The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

  The thin-moustached servant bowed and vanished.

  “Very well, Mother.” Falk said. “You know, of course, I’m delighted to see you. And I’ll leave you now, since my Snowflake had a tiring day, and I must see him properly housed in the Palace stables.”

  She turned, smiling, and spread her arms. Her breasts had only slightly begun to sag into middle age. They were large and wide, with pale pink aureoles contracting into points as he watched. Her pubic hair was a wisp of white that scarcely concealed the lips of her sex.

  “Oh, leave your lout of a squire to tend to your little pet. He does little enough as it is. Now come here and kiss your mother hello properly.”

  * * *

  Wearing the only armor they had with them, nosehorn-leather jacks, the Companions pelted into the prosperous-looking village of Tres Veces. It consisted of several score of structures, some made of stone, as Pablo had said. It seemed oddly devoid of inhabitants or visitors. The narrow streets were empty, the windows of the mostly one-story, flat-roofed buildings stoutly shuttered.

  Then they came with a clatter of hooves into the central plaza and stopped.

  A dozen strange dinosaur knights lined its far side, facing them. Each wore armor of overlapping steel plates, and open, peaked helmets. Each sat astride a war-hadrosaur as colorful and splendid as the Companions’ own absent mounts. A red banner with a white rose hung lank from the standard that rose from each high saddle cantle.

  Each held an Ovdan recurved bow of laminated Triceratops horn with white-fletched arrow nocked and ready. Round shield hung by their pommels.

  “Cataphracts?” Machtigern said.

  “Trebs,” spat Ayaks.

  “Hail, Captain-General!” the man in the central position called in accented but clear Spañol. He sat a glorious white morion with a pink face. Even from thirty meters away, Jaume could see his dark face was clean-shaven and beautiful, with huge dark eyes like a new-hatched duckbill’s. “I greet you and your illustrious Companions with love and honor.”

  “Damned peculiar way you’ve got of showing it,” Will Oakheart said.

  “You have the advantage of me, Señor Montador,” Jaume called back.

  “I am Roshan of the Shining Mountain. It is my honor to be Knight Commander of the Knights of the Flower of the Middle Daughter. These are my Flower Knights: Bálint, Dariush, Gyözö, Jahangir, Mas’ud, Omid, Sher, Temür, Yilmaz, Yuliy, and Zakhar. All as accomplished and gallant as they are beautiful.”

  All but the last two named were as dark as Roshan himself. Yuliy was blond; Zakhar, brown-haired and fairer-skinned than most of his brethren. Jaume recognized their names as Ruso, like his own Companion Ayaks, himself an immigrant from Trebizon. The other names he recognized as mostly Parso or Turco. The Basileia contained large populations from both groups, although Roshan’s Order Military—which the Flower Knights clearly were—might have attracted aspirants from Gran Turán. As had his own, although none currently survived among the Companions.

  “I surely recognize most of you by your repute: Bernat, Florian, Ayaks, Manuel, Owain, Machtigern, Will Oakheart. Noble artists and heroes all. And, of course, the renowned poet and philosopher of Beauty, mightiest hero of the Empire of Nuevaropa, the Imperial Champion Jaume dels Flors. But I regret two of you gentle sirs are yet unknown to me.”

  “They’re Mor Ramón and Mor Grzegorz, Brothers-Aspirant who accompany us in hopes of winning acceptance to full Companions on our quest.” Jaume could see no reason not to tell him. “Which I’m guessing you’re so conveniently placed here to hinder us on.”

  Roshan laughed. But his beautiful features clouded quickly as a dawn sky.

  “Sadly so. As holy duty binds you to free the Infanta, it binds us to stop you.”

  “She’s a child,” Jaume said, his voice rougher than he liked with emotion. “Is that knightly? Is that Beauty, since you follow the same Lady as do we?”

  Roshan dropped his gaze to the paving stones, worn smooth by wagon wheels, horses’ hooves, the feet of men and heavy dinosaurs.

  “It is a duty which overrides all else,” he said. “Those trifles, our hearts. And even our own idiosyncratic conceptions of our religious vows. It is the inescapable burden of a knightly order. And one not unfamiliar to you, I believe.”

