The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

  Oh, Daddy, she thought. I’m not back. I’m just … awake.

  She grew vaguely aware that he had been more attentive to her than he had been in the years since her mother, Marisol, died giving birth to Montse. A thing her father had never held against his second child. He had loved them both intensely … when he could be distracted long enough from the affairs of state to remember the fact.

  Better late than never, I guess.

  “Yes, Father,” she said. Because she felt she had to say something.

  “You had us all worried for a day or two, mi corazón.”

  “Really, I’m fine.”

  He nodded his ginger goatee into his second chin once vigorously. “Right.” She could see awareness of her fall out from behind his slightly protuberant eyes even before he turned forward again.

  “It figures,” she said softly to herself. Given the clop and squeal of Meravellosa’s hooves on the crushed pumice of the roadway, the jingle of harness, and the many noises of beasts and men and women, it barely reached her own ears.

  In fairness, she thought, he’s probably quit worrying about me so he could go back to worrying about Montse. She was mildly surprised at her acuity at figuring that out and felt briefly pleased with herself.

  A brassy fanfare and a woman’s voice boomed through a speaking-trumpet, “All hail to His Majesty Felipe, Emperor of Nuevaropa, Defender of the Tyrant’s Head, Jewel in the eyes of the Eight Creators! ¡Viva al Emperador! ¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡VIVA!”

  And so the Emperor and his daughter returned in triumph and in sorrow to a city they had never loved.

  * * *

  They have provided me with paper, quills, and ink and are allowing me to keep a journal.

  When I asked for one, of course they didn’t want to. Though I have been treated well enough, except for being kidnapped and having a bag put over my head and stuff, they seem outraged at the idea of doing nice things for me. Luckily Count Dragos put in some words for me, the way he did at the outset when they didn’t want to let me keep Misti—she’s hopping and beeping at me now, trying to get me to play with her. Not now! When I’m done. This is important.

  I hope.

  Anyway, he said the same thing he did then: it will make me easier to deal with if I don’t get bored. I know he’s probably saying that because it’s true, but I think I may hate him less than the others.

  Also, he seems to think they’re idiots. Which is right.

  So the conversation ran like this:

  Deep Voiced Boss Priest With Tall Hat: So, you want paper and pens, do you, little girl?

  Me: I said so, didn’t I? (My handlers back home say I am not patient enough with stupid people. If only there weren’t so many of them!)

  DVBPWTH: You want to draw pictures of funny animals, I expect? Like hippopotami and lions and cows? Little children like that, I understand.

  Me: Actually, I’m designing a siege engine making use of a capstan—

  DVBPWTH: Splendid, splendid. We shall see that you have those things.

  (The evil noblewoman who stabbed my friend Claudia and wears too much kohl around her eyes said something in their mush-mouthed foreign gabble.)

  DVBPWTH: What harm can it do us? Let her draw her little imaginary animals, as Count Dragos says.

  At that point I tried to explain they were not imaginary at all, but are all clearly identified in the BESTIARY OF OLD HOME, but they had their big Spañol goons bundle me into a back room with their big goon hands. A little while later the door opened and the DVBPWTH, acting as if he were handing over the keys to the Basileus’s personal commode, gave me a sheaf of paper, some horror feathers with tips cut for writing, a small pot of ink, and some sand to blot with. I asked for a small knife so I could sharpen my own quills, but they didn’t fall for that.

  They did let me have my own small metal spoon, however. I already see a way to use that.

  But they’re not completely stupid. And Dragos isn’t stupid at all. I have to remember that if I am to get away.

  Chapter 10

  El Imperio de Nuevaropa, Empire of Nuevaropa.…—Our own dear home, which occupies the land mass at the western end of Aphrodite Terra and the island kingdom of Anglaterra, which taken together are known as the Tyrant’s Head, because on the map they resemble the skull of Aphrodite’s largest and most fearful predator, Tyrannosaurus rex. It was founded at the end of the High Holy War by the great hero Manuel Delgao, who became its first Emperor. It has been ruled in relative peace and growing prosperity ever since by Emperors and Empresses chosen for the office by the eleven noble Electors from Torre Delgao, from which Manuel I sprang. It is sometimes referred to as the Empire of the Fangèd Throne, after the gilded chair of state which Manuel is said to have ordered made from the skull of a Tyrannosaurus imperator, a monster even larger and more dire than T. rex, which he slew just before founding the Empire. Most modern scholars consider T. imperator to be a myth, and that story as well.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  “My lords,” the peasant youth said, “I know where you can find her.”

