by Victor Milán
“If any are still hanging about after our duckbills chased theirs right back through the midst of them,” Copper said with satisfaction, “having their own chivalry ride them down should set their fookin’ minds right, then.”
“It’s a refreshing draft of home you are, Captain,” Rob said, not without either irony or sincerity.
Karyl rode between the pikes, who had halted, and the Providential dinosaurs, who were turning back yet again to march on whatever their own fleeing knights had left of the Crève Coeur infantry. He raised his voice in a clear tenor cry: “Spare the commons; kill the nobles!”
As a hundred throats took up the cry Rob felt his body fill with sudden scalding outrage. But that’s counter to the nature of things! he thought.
He may’ve honored the accepted order more in the breach than the observance. But still … when all was said, it was an order he accepted no less than any.
His next thought was to wonder how the Providence bucketheads would react. Not just to this affront to their caste, but against their very real pecuniary interests in capturing enemy knights and lords alive to hold for ransom.
Then he heard the unmistakable baritone of Baron Côme take up the call. So did the other dinosaur knights straggling back at last from their pursuit. Not only the lowly had suffered from Crève Coeur depredations. Guillaume’s knights hadn’t bothered with asking ransoms when they overran the western fiefs. They intended to have it all regardless, and weren’t above roasting captives—even ones with blue blood running in their veins—over slow fires to learn the hiding-place of the smallest silver spoon.
The loud and grisly slaughter of the dismounted Crève Coeur knights met head-on inside Rob with reaction to exertion and danger. He slumped from Little Nell’s saddle, to stagger several steps on quivering legs. Then he tumbled to his knees and puked lustily into a berry bush.
Chapter 22
Ballesta, Crossbow, Arbalest—Common weapon consisting of a bow, usually of wood or metal, mounted at the end of a stock, which releases a bolt or quarrel. Varieties include light crossbows, which are cocked by hand; medium crossbows, cocked by means of a lever called a springer’s-foot; and heavy crossbows, cocked by means of a geared pulley called a cranequin. Increasing power comes at the cost of increasing time to reload, as well as increasing cost. Far more expensive than the common Nuevaropan shortbow, but requires far less training to use effectively.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“I’m sorry, Captain Karyl,” Rob said, frowning at the red spot where his arm wound had begun to bleed through the bandages. “I failed you.”
The day was done. All that remained was a trickle of light along the eastern horizon, appropriately blood-colored. Rob sat slumped on the well-trodden ground atop the barrow beside a fire that roared head-high, mostly as a beacon shouting victory to the world. Karyl stood nearby. Behind them captured battle standards flapped in the sunset breeze, among them Guilli’s golden broken heart, and Salvateur’s Creator Torrey in His Glory.
For the moment they had the mound-top to themselves. A party of armored infantry stood watchfully nearby. But Rob wasn’t entirely sure what for. They weren’t to prevent people from approaching the army commander. Karyl had directed that anyone who wanted was free to speak to him.
As for die-hards looking to avenge the Count and his nobles—Karyl had doffed his armor and longsword, and once more wore his customary hooded robe. More to the point, he held his blackwood staff grounded and cradled between arms folded across his chest, and Rob wouldn’t have given the few drops of rancid spit he could muster for the chances of any would-be assassin. Or any six of them.
Out in the dusk cowled figures moved with solemn purpose across the battlefield what everyone was calling the Hidden Marsh. They were sectaries of Maia, Lance, and the Lady Bella, performing their ritual duty of giving final mercy to animals and men too badly injured for even robust Paradise constitutions to heal. There were still enough of them that their moans and cries were constant as the crickets.
It was a duty Rob was glad to have been spared. And indeed, when he quit feeling so sick and doleful, he’d even rejoice over the why. He was taking a sorely needed break from tending to the dinosaurs. Not just his own precious band of six three-horns, none of whom had taken a serious wound despite the loss of fully a third of their crews, dead and injured. Nor even the ten Providence war-duckbills who had survived the battle.
