by Victor Milán
“What?” Machtigern asked the huge Ruso’s back. He always did that right before battle, just as Florian laughed louder and more. He didn’t even know he was doing it.
“Count Leopoldo hasn’t done so badly for himself,” Manfredo said. “It wouldn’t be easy to provision the castle to stand a long siege, however strong its walls. This land is arid. It’s probably why banditry has such strong appeal for him and his barons.”
“He’s done us a bad turn,” said Jacques, walking up. “He’s managed to collect more men-at-arms than we have, both cavalry and dinosaur knights. Worse, to feed them all he’s sucked up most of the provisions available for twenty kilometers around.”
He shook his head. “It was a nightmare enough getting some of our nobles to pay for what they took when supplies were plentiful and cheap.”
Jaume frowned to see just how the travails of keeping not just the Companions but the whole fractious army tight, fed, and functional had worn his friend down. His lank brown hair had gotten sparser and greyer, as had his skin. Despite his armor, his shoulders were visibly slumped.
Jacques planned to retire soon from active service and return to the order’s motherhouse in central Francia to assume direction of its ever-growing holdings from Mor Jérôme. Jérôme had lost both legs when his morion rolled onto him after taking an iron ballista bolt through both lungs. Now, health failing, Jérôme wanted to retire to his family’s vineyards in Sansamour. He had done well; Jaume anticipated Jacques would do better.
But the loss of any Companion left a hole in every Brother’s soul, as well as their battle-order. Even if it wasn’t death that took them. And Jaume could only wonder who would care for them the way Jacques had.
Sadly, the Empire’s most elite band of warrior-artist-philosophers of beauty tended to attract precious few candidates with any gift for organizing things.
“And thanks to our magnates’ obsession with their feudal ties and petty honor at the expense of everything else,” Florian was saying with unaccustomed venom, “our left wing’s significantly weaker than the right.”
Manfredo shrugged. “They’d outnumber us on both sides anyway, unless we put all our riders on one flank and left the other hanging. At least our right has a chance to hold its own against the Terrarojanos.”
Manfredo was an erstwhile law student, exiled for promoting Taliano independence from Trebizon. He’d become a virtuoso of mounted tactics, as he was of musical composition and various instruments. Jaume thought him more skillful than he himself was.
Not that Jaume considered himself a master tactician. As a face-up fighter, the next man he met who could match him would be the first. He inspired men to follow him, and had a knack for clever sleights and ruses. That he won larger battles was something he attributed to bringing better tools to the task, and to being less stupid than his foes.
“I’m not happy with our position,” he said. “I hate to accept battle on my enemy’s terms.”
“Hardly your fault, Captain,” Machtigern said. “Montañazul and the rest barely listen. Tavares keeps telling them they don’t have to.”
“It is my fault, my friend,” said Jaume. “I command.”
Away to the west the Nodosaurs stopped singing.
* * *
“For a fat gob of phlegm, Melchor knows his way around a sword,” Rob admitted at the noon break. He sat on an old hay bale in the shade of the house, still sweating. The day was hot and he’d been exerting himself almost as heavily as the men had. Tough work, this teaching business.
“I saw,” said Karyl, who squatted Eastern-fashion beside him. “Yannic will be competent if he can learn to control his incipient panic. Percil barely knows which end to hold, and feels too angry and challenged by circumstances to learn.”
Rob flicked eyes at him. Maybe more than at any time since he met the man, he felt like a small boy whose hero had stepped out of the ballads to become his companion. Serious about craft, if precious little else, Rob found himself awed in the presence of true mastery: the quiet mastery.
“Their house fighters could only be worth their pay among a people with a generation or two of peace under their belts. Still, they know the basics. It’s better than most we’ve got.”
“Young Lucas seems to be coming right along,” Rob said. Karyl had spent the midmorning break, and half this lunch period, instructing the young painter privately. “He’s mad avid for the blade, and that’s a fact.”
“He has a gift. Apparently his deftness with a brush translates to the sword as well. And it’s making him overconfident. I don’t like all the methods teachers use in Chánguo or Zipangu. But Lucas makes me think maybe it is a good idea, sometimes, to make an aspirant sweep the master’s studio for a year before teaching him technique.”
