The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  “Mounted troops are always at their weakest standing to await attack,” Machtigern said.

  “So do we try to fight back to the lines, or charge back into the thick of things?” Owain asked.

  “I say we hit the horde squarely,” said Wil. “Say we reach the lines: doesn’t that merely defer the ‘dying standing,’ then?”

  He shrugged. “I hope none of you’ll think the less of me, that I’d rather not wait any longer. If die we’re going to, let’s get after it!”

  “I’m with you,” Owain said. The others agreed.

  “What about the Ordinaries?” Machtigern asked. “They deserve a choice. And the poor bastards from the reserve.”

  “They’re cavalrymen,” Florian said. “Dare I suggest when they chose that occupation they made their choice?”

  He threw a final filled gourd to Wil Oakheart, then climbed up the bank with the aid of some tough soda-brush roots. While well-made plate—and the Companions wore the best—distributed its weight so well it didn’t much impair its wearer’s movement, Florian’s agility was striking.

  “Morte à cheval à gallop,” Jaume said: Death on horseback at the gallop. It was every mounted warrior’s creed—and professed desire.

  “So that’s it, then,” said Wil tucking his gourd in his remaining pannier on the back of his resting green-eyed red sackbut, Red Dragon. “Shall we dance, then, mates?”

  “Wait.”

  Florian had stopped half over the edge of the cave-in. He got to his feet and pointed west, past the protective ring of Ordinaries and the horde rolling relentlessly south.

  Machtigern cursed. “More dinosaur knights.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather die cleanly on their steel,” asked Ayaks, “than torn limb from limb?”

  “You make a good point, brother,” Wil said.

  “Not them,” said Florian. “There—beyond. Look, my friends!”

  Huge dinosaurs were striding from the distant forest. Horned dinosaurs, with fighting-castles swaying on their backs.

  “Three-horns!” exclaimed Ayaks. He said something in his own native Slavo.

  Jaume didn’t know the tongue, but caught the words “Voyvoda Karyl Vladevich.” He began to laugh.

  “Before the Hassling I never committed treachery and murder before,” he said. “Now for the first time in my life I’m pleased to be reminded of a job poorly done. Gentlemen, get ready. We ride!”

  * * *

  Twisting sideways in Meravellosa’s saddle, Melodía hurled a javelin. It struck a sackbut’s haunch through a green and white lozenged caparison and bounced back to hang by its barbs. Her missile had failed to pierce thick hide beneath the quilted cloth.

  She led her jinetes north, sweeping in to almost touch range of about thirty dinosaur knights who plodded beside the horde’s west flank. As long as they stayed beyond reach of a quick-pivoting tail-sweep it was as safe as anything you could do on an actual battlefield; if the horde bothered using missile weapons she’d seen no evidence of it.

  Of course, with sheer mind-numbing numbers like these, the Grey Angel Crusade had little need of darts or arrows or even engines. It surprised Melodía mildly they even used armored riders in conventional blocks. It amuses Raguel to degrade his highborn slaves by flaunting his mastery of them, I guess, she thought.

  She breathed through open mouth. Though the breeze blew from the north, the horde’s reek of filth and decay was a miasma so dense it had hit her in the face like a sandbag when she came within a hundred meters.

  Duckbills bugled as darts hit home. Some reared. One javelin, lucky for the caster, less so for its recipient, had struck the unarmored back of a sackbut’s neck. The beast turned in vast circles, shaking its steel-encased head as if to rid itself of the pain and blowing cacophonous chords through the horn its head. Knights behind had to veer well wide to avoid its scything tail.

  Melodía heard tormented howling as several of the duckbills waded right into the mass of Crusaders afoot. Raguel’s bucketheads cared even less about their inferiors than regular ones, it seemed.

  Hand-hurled missiles couldn’t much harm steel-shelled riders. But even stinging their monster mounts helped. To the extent anything could, in such unequal battle.

  She passed the last swaying hadrosaur tail. As she did she heard whistles shrill from the Legion’s ranks, each blowing three sharp blasts. Time to lead my kids clear, she thought. Karyl’s three-horns are coming into crossbow range.

