Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel. T. C. Rypel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 proscribe violence even when one’s way of life is threatened?”

      “That, I have trouble understanding,” Gonji replied thoughtfully. “But I’ve traveled in the West a long time, and before that I was a student of Christian priests in Dai Nihon—in Japan. I have found that their beliefs are as reasonable as any other in explaining some of the horrors I’ve encountered...the supernatural things....”

      “Hah! I’ve yet to encounter anything that can’t be explained by reason,” Paille asserted. “The natural employed perversely—illusion—the uneducated are easily baffled—these are the ways that—”

      Gonji was shaking his head. “So sorry, señor, but I only partly agree. There are things in the world that confound moral explanation even as they demand it. I believe that nothing natural can be wrong—although like you I know that the natural can certainly be put to wrongful use. I feel no compulsion to explain the wonders and mysteries of nature, uh—” He rubbed his forehead, trying to remember something. Then he smiled, remembering, and translated the poem into Latin, in which language it best retained the beauty of the Japanese:

      ‘Unknown to me what dwelleth here:

      Tears flow from my sense of unworthiness and gratitude’

      “That best sums up my attitude toward the unknowable wonders of nature,” Gonji said.

      “That’s quite lovely,” Paille observed. “Did you compose it?”

      “No, I’m not that profound a poet. It’s ancient. My father taught it to me, and his father to him—”

      “But—” Paille began.

      “But,” Gonji interjected, stopping his disagreement short of utterance, “there are those things that demand explanation by their, um, un-nature.”

      “Unnatural quality, you mean.”

      “Hai, arigato—yes, thank you. What do you make of this flying dragon, the wyvern? What possible purpose could it serve in any natural order?”

      “It exists,” Paille said, “and so we must conclude that it does serve some presently unknown function in the order of the cosmos. Or, quite probably, it is at least part illusion, or the product of natural power as yet harnessed only by the rare few adepts among us. There must be a natural explanation, else all rational order crumbles and there is chaos. Nothing of the sane and mundane in the world could be counted on, even as it has been for untold ages.”

      Gonji pondered this. Illusion.... He thought of the fantastic events he had lived through. Of vampires and dragons and beasts of fable that had crossed his path these many years. Can I have imagined that these things were what they were? Have I been self-deluded, misinterpreting every frightful event, recasting every gnome as a giant in flawed memory, even as shadow casts the shapes of things as they are not?

      Iye. No, I have seen truly. Even if it is only I who have seen the truth, whatever that truth might ultimately mean.

      The СКАЧАТЬ