The Dinosaur Lords

by Victor Milán

  “Oh, dear,” said Fina.

  Jaume let Camellia ease out of her gallop, then turned her around. He grounded her, swung a leg over his saddle, and dropped two meters to hard dirt as gracefully as if dressed in a loincloth rather than forty-odd kilos of steel.

  He’d told Melodía that a full suit of plate, though it could get brutally hot, felt neither heavy nor cumbersome. Not even jousting armor, fully half again as heavy as war gear.

  Drawing his longsword—a tourney blunt, of course, not his famous Lady’s Mirror—Jaume approached his fallen foe with gliding raptor grace. Montañazul stirred feebly, like a beetle on its back. When Jaume politely asked him to yield he spat back evident curses, though Melodía couldn’t hear the actual words for the crowd’s raucous joy.

  Montañazul struggled to rise, failed. He kept trying, ignoring Jaume’s second call for surrender.

  Jaume put his rounded sword-tip against the mail gorget around Montañazul’s throat. Montañazul slapped it away with a clang. The onlookers rumbled like far thunder at that breach of decorum.

  Sneaking a sideways look, Melodía saw a rare frown crease her father’s features at seeing his beloved nephew and champion treated so discourteously. Even Montserrat was watching now. But she didn’t look happy. In fact she looked as if she were about to be sick.

  Jaume put his sword to Montañazul’s throat again. The Count batted it away again.

  Jaume poked the sword point into the left eye-slit of Montañazul’s helmet. The audience gasped. Mor Duval stepped briskly in as if to knock the blade away.

  With a quick wrist-turn, Jaume twisted Montañazul’s great helm sideways on his head so he couldn’t see out. Then he tapped his blade twice on the helmet’s side, which now faced the sky. Duval grabbed Jaume’s sword hand and thrust it at the clouds it, proclaiming him victor.

  Beneath a tempest of applause, Fina said earnestly, “He would’ve been within his rights to strike home, since Bluemountain twice refused to yield.”

  “I wish he had,” Melodía said. “Jaume will too someday, I’ll bet.”

  Chapter 17

  Montador, Montadora—To honor knights we give them the title of Montador or Montadora, meaning a man or woman who rides in battle, on horse or dinosaur. Usually we call them Mor or Mora for short.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  “Stop!” the archer cried. “Hand over the hook-horn and your purses, and we’ll let you leave with your lives.”

  Little Nell sighed resignedly as she came to a halt. Walking at her side, Rob Korrigan concurred.

  The afternoon light dappled the leaf corpses that mostly hid the ruts in the indifferently maintained road, and filled Rob’s nostrils with a rich, dry smell as they slowly turned into humus. A cuatralas, black as a baron’s heart, glided from branch to branch, chasing a purple-and-yellow butterfly. Tiny birds twittered to one another among the leaves of tall gingkoes and false plane trees, which grew far enough apart to allow enough sunlight to filter down to sustain a thriving undergrowth of barberry, ferns, and scrub oak.

  Which was in turn enough to hide brigands. Like the one who’d just stepped into the road ahead, drawing a shortbow to his chest. And the pair who emerged from the bushes five or six meters to either side.

  “You take care of these two,” Karyl said, nodding toward the man with the spear and the one with the short sword who hovered menacingly on their flanks. “I’ll deal with the archer.”

  “And isn’t that you all over, then?” Rob murmured as his companion walked calmly forward. He neither saw how Karyl Bogomirskiy, armed solely with his sword-staff, could possibly deal with a bowman twenty-five meters off, nor doubted that he somehow would. Rob was a man who believed in fate and the Fae, and he doubted either intended such a man as Karyl to die like a stunted vexer chick in such a crappy, random way.

  Nonetheless he moved to interpose the patient grey-and-blue bulk of Nell’s butt between himself and the readied arrow as he pulled axe and round shield off her back.

  He slid his arm through a broad swath of nosehorn leather fixed to the back of his shield to grip the narrower hand strap. He loosened the lacings of his axehead cover with his teeth and ditched it with a wrist flip.

  The two brigands to either side of him seemed suddenly less eager for the encounter to proceed. His calm, crisp actions clearly took them aback. They seemed astonished that the threat of a drawn bow hadn’t frozen him in place.

