by Victor Milán
“Old news. I know Rob gives you regular reports. Although you don’t respond.”
The odd thing was, those tidings had arrived with a large number of Imperial deserters begging to join the newly minted outlaw.
“What, then?” he asked.
“Rob and I have been doing your job for you.”
“And a splendid job you’ve done,” he said. “Especially bringing Fleur around.”
She grunted in a fashion that would’ve made her dueña Doña Carlota screech like a Pteranodon chased from its perch. The success in Fleur, such as it was, seemed to belong to a bygone age, though it happened only a week ago. In the end the peasantry and a few barons and knights roused themselves to flee, most joining the refugee army.
Poor befuddled Count Morgain, though, died for a crime usually absolved by time: adolescence. He was too young and uncertain to extract himself from the tug-of-war between his uncle and Archbishop Toville before the Grey Angel Crusade consumed them all.
“Or is it that Haut-Pays holds the Little Fliers against us?” Karyl asked. “I heard that too. The walls of my tent don’t keep out much sound, sadly.”
“Not that either. What I come to tell you is: the horde no longer pursues us.”
“So Raguel scents bigger prey,” Karyl said softly.
“Yes. My patrols report the Imperials have taken up positions on high ground athwart the Imperial Road, just this side of the town of Canterville. The horde should hit them no later than midmorning tomorrow.”
Karyl raised a brow. “And?”
She flushed. “I was getting to that. The Imperial Army has the Fortunate River to secure its right flank. But there’s a good ten kilometers between their left and Duke Eric’s ridges. We might—might—be able to slip through. If someone led us with enough daring and skill.”
“You forgot luck,” he said in a dry whisper.
“That too.”
Karyl hung his head.
“What’s happening to you?” she asked.
“Didn’t Rob tell you?”
“No matter how much you exasperate him, he’d die before betraying your confidence. I doubt I could say that about another human being, alive or dead. He worships you.”
Looking up, Karyl touched the right side of his forehead, where a faint blue discoloration peeked out of the grey-streaked brown hairline. “The young hotspur Duke Falk von Hornberg dented my skull with his axe at the Hassling. Since then I’ve suffered terrible headaches off and on.”
“But you’re not suffering one now.”
“No.” A corner of his bearded mouth twitched. “Although you may be about to change that.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel guilty, Voyvod, it won’t work. Is that why you cry out at night, the headaches?”
“It’s the dreams. I’ve experienced them ever since I … returned. They abated for a while after we reached Providence and began raising the militia. Now they’ve returned with unholy fervor.”
“What do you dream?” She was beyond tact now. Anyway she doubted she could outflank this man with words any more than troops.
“Well, there’s going over the edge of the Eye Cliffs, with a horror trying to gut me with its killing claws and my life pumping away out the stump of my sword-arm,” he said. “Nothing like reliving certain death to add a touch of terror to one’s nights.”
“That happened? Really? I thought it was just another part of your legend, like defeating a full-grown matadora single-handedly as a stripling, and then having her egg hatch out that famous mount of yours so she bonded to you forever.”
He smiled sadly. “I wasn’t really alone,” he said. “I had my faithful duckbill mount. Who sadly didn’t survive the encounter. How I miss sweet Shiraa.”
“‘Sweet’?” Melodía blinked. “An Allosaurus?”
“She accompanied me throughout my travels. I hope she’s made her way well in the wild; she was always clever. And I trained her to kill better than her real mother ever could.”
Melodía was shaking her head incredulously. “But that other? How can that be true? As you say: certain death. In at least two ways, falling and bleeding.”
“I often wonder that myself.”
“And your hand—you’ve uh, got a sword hand. And everyone knows it functions very well. You can’t regrow a severed limb.”
“That’s what I said when the witch who hired us on Bogardus’s behalf cast her spell over my stump,” he said. “Along with, ‘there’s no such thing as sorcery.’ If I can’t rely on my disbelief, what certainty is there? Precious little, I find.”
