The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  Instead true buckethead nature reasserted itself. While the peasant infantry’s impertinence in defying their betters merited punishment, they remained intrinsically beneath contempt.

  Riding equated to nobility. In most tongues the one literally meant the other, hence the use of montador and montadora—“mounted ones”—as the universal Nuevaropan honorifics for knights. Gaétan, who had ridden apart from Rob while rallying the pike to stand firm, was of course a mere merchant. Rob was defiantly proud of being lower-born than anyone.

  These were peasants mounted. And on dinosaurs. Conspicuous horned monsters bigger than any warhorse, even the huge (and currently out-of-vogue) destriers.

  So naturally, honor and outrage drew the horse-borne knights to the two men like flies to fresh wounds.

  To his eternal if secret pride, Rob’s first impulse when three of the knights spurred straight up the barrow at him was to yelp like a dog with a stepped-on tail, wildly think, What the sod am I doing here?, and turn Nell’s big, frilled head to run away.

  But before her ponderous body could start to turn to follow, Rob saw that at least a pair of riders was coming on both flanks. He kept Nell turning left. Then booting her wide sides he sent her bulling toward the rider closing from that side.

  The knight rode a white horse and bore a black shield with a raptor’s hind foot, gold, complete with upraised killing-claw in silver. A striking design, really. Not that Rob had leisure to appreciate it.

  The knight’s lance-head glanced off the iron boss of Rob’s own shield. The horse shied off from Nell’s bizarre stout, front-hooking horn. The Einiosaurus slammed the courser shoulder to shoulder and sent it staggering back on its haunches.

  Despite the opening Rob wasn’t foolish enough to try making a break for it. While Little Nell was lighter than burly Zhubin, despite being longer she was never built for speed. Much less acceleration. She could no more outpace a galloping warhorse than a springer could a dragon in full dive.

  Instead he spun her back clockwise toward the trio he’d first spotted attacking him. Corner-eye motion, reflex, and the Fae’s own luck sent his axe wheeling over and down to his right. Its long beard caught the blade of a sword descending toward his own shrinking flesh. The force of his blow knocked the weapon from a gauntleted hand. Then, roaring rage, Rob thrust the spike sticking from the axe’s business end into the eye-slits of the knight’s armet.

  The knight slumped to the ground, as limply as steel carapace allowed.

  Then they were all around him. Only the first had used a lance, and that was now discarded for close work. Instead they belabored him with sidearms, swords, and a mace or two.

  Individually, afoot or ahorse, any knight would make short shrift of Ma Korrigan’s one and only son. They were raised to fight. Along with roistering and hunting, they did almost nothing but.

  But they weren’t trained to fight him: a canny opponent on an entirely unorthodox mount.

  Little Nell was snorting and rocking her head side to side. But not in fear. Peaceable soul though she was—lacking the cheerfully murderous belligerence of her gigantic three-horned cousins—she nonetheless reacted to attack with outrage.

  She was on her mettle now, and up on her short, thick toes for added traction, as well. The forward-curving tip of her eponymous horn could deliver a fearful downward rip, and drop the entrails of an incautious meat-eater on its hind-feet in an eyeblink. But it would never penetrate a warhorse’s steel barding.

  Its huge round top made an excellent natural battering ram, however. Little Nell had grown up practicing its use. Plus she weighed easily twice what the biggest courser did, knight, armor, and all.

  And unlike Rob, the knights weren’t used to brawling. Rob knew from literally having it pounded into his skull—or stomped—how to fend off multiple attackers. In particular, how to maneuver them into each other’s way. If he used them more with vigor than skill, he did ply axe and shield effectively for offense and defense both.

  The code chivalric did not apply to fighting an impudent peasant. The Crève Coeur knights had no compunction about stabbing Rob in the back.

  If they only could. While Nell wasn’t generally any more agile than she was speedy, she was compact. She could whip around quite smartly. Rob kept her turning this way and that, risking dizziness but keeping his hide unpunctured.

  Mostly.

  A voice that scarcely seemed his own tolled through Rob’s skull as he tried desperately to see a way to stay alive for one more minute, one more second. It cursed him for every sort of fool. What kind of romantic twaddle ever even brought you here, you git? it sneered. You’re a performer, not a bloody warrior. Are you as besotted with that fey rogue Karyl as he is with Bogardus? Or it the Garden and its pretty principles you love more than your only begotten arse?

