have to quit the tree’s cover. He nocked, pulled, drew a breath.
Stepping out on the opposite side, he met the crossbowman’s eyes, dared his hand. Thirty yards or less separated the two archers. A dirk whizzed by Gonji’s left leg; he paid it no heed, blanked out the imprecations of the raging swordsmen.
The crossbowman aimed deliberately—too deliberately. Gonji’s cloth-yard arrow tore through his breastplate, rent half-a-length deep in flesh and bone, wrenching him backward and deflecting his bolt harmlessly into the sky.
Gonji cast away the longbow and drew his swords, a scowl of defiance twisting his features as he regarded the seven puffing footmen like a treed predator. They slowed, yammered to each other in a Germanic dialect unknown to him, then began to spread in a flanking movement.
The three centermost swordsmen charged. Gonji leaped to his right and skipped laterally along the hill to neutralize their line and isolate an end. The advantage was his as long as he could string them out and strike downward.
Then a hail of whistling pinpoints bristled the sky. Gonji flattened, choked on a mouthful of dust as shafts chunked into the hard earth, one nestling a heart’s width from his ear. The nearest soldier screamed and dropped, pierced through the neck by his own army’s errant shot.
Six.
The squad of bowmen below readied for another upslope volley, but before they could launch, Gonji scrambled to his feet and closed with his foes, slamming down the first and engaging the second with twin arcing blades in a breathless instant.
Glinting silver-yellow—blue sparks and the krang! of steel—a blink, a gasping rush of spent breath—
The swordsman slashed, cut empty air as Gonji slipped the blow. The Austrian re-cocked his arm for another strike, and the samurai lunged forward, bound his opponent’s blade in mid-arc with the short sword and ripped the Sagami through dead center of the white cross emblazoned on his surcoat.
The shocking moment of death. Dead before the gasp of despair had escaped the small “o” formed by the mouth. Before the red gout had splashed to earth.
Gonji had leaped back and begun circling again. Eyes alight with cold cunning, his hypnotic, patterned movement momentarily keeping his foes at bay.
The four remaining soldiers spread out to a respectful distance, grunting with contempt. Their squad leader dead, one among them assumed command and cautiously directed them to surround the samurai in a box. Low, nervous chatter. At a word the four unfastened their sword-belts and flung them down in a jangling clatter of hasps and sheathed dirks. As one they slung their bucklers on their forearms and leveled stout steel at Gonji’s coiled stance. Here was a strangely frightening new enemy, different both physically and in fencing style. He was a twin-fanged animal, all teeth and claws and primitive speed and strength.
Each swordsman swallowed back the coppery tang of fear and advanced a tentative step.
Gonji didn’t need to understand their language to catch the meaning of the Austrians’ oaths and imprecations. They were afraid, afraid to die when, in the final analysis, all that they were, all that they had ever hoped to be, had ushered them to this moment. And so they swore their oaths and spat their anger, thinking to freeze the blood in his veins when their own was tinged with frost.
He was wary. Four swordsmen should drop a single man with ease and usually did; but in battle no victories are taken for granted. And misdirected force has a weakening effect, each man relying on the strength of another, relaxing his own.
The warriors edged nearer. All were oblivious to the clamor on the battlefield below.
The senses work faster than the thews, Oguni always said. Let them work hand in hand. Sense movement with the feet. Smell the enemy’s courage—or lack of it!—in his sweat. The metal in the blade may be tasted in the air before it reaches its target....
Gonji rotated slowly. A panorama of anxious eyes, bobbing blades and bucklers. The continuous snaking of his slender swords left no spot uncovered. He emptied his mind and gave free rein to his reflexes. The heavy blades advanced another pace, arms trembling with their weight. Their heft told a great deal, dictated technique and strategy. Boorish insults issued at Gonji from under brows dotted with moisture in the heat. Gonji blinked back the salt burn.
From somewhere, the burst of a hundred muskets. Nerve ends flared. A soldier bellowed hoarsely.
And sprang.
* * * *
On the valley floor Francisco Navárez shouted desperately at his remaining men. The mercenary troop was cut to vulture feed, the handful left screaming madly against certain death. A final volley of pistol shots raked the cavalry line before them, throwing the knights into disarray. The critical moment.
Half the Austrian troops watched the drama on the hillside, briefly ignoring the doomed bunch in the ravine. Navárez fired his pistol and flung it aside, lurching out from behind the carcass of his horse and wrestling astride another screaming animal. With a wave he directed any left alive to follow him up the dusty slope in a frenzied dash for life.
A swarm of arrows dropped men to his right and left as he clenched teeth and eyes, clinging low, cursing deep within his chest. He spurred the frothing animal upward at a stumbling gait. His last impression of the valley was a terrifying glimpse of a musket company advancing on the double. He had no way of knowing whether any survivors followed, hugging tightly, as he was, the neck of the shuddering horse that clumped over churning shale as if through dream-mist. A roaring bellow preceded the first fusillade of gunshots.
Then, the thuck! of torn flesh and a scream of shock and pain. The horse fell from under him. Navárez plummeted head first over the dying animal’s crest and cracked his chin on the baked shale, stunning him. He crawled forward a few feet, raised up on hands and knees. A searing pain shot through his leg. Two horsemen plunged past him as he collapsed. Then another. Heedless to his weakly raised appeal for help.
Desperate. Strangled by the certainty of death.
His eyes refocused, and a hundred yards to the right through a veil of dust and swelter, he witnessed an act of magick: A circle of swordsmen, blades flung to heaven, died in the space of a breath by a flash of silver sorcery.
* * * *
The chilling thunder of the muskets nearly cost Gonji his life.
His parry was slow and imprecise, and the harrowing pass at his ribs lost him positional advantage. But then urgency electrified practiced reflexes. A flick of his left wrist slapped the attacker full in the face with the seppuku blade, sending him spinning, whining in pain.
Gonji spun into a crouch against the hacking whiz above his head and caught the blow hilt-tight on the killing sword, enabling him to throw the second man backward on leg power alone. A low whirling parry-slash deep inside a third downward cut ripped open an attacker’s belly. The man lurched forward with a ghastly moan, clutching his abdomen, as the samurai’s licking swords hammered back two blades with an outward spread of his arms and crashed into the two men’s sides with the crossing return. One foe yanked sword and buckler into the sky in mortal agony, but the second’s hauberk had withstood the slash of the short sword. The Austrian stumbled back a pace, righted and charged, howling ferociously. Gonji’s leaping turn away from the plunging sword landed him a scant six inches from the spearing lunge of the leader, whose ugly red welt now ballooned the left side of his face.
For a frozen instant of time, the samurai was a dead man. Knifing steel poised to skewer back and belly. But such a slice of life would beckon only a fool to bet the odds.
Gonji never stopped moving, executing a quicksilver spinning pass. The first whistling slice of the Sagami sang cleanly through the welted man’s steel, casting the broken end skyward. The short sword’s backswing deflected the rear lunge, and like a fan blade Gonji continued around with the longer katana, slicing through mail and flesh. A blind stab delivered under his armpit—and the leader’s mouth gaped, behind him.
He still clutched the broken sword as he died in his tracks.