“What for?”
“To make sure he’s dedicated to learning, rather than building up his ego. Eastern martial training’s not about just fighting but spiritual development as well. The student needs to learn self-control most of all. Otherwise the sword- and spear-play only make him dangerous to others—and most of all himself.”
“If you say so,” Rob said. “But I doubt we have much time for spiritual instruction. Even if you could interest lad Lucas in same.”
“You’re probably right. Between the Council’s fears and Guillaume’s greed, we’ll have to fight soon. When that happens I’ll have to be more concerned with blades than the well-being of those who wield them. Which is a part of the business I never liked, even at my starkest: that caring too much for one’s troops can be as fatal as caring too little.”
He sighed and stood. “If nothing else, Crève Coeur’s going to want to teach us a sharp lesson in how futile our efforts are.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“People come and go constantly down La Rue Impériale, in plain view of our camp. That’s one of a hundred ways Count Guillaume can get all the news he needs of what we’re about.”
Rob frowned. “You’re right.”
Failing to have recognized what he now saw as plain fact chagrined him. Minstrels were famously well-placed for spying, which added to their infamy and their mystique alike. Not that he himself had ever stooped so low as to spy for some buckethead. Unless he really needed the money.
“We need scouts,” Karyl said. “I think you’re just the man to head them.”
“I’m what, now?” Rob asked in alarm.
“It’s logical. You’re already quartermaster.”
“Don’t remind me.” It was Rob’s turn to sigh. “I suppose that much makes sense. Quartermasters usually have charge of foragers. Scouts forage. As well as harry enemy foragers.”
“Scouts also spy. And hunt enemy spies.”
“That appeals, I admit. The added responsibility, much less so.”
But rather to his distress, Rob was starting to see the sense in Karyl’s proposals.
“It’s always pleased my noble employers to blunder blindly about the landscape until they stumbled into an enemy by chance,” he said. A slow, sly smile stole across his face. “I do believe they’d regard this notion of yours as cheating.”
“Indeed.”
“If it’ll piss off aristos, I’m for it. But—where do I start? I haven’t a clue.”
“Emeric comes to mind. His woods-runners know the country better than anybody. Especially invaders.”
“Right,” Rob said. “I’ll just be taking Emeric aside when we finish up for the afternoon.” He was enjoying even thinking about this new game. It appealed to his devious side.
“Just one more thing,” said Karyl.
Rob frowned in instant suspicion.
“We need eyes and ears in Providence town,” Karyl said. “Children should work best.”
“This is no spur-of-the-moment fancy with you, is it?” You sly bastard, taking advantage of a poor, innocent minstrel lad.
“Their natural curiosity will cover them as well as serve us. And if they get caught, they’re not likely to be
punished too severely.”
A lamp came on in Rob’s mind “It’s the Garden Council you want me to spy on, isn’t it?”
Karyl only smiled. After a moment’s breathless outrage, Rob found himself grinning back.
“Right, then. It’s about bloody time I had some fun in this job.”
Chapter 34
Armadón, Spike-shoulder—Edmontonia longiceps. A typical breed of nodosaur: a massively armored quadrupedal dinosaur, herbivorous, with large forward-sweeping shoulder spikes and truculent attitude; 6.6 meters long, 2 meters high, 5 tonnes. Emblem of the Imperial infantry, the Brown Nodosaurs.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
The Nodosaurs stood in iron silence. It was a favorite trick of theirs, to unnerve the opposition, Jaume knew.
They favored it because it worked.
A hundred fifty meters north of the phalanx, Redland pikes began to waver. The hapless peasant levies knew the Imperial infantry no more gave quarter than took it. The Nodosaurs had taken as their mission inflicting the greatest pain possible on the Empire’s enemies. Neither Creators’ Law, nor Diet legislation, nor even decree of their Imperial master of the moment had ever softened that attitude.
“If our left’s so outmatched, then,” asked Dieter, oblivious to the drama playing out before the Companions’ vantage point, “why not just shore up that side ourselves?”
