The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  A quicker-thinking pair of retainers grabbed their count’s reins and turned his horse to flee the ambush. No arrows sought him out.

  A man half a head shorter than Melodía stepped up by her side. He drew a heavy recurved hornbow to his ear, loosed. A black arrow struck the temple of one of the nobles who were trying to get their liege out of there.

  The archer was Karyl Bogomirskiy, dressed in his usual plain, dark robe with his hair in a topknot.

  “Shoot him!” Melodía shrieked. “Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him! Guillaume’s right in front of you! Why aren’t you shooting him?”

  He looked at her with an eye cold as a lizard’s. “Guilli I can beat,” he said. “Salvateur’s actually good.”

  Guillaume seemed reluctant to quit the field. Eyes rolling, his mare was tossing her head, neighing and sidestepping as the knight pulled the reins one way and her rider another. An arrow hit her white rump. As the Providence scouts and woods-runners laughed, she squealed and took off like a startled bouncer at a dead run back toward the Crève Coeur encampment.

  A burly figure trudged past Melodía. It was Rob Korrigan, bearded chin sunk to breastbone and glancing neither left nor right. He walked straight to where Pilar lay. He held his long-hafted dinosaur master’s axe in his right hand.

  A pair of adolescent blue horrors, bolder than their elders or just stupider, had crept back out of the weeds to snatch a few more mouthfuls of meat from the still-warm body of their victim. One turned to face Rob as he approached. It hissed a warning.

  He split its face with a viper-strike blow of his axe. The other lunged for him. He smashed in the side of its skull with the back of his axe-head.

  Ignoring the two flopping, dying raptors he stopped and looked down at Pilar.

  * * *

  Rob Korrigan had seen many terrible things. Too many to think it was a good idea to look at what the horror pack had done to his lover.

  But he made himself do so.

  His vision snapped down to a tube. He wasn’t aware of his knees giving way until they jarred against the ground.

  He managed just to turn his head aside to avoid defiling Pilar’s body with his puke.

  * * *

  Someone laid a hand on Melodía’s shoulder. She spun, feeling tears fly off her cheeks but with her knife at the ready. She almost recoiled from what she saw.

  A woman stood beside her, taller than she was, dressed in a loincloth and a green scrap wound tightly about her breasts. She had a quiver full of green-fletched arrows slung over her shoulder and a shortbow in her hand. The green and brown paint streaked across her face couldn’t mask the hideous knife-scarring beneath.

  But Stéphanie’s green-flecked amber eyes were gentle, as was her husky contralto voice.

  “You were very brave,” she said. “You faced the horrors with nothing but a knife, and never flinched.”

  Tears flooded Melodía’s eyes. They stung like scalding water.

  “Not so brave as she was.” She nodded toward Pilar.

  “No,” the woods-runner. “But then, who is?”

  She turned and went back to the woods. Her friend’s final words floated to the surface of Melodía’s mind: “The Fae set me to watch over you, Princess. May they protect you now.”

  Melodía didn’t believe the Fae—the hada—existed. Any more than she did Grey Angels. Nor the Creators themselves, for that matter.

  But the Church taught that they existed—and were demons, enemies of the gods. Could Melodía’s lifelong companion, her long-neglected friend, really have been a devil-worshipper?

  She gave her life for me, Melodía thought. Would a demon-lover do that?

  She shook her head. The only thing that matters is that she was truly my friend. And I let her die.

  The horsewoman who had killed the Crève Coeur knight with her dart rode up leading his horse by the reins.

  “Come along, Princess,” said the woman who had yanked her away from the horror’s death-kick. “We have to go. Guilli won’t dawdle any longer than it takes to rally a hundred of his knights before howling back after us with blood in his eye. We’re firing the field, but that won’t keep him long, as pissed as he is.”

  Melodía heard crackling and smelled smoke. The breeze wasn’t stiff but perceptibly blowing back across the field. The weeds were too green to burn readily. The grain-stalks weren’t.

  She heard moans and cries from out in the weeds, where injured Rangers lay. No one seemed inclined to go and give them final mercy before the slow-moving flames reached them.