  Jaume froze with a spoonful of goat-cheese-and-mushroom soup—a specialty of the house, and quite delicious—halfway to his lips.

  Neither he nor the other Companions gathered around the long table in the inn’s otherwise unoccupied common room had to ask who he was.

  “I’m Jaume,” he replied, returning spoon to bowl. “Captain-General of the Companions of Our Lady of the Mirror.”

  “I know, Señor.”

  “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Pablo.”

  They had stopped for an early lunch and to cast about for information at a big, three-story fieldstone structure located on an important crossroads south of the Imperial capital city, La Majestad. It was called the Lambent Lambeosaur, following a fad for naming inns and taverns not just according to Anglaterrano conventions but in actual Anglysh, which had inexplicably swept Francia and Spaña following the Imperial conquest and annexation of the island kingdom in the mid-fifth century AP. Its size and location made it an important gathering place, though here in the late morning the Companions found they had it mostly to themselves.

  They had ridden hard from the vast Imperial Army encampment in Francia’s southeast corner, near the border with the Kingdom of Spaña. So great had been Jaume’s urgency to take up pursuit of his kidnapped young cousin that they had left their plate armor and war-dinosaurs behind, to be brought to them by their squires when the latter could catch up. They took only their personal weapons, light jacks of springer leather, bedrolls and such personal effects as could ride in their saddlebags, with a pair of extra coursers to carry water, food (which they’d have little leisure to forage for), as well as kettles to cook with.

  The full Companions were accustomed to riding light when called for. The new potential Knights-Brother would learn to do so as well, if they hadn’t already.

  “Grzegorz?” Jaume asked one of the two new knights-aspirant they’d taken on in the wake of their losses at the slaughter-field of Canterville. “If you please, make room for Pablo at our table.”

  The Slavo raised a blond brow in question. “A commoner, Captain?”

  “We serve the interests of the common folk,” Jaume said. “Companions claim no nobility beyond ideals and actions.”

  That and the fact that, if his news proved true, Pablo was a gift from Lady Li Herself. The Companions had gotten numerous reports of possible sightings of the kidnappers, from commoners as well as their lords. The currently ruling installment of the Imperial Delgao family was widely if not universally popular; people were generally appalled at the abduction of a young girl by foreigners, and it was widely and correctly perceived that the Emperor Felipe would look with extreme favor on anyone who actually helped to get his younger daughter back.

  Now they had outrun their information. Which was the primary reason for their halt.

  The muscular young knight shrug
ged. “All right,” he said. He removed Bieta, his spear and favored personal weapon, from a chair at the table’s far end from Jaume.

  “Join us,” Jaume told Pablo. The young man was handsome, his sharply sculpted features almost pretty enough for him to be a Companion himself, fresh-faced, with gleaming straight black hair. He was of about average stature for southern Spaña, 168 centimeters or so, more sturdy than spare. He wore an outfit common here in La Meseta, the somewhat arid central plateau of Nuevaropa’s southernmost reino: a short cape or yoke of thatched straw, woven tight like a basket, to keep the sun from stinging his shoulders; a battered vest of some thin dinosaur leather; a brown linen loincloth; and buskins.

  “Drink. Eat, if you want to. You’re our guest.”

  But Pablo shook his head. His eyes, sharp and so brown as to be almost black, would not meet Jaume’s.

  “Please, lords,” he said, with a meaningful glance at the publican, who busied herself behind the counter stacking mugs freshly cleaned by young serving boys and girls who by their looks could be her sons and daughters. “Outside.”

