by Victor Milán
With all these poor people have to do to rebuild their lives, he thought, Creators know when we’ll get to setting things right. At least most of them were original inhabitants of the barony—indeed, most of the original inhabitants. While the hapless inhabitants of the little manorial village of Sous-le-Tertre had been caught in their beds by the Horde’s onslaught, the country folks’ watch dogs and vexers had alerted them in time to bounce promptly away into the forest. There, throwing aside old enmities in the face of new and overwhelming danger, the woods-runners had taken them in. And ambushed the Hordelings who dared follow.
“Now, what have we here?” he asked. Nell stuck her beak in a green bush growing from the roadside and began munching happily.
“Uh—you did notice the herd of Thunder-titans, who are really, really close and getting closer?” asked a nervous, squint-eyed man with a prominent Adam’s apple.
“Why, as it happens I did, bless your soul. And quite a handsome little family they are, too. A dozen adults and adolescents, is it, and four sprightly little calves the size of hay-wains. Five? Hard to tell, the way they gambol amongst the others. And that herd-cow—she’s twenty-five meters long and thirty tons if she’s a hand span. No, I’m taking stock of what I’ve got to work with here, not them.”
Which for a fact wasn’t promising. The colossal dinosaurs, with their little heads swaying at the ends of improbably long necks, their mound-shaped bodies, green-mottled on top, and a sort of yellowish khaki on the belly. They lacked the dorsal spikes that gave their lesser cousins, the spine-backed titans, their names but were perceptibly bulkier. He knew as well as the farming folk did that if they continued on their present course, they’d trample their just-sprouting crops into mud, and a number of their dwellings as well. And he knew, rather better than the farming folk were likely to, the futility of trying to fight them, even with arms considerably better than their crude and hastily sharpened pole-pikes and farm implements.
“It’s the Angel’s curse on us for defying him,” an old woman called from up the road. “The behemoths have never been seen this side of the river before. It is His vengeance!”
“Enough of your noise, now, Becca,” the stout red-faced woman who seemed to be in charge of the self-raised peasant levee said. “I notice you’re still alive, and not long since eaten by the Horde and shat out their unwashed scabby asses.”
“Blasphemy, Sandrine! What of your immortal soul?”
“It’s still stuck firmly in my body, thank the Eight. Now piss off before I send a few of the gawkers to throw rocks at you. Or have done with your eye-harvester screeching, and you can watch the miracle our noble new overlord is surely about to pull out of his … ear.”
Rob stood with fists on hips, appraising the onrushing herd. Well, onrushing by the standard of such unwieldy great beasts. Though the legs of the largest were longer than he was tall, he could easily outpace them by walking briskly.
But the slowest of lava flows will destroy crops and villages in its path, too, he thought, and no more surely than they.
“Which of your fields lie fallow, now?” he called.
Sandrine pointed to a patch toward the green wall of Telar’s Wood. It was naked yellow soil and looked uncultivated to Rob’s eye. But he had no more of a mind for growing stuff from the ground than these hayseeds had of teaching a war-hadrosaur to belly-down on command. He nodded at the confirmation.
“Right.” He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get to it, then. We’ve a job of work to do, and not more time than we need to do it.”
“You already have a plan to deal with the monsters, lord?” asked the narrow-eyed man.
Rob laughed.
“I had that the moment I first heard of your little problem. In my prior life, before I was made noble for my sins, I was a dinosaur master. Meaning I still am, but now I get to put on airs and drink tea with extended pinky. If I drank tea, which thanks to the Lady Maris I do not. What I needed to know was how best to implement my cunning plan.”
“What does that mean?” Sandrine asked.
“Watch and learn. Now, who’s got rotted hay they’d like to get paid to dispose of? A nominal fee, to be sure, but—”
Though the self-constituted self-defense force stoutly refused to leave their posts between the Apatosaurus herd and the fields, Rob quickly got the onlookers chased off to hunt down the necessities of his plan. Which, fortunately, was simple and fairly easy to put in action—slow as they were, the monsters had halved the distance between the futile defenders and their tree-trunk legs.
