by Victor Milán
Florian laughed and clapped his shoulder. “Fair enough, my friend.”
His cheeks flushing pinker than normal Dieter retrieved his poignard. Timaeos picked himself up. He made himself meet Jaume’s gaze.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said. “I’ve failed you and all our brothers. I accept your judgement. Whatever the punishment, I’ve earned it.”
Jaume stared at them a moment. They wilted beneath the unaccustomed heat of his gaze.
“We know from the poor refugees that we’ve two days, three at most, before the Grey Angel horde lands on us. They’ve got three times our numbers, at least. And you’ve all heard the stories again and again: that they think of neither survival, nor avoiding pain, nor least of all of pity, but only of destroying every living thing in their path. What greater dereliction could you perform, than to deny us your strength in the battle to come?”
As if two could make a difference against such a horde, he thought with a spasm of bitterness. Or all of us, knights and Ordinaries together. Against pure horror.
“So hear my judgement: I do not permit that you die, nor go into exile. Clearly, you’ve too much time on your hands and minds: you will busy yourselves from waking to sleep. At exercise, at drill, at your art—which, now of all times, we must not neglect—and barring those things, at mucking the duckbill paddocks! And when you go to bed, it will be alone. For one year you shall remain celibate.
“Above all: you will continue to serve. And you will fight. The horde, not one another!”
They started to respond. He stilled them with upraised palms.
“Understand: there are no more chances. Fail again of your oaths, any of them, and you will be cast out. Let your eyes linger too long on one of your juniors, and out you go.
“You are good men. You will redeem yourselves, and atone for your actions, and heal our sacred circle of Companionship, in the name of the Empire and of the Lady. Do you understand me, brothers?”
Both of them looked at him squarely. “Yes, Captain,” they said, a beat apart.
Their very bluntness heartened him. He’d suspect a greater display of emotion as mere histrionics.
“Then turn, apologize to each other as brothers, clasp arms and embrace. And then get busy, in Bella’s holy Name! The battle of our lives awaits.”
* * *
He found Jacques standing apart, on the brow of the hill where they’d made camp, hugging himself tightly and weeping like a lost child. He looked up at Jaume’s firm grasp on his shoulder.
“Come back to us, old friend,” Jaume said softly. “We can’t afford to do without you. Now less than ever.”
Jacques shook his head violently. A teardrop flew from lank greying locks, struck Jaume’s upper lip and ran into his mouth. It tasted of salt and sorrow.
“What’s the use?” Jacques said. Not very far away, in the turbulent camp below, somebody screamed in bubbling final agony. “Isn’t it all lost already? The ugliness wins at the end. It always does.”
Jaume put back his head and laughed. It was a full laugh, a hearty laugh that belied his lean frame and often-languid manner. Jacques blinked his brown eyes clear to stare at his lord in bewilderment.
“Why else do we fight?” Jaume asked. “Why continue to live, when death inevitably waits? Both for the same reason: to keep a little spark of life, and Beauty, alive against the black.”
Jacques still frowned. But he stood a bit straighter.
“Thank you for reminding me, my friend,” Jaume said.
* * *
But when he was alone in the paddock of handspan-thick pilings he himself had helped to cut and drive, Jaume let his own tears flow.
“I know how badly I’ve failed my Companions and my Lady,” he said as he brushed the supple pebbled skin of Camellia’s graceful neck with soapy water. “I thought I’d picked men who wouldn’t need to be commanded. Then I’m placed in charge of men who refuse to be commanded by anything but their impulses. Men who think they have the right to rule everything but themselves.”
He dumped a hornface-leather bucket of pure water over the dinosaur. She bobbed her cream and butterscotch–crested head with pleasure.
“I’ve no right feeling sorry for myself,” he said. “But sorrow has its beauties too, I suppose.”
And he wept freely, standing beside his morion’s comforting immensity. She nuzzled his ear with her broad blunt beak, then rested her chin on his shoulder while he scratched her cheek.
They stood that way, man and dinosaur, until Jaume’s arming-squire Bartomeu found them and told Jaume he was summoned at once to the Imperial presence.
