The Dinosaur Lords

by Victor Milán

  She poured golden wine from a silver ewer. She handed him the goblet. His turquoise eyes met hers.

  “You seem troubled,” she said, feeling miffed at the fact.

  He smiled sadly. “You’re most perceptive.”

  “Jaumet, I’ve known you since I was a child! What makes you think you can hide things from me?”

  He laughed. “Folly. But I didn’t want to distress you. I just … wanted to delay the inevitable. Cowardice, I admit.”

  Not deigning to dignify that absurdity with a rebuttal, Melodía said, “What kind of bad news are you trying to shield me from?”

  “Pere’s dead.”

  “Oh, no.” She set a forkful of ensalada back on her plate. “I’m so sorry! How did it happen?”

  He sat a moment before answering, “In a way that still haunts me.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  * * *

  Jaume set down his scratcher leg and dabbed his mouth with a linen napkin. He paused a moment to collect his thoughts.

  “After the fighting ended, your father ordered me to stay and straighten matters up in Alemania. When that was done, he commanded I return as quickly as possible and report in person. So, leaving most of my Companions and our dinosaurs to follow in a carraca, Pere, Luc, Dieter, and I took passage down the Channel on the Imperial war-dromon Melisandre.”

  “Montador Dieter?” Melodía asked. “I don’t know him.”

  “Our newest Brother, accepted as a full Companion after the … after the War ended. Still has a bit of the egg stuck to him, but a good and talented boy. He earned his tabard.”

  “Sorry for interrupting,” she said. “Go on.”

  “We were crossing the Great Bend, the wide water off the jut of Anglaterra called the Hinge. It’s where the northern Canal, the Tyrant’s Stripe, veers southwest to become the Maw.”

  “I’ve seen a map,” she said dryly. Like most people, Jaume thought Nuevaropa—the peninsula at the western end of Aphrodite Terra—resembled the head of a Tyrannosaurus. The continental part formed its head and lower jaw, Anglaterra the face.

  “A ship appeared from a squall northwest of us. A larger one, a cog with red sails.”

  “Corsairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe they dared!”

  “Piracy’s still a lively occupation in the islands. It’s not unknown for certain coastal grandes to sponsor corsairs, even now.”

  Melodía’s nose wrinkled. “I know. They catch them sometimes, and execute them publicly. Mercedes are usually easygoing, sweet even. But they’re so bloodthirsty about pirates. It’s awful!”

  “Can you blame them? Anglés corsairs killed tens of thousands of their ancestors during the Rape of La Merced in 370. And their attacks on shipping hurt commerce.”

  “Ah, sí. Mercedes hold their purses very near their hearts. But aside from the idiocy of taking on the Sea Dragons, why bother with a skinny little war-galley, instead of a poorly defended merchantman with a hull full of plunder?”

  “Captain Gaspard said they could tell the Melisandre carried important cargo by the course she plied. Dispatches they could sell to the highest bidder, or important persons they could hold to ransom.”

  “If only they’d known the cargo was you and three Companions! They’d have turned right around and run.”

  “Maybe. There were a lot of them, and they seemed intent. And there was no way we could evade them.”

  “But aren’t galleys supposed to be agile? How could a lumbering cog catch you?”

  “I know nothing of the sea,” he said, “and if it were possible, I’d know less about naval warfare. Our hosts told us the pirates held something called the ‘weather gage,’ meaning they were upwind of us, and could run us down with all those sails no matter where we turned. They overtook us quite rapidly. For all their skill, the Sea Dragons only got a single flaming pitch-ball into them from the stern catapult before they started arrowing us. Then they grappled, and we had some hot work.

  “My Brothers and I barely had time to buckle on breasts and backs before the pirates started swinging aboard. Only half the Dragons wore armor. They can’t row in it, so the oarsmen were unprotected. It didn’t keep them from turning to with a will. They can fight, those marines.”

  He wet his throat with wine. “Big as she was, the cog seemed to overflow with pirates. They showed no fear of marines or us. Luc took an arrow in the eye early on.”

  Melodía winced.

  “He kept fighting, but was quickly swarmed and killed. They were overwhelming us.”

