The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  Yet as Falk watched his fear turned to terrible exaltation. So fiercely did the pre-battle energy surge within him that he tapped his horseman’s axe against his greave like a drumstick. Despite the fact that he was about to fight against an undeniable servant of the Creators, a sense of righteousness filled him.

  Whatever else is happening, he thought, I am defending the principle of Order. It’s what I was raised to do.

  If Raguel wants to use disorder to His ends … so much the worse for Raguel.

  Imperial pikes swung down in a ripple. At last the archers and arbalesters turned from their Faerie-poles to race for the safety of the heavy infantry lines. The trebuchet crews unhitched their beasts and joined them, driving the nosehorns before them. Those serving the lighter engines hitched them to horse-teams waiting in harness. Jumping on the animals’ backs and clinging to catapults and stingers they rode the wheeled weapons-carriage for shelter.

  One catapult’s wheel hit a rock hidden by a low bush and overturned. Most of its passengers sprang free; a woman shrieked as the frame crushed her leg. The crew halted the horses long enough to uncouple them. Then as the riders whipped them on the other artillerists hoisted the upset carriage enough to yank the victim free. With two of them holding her under the arms they all ran on. She howled as each step jarred her broken limb. But Falk felt sure she’d rather that than what the horde would do to her.…

  Coming hard after them the horde hit the Imperial line. Falk clearly heard the Emperor grunt in sympathy. Snowflake growled. He smelled blood.

  Once more the enemy front ranks died in droves. Some silently, some shrieking and wriggling like hooked worms on the pikes. Those behind kept running as if to a combined feast and orgy.

  For the moment even the Imperial peasant ranks looked steady; all they had to do was hold up their five-meter polearms and lean forward. Reassured, Falk looked to his left to see the outnumbered horde riders had broken before Archiduc Antoine and were streaming back north as fast as horses and hadrosaurs could run. Grey Angel Crusaders might not flee—but clearly that didn’t apply to their mounts.

  In any battle, war-beasts formed factions of their own. Whether mammalian or dinosaurian, most were herd animals, and all had keen senses of self-preservation. If they suffered enough casualties they’d run away, no matter exhaustively and expensively trained they were.

  Behind Falk, the runners clumped around the Emperor suddenly twittered like a flock of frightened fliers. The Imperial Herald, who had somehow returned virtually intact to Felipe’s side, shouted at them to be still in a voice as loud as any trumpet. He failed to silence them.

  Falk quickly saw why: The Imperial right had routed. Its beasts ran flat-out along the riverbank. Some toppled over screaming. The great duckbills ran down and crushed any horse or human that got in their way.

  Felipe rose, looking aghast. Falk trudged up the hill to his side, hoping to reassure his liege with his own blue-armored bulk. “Wait, your Majesty,” he said through a throat dry as a chimney. “Your Constable will handle it.”

  As if his full suit of plate hampered him no more than a silken breechclout, Jaume had raced to the east end of La Miche. He shouted instructions and pointed with his famous longsword, the Lady’s Mirror. Over the epic noise of battle Falk could no more hear his rival’s words than if he had shouted them from the far side of the moon Eris.

  But at this moment they were rivals no more. Felipe himself had overridden Jaume’s insistence on serving in the forefront: el Condestable was needed to command the reserve—and the battle itself, as long as he was allowed. Certain nobles had subsequently muttered about the too-nice Jaume and his pretty-boy Companions hanging back from the fight.

  It had pleased Falk greatly to inform them that, if they uttered another such syllable, they could try speaking their minds around a rope dangling them by their throats.

  For all that had passed between them, Falk all but worshipped Jaume, as warrior and war captain. No better man existed in all Nuevaropa to lead the brutally outnumbered Imperial Army against the Crusade and its superhuman Master. In any event the plain fact Jaume was the battle leader, as Felipe was the spiritual, was enough to earn Falk’s whole obedience. For now.

  There was no turning a rout of dinosaurs. Not before they ran themselves out. Jaume didn’t try. Instead he called into motion the plans he’d laid for just such a necessity.