Karyl Bogomirskiy and the Army of Providence were now proud owners of a young herd of war-duckbills, recovered from the routed dinosaur knights. Not all had been captured: a passel of Guilli’s bucketheads had sent a squire out beneath the white plume of parley to negotiate surrender, offering to swear fealty and obedience to Karyl.
The killing frenzy had passed, then. If it had ever gripped the enigmatic master of the day, which Rob begged leave to doubt. Several hundred foot, peasant and professional alike, had also surrendered and begged leave to join the victorious army. Karyl had accepted, on the provision that, along with swearing loyalty to Providence, any found guilty of murder, rape, mutilation, or torture would be executed straightaway.
As in all things, Karyl had been true to his word in that. At least a dozen knights and twice as many House troops and mercenaries had been put to death. Not always quickly or cleanly; their surviving victims had got to some of them before the official hangmen could. Nor did Karyl try to interfere with the impromptu justice, or whatever it was. As far as he was concerned they were bandits.
“What?” Karyl asked. “What failure?”
“My light-horse,” Rob said.
Karyl grunted.
* * *
In midafternoon Rob’s prodigal light-horse had come skulking back. They brought fifteen wounded, not including woods-runners, who had taken their hurt to care for in their own way. Eight men and women had been killed. Irate though he was at their unauthorized departure from the battlefield, the losses tore at his heart. These boys and girls had put their trust in him; and if they had let him down, he felt he’d done the worst by the ones he’d lost.
He’d had the story out of them, stammering and shamefaced. Though they had kept well clear of the Crève Coeur archers, they had been shocked to take losses from arbalesters. The mercenaries’ medium and heavy crossbows not only had more punch than shortbows did, they considerably outranged them. While Providence had its own, of course, the light-horse hadn’t come up against them before, and hadn’t fully appreciated the fact.
While they were reeling back from the unexpectedly lethal enemy quarrels, someone had ridden back across the wooded ridge to report seeing a party of knights riding from the west. The light-riders and their woods-runner allies decided to meet this new threat, and rode to try to delay the enemy reinforcements before they could tip the already overloaded scales further in Count Guillaume’s favor.
They had forgotten all about their original mission.
The newcomers weren’t knights, but house-infantry riding to join the battle. They had quickly dismounted to meet the Providence attack. Neither woods-runners arrows nor cavalry darts proved much use against the mail-clad professionals. And once the house-bows among the party got into action they had quickly driven off the lighter troops.
They’d inflicted most of the losses on Rob’s bold children. When the light-horse and woods-runners finished regrouping in some woods to the south, and tending to their injured as best they could, the battle was over.
* * *
“That’s war,” Karyl said. “We’re lucky things went as well for us as they did. And we won.”
“They serve me well enough, my mad lads and lasses,” said Rob, dragging himself back from the verge of a black pit of depression and fatigue he always sank into after battle. Karyl, he knew, would begin to pay his own blood-price tonight, in the form of howling nightmares he could never recall when wakened. “For the most part, very well indeed. But—they’re volatile. They’re wicked independent, an
d they don’t take to discipline well.”
“No,” Karyl said. “And that’s how we need them to be.”
A woman brought Karyl a clay mug. He accepted with a nod and quiet thanks. She wasn’t one of Rob’s; from her stained leather jack he guessed she’d carried a pike in the third or fourth rank. The first rank had worn waxed and enameled hornface-leather breastplates from the Providence town Armory. The rest had worn whatever was left over.
Rob smelled ale. It was a marvel—or a testimony to the proclivities of his nose—that he smelled anything at all over the terrible residues of slaughter. Which had grown steadily worse all day, for all that decay happened more deliberately here in the relative cool and aridity close to the Shield foothills.
“If I could, lass,” he said, around a tongue that suddenly felt as if it belonged to a nosehorn calf and had gotten crammed in his mouth through some misadventure, “I’d trouble you for one of those as well, if you’d be so kind.”