  “But Maestro Sunzi’s book says numbers mean nothing in war!”

  Jaume smiled. His true love was fierce as a matadora—in her untried way. He prayed she’d never have to put her book knowledge to the test of real battle.

  “Indeed,” he said. “In a way that’s the reason my Companions exist: to master quantity with quality. But … sometimes numbers do matter, when the disparity’s great enough. We killed them like ants, and still they came.

  “But Pere had noticed how panicky fire made the pirates, even though our pitch-ball barely glanced off their stern rail and didn’t set anything alight. So we left Dieter to command Bartomeu and our other arming-squires and servants, fighting alongside the Sea Dragons, and clambered across to the cog.

  “The corsairs gave us a brisk welcome-aboard. But we cut down enough of them to make them stand back, and put fire to their rigging and their bloodred sails.”

  “That sounds like you two,” Melodía said, smiling.

  “When they saw the merry blaze we set, with the Melisandre still not captured, the corsairs panicked. The fear of having their retreat cut off brought them scuttling back like handroaches.”

  “So you two saved the day. Again.”

  “Our bonfire turned the trick. Pere and I grabbed ropes to swing back home.”

  He stopped. The pain was like a dagger in his guts.

  She reached across their forgotten meal to take his right hand in both of hers. She lifted it, kissed it, pressed it to her cheek.

  “Tell me, Jaumet. It’ll take some of the sting away.”

  “Maybe. You deserve to know, in any event. During our fight on the cog, Pere was wounded in the arm. I didn’t even know. The bleeding weakened him—and made his hands slick. He slipped from the rope and fell into the sea.”

  “Oh, Maia,” Melodía said. “Was his armor too heavy to swim in?”

  “I doubt it. He always was a strong swimmer. And it wasn’t as if we had full twenty-kilo suits of plate weighing us down. But—we’d been followed for several days by a bocaterrible.”

  Melodía’s dark-amber eyes went wide. That breed of sea lizard grew to thirteen meters or more, with jaws bigger and more powerful even than a tyrant’s. Everyone who lived near a coast or even a sufficiently deep river feared the monster called “terrible mouth.” It more than pirates or invaders was the reason stout nets guarded the mouth of Bahía Alegre.

  “Pere went under,” Jaume said. “He looked up through the water. Our eyes met. He reached out to me. Then a great shadow engulfed him from below, and whirled him away into the depths.”

  Melodía began to cry. He moved around to hold her. Her cinnamon skin was dear remembered warmth. He stroked her dark-wine hair.

  As she sobbed into his chest, he thought, To think the last words Pere and I exchanged as friend to friend—instead of in the midst of battle—were a bitter argument over whether I was betraying and abandoning him. For you, Princesa.

  May you never learn it, love. That burden cannot be lightened by sharing.

  * * *

  When Melodía had cried herself out, Jaume slid his arm from around her and returned to his chair. They ate awhile in silence.

  Eventually Jaume found voice again, and asked how things went with her. Awful as she felt over Pere’s fate, she did her best to lighten the mood with trifling anecdotes of goings-on at court: how Lupe had caught Llurdis in the dinosaur stables with Lu
pe’s favorite page, and chased them both out naked into the yard with a whip. Of a hidalgo visiting from King Telemarco’s court in La Fuerza, who made a fool of himself over a priceless ring he’d given Abi Thélème for favors she never got around to bestowing on him. Of the suit by the importunate Trebizons for Melodía’s own hand, on behalf of their obese and unwashed Prince.

  Jaume smiled, and nodded, and laughed where appropriate. She wasn’t fooled. He was holding something back. Something that ached like a wound.

  It hurt that he wouldn’t tell her. Maybe he thinks he’s sparing me further pain. Give him time.

  Besides, the nearness of him, after so long and all alone, awakened sensations that made it hard to stay angry at him.

  When they finished eating, he came around the table. Smiling, he took her hand and drew her to her feet.

  “What do you have in mind, Señor Conde?” she asked. Her eyes were turned down to the wide-leaved plants that sprawled between her feet, encased in gilt sandals, and his in soft russet boots.

  “Let’s dance.”

  She looked up at him. “But there’s no music!”