Chapter 36
Orden Militar, Military Order—An Order chartered by the Church of Nuevaropa to defend the Faith, the Church, and the Empire. Usually small, élite military formations, usually, devoted to a single Creator, whose deeds range from individual feats of daring to acts of charity to decisive battlefield maneuvers. Most, such as the all-female Sisters of the Wind and the Knights of the Yellow Tower, consist wholly of knights. A few, like the mercenary Struthio Lancers, refuse to accept knights, and their members defiantly refuse knighthood. Many Orders are famous, most are rich, and some are powerful. Imperial Champion Jaume’s all-male Companions of Our Lady of the Mirror may be the most of all three—occasioning resentment inside the Church and out.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Voyvod Karyl Bogomirskiy’s still alive?” Jaume repeated in astonishment.
A curious sense of relief flooded his belly. Not that this in any way alleviates my guilt, he told himself. And many others certainly aren’t, good men and women.
And good beasts too: a lover of war-hadrosaurs, he tended to deplore Karyl’s living fortresses with their terrible goring horns. Yet they were living things as well, with beauties of their own, and not to be destroyed without cause. In the name of duty I committed a great crime, he thought. I can’t help feeling a certain gratification that my intended victim survived.
The color fell from Duke Falk’s face like sand from an upturned glass jar. “Impossible! I killed the man myself.”
“Apparently not enough, your Grace,” Jaume said with a small smile.
That got him a blue-hot glare. Instead of bursting out further the commander of the Imperial bodyguard slouched down with arms crossed over his gilded breastplate, with his massive bearded chin sunk to its rolled upper rim.
The Imperial council of war was gathered in a large chamber in the Emperor’s personal pavilion. The morning sun laid red and yellow tints across the drawn faces gathered around the long oaken table. Vents near the roof let in sultry air from outside. Despite them the walls of bright cloth kept the worst stinks of the camp at bay.
But certain of the grandes assembled seemed to be trying to take up the slack. As for Tavares … Does the man even deign to wipe himself when he shits?
“You’re telling us a dead man’s up and walking again?” asked Duque Francisco de Mandar. He sketched the symbol of Equilibrium before him, then touched forehead, loins, shoulders, the sides of his rib cage, and hips in the Creators’ sign.
His Duchy contained the Spañol royal capital, La Fuerza. He had come in place of his cousin the King. He commanded a sizable force of vassal lords, hombres armaos, House troops, and peasant levies.
“Truly,” he said, “it’s a sign of judgement upon us.” An immensely tall man, cadaverously thin, Francisco had short black hair, drooping moustaches, and a blue undertone to his skin which Jaume found off-putting. Jaume had heard it said he looked as if he were mourning when he was getting a blow job from one of his innumerable mistresses; his expression today was fit to sour milk.
“Or shocking bad management on somebody’s part,” muttered Graf Rurik.
The beefy Rurik, noted for gruffness, valor, and a majestic tawny moustache, had brought his Knights of the Yellow Tower, an Order-Military devoted to Torrey, to serve the Emperor. So had Lady Janice Tisdell and her Telar-wor
shipping Sisters of the Wind. Neither Captain-General looked with particular favor on the upstart Companions, nor on Jaume’s jumped-up status as Condestable. Still, Rurik manifestly thought even less of his countryman Falk’s elevation.
“Can we really fight this horde?” asked a worried-looking Maxence. The Count of a neighboring province of Collines Argentées, he had arrived just today. Indeed, he had brought the news of Karyl’s astonishing survival—along with regrets from his liege, the Duke de Haut-Pays, unavoidably detained by warding off the incursion of a whole army Karyl had somehow raised in Providence.
“A better question is how?” said Rurik.
Maxence shook lank brown locks. He was no devotee of the Life-to-Come Sect: in fact his hair was wet because the Imperial summons had reached him in the middle of his bath.
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, is it morally permissible? Spiritually? Raguel is the Creators’ holy servant. He works Their will. Can we resist that, except at risk to our souls?”
“Of course we cannot!” Tavares brayed.
His pet nobles bobbed grubby heads in agreement. The outburst made Duke Francisco start. Though he smelled too good to be a Life-to-Come votary, he deferred to the cardinal too much for Jaume’s liking.
