by Victor Milán
“They teach sedition! Pacifism, to begin. Worse, far worse, is this notion that nobles owe a duty to their peasants: absurd! If that idea gets out, it will cause chaos. Anarchy!”
His wife, Condesa María, smiled and patted his bloodred arm. “Roberto knows how dangerous it is for peasants to get above themselves. Other hidalgos admire how efficiently he crushes their every unrest.”
“One wonders that he gets so many of them,” Melodía said sweetly.
“Sí,” Countess María said, nodding. “It is a great mystery. It just goes to show how little serfs differ from the savage horrors of the woods.”
To keep from laughing in her face, Melodía sipped wine. It was a fine vintage from La Meseta, the highland where both La Majestad, the Imperial capital, and Spaña’s capital, La Fuerza, lay. Something good came out of the dusty place, anyway.
Felipe couldn’t stand La Majestad or the Imperial Palace. Melodía liked them less. It was why they’d lived here since Melodía’s mother had died bearing Montse.
“The Gardeners are heretics,” Montañazul declared. “His Holiness has intimated as much himself.”
The Pope sat at Felipe’s left hand. Fearfully old, with a titan’s egg of a head perched on a body scrawny as a half-starved flier’s, swaddled in layers of gold-embroidered white cloth despite the heat, Pío was a great enthusiast of all the Emperor’s worst impulses toward centralizing power. He was one reason for Melodía to be glad she wasn’t allowed a nearer place at table: she had a hard time behaving with the Pope in earshot. Also he smelled.
That Pío never seemed entirely clean lent currency to whispers that he was a secret devotee of the Life-to-Come sect Melodía’s dueña was so devoted to. If true, it had to be secret: La Vida-que-Viene held that the precepts of the Creators’ own Books of the Law, which mandated things like sanitation and sensuous enjoyment of the world the Creators had given their children, were metaphors that were sinful to follow literally. Cleanliness and pleasure, believers taught, were meant to be enjoyed solely in the afterlife.
Melodía wasn’t alone in wondering how they got any followers at all, much less a growing number of them.
Grinning openly now, she said, “You believe the Gardeners teach heresy, Count Roberto? How fascinating. Perhaps you’d like to take up the matter with the man whose writings they base their beliefs on.”
She nodded to Jaume, who sat listening politely on Felipe’s right. She felt sorry for him. The Pope-Metropolitan openly disapproved of Jaume’s hedonistic philosophy. He considered his predecessor’s recognition of the Companions as a holy order a mistake.
Jaume noticed Melodía looking his way and returned a quick, tight smile.
Montañazul became suddenly engrossed in the sizzling slices of nosehorn roast that had just been served him. He was an accomplished duelist, and fancied himself a jouster of the first rank. Jaume was a legendary fighter. He’s not a total fool, Melodía thought.
The rest of the meal passed uneventfully. Montañazul fell to discussing war-duckbills, always a safe and welcome subject to the aristocracy, with the Duke of Alba, which was the large island down-Canal from La Merced. A ferocious old matador, Duke Luis was a former Imperial Constable with only one eye on one side and one leg on the other.
Countess Rincón monopolized Duke Falk. Melodía ate with her usual voracity, which helped her pretend not to notice how the young Alemán’s eyes kept straying her way.
As she finished she became aware of a shadow hanging over her head. For no readily intelligible reason, some ancestor of Prince Heriberto’s had chosen to hang a stuffed cuellolargo above the banquet board by black iron chains. Though only a small one, ten meters long or so, the long-necked sea monster had scared Melodía into fits the first time she’d seen it as a child. Montserrat, on the other hand, had even as a toddler regarded it as the most wonderful thing ever.
Melodía had long gotten over her terror of the toothy beast. She had a harder time shaking off a foreboding that one of La Merced’s frequent earthquakes would drop the wretched thing on her head one day while she drank her soup.
Felipe stood. Silence fell like the plesiosaur unchained. The Pope squinted up at his friend in keen interest. Jaume leaned back in his chair, empty-faced.
