The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  Bogardus sighed. “I see,” he said. “I hadn’t realized things had gone so far.”

  “But you’re the Master Gardener!”

  “All on the whole Council are Master Gardeners.”

  “But everybody calls you Father behind your back. You’re the unquestioned leader.”

  He laughed. It had a bitter ring, she thought.

  “Perhaps my leadership’s more symbolic than actual,” he said. “Still, I understand the argument: that those who possess special insight and wisdom have an obligation to lead others on the proper path. Even by force if need be.”

  “Sister Violette’s explained that to me,” Melodía said. “I still don’t agree.”

  Far from being jealous of Bogardus’s interest in the younger woman, not to mention Melodía’s evident infatuation with Bogardus, Violette had adopted Melodía as a special sort of pet. She had also hinted strongly, though no more, that she wouldn’t mind having Melodía join the two of them in bed.

  She had declined, by pretending not to take the hints. Bogardus had become a strong and warming presence in her life. Violette’s age suggested she had the experience to ease Melodía’s first experience of sex with another woman—unlike Melodía’s friends Llurdis and Lupe back at court. Their own love-play was alarming and sometimes outright violent, enough to make it easy for Melodía to rebuff their occasional importuning.

  But Melodía felt no sexual desire that she could recognize at all. She hoped that Falk hadn’t robbed her of that too when he raped her. But she was simply uninterested in such intimacy.

  “You’re wise beyond your years, querida,” Bogardus said. “Perhaps you’ll soon be ready for a higher mystery.”

  Her pulse picked up. “Do you really think so?”

  “I do. But you must be sure within yourself. For there is such a thing as beauty so intense as to be terrible.”

  She dismissed the notion from consideration as soon as she heard it. It didn’t seem possible. Instead her heart danced with the joyous anticipation of learning secrets.

  How can I prove myself worthy of such an honor? she wondered.

  “But still,” she said, recalling her own vehement words from her walk with Pilar. “This growing reliance on force troubles me. I can’t help but wonder if this Karyl’s not poisoning the very soil the Garden grows in.”

  Bogardus sighed. The army had marched out from Séverin farm that dawn, leaving a small detachment behind on guard, mostly those mildly injured in the inevitable accidents that troubled even the best-run enterprise of such a size. Especially where dinosaurs or even Melodía’s beloved horses were involved.

  “I feared the possibility when I invited him here. But what else could I do? If I could have thought of any alternative—had anyone ever suggested one that worked—I’d never have compromised our principle of peace. But Count Guillaume has proven notably resistant to recourse to Beauty, or even Truth. And little as I like to fall back on the facile, Jaume himself defends those values with the sword he’s named the Lady’s Mirror.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But Jaume himself would be the first to admit he doesn’t have all the answers. He fights himself only when he can find no other way.”

  Thinking of her lover—especially speaking his name aloud—set her emotions to boiling inside her. She felt anger, at him and at herself; and likewise resentment. A sense of loss and a fear of inflicting unhealable wounds. Yet thinking of their times together—his smile, the rich music of his voice, his touch—something else welled within her as well. Something that overrode the seething, and smoothed it away.

  “I know,” she said abruptly.

  Bogardus cocked a brow at her.

  “You know many things,” he said. “Which in particular?”

  “What to do. I see it now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her mind raced so fast that diverting her attention to speaking threatened to trip her up. Her heart raced faster at the beautiful clarity.

  “I see a way,” she said, speaking hurriedly so as to be done with distraction. “It’s just a chance, yes; I admit that. But how can I live with myself if I don’t do what I can to stop the slaughter?”

  “That’s a beautiful sentiment indeed,” Bogardus said. “But how?”

  She smiled at him with only a little of the malice of youth triumphing over age. “As to that,” she said, “you’ll have to wait and see.”

  Chapter 14

  Sacabuche, Sackbut—Parasaurolophus walkeri. One of the most popular war-hadrosaurs. Bipedal herbivore: 9.5 meters, 2.5 meters tall at shoulder, 3 tonnes. Named because its long, tubular head-crest produces a range of sounds like the sackbut, a trumpetlike musical instrument with a movable slide.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  Dust or mud. The eternal choices faced by armies on the march. Like most who marched, Rob would generally take dust. Which was today’s menu. Not that choice ever really came into it.