“It’s a month’s supply of good pine oil for our lamps you’re using up, there,” complained Sandrine as a handful of the more reliable-looking peasants poured jugs of the fragrant stuff onto weeds growing by the ditch that crossed the dinosaurs’ path. Which itself posed no barrier to them: the big ones could simply step across, while the notably more nimble young could leap it easily.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Rob promised. “We’ve casks upon casks of the stuff in the cellar beneath the manor. For reasons best known to his evil little toad mind, the former Baron Melchor put a stout lock upon the door, which was also stout. Patience was not a common virtue among the Hordelings, it seems; they moved on before doing more than clawing at the door a bit. Here now, Bergdahl, don’t do that. Bergdahl!”
As any good dinosaur master must, Rob knew how to make his voice thunder. More to keep dinosaur grooms and apprentices from making disastrous mistakes with grandes’ fabulously expensive war-dinos than for preservation of their own lives and limbs. Though plenty of dinosaur masters, like Morrison, reckoned the occasional fatality among their underlings an excellent lesson for the survivors, Rob had a soft spot in his heart and tried his best to keep casualties down among even the most thumb-fingered. And brained.
The lanky seneschal froze with his big fist cocked back by an ear to punch a peasant, who had apparently stumbled while helping shift a two-wheeled cart piled with straw and spilled some in the roadbed.
“None of that, now, there’s a good fellow,” Rob said. “It’s a rush job. Mistakes happen, and nothing serious spilled.”
Nothing but fucking hay, he thought. What’s wrong with the brute? Note: remember to have a good talk with Bergdahl about his ways of dealing with subordinates before hiring him on staff for the manor.
With Sandrine’s help, Rob chased the farmers, would-be warriors and onlookers alike, five or ten meters back of the line where the ditch crossed beneath the road. He had other helpers heap hay and such combustible trash as the nearby householders had been able to fetch on short notice and had the last of the pine oil spilled on it.
A breeze had come up, blowing out of the north. That meant the smell would only reach the dinosaurs when they were perilously close to the barrier. He had to hope the sight of what he was about to do was enough for the job at hand.
He had produced his key-wound spark-maker and poured a bit of tinder from a flask into a brass bowl on the road, behind the pine-smelling debris. Now he set it alight, blew on it, lit a splinter of kindling with a bit of oil on the end, and handed it ceremoniously to Sandrine.
“You do the honors, madam,” he said grandly.
“You little beggars be respectful, now, and wait for your elders to begin,” he added to the children and young folk who had eagerly started lighting their own splinters, first off the tinder-bowl, then from one another’s torches. “Or thumping will be called for.”
Amazingly, they held back, dancing with impatience behind Rob and the red-haired woman. She was looking from Rob to her own torch as if not sure what either was. He made urgent go-ahead gestures with his hands. The nearest, and also largest, Thunder-titans were less than thirty yards away; he could hear the muttering in their endless throats, even over the distant-thunder grumble of their bellies.
At last Sandrine shrugged and set fire to the hay and trash on the road. It flared up most satisfactorily, the flames pale blue and yellow in the cloud-filtered but br
ight morning sun.
The leading titan, the herd female, snorted loudly. Several others echoed her.
Smoke quickly billowed from the barrier across the road as the youngsters ran up and down the ditch, catcalling the behemoths and setting light to oil-spattered weeds. Which also commenced to smoke lustily, creating a most satisfactory if not entirely continuous line of flames and (mostly) smoke. Behind the ditch, which ran full with water today, a line of the farmers had assembled with buckets and ladles in case the fire got overambitious.
“Steady, there!” Rob called, as some of his youthful fire starters, job done, turned to dance toward the Apatosaurus herd, brandishing their firebrands and shouting taunts. “If you get one of those thing’s attention, it can spin right round with surprising speed and whack you with its tail.”
“What,” Sandrine demanded skeptically, “one of those great fat wads?”