  She turned her mare’s head and set her at an easy lope to pass around the dinosaur knights and gendarmes on the Legion’s left flank. She heard a ringing clatter as steel bows cut loose, then a rippling hiss as feathered quarrels flew past her riders in a hornet swarm. Louder twangs resounded as the two trike-mounted stingers shot.

  Karyl’s mounted artillerists weren’t yet adept at aiming from the backs of moving beasts. Both darts went high. Which meant only they sailed over the high backs of the war-dinosaurs to do unseen carnage among the trudging hordelings.

  Which, of course, would have the same net effect as spitting in the Océano Guenevere.

  Melodía glanced back over her left shoulder. The arbalesters had learned the knack of shooting from howdahs. She saw two empty saddles. A morion toppled majestically forward like a felled tree, evidently chance-struck in the head.

  She turned her face forward. Meravellosa was smart and keen-eyed but it paid to have an extra set of eyes scouting for holes made by small burrowing mammals or dinosaurs. A hoof dropped inadvertently down one could snap a horse’s leg beyond healing—and possibly an unwary rider’s neck when she went flying over her hapless animal’s neck.

  Archers and arbalesters on foot had trotted out in front of the three-horns to shoot at the horde. The ones who carried the heaviest crossbows shot and then ran back; they had the only real chance to do more damage to the enemy knights—and simply didn’t have time to cock their weapons again with gear-and-pulley cranequins. The lighter crossbows and shortbows, though, could do the same as the jinetes’ hand-thrown projectiles had: prick the enemy duckbills and disorder them further, rendering them more vulnerable to the charge when Karyl’s duckbills and terrible trikes closed in.

  As she passed back Legion montadores riding the other way, Melodía found space to think of something besides striking the enemy and not dying. It was an uncomfortable place to be. She was deliberately bringing herself closer to the two greatest nightmare-sources of her young life: Falk, and Raguel.

  Each, in her mind and belly, monstrous.

  But what can I do? she asked herself for the hundredth time in the last night and day. What choice do I really have?

  She had braced the tyrant brooding in his den to force him to act—to command. He had. Now, if Karyl could help the Imperial Constable, the man he saw as his betrayer, for sake of being human, could she hold back? Abandon her new friends in the Fugitive Legion who relied on her? Her father? Her own true love, Jaume, whom she’d spurned in what she now knew was a fit of childish petulance for not doing what she wanted and for defying her father’s command?

  She hoped that even as the spoiled, sheltered twit she had been, she would not have been that person. But she certainly wasn’t now.

  Jaumet, forgive me! she wailed in her own mind.

  And then: No. I can’t do that now.

  She led her squadron around the northern flank of the Legion heavy riders. Wagons followed close behind, carrying bundles of fresh twist-darts and javelins. She and her command had mostly depleted what they carried.

  It wouldn’t be the last time, she reckoned.

  * * *

  Not without pride Rob watched his Short-Haired Horse Captain lead her wild riders back to the wagons to reload. She’d topped her helmet with a red-dyed horsetail to make her easier for her troops to spot in combat. It streamed grandly behind her now, lending her an even more imposingly heathen, Ovdan look.

  Karyl’s she-hada cousin was right about her, he thought. Pampered princess or not, she
does have the spirit of a horse barbarian.

  He wondered briefly how that would play when she became an archduchess and took her place among the Empire’s high grandes. Then he laughed.

  “As if that’s likely to happen,” he said aloud. “She’s destined to end the day in a hordeling’s belly, same as me.”

  He scratched Little Nell behind her neck-frill. “Maia grant I give the foul things indigestion.” She tossed her head and snorted.

  The hook-horn jounced along just out of kicking-range from Karyl’s cantankerous mare. They in turn rode just before and to the left of the block of advancing three-horns. Normally, of course, the fighting-castle crews would shoot their crossbows over the heads of anyone so close, even mounted on horseback—or, like Rob, on a much-smaller cousin of Triceratops. But Karyl had not survived decades of lurid romance-novel adventures by taking things like marksmanship for granted. For which Ma Korrigan’s only acknowledged son was duly glad.