  With no more reluctance than any other, the Army of Providence trudged to war.

  In particular, Rob was eating the dust of the men-at-arms’ horses, and behind them the war-dinosaurs. The road they traveled showed signs of neglect, the crushed-tufa metaling wearing through in places to show bare dirt already grooved by rain-erosion. Whether that was because pressure from Crève Coeur raiders made maintenance difficult, or because the Garden seemed increasingly uninterested in such mundane concerns, Rob didn’t know. To either side wide fields lay bare and brown. The autumn harvest was being taken in. The winter crops were not yet planted, or at least not visibly sprouting.

  Not even Karyl could have prevented the bucketheads and their retainers from claiming right of precedence on the march—even the second sons and daughters who made up most of the heavy cavalry. They were volunteers, after all, like the common soldiers.

  But as it happened the arrangement satisfied Karyl. The knights leading the long column rode their travel horses, lighter, steadier, and more durable than their mettlesome war mounts, courser or dinosaur. Even though they were but lightly armored in chain or leather or just their shirts, armed with sidearms like swords and axes with a few spears thrown in, they were still the best-trained warriors in Providence. They should give a good account of themselves in the unlikely event of sudden attack.

  Unlikely because Rob, thanks to the eyes and ears of his scouts and woods-runners, knew more about Count Guillaume’s movements than Guilli himself did.

  He rode his plodding, nodding spike-frill Little Nell along the road beside the six massive Triceratops. The monsters had filled out under his careful (and plentiful) feeding. Their tough, thick hides shone with health.

  Baggage-bundles were piled high on the three-horns’ backs. The durable personal belongings of the dinosaurs’ attendants and fighting-crews, mostly—things that would suffer little from being cut loose and dumped in the ditch if danger threatened. Their negligible weight would add nothing to the monsters’ fatigue.

  The rest, particularly the disassembled fighting-castles, rode behind in carts pulled by nosehorns, the three-horns’ smaller but still formidable cousins. Who in turn were larger than the Einiosaurus Nell. The massive trikes could pull the carts themselves without noticing the added work, but Karyl, who knew the beasts better than any Nuevaropan alive, didn’t want the bother of unhitching them from wagon-harness to deploy for battle. While Triceratops, the largest practically domesticated dinosaurs Rob knew of, were unmatched for clearing obstacles from their road, it wasn’t as if there were any shortage of powerful draft-dinosaurs available.

  Small knots of chattering children perched atop two of the baggage mounds. Once they’d satisfied themselves the small, noisy creatures posed no threats, the trikes ignored them. A big flier rode in splendid isolation aboard the bull Broke-Horn’s cargo. It was rather a splendid beast itself, tailless, a meter high, with a crest as tall again. Its belly fur and crest were white, its wings slate grey. To Rob, who knew little and cared less about flappy or swimmy thin
gs that fell into the range of “too big to eat” and “too small to eat him,” it had a curiously nautical cast for a creature found so far inland.

  At an easy canter, Karyl came riding back toward Rob along the weed-choked ditch. After making sure Karyl’s mount wasn’t making a beeline to attack her, Little Nell resolutely refused to look at the grey mare. And waspish as she was, Asal showed no inclination to get frisky with the three-horns. It may simply have been their sheer intimidating size, although Rob reckoned their warning snorts and shakes of their frilled head—the least of which must have weighed fully as much as the mare herself did—would freeze the heart of a bronze statue of a horse. Even one as mettlesome as Asal.

  “You seem remarkably well set up for a man who passed the kind of night you did,” Karyl called to Rob as Asal turned about to fall in alongside a manifestly uncomfortable Nell.

  Rob laughed. “A liter of cold water swilled down, and another couple poured over the head, work wizardry to restore a lad,” he said. “And, truth to tell, it’s just as happy I am to put the town behind us. The Garden and its stinking intrigues, the more.”

