by Victor Milán
She drew in a huge breath and sighed mountainously. “This stupid war! Half la Familia’s aroused against my father over it, afraid that if he stirs up too much trouble, we Delgaos will lose our precious monopoly on the Fangèd Throne.”
“I’ve tried to talk him out of it.”
“He’s good at not hearing what he doesn’t want to hear.”
“Expert.”
“I wonder if this allegedly reformed rebel Falk isn’t a bad influence.”
Jaume shook his head. “He does tell your father what he wants to hear, no question. But I don’t really think he’s much to blame. He’s just a boy, really—not much older than you. He is a redoubtable fighter, and shows promise as a field captain. I think his loyalty’s sincere, new as it is.”
“Well … he seems to play quite the lad with the more hotheaded court hangers-on.”
“Few of whom are stepping up to volunteer for the Terraroja campaign.”
She laughed. “No. They’re just straw-stuffed silk doublets with sticks up their butts. But I do blame this confessor of his, Jerónimo. My father’s changed since he turned up. I’m sure this current guiso de caca is his idea.”
“How did he come into your father’s service?”
“Will it get you in trouble if I say he was recommended by that horrid old corpse-tearer the Pope?”
Jaume laughed. “Only if I repeat your description,” he said, “and then, only if His Holiness hears of it. Fortunately, my men are discreet. And they can use a good laugh themselves, after their own trip home from Alemania.”
He’d spent the last two days overseeing the unloading of his Companions, their war-dinosaurs—including his beloved Camellia—and their five hundred Ordinary auxiliaries with their horses from a fleet of round-bottomed cogs. They would form the spine of the Ejército Corregir, whoever won her father’s ridiculous tournament.
“What’s he like, this mystery monk?” Jaume asked.
“I’ve no idea. I’ve never laid eyes on him. I’ve only ever been in the same room with him twice, and both times he was behind a screen.”
She paused. When she’d encountered Jerónimo, she had felt a strange unease, in the pit of her stomach and beneath her skin, as if sensing wrongness somehow.
“Pilar tells me none of the servants have seen him,” she said. “I don’t think my father has, even.”
“Curious indeed.”
An agonized scream pealed over the hills. As it died out, a nosehorn bellowed triumphant rage. Barking and deinonychus-screeches rose to an uproar. Men shouted confusion.
Melodía and Jaume looked at each other, and kneed their horses to a fast trot downslope.
* * *
“You know,” Rob said, through the veil of rain sluicing off his slouch hat brim, “you were a perfect romantic hero.” Maybe even more than Jaume, he thought, but with rare discretion chose not to say.
It was your typical Nuevaropa thunderstorm. The sky warred with itself and the land, volleying rain, hurling howling wave-attacks of wind and jagged blue-white lightning spears, beating thunder war-drums. Despite having to punch through many layers of leaf-laden branches in the old oak forest, raindrops stung Rob’s bare skin.
“Not my fault,” said Karyl.
Holding his paisley parasol gamely aloft, Rob rode swaying atop the luggage piled on his hook-horn’s back. Rob could feel his friend muttering disconsolately to herself. Normally stoic, Little Nell didn’t like when weather got on her. Which, sadly, it often did.
Karyl walked point. His lack of class-consciousness sometimes truly exasperated Rob: despise nobles he might, but they by-Torre should act like nobles. Karyl’s most recent outrage to Rob’s propriety was buying a conical woven-straw peasant hat for a few copper centavos from one of the vendors who sprouted like toadstools along the better-traveled roads.
He wore it now, its string tied beneath his chin, his head bowed as he trudged into the storm. It made him look more than a little like an ambulatory mushroom himself, to Rob’s admittedly fanciful eye.
“How do you know what I was, anyway?” Karyl said.
“The songs!” Rob said. “I’ve heard the songs for years—cut my teeth on ’em. Read the romances. Now I’m dying to hear the truth from you. You know how balladeers lie.”
“Present company excluded?”
“By no means! I worst of all!”
Karyl seemed to mull that over for a bit. “Keep talking. I’ll let you know when you stray too far from truth.”
