The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  Though slowed to a plod, the hadrosaurs continued. Despite being weighed-down by a good five hundred kilos of rider and their own armor, either heavy woven caparisons or thick dinosaur-leather plates that guarded breast and sides, a duckbill’s big splay-toed hind feet could cope with mud.

  Following hotly, the heavy-horse didn’t fare so well. Hooves plunged as if pile-driven, deep into mud. Coursers shrieked as legs snapped. Knights tumbled over flying-maned necks to land with slogging splashes.

  The rear ranks slammed into the stalled front ones with the sliding crash of two heavy-cavalry armies meeting at full charge. And to much the same effect. More equine legs broke. Horses and men were slammed into the bog. Then the ones who knocked them down tripped over them, and all got trampled by following riders who couldn’t stop their mounts in time. The marsh erupted in screams and mud and thrashing.

  Hornbow in hand, Karyl led his three-horns forward at a walk. The monsters bellowed belligerence. As dinosaurs, they had a simple outlook: disturbance equaled possible danger.

  In Their wisdom the Creators had not gifted three-horns with a springer’s speed, to run away from threats. Nor a tyrant’s teeth, nor a titan’s impregnable size. They had instead given Triceratops horridus a huge, strong body, equipped with a natural bony shield and lances.

  To Rob in the—painfully temporary—safety of his imagined barrow mound, Karyl looked like a child on its stick horse alongside the ten-tonne behemoths.

  Karyl drew, aimed, loosed. A dinosaur knight with a red and white lozenge pattern painted on shield and helmet toppled from a sackbut’s saddle. With a rattle of steel bows the arbalesters loosed a volley from the fighting castles strapped to the three-horn’s three-meter high backs. A grey and gold morion, hit through the brain, toppled thrashing into the swamp.

  Lucky shot! thought Rob. Or not, if it’s your leg crushed beneath the beast.

  The Providence heavy riders swept forward to the attack: dinosaurry on Rob’s right, cavalry on the left. The hill vibrated beneath his boots. His heart played fanfares in his chest, though his mind knew their numbers were pitifully few to throw against Count Guillaume’s might.

  The Crève Coeur dinosaurs were beginning to emerge from the marsh onto solid land. But they straggled badly now. With the oncoming three-horns fixing their front, the Providence dinosaur knights had a chance to hit them in the flank.

  And unlike the shortbows, Karyl’s recurved Ovdan bow and the crossbows could punch through armor. Rob saw another dinosaur knight fall. Others cried out in pain as bolts struck through plate into their legs, and pinned shields to arms.

  Then he saw something he liked a good deal less. That canny goblin Salvateur hadn’t joined the headlong race into the quagmire. And now he was using his brindled black sackbut like a herd dog, driving the surviving cavalry out of the marsh, south to where it narrowed down to simple stream. They’d lost over a score of coursers to the inanimate ambush.

  Which meant they still outnumbered the Providence men and women at arms three to two.

  A fresh and terrible scream brought Rob’s attention back to the field’s middle. Big Sally, the Triceratops herd-queen, had buried her brow-horns in a morion’s unarmored white belly. The duckbill dabbed brown forepaws uselessly at its tormentor’s massive head. Its rider toppled backward to the ground. His cries and likely he himself died as a purple and gold dappled sackbut trod promptly on his head.

  The three-horns were the most bellicose herd-beasts known, far more than even the wild nosehorns native to the Tyrant’s Head. Trikes rejoiced in slaughter as much as any great meat-eater. More: a wild matador or tyrant fought solely to feed. Triceratops fought to defend itself and its herd-mates—and, or so Rob felt sure, for fun.

  The other five trikes plodded into the disorganized herd of hadrosaurs, goring legs and spilling guts. Rob’s eyes brimmed with tears to see such marvelous beasts suffering so. Yet at the same time his skin seemed to burn, not just from the poorly cloud-filtered sun on his confounded sweaty, chafing armor, but with pride at the sheer power of the living forts he had helped Karyl bring to battle today.

