Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds. T.C. Rypel
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warrior was left to his own resources: the might of his sword arm, the strength of his courage, the depth of his experience.
Tora’s hooves thumped easily across the crusted, barren plain as they departed the river road for the less traveled southwest track Gonji sought. Gaining it at mid-morn, Gonji soon encountered a small caravan of traders bound for Barcelona. These hucksters took a dim view of this singular foreign warrior with his formidable array of weaponry. Gonji doffed his eye-slitted sallet and bowed, engaging them in curt conversation. They cast many an edgy glance at his pistols, wicked halberd, and matched set of swords before considering selling him the few provisions he requested.
The tinkle of his gold and the advantage of their numbers had just about won them over when a leathery-faced old duffer pointed out the wooden crucifix tied about Tora’s neck.
“Sacrilege,” the merchant declared.
“How do you know what my horse believes?” Gonji queried archly. The jest was lost on them. “In truth, I believe the power of Iasu this cross declares will ward off the evil ones. I can think of no simpler, more direct way of showing vampires and werewolves not to waste their time on me.”
They sold him the few meager goods he asked for, charging prices that reflected their low esteem and drawing the line at the black powder he needed for his pistols.
“Whatever your business,” one of them told him in parting, “mind that you steer well clear of the Valley of Barbaso.”
“Hai. Domo arigato,” Gonji replied, to their befuddlement. He bowed and rode on, with their gun barrels quietly leveled at him until he was nearly out of sight.
Later that same morning, a band of mounted hunters sold him a sinew bowstring for a fee that caused him to wince—the only change of expression he’d shown them, though their bows had been aimed at his breast for an uneasy while.
They further offered to help him string the difficult three-man longbow for an additional charge. While Gonji had long since developed a bending method for stringing the great longbow unaided—though it was tricky—their mild jeering at his claim aroused his competitive instinct. So Gonji instead proposed a display of his skill in exchange for their free assistance.
As they scoffed and wagered among themselves the distance by which he’d miss the proposed target, the samurai nocked a thirteen-fist war arrow, rotated the bow over his head and through the half-arc of a kyu-jutsu draw, and skewered the trunk of a cork oak later estimated at two hundred and seventy-five yards away.
The impressed hunters threw in a scrap of advice along with the free stringing:
“Marksman or not, swing wide of the Valley of Barbaso, amigo.”
“Hai, arigato.”
* * * *
Gonji entered the valley that cradled the town of Barbaso a little after midday. Plenty of time, he assured himself, to reach the town before nightfall.
But as he made the gradual descent into the valley, he soon became aware of the subtle change in atmosphere, some mystical sense stirring within him, warning him to remain on his guard. The terrain became more rugged, the snow mat broken in many places by protruding roots and overgrown with brush. There were virtually no forests south of the mountains, yet the evergreen oaks grew thickly enough here to qualify as such. The lush bower blotted the sun’s weak rays and absorbed the wind. It was cold and still, save for the distant chirruping of an occasional bird. The snow piled higher as Gonji progressed, though the valley floor should have been spared to a greater degree. The air seemed unaccountably thick and hazy, the trail ahead obscured. Now and again the samurai sensed movement on the periphery of his vision, but when he looked nothing came into view.
Some things deceitfully operate on the edge of the senses, Gonji-san. That is the purpose of this phase of our training…
The inscrutable ninja master had been right as always: Gonji was instinctively aware of the insidious power that took predatory note of his presence.
The trail thinned, mounded up over a scrub-tangled knoll, then dropped steeply toward a gloomy hollow. Here the barren beech and poplar trees clustered densely under a dwarfing stand of ice-drooping green oaks. At the entrance of the hollow stood two enormous boulders, flanking the trail, looming before him like the lifeless eyes of some granite colossus. From what source they had tumbled, no man could say.
When sorcery opens the way, worlds may tip and spill, one into another…
Gonji halted a moment and scanned the trail ahead. Nodding and squaring himself in the saddle, he clucked Tora into an easy trot, wrestling with the reins against his steed’s skittishness. When they reached those massive guardian stones, Gonji yanked back on the reins and swept his halberd out of its moorings. Catching it up smartly under the crook of his right arm, he arced its deadly edge across the top of the stone where the evil eyes had peered at him hungrily seconds before.
Tora whinnied and stamped as sparks showered over the boulder, and the huge form launched over their heads with a fearsome bellow. An incredibly round and fat demon bounded down behind them on the trail, swelled rapidly to an even greater girth, and bounced straight up into the shuddering lower boughs of an evergreen before landing again between the boulders, with a tremendous thud!
Gonji fought to control his mount as he leveled the halberd threateningly and peered with narrow-eyed disbelief at the bizarre apparition. Settling Tora and stretching up boldly on his saddle, he studied the hissing creature, which sucked great howling breaths through a mouth that seemed capable of expanding without limit.
Stubby arms and legs jutted comically from a body the size of a coach. Its head was as round as its body, jammed atop plump shoulders with economy—no space wasted on a neck. The head was hairless; the ears, beet red and pointed like the leaves of a lilac; and the face was dominated by that elastic mouth, as supple as a snake. Its nose was a tiny scallop between two beady yellow eyes which Gonji could not help comparing to his own in their angularity. The creature, too, seemed to take note of the similarity when the samurai doffed his sallet and proffered a shallow bow.
“You remind me of me, funny man,” the demon said in a peculiar high voice. “What land spit you from its shores?”
Gonji rankled but remained expressionless. “I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara, son of the daimyo Sabatake Todohiro of Dai Nihon, the Land of the Gods.”
The creature laughed derisively. “The Land of the Gods!” it mimicked. “Well you’re in my land now. I’m Bulba, and these are my boulders. That’s my tree over there. And you’re riding on my trail.”
“I’m riding on the snow,” Gonji countered with mixed pique and amusement. The obese demon’s wheezing punctuated his words with keening whistles between the syllables.
“The snow’s mine, too!”
Gonji leaned forward over Tora’s withers. “The snow belongs to the kami of the sky. It’s his carpet for—”
“Bah!” Bulba scoffed, waving a flabby arm. “That’s empty theosophical piffle! Whatever falls out of his pockets—”
A loaf of finger jerked upward out of a porky fist.
“—and lands in my territory—”
And then downwards, though barely below the horizontal.
“—becomes mine!”
Gonji replaced the sallet on his head in martial threat. “Nevertheless, my path lies through your land. Now will you remove your great bulk, or will I have to prod you out of the way?”
Bulba’s ears deepened in their redness. He sucked in air until it seemed his eyes would pop and, swelling until he was nearly wedged between the great stones, he blew such a blast of wind down into the snow before him that Gonji and Tora were engulfed in a blinding squall that took a minute to settle back to earth.
Gonji brushed the snow from his beard and caked garb with firm, even strokes. Tora snorted and tossed his head, flicking his ears