by Victor Milán
Behind Le Boule, or so Falk both hoped and expected, the several hundred household foot who formed the final Imperial reserve would be corralling and rallying as many fleeing conscripts as they could to return to the fight.
The horde was already beginning to flow around the flanks of the house-shields’ wedge to surround them. Falk knew it showed no conscious tactics. Only the brute nature of mob and flow.
He smiled. Letting his axe dangle momentarily by its lanyard, he leaned forward to pat his mount’s thick neck.
“Time to show what we can do, eh, boy?”
Snowflake roared again. He, at least, was happy.
Then with a mighty thrust of his hind-limbs the tyrant was among the hordelings, his great jaws tossing men and women like screaming mice.
* * *
“Oh, those children! They’re children!” cried Jacques, riding at Jaume’s right hand.
“We have to forget them!” Jaume yelled back. “We’re on the enemy!”
Whether driven by Raguel’s malevolent will or their own, a dozen Crusader dinosaur knights and several dozen gendarmes had returned from their rout to the fight. They beset an Imperial left wing stalled and losing the battle against the nominally human flood of the horde. Or they were reinforcements; either way, to throw them in piecemeal was poor tactics. Jaume already knew Raguel didn’t care.
He waggled his upraised lance side to side. The Companions winged out to either side into a chevron. Then he dipped the pennon-tipped lance head briefly forward.
As one the trotting duckbills stretched their gloriously crested heads out and uttered their inaudible death cry.
A few of the enemy duckbill-riders had turned to face the new threat. It didn’t help. Though their armor saved the knights from most of the terremoto’s effects, their mounts took it all. Some reared and plunged, trumpeted pain and fear. Two fell over kicking.
The Companions couched lances and charged home. Of all the good works they meant to do for their Lady today, mercy was not among them.
A knight in clear-enameled plate tried to wrestle his brilliant blue sackbut back under control. Its tube-crested head wagged frantically left and right; its eyes rolled as if loosened in their sockets. Jaume lifted his lance to let Camellia plow into the beast with her massive keelbone.
The Parasaurolophus had no chance. The impact rocked it back so hard Jaume heard its tailbone break in a thunderclap. The dinosaur shrieked so shrilly it broke out of Jaume’s hearing-range as the beast toppled with a crash and a cloud of yellow dust.
Ribs broke loudly as Camellia ran over her fallen foe. The rider’s armet-encased skull popped like an overripe berry as her right foot came down squarely on it.
Another Crusader knight managed to wheel his buff and green morion toward Jaume. Though blood ran from a ruptured right tympanum, the hadrosaur coiled back onto huge haunches to spring. It didn’t get time. Jaume had time to register that the trim of his enemy’s green shield and breastplate was real gold. Then his lance took him in the gorget and knocked him right over his cantle to tumble down his monster’s tail.
Camellia bulled the morion aside. Its rider squealed like a scalded fatty as she trampled his armored thighs.
She bore down on a bay courser. Agile as a springer, the warhorse leapt out of her way. Jaume’s lance crunched through the mail guarding the pit of its rider’s upraised swordarm. He let the lance fall with its victim and drew the Lady’s Mirror.
His main weapon now was still Camellia herself. Her rampaging bulk scattered coursers like straw dogs.
The Companions’ rush had hammered down the Crusader dinosaur knights and blown right through the men-at-arms. But it wasn’t without cost.
To his right Jaume saw Persephone, Timaeos’s sackbut, hurtle to the ground. Her breastbone threw up a bow-wave of dust and well-minced vegetation. Blood pulsed dark red from the lance broken-off through segmented gorget and cream-and-rust neck.
Timaeos flew over her neck. The giant Griego had presence of mind to cast his shield, which bore his device of a red lantern, away in midair. Then he tucked his armeted head and rolled.
The helmet was ripped away. Timaeos sprang to his feet as if nothing had happened. His bronze hair and beard blazed defiantly even in the feeble sun.
Ayaks rode toward him. He held out a hand to swing Timaeos aboard his morion Bogdan. But Timaeos waved him off.
“Go!” he roared. “Ride like Hell! I follow on foot!” And turning he smashed the head of a charging courser with his maul. The rider’s neck broke with an audible crack as he was thrown free.