“But that’s not all that haunts your dreams?”
“No. I get visions—flashes—of incredible beauty. The pain of separation from it is as great as any pains of the body I’ve known. But there’s real pain too. And terror, and despair like an infinite well. A sense of helplessness—of being toyed with. And a sense that … it’s not over. That I’ve never truly escaped.”
“I can … see that would be disconcerting.”
“But you don’t see that it’s reason to sulk in my tent.”
“Well—I know it wakes you screaming most nights, lately. I definitely know how you used to sneak off by yourself so your cries won’t waken the camp. It was damned obnoxious, frankly, having my people keep watch over you in your nocturnal hidey-holes.”
Especially since I won’t ask them to do anything I don’t do.
He smiled like a slit throat. “That isn’t all.”
“What more?”
“Guilt,” he said.
She drew her head back in surprise. “Guilt? What do you mean?”
“You’ve heard the story, I suppose, how I was driven into exile by my own father? How I wandered Aphrodite Terra for ten years and more, until I acquired the skills and means to return, punish the wicked, and reclaim my birthright?”
“Your legend I spoke of.” She couldn’t help a passing smile. “No getting away from it in camp.”
“So you know the rest: I achieved my goal—the goal of every dispossessed hero in every bedtime story and tavern song. My quest ended. I won. And what I won, was ashes.”
It was growing dark inside the tent as day settled with illusionary ease into twilight. “I was … overwhelmed by my victory,” he said. “It took so long. My struggle so great—both exile and the day’s battle.
“As I sat on the throne I’d regained my first coherent thought was, Why?”
“I don’t understand,” Melodía said.
“It all made no sense to me, suddenly. All the years, all the tears. I realized that I hadn’t wanted the damned throne so much as I felt obligated to win it back. Not because I had any reason, or any desire. Maybe … a last attempt to please my father. Who’d betrayed me, and been betrayed and murdered by his own mistress, years before.
“That was when the grief hit me. It seemed as if everyone I’d known and loved, cared for, even liked, had died to win this … chair. Oh, to be sure, some I cared about got merely been left behind, like my cousin Tir. But of course I’d lost her too, in a way.
“I had killed my loved ones, my friends, thousands who trusted me. With my ambition. Which wasn’t even mine.
“The grief crushed me. Almost physically. It was all I could do to go though the motions of setting things in order.
“It was after that, when the blackness lifted—a little—I determined to expunge passion. From myself, and—this sounds crazy, no doubt; it does to me, now—from my realm. As if I could force my subjects to put aside all feelings in favor of the coldest calculation.
“I failed. Mostly because—well, because it can’t be done; it’s insane. But beyond that, I never really got around to trying to enforce it. There were too many other things for me to be doing. And my secret police.”
“But you feel now,” Melodía said.
“Yes. So much that every emotion, however fleeting, is like a reopened wound. Even happiness. It makes me think that my resolve to purge myself of passio
n was really nothing but an attempt to hide from pain. The pain of feeling.”
“How did you get your feelings back?”
“I don’t know. I suspect it’s twisted in with the source of my nightmares. It’s as if somebody, some thing, gave me back the capacity to feel.”
“Isn’t that a great gift?”
His laugh was raw as the edge of a freshly sharpened sword. “Is it? Or the subtlest of tortures?”
“So what you’re really telling me is, you’re crippled by feeling sorry for yourself.”
He laughed again. “Perhaps I am. But listen: just as I’ve been betrayed at every turn—at home, at the Hassling, in Providence—so I have betrayed all those who relied upon me to their own destruction.”
He blew a sigh through pursed lips. “With the sanctuary of death denied me, when I came here—when I came to Providence—well, I drew courage to put faith in myself and others from my hope I’d found a cause worth living for. Embodied in a single man.”
“Bogardus!” Melodía blurted before she could stop herself. “You were as smitten with him as I was!”