She laughed. She had an open face, below the filth, and a shock of brown hair. She might have been quite the pert one, if she hadn’t reeked so much of rotting blood herself.
“That’s already taken care of,” she said, handing him a second mug. The stone grip was cool and somehow reassuring in his hand. “Compliments of Baron Côme. It’s his own house-brew, recovered from Guilli’s baggage train.”
By now Rob had already sloshed half of it down his throat. He finished off the rest, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—whether putting more ale on his hand in the process than assorted foulness on his beard and lips, he couldn’t say—and gave the empty back.
“My thanks to the Baron,” he said, feeling like a dry sponge swelling with moisture. “And to you as well.”
He did not send his compliments to the Baron, yet. He was sure it was actually fine. Right now Rob was so parched swilling nosehorn piss might have tasted as sweet. He took his ale far too seriously to be handing out compliments for the sake of form.
Karyl sipped more slowly from his mug. “You need to appoint a captain for your light-horse,” he told Rob.
It was as if Gaétan’s maul clouted Rob behind the ear. His head whirled and his stomach flopped over. A cold feeling crept through his body, supplanting both the cool of the drink and the warmth of the alcohol in the ale.
“So it’s sacked I am, then,” he said huskily. “Not that I can blame you, after I lost control of my troopers today.”
But: I thought you said I didn’t fail!
At once he cursed himself inside: Foolish boy! Won’t you be happier, sloughing off the woe and hassle? Wouldn’t it make you happiest of all to shuck the bloody lot, and hit the free road once more, just you and Nell and no greater burden than pack, axe, and lute?
Oh, and heart, of course. That’s heaviest of all. But there’s a burden well-familiar, if not well-loved.
And yet. And yet. There were all those lovely war-dinosaurs to tend and mold into perfect fighting creatures. Not just any dinosaurs: the greatest of war-dinosaurs. The true dinosaur lords, masters of the battlefield. Triceratops. And the man who had mastered the use of those living, walking, three-horned fortresses in war as no Nuevaropan had. Nor probably any other in any time or clime.
Rob knew himself a hero-worshipper to the core. In his second and fallback trade as minstrel it made coin clink in the cup, knowing all the hero-songs and ballads, the newest and the oldest, and sing them with heartfelt fervor. He found it harder by far to fake the passion for heroes, and heroines too, than love for any woman.
No matter how painfully that greatest of dreads, responsibility, weighed on his shoulders, Rob could bear to leave neither the monsters nor the man.
Still, he found himself blinking back tears at the hurt of such summary dismissal.
Karyl was staring at him as if he’d sprouted a rack of brow-horns like Big Sally’s.
“Of course you’re not sacked,” he said. “I suspect I need you more than ever. You carry on doing as you’ve done: tell the scouts where to go and what to do, and take their reports of what they learn. But now we know they need someone to lead them in battle.”
“Someone to command them?” Rob asked. At this point the words seemed to make little sense to him; fatigue and adrenaline reaction were turning spring-steel wit to lead.
“We both know they won’t put up with being commanded,” Karyl said. “If they were the sort for that they wouldn’t suit as scouts or skirmishers. No, what they want is someone who impresses them. Somebody they can follow as an example, because he’s the best. Or she—that cacafuego Stéphanie would serve well, or her brother. As they do, among their own. But they’re not horse-people, any more than you, nor have any desire to be. Your wild riders would never accept them as anything but allies.”
Some mysteriously still-active part of Rob’s mind recalled that was a temperament Karyl understood well. In part he was descended from half-wild horse-nomads. He had spent his first few years of exile among his late mother’s Parso clan.
Karyl drained his mug and stooped to set it on the ground by his feet. A skinny youth in a loincloth materialized out of the gloom and scooped it up. Karyl nodded absent thanks as he vanished.
They love him, Rob thought. And why not? All he’s done for them is the impossible.
“The only way to use the light-horse and not lose them is with the lightest touch,” Karyl said. “We just need to find the right person. Someone they’ll choose to follow.”
“Well, we’ve time. Today’s bought us that. If only a little.”