  But Ma Korrigan had also beaten into him the lesson that when needs must, one did what one must. Or had it been life?

  … The voice’s saying love brought in his mind a face whose mask of blood had blessed it, by hiding what claws and teeth had done to its loveliness. The mocking voice drowned in the brightness of simple rage.

  He ducked beyond a mace’s whistling arc, returned a clanging blow on the wielder’s upper arm. Metal flexed with a twang. Flecks of blue enamel flew into the air, each glittering like a tiny jewel in Rob’s exaggerated perception.

  His axe Wanda, with the leverage over a meter of helve gave her, was one of the few weapons on the battlefield privileged to be able to harm an enemy wrapped in full plate. But Rob, naturally strong lad though he was, and kept burly by the hoisting and shoving attendant on a dinosaur master’s craft, lacked strength to hack through metal one-handed. He could still deal almighty dents, though—with a lucky hit, enough to break bone beneath.

  He handed his enemies whacks that left them reeling. But they were still five, and he just the one. And while arithmetic was never my strong suit, he thought, I’m pretty sure that adds up to me right fucked.

  Amidst his endless evolutions Rob caught glimpse of the Crève Coeur dinosaurs in garish, high-tailed retreat. And Count Guillaume, unmistakable in his gilded armor on his royal-blue mount, either valiantly standing off a pair of trikes or trapped between them. One had lost its fighting-castle and crew; Rob couldn’t see a mahout straddling its neck behind the frill. It plainly didn’t matter to the beast. The killing-joy was on it.

  Exertion burned Rob’s arms and shoulders like fire. His lungs tried to turn themselves inside out, tearing themselves to pieces in the process. Metal clanging metal had him half deaf, he choked on the yellow dust their swirling dogfight wound them in, and the rim of his helmet, with the help of a sword-whack or two, had gashed his forehead so he must blink constantly to clear his eyes of blood that both stung and threatened to gum his eyelids shut.

  The inevitable happened. From nowhere Rob ever saw a sword-tip raked his axe arm, laying it open wrist to elbow. Blood gushed.

  Wanda slipped from his fingers to drop with a shock to her lanyard’s short extent. Rob’s blood wasn’t gushing out that fast—no artery had been cut. But it was as if his energy and strength were air, not fluid; and the gash let all out at once. He slumped in the saddle, so weary and soul-sick he almost welcomed the death-blow by a silver-armored knight who was cocking back beside the scarlet horror tail feathers that sprouted from behind his armet’s crown.

  Chapter 21

  Caracorno Spinoso, Spike-frill—Styracosaurus albertensis. Ovdan hornface (Ceratopsian) dinosaur. Quadrupedal herbivore with a large nasal horn and four to six large horns protruding from its neck-frill. 5.5 meters long, 1.8 meters tall, 3 tonnes. Mostly shades of yellow and brown in arresting patterns. Favored war-mount for heavy Turano and Parso riders

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  A fist-sized lump of lead attached to a stout staff slammed down on the crimson-feathered helmet from behind. The knight pitched right out of the saddle.

  Where the Brokenheart had been a blink before, Rob saw Gaé
tan grinning at him from Zhubin’s broad back, behind the riderless horse. He’d slung his hornbow. He wore an arming-sword, but for serious socializing he’d equipped himself with a maul.

  It was a rough and ready weapon. Archers used them to pound stakes in the ground before whittling sharp the ends with knives and hatchets to make Faerie-poles. The three-horns’ fighting-castle crews used versions with hafts two or three meters long. Gaétan’s weapon had a haft about the same length as Rob’s axe did. While it could righteously bust up an unprotected victim, its main function was to do just what it did: knock an armored rider off his mount.

  Now we’re outnumbered a paltry two to one, thought Rob. Joy. He wheeled a huffing Little Nell to her right.

  To see a mace with a proper flanged head smash in the green-enameled side of a burgonet with a gold-inlaid visor worn by the knight he faced. Mora Regina had caught the Crève Coeur horseman with a savage backhand stroke aided by the force of a lunging dapple-grey as leggy and raw as she was. Her own plate was likewise green, with arms in gold and red and the breast.