  He refused to let his mind linger on the question of whether the kindest fate the day could offer might be a chisel-pointed quarrel through the back of his fool head.…

  Regular as clockwork, Karyl loosed shots from his hornbow. Rob’s eyeballs were rattling in their sockets so hard he had trouble focusing, but if he knew Karyl—and to the extent any living creature could, he did—his arrows were regularly reaping Crusader lives. From the rising ruction out ahead he gathered the Legion’s shooters were likewise doing their customary bloody work.

  Heavy footfalls drummed from Rob’s left. He looked to see Baron Côme leading the dinosaurry past the trikes on his brown-backed morion Bijou. Behind them rode the heavy cavalry. To the south the right wing did the same. They were commanded by the youthful Baron of Fond-Étang, Ismaël, who, much chastened, had joined the fugitive army with a few retainers in Métairie Brulée shortly after it saw off Célestine’s troops. Like so many others he had seen his fief overrun by the horde, and barely escaped.

  Karyl’s army today was the largest and most powerful he’d fielded since he and Rob had arrived in Providence with little more than what they carried on their backs. Well, and Little Nell’s back. As close as Rob could reckon—admittedly not much; numbers didn’t sing to him as they did to Élodie, say—they brought six thousand fighting men and women against the horde. Many had been battle-seasoned into veterans in a sprinkle of days.

  None of which meant a nosehorn-fly bite on a thunder-titan’s ass against that endless flood of malice. “What am I even doing here,” he muttered to Nell. “Not much call for a spymaster in a headlong charge to certain doom.”

  He sighed theatrically, even though he was pretty sure no one was paying any attention to him. He was always his own best audience, anyway.

  “Probably because at this point I couldn’t bear to be left out. Even of this grand self-immolation on which Himself and His whole army seem bent.”

  The hook-horn snorted again.

  “Aye and you’re right, Nell,” he said. “Think of the songs I’ll sing of this day if by some fool’s chance I happen to survive it? Oh, and the glorious palace I’ll build us when you learn to shit gold, a thing roughly as likely.”

  The Legion duckbills commenced a ground-shaking trot. Something drew Rob’s eye far to his left, above the heads of Côme’s dinosaur-riders. Up by the ridge’s treeline five hundred meters away stood a lone figure, cloaked and hooded.

  The Witness, Rob knew, and his throat seized up. Karyl was right. She’s real too. And why should you, of all people, wonder at things legendary rising up to walk the world?

  He thought of calling her to Karyl’s attention. Then he thought better of it. Precious little goes on that Karyl misses. And right now I fancy he’s a few better things to think on.

  The archers and lighter arbalesters came streaming back between the trikes. And the mounted Legion wings charged home against the head and tail of the column of dinosaur knights and men-at-arms.

  Karyl slowed Asal. Rob hastily followed suit, reining Little Nell to her easygoing walk. The three-horns plodded on.

  And, lowering their huge horned heads, dug into the Grey Angel’s war-dinosaurs.

  Refugees and prisoners alike had told the Fugitive Legion that the bulk of the Crusading knights had joined of their own choice, not Raguel’s talons sunk in their brains. Some did it for fear for their families, or themselves. Others took up the Grey Angel’s cause for loot and glory or to be on the winning side. Some even came over from religious zeal: the Grey Angel Crusade must be carrying out the Creators’ divine judgement.

  But some knights came willingly to Raguel for the pleasure of blood and torture.

  Little of which accounted to Rob for the fact the Crusader knights continued riding toward the Imperial lines until the very moment the Triceratops commenced their lumbering attack. Raguel must have laid that much compulsion on them, he thought, to ignore the approach of a threat so dire. To say nothing of so massive.

  At last the Crusaders spun their duckbills to counter-charge the walking fortresses. Launching off their tremendous drumsticks, war-hadrosaurs got off the mark a good deal quicker than coursers did.

  Now it only meant the monsters and their riders died that much sooner.

  Triceratops could build up fair speed of their own. Karyl seldom used them that way. It jostled the fighting-castles something fierce, threatening to pitch their crews clean out or even jar the hornface-leather reinforced wicker baskets free. And was unnecessary besides: the trikes were at their most brutally effective when they lowered their enormous heads, dug upward, and simply walked.

