replied with a tremulous breath, “I’ve been there.”
Gonji experienced a rash of gooseflesh. Could the strange man have learned of Gonji’s own participation in the outrage at Holy Word Monastery?
Simon’s trembling subsided, and he glared at Gonji.
“What did Tralayn tell you...of me?”
“Enough,” Gonji replied evenly, gauging the reaction. Then: “Everything. Enough to know that you shirk your responsibility, your duty. You resist your destiny, Monsieur Thing-of-Legend—Herr Grejkill—shi-kaze...Deathwind!”
Gonji’s pulse raced, and he began to pace as he spoke, circling about Simon imperiously, their roles subtly reversed now, as the man of folklore and legend cast his eyes groundward again and flushed with a look that resembled shame. Or guilt. Or self-loathing.
Simon swallowed with noticeable difficulty. “She broke her vow.”
“What is a vow,” Gonji proposed, ambling with hands behind his back, “when measured against the lives of men?” A poignant stab: You speak in tarnished, hypocritical assertions, Gonji-san. Does not bushido itself demand—Iye, I must maintain the upper hand. He must be made to see. These people—they matter. “She broke a vow for the higher value of saving the city and the people she loved. She knew that your great power might be—”
Simon hissed him to silence with a flash of gleaming white teeth, abruptly hostile once again. “Leave this place,” he shouted. “Go away from here. All I ever asked of men was that they leave me alone. Alone with this accursed burden I bear like some scourge out of Hell. My every crossing with men has brought death and destruction. Now you come to me, an infidel, blaring like a herald of Death that all those I could call friend are dead. Leave me now!”
Simon turned his back to him, shoulders bunching with tension. But Gonji continued pacing around him, sweating palms rubbing over the fabric of his half-kimono as he picked over his words, like a man traversing a thicket of deadly thorns.
“Ah, so desu ka? Is that the truth?” Gonji probed. “You care for people only after they’re dead, so that you can play godling with your aroused sense of vengeance? Why don’t you try doing something for the living now and again?”
Simon whirled and transfixed him with the silver darts of his eyes as the pale moon burst through the cloud cover. A searching wind whirled into the glade.
“Infidel,” Simon intoned venomously, “you have no idea what you’re saying. If you’ve been told what you claim, then you must know what you ask is impossible. You could never understand my lot. And I don’t like you. You...or your idiotic methods—what in God’s name was your plan the other night? What kind of rebellious action was that? Yet you attack my sense of responsibility?”
His words stung Gonji deeply. Rampant visions swelled: The vulgar drunken spectacle he’d made of himself; his failed duty; his shame and embarrassment at being forbidden even the saving stroke of seppuku.
He strove to lay at rest the mocking voices, to come to terms with painful honesty.
“Hai...you’re quite right,” Gonji replied with a thin, tight smile. “At least half-right. The action was not of my order. But I, too, have failed in my duty toward these people. Yet if I can I’m going to salvage what’s left of their way of life. When I came into their service it was unbidden, owing them nothing, at least at first. But you—you—they’ve been protecting your secret, harboring you, sheltering you, some of them, for a year now. Abiding all the while your anti-social contempt. Now they’re dying in the streets by sword and pistol and sorcery, crying out for assistance, and what do you do? Nothing but lash out on your own, strike down Klann’s troops as it pleases you by cover of night, only to have citizens beaten and shot for your crimes—ja, crimes—”
Simon’s scalding eyes followed him. “Mind your tongue, barbarian—” The ensorceled hermit began to circle warily again, such that they now described orbits around each other. The roncin mare shrilled and bucked as Simon neared her tether.
Gonji’s own anger rose again. “An old Polish farmer once told me of a proverb spoken in these territories. Something about the filthiest bird being the one who befouls his own nest. From my vantage you’re a pretty filthy bird these days—”
“Have a care, heathen swine.”
“Hai, call me ‘heathen’ as well you might. But if it’s insults you crave, then call me fool for having sought you out these many long years. Ten—miserable—karma-laden years as a worthless ronin, wandering this backward continent in search of the legendary Deathwind—him who would guide me to my destiny!” Gonji snorted and spat noisily behind him. “That’s for the trail I’ve ridden. If your wish is to insult me, then laugh at the way the gods mock my every effort.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Ha! Mine and that of the people of Vedun, now that their lives have become entwined with mine,” Gonji sneered. “How easy for you to cast aside the troubles of the world you move in, with a simple swipe of your legendary aloofness. And you’re wrong, Sir Hermit—there are those who still care about you. Tralayn saw to that with her constant insistence to them that a powerful Deliverer would be coming to their aid. Despite all my efforts on their behalf, with all the scratching and clawing and dishonorable compromise of principle I’ve had to bear just to win some measure of respect, they still wait for you.”
Contempt filled the glade as they stalked each other cautiously, the wind a vortex that sledded around the clearing. Simon seemed about to respond, but Gonji grimaced and cut him short. “You think you have just reason to be bitter because your fellow man has made you an outcast? I could teach you a thing or two about loneliness, Herr Beast-with-the-Soul-of-a-Man—or is it the other way around? You think you’re the only man who ever felt starved for the approval, the companionship, the affection of his fellows? Do you know what it’s like to be a half-breed, to have no life of meaning on any continent? Those people are going to die back there in Vedun, and their deaths will be owing much to you, you and your misdirected vengeance—”
The samurai broke eye contact with him, turned his head away, his breath coming in strained pulls now. “To so lose control like this goes against all my noble training, and I would as lief die by my own hand in this spot as bare my emotions. Yet I can do nothing right now to disguise my revulsion for you....”
Simon stopped pacing and glared at him, his hard gaze transforming, for just a moment, into a curious mix of sympathy and uncertainty. But Gonji saw nothing of it.
The tall man looked down at the bow and quiver at his feet. “Why don’t you pick up your things...and go now.”
The sheathed katana’s hilt was squeezed in a grip that might have throttled a man, as Gonji spat a choked curse and regained his harmony after a struggle. Again he met the mystery man’s eyes, and now his own eyes of black marble flashed with implied threat.
Do what you’ve come to do, by whatever means....
“How can you worship as you claim?” Gonji queried. “You make a shrine of your self-pity and worship there.”
Simon’s eyebrows arched in quiet, rising petulance. “You’ve said what you’ve come to say. Now go—”
“Aren’t followers of Iasu supposed to band together for their common good, for the struggle against the evil things in the world? Even the civilians in Vedun