“What could be a lovelier tale?” Rob asked. “You defeated a rampaging matadora before you were twenty, a mere stripling without so much as fuzz on your chin. Its offspring hatched before your eyes and bonded to you. Which happens to be the only way to get a wild meat-eating dinosaur to serve as a mount. And they’re far better than captivity-bred ones.
“You won knighthood from your Archduke, fair and square. But more important, you won Shiraa, nearly as fabled as you are yourself!”
Karyl produced a sound like a siege-engine stone rolling down a rain gutter.
“Ah, forgive me!” Rob exclaimed, flash-contrite. “I didn’t mean to prod a sore spot, surely I did not. You still mourn her.”
“She was my friend,” Karyl said. “The only one to survive being my friend. Until the Hassling.”
Rob shook his head sorrowfully. It was a song so sad it would be years before he could bring himself to sing it.
Little Nell’s strong toes thumped logs sawn in half lengthwise and buried round-side down. The local grande kept his road well corduroyed. Hardwood logs came as cheap as dinosaur power hereabouts.
If the lord charged for passage, Rob had seen no sign. Rob had a dragon’s eye for toll stations; he refused to pay on principle, as an Irlandés and a Traveler. Some nobles, though, were actually smart enough to be content with the proceeds from the commerce good roads brought.
“A conspiracy of barons treacherously murdered your father,” Rob went on, since Karyl hadn’t told him not to. “And shouldn’t that be the collective phrase for them, then? ‘A conspiracy of barons.’ Like a murder of crows or a rending of horrors. They supplanted you with your bastard half brother and chased you into exile with no more than Shiraa and the shirt on your back.”
“Breeches and barefoot. No shirt. It was raining then too.”
“For years you wandered. Decades. If the legends are true, you traveled the length and breadth of Aphrodite Terra, studying the arts of war and personal combat, gathering your strength.”
“The legends aren’t all wrong,” Karyl said, “so far as they go. Surprising.”
Rob chuckled. “And then—ah, what could be finer?”
“Not this, surely.”
“You returned from exile with an army,” Rob said, undeterred. “Oppressed by the usurper, the peasants rallied to your flag.”
“By the usurper’s mother, actually,” Karyl said. “Alžběta Alexandrovna, Baroness Stechkina. My half brother Yan-Paulus the Bastard isn’t such a bad sort. But he was utterly under her thumb.”
Rob waved an airy hand through the rain. “Detail. Legend cares naught for quibbles. The fact is, no tale’s taller nor grander nor more beloved than that of the displaced nobleman seeking to recover the throne that was foully and unjustly stolen from him. And what did you do? Exactly that!”
He shook his head in admiration, flinging water in all directions from his hat. “That’s what makes your story so compelling, Voyvod. You actually lived the storybook ending.”
“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
“What?” Rob said in horror. “You broke the barons’ petty, cruel rule and made men equal! Such a thing as has never been known before. And you raised the finest fighting force we’ll see in all our lifetimes, the White River Legion!”
“Which you destroyed.”
“Much good it did me. It’s sacked I was, for upstaging the bucketheads and their precious scheme to do you down themselves! So here I am, wet, vagabond, and p
enniless.”
“And I find myself in the same state, for much the same reasons. What do you think of my ‘storybook ending’ now?”
“But you brought years of enlightened rule!”
Karyl glanced back at Rob. Beneath the sweep of his hat, his eyes appeared so dark and deep, Rob half imagined if he looked closer he’d see the stars.
“So you believe,” Karyl said.
“Isn’t it true? The whole Empire still buzzes with it. It’s why your own employers turned on you! They feared the example you set their own downtrodden serfs.”
“Perhaps. I suspect they mostly feared I was getting too powerful.” He shrugged. “They may’ve been right. If not the way the Emperor believed.”
“That makes no sense,” Rob said. “Are you saying you weren’t a wise, enlightened ruler?”
“Yes.”
Rob threw up his hands theatrically. The gesture caused his parasol, momentarily forgotten, to brush a hanging branch and dump pent-up rainwater on him. His hat brim collapsed around his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said, not deigning to acknowledge the mishap.
“Maybe someday I’ll explain it to you,” Karyl said.
“How about now?” asked Rob. “I hate waiting for a story’s end.”
Raindrops exploded on Karyl’s hat and ran off the back like pale streamers. He said nothing.
