The wygyll flew overhead, shrilling at him in ridicule as he gathered his weapons and breath. He glanced at the second pistol, thrust it back into his obi, and regained the cliff base with a running leap. Paying no heed to the enemy, he scrabbled up the wall, using the earlier chinks. The ascent was easier this time, and he reached his last handhold in seconds.
When he paused to get a fix on the wygyll, all he saw were sapphire stars and the moon’s crooked golden grin.
Uh-oh. Something new, neh?
Swift and silent, the creature pushed itself over the edge directly above him to lance down like a shaft from a siege catapult, clutching at full arm’s length—the sharpened sapling Gonji himself had honed into a spear.
The katana snicked out of the back harness as the wygyll dead-dropped straight at Gonji’s face. The samurai swung outward and to the right at the last instant, clinging by the nekode and the toes of his left foot. He struck the beast’s weapon a sharp blow as it passed by, deflecting its lethal course. The wygyll shrilled and soared into a tight loop, boring down through the air at him again in seconds. But as it braked with a counter-flap to avoid hitting the rocky wall, Gonji’s blade snapped up, parrying the spear. He completed the circle with a wrist-twisting riposte—a soft thwack—a burst of feathers—
The creature keened a high whining note. Blood spilled from the shallow slice along its convex rib cage. It released the spear and twirled off in a contorted flight pattern, maddened by its pain.
Gonji gained a narrow rock shelf halfway up the cuesta. He clawed his way up still higher, reached the shelf with his feet, nerve ends prickling with his desperate desire not to be dislodged again now that his goal was so near. He thrust the naked katana blade through his obi. Fought the rock, the gnawing wind and bitter cold, his stiffening sinews—
Five yards left.
The wygyll swooped and screamed at him. He slipped his grip with one boot, nearly lost his purchase. Pausing to regain his hold and steady himself, he realized that he was momentarily helpless to fend off the bird-thing. It saw, and knew, and flapped down at him. Its powerful talons cut the air eagerly as the distance closed.
Gonji pulled the second pistol. With practiced flexibility he twisted outward and fired at the onrushing creature. He barked an expletive that was drowned out by the cracking report as the wheel-lock belched smoke and flame. The wygyll shrieked a caterwauling note over and over as the pistol ball tore through a wing with a cascade of gray-white feathers. The samurai was forgotten as it struggled to regain its failing power of flight.
Gonji discarded the spent pistol. Shivering as he pulled and dragged himself upward along the craggy higher reaches of the cliff, he at last secured the brink with the spiked nekode.
Bobbing and fluttering through the air with the erratic course of a butterfly, the wygyll attacked him with a hail of ear-piercing cries and its pummeling wingbeats. Injured though it was, the creature now fought for the aerie-home it had been so confident of a short while before.
But Gonji, too, had won his territorial objective. With a mighty push he lurched over the edge and onto the cliff. He caught a glimpse of a huge wattled structure and the riven carcass of the boar. Then the powerful talons sank into his back, seizing garment and skin in equal measure. He yelped a pained outcry as he was lifted off the rock. For a saucer-eyed instant he viewed the long drop, the flash of his campfire, no ground to cushion him for a long way. Then he snatched the wiry forearm at his shoulder and held on with the dynamic strength of self-preservation. The squawking beast strove to drop him, but the other fore-claw became entangled in his sword harness, and one hind talon was snared in the fabric of his short kimono. The other clawed his back, and Gonji roared in pain and stabbed upward with the Sagami repeatedly, finding a soft spot behind the chitinous beak and jamming home the deadly point.
Screaming and twisting in the air, unable to control its burden any longer, the wygyll spiraled back over the aerie on the cliff-top. Another backlash of the gleaming katana caused it to tear free of their mutually tangled grip.
Gonji dropped onto the cliff and rolled, losing the Sagami in the snow. He drew his ko-dachi and raised it in high guard. The wygyll stalked him now with bounding half-flight strides, flapping and crying out in frenzy at this raider of its domain. In great pain and weakening fast, the creature darted in and out with its snapping beak. But Gonji’s short sword deftly held it at bay, clashing and slapping at the wygyll’s waning attack. A crimson tracery of blood marked the creature’s track in the snow.
Gonji found the katana, poised it for the kill. But something stopped him. Small twittering sounds emanated from the nearby wattle-work structure—more a thatched hut for humankind than any roost for beasts of the air—behind him.
The wygyll’s nestlings, squalling in fear.
Seeing his notice of its young, the wygyll charged him with its remaining energy, throwing its life into the breech in their defense. But Gonji merely beat it back with a series of double-bladed parries. It came on once more, with the same result. The wygyll fell back, studied his eyes with its own keenly intelligent gaze.
It was a quarter of an hour or so before the samurai made his intent clear. With a noble bow of its head, the creature hunched its battered wings in a gesture that bespoke resignation. It lurched past him to hunker down before its hutch, where it proceeded to work at its manifold wounds.
As Gonji watched it, the bushido principle of the warrior’s tenderness permeated him. He felt profound sympathy for this forlorn creature, now that he recalled its full legend.
“I can fight, it’s true,” Gonji told the oddly attentive creature, “but I’ll never be the hunter you once were. And now I fear that, thanks to me, you’ll neither be hunting nor fighting for a good long time.”
The nestlings—two of them—crawled from the hutch out of their vestigial responsiveness to human speech. They reminded Gonji of nothing so much as the tiny winged Cupids—albeit with soft beaks where their mouths ought to be—he’d seen represented in art. They ran to their father with teetering steps and, one under either furled wing, huddled close to him in affectionate innocence.
* * * *
An hour later Gonji sat before his blazing fire at the base of the cliff, feeling a curious mixture of anticipation, satisfying fatigue, and formless anger.
He poked at the roasting portion of boar with a stick. The remainder of the chunk he had taken, perhaps three days’ worth, was already packed into a saddlebag. He laved his cuts and abrasions as he mulled over the sad lore of the wygyll, as he had heard it told.
They’d been more human once. A race that had grown side-by-side with man, his friend and mentor in the ways of the hunt, a race of highly intelligent flying humanoids. But man’s jealousy of the wygyll’s unfettered freedom in the skies had been their downfall. A powerful king who was consumed by envy of their glorious airborne culture had set his court sorcerer to placing a double-edged curse upon the wygylls: Their humanity was stunted, their line becoming increasingly ornithoid with each successive generation. The language they had shared with man was lost, and with their power of speech had faded their unique culture. Worse still, the evil curse had visited upon them the paradox of procreative genocide—every female of their race died in birthing her young, leaving a grieving mate to perform a function for which his abilities were ever eroding. Procreation meant death to the wygylls.
Gonji hawked and spat into the popping flames. He took a walk in the pre-dawn stillness, feeling the need for the clean, cold wind in his face. The valley shone dully as the moon lent its silver to the snowbound land. A sprawling vista of loneliness—an old harpy with the samurai.
Hai, this is the Spain I know, he thought in an effort to cheer himself. I know its land, its people; its monsters and magics. The land of my first landing…briefly. And then later a place of triumph…and tragedy.
He tried to summon a flamboyant phrase out of Gongora y Argote’s poetry—so popular at court when last he’d been in Spain—but it escaped him.
And what of