“Your Holiness,” Felipe said with a bow to the Pope. “My lords and ladies. I should like to announce a most momentous decision at which I, after much prayer to our Creators and consultations with my wise counselors, have just arrived.
“I hereby decree an Imperial Army of Correction, to march upon the Condado de Terraroja and restore that realm proper obedience, to the Empire and to the Holy Church!”
Applause and cheers flew up. Melodía squeezed her eyes shut.
She opened them to look at Jaume. His face was rigid. Out of loyalty to his lord and kinsman, Jaume was swallowing his misgivings, though she knew they burned his belly.
Wouldn’t you serve Father better by speaking out against this lunacy? she wanted to shout at him. Yet, twisted this way and that by her own loyalties and convictions, she couldn’t find voice either.
Felipe stood beaming brighter than the dozens of torches, hundreds of lamps, and thousands of candles that lit the banquet. He looked transported, as if, against everyone’s expectations including his own, he had achieved something great in his own right. A deed to match those of Manuel the Great—progenitor of Torre Delgao, who killed the fabled Tyrannosaurus imperator, made its skull into the Fangèd Throne, and founded the Empire to rule from it.
Melodía could only shake her head. My father makes war on his own people, and thinks it’s the grandest thing he could ever do.
Chief Minister Mondragón sat beside Jaume. His hands applauded, but his face looked as if he had had just bitten into a medicinal root. Melodía and Jaume weren’t the only ones to disapprove the Emperor’s latest fancy.
“Preparations will begin at once,” Felipe piped. The hall fell silent. “The army will march five weeks from now. As for its commander”—he swept his smile like a beacon to his right—“I can conceive of none more fitting than Count Jaume, Knight-Commander of the Companions of Our Lady of the Mirror, Champion of the Empire, and my own strong and trusted right hand!”
“No.”
The single syllable echoed like a trumpet blast. The diners turned to stare.
Duke Falk von Hornberg had risen. He was the tallest man in the hall.
“I mean no disrespect, your Majesty,” he said. “Neither to yourself, nor to His Holiness, nor to noble Count Jaume. Yet I must humbly claim consideration for command of your army. By right of precedence as a duke, if not my deeds.”
Old Alba slammed a big fist down on the table, making cutlery jump for a meter in either direction. “A rebel vexer-whelp commanding an Imperial army? Intolerable!”
Pío turned him a pinched look. “Might I remind your Grace that Duke Falk has received plenary pardon from both the Emperor’s hand and our own?”
Conversation commenced to sizzle like grease on a stove. Falk stood unspeaking, head high, no more moved than a monolith by mist. Jaume looked pained, but still said nothing.
At length Felipe raised a hand. The babble stopped.
“We honor our kinsman Count Jaume as a great and proven champion,” he said. “Yet we have also heard a great deal about the battlefield prowess of this strong young Alemán. I can see but one course of action.”
He grinned as if to split his head in half. “We shall have a Grand Tourney, and the winner will command the Ejército Corregir!”
Mondragón recoiled in his chair. Jaume pressed two fingers to his brow.
Duke Falk smirked as if he’d won already.
I hate him, Melodía thought.
Chapter 13
Brincador, Bouncer—Psittacosaurus ordosensis. Bipedal plant-eating dinosaur with a short, powerful beak; 1.5 meters, 14 kilograms. Distinguished by quill-like plumes. Common Nuevaropan garden pest.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Onc
e we’re married,” Melodía said, “I should join you.”
With barely a flinch at that, her lover, in theory if not recent fact, finished raising his right arm. His left hand, gloved in fine springer suede, pulled a release. A half-meter-long dragonfly, red from bulbous eyes to the vein lacework of transparent wings, took off from the leather bracer on Jaume’s forearm and shot forward.
Jaume turned startled turquoise eyes to Melodía. “Beg your pardon, mi amor?”
Seeing doom arrowing toward it across the clearing, a green-and-yellow brincador the size of a small dog jumped up from behind the fern sprig that had proven so inadequate to hide it. It bounced frantically away with tall powder-blue tail plumes bobbing.
The dragonfly hit the bouncer like a crossbow bolt. The little creature screamed as the insect sank spike-tipped legs into its body. Ruby mandibles bit deep into its neck.