  He put an arm around her waist and began to lead her through a galliard. His hand seemed to scorch her bare hip. She tried to concentrate on the cinco pasos, the Five Steps of this particular dance. Her breath came in chops.

  “Where you are, mi amor,” he said, “is music. Isn’t that your name?”

  She laughed. They danced.

  He turned her to face him, clasped her close. She gasped. He raised her off the ground and spun her three-quarters of a circle in a scandalous vuelta.

  When he set her down he kissed her. She felt as if hot honey filled her veins. She kissed him back with adolescent fervor.

  The flat muscles of his chest crushed her bare breasts. She clutched his lower rib cage. Strong, long-fingered hands molded her buttocks as if Jaume were a blind artist and meant to sculpt them.

  He bore her back to the table. Reached to sweep spent dishes from the way.

  A tiny throat was cleared.

  In the act of sliding a hand down his body to the firmness that pressed against her belly through his trunks, Melodía froze. Her racing heart stumbled painfully. She knew that sound.

  “Montse,” she hissed.

  “Good afternoon, Count Jaume,” the little girl said, with formal deference that was utterly unlike her.

  Giving a last kiss to Melodía’s sweat-streaming forehead, Jaume straightened, then turned and bowed. “A pleasure as always to see you, Infanta Montserrat,” he said gravely.

  Melodía glared at her sister. Montse’s dark-blond dreadlocks dangled over the shoulders of a smock as grubby and grey-mottled as any garment she’d worn more than five minutes. She had wide cheekbones, a snub nose, great green eyes whose dancing mischief gave the lie to the innocence she was faking.

  She curtsied. “I like you, Count Cousin. You don’t treat me like a little girl.”

  “You are a little girl,” Melodía said, pulling herself reluctantly and with a certain difficulty to a sitting position on the table’s edge. “A nosy little brat, to be precise.”

  “I like to take people at their own evaluation,” Jaume said. “Life plays much more harmoniously that way.”

  “You spoil her,” Melodía said sulkily. “She oughtn’t spy on people.”

  “I’m not spying,” Montse said. “I hate spies. I want to build things. You know that.”

  “Yes, yes,” Melodía said. Exasperating as Montse was, she found it hard to stay mad at her. “And I want to serve the Empire in a way that matters. And both of us are Imperial Princesses, and will doubtless never get what we want.”

  Jaume winked at her and silently said, “Not so.” She had to fight down a giggle.

  “We know you weren’t spying on us, Montserrat,” Jaume said. “So what errand brought you here?”

  “I was sent to fetch my sister to begin her preparations,” she declared importantly.

  “For what?” Melodía asked.

  “Father’s decreed a huge banquet tonight, to celebrate Jaume’s return. All kinds of boring people will be there. I’m glad I’m too young to have to go.”

  Chapter 12

  Cuellolargo, Long-Neck—Elasmosaurus platyurus. A kind of plesiosaur or long-necked sea monster; 14 meters, 2 tonnes. Eats fish and smaller marine lizards. Rarely attacks humans, sea-stories notwithstanding, and only when provoked.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  “Something’s got to be done,” declared the Conde Montañazul.

  Melodía, a forkful of a salad halfway to her lips, exerted considerable will not to roll her eyes. How many bad ideas get prefaced with that phrase? she wondered.

  Count Bluemountain was a tall man, still strongly built in middle age, with a pointy black beard striped silver down the sides. He wore a gown of scarlet silk with a blue mountain on gold shield sewn on the front. His fief was large, prosperous from mines and fine cloths, if not necessarily from wise rule. He was influential, popular among his fellow grandes.

  Melodía held her tongue. For now.

  The feasting hall was lively as a skimmer rookery with conversation and the companionable clatter of tableware. A small army of servants swarmed around bearing pitchers and trays. The smells of meats roasting and pastries baking competed with myriad essences the diners had doused themselves in, which fortunately blended into a mélange Melodía found pleasant. The twenty-five-meter-long blueheart table teemed with those whose estimates of their own importance accorded closely enough with the Imperial Chamberlain’s to get them a place at it.