  The defeated wing fled out of Falk’s sight, around the far end of the loaf-shaped rise. As soon as they went by, nosehorns lunged to pull wagons to block the gap between ridge and riverbank. Some drovers released the animals and led them back behind La Miche, as others wrestled the wagons into a makeshift wall of several layers. A body of the mailed spearmen in reserve took up position a few cautious paces in back of them.

  The brunt of the horde’s foot-charge had so far landed on the Twelfth Tercio and the peasant pikes. They hadn’t yet flowed around the Third’s currently unprotected right flank. Had the Crusaders tried to rush through the opening left by Mandar’s advance, house-shields stood ready to stop them.

  As the pursuing enemy bore down, dinosaur knights precariously mingled with gendarmes, whistles shrilled from the Nodosaurs’ brown ranks. With practiced precision the right end of the Third Tercio phalanx pivoted back to anchor against the foot of La Miche, forming two sides of a bristling pike-box.

  Nodosaur crossbows pumped bolts into the onrushing dinosaurs. A splendid green and scarlet sackbut with yellow speckles on flanks and belly took a lucky hit the right eyehole of its chamfron and went down. The horde riders were able to swing around the ten-meter monster’s death thrashing, but inevitably lost momentum. Some swerved toward the tercio. Others continued rushing upon the wagon-wall.

  But neither warhorse nor dinosaur would willingly impale itself on a hedge of long spikes, or crush itself against an apparently impenetrable barrier. The charging duckbills stopped short, shying and crying alarm, when they saw what awaited them.

  Unfortunately for everyone concerned, dinosaurs weren’t terribly precise judges of their own momentum. And even in a cloth caparison in lieu of metal and hornface-leather armor, with a saddle and steel-clad rider on its back, a war-hadrosaur weighed almost four tonnes.

  Even as they dropped thick tails as drags to help slow them down, duckbills crashed into wagons. Shattering wood squealed as deafeningly as the monsters themselves. Splinters whirled upward in a cloud of yellow dust. Wagons flew up like kicked toys.

  Meanwhile the dinosaurs who had refused before the four-deep array of browned-iron pike-heads were rammed from behind by their fellows and impaled regardless. They fell among the Nodosaurs like flailing, bellowing trebuchet stones.

  Three-deep, the wagon-wall buckled but held. And the Nodosaurs knew what to expect from a charge of dinosaur knights. Though scores of pike-wielders were squashed to crunchy brown-and-red pulp, the Imperial phalanx stood firm. The ranks behind lowered their pikes and pushed forward to fill the gaps.

  Blocked by walls of pikes and wood, what had been victorious pursuit decayed into a vast and noisy traffic jam. The house-shields waiting behind the Third Tercio charged out to strike the stalled knights, jabbing duckbill bellies and courser flanks with their spears. Beasts and riders alike wailed as they tumbled over the seven-meter drop to the river below.

  Nodosaur auxiliaries in light dinosaur-leather tunics and browned-iron caps, with bucklers strapped to their forearms, darted among milling war-beasts to hamstring them with their hatchets. It was risky work. Many were ridden down, smashed to rag dolls by frantically swinging duckbill tails, or crushed beneath massive falling bodies. But they fought with the same fatalistic fury as their fellows in the phalanx: they were all Nodosaurs.

  When he knew the right would hold, Falk ran his eyes back along the lines. Against general expectations the peasant masses of the Imperial center not only held, but fought. The terror inspired by a Grey Angel and his horde could take two forms: panic or desperate resistance. The latter emot
ion prevailed among the hard-pressed Imperials.

  So far.

  On the west the Twelfth Tercio stood like its namesake: a Steel Wall in truth. They had killed a whole rampart before them. Screaming as though afire, the Crusaders swarmed over their fallen comrades, to die in their turns on the obdurate pike-heads.

  Beyond the Nodosaurs and their artificial berm of bodies a less pleasant sight met Falk’s gaze. Archduke Antoine had chased the horde riders from the field. Unfortunately his force had also slowed, tired, and gotten strung out, as pursuing riders always did. Crusaders afoot attacked the knights in soldier-ant swarms. Falk saw a yellow and blue morion pulled down by barehanded men and women. Their easy victory had put the Imperial dinosaur knights and gendarmes in deadly trouble.