Jaume turned his attention forward again. He and Camellia were now plunging into the horde. Men and women burst beneath her feet like blood-filled bladders. Blood spattered Jaume like unceasing rain.
Somehow Jacques had forged forty meters ahead of his Captain-General. Now the Francés knight stood at bay on his white female sackbut Puretée. Hooting plangently, she reared, pawing air. Jacques slashed longsword at Crusaders clinging to his chain-and-leather reins.
Screaming, the hordelings swarmed up the sackbut’s sides, climbing each other in their eagerness to come to grips with her rider. A woman jumped up behind Jacques and wrapped her arms around his armet. He hacked up and back with his shield. Its rim caved in the woman’s left cheek. She fell away—but pulled the helmet off as she did.
Jaume urged Camellia to a two-legged run through the throng. For a moment a seethe of filthy bodies hid Jacques from his view. Then he saw his friend dragged from the saddle. Puretée spun squealing. Her tail knocked Crusaders broken and kicking through the air.
But the mob closed over Jacques as seamlessly as water over a pebble tossed in a pond, and almost as quickly. Hooting in panic and despair, his sackbut fled through the horde.
Desperately Jaume steered Camellia toward his fallen friend. As he approached the place where Jacques had vanished a woman jumped up, holding a white-armor encased leg above her head and screeching triumph. She was so drenched in blood and filth that Jaume couldn’t tell whether she was nude or not beneath hair that hung matted to her thighs. He split her head in passage with his sword.
Weeping, Jaume drove on past. The unceasing squelch of bones and flesh at every step was like a gauntleted fist punching his soul. But the only hope he or any of his Companions had—to say nothing of the horse-mounted Ordinaries following them—was to keep moving.
Never before had he encountered enemies who refused to flee when confronted with war-dinosaurs trampling them to ruptured bags of shard and juice. But not only didn’t the horde run, it attacked.
Cutting left and right at snarling faces that leapt at him, severing hands that clutched for legs and reins, scarcely able to breathe for the unbelievable reek of filth and piss and ruptured guts, Jaume rode Camellia all-out across the very floor of Hell.
* * *
Blowing a sigh of complete exhaustion, Snowflake sank to the hilltop just left of Felipe’s tent. Red threads twined his head, his tail, his vast powerful body. Not all of the gore was human. He’d suffered at least a dozen gashes.
Albrecht helped Falk down from the white Tyrannosaurus’s saddle. Falk sat down heavily on the grass. He barely noticed when his arming-squire unstrapped his helmet and took it off. He only roused when the boy offered a bucket of water, which he gratefully seized and dumped over his head.
Nearby a naked woman lay on her side, pinned by a Tyrant pilum through the belly to a man behind her in a terrible parody of sodomy. Her fingers and toes twitched. If still conscious she must be suffering unendurably.
Falk threw her instantly from his mind. He had run out of compassion for Raguel’s killers long before he ran out of strength to kill them.
Albrecht had thoughtfully brought more buckets. Falk drank deep from a second, then poured the rest of that one over his head. Pink runlets streamed down his armor into the soil.
His shield was gone, torn away by enemies who showed neither fear nor fatigue. His armor was dented, his arrogant tw
o-headed toothed falcon insignia almost effaced. The curved blade of his axe was notched and dulled. Though it weighed no more than an arming-sword, between the mass of its head and Falk’s strength it crushed skulls and smashed bones even without a keen edge. But there were so many of them, attacking so relentlessly, that he’d blunted and notched his axe so badly on foes—few of whom wore armor, and not all even wore clothes—that it was little more than a steel club.
Jaume’s drive through the Crusaders’ right flank had at least slowed their onslaught. But though the Companions and their Ordinaries had ridden clean through to the riverbank, losing at least half their numbers but killing a thousand and more, still the horde came on, undiminished.
Falk had fought as long as he could. Then he’d fallen back up the Emperor’s hill to catch his breath. He reckoned conservatively that together he and Snowflake had killed over a hundred men and women. And some had arms, and knew how to use them.