  Except Pilar, of course. But maybe it’s no bad thing to separate yourself from the lass as well, fine as she is, Rob told himself. Precisely because she’s so fine. It’s perspective you’re needing now, Robby, me lad.

  “Why now, more than before?” Karyl asked.

  Rob looked at him. He knew the man was never the one for mere rhetorical questions. “The Council’s showing a most unhealthy inclination to poke their noses into other folks’ affairs. And no nose sharper than that silver-haired witch Sister Violette’s.” He shook his head. “What’s trying to forbid people wearing purple feathers in their hats got to do with Beauty or Truth, or forcing them to petition the Council every time they want to build a new wall?”

  “I’m told the Master Gardeners feel called upon to extend the benefit of their superior aesthetic vision to the population as a whole,” Karyl said dryly, “improving their poor lives thereby.”

  Rob snorted. “Next they’ll be banning the singing of bawdy songs in the ale-houses! Or the ale-houses themselves, which Mother Maia forfend. They’re working the strong arm, and that’s the fact.”

  “The little Princess wasn’t wrong,” Karyl said. “Not altogether. When they saw Salvateur stood off, it gave the Council a taste of the power soldiery confers. Apparently they like it.”

  “But it’s Violette and her pious pacifist choir who’re gaining the upper hand!”

  “It’s pacifists who are most prone to grow entranced by force,” Karyl said, “once they taste the forbidden draft. Not that Violette and her claque love us. But don’t confuse their contempt for the implement with their lust for what they perceive that implement can do for them. Our greatest challenge now isn’t Guilli. It’s beating him before our own employers pull us down.”

  Strange, Rob thought. That captive rogue of a Crève Coeur knight said much the same thing.

  “What about Bogardus?” he asked. “Has the power gone to his head too, then?”

  “Not yet, I think. Though he was our first champion, and in some ways remains our only one of consequence. He’s seen battle from the bloody, sweaty inside, that one; a priest isn’t all he was, before coming here. He knows what’s real. More than the rest of the Council, anyway.”

  He shrugged. “But he’ll go along with them in the end. No choice: otherwise they’ll take him down. Or make him a mere figurehead. Which would be worse for a man like him.”

  Rob’s face fisted in a scowl. Resentment against Violette and her claque had flooded his stocky body, as well as remembered annoyance at Karyl for not speaking up more briskly in his—and Rob’s—defense. Despite the fact he was no slouch in a fight, he knew the other could squash him like a blood-bloated mosquito, with approximately the same exertion. Notwithstanding that—or was it because?—Rob suddenly couldn’t resist baiting him.

  “You’re as infatuated with Bogardus as ever that Imperial chit is,” Rob said. “You put too damned much faith in him.”

  Karyl rode a few breaths in silence. It was a time of cold belly-turning fear for Rob: that he had gone too far. It was a usual consequence of letting his imp of the perverse—never long dormant—take control of his mouth.

  But instead of drawing the conventional, cross-hilted arming-sword he wore to battle and cutting short Rob’s young life, Karyl answered quietly, “I know.”

  Rob literally swayed in the saddle.

  “You know?”

  “Of course. I’m … a seeker, I suppose. It may be all I’m really living for.”

  “Seeking what?”

  “Some kind of certainty. What the Witness told me, the things I’ve experienced, have brought all that I knew, or thought I knew, about my world and myself crashing into ruin. I don’t even know why I’m alive.”

  He held up his left hand. His sword hand, now tanned and strong and in no visible way different from the other. Even now, with it slowly dawning on Rob that he was likely to be allowed to keep his head a while yet, said head couldn’t help swelling with a hearty case of I told you so.

  A domesticated horror belonging to a pack set on Karyl by Duke Falk’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Hornberg, to make sure he was dead after the Battle of Hassling had bitten Karyl’s sword hand clean off. When the self-proclaimed witch Aphrodite had hired him and Rob on Bogardus’s behalf to come to Providence and raise an army to fight, she had performed a magic she claimed would grow it back. Skeptic to the core, Karyl openly doubted the existence both of witches and of magic.