  Through his own pulse roaring in his ears, Rob Korrigan heard a sliding susurration like cicadas in high summer, with metallic music underneath. The Ruybrasiliana knight had brought her mailed-infantry reserve along. Shoulder to shoulder the erstwhile house-shields marched past either side of the barrow.

  As Nell faced west again, across the field of battle proper, Rob was astonished to see an orange-maned chestnut rearing against the weight of the knight on its back, rolling its eyes and pawing air with its hooves as nearly naked men and women swarmed up horse and rider like ants on the corpse of a forest-glider. It was a mob of Providence light-archers. Some clung to shield and sword arm. Others stabbed at armor-joints and eye-slits with their daggers. A woman with a wild mat of hair that might have been dark-blond beneath greasy grime actually rode the man-at-arms’s back. Her legs wrapped around his cuirass from behind, she wrenched a yellow-and-blue-plumed helmet sideways as if trying to break the wearer’s neck.

  The last two knights confronting Rob and Gaétan turned their horses and fled. The youthful merchant had clearly dropped another whilst Rob was otherwise occupied. With a nod of her armet to her rescuees, Regina led the reserve forward to bolster the pikes.

  The main body of heavy Crève Coeur horse had disengaged from the infantry. The Providential pikes had shifted to fill the holes torn in the ranks by stricken warhorses. At one they used the dead courser itself as a breastwork, crouching to present their long spears over it. The enemy knights stayed close, though, continuing to feint at the pikes, holding their attention.

  And whether it was actually their design or not, Rob saw with a belly-kick of horror how they were about to turn the day disastrously against Providence. Because while the knights kept the pikes facing forward, Baron Salvateur was riding his black sackbut at a jarring two-legged run south, around their left flank.

  With the unwieldy pikes pointing toward the horse his monster could trample the length of their ranks almost unimpeded. The chivalry, fighting as individuals rather than a unit but full of self-righteous fury, would trample the survivors so completely there’d be nothing for the Crève Coeur infantry to do when it at last arrived.

  “Shoot him!” Rob roared to Gaétan.

  “Out of arrows,” Gaétan said. His big, bluff face had been red with exertion beneath a torrent of sweat. Now the color dropped away, leaving ash.

  Swift motion caught the edge of Rob’s eyes and drew it ’round. Asal was streaking toward the black dinosaur at a dead run. Karyl leaned forward over her wind-whipped silvery mane. His own bow was cased by his saddle. His arming-sword glinted in his left hand.

  “Is he out of his mind?” Gaétan asked.

  “Oh, aye,” said Rob, almost off-handedly. “But I’d still not bet against him.”

  It was whistling-past-the-graveyard flippancy. Rob was actually sure he was about to see Karyl’s wonderful and terrible song end here.

  A normal buckethead would likely not have even noticed a lone, light-armored horseman riding up behind, much less paid attention if he had. But Salvateur, corpse-tearers eat his eyes, showed himself smarter than his brother nobles yet again. Somehow he spotted Karyl and turned to deal with him.

  Karyl ducked the Baron’s sword-stroke as he rode along the black sackbut’s flank. He slashed the beast’s huge right thigh, unprotected by its hornface-leather barding, as he passed.

  The monster snorted annoyance. Probably at the impact—Rob doubted Karyl had cut through its hide.

  Characteristically, the Baron didn’t bother with even the semblance of a chivalrous duel. Not that even that could be anything but one-sided, pitting as it did four tonnes of monster, armor, and master against a smallish man mounted on a beast scarcely more than an outsized pony, who massed maybe four hundred kilos with a full belly in drowning rainstorm. Instead he wheeled his duckbill with that startling quickness the great counterbalancing tail gave to two-legged dinosaurs. Then, as Karyl circled ’round for another futile pass, spun the sackbut rapidly again, looking to smash horse and rider with a sweep of that tail.

  No sense of fair play whatever, Rob thought. Give the devil this, he’s a bastard after my own heart.

  Karyl hauled back on the reins. His ill-tempered little mare dug in her forehooves. The tail swept harmlessly by, its tip seemingly no more than a handspan from her flared nostrils.