  Jaume felt his cheeks blush hot. That shot had struck home. But that was information he wasn’t willing to divulge—if his traitor countenance hadn’t done so already.

  “Believe me, Mor Roshan,” Florian said, “we don’t have any such ambivalence.”

  “In that you have advantage over us, my friend.”

  The Francés knight with the long golden hair, green eyes, and twisting smile was Jaume’s closest living friend among his beloved brothers. He was renowned for wit as sharp as his rapier, which he used with equal skill. But not always equal judgment. For a heartbeat Jaume was afraid Florian would unsheathe his tongue over the invader’s use of the word amigo.

  That under the tactical circumstances twelve catafractos as skilled as Jaume took these to be could drop him and all his men in a single volley before they could dodge did not concern him. It was that, enemies or not, there was no call to be rude. Courtesy was beautiful.

  “I take it it’s no accident we find you here,” Jaume said, “instead of our quarry.”

  “Which has long since flown,” Manuel said. “If it was ever here.”

  “Alas, you are both correct in your suppositions.”

  “Set up,” Florian said in disgust.

  “Like skittles,” agreed Machtigern.

  “Did you send the fake informant to mislead us?” Jaume asked.

  “Would you have used such a stratagem?”

  “Of course.”

  Many of the Empire’s secular knights, and even certain other Orders Military, disdained the Companions for their willingness to use sleights. Then again those same critics tended to consider the use of any tactics other than blundering straight ahead in a full-speed charge as cowardly. There were reasons the Companions called many of their noble warriors “bucketheads,” and not just because of their helmets.

  Roshan nodded, as if taking in new information. “We did not. That was our … masters.”

  That would be the actual kidnappers, of course. If the Flower Knight was to be believed. The Trebs were famous for their intricate and almost compulsive intrigues.

  But if Roshan’s dismay at what his duty compels him to do is faked, Jaume thought, then his excellence as an actor is unsurpassed.

  Florian shook back his long, kinky locks.

  “So what’s it to be, then? Wherever the child snatchers you work for have gone, we’re going to run them down. And you stand in our road.”

  “Indeed, Mor Florian,” Roshan said. “But as the noted strategist Manuel de Piedrablanca has observed, we have done our duty and covered their escape. Though you came close, they were never here; this was always a pure ambush.”

  Which we fell into as obligingly as a blind matador, Jaume thought ruefully.

  “But now we must end this delightful encounter,” Roshan said. He spoke a single crisp command.

  Hornbows rose. Thumb-rings pulled white fletching to cheeks in the distinctive and exotic Ovdan draw.

  “Scatter!” Jaume yelled.

  He knew it was futile even as he turned his mare’s head to his left and nudged her light-grey barrel with his heels. But the volley passed over their heads with the unmistakable fluttering hum of arrows in flight.

  Once out of sight of the plaza behind a two-story counting house, Jaume turned right down a twisting lane and set the mare galloping. He drew the Lady’s Mirror from its sheath across his back. He knew too much about the Ovdan archer skills employed by Trebs as well as Turanes to believe he and his men had a hope of catching the cataphracts before they had drawn again. But he knew from the basic tactical knowledge he instilled in every Brother before he was ever accepted to Companion status that both the men with him and the ones who had broken the ot
her way were now closing in like pincers on the catafractos’ flanks.

  The square was empty. Blank, shuttered windows seemed to mock the Companions like blind eyes.

  “Spread out and sweep the village,” Jaume called. “They can’t have gotten far.” Big bipedal war-dinosaurs could outsprint horses, but horses ran faster longer.

  Five minutes later, they rallied on the road. “Nothing, Captain,” Florian reported in disgust. “And the road’s too well metaled with busted pumice to take prints, especially from big duckbill feet.”

  “How could they have gotten away?” Ramón asked. “It’s like magic.”

  “Be careful what you say,” said Owain darkly. The strapping blond Galés seldom spoke, though he sang with a baritone beauty that brought tears to his Brothers’ eyes.

  “You don’t really believe they used magic to get away from us, do you?” Machtigern asked.

  “Magic walks the world, my friend. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.”

