by Victor Milán
The smell of autumn flowers held a curious note of cinnamon.
“I thought no plan survived first contact with the enemy,” Rob said with a certain sourness.
“We’ve not made contact,” Karyl said. “Yet.”
He had arrayed the Providential foot in ranks down the valley’s gentle slope, athwart the enemy’s path. Most sat among the yellow wildflowers with their weapons beside them. A murmur and agitated motion rippled over them like those flowers in the breeze as they saw the enemy knights appear.
His senses honed keen by the need to follow audience reactions, Rob detected both eagerness and apprehension among the waiting men and women. Peasants and townsfolk simply did not stand against noblemen mounted on steel-clad horses. Much less three-tonne armored monsters.
They’re a fearful sight, for true, Rob thought, even as his dinosaur master heart thrilled to the beauty of the thirty or so war-duckbills lumbering slowly down the distant ridge toward them at a two-legged walk. The chivalry’s coursers, winged out either side, were another thing: heavy cavalry scared him to the marrow. He knew the dinosaurs were deadlier, that a hadrosaur could trample a fully caparisoned warhorse almost as easily as a naked man, and smash them three at a time with its tail.
But war-dinosaurs were to Rob as the sea to a mariner: he knew their dangers, and respected them well. But they were still his element. Horses were alien.
Little Nell stood on the barrow’s backslope, cropping ferns beneath the eye of a waifish farm-girl with a mop of brown hair. Rob had a proper staff now, dinosaur-grooms youthful and eager, whom he terrorized joyously, if without the genuine mean-spiritedness that had seemed to animate his own old mentor. Morrison was a Scocés dinosaur master, scarcely older than Rob was now, who had fists like sledgehammers and used them as his primary teaching-tools. Karyl’s dinosaurs, at least, were as ready for war as they could be, and Rob knew with certainty that would have soothed him better had he seen any other good news at all.
Rob’s axe Wanda, a round shield, and a steel hat hung from either side of the saddle on Nell’s steep-sided back. Rob wore a heavy cuirass of sackbut side-leather with rows of black-iron bosses on the front, and divided skirts of enameled leather with smaller bosses on them to cover the fronts of his otherwise bare thighs. They chafed something fierce, especially the breastplate’s stiff armholes and the upper ends of his hobnailed boots. But they’d help keep stray bits of metal from wandering into his own personal body when the shitstorm came down. He was just glad he wasn’t boiling like the knights in their steel shells.
Absently Karyl tucked the coin Rob had tossed him in a pouch hung from his sword-belt. He wore a stout tan jack of hornface hide and a visorless burgonet, basically an open-faced steel helmet with a bill to protect his eyes from down-bound mischief. A conventional cross-hilted arming-sword rode in a scabbard at his waist. He wore loose white silk trousers and tall boots. In all, he could have been an especially well-off rider in Rob’s light-horse scouts.
“You don’t really care about the money, do you?” Rob said. “What kind of a mercenary are you, anyway?”
Sergeants began shouting the militia to its feet. On the right flank their meager force of a dozen dinosaur knights bestrode their war-hadrosaurs, which began to bob their gorgeously crested heads and blow booming dulcian greetings to their distant kin. On their left waited fifty men-at-arms on horseback. In between half a thousand pikemen and women rose grumbling and hefting their unwieldy weapons, four meters of sturdy ash haft each tipped with half a meter of polished, pointed steel.
Out front stood a hundred or so men and women with shortbows. Most wore no more than loincloths, and none of them armor. With them waited twenty-five arbalesters, armed with powerful but slow to operate cranequin-cocked heavy crossbows, and fifty house-archers in mail. To guard them a hedge of Faerie-poles had been driven into the turf: stakes with sharpened ends slanted forward.
Behind the main body, on the back of the rise, waited an armored infantry reserve: about a hundred fifty house-shields and mercenaries. Fifty had horses to carry them where they were needed, though they would fight afoot. On the flats beyond the supply wagons were parked in a round mass, with the outermost chained together tongue to tailgate, guarded by camp followers and their own drovers armed with slings, spears, and axes. Though many were children, and none trained combatants, they’d fight with amateur ferocity against any who tried to plunder the baggage.