“Can break a bull Allosaurus’ spine with a tail crack. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
Well, no, he hadn’t. His horrible drunken old Scocés dinosaur master, Morrison, to whom he’d been ’prenticed, had seen it with his eye—or maybe both, back when he still had the two. Or not; the foul-tempered old bugger was no more married to the truth than Rob himself was. Sod him in Hell; but he was a brilliant hand with dinosaurs.
With deliberation rather than alacrity, the lead dinosaur had turned southwest—back toward the forest, which here ran mostly to hardwoods, Telar be praised. The others turned to follow its example. Rob and his people wouldn’t have to try herding the giants with torches and shouts until they wandered across one of the borders of the barony and became some other set of unfortunates’ problem.
They liked the dense woods little better than the Hordelings had, though they faced little likelihood of woods-runner arrow-showers from covert. But by the locals’ testimony they had crossed it to get here. Now it seemed they were willing to shoulder a path back, to get away from the flames.
The smallest of the juveniles, barely bigger than a yearling ambler, broke away from the herd to approach the fire-wall. Rob knew the beasts weren’t powerfully bright; little call they had to be, given how much they could wring out of simply being powerful. Still, like any animal other than humans, they feared fire from birth. But this one let curiosity overpower instinct.
Rob had Wanda, his utility and sometime fighting axe, in hand; he’d used her to bust up some rotted blanks from an old outbuilding to add fuel for his fire-wall. He ran toward the little dinosaur, waving the axe and shouting in Anglysh, “Away with you, you daft little bugger! Shoo!” The baby titan blinked at him with large brown eyes and turned and cantered back toward its majestically retreating elders.
When Rob turned away, he noticed that Bergdahl seemed to have corralled several of the comelier local maidens, beyond the smoke and ditch. Rob hopped across and strode up to investigate.
“—ordered to present yourself at the manor at sunset,” the seneschal was telling the three wide-eyed young women. “You must be prepared to serve your master the Baron’s pleasures. It’s the law, and your duty—and no more than his due, as a reward for saving your lowly crops and hovels.”
“No, no, no. Wait, wait now!” Rob called. Not without regret, for the three—two black-haired lasses, one tall, one short, both slim, and a buxom blonde whose height was in between—were decidedly easy on his eyes. For all that they concealed their bodies beneath the sort of shapeless hemp or linen smocks people wore up here in the Sierra Scudo foothills, where it actually got cool at nights even in summer, when the wind blew down from among towering perpetually snow-sheathed peaks. “That’s not right.”
“Of course it is, my lord,” Bergdahl said, turning. He sounded actively outraged. “There’s no such duty. It’s forbidden by law to try to enforce it.” Not that I’m a man to stick closely to the law’s letter, or any part of it, he thought. But in this case …
“But your rights as lord of the manor—”
“You worked for the young hotspur Duke Falk himself, did you not? Now, surely he’d never contemplate such a thing, and him the big damn hero, and everything and such.”
He noticed a down-drooping outer corner of one of his seneschal’s eyes commence to twitch. The man suffers tics, now, does he? Perhaps he needed to engage more staff for the castle, to call it a grander thing than it was, if the man was suffering so from overwork.
“And more to the point, my own Duke Karyl would hang me from a tree for doing it.”
The wide shoulders shrugged. “Others do it, regardless of the law.”
Don’t I know it, Rob thought in rising anger.
“Ah, but that’s the very kind of law His Grace is readiest to enforce. He hates such deeds with a fiery passion. And so do I.”
Rob willed his fists to unball, restraining his urge to smash that beaked goblin face. It’s not his fault he’s ill-favored as a reaper’s ass, he thought, and a shame and a reproach to Ma Korrigan’s boy to hold his homeliness against him.
Actually, that was his second impulse. His first had been to split that round head with Wanda. But at least that one was easy to shrug off. Rob had never yet killed man or woman out of mere spite but had punched plenty of the Creators’ own who pissed him off.