  “But Raguel’s gone from the world, for better or worse,” Jaume said. “Better, I have to think, Grey Angel or not, since we all saw what he did.”

  “But they do not die,” Owain said. “And he has six friends.”

  “You don’t really think we’re up against an Angel here, do you?” Will asked in Anglysh, the native tongue of both men. Jaume could follow well enough. Like most noble Southerners, he was at least conversant in that language, Francés, and in Alemán, along with the Imperial common tongue, Spañol, while knowing next to nothing of Slavo, the speech of the fifth and final Torre Major of Nuevaropa.

  “No,” Owain replied in Spañol. “But there are other magics.”

  “The Fae?” Jaume shook his head. “Too much for me. That’s passing beyond doctrine and on to superstition.”

  Owain looked grim and shook his head, but said no more.

  “Forgive him, Captain,” Will Oakheart said. “The Welsh are a superstitious lot.” The two Anglaterranos were best friends, though never lovers, so far as Jaume knew. As Jaume had become platonic best friends with Florian, after the sea-monster took his childhood friend and lover, Pere, during a fight with pirates in La Canal.

  “We don’t have to go piling on explanations,” Machtigern said. “They got away somehow. They’re clever bastards. We’d probably find a way, too, in their position.”

  “It was almost as if they were trying to imitate your brotherhood,” Mor Grzegorz said. “Ours. Or is that presumptuous? Pardon, I do not know.”

  “You’re already our Brother, Grzegorz,” Florian said. “You and Ramón. Don’t worry about the details.”

  “All I’m worried about now is that we’ve missed the Infanta’s actual kidnappers. And whether or not Roshan told us the truth, we have no idea where to find them.”

  “They are heading to Laventura,” Ayaks said. The brooding blond giant was brooding harder than usual. He had left his allegiance to the Basileia—something that wasn’t always necessarily strong to start with among its lesser nationalities, such as los Rusos and los Talianos—behind when he came to Nuevaropa to seek and win acceptance as a Companion. But he took his nominal countrymen’s betrayal of both hospitality and diplomatic law personally.

  Jaume wondered how Manfredo, the former Taliano law student—and former Companion—would have felt. Probably even more outraged; it had been the fact that his heart lay more with Torre, the Youngest Son, the Creator associated with Order, than with Beauty and the Middle Daughter that led to his splitting with the Companions. Jaume wondered how he and the Brabantés knight Wouter de Jong had fared after leaving the Order, disgusted by the atrocities committed by the very Imperial Army they were on the verge of joining in its then Crusade against Providence.

  He didn’t wonder long. The present was more urgent for him at the best of times. Which these were not.

  “So we know,” Ayaks said, “they will head just east of south.”

  “Many roads lead from here to Laventura, hermano,” Manuel said.

  “So how do we proceed?” Jaume asked.

  “Let’s scour the area surrounding for information,” Manuel said, “and return to the Lambent Lambeosaur for tonight. Our squires and our war-dinosaurs should catch up to us by morning.”

  Jaume’s own arming-squire, Bartomeu, had kept in touch with the Companions by means of horseback messengers since his group had passed the eastern tip of the Mountains of Power. He was proving adept at organizing and getting things done. Have to think about knighting the boy soon, I suspect, Jaume thought. He was blooded at Canterville against the Horde, and did well. I’ll miss having him as squire, though.

  “Do we have time?” Ayaks asked. “Laventura isn’t far.”

  “They can’t travel as fast as they’d like,” Manuel said. “Not with the whole countryside roused against them by now. Especially not now that they’ve met with a dozen dinosaur knights, who doubtless came from Laventura to meet them.”

  “And we need our dinosaurs, to deal with theirs,” Jaume said.

  “And how about their arrows?” Florian asked. “If they use chisel tips, they’ll shoot through our plate. And I doubt they’ll shoot to miss next time.”

  “Which begs the question of why they shot to miss this time,” said Will. The two Angleses lived up to the common stereotype of their countrymen by being accomplished archers of the longbow, a weapon almost never used on continental Nuevaropa, where the short bow—far weaker and shorter-ranged than either longbow or hornbow—dominated. Their problem was that, unlike the recurved Ovdan bows the cataphracts used, the longbow was badly suited to being shot from horse- or dinosaur-back.