  Neither did she.

  She looked at her rescuer. “Name?” she croaked. Her throat suddenly felt as dry as kiln-fired clay.

  “Pardon, Highness?”

  “What’s your name?” she managed to say. “Please.”

  “Valérie.”

  “Thank you, Valérie,” she said.

  Hands helped boost her into the saddle of the dead noble’s bay. Her years of training and experience as an equestrienne took over. No matter how fast the Providence raiding-party fled Count Guillaume’s vengeance, she could keep pace and keep the saddle without conscious thought.

  Which was good, because as they set off back through the woods Melodía sank at once into a black abyss of sorrow so profound it swallowed even self-reproach.

  * * *

  Rob’s thoughts were black, his heart a lump of lead. He sat his borrowed marchadora in even more sacklike style than usual.

  The rescue party rode homeward between ripe-grain fields at an easy walk. Scouts hung back to keep an eye on Guillaume—as they had since the instant he rode into the ford across the Lisette heading east. Even armored in just their shirts his men-at-arms weren’t liable to ride as fast as the light horse did. Especially after woods-runners had feathered one or two smartly in shoot-and-go ambushes.

  “Are you all right?” asked Karyl, who rode beside him on Asal.

  After a moment, Rob stirred himself to lift his chin fractionally from his clavicle. “She was just a girl.” His voice grated like a rusty hinge.

  Karyl said nothing.

  Rob continued to ride. Karyl kept saying nothing. At last Rob growled.

  “Damn you,” he said.

  “That’s redundant, I suspect.”

  “And you claim you aren’t good at manipulating others.”

  “I am good at getting results,” Karyl said. “Until I fail horribly, and bring death and devastation to all those around me. Keep that in mind, my friend: if you continue to ride at my side, there’s only more misery and loss, and worse, ahead.”

  But those words no more penetrated Rob’s gloom than rain the feathers on a galley-bird’s back.

  He sucked in a long breath.

  “When I was young,” Rob said, “I had a sister. Alys was her name. She was older than I by a year and a half. She looked out for me when I was a lad. Whenever my stupid tongue got the rest of me in trouble she came to my defense. And far too often that was, for I had even less sense in those days than I do now.

  “She was sweet as well as clever, was Alys. And beautiful as a newborn day. There were no feathers she couldn’t smooth, no matter how her scapegrace younger brother ruffled them. Everyone loved her.

  “Came a twilight, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-four. I remember it all too clearly. We’d parked the wagons for the night, unhitched our nosehorns and set them to graze. A party of four nobles arrived at our caravan, riding striders. Young bucks, the lot, scarcely older than Alys. They’d been out hunting. And drinking freely, that was clear. Their young buckethead blood ran hot.

  “Short story made shorter: they saw my sister. They fancied her. They took her.”

  He had to squeeze his eyes shut. I don’t know why I don’t want Himself to see my tears, he thought, but that I do not.

  “They dumped her back by the camp in the wee hours of the morning,” he said. “For the brag of it, I suppose. She was … they’d used her. Badly. She was bleeding.…”

&nbs
p; He sighed.

  “Bleeding from everywhere was my angel, Alys, my sister dear. And her face all bruised and puffy. Even her nose was broken. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘Rob, don’t mourn me, please. Find your own beauty in life.’”

  They rode a while longer, their horses’ hooves clopping out of synchronization. They entered a pine-wood where green- and yellow-feathered climbers chased each other screeching through boughs. The men and women who rode behind stayed oddly silent, their earlier exhilaration subdued by reaction and late-afternoon heat.

  “What really happened?” Karyl asked.

  “She died thrashing and moaning and never spoke a coherent word that anybody heard,” Rob snarled. “What d’you think happened?”

  He turned and spat into the brush by the path, where green flies clustered on the body of a small dead thing.

  “The rest, though, that was true as Creators’ Word, in every syllable,” Rob said. “You’ve no reason to credit that, I know. I’ve told you many a tall tale of my past, and I’m going to do again. But that was real. That’s how it happened with my sister. I loved her, failed her, and lost her. To the stinking nobles.”