It was a feat of legend. He doubted it even came close to being the day’s most remarkable one. That, he suspected, belonged to the Companions on their epic hellride.
The problem, of course, was that the only witnesses who might have interest in commemorating all that skill and insane bravery would probably not survive to do so.
Falk could literally not raise his arm to strike again. His body throbbed in a discord of a hundred aches. I wonder, would Father at last be proud of me? he thought. Would Mother? As greatly as such questions had tormented him day and night throughout his life, right now he couldn’t rouse himself to really care.
Yet he knew he’d get little respite. Already his Scarlet Tyrants were hard-pressed by the flesh-flood, falling step by step back up Le Boule’s base. From up the slope crossbows and shortbows loosed ceaselessly over their heads. The Imperial Army missileers were resupplied by a constant stream of wagons full of arrows and quarrels. Which barely slowed before they were emptied.
By now the Grey Angel Crusade must have lost tens of thousands dead and wounded. It made no difference Falk could see. It was like trying to bail the ocean with his hat.
Someone shouted alarm from nearby. Falk raised his lead head.
Raguel, who had sat watching the battle like a statue, was riding his monstrous bull tyrant slowly forward again. And thirty dinosaur knights and a hundred heavy-horse had just trotted from the wooded rise to the west, along the horde’s right flank.
Falk sighed. “That’s it,” he said aloud despite himself. “We’re done.”
Anchored on the Fortunate River, the Imperial right held firm despite awful losses. But on the other wing the Imperial Army had nothing left that would slow so much as a procession of cripples on crutches. Much less that many fresh riders on fresh mounts.
He felt a pat on his right pauldron. He looked around. For the first time he noticed that the vambrace and rerebraces protecting that arm had been stripped away, leaving a torn silk gambeson sleeve and steel gauntlet.
The Emperor stood beside him, smiling down on Falk like a benign bearded moon. He held his longsword in his right hand.
“The time has come to show these madmen how Nuevaropan grandes can die,” he said, holding out his left arm to allow an ashen-faced page to strap a heater shield to it.
“No, Majesty,” Falk said. He tried to stand. Felipe held him down with unexpected strength.
“Rest, son,” the Emperor said. “Conserve your strength. They’ll come to us, you know.”
Sighing, Falk slumped. There was no denying the truth. The Tyrants were being driven up the hill. They’d soon be overrun.
Snowflake lay on his belly with blood-red eyes closed and the tip of his snout resting on the sod. A change of the humid breeze wind brought coolness and a waft of forest smell. The contrast to the hot abattoir stink shocked Falk. Its freshness was a taunt, reminding him of what he was about to lose—hope; the world; all—in a few more inhalations.
Snowflake whuffed. His eyes opened. Despite his own killing exhaustion he raised his great head to stare toward the newcomers.
The messenger boys pointed that way, shouting. Some cheered. Others danced and laughed, mad as hordelings, tears gleaming on their cheeks.
Falk looked. For a moment his brain flatly refused to make sense of what he saw.
A kilometer to his left, monsters were emerging from the trees. Monsters that walked on four columnar legs. Monsters with horns like lances on their brows, who wore steel on their faces and castles on their backs.
Triceratops horridus came to war. They bellowed gleeful belligerence as they trundled toward the horde.
Beside them marched infantry with spears and shields and bows. Before them rode a single lonely figure on a grey horse, followed closely by a man on a curious and much smaller hornface.
“And so my enemy comes to join the battle,” Felipe murmured. “Will you help them, Voyvod Karyl? Or us?”
He shook his head sadly. “It will hardly make a difference either way.”
Chapter 42
Hombre armao, Man-at-arms, Gendarme—Warriors who fight on horseback, whether knightly or not: cavalry, as opposed to dinosaurry. Unlike dinosaur knights, they are overwhelmingly male. Heavy cavalry wear full-plate armor; the medium cavalry, plate-and-mail or nosehorn leather armor.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“So,” Rob said, peering through the screen of brush at the forest’s edge at a turbulent grey sea of humanity, “are you sure this is a good idea, then?”