  Then she gathered her haunches and sprang forward like a bouncer. Having missed its target the Parasaurolophus had arched its tail high. Riding beneath it Karyl slashed the duckbill across the rectum.

  The monster squealed so loudly Rob tried to cover his ears. Only the mass of the shield still strapped to his left arm kept him braining himself with it.

  In its agony the sackbut crow-hopped to the right so violently it fell over. Salvateur, skilled as he was shrewd, jumped free of the saddle in time to land on his feet. He dropped to one knee, putting sword to turf to catch himself. Then he snapped upright as vigorously as if he’d spent all morning resting for just this moment.

  Karyl was already on him. Rob thought he might ride the Baron down—which, given his armor, might do the mare more damage than the man. Instead Karyl’s sword darted over the top of Salvateur’s heater shield as he raised it. Its tip slid precisely into the single slit of the Baron’s sallet.

  It came back out gleaming wetly red. Salvateur collapsed as if all his bones had been magically dissolved in the instant.

  A joyfully belligerent bellowing announced the three-horns’ return to the rest of the Providence milita. Their butchery of the Crève Coeur hadrosaurs had barely got them breathing hard; they walked toward the rear of the enemy cavalry at their customary spraddle-elbowed plod. Even the one who had lost his fighting-castle, whom Rob recognized now as Broke-Horn—his namesake, growing slowly back, being concealed by the same steel tip that sheathed its mate. Rob was shocked to see how their flanks ran with blood. Then he realized it mostly couldn’t be theirs.

  A high and constant keening overrode the other noise of battle. Big Sally marched at the head of her small herd, ignoring the broken-off lance that jutted from one shoulder. Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur writhed on her proudly upheld left horn, whose steel-shod tip was rammed right through the belly of his golden armor. He was screaming without seeming to pause to inhale.

  Most of the Providence dinosaurry had gone chasing off after their routed opposite numbers—a pisser, but bucketheads to the life. A couple, though, walked alongside the trikes, clearly winded but still game. Rob recognized Côme, his plain brown plate battered and showing bright streaks of bared metal. His brown and gold morion Bijou hung her round-crested head with fatigue.

  Gaétan had sent Zhubin downslope in a lumbering but rapid trot. He already had the pikes advancing on the Crève Coeur chivalry, who were starting to cast worried glances over their shoulders. The infantry shouted in a mix of fury, triumph, and glee fit to congeal Rob’s blood, and they were on his side.
<
br />   It was more than even buckethead bravery could stand: being caught between upper and nether millstones, but with spikes. They broke like a sweat droplet hitting a flagstone. They ran their horses as fast as they’d go around the north and south ends of the approaching monster bloc. The mounts were blown and lathered, and still ran with a will. They were as frightened of the pikes and giant hornfaces as their riders were.

  Rob craned to see beyond the war-dinosaurs heading slowly toward him and the horses going rapidly away. His morning’s lost wager to Karyl notwithstanding, Rob Korrigan was not a man to lightly gamble coin. Drinking and wenching were vices enough to sop up whatever excess energy and money he may happen to have, thank you very much. But he had a gambler’s instincts for odds.

  And Providence’s were still bad, if the Crève Coeur foot, which had so far done little more than walk in the cloud-strained morning sunshine, fell upon them. They still outnumbered Karyl’s infantry. The Providence heavy-hitters were scattered or worn out. The house-shield professional infantry could swarm the handful of three-horns the way the archers had swarmed the Crève Coeur knights, surrounding the beasts and hamstringing them.

  “What about their foot, then?” he said to the air.

  It was as close to prayer as he generally came. He feared the Fae too well to risk drawing their notably trickish attention. And while he had never settled in his own mind whether he believed in the Creators or not, he knew from long experience that if they were there, they were deaf as posts. At least to the importunings of the likes of him.

  Rob jumped to hear a laugh from right beside him, so dry it was really just a croak with mostly imputed humorous overtones. He turned to see Eamonn Copper. The mercenary captain had lost his helmet, baring red hair starting to curl in rebellion against sweat and the now-absent pressure of his helmet. The plain green surcoat he wore over his armor was splashed with drying blood and torn as if he’d lost a kicking-contest with a horror.