  He shuddered with the effort of holding down the passion that grew huge inside him. “And now I’ve gone and done it again.”

  “That’s why you hate them,” Karyl said.

  “Aye. Everything I love, the blue-blood bastards take from me.”

  “They’re good at that. It’s what they do.”

  “And yet you’re a noble yourself.”

  “And you see the good I’ve done.” The bitterness in Karyl’s voice matched that in Rob’s throat.

  Rob shook his head. “Karyl Bogomirskiy, I’ll never understand you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  They rode for a time in silence. Karyl had packed Melodía, much chastened, off to the Garden villa—protected by an armed escort, but not under guard. Rob protested: how could they know she hadn’t intended to sell them out?

  Karyl asked what coin the Count of Crève Coeur could possibly offer an Imperial Princess? Sanctuary, perhaps—but even as naïve as Melodía had proven herself to be, she knew perfectly well that if the Empire demanded Guillaume turn her over, he’d have no choice but comply or face attainder. With the best will in the world—which few had ever accused the Comte Crève Coeur of possessing—there was no way he’d do that for a stranger who was no kin of his.

  And the Princess had proven laughably naïve indeed. Had one a sufficiently cruel sense of humor.

  Despite her shock and grief at the enormity she had brought upon her friends, Melodía had kept herself under strict control as she replied lucidly and fully to Karyl’s interrogation. Nor could even Rob Korrigan, who had slight reason to give her slack, deny her contrition was real.

  She had, she explained with her face ashen and fingers writhing together like snakes, intended to try talking to the enemy in hopes of finding common ground; and failing that, to appeal to his better nature.

  Unfortunately, Guillaume had none.

  Karyl looked to Rob.

  “It’s time,” he said. “Let loose your own human raptor-packs. Have them run down Guillaume’s scouts and spies and foragers. Kill them hard, but kill them fast.”

  “All of them?”

  “All. I want Guillaume blind. Completely. We can’t stop him foraging altogether. We can make him send out big, slow parties, clanking with armored escorts.”

  Rob nodded. “My kids’ll be glad to hear those orders.”

  “Well, tell the woods-runners to restrain their more … elaborate impulses when it comes to paying off the Rangers. It’s not that I’ll waste any tears on them, though atrocity isn’t how I make war. But we don’t have time for games.”

  “We should be square there, then,” Rob said. “Lad Gaétan’s been ever so civilizing an influence on Stéphanie. And her brother does what she says, I notice.”

  “I should talk to the boy, then. I don’t want her getting too civilized on me. Otherwise she’ll be no more use than that poor pampered little fool of a princess.”

  Rob started to chuckle. It came out a grunt.

  “I still say we rescued the wrong girl.”

  “Tell your scouts, especially the light-horse, to take as few risks as possible. That said, the more they sting Guilli’s broad ass, the better. Have them burn a few tents, run off some coursers, put arrows in a few of his war-duckbills. They won’t do much real harm. But that’s not the point. The point is, anger makes people stupid.”

  “Bucketheads are stupid to start with, Captain.”

  “So they are. But I want them as stupid as theoretically possible. Especially the Count. And don’t forget—Salvateur is anything but stupid.”

  “Oh, aye,” Rob said. “That he is, the black Sasanach rogue.”

  “So then, tell your people that’s how much I want them to annoy Count Guillaume,” Karyl said. “Until he’s angrier than Salvateur’s voice of reason is persuasive.”

  Despite himself Rob found himself laughing. Longer and louder than strictly called for, perhaps.

  At last he got hold of himself. Wiping a tear—mostly of mirth—from his eye, he shook his head in admiration.

  “Ah, Karyl Bogomirskiy,” he said. “They ought to rename the old song for you. You’re a man you don’t meet every day.”

  “No doubt Paradise is a better place for it,” Karyl said. “Now, go. We’ll face Crève Coeur tomorrow, most likely. And when we do, I want him mad enough to charge Big Sally head to head.”