  He saw an arbalester lanced by a knight on an ochre morion. She dropped her crossbow to grab at the haft through her belly. The Brokenheart didn’t let go of his lance, then, as he should. Instead he thrust it deeper, cruelly driving his victim back against far wicker wall of the fighting-castle. One of her comrades shot the knight; Rob saw him reel. Or her—their breastplates were the same, and a woman’s lesser strength was no true disadvantage for a warrior whose weapon was a dinosaur. Another crossbowman took up an axe and began whaling on the lancer’s armor with a smithy sound.

  Rob’s guts seemed to bubble, then, and the skin bunched at the back of his neck. As they closed with the enemy, the Providence war-duckbills had bellowed a mass terremoto. Musician that he was, Rob marveled that a thing could be both unheard and loud: he felt its pressure like palms on his cheeks and thumbs in his eyes, and it was aimed away from him.

  The Crève Coeur dinosaurs screamed and shied away from the silent sound-blast. Several toppled kicking and lashing out blindly with their immense tails. The knights’ armor protected them from most of the terremoto’s force. Small good it did them, with their mounts stunned or thrown into uncontrollable panic.

  The Providence dinosaur knights charged home. Butchery ensued. For all their numbers, the Crève Coeur knights were helpless, crushed between plodding trikes and sprinting duckbills.

  Not so the chivalry. For all his undoubtedly black character, Salvateur was a wizard field captain: against all odds he had his seventy or eighty heavy-horse forming to meet the fifty Providence lancers closing fast on them.

  We’ve still a chance, though, Rob thought. Once they’d goaded the Crève Coeur bucketheads into a rushing angrily into the hidden marsh, his light-horse had been instructed to keep biting them behind. Cavalry coursers were armored lightly in the rear. A few javelins stuck in equine rumps could go a long way to keeping the Crève Coeur knights in disarray. Which would mean, numerical advantage or no, the concerted Providence charge would shatter them like glass on an anvil.

  He looked up and away, past the seethe of dinosaurs and horsemen to his own riders.

  Just in time to see them vanish into the trees on the far ridgetop, bound for the Creators alone knew where.

  Salvateur’s rallied knights counter-charged the Providence horse. Steel masses crashed together. For a moment their impact drowned out the abattoir racket of the dinosaur scrum. Then in what seemed little more than the space of a few heartbeats the Providence knights broke, their horses racing back east with eyes rolled and manes and tails streaming.

  Gaétan was yelling at the infantry to make ready. Under-officers ran along the front rank, trying to ensure all the pikes were pointing more-or-less the right way forward. The front rank knelt with the butts of their long spears grounded and the heads angled up. The soldiers behind them held their pikes level at their waists, the third rank at their shoulders, and the last line overhead.

  An Imperial tercio would have several more ranks standing behind to take the place of those in front who fell. But a tercio was five or six times as strong, and the Nodosaurs professionals as painstakingly trained to their tasks as any other craftsfolk, carpenters or masons or blacksmiths. Whereas the Providence pikes were handled by hastily schooled amateurs, whose only hope was to stand firm against the terror the wave of armored horsemen bearing down on them sent bursting into every chest and yammering madness into every skull.…

  Rob ran to Little Nell and climbed aboard. She never paused in her self-appointed task of eating a small spiky-leaved shrub down to the ground. He ran his arm through the leather sleeve fastened to the inside of his round wooden shield, gripped the leather sling. He put his steel hat on his head—swore as sun-heated metal scorched his fingers—and hefted Wanda. He found her weight but moderately reassuring.

  Not even Salvateur’s skill could get the Crève Coeur chivalry into prope
r order again after their melee with the Providential gendarmes, brief and victorious as it was. Clearly, they didn’t care. Common foot soldiers always ran—the bucketheads made an exception in their minds for the Nodosaurs, Rob knew; something to do with the fact that noble second sons and daughters (a few, anyway) joined the browned-iron Imperial ranks.

  They knew they’d win. The bastards always did.