It’s not your fault you don’t know young bucketheads raped and killed my older sister for a lark, he thought. But you don’t need to know it, either. I don’t know you, bucko. The Emp himself may vouch for you; but Himself has a bloody great Grey Angel for a confessor and is none the wiser, so.
“Take the day off,” he made himself say in an even tone—though he knew it would sound flat against his usual cheerful bantering nosehorn-shit.
“Oh, my Lord, I couldn’t possibly—”
“What’s this? A servant balking at time free from his chores? Truly, overwork has affected your mind, as well as causing that tic in your eye. Off with you, now.”
He put a touch of steel in that last. He had plenty of experience bossing recalcitrant dinosaur grooms—and facing would-be tavern brawlers.
Bergdahl’s shoulders slumped. He turned and shuffled back to his horse, whom he’d tied to the stout frame of a simple lever-style bucket hoist by the irrigation ditch that ran alongside the road. Here, and it’s in the sun, Rob thought, annoyed that he’d missed the fact, where it can’t reach the water to drink! And a fine young plane tree stands just a few meters beyond to give the poor beast shade. He added to his growing list of mental notes to talk to his seneschal about caring more for one’s animals; the beast might not be a dinosaur, but not even Rob could hold that much against it. But not everybody had been brought up right in that regard, he knew, and would be better for proper instruction.
“So that’s it?” Sandrine asked him, as they watched the Thunder-titans make their brisk—for twenty-ton behemoths—way toward Telar’s Wood. They seemed to be heading to the road between the trees. Fifty meters or so on it crossed the L’Eau Riant by a bridge. Which, though clearly made of heavy hardwood timbers to support heavily laden wagons drawn by nosehorns, was never constructed to accommodate the weight of even one of the massive adult Apatosauruses. Rob was almost tempted to follow and see if they’d try to cross over it. For all their bulk they were surprisingly narrow, as dinosaurs tended to be; they might fit between the railings.
Or splinter them. The thought that he might have to bear the expense if they broke the bloody bridge doused his urge to spectate.
“Yes,” he told her.
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
She scowled. “Why didn’t you just tell us? You could even have stayed in bed.” While common folk worked the fields, she did not say, but he heard.
Her envy wasn’t his problem. He’d slept as late as mortally possible when he was mere Rob Korrigan, even—especially—when he was just scraping by as a minstrel, as he did between dinosaur-master jobs. Whose tenure was anything but secure, given the trickish ways of high-spirited war-dinosaurs. And high-spirit
ed war grandes, who in general Rob found little brighter than his charges.
“Would you have believed me?” he asked. “That it was so simple and all?”
Her frown deepened, but seemed to soften its contours, becoming more a look of consternation than anger.
“No,” she said. “Such huge things. Who’d have known?”
Anyone who remembered all things fear fire, he thought. But he used a skill he’d developed for the first time in his life while living and working closely with Karyl: holding his tongue. Which was a skill whose usefulness he’d quickly discovered. Although initially he picked up the knack in something of a hurry because he was terrified Karyl would kill him as casually as swatting a nosehorn-fly if Rob said something that angered him.
In this case, he might have need of such an ally as Sandrine, in this new and doubtful business of being a Baron. Something he sensed he’d made of her, despite her still-visible reticence. That was mostly show, he reckoned, for the saving of her face before the others. And welcome to it she was.
She looked at him now with just a V between her brows—appraising. “But now we know the sleight.”
“I’d hope so.”
“But you’d teach us to do something like this on our own? Protect ourselves?”
And how might I have accomplished the thing without your noticing that all it took was a little fire, well applied? I’m a dinosaur master and musician, not a conjurer.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She frowned again, this time in puzzlement—the woman seemed to frown as her customary expression, but got a great many uses of it, the way Karyl’s pet did with her lone cry of “Shiraa!”
“Because then we don’t need you?”
I don’t see what need you have of me ruling over you as a general thing, he thought. But here we are. It is the Creators’ Law, and I’m no man to argue with that. At least not now, with a thirst too powerful for water building within.