Calling out to Gonji in a mewling, yammering singsong voice filled with sentient taunting, it grasped the great bulk of the boar—well over a yard in length—and flapped laboriously upward. Its taloned feet and clawed humanoid hands clutched while its powerful wings beat against gravity. Slowly it rose, making steady progress toward its roost atop the cliff overlooking the crackling fire.
“Iye,” Gonji breathed, eyes filled with the vision of the departing carcass, the prize so dearly won.
“Noooooo!”
Gonji drew the Sagami as he ran through the crunching snow, yielding it impotently in his right hand. By the time he stood beneath the lofting creature, his katana in pointless low middle guard, it was already cresting the cliff. He watched it disappear over the edge with an anguish that a lifetime’s discipline could not keep from his face.
Above, the bird-thing peered over the brink, its supple beak emitting a mocking warble. Its piercing, intelligent eyes gleamed with self-satisfaction and cunning. It made a swift motion in the moonlight.
The boar’s genitals dropped in the trampled snow beside Gonji.
* * * *
The campfire tinged the area with sultry hues. Before its glare knelt the samurai, all thought dispersed by his deep meditation. His shadow loomed large against the base of the steep cuesta at his back. Before him lay the sheathed Sagami, storied sword of uncounted legends.
His methodical ritual ablutions completed, he dressed, retied his topknot just so, and lashed his daisho—the matched set of long and short swords—to his back with the harness he’d used since Vedun. He placed his tanto in his boot, then carefully sifted through his remaining black powder, obtaining what seemed enough dry charge to load both pistols. These he loaded and spannered, fixing them at last inside his obi. Then he rose and grimly eyed the roost above, where his tormentor whooped and nattered.
It peered down at him, scuffed the ground with a hind claw. A piece of the boar’s entrails dropped straight at Gonji. The samurai batted it aside with a swift circular block.
He tied around his forehead the hachi-maki—the headband of resolution. All the while, barbed thoughts dropped into his mind. Leaden ingots of karma, dragging down one’s soul, Gonji-san…
He was a fool, a rabbit, a bumbling failure. His ancestors turned their faces in shame. Old Todo would order him to commit seppuku at once, if he found him incapable of protecting even his own victuals. His hated half-brother Tatsuya—hai, even dead Tatsuya must laugh from the world unknown: See the blonde tigress’ cub—even the birds mock his skill!
The merest trace of a smile perked Gonji’s lips. He banished thought, clearing his mind for the encounter to come. Calmer now in his determination, where once the anticipation of single combat had filled him with the eager fury of an inferno.
The wonder of life’s vicissitudes.
On his left hand he wore a spiked gauntlet—the nekode—as an aid in scaling, after the fashion taught by the old ninja master who had secretly befriended an artless young samurai against his father’s wishes. Then, emptying his mind and allowing the karumi-jutsu climbing technique full sway, he began to ascend the slick wall of the cuesta.
Digging and scraping, Gonji utilized the nooks in the almost sheer cliff face. The nekode gouged chinks where there had been none. He used his fingers and toes for purchase, clinging like a spider, teeth gritting with the effort. He fought off the numbing chill, flexing and relaxing muscle groups in turn, shifting his weight, feeling out the easiest advance upward, testing and probing, lightening his body as the time-honored, almost mystical method had taught.
The first three yards came easy. Five. But how high to the nest? Fifteen—eighteen yards?
Wygyll.
All at once, as the monster bird took note of him with a quizzical shriek of disbelief, Gonji remembered its name. Not the name it would be called here in Spain. That one he could not recollect. It was the English name he remembered. The English, he had heard, had their names for everything. Things they knew well; things they would not admit to believing in.
This creature was a member of an old race, older than man. Scavengers who roosted on cliffs and ledges.
Wygyll. The wygyll’s aerie. Forty feet above.
Something stinking and moist landed on his shoulder. Some part of the boar’s viscera. He shrugged it off. Soft crumbling sounds descended past his position. Then a rock cracked him on the skull, scintillas of starlight lacing the momentary blackness of his vision.
“Cholera!” he swore, his favorite European imprecation having the venting effect it sometimes manifested. He shook his head to clear it, sure that he had been cut. His skull throbbed at the point where it swelled.
Above—the soughing of wingbeats as the wygyll lofted from its perch. Gonji steeled himself, wary but relaxed.
Must maintain the hold, he told himself. What was their favorite technique? Ah—four claws extended; clamp with the hind, rake with the fore. A simple attack pattern that could leave an ox in shredded ruin.
In his peripheral vision he could see the fifteen-foot wingspread looping lazily about the area, tipping gently at the extremities of its flight path to sail into a graceful figure eight knotted behind the clinging samurai’s unprotected back.
Without warning the air ballet ended. With a war cry more penetrating than the teeth of the wind, the wygyll dove. Wings trimmed, talons tensed for a strike.
Gonji willed his thews to relax. He inched up another span. Felt the rush of the approaching marauder. Sensed the closing distance between them. He drew a pistol smoothly, cocked it, turned outward from the wall, maintaining a three-point grip—
But it was coming on at too indirect a tangent. He knew he was firing from so oblique an angle that he threatened his own precarious hold with the recoil.
The wygyll did not recognize the menace the firearm posed. It swooped in with searching talons eager to rake and tear.
Gonji fired—splfszzzz.
“Sonofabitch—cholera!”
He gathered his senses at once, even as the wygyll cried out in terror of the misfired pistol’s spluttering powder. His right hand flung off the useless piece and went to the hilt of the Sagami at his shoulder. But the wygyll’s fear of the harmless pyrotechnic caused it to swerve into an ungainly tumble. Feathers fluttered off its wings from the violent directional change.
The flying predator soared from side to side of the broad cirque valley, whether gathering speed or wrath, Gonji could not tell. It strafed Tora once, twice, the valiant steed’s hooves lashing up to ward it off.
Gonji used the opportunity to gain another yard. He was working on the second before he caught sight of the cunning beast’s next intention. Farther along the base of the cliff lay a large chunk of sodden log. This the wygyll descended upon with a vengeance, dragging and clawing it from the ground’s frozen clench. Screeching once at the samurai, it went clumsily airborne with its burden, quickly growing accustomed to the weight, in its rage.
Gonji’s eyes widened. He took an uncertain reach upward, then one step back. The creature lofted to his level, then higher, still rising on its mighty wings. When it had reached the escarpment, it hovered above the helpless would-be invader of its realm.
Gonji experienced an expanded moment of terror as the log fell heavily toward him. An instant’s fatuous thought that he might somehow leap around the plummeting missile that filled his vision—
And he was leaping off the wall in breathless frustration, losing his hard-won ground. He landed catlike in the snow, tumbling into a shock-absorbing