thought about the boy’s words as he watched them run down the lane. He’s not sure.... Indecision and lack of resolve would be a crippling problem if these people wound up in an armed revolt. Klann wouldn’t be shackled by Christian principles. He shook his head. Ah well, the mercenaries have backed off considerably since Ben-Draba was beaten to death by...hai.... He smiled thinly. Our other mystery man....
He leapt astride Tora and rode back into the main street, resolving to check in with Flavio.
Gonji was determined to treat his position as bodyguard to Council Elder Flavio with dignity and seriousness, although he knew that the hiring had been prompted by his own cajoling and Flavio’s desire to dispense the city’s debt to the samurai for having retrieved the body of Mark Benedetto. Yet bodyguard he was, and he would deport himself as a bodyguard. He had promised not to dog the Elder’s steps but had made a point of checking on his well-being from time to time.
He was clattering along easily toward the Ministry building on the Street of Hope when he was halted by the cry of a pedestrian on his left.
“Ho, there! A word with you, monsieur!” came the stentorian voice in ringing French.
Gonji pulled up and looked over. It was Alain Paille, the flamboyant and eccentric artist-poet whose revolutionary pronouncements since Klann’s arrival had caused the city no end of discomfiture and the occupying troops no little amusement. He was thin, dark, and willowy, with piercing blue eyes, a sketchy shadow of beard, and an unruly mane that no comb had furrowed in recent days. His paint-stained apron evidenced his current commission: an illustration in progress on the ceiling of Vedun’s chapel. In his hand he carried a furled paper.
“Behold the Liberator!” he shouted, wide-eyed, stopping in front of Tora. “He of whom ballades will be sung!”
Gonji glanced about self-consciously. Few had taken special notice of Paille, from whom such outbursts had long been expected. He was, as it happened, Vedun’s best-known tippler. Those who had heard now watched Gonji for a reaction.
Gonji cleared his throat. “Ja, well—what can I do for you?” He had ignored the French, spoke instead in High German.
“I’ve been seeking you. We must speak. I believe we share a dream. You do speak French, don’t you?”
“I speak French...of a sort,” Gonji replied. “But it gives me trouble. It’s a language I—” He groped for an appropriate word, came up with one.
“‘Disdain?’” Paille repeated with surprise. “But you mustn’t! All men of intellect and breeding speak French! I’ve been inquiring after you, and I believe you are such a man. Yours is simply a problem of pronunciation. But be at ease—we shall correct that. Do speak French, s’il vous plait.”
“I don’t please,” Gonji said with a wry look, “but I’ll speak it. What’s your business?”
“I think a drink is in order first. Shall we hie us to the auberge?” Paille pointed the paper toward the nearest inn, Wojcik’s Haven.
“Not now. I’ve business at the Ministry.”
“Wonderful! So have I,” Paille said, waving the handbill. “We can talk as we walk, oui?”
“Oui...wonderful,” Gonji said softly, glancing at passersby who were listening in on the conversation.
He dismounted and led Tora by the reins. He had been in a mood to ride alone, frankly hoping to encounter the swaggering Captain Julian Kel’Tekeli, to show him that Gonji was just as capable as he of affecting a display of cleanliness, polish, and poise. But now he stoically accepted the way karma had of laying low the proud....
“I am Alain Paille,” the artist boomed, “a painter, poet, and balladeer, chronicler of the times and tides of men, and soldier of freedom par excellence. And you are—no-no, don’t tell me—you are Gonji Sabatake, master of fighting arts from the fabled orient, dispossessed son of Japan’s mightiest warlord—”
Gonji winced and rubbed an itching eye, blew a long, impatient breath. Behind him, Tora nickered and bobbed his head.
“—champion of égalité and freedom, fated participant in the coming battle that will secure democracy from the strangling grip of monarchy and aristocracy—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Gonji groaned. They were tramping through a steep-walled lane, and Paille’s words echoed from one end to the other of its tunneling course. “Hold on, monsieur poète. Very sorry, but that’s a terribly mixed bag of facts and fancies. And listen, don’t you ever speak in anything but that blaring herald’s voice?”
Paille looked wounded. “Anger, pain, frustration, humiliation—these things are ne’er articulated by the calm and soft voice! But you are right, of course; we must be circumspect. The ears of the enemy are all about us.”
He leaned close and laid a finger across his lips with a conspiratorial suspiration, and Gonji caught a full blast of the artist’s midday pick-me-up. Wine. And a humble vintage.
“Oui, that’s best,” Gonji agreed, relieved. “Now...I’m not sure I understood all this—May we have continued in Spanish?” Gonji stumbled over the words.
“May we continue, not ‘May we have continued’,” Paille corrected. He sighed. “But, sí, Spanish then, the cutthroats’ language.... Such a shame. French is so elegant. My brother Guy, he always said that it sings to the ear, and Guy should know—he has only one ear, or still had the last I heard. But no matter—”
“Your brother Guy, who has only one ear...,” Gonji repeated blankly. But Paille had already launched into a summation of what he had said before.
Gonji shook his head. “Equality? Democracy? Peasants aren’t fit to rule themselves. There must always be a ruling class to guide them. And a soldiering class to preserve order.”
“Hmm. You’re allowing your politics and training to stand in the way of your destiny. But it is a fact, señor, that divine right of kings and governing power by virtue of birth to a privileged class are dying concepts. And it is a further truth that men are equals at birth and as such must be free to choose their own political order.”
Gonji kicked a stone out of his path. “Is that so? And who has discerned these ‘truths’?”
Paille looked surprised. “Why, I have, of course!”
Gonji smiled. “Ah, so you are another prophet, like this Tralayn?”
“Nooo! I am a visionary, not a soothsayer,” Paille qualified. “My vision is of an ideal, an earthly, temporal one. Not an ideal muddled by vague religious sentiment—oh! thank heaven my brother can’t hear me speak like this—”
“Your brother Guy, the one with only one ear—?”
“No-no, my brother David, the one who smiles like a nibbling rabbit—he’s a writer, an apologist of Holy Mother Church—”
Gonji looked confused. “Your brother David who—”
“No, I’m not a sleepy Christian like most who live here,” the artist continued. “They choose to cower in wait of a divine Deliverer and wouldn’t recognize one unless he came in a blinding light and on wings of a dove. I think they expect that the Christ has reserved His second coming for the plight of Vedun.”
“You don’t believe in Iasu, then—the Christ, the god of the West?” Gonji asked.
“Oh, He is there—somewhere, I suppose,” Paille replied. “He seems to play a hide-and-seek game with humanity, and currently it is His turn to hide. That’s why it is my duty as a visionary to shake these people out of their apathy and fatalism. But I fear my esprit and panache are misinterpreted. They believe me to be....” He shrugged.
“A madman,” Gonji finished.
Paille scowled. “The ugly lot of genius,” he snarled. “You understand the Christian doctrines? Those that would