by Victor Milán
Rob grunted and scratched his chin. Well struck, lad, he thought, whether you know it or not. Admitting you’ve a belittling prick for a father can scarcely hurt your case with our Karyl.
“Very well,” Karyl said. “I will train you in sword craft. Roust out some volunteers. Get a work gang together and clean out the farmhouse. Have it done by midmorning, when Rob and I assemble the troops again. Make it ready for us to live in.”
At that point Rob expected Lucas to back away quickly. In his experience, artists lacked a taste for hard manual labor. He wasn’t overfond of it himself, though as a dinosaur master he saw more than his share.
But the boy almost unhinged head from neck nodding his acceptance. “Thank you, lord! You won’t regret taking me as your student. You won’t!”
“See that that’s true,” Karyl said. And to Rob’s astonishment the young man straightaway set off at a trot for the High Road.
Chapter 26
Torre, Torrey—Baron of the Creators: Gen ☶ (Mountain)—The Youngest Son. Represents Order (yet he’s the Trickster), law, bureaucracy, priests, smiths, miners, masons, and Mountains. Also burrowing animals. Known for his authority. Aspect: a powerful blond youth with a gold mail hauberk over a brown tunic, holding a hammer and a shovel. Sacred Animal: ferret. Colors: brown and yellow. Symbol: a golden tower.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Look at this.”
Jaume trailed fingertips along the ruined wall, savoring textures. Red-veined vines had suckered their way up the remnant, which in places still stood twice as tall as Jaume. Round-arched windows pierced it, long bereft of glass. Jaume recognized the style as dating from the Years of Trouble: the first two centuries of known history, before the Empire rose.
“As always, the forest reclaims its own,” Florian said.
The two men walked at sunset through an abandoned temple. The ruin lay a short way down a thickly wooded valley from the clearings where the army had bivouacked for the night. The breeze rustled branches spiked with narrow leaves as cuatralas, tiny raptors, glided between them on front and hind legs that were feathered like wings. Insects trilled welcome to the coming night. The sounds of beasts bawling and men calling played faintly in Jaume’s ears.
Fortunately the wind carried smells of the nobles’ retinues down a valley away from this one. Too many grandes resisted both army regulations and the rather brisk words of the Creators on the subject of hygiene. Jaume resisted the urge to pity himself.
At least he found Florian’s company congenial. Surprisingly so. The golden-haired Companion seemed to understand that silence could convey as much beauty as sound.
“No,” Jaume told him. “Here.”
Despite thick forest canopy, the day’s heat still lived in the yellow sandstone. He touched a hand’s-width swath where the gritty surface had turned smooth.
“It’s vitrified,” said Florian, leaning close to look. “Melted to glass and then reset.” A skilled smith as well as painter, Florian well understood matters such as the casting of metal and glass, which were mysteries to Jaume.
“What could do that?” Jaume asked.
“A lot of heat,” Florian said, straightening. He smoothed back a lock of hair sweat-glued to his forehead. “But where could it have come from?”
“Any number of sources, couldn’t it?” Jaume said. “A forest fire, perhaps?”
“That wouldn’t get hot enough.”
“A nearby volcano? A meteor strike?”
“There’s no sign of either near enough and big enough to cause this. Even after centuries, even as fast as the undergrowth returns, we’d see some evidence. Anyway, how would heat sources like those just leave streaks?”
“Lightning, then?”
“I don’t think so. The path is smooth, and meters long. If you look around there are other such tracks glazed along the walls. Also…”
He parted jagged vine leaves to reveal a small alcove. Carved beneath it was the glyph of the Youngest Son, a solid line above two broken ones. Empty now, it must once have held a small statue or icon of Torrey: tall, blond-bearded, usually shown cradling a ferret in his hands.
Torrey was the Creator associated with order, strength, and solidity. He was also the Trickster among the Eight. Each Creator embodied both sides of the coin, as it were: Maia was goddess of death as well as life-giver, and the Lady Herself, whose element was Fire, represented both Beauty’s flowering and inevitable decay.