  Men- and women-at-arms in plate and chain rode from the left to aid their bogged-down heavy brethren. Jaume had thrown his cavalry reserve into the fight. Falk expected to see him lead his own Companions and Ordinaries shortly to support them.

  Four men in gashed plate and bloodied rags of feather capes trudged up the back of Le Boule. Sweat-lank hair framed grimy, sagging faces. Falk recognized the Conde de la Estrella del Hierro and several others from the quickly defeated Imperial right wing. They dropped to their knees to kiss Felipe’s hands, sniveling excuses and pleas for forgiveness.

  Sneering at their disgrace, the Duke turned his attention back to the battle as an outcry rose from the Imperial ranks. Tall as a two-story barn on the back of his tyrant, his soul-reaper poised at his side, the Grey Angel Raguel had begun to ride forward. His curiously colored monster walked with the characteristic tail-swinging gait of a big flesh-eater.

  Screams of unmistakable horror made Falk snap his head left. To his surprise the horde on that side had pulled back fifty meters from the corpse-rampart the Twelfth Tercio had made of their brothers and sisters. I thought the horde never quit coming, he thought, much less retreated.

  The flesh-floodwaters parted. Out ran two hundred horrors. Bodies streaked green and brown, wide-open mouths pink and rimmed with yellow saw-teeth, they sprang forth with their killing-claws daintily upheld.

  On each feathered back rode a young child.

  Chapter 41

  Guerrero de Casa, House-soldier—Professional soldiers, usually well-armored infantry, who fight for a lord as retainers. Most are either Scuderos de Casa (house-shields), armed with spear and shield; or Arcos de Casa (house-bows), armed with shortbows or occasionally crossbows. Most are commoners. Widely hated because unscrupulous lords often use them to bully their serfs most cruelly.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  The deinonychus-riding children had solemn faces. Their mouths were tightly shut. Each clutched a spear or dagger in chubby hands.

  Over his left shoulder, from just behind his line of sight, Duke Falk heard Count Ironstar begin a high-pitched litany of terror: “It is a judgement on our wickedness, that even children raise their hands against us! We’re all going to die! All going to die! All going to—”

  Falk transferred his axe to his left hand. Without looking around he swung backhand. He put broad hips and strong legs fully into it.

  “All going—” The words stopped suddenly. Falk felt resistance. Then parting. Then shock.

  Then nothing. Something bounced heavily on the turf behind him.

  “Perhaps the rest of you gentlemen will do a better job of keeping your heads,” Felipe said dryly, as Falk heard a second, weightier thud. He brought the axe back around to ground before him. Crimson dripped from the blade into the grass by the shiny blue toes of his sabatons.

  To Falk’s alarm, he realized the Nodosaurs’ own lethal efficiency might undo them. The Crusaders unflaggingly continued clambering up the berm of dead bodies the terciaries had built before them, even as more were added to it. Now the wall rose higher than the tallest Nodosaur. It totally masked the Twelfth’s view of the abomination rushing toward them.

  Until the horrors themselves, frightfully agile despite their burdens, reached the top of the grisly pile.

  For a moment each froze to regard the other: the ravening pack-hunters and their stiff-faced riders; gazing back up at them, their attitudes eloquent of shock despite the brown sallets that hid their faces, the Nodosaurs.

  Not even in the gruesomest bedtime stories his nannies, encouraged a moral instruction by his mutually antagonistic and lethally capricious parents, had told him had Falk ever heard of such a thing. And while those in his earshot were careful to control their reactions better than the unfortunate and now considerably shorter Estrella del Hierro, from the gasps from close at hand and the outright screams from farther, he reckoned no one else had either.

  With a many-voiced screech of rage the raptors flung themselves on the pikes. Some were held in the air, impaled alongside children who still eerily made no sound as they wiggled futile arms and legs. Some ran down the inner slope of the flesh-mound to dart among the Nodosaurs’ legs. Some ran up the shafts of the very pikes that transfixed them to snap at exposed chins and throats.

  Not even a seasoned veteran in helmet and half-armor could stand for long against a man-sized meat-eater that hung on with fore-claws, raking for any gap in protection at body and thighs with the huge rear talons that gave them their True Name, which translated to “terrible claw.” As the Nodosaurs wrestled with squalling horrors, children ran among them slashing and stabbing until they were swatted down.

