by Victor Milán
“But seeing them close up makes me believe in love at first sight, almost.”
A skinny teenaged girl in an unbleached linen smock ran up carrying a hemp bag. Rob took it with thanks. He didn’t know her name. Since the successful repulse of Baron Salvateur’s probe, recruits had poured into Séverin farm, from the town, the province, and even beyond.
Anyway, she’s not one of mine, he thought.
He was having enough trouble keeping track of his new scouts. As for the woods-runners, except for a notable few he was hopeless at them; they came and went as if blown on the breeze. He honestly didn’t think they cared whether he knew their names or not. They helped out of respect for Stéphanie and Emeric—and hatred for Count Guilli and his Rangers.
The trike-riders halted their mounts by clucking, and clattering what looked to Rob like shillelaghs on their frills. The Ovdans were free about banging the beasts with the things. It wasn’t cruelty, he knew. It took a lot to get the attention of something that big, with that thick of a hide.
And now he truly appreciated for the very first time just how big Triceratops were. Titans were vaster, of course. But you couldn’t train those for war. Or at least no one Rob knew of did, although legend had them being used in battle in any number of exotic locations, from Zipangu to Tejas.
A dinosaur knight’s duckbill was easily as long as the three-horns, which ran around nine to ten meters in length and sometimes longer. But where the largest sackbut or morion ridden to war seldom weighed more than three tonnes, the lead trike, a female who was obviously the herd prime, must go upward of ten metric tonnes if she weighed a gram.
Rob walked right up to her snout, bold as you please. And considerably bolder than he felt. But that was how you treated a hornface of any ilk. His direct approach made her point her massive head straight at Rob in case he was crazy-suicidal enough to attack.
What you did not want was to go creeping up on one of the monsters from sides or rear, where the frill blocked its vision. If you did it would simply take you for a Horror looking to leap on its back, and stomp you into a carpet accordingly.
Instead of goring or trampling Rob the Triceratops lowered her huge head inquisitively. The tip of her nasal horn came level with the tip of Rob’s own nose. He reminded himself that the horn wasn’t much use in a fight, since if it rammed something too hard it could break the monster’s snout. But it was as long as the span of his outstretched fingers, and big around at the base as two fists, and came to a nasty if not exactly needlelike point.
And “too hard” was a relative term. It meant, if she tried digging the horn into the flank of a rival hornface, or the gut of a marauding meat-eater. That horn would still serve quite nicely to split open a thin-skinned lightweight like a raptor, or a man. Yellow, it was, shading to brown so dark as almost to be black at the end.
And those great horns jutting a meter and a half from either bony brow—those were meant to kill the largest Tyrannosaur. They were weapons as formidable in their way as any tyrant’s teeth.
The trike’s nostrils were big, protruding to either side of her beaked snout. Moving deliberately but confidently Rob shifted to blow into the left one. She jerked her head slightly, then blew back. Plant-eating dinosaurs were just like horses that way: they breathed in each other’s noses to get acquainted.
Having reassured the big female that here was a tailless two-leg who knew how to talk Triceratops, Rob went to the trebuchet in his arsenal. He dug in the bag the nameless recruit had fetched him and brought out a handful of dried figs. He let her smell them, then held them to her mouth.
And, as it opened, Rob hoped that she’d react to that the same as his own Little Nell would—docile and minute by comparison as she was. That great yellow beak could take his hand off effortlessly; the shearing teeth behind would mince it, bones and all. But instead, a fat yellowish-pink tongue emerged and swept the figs from his open palm with surprising gentleness.
The trike munched them right down, rumbling with satisfaction. Rob reached up to scratch the wrinkly flesh beneath her yellow eye, taking care not to seem to threaten the eye itself.
She bobbed her head appreciatively. It was as long as Rob was tall. Yellow-tan like the body, the horned face bore a striking pattern of darker brown that highlighted its frill and the bony structure of its face.
“So we’re friends, now, girl,” he muttered. “Gently now.”
She blew through her nostrils again as if in acknowledgment.
“Well handled,” Karyl said.