  Rob knew the type too well. They weren’t fighters, but bushwhackers, whose primary weapons were surprise and intimidation, not the implements they were suddenly holding in oddly tentative ways, as if trying to remember what they were there for. Most of their combat seasoning came from putting the boot in on a cowed or fallen foe.

  Like house-shields, Rob thought—the noble class’s hired, armored bullyboys, and occasionally girls. The comparison filled him with such righteous fury it pushed all trepidation right out of him.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded, turning left and right to flourish Wanda at each in turn. A showman through, he made sure to let shafts of sunlight glance off her bearded grey head. “Aren’t you eager to take what I’ve got, then?”

  Nell snorted, twitched her big tail, and stamped a hind foot. It occurred to him that he might have just given the hook-horn a swat in the fanny and sent her charging straight at the archer. It would take more skill and stone than he probably possessed to get an arrow in her eye—the only way that puny shortbow could hurt her—before she knocked him down with her horn and trampled his ribs to porridge.

  Too late now. He stepped right, toward the spearman, just enough to look past the hook-horn to see how his friend was doing.

  Karyl carried his staff as if it was all stick and no sword. He advanced steadily toward the arrowhead aimed for his chest. He’d already made up half the distance.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” the bowman said. “I’ll shoot! I will!”

  Karyl kept walking.

  Rob saw the spearman’s eyes go wide beneath a lank hank of black hair. He had already heard the rustle of a boot on fallen, crunchy leaves. He thrust his axe toward the spearman, shouted “Boo!” and wheeled smartly clockwise, swinging the axe horizontally and bringing up his shield.

  The man with the short sword emitted a yelp through a surprisingly neat yellow beard and sat down hard on his loincloth, just in time to prevent Rob’s axe from biting his guts out. Though the smell that wafted from him indicated that he cut fairly close to the Creators’ strict laws of cleanliness, for a forest bandit, his breath suggested he subsisted solely on raw garlic, onions, and the sort of wine that to Rob’s mind represented a waste of good turpentine.

  Rob had already checked his turn. He quickly pivoted back the other way.

  The spearhead scraped along the shield’s Centrosaurus-hide front. Rob guided the weapon safely past and thrust hard with Wanda. The axehead took that bandit right in the mouth with a crackle of teeth smashing.

  The black-haired man dropped his spear to clutch his ruined mouth. He fell down to roll about among fragrant low ferns and dainty shade-loving purple flowers. Him it could only make smell better.

  This time Rob continued his widdershins wheel, in case the swordsman had found his courage and his feet again. He had. He was closing in with his arm cocked well back over his shoulder for a slash at the vulnerable back of Rob’s head. Rob slammed the shield-rim into his face. He staggered back. Rob stepped up and gave him his right shin hard in the balls.

  “If you drop your bow and go,” he heard Karyl say, “I’ll let you live.”

  He’d have sworn the man spoke no louder than a whisper. Yet he heard him clearly as if the dark-bearded lips were almost brushing his own ear.

  His opponents having opted to drop their weapons to hold on to their violated parts and moan about their sorry state, Rob risked a look down the road.

  Karyl was no more than the span of his own outstretched arms from the head of the draw
n arrow. Which was now describing increasingly wild figures of eight in the air.

  Karyl advanced another inexorable step. The bowman shrieked like a frightened child and threw down his bow. The nocked arrow tumbled, to go notch-first into the roadside weeds. The brigand turned and ran as fast as his spindly brown legs would carry him.

  “The quiver too,” Karyl called after him.

  Without breaking stride the bandit shucked the strap off his shoulder and let the half-full pouch of arrows fall. He kept running until he vanished around a bend in the track.

  Karyl had never drawn blade.

  “Right,” Rob said to the men he’d downed. He gave the one with the bloody mouth a boot in the ribs. “Help your friend and be off. Unless you’d like some more?”

  The man scrambled up. He circled wide of Rob to the aid of his partner. His hand left a broad smear of blood on the other’s forearm as he dragged him to his feet. Supporting each other, the pair staggered off into the bushes and were gone.