  Chapter 18

  Dinero, Money—While regional names vary, our coinage is standardized throughout the Empire of Nuevaropa: trono of 32 grams of gold, equaling 20 pesetas in value; Corona, 16 grams gold, equaling 10 pesetas; Imperial, 8 grams gold equaling 5 pesetas; peseta, 32 grams of silver, valuing 1/20 trono or 4 pesos; peso, 8 grams silver, equaling 1/4 of a peseta; and the Centimo, 8 grams copper, valued at 1/100 of a peso.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  “All right,” Rob said in disgust. “You win.”

  He flipped a silver peso to Karyl. The other caught it without so much as glancing around.

  They stood on a low rise with their army around them. Rob’s Traveler fancy made it a barrow, soil mounded over some ancient battle’s dead. In front of them a valley of tall green grass and blue and purple wildflowers sloped gently down to where a line of tall, feathery-topped reeds marked the course of a small stream half a kilometer away. Then the land angled up again for perhaps eleven hundred more meters to a ridge, taller and sharper than this one.

  It was no superstitious fear of ghosts that rippled a chill down Rob’s spine. From the woods that crowned the ridgeline dinosaur knights appeared. Steel chamfrons glittered in midmorning sun that already stung Rob’s exposed arms through a scrim of cloud. Pennons fluttered from upraised lances, blue and green.

  Crève Coeur’s colors.

  “So you were right, my Captain,” Rob said. “It really was that easy to bait Guilli into coming to us.”

  “So far.”

  The slaughter of his beloved hunting horror pack, along with a handful of Rangers and some of his favorites—to say nothing of the personal humiliation of having it done right under his tuber-shaped nose—had stung the Count’s pride the way a woods-runner arrow had stung his horse’s fine white fanny. He had rousted out his army and marched them east toward Providence town straightaway.

  They had made slow going. Naturally enough, since the good Count refused to leave the vast unwieldy tail of baggage wagons his buckethead vassals and allies dragged behind them. Rob’s scouts had feted them en route with showers of taunts and arrows. Although delivered at such a range that the one did about as much harm as the other, they did what they were meant to do.

  No matter how pissed their commander was, the invaders were not about to march all night, especially through the deep forest they found themselves in when the sun sank away in the east.
They bivouacked. Not all their sentries had survived the darkness. A dozen or so tents and supply wagons had gone up in flames.

  Again, no more than wasp-stings. But Guillaume and his troops had not passed a restful night. Nor was Guilli in a calm, contemplative mood when he marched again in the morning.

  Light-horse dart attacks and arrows from covert had promptly met the Brokenhearts. Guillaume pressed with determined fury in the very direction he was stung from the hardest. In his eagerness to get to grips with his foe he even forsook the wide, well-tended Western Road, now two kilometers south, for what was basically a goat track.

  “How could he be so easy to bait?” Rob demanded. “Guilli’s a dolt, right enough. But Salvateur, now—he’s got a long head on him, as our Northmen brothers say.”

  That was bitter Irlandés irony: the wild Northmen with their sea-serpent drawn dragon-boats were neither subjects of the Empire nor its friends. For the better art of a century they had held the islands north of Ayr-Land, which territory they traded with constantly and raided barely less often. They were as cruel a curse upon the Ayrysh as their Anglysh overlords—almost.

  “Crève Coeur’s injured pride moans louder than Salvateur can speak wisdom,” Karyl said. “Give the Count his due: his best move has always been to find us and destroy us, so totally and viciously the province loses not just the means, but even the will to resist. He wants to fight us, wherever we stand. And after all, he knows in his heart he’ll win.”

  And Karyl smiled. Rob fervently hoped Karyl would never smile that way while thinking of him.

  The day was fine. The sun shone halfway up the sky, an intense white round in the overcast. The Shield Mountains made a jagged blue rampart away to their right, seeming deceptively close. The breeze blew stiff and from the north, across the shallow valley, covering most of the army’s thousand noises, mutter and rumble and clink of metal, with the rustle of grass and scrub and its own native hiss and boom. It also brought Rob and Karyl the musty smells of the war-dinosaurs mustered to the right of their vantage point. Karyl ran a clean camp, meaning that was the worst smell they were likely to encounter. Until blood and even less savory substances began to spill, of course.