Tiny, colorful fliers chattered at each other among the branches all around, incongruous highlights to the constant mutter of clatter, shouts, and screams from below. Rob was on his hook-horn, Little Nell. Karyl sat Asal at his side. Despite the greatest bloodletting in five centuries taking place practically at their feet, the hook-horn was clearly more nervous about a mare half her weigh.
Rob wore a pot-helm and a mail coat, and carried his dinosaur master’s axe, Wanda. A white-painted round shield hung by his left knee. It bore a blue Triceratops head, which someone had started using as the badge of what someone else had dubbed the Fugitive Legion. Both had spread through the army like dirty limericks.
“Of course it isn’t,” said Karyl. He had his imperturbability back. “But we’re going to do it anyway.”
He wore a peaked Ovdan cap with an aventail of overlapping steel plates protecting his neck, and his usual buff strider-leather jack. A buckler rode his saddle’s right side, his cross-hilt longsword at his right hip. He carried an arrow-quiver slung, and others more arrows in the saddle panniers. He held his recurved Ovdan hornbow in his right hand.
He nudged the mare to a walk. Bobbing her head ill-naturedly she crackled through the thin leafy branches into the sunlight. Such as it was on this dark and dreary day.
“But why?” Rob called after. “Why are we doing this? Why are you doing this? The Impies betrayed you, stabbed you in the back. Now they’ve put a price on your head. Why court death to rescue them?”
“Because I find, after everything, I’m still human,” Karyl said without glancing back.
Tree limbs splintered around Rob as twenty-nine armored monsters rumbled out of the woods. Shaking his head, muttering curses not even he could hear above their noise, he booted Nell’s stout sides and rode bouncing and trotting after his Fae-touched master.
* * *
“We’re alive, Lord.”
The usually matter-of-fact Machtigern spoke in tones of wonder.
The Companions and their Ordinaries had come to rest on the bank of the Fortunate River. They had ridden clean through the Grey Angel horde. The surviving Ordinaries had arrayed themselves in a semicircle facing outward, guarding the remnants of the medium cavalry and the knights-brother.
Jaume and men slumped in the saddle of duckbills whose gloriously crested heads hung in exhaustion, and whose sides pumped like vast bellows. The men had stripped off their helmets to pour water over heads steaming from confinement in steel cans, then drank cautiously.
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For the moment the horde passed them by. It focused with inhuman single-mindedness on throwing itself against the last stout defenses on La Miche and Le Boule. Battered and spent, Jaume could barely stand to look around and take stock of what they’d paid the butcher.
But how can one see beauty, if one never confronts its opposite? he asked himself. Not even the Lady’s truth could do much to ease his pain at the loss of his beautiful brothers and their auxiliaries.
When he did look what he saw was ugly enough. Only Florian, Ayaks, solid Bernat, Machtigern, and the two Anglaterranos, Owain and Wil Oakheart, remained of their sweet brotherhood.
“What about Timaeos?” he asked.
Oh, Melodía, my love, he thought. How I pray to the Lady that you’re safe away from here!
But he didn’t dare reflect too deeply on the likelihood of that. Even his soul had a breaking-point.
Ayaks shook his sweat-drenched blond head. “Gone. He waded through devils for two hundred meters before they brought him down.”
“Another epic feat’s going to go begging for lack of tongues to sing it,” said Florian lightly. He had clambered down a collapsed section of bank to refill the Companions’ water gourds from the river. He tossed one up. Owain caught it with one hand and tipped it into his upturned mouth.
“I’m writing down as much as I can,” said Bernat. He flashed a rare smile. “Maybe someone will find my chronicle on my body and see fit to preserve it, when this madness is over.”
Jaume grimaced. “I saw poor Jacques die. And so we’ve lost Iñigo Etchegaray and István—”
“And both Pedros, yes,” Florian said. “And Dieter.”
Jaume shook his head. “A shame. The boy never had a chance to show the world what he could do.”
“He died well,” Ayaks said. “I saw it happen.” He didn’t elaborate.
“I can only hope to do as well,” Jaume said. “I saw Rupp die too. At least our good Coronel Alma survived. The Ordinaries are in good hands.”
“What now?” Ayaks asked.
“We can die standing,” said Florian, “or die riding. Other than that—” He frowned thoughtfully. “That’s it.”