“We’re inside the old walls,” Florian said. “Would lightning have struck here?”
He fingered his chin, which though somewhat long did not spoil the perfect symmetry of his features. In ways it’s a pity he never takes men for lovers, Jaume thought. He’s probably the prettiest among my beautiful Companions.
Not that it mattered. As Captain-General, Jaume would take no lovers from among the Companions or their auxiliaries. The rule against sex with subordinates applied to him most strongly of all. Pere, of course, had been the exception; that was a continuation of a relationship bonded tight when both were youths.
Poor Pere, Jaume thought. I’ll always love you. I’ll always miss you.
“It may be irrational,” Florian said, “but this reminds me somehow of battle damage.”
Jaume shook his head to clear away the vision of his friend and lover’s eyes, huge and reproachful through the Channel water, and the great shadow swelling from below to carry him down and away forever.
“What weapon could score and melt stone like that?” Florian admitted there was none such. “No, my friend, you’re right: your fancy’s getting the better of you. Could lightning have struck after the temple collapsed?”
It occurred to Jaume that despite his misgivings, he felt comfortable calling Florian “friend.” He wondered when that had happened.
“Something’s preoccupying you, though, Captain,” Florian said.
He kept his tone light, on the edge of bantering, as he normally did. The fact he used Jaume’s title showed how serious his intent really was.
“It’s the army,” Jaume said. “The progress we’re making—or not making. It cuts up my stomach like broken glass.”
“I know what you mean. We’re a week on the march, with at least as long to go to reach our goal, and here Terraroja lies no more than a hard day and night’s ride on a good mount from La Merced.”
He shook his head. “And what can we expect? It took us two days to chivvy the bucketheads out of the clearing inland of the palace where the full army mustered. It’s like herding cats.”
Jaume laughed. “It’s a mystery: if my lord Bluemountain and his peers are so eager to get at the foe, why do they drag their heels every millimeter of the way?”
“Not that mysterious. Each is as reluctant to give up the slightest scrap of prerogative as he is eager to spill blood.”
“I don’t understand it,” Jaume said. “We’ve campaigned alongside nobles before. They always tend to be dense and impetuous by turns. But never like this.”
“It’s the Life-to-Come sect,” Florian said. “Pío’s Legate openly preaches it. And naturally the bucketheads love it: it turns all The Books of the Law on their heads, and gives free rein to their hunger for rape and blood and plunder at the expense of those they consider inferior.”
“You may be too cynical,” Jaume said.
“And you may not be cynical enough. No mistake, Captain: we love you for being too good for this world. But it’ll bring you heartache.”
Jaume’s smile was bittersweet. My heart already aches as much as it can, I think.
“There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?” Florian asked.
Jaume sighed. “I should have been there for the execution today. If I order ugly things done, I should be there to witness them.”
“Ah, but you had to race off yet again to prevent Montañazul and that fearsome woman who commands the Third from having at each other with dirks over right-of-way.”
Florian laughed. “And our Coronel van Damme returns their contempt with interest.” The Nodosaurs prided themselves on being as prickly as their armored, spike-shouldered dinosaur namesakes.
“She’s got little more use for me than Bluemountain and the rest of the nobles do,” Jaume said. “She makes that clear enough. But she’ll give me no trouble on her own account. The Nodosaurs pride themselves on their professionalism. I’m her commander; she doesn’t have to like me to obey. It’s the same rule she’s lived by since she joined the ranks as a pike-pusher.” Which was rare. Usually women Nodosaurs served as skirmishers.
“The Imperial infantry looks down on everyone who isn’t one of them,” Florian said. “Except your uncle the Emperor.”
“He is one of them,” Jaume said. “At least, he’s a former pikeman. He’s the only occupant of the Fangèd Throne who’s ever known what it feels like to carry four meters of hardwood shaft and a meter of iron head on his shoulder all day in the heat, and the terror and exhaustion of fighting in the phalanx. They love him for it, as if he were both father and son to them.”