Blood sprayed in arcs the color of the killer’s body. The bouncer kicked a final time and went limp.
“Are you all right, Melodía?” Jaume asked. “Your cheeks are flushed.”
She shook herself like a wet dog. Her racing pulse made her fluttery.
“Sorry to leave you hanging, querido,” she said breathlessly. “I said that once we’re married, I should join you.”
He looked at her as if she had grown a colorful crest like the one his morion, Camellia, sported.
“How do you mean?” he asked mildly.
She nudged her adored silver-grey mare, Meravellosa, to a walk toward where the giant dragonfly ripped audibly at its victim’s feathered skin. A beat later Jaume’s white mare followed, perforce. Around them on the hillside inland of the palace rose a mixed forest of broadleafs and evergreens.
Discussion, even of their married future, wasn’t really what she wanted right now. But with four gamekeepers in Prince Heriberto’s livery converging on the kill, she wasn’t going to get a shot at that. Despite what Northerners thought, South Nuevaropans had some sexual propriety.
That the lovers got even this tease of time together resulted purely from Jaume’s ability to talk his way out of the main event. The Emperor was hunting today.
“You’re always off on missions,” she said when she heard his horse chuff up alongside hers. “Now that you’re finally home, you work around the clock readying the army for this ridiculous war.”
And my role as a dutiful little Imperial daughter is to keep meekly out of the way and do nothing useful.
“We never see each other!”
He sighed. “I feel that as keenly as you do. You know that. But—that’s my duty.”
“I’d never ask you to give that up,” she said brightly. The tips of the topknot that sprouted from Melodía’s headpiece rasped quietly on the yellow silk stretched over bamboo frames to protect her shoulders from the sun’s sting. “I know it’s your joy as well as your duty. So I was thinking I could join you.”
“You mean, join the Companions?”
“Exactly!”
The gamekeepers approached the kill. The dragonfly flapped its wings and hissed a warning: Stay away! Mine!
The three keepers hung back. They knew too well what those jaws and claws could do. The huge insect couldn’t kill a fit adult human. But like an angry house cat, it could rip up a person’s face pretty well.
Halting twenty meters upwind, Jaume took a small strider-leather bag from his belt. Pinching up powder ground from certain dried glands of the dragonfly’s kin, he brushed fingertips together, wafting it to the rising breeze. Its appetite suppressed by the dust, the dragonfly at once let go of its prey and thrummed into the air, following the scent-trail docilely back to its master’s wrist.
Melodía and Jaume rode forward. The dragonfly settled with a buzz and a clatter on Jaume’s forearm. He looped a thong noose around the junction of abdomen and thorax and drew it tight, tying the creature to his bracer. Ignoring the proceedings, it began burnishing ruby mouthparts with its forelegs.
Melodía boiled in lidded frustration. But her father had taught her that nobles owed their people certain dues, and such rituals as this one were among them, and had to be rigorously observed.
As they approached, the chief keeper, with a gap-toothed grin, held the dead bouncer up for Jaume’s approval. Melodía fidgeted in her saddle and tried to distract herself by gazing out through the thinning trees downslope across a panoramic view of La Merced.
She truly loved the city, where she had grown to young adulthood in Felipe’s court. In her heart it could never match her birthplace, Castillo Golondrina, nor her father’s duchy Los Almendros, the Almond Plantation. But it beat La Majestad hands down.
Two great headlands enveloped the meteor-dug Bahía Alegre like arms, defining and protecting the finest anchorage on La Canal. La Merced crowded the southern and eastern rim in colorful tile roofs and soaring cone-topped towers of white limestone, dominated by the Pope’s palace, Creators’ House. The docks teemed with ships of every size. Its streets, from capillary alleys to boulevard arteries, pulsed with traffic, human, dinosaur, and vehicular.
The eastern headland was mostly occupied by the enormous main base of the Imperial Navy, the Sea Dragons who protected the Channel commerce that fueled La Merced’s famed wealth and hedonism. Closer to hand at the bay’s west end, Melodía could just see Adelina’s Frown, the high chalk bluff crowned by the Firefly Palace. From here the white stone pentagon looked a lot more like the impregnable fortress it was built to be than it did from inside.