He’s tipped his head forward. Now he regarded her through the curtain his hair.
“Yes. As good a way to put it as any, I suppose.”
“But you spent so little time at the villa,” she said. “At least, I only saw you there when you came to make reports or requests.”
“But Bogardus had given me that greatest gift: a task. A challenge. It took away my pain, the headaches and the nightmares. And I suppose I feared to look too closely at my idol, lest I see imperfections.”
She sat back. “As did I,” she whispered.
“We both sought badly needed shelter,” he said. “We both thought we’d found it. And we both were wrong.
“Bogardus’s betrayal hammered one more spike into my soul. And, as it were, my head.”
Empathy filled Melodía’s soul and heated her cheeks like fever. He’s so strong, she thought, simply to have survived such horrible things. And yet so vulnerable.
She stepped hard on her feelings, then. She knew them too well. The last thing she needed now was another attachment. Especially to their fugitive army’s reluctant commander. And the last thing she wanted was a sexual entanglement.
It wasn’t just her rape by Falk—she felt anger stir within her. It wouldn’t leave, but she’d learned to keep it on a short chain. But it never slept.
It was also her own betrayal by Bogardus and Violette. She recognized that now as another violation. No matter that her body still craved their touch.
That much is easy to dispel at least, when it becomes a distraction, she thought. All she had to do was remember the terrible voyeur, sitting in His alcove a few meters away during all their lovemaking.…
“And this gift—” She made herself focus on what Karyl was saying. “—if that’s what it is, of having my feelings back. I’ve come to suspect that’s addition by subtraction: somehow my head lost the ability to rule my heart.”
“I can’t address any of that,” Melodía said. “I only know that your army, your people have a need. They need leadership.”
“Haven’t you heard a word I said?” he said without heat. “Everyone who follows me, I lead to devastation, emotional if not physical. It’s happening again. How does that differ from me betraying them?”
“Well—it does. You don’t intend to.”
“But I keep doing it. Am I not culpable? What betrayal will I bring us next?”
“You don’t have to carry the weight of the whole world on your shoulders! If you set that down, maybe you wouldn’t feel so—crushed.”
“But I carry the whole army on my shoulders,” he said quietly. “You said so yourself.”
Melodía glared at him a moment. “Well—it’s smaller.”
They both laughed. Too long, too loud. In the end laboriously, until tears began. It wasn’t that funny; nothing could have been. Still, that was how they laughed, until they couldn’t anymore.
“Suppose I do carry the army’s weight on my shoulders,” Karyl said. “And perhaps the weight of the world as well. Have I the right to lay them aside? Apart from that—can I?”
“You certainly can’t lay down the army! We all depend on you.”
He squeezed a bitter laugh out his nose. “There’s your first mistake. You need to learn to rely on yourselves. The desire to be led is the betrayal of self.”
She frowned. She believed with all her being in the principle of leadership. And not because she’d been raised to it. She was sure.
“Well,” he said wearily, “my people, as you call them, won’t learn to rely on themselves between now and sunup, will they? For good or ill I’ve let them come to depend on me. And at least we face the kind of technical challenge I’ve the skills to meet.”
It struck her as odd that he’d equate an existential threat to a challenge. But whatever he said, it didn’t matter. So long as he picked up the reins again.
“Considering the problem might even alleviate the blackness,” he said with a wry smile. “For a while, anyway.”
She blinked at tears. Her skin prickled. Is this victory? she wondered.
“So,” he said, sitting straighter and putting more snap in his words. “You’ve proven yourself competent in large-scale maneuver as well as tactics. Sum up our options as you see them, Captain.”
“We can get away clean,” she said. “If we act decisively and at once. Otherwise—”
She shrugged. “It’s stand and fight, or move and fight. The only other choices—”
“Die passively,” Karyl said, “or join the horde. Yes. I think we can discard those. So what would you do? Leave the Imperials and the horde to one another’s good graces?”