“Eloquently put, Captain. You should be a poet. But—are you sure that’s all that’s eating at you?”
To cover his wince, Jaume stooped beside a cluster of white night blossoms where the broken wall stub fell away to the springy mulch of the forest floor. Because there were several, he felt no hesitation in plucking one. He rose, holding it to his nose, savoring its thick perfume and the resiliency of the stem between his fingers.
“Isn’t that enough?” he said.
Melodía, he thought, I write you every day. And all I hear back is silence. Have you really turned your back on me, my love?
He longed to relieve the pressure of pain in his heart, to let some out. But he didn’t feel close enough to this mercurial Francés yet for that much intimacy.
They left the confines of the ancient temple, moving up the game trail that led to their camp. At once the sound of rustling came through the gloomy growth ahead. Both men put hand to sword hilt.
Florian laughed.
“By the sound I thought we were about to be charged by a matador bull,” he said. “Dieter, my boy, you’ve much to learn about stealth.”
As usual, Dieter wore his emotions on his face as clearly as if portrait-master Pedro the Greater had painted them there.
“What’s the bad news?” Jaume asked lightly.
“You—you have a visitor, Captain,” Dieter said.
* * *
“So it’s, ‘when Rob and I assemble the troops,’ now, is it?” Rob said on the villa’s doorstep. “What’s the role Rob Korrigan plays in assembling troops, then? I’d hardly know which part goes where.”
“I need you to help me teach them,” Karyl said.
“Teach? Teach what?”
“Everything. You taught them during weapons drills this afternoon.”
“That was more by way of supervising: keeping the lads from busting each other’s heads and arms. But I had to dump a few on their asses to do it. I’m not sure how fine a lesson that may be. Though I suppose they did learn Rob Korrigan was not a man to be fucked-about with.”
“That sounds like teaching to me,” Karyl said, without a tint of irony.
“Does it, now? You who never so much as raises his voice, much less a hand?”
“I’ve had more practice,” Karyl said. “It’s a skill, like any other: you’ll learn by practice. Anyway, everyone has his own approach.”
“Which might be my salvation, I suppose,” Rob grumbled. He was thinking, How do I learn your skill of looking at a body fit to freeze flames solid?
The fact was he had felt as if he were floundering in waist-deep muck all afternoon. All he knew about teaching came from his own experience of being taught by his old master, Morrison. Which, boiled down, was: sooner or later it all comes down to a sound thrashing.
He caught himself asking just who he might be, to question the great Voyvod Karyl? And shook his head in self-disgust at that.
Especially since he knew he was hooked already. Not the first time my weakness for hero-worship has sprung up to bite me on the ass, and doubtless not be the last.
“So why’d you try so hard to dissuade the boy from dedicating himself to the sword, then?” Rob asked, mostly to change the subject. “I thought you were anti-art.”
“I’m dead to it now,” Karyl said, “although I wouldn’t try to ban it any longer.”
“Why, then?”
“I hate waste. That’s all.”
“Right,” Rob said. “Well, I’m hungry and thirsty. So let’s go in and make our report.”
“Wait.”
The quiet word stopped Rob with his foot raised to the step. He turned back.
“You’ve received the payment promised for delivering me?” Karyl asked.
A moment of silence passed, during which Rob’s mouth tasted of copper and a bell seemed to ring in his head.
“Yes,” he said at last, unwilling to risk trying to slip a lie past those dark raptor eyes. “Last night Bogardus took me aside privately and gave me the money Aphrodite had left.”
“So will you stay?”
Frogs croaked down the darkness. Insects chirped and sang back from the trees. Terror-moths blundered about around the two men’s heads, occasionally brushing cheek or brow with butter-soft wings whose backs were patterned like screaming wide-eyed faces. Tiny snub-nosed fliers flitted in pursuit, snapping at the moths with needle teeth. Detached wings and body parts fell like soft carnage rain.