  Melodía sat on her father’s left, seven chairs down. Despite her rank, it was a standard placement for her at state dinners. As always she resented being excluded from the only conversation that mattered.

  “Something must be done about what, Don Roberto?” the Condesa Rincón asked.

  A countess in her own right, Teresa de Rincón was a widow of late middle age, silver haired and still trim. She sat across from Melodía, nestled closer to Herzog Falk von Hornberg than protocol required.

  “Why, this Garden of Beauty and Truth in Providence, of course,” Montañazul said. “They’re a scandal. Their nonsense is likely to attract the sort of attention no one wants from the Grey Angels themselves! It wouldn’t surprise me if they sent that assassin after our beloved Emperor.”

  Melodía swallowed anger at the implied slur against her beloved Jaume. “Wouldn’t a more obvious culprit be the Princes’ Party?” she made herself ask blandly. “They’re the ones who made war on my father, not the Gardeners. Who are pacifists anyway.”

  She turned to look at the norteño Duke. So did everyone else in earshot. His presence at court provided such delicious controversy.

  “A reasonable conjecture, Princess,” he said with a blandness that made her want to kick him. He wiped his full lips on a linen napkin. “On the surface. But I ask, why? We never intended harm to our Emperor, or his family. Also, His Majesty has convinced me that no assassins would accept such a commission in the first place. So against whom would we dispatch them?”

  Melodía’s mouth tightened. Falk looked like just another big muscle-bound dolt, epitome of the buckethead, as wags called the Empire’s warrior-aristocrats. But he was showing a most unbucketheadlike turn of both wit and forbearance.

  “Might your Party try to assassinate the evil advisors the Princes claimed they fought against?” she asked.

  “To what end, Highness? We lost our war and admitted our fault.”

  “Really, you shouldn’t bullyrag our guest,” Countess Rincón said, giving a squeeze of solidarity to Falk’s thick biceps. “He’s done his penance, and received absolution.”

  “Don’t let Señorita Melodía fool you, your Grace,” called a nasal and unwelcome voice from farther down the table.

  The immaculately coiffed, bearded, and outsized head of Melodía’s cousin Gonzalo Delgao sat on a white ruff as if it were a plate. Which was very much where
Melodía would have liked to see it. She noticed that the diminutive, black-velvet-clad man had arranged his silver salad dish and utensils with his customary precision after finishing the course.

  Across from him sat his younger brother Benedicto, big as a titan and just as swift, his great handsome brown block of a face creased by the effort of following the conversation.

  “How do you mean?” Falk asked Gonzalo.

  “Our Princess opposed her father’s waging war on you and your comrades in the North,” Gonzalo said. A beat later his brother nodded accord.

  The brothers’ usual partners in undermining Melodía’s father, their supercilious brother-in-law René Alarcón and Augusto Manorquín, from a cadet family of Torre Ramírez, were blessedly absent. They might be elsewhere brewing mischief; Melodía suspected they were patronizing one of La Merced’s justly famous brothels.

  Again Falk’s blue eyes fixed on Melodía. She found their intensity unsettling. It was already quite warm enough in here, thank you.

  “Why, your Highness?” Falk asked.

  “She’s against war,” Gonzalo said. “She’s full of novel notions, my cousin.”

  “But doesn’t war ultimately maintain that very order which supports you in your position of privilege?” Falk asked.

  “I don’t oppose all war,” she said, shooting a ruffled-harrier look Gonzalo’s way. “Only unnecessary ones. I’ve studied military history extensively. And before you ask, yes, I think my father should have tried harder to resolve his dispute with your Princes’ Party through negotiation before opting for war.”

  Falk lifted a brow. “Reading about war is not the same as experiencing it, Highness.”

  “I know that,” she said. “You fought with distinction in that war, your Grace. Can you name me any activity less orderly?”

  “An interesting point, Princess. Battle, at least, is the most chaotic activity imaginable.”

  “Regardless of who sent the assassin and why,” Montañazul said, loudly trying to win back center stage, “I still say the Emperor has to act against this Garden of Beauty and Truth, so-called. Bring them to heel like disobedient vexers.”

  “Why?” Falk asked, sipping wine. “What threat can a pack of pacifists pose?”