  Rob had taken a different view. And when the lost member in fact sprouted anew, good as ever, on the long journey hither, Karyl had seemed as much soured by it as overjoyed.

  “Even skepticism’s played me false,” he said, as if sniffing Rob’s thoughts. “I don’t what to believe anymore. I need the hope that I might find answers, somewhere. Bogardus is wise; he practically glows with certainty. Maybe he has what I need.”

  “Why not ask him?”

  Karyl shook his head. “My need shames me. Its intensity, its urgency.”

  “I don’t mean to make light of your feelings, my friend, but after all you’ve faced and all you’ve survived, surely you’ll not let shame get the better of you?”

  Karyl’s face was a naked plea. “But what if he tells me he doesn’t know?”

  * * *

  Rob sighed. Putting hands on thighs he hoisted himself off his seat on a fallen log.

  The evening conference had been quick. It was early yet. Despite the fact sunlight still shone nearly level between slim sapling boles a small fire danced yellow, chuckling to itself. The tang of its smoke was already noticeably mingled with the smells of meat roasting and legumes boiling for two thousand or so evening meals.

  The sun was still a red ball beyond the clouds above the eastern horizon when Karyl ordered a halt for the day, amidst country that had begun to roll noticeably more than the earlier pure farmland. It struck Rob as early. Clearly Karyl was in no hurry.

  It’s Himself’s decision to make, and I’ve no interest in the why and wherefores, he thought. All I am is glad it isn’t mine. Even though he’d been relieved of the crushing burden of being quartermaster, he found himself with more responsibility than he wanted or ever had wanted, thank you kindly.

  It was strange, he thought. A dinosaur master had plenty of responsibility, and that was the trade he’d chosen, and was happy to be practicing it again. It seldom felt like a burden when he was doing it. And being master of the scouts and spies, now—that was more like what the grandes called a hobby. The achievement of a mischievous childhood dream—more play than anything else, really. Yet add them up and you got—

  Responsibility. Ugh. I can’t seem to get the awful thing off my back.

  Most of Karyl’s captains had quickly departed the little clearing in a sapling-stand atop a low hill. One of the last to leave laid a hand on the commander’s shoulder and said something
that made him shrug.

  Baron Côme was a man of Rob’s height or a little more, a muscular sixty-five-year-old with a shock of tan hair, and a face like an old shoe that was rescued from plainness by bright blue eyes and a smile roguish enough for an Irlandés. He and a few dozen retainers had joined the army within days of Karyl and Rob’s acquittal. The blue-jowled Baron Salvateur had taken out his fury at being repulsed from Providence town by driving Côme from his domain, Le Vallée de la Sérénité.

  Rob would’ve resented the Baron’s late arrival, if not for the fact that his fief on the Lisette had stood a bulwark against the invaders since the incursions began, long before Rob and Karyl got here. And that Côme’s beloved wife, Zoé, had fallen fighting the Brokenhearts the year before. He was that near-oxymoron, a genuinely clever buckethead, as opposed to simply sly or cunning. He was popular among both lowborn and high. Rob liked him himself, for a wonder.

  More than he liked the taller, red-haired man who hung back with Côme. Eamonn Copper was Ayrish, and it may have been his share of native charm the Francés, Côme, had hogged for himself. A noted mercenary captain on his own hook, he had joined the army with a contingent of eighty mailed spear and shield men, the most of them former house-troops, like as not deserters.

  Copper had trouble keeping employment. The anger many of his and Rob’s countrymen shared crackled along the surface of his skin like static electricity. Men said he was overly fond of drink.

  Although he made no claims of noble birth, or knighthood—he was as chary of details of his own history as Rob Korrigan was with truth about his own—he was known to be skilled on a war-hadrosaur. Having satisfied both Karyl and Rob of his ability to use her, he had been given Brigid, as Rob had dubbed the somewhat flighty orange sackbut female they’d taken from the knight at Whispering Woods, the same having no further use for her.

  The two moved on. All but yapping at their heels like a pug dog, and equally ignored, went a rotund, bearded figure. Rob spat after him as they went away out of sight through the brush and down, not caring if he saw or not.