses—

Salguero shouted for them to assemble, but Buey motioned that the threat was over, pointing: It was the musket company’s scattered horses. Two mounted figures were herding them toward the encampment. Strangers, clutching still smoking pistols.

“Who—?” Salguero was asking, but Buey shrugged him off.

“They helped us. Dropped the last two as they rode away. Corsini—” Buey was moving toward the Italian brigand, extending a hand, offering a bandanna to stanch the flow of blood from a rapier cut on Corsini’s face. He’d sport a new scar across his old one, Buey observed. Then the two of them were clearing the air between them, patching their differences.

But everyone else watched the closing strangers. The riderless mounts streamed past, and then the two Frenchmen clopped up and saluted Gonji’s party.

The taller man scanned them with penetrating blue eyes. He was fair of hair and skin, and a glimmer of a smile perked his lips when his gaze fell on Gonji.

“
Gracias, hombres
,”
Salguero was saying. “
Habla usted espanol
?”

“
Castellano
,” the Frenchman answered. “Castilian Spanish.”

“Ah, fine,” the captain said. “May we ask who you are and what interest you have in aiding us?”

“I am Brian de Chancy,” the tall blond man replied. “My companion is Armand Le Clerc. Let me say that we have a common interest with—” He turned from Salguero to Gonji.

The samurai stiffened, ignoring the pain in his bleeding shoulder now, wary, as he was these days, of Frenchmen seeking him out.

“You are, are you not,” the shorter, darker Le Clerc was asking in a youthful voice, “the celebrated warrior Gonji Sabatake?”

Gonji nodded slightly, still cautious. The pair looked to each other, and de Chancy dismounted and strode up to Gonji. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a shriveled white rose. This he held up before Gonji’s eyes.

Buey rubbed his nose and sniffed. “I think you’re being courted,” he said in Portuguese, some of the men snickering.

De Chancy chortled. “I’ll dispense with chivalry, my loutish friend,” he told Buey, “since our mission is urgent.”

Buey affected a wryly brutish expression as his yokefellows brayed at the implied threat. De Chancy turned back to Gonji.

“Do you recognize this symbol of secrecy?”

Gonji shook his head. “So sorry, I cannot say that I do.” But he was thinking of the Knights of Wonder.

“Well, how is your knowledge of heraldry?” de Chancy asked, shrugging off his greatcoat and turning slowly before their curious gazes.

He wore a white mantle emblazoned at the back with a red Latin cross, and Gonji wondered at the gasps and exclamations this evoked from some of the others.

“Jesus-Maria,” Salguero was breathing. “The Order of Knights Templars? But—”

“Yes, I know,” de Chancy said with an indulgent smile, “suppressed—
disbanded
,
so they would have you believe—for nearly three hundred years. Not so.
I
am the present Grand Master of the Templars, and
monsieur le samurai
’s
work has been brought to our attention. You’ll forgive me if I speak briefly and to the point.” He addressed Gonji now, who could only stare in narrow-eyed bewilderment as to the portent of all this.

“For centuries we’ve been the guardians of knowledge the world is ill prepared to receive. Some knowledge, you see, leads to madness. You, it seems, are on the brink of discovering certain important facets of that knowledge. Your long struggle against the tyranny of evil powers has brought you to the doorway of Arcadia—”

“Arcadia?” Gonji repeated, dumbfounded.

“Yes,
monsieur le samurai—
Paradise. The Garden of Eden. Lost innocence—what is left of it after eons of pride and greed. The transcendent knowledge of reclaiming the simultaneously physical and spiritual realm the Creator made for humankind. A world of endless possibilities, of which this earth we walk is but the tiniest fragment. Grasping, ravening powers have sought for millennia to aggrandize themselves of all Arcadia, to enslave all the sentient races who aren’t already enslaved.”

Gonji was shaking his head, staying the knight’s torrent of impassioned words. “I’m afraid, Sir Knight, that you’ve lost me. What exactly am I supposed to do about this—‘battle of worlds’ when I can’t even be sure I’ll get out of Spain alive?”

“You must,” the young knight Le Clerc said simply.

“Take this,” de Chancy said, pushing a pouch toward Gonji. “Within you’ll find a cheque for a…substantial amount, which the Hapsburg chancellery will honor when you’ve reached Vienna. They will exchange this note for silver or gold. Take no great heed of the name on the authorization, and do not connect it in any way with the order. The money is to be used toward the promulgation of the
Wunderknechten
movement. When you’ve done that, you must continue your quest after a doorway into Arcadia. You will know it by the words
Et in Arcadia Ego.”

“‘And in Arcadia I—’” Gonji tilted his head, prompting the man, as he translated. “I—
what
? No verb?”

De Chancy looked to Le Clerc and smiled. “That is the secret of Arcadia. You must help us to learn it, so that we may win the battle to reclaim the fullness of the worlds that were created for all sentient beings. Where have they gone? How may common men pass into them?”

“And exactly how shall I attain this wondrous knowledge?” Gonji asked peevishly.

“By asking—whomever guards the… doorways,” Le Clerc answered.

“Some call them
jetties
,” de Chancy added.

“The gatekeeper?” Gonji said, recalling Domingo’s similar charge.

“
Oui
,”
de Chancy breathed reverently. “But have a care, sir—they might be angels.”

The refugees within earshot whispered and jostled as Gonji fell silent, mulling over the new questions that joined the queue behind the others that already vied for solution.

* * * *