And in front of all, dead in the middle, stood six mighty dinosaurs with wicker fighting-castles armored with thick leather slabs on their backs, tossing great heads to challenge foes they dimly glimpsed. Wicked steel caps glittered on the tips of their long brow horns. Chamfrons molded of the waxed hides of their smaller hornface cousins protected their faces, as metal ones did warhorse and hadrosaur.
“Shall I give us a song, then?” Rob asked, unlimbering the implement he had slung across his back: his trusty lute.
“If you think it’ll do good,” Karyl said.
Rob strode out through the stakes to stand beside the three-horns. A strum of his lute brought eyes to him. He began playing and singing “A Rasty Old Bastard Am I.” The song was a tavern favorite, penned years ago by one Rob Korrigan. By the time he finished the whole army seemed to be singing and laughing at its ludicrously obscene lyrics.
Rob wasn’t sure what the highborn men and women on the mounted flanks made of it—except for Baron Côme, whose lusty baritone rang out clearly across the whole rowdy chorus.
When the song ended, Karyl rode out beside Rob on Asal. He sat for a moment gazing at his little army with those dark, long-flying dragon eyes.
“Men and women,” he called. For such a soft-spoken man, Rob marveled, he can surely make his voice ring like trumpets. “Children of Providence! Today you face great danger—and great opportunity.
“You know what we fight for. Your neighbors and loved ones. Your homes. Your crops and livestock. Your livelihoods. Your lives.
“Some of you live far from this field. Remember that here stands your one and only chance to save everything that you hold dear.
“Not all of us will live to see the sun set in the east. But if you do as we’ve taught you, and above all, if you fight as if you stood in the doorway of your own house with your children at your backs, then you will prevail. Whether we stand or fall, those we fight for shall live safe and live free!”
The army erupted in wild cheers. Even most of the nobles and their retainers joined in. Only a few sat on their mounts in dour postures.
“So what’s it to be, then?” Rob asked softly when the plaudits subsided. The Crève Coeur montadores were less than a kilometer away. They were also, as Karyl had intended, riding well in advance of their own foot, which had just now begun to appear on the far height. “Do we really have a chance, then, Captain?”
“Yes,” Karyl said. “Our people protect their own. Crève Coeur only brings serfs, uprooted and unhappy. And mere warriors.”
“Mere warriors?”
“A warrior fights for his appetites: lust for loot and rape and blood, the easier, the better. And for his tribal chieftain. No matter how much he tells himself he serves, when his blood runs hot he’ll do anything in single-minded pursuit of his own personal glory.”
“So what are you, then, if not a warrior?”
“A professional. That’s why we always won, the Legion and I.”
His voice was haunted. “We fought as the craftsmen and women we were. Until you scattered us with your clever stratagem. And that orange-haired bastard stabbed us in the back.”
“So there’s a difference, then, between a warrior, and a professional?” Rob asked. He knew his friend for a master of his chosen craft—but all the same, he didn’t want him distracted by unhappy memories.
Briskly businesslike again, Karyl uncased his hornbow, already strung and bent into a D-shape, from its sea-monster skin sheath slung from Asal’s saddle.
“Professional soldiers fight for t
heir lives and for their comrades. For victory. And for pay.”
Slipping a jade ring, worn smooth with use, over his thumb, Karyl tested the tautness of his bowstring evidently he found it to his satisfaction.
“And what of glory, then?” Rob asked.
Karyl laughed. “That’s the mark of a professional: to know there’s no such thing.”
“But pay, then—really? You don’t care about gold any more than that coin I threw you. Would you’ve even noticed if it was copper instead of the promised silver? What kind of mercenary are you, anyway, Karyl Vladevich?”
“There’s other coin than gold and silver,” Karyl said. “There were things I’d rather have devoted my whole life to, my friend, than perfecting my skills at combat at every scale. But that’s where life has brought me.
“Now, to fight with all my will and skill gives purpose to my life. Or its illusion, at any rate. It’ll do until I finish my quest.”