  “As you wish.” Jaume pushed his chair back with a scrape of stout legs on rough wood planking. He rose, lifting the baldric that held the Lady’s Mirror from where it hung across the back of his chair and slinging it over his back so that the longsword’s silvered pommel jutted up above his right shoulder. “Outside it is.”

  * * *

  Felipe turned and, smiling, beckoned Melodía to ride up alongside him. She dutifully urged Meravellosa into a brief trot and obeyed. She felt pleased that he was acknowledging her as a father. And as Emperor—especially after she had been exiled from his court-away-from-court because of charges trumped up by none other than Duke Falk.

  She also felt a corresponding stab of anger that she had been exiled from his court-away-from-court because of charges trumped up by none other than Duke Falk. Is it good that I’m feeling something again? Even if I’m not much enjoying the things I feel.

  Unlike La Fuerza, the seat of the King of Spaña, La Majestad had always struck Melodía as beautiful. It even did today, to the extent that anything piercing the curious roiling blanket of anxiety and gloom that now enveloped her could be beautiful. Where the Spañol capital was narrow and crabbed and looked dark, somehow, even at high noon with thin cloud cover, La Majestad, with its confining, twisting lanes and squeezed-together buildings, all dark stone or brick, felt light and expansive. The ways were broad—at least the major ones, such as the road the Imperial procession was passing down now, which led from the Plateau’s edge directly to the drawbridge to the Palace. The houses and shops were wider and not so tall, built of yellow and tan materials, or, for humbler structures, their adobe walls were washed with the local limestone-rich soil, mixed with some kind of fixative to resist the occasional rain.

  Not to say that the Imperial crown city was a hotbed of gaiety; that was La Merced, and Majestuosos would be mightily offended at being compared to Mercedes, whom they considered boisterous and addicted to frivolity. But whereas the citizens of La Merced were associated with bourgeois cheer and the occasional outbreak of civic madness, and Fuerzanos with paranoid mistrust, Majestics cultivated dignified reserve.

  Although Melodía doubted that had much to do with the curiously muted quality of the crowds that thronged La Via Imperial to receive their Emperor’s return. There were cheers and shouts and the waving of banners and songs of thanksgiving to Felipe and the Creators for delivering them from deadly peril. But they had a strange, strained, wild-edged quality, as if the cheers might at any moment devolve into sobs and wails of fear and shrieks of outright madness.

  Because, after all, the true and truly terrible threat from which the recent victory had saved them had come from none other than one of the Eight’s appointed servitors on Paradise.

  When Melodía rode past a man with hair and beard like a wild bush and wearing nothing but a coat of ground-in-looking grime—full public nudity being a recognized display of formal protest and reproof—standing on a nail-keg and screaming denunciations of them all for heresy and blasphemy, it scarcely seemed out of place. Nor did it strike her odd that none of the Majestics tried to shut up his spewing sedition. It was as if he represented their own consciences, and the guilt they felt at celebrating the fact that they were not all at this very moment dying horribly.

  La Majestad prized itself on its tradition of free speech anyway. La Dieta encouraged plain and open public speech, by way of the city government, which answered to the Diet. Although exceptions could sometimes be found when that speech proved too pointed or personal about the Diet or its members.

  But though La Casa de la Dieta dominated the city from the Plateau’s northeast quarter, with its soaring, reddish-brown sandstone walls, its flying buttresses and narrow pointed-top windows and spiky finials, it was overshadowed if not overborne by the enormous pointed bulk of Monte de Gloria—Mount Glory—into the near face of whose steep southwest-facing granite main peak the Imperial Palace itself was carved. It couldn’t match the snow-clad cloud-rippers that dominated the Sierra Scudo that separated the Tyrant’s Head from Ovda. But it still thrust up an imposing three hundred meters of bare rock from the top of the Plateau, itself nearly a hundred meters higher than the surrounding Meseta.

  Despite its dominating presence, it had never felt oppressive to Melodía before. Now the sight caused her belly to flutter and her throat to constrict with a terrible sense of apprehension.