Pedro the Lesser, the diminutive weapons master, was passing nearby in his customary oblivious precombat pacing.
“Strange things happen in battle,” he told the Alemán. “Not even the Creators can predict them.”
Then he was off again, rolling on bowed legs, bearded chin sunk to breastplate, muttering to himself. What he said no man knew. Poems? Prayers? It was inaudible, and no one cared to intrude.
At a command Jaume couldn’t hear, the Nodosaur skirmishers formed a double line, front rank kneeling, rear aiming their crossbows over their comrades’ shoulders. They targeted their opposite numbers, armored house-bowmen and peasant archers in light armor or none, who stood in front of the Terrarojano foot. With a single musical tung! of springing steel, the Imperial arbalests began to work murder among them.
Jaume heard the distant wailing wounded. Small figures fell, thrashing hideously or lying still. At this range most arrows from the light-draw Terraroja bows fell like rain in a meadow, harmless. But bolts from Imperial medium-crossbows pierced dinosaur-leather and even mail armor like wet paper. They punched right through house-archers’ steel hats to trepan the skulls beneath.
The intricate dance, as those with emptied weapons moved to the rear and their comrades stepped forward to aim and loose in turn, enthralled Jaume as it always did. The smaller crossbows were cocked using a lever called a springer’s-foot, the bigger ones with pulley-and-gear contrivances known as cranequins. Jaume found the way the skirmishers kept up a steady bolt storm despite their different loading times actively beautiful. Temperamentally unsuited to the phalanx’s tight formation, the Nodosaur light infantry were precise when they needed to be.
Trumpets blared across the expanse of pale-green grass and reddish soil. Drums boomed. Pennons waved vigorously. The Terrarojano army advanced. The Ejército Corregir—the silent brown pikes, the gaily caparisoned heavy horse, the dinosaur knights, unmatched in might and arrogance—marched to meet them.
Jaume turned away. “Mount up, my friends!” he called. “We’ll know where we’re needed soon enough.”
At her master’s approach, Camellia raised her head, clutching in her beak a clump of uprooted weeds with red dirt dribbling from their roots. She blew a greeting to her master through wide orange-marbled nostrils.
She wore a chamfron, a steel half mask similar to the ones used on warhorses. Overlapping plates guarded her throat, a steel boss her chest. A heavy cloth caparison and her own tough hide sufficed to protect the rest. Like their riders’, the hadrosaurs’ armor was white, and emblazoned with a red circle on a tilted cross: the holy Mirror of the Creator Bella, Lady of Fire and Beauty.
“Yes, it’s almost time, sweetheart,” Jaume called to the morion. He encircled her neck with a steel-shelled arm and hugged her crested head. She rubbed against his breastplate. He smiled and scratched her cheek behind the chamfron.
“My helmet, Bartomeu, if you please,” he told his arming-squire.
The boy looked miserable. His own risk was slight. When his master was mounted, he’d join the other squires under dinosaur master Rupp von Teuzen, guarding the army’s baggage train strung out south along the road. The drovers and a mercenary jinete—light rider—company Jaume had hired to scout and protect foraging parties would fight alongside them if the enemy broke through. Bartomeu didn’t fear for his own safety, but for his master’s.
He placed the scoop-shaped war-sallet on Jaume’s head. Unlike the heavier, one-piece tourney helmet, this one had a visor that swung down to meet the bevor that guarded his neck and cupped his chin. Jaume felt Bartomeu’s hands tremble as they fastened his chin strap.
He caught the back of Bartomeu’s blond head with a white-enameled gauntlet and drew him close to kiss him in reward and reassurance. On the brow, so it wouldn’t be misinterpreted as showing sexual interest.
“Thank you,” he said.
He smiled broadly as he broke away, and showed no sign he noticed how the boy’s face fell at the chaste gesture. Bartomeu strapped Jaume’s escutcheon-shaped shield to his left arm. With the usual help from his squire and Camellia, Jaume mounted the saddle atop her high, humped back. His cracked ribs still pained him, but if there was one thing he was skilled at as a lifelong campaigner, it was ignoring the pangs of minor wounds. Or not-so-minor ones.