  “That’s evidence their leader was telling the truth when he said they didn’t much care for what they have to do, anyway,” Florian said.

  “They seemed to give us a great deal of information,” said Bernat. As chronicler of the Order, he had a keen appreciation of such matters. “Was that a slip, I wonder? Arrogance or guile?”

  “You can trust a Treb for those things, if nothing else,” Machtigern said. He gave Ayaks a glance. “Present company excepted, Brother.”

  “I am no Treb,” Ayaks said. “I am a Rus, a Companion, and I serve the Fangèd Throne as well as the Lady.”

  “They’re playing some game of their own, those knights,” Florian said. “We can rely on that, if nothing else.”

  “Indeed,” Manuel said thoughtfully. “But the question is—what is it?”

  Chapter 12

  Los Libros de la Ley, THE BOOKS OF THE LAW—The Creators’ Own Law. Popularly attributed to Torrey, the Youngest Son, who stands for Order. They are largely filled with explanation and annotation, since the actual laws are few and simple: for example, establishing worship of the Creators as the worldwide faith, although allowing it to take many forms; enjoining people to actively enjoy life; abjuring eternal punishment; mandating proper hygiene; and forbidding slavery and torture.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  I did it! My plan worked! I hugged Silver Mistral extra-hard when I got back to the carriage!

  (The less said about the smell where I am now, the better. It’s a mostly empty storeroom in a tanner’s yard we’re staying in for the night. As always, the bad people are afraid of being spotted if we stay in the open. Why they don’t travel at night, I don’t know, but I’m not about to suggest it to them.)

  When I ask to go relieve myself, they let me. They find a sidetrack where they can get off the main road, or anyway as main a road as they ever follow. (They’re staying mostly off the major roads to cut down the chances of discovery. I got that much from what they say in Spañol.) Then they stop the carriages under the best cover they can find.

  When I go, they always send along Diego or Elfego in case I try to run for it—they can both catch me, big lumbering lunks though they look like. They also send one of the two priestesses. I actually prefer Paraskeve, even though she’s real mean, because she mostly just ignores me, other than to ke
ep an eye on me so I don’t bolt.

  But today it was the other woman, Anastasia, whom they usually call Tasoula because I guess that’s her nickname or something. I really really don’t like her. She doesn’t hurt me or anything. She hardly seems to notice I exist, most of the time. But she’s dirty. She looks all grimy, even though the Creators (whom I do not believe in) say we’re supposed to keep ourselves clean, and shouldn’t one of Their priestesses, like, set a good example? But she stinks like a Life-to-Come sectary, so it’s better walking outdoors with her than riding in one of those stuffy carriages with her, let me tell you. When we were walking, she kept rubbing dirt and twigs and leaves on her face and skin and hair and talking to herself, I guess, about “the voices of the wildwood” telling her scary things and giving her scary orders. That kind of scares me, especially since sometimes it seems she’s not talking just to herself but is talking to them? Then she caught some beetles and crushed them and rubbed the juices and goo all over her arms, which are the only parts of her robes left bare aside from her face. They look hot, as well as being gross. That made me pretty nervous.

  Today I found a path that led to a stream among a small stand of pine trees in a mostly open area. The Meseta isn’t as flat as I always think it is—there’s plenty of rolling hills and low ridges, it turns out. At first I mostly took it because I didn’t want the nettles to scratch my legs. They hurt, and itch something fierce at night, too. But when I got to the little stream, I noticed a sandal print in some bare mud by the bank, so it wasn’t just a trail the springers or maybe wild nosehorns made going to drink. So I’ll try to pick out spots like this in the future where I know people might come.

  Because I did it! I dropped my first note!

  I stopped to hunker down and get a drink and slipped the note into some weeds. Both crazy Tasoula and Diego, who was the Spañol brute they sent to escort us today, were standing ten or so meters away, so all I had to worry about was making sure it was hidden from them. Neither of them noticed anything! But I hope anybody who comes to let their livestock drink at the stream, or fill a water skin, will see it.