“Rather we should submit meekly to the just punishment our Creators have decreed for the wickedness we have wrongly permitted in Their names!”
Felipe frowned. “I disagree,” he said mildly.
It was as if he’d scuffed up a flier pelt and touched a spark from it to everyone in the room. Felipe the pious, the great friend of Tavares’s late patron Pío, contradicting a man of the cloth? A man he himself had seen given the red hat despite the known distaste of Pío’s successor for him—had hand-selected as the Imperial Army’s chaplain?
It was so unexpected that instead of his usual theatrics Tavares simply blinked at Felipe as if he had spoken in the tongue of far Vareta.
“I have taken counsel,” Felipe went on, voice strengthening as he went along. “Of my prayers, and of course of my faithful and pious confessor, Fray Jerónimo, who as you all know is an exceedingly holy man.”
That sent a certain look scurrying around the table like a mouse. None of us knows that, Jaume thought, covering his own skepticism by lifting a goblet of rather sour local wine to his lips. Because so far as I know, no living soul other than His Majesty has ever so much as seen this holy man. Not even his own chief bodyguard.
“Fray Jerónimo has shared with me this wisdom,” Felipe said, eyes shining with eagerness. “As is well known, the Grey Angels exist to maintain the Equilibrium of the World: the smooth and regular turning of the Wheel. A Grey Angel Crusade hasn’t got destruction as its end, although it may employ such means. So my confessor asked me, is it not possible that this Crusade is ultimately meant as much as a test as chastisement? To discover whether the Imperio is fit to persist—and I to rule it?”
He paused. The expressions Jaume saw around the long table ranged from blankness to shock to anger-flush growing behind Tavares’s surprisingly trim beard—and coating of grime. Jaume hoped his own habitual soft smile hadn’t frozen too hard.
Felipe noticed none of the reactions. That was nothing exceptional: he was a man who didn’t take hints. Instead he warbled on, happy as a child opening his Creators’ Day gifts:
“‘Should the Emperador’—my confessor said—‘confront and defeat the Grey Angel Crusade, that will signify, not blasphemous thwarting of the Creators’ will, but rather irrefutable demonstration that he and his dreams of centralizing power unto the Fangèd Throne enjoy the purest favor of the Eight. Win, and you win their imprimatur.’”
Felipe sat back beaming all over his pudgy face. “Now that I know it’s all a test of my worthiness—our worthiness, my friends!—I await the contest with eagerness!”
You’re the only one. Even as he thought it, Jaume could read the words on several of his fellow-captains’ faces as plainly as if they were block-printed there.
He looked to Tavares. The cardinal’s face was like a skull without the grin. For once the chaplain could find no words.
With an anything but congenial grin of his own, Jaume leaned forward. He had not beaten the brutal miquelet mountain bandits of his native Catalunya as a child, or won countless duels and battles since, by lacking a matador’s instinct for the kill.
“If we wish for signs of our Creators’ judgement,” he said, “we need look no further than the plagues that stalk the camp, carrying away hundreds and weakening thousands to the point of uselessness. In very face of the battle, which, as your Majesty says, will determine the fate of the Empire.”
“They are themselves judgements for sin!” Tavares declaimed. At once his narrow jaw clamped shut, and his eyes went wide. For all his obduracy, he wasn’t stupid. He knew he’d said too much already.
Jaume smiled sweetly. “For once,” he purred, “I agree with His Eminence. By defying their Creators’ explicit commands on cleanliness we have broken Divine law. This hideous pestilence is the very punishment they decree for that crime.”
“The BOOKS OF THE LAW are allegorical!” Tavares cried. “To take them literally is to be found wanting. And wanton!”
“Rubbish,” the tall and ice-blond Lady Janice said. “The outbreak proves the literal interpretation’s correct—to anyone impious enough to doubt them in the first place.”
Tavares’s eyes shot black fire at her. But he said nothing. Like Rurik and Jaume, as leader of an Order Military the Anglesa was a cardinal in the Holy Church. And all three were considerably senior to Tavares.