  Then again, she thought, what doesn’t, these days? It feels as if the only thing I can be bothered to feel is fear.

  The Imperial Way took a strider-leg jog around the flank of the great Temple of All Creators, in order to maximize the impact of the first close look at the Palacio Imperial itself. Which even now, despite everything, caught Melodía’s breath briefly in her throat.

  As always, her first impression was left by El Salto del Corazón, Heart’s Leap, a white-frothing cascade of water from between the main mount and a lesser peak on the left, northwestern side. It came from the amount of rain, freakish for La Meseta, which fell on the substantial but lower mass of the Sierra that extended to the north and east, masked by the great peak. Though rather thin, it made a rushing sound audible even from here, a quarter kilometer away, as it splashed down the grey stone and then, a couple of stories above the level of the Plateau, leapt into space.

  Beyond a wide, open plaza directly ahead, a stout drawbridge crossed the thirty-meter gap of Martina’s Moat, a natural though improved crevasse that separated the city from a great flat ledge jutting from the hip of the mountain. A wall of yellow limestone block rose fifteen meters from the very rim. A few rooftops, of yellow or pinkish-red tiles, peeked over the top. Both the bridge and the gate that stood open in the cortina wall were ten meters across, to allow for easy access. The whole suggested openness of access—which could, however, snap tightly shut at very short notice.

  Which was both intended and correct, she knew. The Empire, and its ruling Torre Delgao, invited approach—but had a stern, fast way of redressing violation. As Jaume’s about to teach the monsters who kidnapped my sister!

  Forty meters above the ledge a crack opened in the steep cliff face. Inside that, as it narrowed toward the bottom, rose the façade of El Palacio de la Corazón Imperial: Imperial Heart Palace, stronghold of the Emperor of Nuevaropa. Begun by the first Emperor, Manuel, completed by his daughter and successor, Juana the Wise—Melodía’s heroine growing up, both the first and last hereditary Empress, and the first person Elected to the Fangèd Throne—it outdid both the Dieta and the Gran Templo in displaying the exuberant ostentation of Early Imperial Gótico architecture. Its golden limestone and granite lines were designed to draw the eye up and up. Numerous windows pierced it, to allow in abundant natural light.

  As the Imperial procession approached the near end of the drawbridge—which was unguarded, because what was the point?—a score of trumpets blew a strident fanfare. Falk’s Tyrant Snowflake, wh
ich had been tossing its huge albino head and snarling through a silver cage of a muzzle at citizens both terrified and delighted by the monster’s ferocious display, faltered. It did not seem to care for the idea of crossing the chasm. Falk must have said something, or maybe just pressed more urgently with his knees, because shortly the monster stepped onto the wooden span, its tail swinging almost from rail to massive rail with the rhythm of its walk.

  Her father turned in his saddle to look back at her. He smiled.

  It’s the first time in a couple of days he’s seen me look alert, she realized. She smiled back, tentatively.

  Though the noise of the crowds—cheering, mostly—and the trumpets inside the castle yard made it impossible to hear, he mouthed something and beckoned her alongside him with his hand.

  The boots of the thirty or so Scarlet Tyrants who marched behind their commander beat the planking like drums as she nudged Meravellosa up next to her father on his bay. Her heart swelled. She had seldom felt such a closeness with her father, a kinship, since her mother had died giving birth to Montserrat.

  The two horses added the higher-pitched clop of their hooves to the wood percussion. Meravellosa all but pranced across the bridge, holding her head up proudly and perking her ears forward, as if to reproach the huge meat-eating dinosaur for its timidity at the crossing.

  Melodía glanced down and to the right. The chasm plunged a good fifty meters, to end in a splash of spray on jumbled rocks. Such of the cataract as remained; the municipality of La Majestad collected much of its water by means of a great bronze funnel built out from the Plateau’s side, discreetly out of sight below the rim, for storage in the cisterns dug deeply into it.

  She had often felt a fleeting urge to throw herself into the Moat when looking down it, or from any other great height. She never knew why.

  Now she felt the impulse, stronger than ever before, and not so fleeting. And knew why.