For some mad reason Rob felt abruptly miffed. He got to his feet. It took a bit of struggle.
“Why not me, then?” he demanded, hearing and hating the whine in his voice. “You said yourself I have their trust.”
Arching a brow, Karyl ran an eye down his companion’s body, which Rob knew to resemble a barrel, and his legs, which were short and bowed.
“You surely don’t see yourself bobbing along at half the speed of your light-horse on that fat, outlandish hornface of yours—”
“Nell’s not fat. Sturdy built, aye, I grant—”
“—and leading them to attack mounted knights.”
“Oh, fuck no!” Rob blurted. Then, “Sorry, Lord! Er—Captain. Colonel.”
“I’ve heard the phrase before,” Karyl said.
“I fought today, sure,” said Rob. “But that was purely self-defense. I’m not insane. Which you bloody have to be to tackle bloody knights, even hit and run.”
It struck him—as usual, too late—that this was not a tactful thing to say to a man who had fought a famous dinosaur knight while tricked out as a light-horseman and riding an ill-tempered mare little larger than a pony. And killed him. Indeed, Rob intended to furiously scribble songs about all Karyl’s exploits here at the Marais Caché first chance he got, not just his defeat of Salvateur.
Karyl just laughed and clapped Rob’s shoulder. “That’s neither your gift nor your temperament, my friend. You serve us best as what you’ve been: the Master Spider at the center of his web. Whose fangs are deadly, when the prey comes to him. That’s the greater part of command, really, finding the right worker for the job. As I’ve done with you, and you do well in turn.
“Now: I need you to lend me some of your riders. Twenty should do the trick. Plus by your leave I’ll take a few woods-runners, if they’ll go.”
The woods-runners would march through glowing lava if you asked them, Rob thought. Like pretty much everyone else in the army.
“What? Lend them to you? For what?”
“I’m off as fast as we can ride, to negotiate the surrender of County Crève Coeur.”
“Surrender?” Rob almost stammered the word. “But we don’t have siege engines.”
“Don’t need them. Guillaume died without issue. I’m going to make faces at his court. Believe me, that’ll be enough, arriving on the heels of news of this day’s doings.”
Rob sucked in a deep breath.
“I see that,
” he said slowly. “Count Guillaume brought an army bigger than yours, better in every way. Now it’s dead or scattered or become your own personal property, and Guilli’s gone to take his chances on the Wheel.”
He uttered a corpse-tearer laugh. “They’ll think you’re a Faerie yourself.”
Karyl’s face went ever so slightly pale beneath the orange dance of firelight. His eyes narrowed briefly. Rob reeled, appalled by what he’d said.
At least he’d recovered enough wit not to make things worse by apologizing.
But what Karyl Bogomirskiy didn’t kill you for, he got over quickly. Come to that, if he killed you, he got over that pretty quickly too.
“We’ll ride as soon as I can get some provisions ready,” Karyl said. “We need to move fast, though.”
“What about me?”
“You’ll lead the army back to Providence town,” Karyl said. “They need their rest tonight, but get them rolling as soon after dawn as you can.”
“Why me? I mean—why not Baron Côme? Or Copper. Or even Gaétan.”
“You’re my lieutenant,” Karyl said. “My second in command. They’ll do what you tell them; they swore to do so when they joined. Anyway, literally all you have to do is tell them; they know what to do. And then ride east as fast as the foot can follow.”
“So why the rush, then?”
“Don’t forget Count Guillaume wasn’t the only threat. Métairie Brulée and Castaña have mostly sat things out so far. No doubt they were hoping to help rend the carcass after Crève Coeur killed us.
“Some of Guillaume’s scattered knights will no doubt have crossed the Lisette into Métairie Brulée by now. What they have to tell Comtesse Célestine will paralyze her, for the moment. We don’t want Don Raúl de Castaña thinking he sniffs opportunity, though. Providence town’s a central location. However things break, the sooner you get the army back there, the less likely we are to see rapid trouble.”