  The quiver retrieved and slung over one shoulder, Karyl bent over to lay the staff down and pick up the bow. He used his right hand; his left was swaddled to a sort of club. But Rob had glimpsed what lay beneath the stream-washed linen bandages Karyl rewrapped it with each night. He wondered if Karyl thought to hide the wrinkled pink worms of half-grown fingers from Rob, or from himself.

  “Can you use this?” he asked, brandishing the bow at Rob. “It can bring some meat for the pot, and help resolve similar adventures in future.”

  Rob drew the corners of his mouth down toward his jaw. “Not well. I stick what I’m pointing at rather more often than I do my own foot, I suppose.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  Rob expected him to walk the bow back to him. Instead Karyl slung it over his left shoulder, recovered his staff, and simply stood by the road. After a moment Rob realized Karyl was waiting for him to get Little Nell under way and move forward to catch him up.

  He finished hanging his shield back with the baggage piled on his dinosaur’s back and collected the cover for Wanda’s head.

  “That was dead brave,” Rob said as he fitted it back in place. “As brave as anything I’ve seen, perhaps.”

  Karyl grunted. “Physical valor is the most overvalued commodity on Paradise.”

  The shock hit Rob like a plunge in an icy mountain stream. Such a statement was practically heresy. More to the point, Rob was a bard—and celebrating physical courage was a primary stock-in-trade.

  Karyl might just as well have pissed all over the ideal of Beauty. Or gold, or honor, or power—or the intrigue, fucking, and rampant bloodletting those things tended to engender. And did, in any self-respecting song or story.

  Worst of all, Rob more than half-suspected the thing himself.

  “How can you say that?” he blustered.

  “Courage is as common as young men with more sperm in their sacks than sense in their skulls,” Karyl said. “The willingness of men and women to die without question is a virtue primarily for the unworthy, who use it for their gain.”

  “But you were a mercenary leader! A mercenary lord. Wouldn’t getting others to die for your gain define the job?”

  Karyl nodded. “Precisely.”

  “And yet without so much as lifting your hand you chased off a man with arrow nocked, drawn, and aimed,” Rob said, hanging his axe behind the shield. “How do you even explain such a thing?”

  “In the East they say there’s nothing more dangerous than one who lives as if already dead.”

  Rob rubbed his beard. The stresses and strains of the encounter, brief as it was, had made the sweat run briskly down his face for a spell despite the cool forest air.

  “There’s a thing that’s easier said than done, I think.”

  Karyl laughed softly. “It’s not hard when you’ve done it as often as I have.”

  “Done what?”

  “Died.” His mouth tightened inside his neat beard. “It would come as something of a relief, I think. If it took this time.”

  Shaking his head, Rob grasped the lead attached to the complicated bridle fitted over Nell’s head and fringe and clucked her into amiable motion.

  “All good and well,” he said. “But if he had loosed at you, you’d have just knocked the arrow out of the air, right? Or snatched it with your hand like those ninja blokes in Zipangu, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Karyl shrugged.

  “Or died,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  Tirán Rey, King Tyrant, Tyrant—Tyrannosaurus rex. Large bipedal meat-eating dinosaur; 13 meters long, 7 tonnes. Aphrodite Terra’s largest known and most feared predator; notorious even in Nuevaropa, to which it is not native. Sturdier than Allosaurus. Like the matador, encountered rarely as a war-mount.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  The knight-marshal bellowed, “Go!”

  Count Jaume lowered his lance, couched it, and booted his gigantic mount into a charge.

  Facing him across the well-beaten lists, Duke Falk von Hornberg did likewise.

  Melodía drew a deep breath. Princess Fanny took her right hand. Another hand gripped her left. She glanced that way and was amazed to see Abigail Thélème’s eyes fixed on hers.

  “Courage, Día,” she said.

  It was late in the day. The light slanting in across the forest had taken on a buttery hue. The contest everyone expected had finally come to pass.

  The two pale-skinned monsters met. Though hers was the most terrifying possible antagonist, Camellia never flinched. Jaume aimed true.

  Two lances splintered on shields.

  Jaume and Falk rode on to the end of the field, stopped their mounts, and turned them. Their arming-squires ran out to give their masters fresh lances.

