caught his meaning and nodded. “Ah, wakarimasu—I see—Michael, did the troops take a body count of the citizenry?”
“I don’t think so. They were preoccupied with their own slain.”
“Yoi—good. Then the wagons will be hitched for the purpose of moving coffins to the homes of the bereaved. If there is no interference with the movement of the first few actual bodies, then we begin moving the armament coffins to strategic locations. These will then be the first stop for militiamen when the fighting starts.” Gasps and whispers of shock.
Gonji went on, gleaming black eyes mirroring the images in his thoughts. “But that may not be enough...we’ll also have to have raiding parties to attack the garrison’s armory...and loot the dead soldiery...we should be grateful for this rain spell that—”
“It’s sacrilege!” Galioto the dairy stockman cried, his face a landscape of anguish. “Some of the bodies will already be corrupting. To deny them burial is—”
“That’s right,” Gonji said, picking up part of the man’s line of concern, “we’ll have to see what Dr. Verrico and the undertaker can do about retarding corruption. And keep the coffins sealed....”
A farmer jumped up, storming.
“Men of Vedun—come to your senses! Listen to what these madmen are ordering. The bodies of your loved ones corrupting in your homes—”
“Sit down, Yuschak,” Michael called over the din.
“—our children, our women, the old folk all led down here like cattle to the slaughter! Eaten by beasts from the underworld. Stung to death so that they bloat like fish—like—like—like Baron Rorka!”
Aldo Monetto bounded over the benches, past the bodies that parted before his charge, to stand in the middle of the fearful dissidents.
“Listen to me, all of you,” Monetto said, gesturing placatingly. “Now, you all know me. You know that I give my heart to the defense of the city. My loyalty to the leadership of the council, to Gonji’s devotion to our cause. You know that I tilted at the great worm from the tunnels. Karl and I—some of the others here—we fought with it, helped destroy it, and are here now to tell of it. It’s true that it was here, there’s no denying the awful reality of it. But it’s also true that its carcass now lies in ruin in that very cavern where we’ve trained so hard. It’s now a monument to our hard work. That’s so, no? Mord threw his best at us, and we destroyed it. At the last it went down like a hog in Roric’s slaughterhouse, like some quail you’ve seen Karl down with his bow.”
He paused briefly, glancing around at the anxious, encircling citizens. “Now you also know the size of my family, and my love for them. And I tell you that our homes are not safe. There’s no sanctuary in Vedun anymore. Some of you saw what that giant did, dragging people from their homes. I see by your faces that you’ll not forget, though you pray that the memory would lie still.” Monetto paused and licked his parched lips, seemingly out of words.
“My children will be evacuated from Vedun. And that’s...all I have to say,” he concluded.
Gonji caught Aldo’s eye and passed him a slight nod of gratitude.
“All this horror,” a craftsman whined in despair, unable to stave off the stomach-twisting fear and apprehension any longer. “Our families threatened. The holy chapel become an armory.” He sobbed. “Flavio would not want that—”
“No!” Gonji cried. “Flavio would not want that!”
He leaped down from the table and stalked into their numbers with a cold and deadly expression, as if his intent were to strike a man dead. The chatter abated, and all eyes were on the samurai.
Gonji recognized the subtle turning in the group’s spirit following Monetto’s heartfelt reproach of their timidity: Resignation to fate, perhaps. A nascent malleability of their collective will. Ignoring the cautions flung before his quick-stepping mind by the conscience of the Western child part of him, he moved in among them and began to shape their dawning resignation.
“Flavio would not want that,” he repeated in Spanish, in which language—one of the earliest he’d learned—he felt most comfortable at oratory.
“Flavio would not want to see his chapel filled with concealed weapons, his compatriots’ dead denied a quick consignment to their graves. His friends in armed revolt....
“By now you’ve all heard how I failed in my solemn duty to protect Flavio. What you may not know is that I would have ended my own life that very day for this grave dereliction of duty. This bitter dishonor. Had not my good friends reminded me that”—his voice shrank to a hoarse whisper—“that Flavio would not want that.” He paused, blinked, as if awaking from a dream.
“But tell me—what would Flavio want? He is beyond asking—may all good kami convey him to his reward—so we are left with asking ourselves. Would he have wanted us to hate Klann or his captains for what they’ve brought to us? No, Flavio would not want that. Nor are the Llorm troops, or even those mercenaries who do what they do because they know no other way, nor are any of these to be hated. Flavio, again, would not want that—but...to hate the evil that they do, the evil perpetrated by Mord. This alone would Flavio want in this business—that we hate the evil and fight it to the death, if necessary.”
He clamped his hands behind him and strode with head down as he spoke now. “Flavio...was a great man. A man of shining idealism and firmness of belief that he adhered to all the days of his life. He should not have died in vain, if we fight now to save the seed of his ideals: the dream of peace and freedom of worship and the brotherhood of men of all nations—and you, Vedun, are that seed!
“You cannot live and grow in this place any longer. You would be trampled under the hooves of dragoons; your women savagely used; your children dragged to befouled dungeons and hideously sacrificed to the whims of the dark powers. And, I can assure you, Flavio would not want that. No...he would not. I think, if he were with us now, he would have to agree with the wisdom of our plan....
“That is all that I can think to tell you.”
He moved back to the table, where he leaned and crossed his arms, listening to the breathy silence as the translators finished, feeling the congealing atmosphere of bitter acceptance.
Paille shattered the sepulchral spell. “Why the long faces? Can’t you see the bright tomorrow to it all? When the town is cleansed, you can all return to your lives, to a new order, free of the yoke of—”
Ignace Obradek stood and cackled trenchantly, twisting and turning to crane his head toward the chamber’s dim ceiling, as if his dead eyes could see something denied the rest of them. By his side, the gloomy Paolo kept his place and let his boss rant.
“Bede gowno sie przed dam sie!” the blind wagoner squealed, barely able to squeeze the words out between gusts of mirth.
Several men brayed at the words.
“What’s that?” Gonji asked.
Most of the men near Gonji shrugged sheepishly. Stefan Berenyi seemed about to reply, but he was stopped short by a cultured crystal voice.
“It’s Polish,” Lydia Benedetto explained. “Sort of an...old man’s battle cry: ‘I’ll shit myself, but I won’t give up.’ He seems to have become the spokesman for the