The city sang to Melodía of vitality, industry, a positive greed for the joys life offered. It offered many contradictions: respectable yet volatile, such that the Civic Guard frequently turned out for riots in cobalt-blue enameled three-quarter plate; spectacle-loving and bourgeois; tolerant and kindhearted, yet relentless and even cruel in its treatments of its ancient nemesis, pirates.
She loved La Merced. Even when it appalled her.
“Excellent, Lorenzo,” Jaume said at last. “A clean kill. Keep the meat for yourself and your crew.”
That won smiling thanks from the gamekeepers. They bagged the carcass and transferred the hunting-dragonfly to the lead gamekeeper’s wrist. Then they trotted off toward the clamor that indicated where the bulk of the hunt was going on.
As they vanished into the undergrowth, Jaume blew out a long breath. “That’s done.”
Thank the Creators! Melodía thought. “You don’t enjoy the hunt?”
He shrugged. “Part of me enjoys killing—or I wouldn’t do what I do. There’s a certain terrible beauty to it. But only if it’s needful.”
He fell silent, his beautiful features set in a look of pain. Once again Melodía saw evidence that something troubled him. It hurt her that he wouldn’t share. But she was too sensible of his feelings to ask. Or perhaps, she admitted to herself, too proud.
She ground her teeth against what she really wanted to say.
“You really want to join the Companions?” he asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Well, it’s, it’s—it’s dangerous.”
“Of course it’s dangerous! You’ve got more Brothers in the ground than active, and as many more retired by wounds. It cost us Pere. But at least it’s active. I can just sit on my culo in the palace and still be stalked by assassins, as it turns out.”
“I don’t think the assassin was sent for you.”
She slumped. “Of course, you’re too kind to point out the Parasaurolophus in the parlor: that I’m merely an Imperial Princess, so why would anyone bother to send the Brotherhood after me?”
Jaume looked grim.
“So why shouldn’t I become a Companion?” she asked, her heartbeat quickening. “It would give me a chance to do something real.”
They rode at a walk through glorious sunlight obscured by just the thinnest scrim of cloud, down toward the dinosaur hunt. The air was almost cool, fragrant with winter flowers and green growth moist from predawn rain. Birds trilled and chased bright lizards among soft-spined
boughs.
“It’s not all songs and glory,” he said. “Being a Companion is arduous, sometimes boring, often terrifying. It can grind like a millstone.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I hear the ballads. It’s hard not to.”
He laughed. “That’s unimpeachable testimony.”
“But Pe—your Brothers tell me stories. I know what it’s like.”
Jaume frowned. Melodía felt an urge to kiss it away.
But no. That would hardly be decorous. Their inferiors might see.
“I hardly know how to say this, love,” he said. “I know you’re brave and strong. You’re well trained in combat, and show a gift for it. But becoming a Companion isn’t easy. You have to qualify. You’ve got the character and spirit, as much as any Brother. That’s part of why I love you as I do. But it demands great physical prowess as well as endurance. And—you’d have to win admission by deeds.”
“And you don’t you think I can?”
“When would you have the opportunity?”
“I can be your squire! Your page! Whatever you call that boy who follows you around making calf eyes at you.”
“I call him Bartomeu. He’s my arming-squire, which is why he follows me. And—our rules forbid us taking lovers among juniors. It’s unjust. Would you want to live in enforced celibacy?”
“How am I living now? Like a Life-to-Come cenobite who hasn’t bathed since last Qian! I could sign on as a mercenary—become an Ordinary, carve my way into the Companions with my blade!”
Her hand made sword slashes in the air. Meravellosa tossed her head and snorted. In eagerness, Melodía reckoned.
“Like that pretty French boy Florian! He was common-born, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Jaume said. “But they’re all pretty boys.”
“Is that the problem? That your Companions are just a boy’s club? No concha allowed?”
Jaume opened and closed his mouth repeatedly without actually emitting sound.
“Your father would never let you join,” he managed at last. “Especially not with us due to lead the Army of Correction to war.”