Heat crept up Rob’s cheeks. He didn’t know what Karyl meant by that question. Instinctively he feared it.
“I suppose,” Rob said with a carelessness he didn’t feel. It rang false to his own ears.
Yet for a fact, where’ve I got to go? It’s not as if anyone’s clamoring for the service of a dinosaur master sacked for showing up his blue blood masters.
“Do you mean it?” Karyl asked.
“Do you want me to? And how did you know about the money, anyway?”
Karyl chuckled softly. It shocked Rob in a way, as if it came from a full-grown tyrant bull.
“It was the only way it could be. All men must eat. All women too. You performed a service in expectation of pay.”
“Well—yes. Yes I did.”
“I’m a mercenary. I don’t share the disdain of commerce my class so cherishes. I was raised to look down on it, but I got that nonsense bashed from me soon enough on the exile’s road. High Ovda isn’t like Nuevaropa. It’s drier. Living’s harder. And I always had to make sure I was more valuable alive than shopped to Baroness Stechkina’s assassins. So I sold my services as a caravan guard and made my way east.”
Rob flinched and blinked violently as a half-eaten abdomen arced in to hit him in the eye. It dropped away at once, but he wiped furiously with his thumb at the residue he could feel wetting his cheek like an entrail tear.
Karyl cocked a brow. “Carry on,” Rob said, waving his free hand at him. “I’m fine.”
“Or rather, I sold Shiraa’s services,” Karyl said. “I was a kind of appurtenance, like a saddlebag, albeit admittedly useful for keeping her from eating the wrong people. I was a boy, skinny as a willow branch and not terribly skilled at arms.”
Rob was rapt. It was as much as he’d ever heard Karyl say about his own past—details the legends and ballads had never covered.
If I survive this … whatever-it-is I find myself embroiled in, he thought, I’ll dine richly for the rest of my days spinning whole new songs into the Saga of Karyl Bogomirskiy.
“So—you don’t resent it that I took gold to deliver you like a parcel?”
“How could I? I took money for wringing labor from my own people by f
orce. I took money for killing. You betrayed no confidence; you did me no harm. And to tell you the truth, you’ve brought me something I thought I’d never know again.”
“What’s that?”
“A spark of joy in my life. It’s a challenge, preparing Providence to defeat dinosaur knights. I may not be up to it. I certainly can’t do it alone. That’s why I asked if you meant to stay.”
Rob’s breath caught in his throat. The great captain wants me to help him?
That other part of him, the cynical observer—or was it the realist?—observed that, despite his disinterest in and professed dislike of passions, Karyl knew quite well how to stir them in others.
“What do you want me to do, my lord?” he asked.
“Help me as you did today. And also, I need you to be my quartermaster.”
“I’m honored beyond—wait. Quartermaster, did you say?”
“I did.”
“But I know nothing about it!”
“You’re a dinosaur master. You know how to get your monsters provisions and proper housing.”
“Well … yes.”
“Soldiers need those things too. The local men can live with their families for now, but the rest will need to be quartered. At that, even the locals will start to gripe if the outsiders get meal stipends and they don’t.”
“Sure and that’s Creators’ Gospel. But here, now, what about this Lucas—”
“An eager lad. But he’s an artist, a Gardener in full bloom, and as practical as a paper shield. I wouldn’t want to rely on him to keep me fed.”
“Since you put it that way—”
“We’ll also need sanitation seen to, in a hurry.” Rare as disease was, in Nuevaropa at least, a lack of proper disposal of bodily wastes inevitably caused an outbreak that cut down men and beasts like an arrow storm. Even as The Books of the Law promised.
“Providence is rich,” Karyl went on, “with its commerce and its silver mines. How long that will remain true, with so many hands turned to fighting and to … whatever it is the Gardeners do … is an open question. For now, they can afford to pay. And they’re going to have to.”
“You want me to tell the Council that?” Rob asked in wide-eyed terror.