Felipe nodded. “True, true. What the BOOKS predict is what we’re suffering. Falk, my boy: see to it that full compliance with Holy Teaching on cleanliness is promulgated as army regulation, and rigorously enforced.”
Falk’s smile reminded Jaume of the Duke’s albino war-mount, Snowflake. “It will be a pleasure, Majesty.”
Tavares glared through knife-slit eyes. “Softly, my lord. Softly. We already face the wrath of our Creators.”
“I won’t surrender my Empire or my people to destruction, no matter how righteous it’s supposed to be!” Felipe said. “I have served the Empire as well as my Creators loyally for all my life. I cannot believe they would damn me for doing what they Created me to do.”
“They don’t damn at all,” Jaume said—softly. “As they also make clear in the BOOKS OF THE LAW.”
“Lies!” Tavares almost screeched the word. Spittle flew from his mouth. Jaume recoiled. Did the man think that was persuasive?
Ah, no, he rebuked himself. The fanatic doesn’t seek to persuade. He wants only to punish disbelief.
The chaplain inflated his narrow chest for another outburst. But Felipe held up his hand.
“Enough,” he said. “I don’t have the stomach for theological debate right now. If nothing else, it would seem to be rather after the fact at this point. The hay is in the barn, the Slayer’s in the herd, the Grey Angel Crusade has begun.
“I am not asking for discussion, gentlemen, ladies. I see a threat to my people and my throne. Wherever it originates I intend to fight it.
“Therefore I command: let anyone who cannot in good conscience fight leave the army at once. Because from this very instant any who resist, sow dissension, or even hang back from the fight once joined, will be hanged forthwith as a mutineer and traitor!”
“You risk your very soul,” Tavares said, his voice now low and deadly as a venomous snake.
“Yes,” Felipe said. “Well. It’s my own to risk. And if there’s sin, let it be mine alone, as the decision to fight is mine alone.”
“So be it.”
Tavares stood. He turned a mad glare from Felipe to Jaume, who forced himself to meet it with calm. The chaplain spun toward the door in a crimson swirl.
“One moment, Eminence.” The Emperor’s quiet words snapped the Cardinal back around. “You were wished upon me by my late friend, Pío. For his sake I’ve put up with you, though I’ve
found you quite as insufferable as Jaume reported you were with his Army of Correction.
“And now I’ve done all I can for Pío’s blessed memory. If you think yourself exempt from any decree I have made or shall make, you are sadly mistaken. Do you understand me? One word of doubt preached to my warriors, and I will request the captain of my bodyguard to remove your Eminence’s head from your shoulders with that pet axe of his. One word.”
Stiffly, Tavares bowed and left.
* * *
“What is it you need to tell us, and us alone, your Majesty?” Jaume asked.
Emperor Felipe sat silent a moment in the gilded folding chair he’d had made up in case he ever got to lead the army on campaign, as if to ensure the dismissed conferees had gotten fully out of earshot of the chamber in his sprawling and elaborate pavilion. Then he looked at Jaume and Falk, and the broadness of his grin and the joy in his sea-green eyes startled Jaume almost to the point of shock.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “My good, loyal boys. Maxence brought further news, which he wisely chose to impart to me alone. My daughter escaped the fall of Providence town.”
“Bella!” Jaume exclaimed. He flung himself on one knee beside the Emperor, clung to him, and gave way to heartfelt sobs of relief and joy.
Felipe’s arms grasped him clumsily from above. Jaume felt him shake as he cried too. The Emperor pressed his cheek against Jaume’s head; Jaume felt hot tears drip hot onto his scalp and run down his cheek.
But Jaume’s duty would not permit him to indulge himself too long, even in the pure and simple beauty of his passion. He forced himself back into control and pulled away, blinking his eyes clear.
The Emperor’s own eyes still swam, and tear trails glittered down his cheek. Tears dewed his Imperial beard.
“But there’s worse news too,” Felipe said in a clotted voice.
“Majesty?” Jaume’s own voice was clear.
“She’s with Bogomirskiy’s rebel army.”
Jaume’s soul was a blade red from the forge, plunged into icy water. I knew the moment His Majesty’s words reached my ears, of course. How else could my beloved have escaped the rise of Raguel in Providence town?