All around him Companion duckbills were rising from the grass. His was the only sallet. The others wore round armets, except Florian, who sported a bascinet whose beaked visor he had painted in the likeness of a glaring hornface. It was alarmingly realistic.
Jaume grinned at them. He enjoyed this. He lived for the thrills of battle—and embraced its horrors as gifts from the Lady too. His only fear was for Camellia and his men. When intrigue in his father’s court had forced Jaume to take the field against the ferocious miquelet bandits at the ridiculously young age of nineteen, he had been forced to confront, once and for all, the fact that he would one day die.
He and his Brothers looked west, where Estrella del Hierro’s mounted wing was the army’s weakest point. In sheer numbers the Imperial disadvantage didn’t look too bad. The Ejército Corregir had about 7,500 men, the enemy a little more than 10,000. The Terrarojanos’ slight edge in missilery, and their 6,000 pikes backed by 500 spear-and-shield men facing 3,000 Nodosaurs, 2,000 peasant levies, and 400 armored foot, meant little. Van Damme would pit her tercio with its skirmishers and engineers against three times their number, even in armored household troops, and like her chances. And so would Jaume.
In all their five centuries of history, no Nodosaur tercio had ever broken. Some had died where they stood—literally, to the last man and woman, mostly during the Demon War against the Fae and their traitorous human allies, and the brutal conquest of Anglaterra. They would, if commanded, retire in good order. They seldom had to.
But knights won battles. Terraroja had twice the heavy cavalry Jaume did, and 170 dinosaur knights to his 75—which included the Companions in reserve. They outnumbered Count Ironstar’s riders two to one, with a healthy advantage left over to take on Montañazul on the right. If the Redlanders could drive the Army of Correction’s men-at-arms from the field, the Imperial levies would scatter like dandelion fuzz to a puff. And then Don Leopoldo could grind the Nodosaurs to blood-and-bone gruel at his leisure.
It fell to the Companions to keep that from happening.
Steel ballista bows twanged basso. Catapult arms thudded against rope-wound stops. Stone balls arced high to bounce through tightly packed formations, leaving screams and smears of deeper red on red dirt. Redlands horses shrieked piteously as iron stinger darts streaked snake-low o
ver grass to strike through their armored flanks and bring them down in pinwheels of limbs, blood, and bodies.
“I hate this most,” Machtigern said. “The beasts have no choice in being here.”
“Neither do the peasants,” called Florian. Machtigern frowned and flared his nostrils in dismay, but nodded assent.
The mounted masses approached collision. On the left, Estrella del Hierro himself rode in the lead with a score of barons and knights. Their star-steel armor shone like silver. Except for the personal insignia on each knight’s breast, Ironstar plate was painted only with clear varnish to keep off rust.
“Why won’t Ironstar order the terremoto?” Fernão demanded angrily. “What’s the fool waiting for?”
“Not so foolish,” said Manfredo. “Outnumbered as he is, he can’t waste it at too great a range.”
Uttering the devastating cries took a lot out of the war-hadrosaurs. On the move, they could deliver only one without pausing to recapture breath.
Terraroja had no such constraints. With his greater numbers he didn’t have to worry about concentrating his dinosaurs’ sound-weapons for maximum effect.
Jaume’s teeth peeled back from his lips as he saw the Redlands monsters, rolling at a ground-eating four-legged lope, stretch their gloriously crested heads forward on their necks.
He heard nothing. But the hair rose at his nape. His stomach quivered.
Dinosaur knights and their mounts were trained against the terremoto. Their armor and shields would ward off some of its effects. But there were simply too many enemy monsters bellowing at once. The galloping Imperial dinosaurs faltered as if an invisible wall had struck them.
“That’s them fucked, then,” Wil Oakheart of Oakheart said conversationally. “There’s where we’re needed.”
He clanged his visor shut.
“Pass the word to the Ordinaries,” Jaume said as the Redlands duckbills rose up on huge hind legs for their final sprinting charge. “We ride west to help Ironstar!”
* * *