Daddy! the little girl within her cried. She tried to moisten her lips. But her mouth was dry.
She looked at him helplessly and spread her hands. “I can’t make that choice. I don’t have the … standing. I don’t have the right. People have flocked to join this, this agglomeration because you command. We don’t have a banner of our own. Not even a name. And we haven’t needed those things. Because you’re our beacon. You define us. Karyl, the hero of legend.”
He winced. “The very burdens I’ve tried to shed.”
“You admitted that wasn’t an option right now. Please, Colonel. We’ll follow you no matter what. Only, command us!”
He deflated. Seemed actually to shrink. Her heart stopped soaring like a bird hitting a high tower window, and plummeted. Then, as if his head weighed as much as a mountain, he looked up at her.
In the near-dark of the tent his eyes were black beacons of despair.
Chapter 38
Gordito, Fatty—Protoceratops andrewsi. A small Ceratopsian dinosaur: a frilled, plant-eating quadruped, 2.5 meters long, 400 kilograms, 1 meter high, with a powerful toothed beak. The only “hornface” to lack horns. A ubiquitous domestic herd beast, not found wild in Nuevaropa. Timid by nature.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
The Allosaurus woke to the smell of something good: a hadrosaur haunch, roasting over flames.
She stirred herself, then slipped from the bed she had made in a patch of nettle scrub, to which her pebble-scaled hide was impervious, in a wood of fragrant spruce—not too close to a game trail to a small stream, but not too far either. As was her custom, she made little noise or commotion for an unfriendly eye to see, despite her size.
She knew the smell from being raised by her mother. She was normally fed fresh flesh of plant-eating dinosaurs. Or at least dead. Occasionally she was allowed to hunt her own prey, under her mother’s supervision. But sometimes she got to eat cooked meat, fresh off a fire placed in a big pit the two-legs had dug for the purpose. Which was how she knew which smell went to which beast.
Her stomach rumbled. She had not eaten in suns. How many—more than her mind would hold. Such details concerned her little, anyway. Hunger, however.…
She smelled the breeze cautiously. It
came from up the trail. She would have to be careful approaching the stream, lest she run into two-legs or another great meat-eater. But that didn’t bother her much. She could give them slip. Or if not, kill them, for then they’d threaten her.
She had the brook to herself, except for a scurry of the usual small forest creatures, all hurrying to be elsewhere. After drinking her fill she followed the aroma. She felt uneasy doing so. Her mother had taught her to avoid two-legs whenever possible, as well as to refrain from killing the small, vulnerable, so-tasty creatures, without her mother’s express command. Or when she had no choice.
She knew the smell of that much flesh roasting meant many two-legs gathered together in one of their camps, or the clusters of above-ground dens of wood and stone they liked to raise for themselves. That meant added danger.
But hunger drove her. And not for tasty Hadrosaurus alone.
She was lonely. She had been with her mother constantly from the moment of her hatching on—her mother was the very first thing she had laid eyes on, emerging from her egg. Which of course was how she knew that was her mother. They had never been parted for very long—until that terrible day, now seasons past, when a cowardly sneak-attack by a white Tyrannosaurus bull and the two-legs who rode him left both Shiraa and her mother wounded.
The sneak who had struck down her mother had too many two-legs mounted on war-hadrosaurs and horses with him for Shiraa to contend with. She had been forced to flee splashing through the water, which was rich with the smells of blood and fresh shit, while her mother floated helplessly away downstream, stunned.
She had laid up until she healed, then come out and fed. Her mind was fixed on one thing: reunion with her mother.
And lucky matadora that she was, she had smelled faint traces of her mother and begun to follow them. That had begun even longer ago than her last meal—much longer, she felt—but her determination never faltered. Her love was too great.
In time she learned to associate a strange two-legs, silent and peculiar of head, with the wisps of scent that led her on. She sensed, somehow, it was steering her toward her mother. That was enough for her, though not for the ache in her loving heart.