“Faugh!” Rob exclaimed. “You’re no easier to reason with than a cat.”
That got him a laugh.
“Of course,” Karyl said. “I’m a nobleman.”
Chapter 14
Nariz Cornuda, Nosehorn, One-horn—Centrosaurus apertus. Quadrupedal herbivore with a toothed beak and a single large nasal horn; 6 meters long, 1.8 meters tall, 3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s most common hornface (ceratopsian dinosaur); predominant dray and meat-beast. Wild herds can be destructive and aggressive; popular (if extremely dangerous) to hunt.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Melodía and Jaume rode their horses downslope through the undergrowth as fast as they dared. Her heart hammered. The sharp scent of crushed ferns filled her head.
They emerged onto an outcrop of limestone boulders. As they drew rein, something big came crashing and snorting toward the clearing below.
Bellowing fury, a monster plunged forth: a wild nosehorn, a mighty patriarch seven meters long, black and green, with a bristle of hairlike feathers above mountainous shoulders. He swung his huge head left and right, looking for foes.
Melodía’s breath caught in her throat. He had been raiding estancias, killing herd bulls and stealing the cows for his harem. He’d killed two peasants and a house-archer who’d made the mistake of trying to stop him, and a herd-girl who hadn’t gotten out of his way fast enough.
Now her father was hunting him.
“Jaume!” Melodía exclaimed. “His horn.”
The dinosaur’s neck-frill and bony face were strikingly patterned, indigo on yellow. The horn on its massive snout was curved, a meter and a half long. Half its length gleamed wetly red.
“Probably a horror’s blood, or tracking-dog’s,” Jaume said.
Melodía searched for a quick way down. She was terrified of what was to come. Her only thought was to help her father. Somehow.
From a cycad thicket near the base of the outcrop sprang half a dozen scarlet-feathered horrors with black eye-stripes. Squalling, they spread their taloned arms like wings, showing golden bellies.
Tossing her black-and-silver mane in alarm, Meravellosa sidestepped and whickered. Everything on Nuevaropa feared deinonychus, except matadors and titans.
The bull dug blunt-toed feet into the springy turf and bellowed. The horrors hopped and sidled, chattering angrily in reply. Wild ones might hesitate to attack a full-grown nosehorn, especially such a huge one, but not a human-trained pack. Some of the horrors might be gored or trampled, but once one or two got on the nosehorn’s back, their killing-claws could cut through its tough hide. Even if they didn’t manage to eviscerate the bull, it would rapidly bleed to death.
“I don’t like those things,” Melodía said. These horrors were a specially prized breed known as los Cardenales de la Muerte: Death’s Cardinals. Prince Harry had gifted her father with the pack the year before. “They’re cruel.”
“It’s their nature,” Jaume said. “That said, its beauty isn’t easy to see.”
Cudgel-armed gamekeepers kept the horrors from closing in. The kill wasn’t meant for them. To the baying of hounds and trumpets and hoarse halloos, Felipe himself burst from some saplings behind the nosehorn, mounted on a green-and-yellow great strider and carrying a hunting spear. He wore a splendid silver casque cast to resemble a horror skull, trailing long yellow and scarlet plumes, and a short red hunting cape.
As usual, the Emperor rode like a grain sack, pumping his elbows to the sides like stubby wings. Despite that, Melodía thought to see a curious touch of dignity along with a childlike joy that turned his cheeks red.
Behind Felipe came two of his favored hunting cronies. Count Esmond, the castellan, rode a big cream-colored mule, his long face even in the heat of the chase looking as if he suspected someone of dipping into palace accounts. Prince Harry, Heriberto himself, flanked him, looking as dashing as a portly man could on a black marchador. Around them a pack of hounds came quickly to a halt, prudently out of range of trampling feet and slashing raptor-claws.
Uttering a wild whoop, Felipe couched his spear like a lance and booted his unhappy strider to a charge. Melodía’s first thought was that Felipe’s cry was a misplaced act of chivalry—warning his target of his attack. But the instant the Centrosaurus began spinning in place with frightening alacrity, she saw the cunning behind it.
The monster’s turn allowed the Emperor to drive his leaf-shaped spearhead in behind its right shoulder with a butcher-shop thunk, rather than into its rump.