Rob grinned immoderately but tried to pass it off: “Beasts are simpler than men.”
“Not necessarily,” Karyl said. “We’re just more likely to take their acquiescence for granted.”
Rob wasn’t about to take a ten-tonne monster for granted. Hoping he’d done enough to win her trust he moved back beyond the frill. The mahout looked quizzically down at him, then shifted his leg, clad in sturdy brown cotton-twill trousers, to let Rob scratch his mount’s relatively thin-scaled neck.
She rumbled and nodded happily. Her rider called out something in his beastly tongue. Gaétan laughed and answered.
“He says he’s surprised,” Gaétan translated. “Most lowlanders are afraid of a three-horn.”
Rob laughed—softly, so as not to startle the beast.
“Are they all daft up on the Plateau, then, that they don’t fear such a monster as this? Me, I fear well anything that can crush me by no more than a moment’s inattention.”
He drew in a deep and satisfied breath. “Well, this one seems sound enough at any rate. Let’s have a look at the rest of ye, then.”
Chapter 8
Torre, Tower—One of the ruling families of the five Kingdoms which make up the Empire of Nuevaropa, plus the symbolic Torre Menor or Lesser Tower, which represents the recognized Nuevaropan minorities in the Diet, and Torre Delgao, the family from which the Emperor or Empress is always Elected.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
The first thing Melodía noticed about the farm was the stink. Or rather, the lack of it. The afternoon breeze blew the smells of the horse and dinosaur enclosures away. But Karyl kept a clean camp or she’d have been able to smell the stench regardless.
She knew enough, from her own reading and Jaume’s tutelage, to approve of that much.
She touched Bogardus on the arm. Despite his seemingly sedentary life as a sect leader it felt firm with muscle. Maybe he actually does garden, she thought.
“Which one’s Karyl?” she asked.
“The snake most dangerous,” said Sister Violette, who walked on Bogardus’s other side from Melodía. “Because he looks the most innocuous.”
Melodía wasn’t sure what she felt about the Councilwoman, largely because she was none too sure how Violette felt about her. She acted friendly. But Melodía thought to see a certain wariness in her. She acted almost proprietary toward the Eldest Brother. And while jealousy was considered a risible vice, especially here in the south of the Tyrant’s Head, it still ensnared some. Melodía had no way of telling whether Violette simply felt affection for Bogardus, or might see her as a threat to their relationship.
“Our Colonel’s not in view,” Bogardus said, with just a trace of extra emphasis on the first two words. “But don’t fear, Sister. He won’t be far away.”
Séverin farm seethed with purposeful activity. It gave Melodía a homesick twinge: it reminded her of nothing so much as everyday life on the expansive grounds of the Firefly Palace. Despite a breeze blowing down from the passes, carrying an edge that chilled Melodía’s skin slightly through her long trousers and sleeves, most men and women wore nothing but loincloths, though most women bound their breasts for comfort and convenience as they worked or drilled.
At the center of it all stood, or wallowed six enormous hornfaces in a stream that ran slaunchwise across the property. They were the wonders that had brought the group from the Garden villa to see. Melodía knew what to ex
pect. Yet the actual sight of the creatures made Melodía stop and stare, her relative lack of affinity for dinosaurs notwithstanding.
“Impressive, aren’t they?” asked Bogardus with a warm, deep chuckle. She could only nod. “That’s Rob Korrigan, our dinosaur master, there.”
A man wearing a sort of cloth skirt stood shin-deep in water next to one of the Triceratops. He, not the dinosaur, seemed to be the focus of attention of eight or nine others gathered around.
He was a man of medium height or a little over, she judged. His bare torso resembled a wine cask, if those sported curly red-brown fur on their upper halves, which in Melodía’s experience they did not. His arms seemed unnaturally long, as if he might be able to scratch the kneecaps of his bandy legs without bending over. But his face, though his chin almost rested on his collarbone without much by way of interference from a neck, was surprisingly handsome: strong jaw outlined in a neat beard, well-defined profile marred only by a somewhat flattened nose. His hair was an unruly shock the same bronze as his beard and body hair.
