by Victor Milán
“I wish I could in conscience bid you farewell, my lord, my love,” said Manfredo. “But I do not see how the path you must choose leads anywhere but to pain and ruin. I wish you the best you can take from what lies ahead. And I must now bid you, bid all of you, good-bye.”
He turned and spurred his splendid maroon and gold halberd-crested duckbill Variopinto east across the scrub-pocked plain.
After a moment, Wouter de Jong mumbled something and rode after him.
Mor Wouter’s lover Dieter watched him go through pools of tears. He turned his sackbut’s long-crested head as if to follow. Then he turned it back toward Jaume, and hung his head, and wept so the tears ran down gleaming across his whiter breastplate and the orange Lady’s Mirror painted there.
“The rest of you are with me?” Jaume asked.
“Yes,” sobbed Dieter.
“Until the end, Captain,” Florian said.
Alma drew his own arming-sword and thrust it high. The whole corps of men-at-arms followed a blink later, joining in one many-throated shout: “For Lord Jaume and the Lady!”
Allowing himself the least of smiles, Jaume looked to the one Companion remaining who had not yet spoken his choice.
“Jacques?” he asked softly.
Jacques squeezed his eyes shut. “I will ride with you to the end of the world, Jaume,” he said, “though in so doing I damn myself.”
“It will not come to that, my friend,” Jaume said. “I swear it. Thank you. Thank you all, my friends.”
He stabbed the Lady’s Mirror into the heedless, clouded sky. Then he swept it down to point along the befouled lane.
“And now—Companions, we ride!”
“Companions!” they all shouted back. And followed.
Chapter 27
La Vida se Viene, Life-to-Come—A radical sect of the Church of Nuevaropa that preached self-denial, holding that the Creators’ mandates in The Books OF THE LAW were metaphorical, and sometimes even meant the opposite of what they said. Despite its heterodoxy, which crossed the line into heresy when some sectaries claimed that sin could lead to eternal damnation, the Life-to-Come enjoyed a substantial following in the early eighth century.
—LA GRAN HISTORIA DEL IMPERIO DEL TRONO COLMILLADO
The sky on both sides of the Companions was now full of brilliant banners snapping. The bright colors were like nonsense yammering in Jaume’s mind.
The peasant-levy masses they rode between were drab, soil-colored. Not unlikely more than a few of the poor tormented victims hung up as road signs came from among their sullen ranks, although Jaume feared the bulk were peasants whose main crime, and greatest misfortune, had simply been to live in the path of an army of badly scared men and women. But the rabble were screened from the arriving champions by cordons of house-soldiers, all gleaming mail and livery in blue and gold and red and green. Their gaiety affronted Jaume’s inner darkness as sorely as the banners.
Only the relentless brown and black and silence of the Twelfth Nodosaurs, faceless in their charcoal-scuttle sallets, made sense to his mood. Perhaps it was that he knew the real authors of the outrage he and his men—champions all—had been degraded by being forced to pass through were to be found among the brilliant colors. The Nodosaurs were about brutality—professionally so, and if anything prouder of their ability to absorb it than to dish it out.
But while they might have been tasked with carrying out the atrocities, they did not originate them. Cruelty was something entirely different from brutality. The earlier crimes had sprung from the cultured, the sophisticated, the gay of taste and manner. The natural rulers of Humankind: the nobility.
Jaume’s nose told him the doctrines of the world-denying Life-to-Come sect held sway even in the Imperial camp. It was a testimony that he could even detect the unclean smell of the human horde after the abattoir avenue they had been forced to travel.
He led his Companions and their army between the ranks of thousands of men and beasts in unnatural silence. Unless he couldn’t hear for the lamentation in his heart. But he did hear the wind: whispering its promises and lies, sighing, moaning, and eventually booming in the silken walls of the Emperor’s open-front pavilion.
Jaume forced his gaze to focus on the single figure sitting in the shade—and, most particularly, not to look at the men who stood on the Emperor’s either hand. With a plummeting sensation he noted that he didn’t find the erstwhile rebel Falk the more unsettling—by a wide margin.