  So close at hand it took Rob’s breath away, Mañana, one of the youngest bulls brought down from Ovda by Karyl’s cacafuego cousin, slid his steel-capped horns beneath a charging sackbut’s buffy chest. Ignoring the lance that glanced sparking off his steel chamfron, he used his horns like a giant hayfork. With a heave of massive neck muscles he raised the hadrosaur upright. Then he drove home the horns in the sackbut’s belly.

  Rob winced in sympathy at the Parasaurolophus’s symphony of pain. Blood squirted over Mañana’s face. Purple-grey loops of gut as big around as Rob’s thigh plopped into the yellow calcite dust. Squealing, the beast fell onto its side. Its three-toed feet kicked its own viscera to shreds.

  Rob felt as if the horns were spearing his own belly. That was ever and always the dilemma of his foremost trade as dinosaur master: to love and nurture and coddle and train the huge beasts that dominated the Paraíso landscape—for just this: to kill and be killed by each other.

  Well, and men, of course. To any dinosaur master worth his or her silver, that was a side issue. You’d never endure the risks and drudging and heartache entailed by the trade if you didn’t at base prefer dinosaurs to humans.

  And Raguel’s war-duckbills were magnificent. The strange, will-less hordelings made only the scantest effort to care for themselves. They often dropped dead on the march from hunger and dehydration. Not because food—if of often terrible nature—and water weren’t available, but merely because, in whatever fearful ecstasy gripped their minds and souls (if they still happened to have them; a point unclear), they simply forgot to drink or eat.

  But no one, not even a Grey Angel, could treat war-beasts that way, equine or dinosaurian. Not and get use out of them. Somebody had been found to care for them. And their riders’ armor, by appearances.

  Which confirms these bucketheads have voluntarily joined in this great evil, thought Rob. More’s the pity our trikes can’t get at the bastards directly, and spare their lovely dinosaurs.

  In a shockingly short time it was over. None of the three-horns were seriously hurt. They spread out slightly to avoid the kicking bodies of those they’d felled. The duckbills, anyway; they didn’t deign to notice when grounded riders got in their way.

  Led by their dinosaur knights, the Legion wings had already plunged among the Crusader foot. The coursers in the three-horns’ path took one look at the ten-tonne monsters and bolted. Most stampeded stra
ight into the horde themselves, disregarding their riders’ efforts to control them.

  Gaétan rode past Rob on Zhubin, waving his sword and whooping. Behind them marched the Legion pikes—no hapless conscripts but volunteers, well-trained and respected, and leavened with veterans. With what Rob thought more courage than sense Gaétan’s spear-and-shield men ran forward with mail jingling to form a buffer between the horde and the vulnerable trike legs and bellies. Archers launched arrows over their comrades’ heads and even fighting castles rising two stories in the air; they could flight-shoot at absurdly high angles and be sure of finding plenty of targets when their arrows stormed down. Rob heard their feathers hissing over even the demon-chorus of screaming and bugling and banging.

  Rob reined his hook-horn to a stop. By your leave, Karyl dear, he thought, Nell and I’ll just stay back here and wait for the goblins to come to me. Not as if I’ve long to wait.

  Not long enough.…

  He slipped his arm into the leather sleeve on the back of his round shield. As he picked it up and wiggled it down his arm to where he could grasp the leather-wrapped wood handle, the hordelings turned to attack their new tormentors.

  “The Eight make us fucking grateful,” he croaked through a throat dry as High Ovdan desert, “for what we are about to fucking receive.”

  Chapter 43

  Montador, Montadora—To honor knights we give them the title of Montador or Montadora, meaning a man or woman who rides in battle, on horse or dinosaur. Usually we call them Mor or Mora for short.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  Shock ran up Melodía’s arm as she slashed her talwar across the back of a hordeling’s neck. As the middle-aged woman pitched soundlessly onto her face, Melodía tried not to think how she resembled her long-dead mother, Marisol. Or what the pink scrap was that she’d been masticating as mindlessly as a duckbill with a mouthful of weeds when Melodía cut her down.…

  She wheeled Meravellosa away from the mob. Karyl’s three-horns and montadores had already vanished into the horde’s main stream. She and her jinetes were now slashing at the rear of the colossal mob trying to overpower the Legion’s peasant pikes.