“And what quest’s that?” Even with death literally marching down on him from behind Rob was entranced by this glimpse into his companion’s tortured soul. He knew it would be fleeting, and felt compelled to grasp all he could get.
“I seek answers,” Karyl said softly. “Why am I here? Why are we here, men and women, on this world Paradise where we seem as out of place as a titan in a royal hall?”
He shrugged. “Or I seek the peace of death. And that’s let me down a few times already.”
Shifting the bow to his left he stretched his right hand down toward Rob. After a blank moment Rob reached out to clasp him forearm to forearm. Karyl’s felt as if it were wound in steel wire.
“Now it begins,” Karyl said. “May the luck of the Irlandés attend you, my friend.”
Rob laughed sourly.
“It’s better luck than that we want,” he said. “Or it’s well and truly fucked we are.”
Chapter 19
Gancho, Hook-horn—Einiosaurus procurvicornis. A hornface (Ceratopsian dinosaur) of Anglaterra, where they are a popular dray beast: quadrupedal, herbivorous, 6 meters long, 2 meters high, 2 tonnes. Named for their massive forward-hooking nasal armament. Two longer, thinner horns project from the tops of their neck-frills. Placid unless provoked.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
As the Crève Coeur knights freshened their pace to a trot, Karyl drew his sword and flourished it high. Red-faced apprentices from Providence town blew trumpets as if trying to make up for lack of skill with sheer enthusiasm. From the woods that anchored either flank of the Providence pikes rode a hundred light-horsemen and women. Forty had woods-runners mounted behind, shortbows in hand. The scouts swarmed toward the enemy like eager bees.
Rob watched from the top of the rise. Beside him stood Gaétan, whose spoke-frill Zhubin was now tethered alongside his boon friend Little Nell with his beak buried in a flowering bush. The young merchant wore a plain cuirass today to guard his still-tender chest. He carried his own hornbow strung, and a quiver slung over his steel-clad back.
Gaétan and Eamonn Copper commanded the foot. The reserve of armored professional infantry was led by Côme’s chief lieutenant Mora Regina, a beautiful immigrant from Ruybrasil. She was an aloof one, with skin the color of creamed coffee and sapphire eyes, and not at all impressed with Rob Korrigan’s gallantries. Which was just as well, he told himself; she stood a head taller than he on those long, lean legs, and that always made for uncomfortable coupling, in his experience.
Rob’s role in the coming battle was to take reports from his scouts, for what use they might be. And, mainly, try not to die.
Thirty Crève Coeur dinosaur knights came on, a hundred heavy cavalry at their backs. Out front rode Count Guillaume, resplendent in gilded plate with his arms on the breast. His dinosaur was a gold-bellied blue sackbut. Beside him Salvateur rode a striking black Parasaurolophus, brindled in cream. His armor was matte natural metal, his insignia black and gold. From the saddle-cantle behind each man rose a standard displaying his arms, and blue and green pennons fidgeted from every upheld lance.
A hundred meters shy of the Crève Coeur dinosaurs’ snouts, the light-horse paused. Pillion-riding woods-runners jumped down into waist-high green grass. Rob’s mad young riders pressed on.
Flushed and flying high after a night spent massacring the last of the Crève Coeur Rangers and foragers, and a morning harrying the main body, they felt no fatigue. Nor fear, nor—Rob realized with a jolt to his heart—common sense. They were young, and full of themselves, and felt immortal. And due for a hard and sudden dose of reality, his dear, bold boys and girls. Had he the luxury he’d have wept for them in advance.
Time enough for that afterward, he thought, if the Lady will that I survive.
The light-horse swarmed up both sides of the enemy column, closing within meters of dinosaur knights to hurl javelins, twist-darts, and mockery. The woods-runners shot their shortbows, taking care not to hit their comrades. The knights had to trust their armor and endure: neither dinosaurs nor the heavy-laden horses behind could catch the impertinent lowborn riders.
Crève Coeur house-archers would have slaughtered the light-horse, in their thin leather armor. Too bad for the invaders they were still trudging down the Western Road half a klick behind.