  There weren’t enough of them together to defeat a tercio three thousand strong. Far from it. But a pike formation lived on its solidity as much or more as a mounted charge did. The handful of dinosaurs and children spread disorder fast and wide.

  Falk had just a sense of the Steel Wall beginning to waver at this attack from within. Then the horde, which had held back to allow the spectacle of the raptor-riders to take full effect, surged forward. They rolled over the wall of bodies like a flood tide to smash down on the disordered Imperials.

  Falk would never get the chance to ask any man or woman of the Twelfth whether they stayed their hands for ever so-slight a fraction of a moment from unwillingness to slaughter children wholesale, or from the unexpected, mind-bending awfulness of the sight. In the proudest tradition of the Imperial heavy infantry the Tercio Duodécimo had stood and fought unyielding. Now in the proudest tradition of the Nodosaurs it stood and died in place. The lightly armored hamstringers and arbalesters, the engineers and artillerists who had retreated into the phalanx for shelter, fell alongside the browned-iron pike-wielders to the swords and spears, the axes and clubs, the bare hands and crimsoned teeth of the Grey Angel horde.

  Through eyelashes laden with unabashed tears Falk watched the Companions, resplendent in their white armor, trot around Le Boule to rescue the embattled remnants of the Imperial left. Their half-thousand Ordinary cavalry thundered behind. Falk bellowed to the spear-and-shield men who waited behind the peasant center to advance; his bull nosehorn build gave him the volume to make himself heard over the racket. The Imperial Heralds, hearing his commands, relayed them with blasts on their long brass horns.

  Falk shouted new commands. The Scarlet Tyrants at the foot of the hill braced. Each man plucked the pair of heavy throwing-spears from the turf where it was planted before him.

  The Duke ran the few steps to Snowflake. His arming-squire Albrecht waited with a stepladder to help him mount the restless Snowflake. His eyes wider and wiry hair wilder than usual, the boy handed Falk up first his helmet, which Falk placed over his head and cinched beneath his broad chin, and then his heater shield with its blue border, white field, and black two-headed falcon. Last, Falk accepted his horseman’s axe, taking the lanyard loop about his right wrist.

  When Falk had last glanced toward the Imperial center the peasants held their own and more, despite being shoved back step by step by the sheer weight of bodies in the scores of thousands. But their fear had grown like a tinder-pile.

  The Twelfth Tercio’s death gave it the sp
ark.

  The levies’ morale went up in a flash. Throwing down their pikes they ran for the rear with piss and shit streaming down bare legs. Here was why Jaume had deployed the professional household troops behind them: the fleeing mass shied like warhorses from their shields and spear points, then flowed to either side of their wide wedge formation. Which channeled them around Le Boule as well—instead of them stampeding up it to trample the Emperor himself.

  Snowflake rose to his feet. His heavily muscled white sides trembled with anticipation. Falk gave him a special press of armored heels. The Tyrannosaurus roared.

  It was no terremoto. But then, it was the hunting cry of a monster scarcely less mythically terrifying to Nuevaropans than the Grey Angel Himself. It halted not just many fleeing peasants but a number of the Crusaders who chased them.

  The house-shields yelled and charged, battering through the last of the broken commoners. The Imperial archers, who like the Nodosaur missile troops had pulled back among their better-armored comrades as the enemy closed, added a quick shower of arrows. Then the mailed foot waded into the horde, bashing with shields, jabbing with spears.

  They killed their way deep into the howling mob. They were no Nodosaurs, whose skills at fighting and shoulder-to-shoulder maneuver were as matchless as their courage. The bulk of the House troops’ experience no doubt came from brutalizing unarmed and unarmored serfs. Then again, that described the vast majority of Raguel’s shrieking minions. The mailed soldiers fought professionally and well, and worked terrific execution.

  But they had never faced an enemy like this one. No one had, for half a millennium. Their butchery, while exemplary, won no more than the pause of a few breaths.

  As Falk rode past the splendid red and gold ranks of his Tyrants, he signaled with his axe for them to hold in place. They needed no orders to kill any Crusaders who got past the spearmen. Their one overriding imperative was to protect the Emperor himself.