  “Tourney rules allow three lances each,” Fina said. Her eyes were bright. She leaned far forward, like a starving woman toward a platter of smoking roast nosehorn.

  Like living avalanches, the great dinosaurs charged each other. Again both lances shattered, with much noise and no visible effect.

  By now the crowd had cheered itself hoarse. Everyone was on their feet. Melodía’s father and even the ancient, feeble Pope were standing up in the Imperial box. Almost lost amid the grown-ups, she saw Montse, her feather crest gone, her dark-gold dreadlocks spilling over the hands that covered her eyes. Is she peeking between her fingers? Melodía wondered.

  Once more the dinosaur knights swapped ends. Once more they accepted fresh lances from their squires. The black-armored rider and the white-armored one wheeled their monsters, leveled lances, charged.

  The stands shook beneath Melodía’s feet to the monsters’ hammering footfalls. Camellia rolled forward in her rocking four-footed lope. Snowflake ran with oddly mincing steps, his tiny two-clawed hands cradled daintily to his chest.

  They met. Jaume’s rounded lance-tip hit the Duke’s armet above the right eye-slit. Falk’s head snapped back. He reeled in his high-cantled saddle as the monsters thundered past each other. His own lance broke ineffectually on Jaume’s white-and-orange shield.

  Camellia’s sides heaved with exertion when Jaume brought her about. Sweat glistened on her pebble-scaled skin. At the field’s far end Snowflake panted, his jaws opened slightly inside the silver muzzle.

  Jaume drew his longsword from its sheath behind his right shoulder. Falk took his axe from the sheath hung from his saddle where it rode before his right thigh.

  Melodía had pulled her friends’ hands up to her breastbone. She shook with fear and nausea. She longed for this to just be over. For her cousin, her lover, her best friend to be safe and well away from here.

  Crying “For the Lady!” and “Hornberg!,” the knights spurred their mounts directly toward each other. The passages with lances were pure formalities of the joust: in real battle a dinosaur knight’s main weapon was his multi-tonne mount.

  Sackbut and king tyrant met with an impact like Chián the Father, King of the Creators, pounding His fists together.

/>   Nose to tail, the dinosaurs went around and around. Their riders belabored each other with a smithy clangor of steel on steel. White dust swirled up like smoke to obscure the fight.

  Through a break in the cloud, Melodía saw Falk’s axe smash into Jaume’s shield. Then Camellia was squatting protectively as her master rolled backward down her rump.

  Melodía screamed. Sour vomit flooded her mouth. Fanny and Abi held her tight, kept her from toppling forward over the rail onto the field.

  She heard clapping from close by. “Fina!” Llurdis snapped.

  “Oh! I’m sorry! Melodía, I didn’t mean—” Fina broke into sobs.

  Prying herself upright, Melodía made herself look. Jaume was already on his feet, shield high, sword held out and down by his side. He gazed up at his rival—into the jagged teeth of the tyrant, dripping saliva a scant four meters from Jaume’s face.

  The cage of silver bars that confined those teeth seemed no more substantial than the honey-crystal straws the vendors peddled in the bazaar.

  “Don’t give up, Melodía,” Fina sniffled. “Remember how Count Jaume climbed up behind Baron Sándoval, threw him from the saddle of his morion, and broke his wicked neck!”

  Possibly in response to a signal from Falk, Snowflake thrust his head forward and roared. That he couldn’t fully open his mouth didn’t seem to hamper his volume.

  The audience shrieked. Women fainted. Men fainted. The war-hadrosaurs penned nearby drowned out the crowd’s ecstatic fear with a fanfare of terror.

  Though his sallet and bevor hid his face, Jaume alone seemed unmoved. He stood erect, defying the fury and blast and charnel stink of the Tyrannosaurus’s roar. The tip of his tourney sword began to tap the ground.

  Melodía had to stifle a giggle she feared would turn to a fully mad laugh. It seemed as if her lover was saying, Is that the best you have? That mindless noise?

  The crowd sensed it too. Slowly they took up the chant: “Jau-me! Jau-me!”

  “It seems Duke Falk remembers Sándoval’s unfortunate example too,” remarked Abi Thélème, letting go of Melodía’s arm now Melodía seemed able to stand by herself. “Look.”