  But that doesn’t mean I’ve got to sit by and let them have their way, Rob thought. Sucking down a deep draught of air, he began to bellow the ballad he’d written on the road back from the bloody debacle of Blueflowers, which the minds of the Providence militia-folk had since turned to a song of triumph:

  “Now hear me sing,

  “Of a wondrous thing—”

  The Providence missileers let fly. Two horses in the front rank went down, the steel peytrels that protected their chests struck through by crossbow quarrels. At least one courser stumbled over a fallen mate, rolling over and over and crushing its rider. Rob thought to see another saddle emptied by the bolts, or even two. But there weren’t many arbalesters. And though the archers’ arrows fell thickly as raindrops among the gendarmes they did about the same amount of actual damage.

  “When men and women, though their birth was base,

  “Nevertheless still dared to face—”

  As the knights approached the Faerie poles, archers and arbalesters scattered, streaming north and south across the front of the pike array. They had to flee neither fast nor far; the Crève Coeur chivalry weren’t interested in them. A few, perhaps the bolder and the more timid alike, crouched behind the Faerie-poles.

  “The iron knights of Brokenheart,

  “That day on Blueflowers field!”

  The knights put their coursers to the gallop and dropped their lances level. They wove easily between the stakes, which weren’t sown thickly enough to prevent their passing. That hadn’t been practicable in the time they had to prepare. It did reduce their cohesion, slowed them ever so slightly. That made them no less terrifying to Rob, whose pulse thundered in his ears.

  A few riders speared archers shrieking from behind the Faerie-poles. The rest stayed fixed on the infuriating and inviting target behind: half a thousand mere peasants with long sticks.

  Rob heard Gaétan’s bow twang. A knight in green-enameled armor dropped from the saddle of a lathered blood bay.

  He let his song end. No one was listening to him anymore. Whatever good it could do, it had done.

  “This is fucking gonna hurt,” he said aloud to no one in particular.

  The steel-shod tide reached the pikes.

  Chapter 20

  Dinosauría, Dinosaurry—A military formation of dinosaur knights—as distinct from horse-mounted knights, or cavalry. All but irresistible at the charge, the dinosaurry are the main weapon of decision in Nuevaropan land warfare.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  For the whole ride back to Providence, Melodía’s heart had steeped in cold shit, as if sunk to the bottom of a cavern-sized cesspool. But when she saw the whole of the Garden—what my idiocy’s left alive of them, anyway, she thought in a wail—gathered before the blue château gates in the twilight to greet her, her heart sank and chilled and shriveled even more.

  She had scarcely registered when, a few kilometers up the Chausée de l’Ouest from the town, the smallest of her four-rider escort had booted her chestnut gelding to a run to carry word of their coming to the château ahead of them. The other three, two boys and a girl, none older than Melodía if indeed as old, continued at the sedate pace they’d maintained since Karyl had dispatched them. They treated her, as they had all along, as if she was an unfortunate child—possibly one with eggshell skin.

  To her relief, one thing they didn’t treat her as was a traitor. What they thought her purpose in going to seek audience with Count Guillaume was, she had no notion. They hadn’t spoken to her beyond necessities.

  From the pitying glances her escorts had cast her way, and the hushed tones in which they conversed on subjects other than how much they hated missing the big fight with Guilli, she gathered that Valérie and the rest who had been in on her rescue had told her of the state they’d found her in, desperately facing down the Count’s own horror pack. And of Pilar’s horrible death.

  The party reined to a halt a few paces short of the quietly waiting crowd. Without anyone saying a word, Melodía swung down from the saddle of her borrowed mount, a buckskin High Ovdan pony, with long black bangs hanging in its eyes and a surprisingly placid disposition. Overhead the clouds were breaking into long horsetail streaks, white or pink, across a sky that shaded east to west from turquoise to a deep blue. The air smelled sweet with freshly cut hay in a nearby field. From somewhere a bird trilled.

  It was the hardest thing she ever remembered, making herself stand erect, square her shoulders, and walk right up to the grim-faced Bogardus. Lady Violette stood by his side, the sunset breeze molding her thin white gown to her slim body. Absolon had been her close friend and occasional lover as well as ally, Melodía knew.

  I’d rather face the horrors, without even the false hope of Pilar’s knife, Melodía thought.

  But she made herself do it. Then, face-to-face, she tried to meet Bogardus’s gaze. She couldn’t. Instead she dropped to a knee and grabbed the purple-trimmed hem of his simple grey smock.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I killed them. I killed them all. It was all my fault.”