A good terremoto would scatter light-horse and woods-runners—tumble some heels-over-fundament with blood streaming from their ears, maybe even kill a few. But Guillaume wouldn’t dignify these vermin with such a noble weapon. Besides, the Cryless Cry was best reserved for a foe that offered more than mere annoyance.
Which was all Rob’s riders could muster. Neither javelins nor shortbow-driven arrows could penetrate good steel plate at any range. They couldn’t even pierce the war-duckbills’ thick hides.
But their barbed heads hurt the monsters. Great-crested war-dinosaurs trumpeted pain. Dinosaur knight ranks churned as mounts flinched and reared.
So huge and powerful were the duckbills that cohesion meant far less to them than even the heaviest cavalry. But disorder put dinosaur knights at a bad disadvantage against other dinosaur knights—and rendered them even more vulnerable to Triceratops horns.
What did tell wasn’t minor pangs to sackbuts and morions, but the pricking of the thunder-titan egos of their noble riders. Especially Count Guillaume’s. They were the real targets of the barrage, whether pointed with words or metal.
Karyl waved his arming-sword once more. The trumpeters blew a new signal. The shortbow archers with the main body of the Providence army left the safety of their sharpened stakes. They ran out a hundred meters ahead of the three-horns to loose their own volleys of arrows and jeers at the enemy knights.
The missiles fell harmlessly without even reaching the stream, now halfway between the armies. They weren’t meant to strike the enemy. Like the pinprick efforts of the scouts, they were sheer effrontery—and that was the point. Rude and ragged boys and girls, town ’prentices alongside peasant farmers, shouldn’t dare raise hands against their betters. It was an affront to Nature and to Torrey’s sacred Order.
Some turned and bared their rumps to the knights.
The Providence light-horse kept swirling on the Crève Coeur dinosaur-riders’ flanks, tantalizingly just out of reach. Rob watched a feathered twist-dart bounce off the shield of no less than Count Guillaume himself. Meanwhile the woods-runners kept popping up from the grass like inquisitive compitos to shoot and vanish again.
The invading knights’ patience snapped. Rob heard Crève Coeur voices shout in fury muffled by visors shut tight against the missiles. Giant-roweled silver spurs raked garish hadrosaur flanks. The duckbills tucked mittenlike paws to their chests and sprang into a bounding bipedal lope.
Baron Salvateur tried to hold his comrades back. Guillaume was having none of that. Bellowing in rage, he almost ran his chief lieutenant’s black sackbut down with his blue duckbill in his determination to keep out in front of his rapidly advancing dinosaur knights. Behind them the chivalry urged their horses to a canter.
The Brokenhearts were nearing where a meander of deeper green among the weeds marked the stream’s hidden course. Still over five hundred meters from the Providence lines, they were too far away to charge effectively. Their anger drove them to rush straight ahead as fast as they could without spending their mounts. They were panting to get in range where they could charge home against the peasant mass that stood obscenely defying them.
The light-riders pulled away to give the bucketheads ample room. No woods-runners were to be seen. Rob felt no concern for them. They’d practiced hiding from highborn riders since they were weaned.
Terror and exaltation warred inside his chest as the glittering avalanche of steel and scale, color and noise, hurtled toward him. The four ranks of Providence pike-bearers before the barrow shifted and muttered nervously. He hoped they’d stand. He at least had faced the terrible power of armored knights and dinosaurs before. The militia couldn’t possibly have imagined what it would really be like.
For their part the shortbow archers laughed and jested with each other as they came trotting back to the shelter of their Faerie-poles. Some kept catcalling at the foe, as if this was all some merry village festival, and the onrushing three-tonne war-dinosaurs no more than pantomimes of sticks and silk with drunken revelers within.
Rob hoped not too many would die of disillusionment.
But the bucketheads have themselves a surprise coming too, so he thought with evil anticipation.
Just as, with a splashing audible above all the colossal hammer and clank and bugling, the proud Count Guillaume and his thirty dinosaur knights plunged into the marsh the tall stream-growth was hiding.
Muck sprayed high as the ramparts of a modest in rainbow-struck arcs. The duckbills reared, threw back gloriously crested heads to bellow their surprise. Several less-alert knights actually bounced against suddenly upraised necks thick as tree trunks.