Neither he nor his rapt circle paid the least attention to the new arrivals. Instead he cocked back his axe—which had a meter-long hardwood haft and a spike to back its bearded head—and whacked its flat against the outside of the three-horn’s near rear hock. She snorted and bobbed her immense frilled head but didn’t seem unduly bothered.
It occurred to Melodía to wonder what it would take to get the attention of such a gigantic beast. And whether it might really be such a good idea to do so. Seen up close, those horns that jutted from her brow, each a good meter and a half long, were flatly terrifying.
A clump, mud on the outside, grey-white dust on the inside, fell away from the wrinkled brown leg. Rob grinned and squatted, hands on thighs.
“Look here, now,” he called. He pointed with a blunt forefingers. “Just as I thought: here’s a growth of flaying-fungus. Nothing serious now, but let it go and it’ll eat her hide like an army of soldier ants.”
“Eat hide like that, off a beast that big?” asked a woman with brick-colored hair cropped short over fisted features.
Rob laughed. “Well you might wonder how something which seems so trivial can defeat armor that sheds arrow and spears like water. And the answer is: time and persistence. Just as ants and other tiny scavengers can strip what the big meat-eaters leave of a titan carcass in a matter of days.”
He stood. “Mix up lye, a large spoon to four liters of water, and use that to scour the spot well with a stiff-bristle brush. Then rinse and rinse until you’re sure you’ll wear through the hide yourself, and rinse again.”
“Shall we bind it after, like a wound?” asked a stocky male peasant, one of the older recruits, whose nose and front teeth had clearly been broken by a blow at some point in his career.
“No, indeed. The good sweet air of Providence will work cure enough.”
Melodía felt herself frowning at his failure to notice her, Pilar, or their austere escorts. I should hope I’m more interesting than fungus. She felt the anger inside her—which though she kept buried deep, most of the time, never let her forget it was there—start to roil like black tentacles in her gut.
Then she caught herself. She’d had plenty of experience with masters in the course of her education and life at court. It was the nature of the breed to obsess on the object of their mastery. Jaume claimed that was how they got to be masters, which made sense to her, when she thought about it.
As if sensing her displeasure Bogardus cleared his throat. “Master Rob,” he called, “we’ve a new arrival to our Garden whom I’d like you to meet.”
The burly man looked around. His beard came to a small point, Melodía saw. His eyes were large and green-hazel.
“Is this the fabled Princess Melodía we’ve heard so much about, then?” he said.
“This is our new sister and her servant,” said Violette.
“Friend,” Melodía corrected. She felt Pilar briefly grasp and squeeze her hand. I hate myself for treating my childhood friend as a mere appurtenance all these years, she thought. I won’t let it go.
“Well, you’ll forgive me my informal dress, Highness. Or you’ll not. Either way, welcome to our camp. And who’s this ravishing creature here?”
Melodía had to glance around to follow his gaze—straight to Pilar. Who seemed to be blushing. Something Melodía had never seen her lifelong companion do before, in memory.
“This is my friend, Pilar. And as for informality, Master Rob, you didn’t have much advance notice of our visit. And anyway, I’m happy to be a plain Gardener now, since I’m not even sure I’m legally a princess anymore.”
Rob approached, unself-conscious, water dripping from his hairy calves. “Ah, yes. We’ve heard about your arrest in La Merced, and your daring escape. There’s quite the price on your head, I understand, so.”
She must have looked alarmed at that. He laughed.
“We’ll all be Imperial outlaws here soon enough, mark my words,” he said. “You need have no fear of being turned in for the reward, I’m thinking.”
He came right up, and past her, to take Pilar’s hand in his and press it to his bearded lips.
“Enchanted to meet you, señorita,” he said. Then to Melodía: “You too, of course.”
She smiled thinly. Inside she was trying to still the reflexive surge of panic the man’s casual talk of outlawry had roused in her, to momentarily blanket the always seethe of rage.