At the tent’s peak flapped the Empire’s flag, blood-red field bearing a gold imperial tyrant’s skull, and beside it the silver key on blue of the Holy Church of Nuevaropa. Flanking them slightly lower were the banners of the Kings of Spaña and Francia. Lower still flew the emblems of the lesser grandes of the Crusading Army, arranged according to strict precedence.
As Camellia drew near the Emperor, Jaume saw he sat in a gilt-wood chair with red velvet padding in lieu of a throne. Felipe wore the simplest of crowns around his close-cropped, greying ginger hair: a gold circlet with the tyrant-skull emblem on the front. A yoke of red and yellow feathers covered his shoulders. He wore a gold-trimmed scarlet kilt of linen clasped by a sword-belt, whose martial effect was somewhat spoiled by the overhanging Imperial paunch. A pair of sturdy marching-buskins wound their straps up his shins.
That surprised Jaume. His uncle usually loved his pomp and display. Now he seemed to hearken back to the more austere days of his youth, when he fought Slavos and Northmen invaders from the sea as a common pikemen in the phalanx his cousin the King of the Alemanes maintained in emulation of the Nodosaurs.
As Jaume halted Camellia the ritually prescribed ten meters from his sovereign, the Imperial Herald cried the approach of the Imperial Champion in a voice scarcely less brassy than the dozen trumpets whose fanfare had preceded him. Jaume bowed in the saddle and touched his brow in salute.
“Your Majesty,” he said, “your Constable comes before you, bringing your Army of Correction, obedient to your summons.”
Felipe nodded once.
Jaume sent Camellia to her belly. She lowered her beautiful cream-and-butterscotch head, touching her beak daintily to the hard-packed ground as if in submission to the little creature on its chair. Jaume swung down easily, as if the thirty kilos of steel plate stewing his limbs and body were of no more moment than a silken loincloth.
With his right hand he drew his sword. With the left he drew his Constable’s baton. Crossing them before his face, he knelt and bowed, so low that his long orange hair fell over the juncture of steel and bone.
“My sword the Mirror and I,” he said, “alike at your service, my lord, ever and always.”
Felipe laughed. “Of course! Now stand up, dear boy, and come let me embrace you.”
Jaume rose. He barely managed to sheath his sword and tuck the baton back in the orange sash wound around the iron waist of his breast-and-back before Felipe jumped up to enfold him in his skinny arms. If the sun-heated armor stung it didn’t dim his smile in the least.
“My boy, my boy,” the Emperor said, holding Jaume back at arm’s length. “So good to have you back with us again!”
“It’s good to see you, Uncle.”
“Now we shall do great things now in the Creators’ name. We’ll lay this damned sedition and heresy to rest, and forestall any such terrible thing as a Grey Angel Crusade.”
“It’s an outcome I fervently desire,” said Jaume. Truly: for he didn’t want a Grey Angel Crusade. No sane man or woman could.
As for the rest—well, weeks remained of the march to Providence. Maybe he could talk some sanity into his uncle in the interim.
Felipe turned to his right. “You know my new captain of bodyguards, of course.”
Felipe said, turning to his right.
“Duke Falk,” Jaume said.
“Constable.” The black-bearded man stepped forward, extending a forearm thick as a normal man’s thigh. Jaume gripped firmly it as Falk took and squeezed his own arm. If Jaume did a t
hing, he did it without reserve.
It still gave him something of a shock to see the Northerner caparisoned, not in his customary royal-blue plate with the black falcon on its white shield on the breast, but the gilded breastplate figured like a muscular male torso, skirt of leather strips, golden greaves, scarlet cape and red-plumed barbute of the commander of the imperial tyrants. Jaume felt a pang as well. Sieur Duval had never had much use for the Emperor’s flamboyant nephew, and had been too bluff and honest to hide the fact. Nonetheless the Riquezo’s devotion to the Emperor had been absolute, and his intelligence and vigilance matched his zeal.
Still, Falk von Hornberg was a man of proven ability himself. For all he’d proven most of it fighting against the Empire.
“And I believe you already know the new chaplain of Our Imperial Army,” Felipe said. Jaume stepped back. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, nephew, for keeping him after he came back to la Merced for poor Pío’s funeral. But you’ll doubtless be as pleased as I that Leo elevated him to Cardinal, as his predecessor wished.”