  And the tears erupted, and dissolved her like lava.

  She felt two strong hands on her arms. She quailed. What would he do to her? What could he do to her that was one-tenth the punishment she had deserved?

  He hoisted her to her feet, with that often-surprising strength of his—she couldn’t bear to remember just how she’d learned of it. She raised her face, then, made herself blink away the tears, and look squarely into Bogardus’s face.

  He smiled.

  “We know you acted out of love for us,” he said, “however mistakenly you did it. We are in a war, and sadly, there are casualties in war. You are welcome here, as always.”

  “We’re only glad you made it back to us safely,” Violette said, with curious intensity.

  Melodía scarcely noticed. Because Bogardus enfolded her in his powerful arms, and cradled her against the rock of his chest, and she surrendered to a sorrow that seemed to flow from the coldest depths of Paradise.

  * * *

  Irresistible, an avalanche of muscle and gaily painted steel tipped with fluttering pennons and death, the Crève Coeur cavalry thundered down on the Providence pike-ranks. And stopped.

  Neither horses nor dinosaurs were intellectual giants. Rob knew it; everybody knew it. But they were living creatures, and the tendency of such is to do their level best to continue to go on living.

  Neither horses nor dinosaurs would, unless panicked completely senseless, dash themselves to bags of bone-shards against immovable objects, or what they took for same. Nor were these coursers, exhaustively and expertly war-trained though they were, about to impale themselves on a four-deep hedge of iron thorns.

  So … they refused.

  Of course most of the horses running behind the front couldn’t see the obstacle: no one was going to confuse a horse’s vision with a long-flying dragon’s. So just as had happened when they bogged down in the mire, the rear ranks piled into the ones who had shied and halted meters short of the pike-heads. Which had the effect of driving most of them into the pike-heads.

  The force of the impact of dozens of heavy, powerful equine bodies physically drove the Providence line back into an irregular wave. Some of the kneeling front rank had to let go their weapons and jump back to avoid being crushed.

  But both sides instantly discovered a very important fact: unlike most weapons, a steel pike-head backed by four meters and four kilos of hardwood shaft would penetrate the finest plate—whether a knight’s cuirass or a horse’s barding.

  Ho
rses and humans screamed as the pikes plunged deep into their torsos. The ones that had been braced against the ground did the worst execution. Not only since they didn’t depend on mere human mass and muscle to stay firm, but because some of them actually angled up under the horses’ chest-armor.

  Perhaps it was Rob’s perfervid imagination—which, as a jongleur, was generally his stock in trade, if less in demand for a dinosaur master. But it seemed to him he could literally see a wave of resolution and confidence pass among the ranks of Providence pikes.

  They had done the impossible: plain lowborn men and women had stood against the invincibly armored chivalry in full charge. And they not only lived—they were doing the killing.

  They liked it. And they began to push back. The impaled mounts began to fall. The pikes of mostly the latter three ranks began to dig into the pushing, milling mob the rest of the Crève Coeur cavalry had become. Pikes thrust through horses’ neck-armor and even the chamfrons protecting their faces. They punched holes in knightly steel and the privileged hide—and entrails—behind.

  But not all the line had held. And it wasn’t the pike-pushers’ fault.

  Blame momentum: Rob did. A handful of the charging coursers, perhaps slower on the uptake than their kindred, had left it too late to stop. Instead of pulling up before the pikes, they stumbled, and hurtled like living missiles of meat and metal, each weighing just north of a metric ton, screaming and leg-flailing through the foot-soldier ranks. Their riders flew off like discarded dolls.

  Rob sucked in his breath as the following knights blasted through the gaps their hapless comrades had made. Though only a dozen or so made it through the painfully thin Providence line, they could now wheel to fall upon the backs of the pike-pushers. Who, engaged from the front already, could do little to protect themselves.

  It was one of the most dearly desired outcomes in battle: to strike your foe on the flank, or better from behind. Such attacks struck panic in their victims far out of proportion to their actual danger. Even the hearts of the stoutest veterans—which these Providential amateurs were not—would quail, almost certainly causing them to break and rout in terror as human nature asserted itself.