Bogardus assured me they could tie the Empire up in courts for years, if Daddy tries to make them give me back, she made herself recall. My father may not uphold all the traditions that have helped our Torre remain sole holders of the Imperial throne for centuries, but he won’t want to make the family look worse than it does already by throwing an armed snit about me.
Surely, Bogardus knows more about the Empire’s law and noble sensibilities than this rough creature?
She had thought about mentioning the report of a Grey Angel Emergence in Providence that so fortuitously reached La Merced as Falk succeeded Duval as her father’s chief bodyguard. That could provoke a hysterical response not just at court but in the streets of La Merced—and lead to the Empire taking action against the Garden for reasons having nothing to do with her.
She had thought better of it. We’re guests here, she reminded herself again, by sufferance of Bogardus and the Council. It just seems rude to bring that matter up.
And the Garden itself, the community and the literal garden it nurtured at the villa, were so calm and beautiful as to render the notion of some mythical monster’s presence … as absurd as it was.
“Where’s Karyl?” Bogardus asked. His deep, smooth voice was like oil poured on the fears Rob’s insouciance had raised.
With visible reluctance Rob let go of Pilar’s hand. The gitana had gotten over her bout of shyness—or dropped the façade, Melodía guessed—and was smiling openly at the dinosaur master now. He was, candidly, a bit coarse for Melodía’s tastes. But she had to admit there was charm to his hada grin and the mischief-light dancing in his eyes.
“Himself will be on the other side of these great beasts,” Rob said, “admiring them in the guise of inspecting them. Where else would he be?”
Bogardus smiled at Melodía. “Shall we?”
Ignoring Bogardus’s proffered hand Melodía splashed through the stream—upstream of the large dinosaurs, of course. Though she and Pilar had bathed and donned fresh clothing after being welcomed to the villa, she wore the same boots, still scuffed and stained from worse than mountain-shed water and a little bottom mud. She noticed with amusement that the ever-capable Pilar wasn’t at all backward about accepting the assistance of Rob’s crooked elbow.
On the far bank a slight man in a nondescript dark skirt not too different from Rob’s stood talking with three other people. Her eyes slid right past him, before stopping with a bit of a shock and snapping back to him. The snake most dangerous.… she recalled.
This is the devil in
human form whom my father ordered Jaume to throw away his own honor, and that of the Empire, in order to bring down? She could hardly believe it. Why, he’s shorter than I am!
On second glance there was no mistaking him, from Jaume’s account, reports from the Princes’ War, and yes, the songs that celebrated both his long and epic rise and meteoric fall. The long, dark, grey-threaded hair, worn in a sort of horsetail from the crown that hung over unbound hair at the back of his head. His bearded face, so gaunt it reminded Melodía of a Life-to-Come sectary who took their eccentric self-denial doctrines too much to heart. His ribs, a washboard to fit the most extreme ascetic.
But the ropy muscles that twined his limbs and torso definitely did not belong to any cloistered monk. Nor did his air of total physical assurance—his movements graceful yet slightly abrupt, like a lizard moving on a cool day.
Without so much as a glance at the newcomers he continued talking to his companions. One was a sturdy, good-looking young blond man with an arm in a sling. The other two were even smaller than Karyl himself. Judging by the olive skins, the long blue-black hair both man and woman wore in braids, and the quilted jackets they wore, they must be Parsos or Turcos from the Grand Turanian Empire of High Ovda. Probably they had come with the three-horns; the huge hornfaces didn’t live in Nuevaropa, but abounded on the grassy semiarid plateau east beyond the Shield range. Which roughly exhausted Melodía’s stock of knowledge about the beasts, other than that they were truly fearful to meet in battle. Which the merest glimpse of them was enough to show.
“Voyvod Karyl,” she said, walking toward him, “I’m Melodía.”
He turned a rumpled brow to her. “Who?”
She stopped. Her stomach went tense and cold. She drew a deep breath. Down, she told her anger. I am a guest here. And this man serves my hosts.
“Melodía Delgao,” Bogardus said, joining her.
“Emperor Felipe’s daughter,” said Violette.
Karyl grunted. “Apologies, your Highness,” he said.