Jaume could not keep his brow from tensing at he looked at the downturned red hat that topped the slight figure to Felipe’s left. Then the hat raised.
Beneath the flat red brim, black eyes burned into Jaume’s from a dark, gaunt face.
“Well met, Count Jaume,” said Cardinal Tavares with a smile. “Well met indeed.”
“Your Eminence,” Jaume said.
“You make grave sacrifice, coming to lead the Crusade against your own adherents.”
“Oh, but they’ve departed far from that,” Felipe said cheerfully, “as they have from holy doctrine.”
“That remains to be seen,” Tavares said.
Jaume set his jaw. I thought I smelled his unwashed claw behind the horror we rode past, Jaume thought.
Tavares was a fanatic adherent of La Vida se Viene—the Life-to-Come sect, which preached that the Creators’ own doctrine about this world being Paradise meant to give pleasure to its inhabitants was only a metaphor, and that their real Law was stern self-denial, and the unchallengeability of the established order. As Papal Legate to Jaume’s Army of Correction, he had encouraged Jaume’s already-fractious noble underlings to defy his authority—and, yes, to commit atrocities. Which culminated in the murder of Count Leopoldo of Terraroja and his Countess, after they had surrendered in return for Jaume’s grant of parole until Leopoldo could be tried before the Emperor himself.
It had been the greatest blot upon his honor. Until today, at least—an image of his beloved Melodía, naked, tortured, and hung up in the sky filled his mind, and filled his mouth with sour vomit.
But I’ve still got time, he told himself, to resolve this madness. Or if I must see my darling spirited away to safety—in Ovda perhaps.
Thank the Lady she’s safe for now!
* * *
With a clangor like hammer meeting anvil the longsword struck the flat of Melodía’s hastily upflung weapon.
It felt as if Melodía had tried to stop that hammer with her bare hand. The shock that shot up her arm was terrible. It threatened to splinter the bones of her forearm and part her elbow, even bash her shoulder from its socket.
Somehow she managed to keep a grip on the hilt of the talwar Karyl’s vulgar but undeniably charismatic cousin had gifted her with. Mirrored in the curved steel of her own blade she glimpsed her own eyes, huge as a frightened cat’s. If I don’t do something quick, I’ll die!
The orange dancing light of flames that bellowed as they consumed the farmhouse mere from her lit the Castañero’s face sneering at Melodía from his open helmet. Going by his serviceable boiled hornface-leather cuirass and the fact he rode a six-meter-long strider instead of a horse, she guessed he was some hedge knight or mercenary adventurer hoping to steal enough, possibly on this raid, to buy and equip a more potent mount. What mattered most was that being male he was stronger than she was, even if not greatly larger.
And, she was realizing to her dismay, he was better. Tir had assured her the long, curved, slightly blade-heavy talwar was every bit as deadly as a longsword, specifically designed for mounted combat. But like most young noblewomen Melodía had trained mainly in missile weapons and spear-fighting, where her upper-body muscle strength would give her less a disadvantage against a male opponent.
Mostly by luck she managed to deflect a backhand cut up over the spired top of her Ovdan helmet. Fortunately her weapons master had not neglected swordplay training for her highborn charges either. Melodía’s body remembered what it needed to without the intervention of her brain. So far.
Meravellosa dodged a peck by the raider’s Gallimimus. The mare was a shifty beast, agile and sure-footed. But the strider’s bipedal build and hefty tail enabled it to spin with alarming speed, and its toothless beak could strike with savage power at serpent speed. Melodía herself was going to have a bone bruise on her right thigh. She found she had almost all she could handle and more just keeping Meravellosa from getting pecked and shying away, giving her adversary a free cut at her.
Battle was turning out to be a lot more complicated than Melodía Estrella Delgao Llobregat, Princesa Imperial, had ever imagined from all her study of book and scroll.
Worst of all, Meravellosa had her tail to the burning farmhouse—and the Castañero’s onslaught kept driving them closer. Smoke’s scorpion-tails stung Melodía in the eyes and put barbs in her breath that caught in her throat.
A heavy blow rang her blade offline. The longsword darted for her face. Yanking Meravellosa’s head aside she flung herself half out of the saddle to avoid the thrust. The sword’s tip sliced along her right cheekbone.