“A heart shot,” Jaume said. “Well struck.”
Letting go the reins, Felipe waved off his noble companions. A mule-mounted flock of Scarlet Tyrants pounded into the clearing, faces understandably grim beneath horsehair-crested gilt helmets at their charge’s complete incaution. They dismounted speedily to Felipe’s either side, unlimbering cocked and loaded arbalests slung over their scarlet-caped backs.
The nosehorn squalled. Yellow eyes as broad as Melodía’s palm rolled beneath bony flanges not unlike a matador’s. Bloody froth bubbled from its nostrils. The powerful beak snapped futilely toward the spear’s stout ash shaft.
Smelling blood, Death’s Cardinals shrieked and lunged. Harry’s keepers whistled them back, by the authority of meter-and-a-half staffs tipped with lead bulbs. These they used sparingly. Raptors tamed and trained to the hunt were costly. Peasants, on the other hand, came cheap.
The nosehorn kept turning. Though it inexorably drove the spear deeper into its own chest, it ignored the pain. It saw its attacker clearly now. It was determined to return the favor with its own horn.
The crossbar behind the hunting spear’s head kept the bull from pushing its body all the way up the shaft to get at the hunter. Felipe clung with both hands. His mount was about the same length as the Centrosaurus, but weighed a fraction as much. Four-leg force drove two-legs back.
The bull torqued the Emperor right out of his saddle.
Melodía screamed. Whipping out her falchion, she made to nudge Meravellosa into a risky plunge down to the clearing. The mare recoiled as Jaume’s hand snaked out to catch her reins.
“Let me go!” Melodía shouted. “I have to help him.”
“We can’t,” Jaume said sharply. “It’s too late. We’d just get in the way.”
She snarled at him, feeling a raptorish urge to take a bite out of his face.
“Besides,” he said, more gently, “don’t underestimate your father. Watch.”
He dropped the reins. Melodía let her sword arm fall. Sheepishly she realized the most she could do with the short, heavy blade would be to distract the nosehorn long enou
gh for it to gore her before finishing off her father.
Although he’d landed on his broad bottom, the Emperor had immediately sprung to his feet. Now he had the spear haft clamped under his right armpit and gripped in both gloved hands. His round face showed no fear, only utter absorption.
Inevitably the gigantic hornface pushed Felipe back and around. He shifted his boots just enough to keep leaning into the spear without falling. A beat late, Melodía remembered that in his youth her father had fought Northman sea raiders and Slavos as a common pikeman in the army of his cousin the King of Alemania.
The monster groaned. It kept straining to get his huge, bloody horn into Felipe. The Emperor kept shooting quick glances over his shoulder. He worked the spear up and down, twisting the deeply driven blade to do more damage inside the vast, sweat-streaming body.
He sidestepped. With a grunt of effort, he swung the spear haft to plant its brass-shod butt against the bole of a stout bloodwood tree. His weapon thus braced, he leaned forward and held on hard.
The nosehorn uttered a vast wheezing gasp that wrenched Melodía’s heart despite the eagerness and filial fear that hummed in her blood. Pink froth jetted from beak and nose. It fell onto its side.
The Emperor just managed to let go the shaft and dance aside in time to avoid being flipped into the trees. The fallen dinosaur thrashed three times and then, with a final seismic sigh, lay still.
While Emperor fought monster, more mounted courtiers had arrived. Now they flocked around him, chattering congratulations. Muttering darkly, the Scarlet Tyrants reslung their crossbows. Felipe stood smiling in quiet satisfaction, half-surreptitiously massaging his right elbow where the spear haft had given it a good crack as it was torn free.
Jaume nodded. “Now we can let your marvelous mare find us a gentle way down to join the rest,” he said with a smile.
She grinned back in mad relief.
A thought struck her. He’d made a pun: “Meravellosa” meant “marvelous” in Catalan, her mother’s birth tongue as well as his. Jaume had taken the trouble to remember the name of Melodía’s mount because he knew how much she doted on the dark-silver mare with the black-and-silver mane and tail. She’d wager her fancy headpiece that he never thought of asking the name of his own lovely bay mare, on loan from Heriberto’s well-stocked stables.