The pain was brilliant. Blinding. A scream and hammerblow, all at once. Her nose and mouth filled with the copper tang of fear.
Shock seized Melodía in matador jaws. Brutal as her rape by Falk had been, she’d never been attacked with lethal intent before. As her mind exploded in white panic she somehow managed to send Meravellosa springing forward, away from the blazing building and past her foe.
What will Montse say when she learns I’m killed?
For some reason, thought of her beloved little sister restored a sliver of self-control. Melodía might not know real combat, but she knew riding. And she knew that, though her mare’s four legs gave her a fast take-off, the dinosaur’s powerful drumsticks would enable it to run Meravellosa down in the sprint.
Without consciously forming a plan she stopped Meravellosa and spun her in place. Her vision was promptly filled was the strider’s jaws gaping, stretched right at her to the fullest extent of its long neck. It must have been screeching at her, but she heard nothing.
The fact the beak lacked a single tooth did not make it one Gods-damned bit less scary than the abundantly fanged horror that had sprung at her with every intention of snapping her face off.
As if her body acted on its own, her knees urged her mare forward. Right at the monster and the fire. Melodía felt as if she were observing events from somewhere remote. I hope when that awful thing bites me, that feels as if it’s happening to someone else too.
Meravellosa saved her then. What her mistress asked of her was not simply to launch herself right at an enemy’s open mouth, but toward roaring flame. Neither of which was something any horse in possession of its senses would choose to do.
She was a wonderfully intelligent animal, trained as well as the silver a magnate father showered on his daughters in lieu of actual attention could provide. Neither saved Melodía now. It was the love and trust the mare felt toward her.
Plain friendship saved her. That and the fact that, although both mare and dinosaur weighed about the same, Meravellosa’s four hooves gave her superior traction to two splay-taloned feet.
Meravellosa put her head down and charged, ramming her left shoulder into the Gallimimus’s breastbone. The strider squalled in fury as the horse drove it back. Recovering quickly, the raider shouted something Melodía couldn’t make out and raised his sword to cut her down.
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Melodía coughed as an acrid, awful stench filled her head and throat. The strider shrieked an octave higher. Frantically the Castañero looked around. His cloak, his mount’s tailfeathers, and his own hair had taken fire.
The anger that constantly smoldered inside Melodía roared suddenly to flame, brighter and hotter than the conflagration that was eating some poor peasant’s home.
“You fucker!” she shrieked. “Die!” Melodía flung herself forward along Meravellosa’s neck, and using the last of the mare’s momentum and the strength of her own fury, stabbed her sword-tip into the marauder’s left armpit. Linked steel rings resisted briefly, parted with a strangely musical tinkle. She felt her blade drive deep.
The man uttered a gargling scream. Feeling the flames bite his mount darted right out from under him. He fell, pulling Melodía’s trapped blade with him.
His weight dragged her half out of the saddle. With both hands she yanked the talwar furiously to free it. Fierce heat though not flames stung her cheek and arm. Some still-detached part of her mind thought, I’m glad I cut my hair short. Meravellosa snorted, bobbed her head and danced.
A rush of movement brought Melodía’s head up. An enemy horseman bore down on her with sword upraised. I’m dead, she knew. Fuck.
Something blurred in from her left. She heard a wet, peculiar crunch. The swordsman’s sudden scream was muffled by the iron shank of the feathered twist-dart that skewered his face from side to side.
As he thrashed backward over his horse’s crupper, loudly gargling his own blood, Melodía finally pulled her weapon free of the man on the ground. Meravellosa promptly dashed free of the fire. She almost collided with the chestnut mount of a young blond woman in a leather jack and simple steel cap, who was whipping the thong that had been wrapped around the twist-dart about her right forearm with practiced ease.
“Valérie,” Melodía said. Or croaked. “You’re getting in the habit of saving me with those darts of yours.”
The blond woman grinned. “My pleasure, Día.”
Melodía looked around for more foes. None remained in sight. At least none still upright. Survivors of the farm household whose ravaging Melodía’s mixed troop of jinetes and woods-runner had interrupted were noisily finishing off a couple of fallen raiders with farm implements in the yard. Melodía glanced toward them, then hastily away.
