by Victor Milán
The Alemán had backed his mount several steps away from his foe. He gestured with his axe. Falk’s arming-squire, Albrecht, pale as Snowflake’s hide, scuttled out to hold the reins while Falk dismounted.
“The boy’s dead brave, anyway,” Fanny said. “I wouldn’t fancy getting that close to that head, muzzle or not!”
* * *
Duke Falk fumed silently as he swung his armored leg over his saddle and easily dropped the final meter to the ground. Attendants ran out to throw a blanket over Snowflake’s head, rendering the monster docile.
Listen to them chant his name! he thought furiously. As if I hadn’t just unseated him!
Technically Falk had won a point. Should the fight end in mutual exhaustion or incapacitation—as two bouts already had—it would give him the match, this tourney, and command of the Army of Correction.
And here the mob was chanting for the man he’d bested.
Jaume’s almost inhuman defiance of Snowflake’s roar had won them, of course. It simply didn’t seem possible not to quail when a tyrant challenged a mere man. Not when it could put to flight even three-tonne war-trained hadrosaurs.
Falk drew in a deep breath. Even with the cooling breezes off the Canal, the afternoon heat made his dark-enameled plate a furnace. Sweat slicked his body inside the formed steel and sopping-wet padding. His breathing roared like surf in his ears. Each exhalation’s smell was stronger than the reek of dust and dinosaur dung.
Despite himself, Falk grinned inside his visor. He is a hero, and no mistake, he thought.
As if to counter that he spotted Bergdahl, standing at the shady end of the commoners’ seats. He had his arms folded, head tipped to one side, and a particularly pointed expression on his goblin face. Hada, they’d call it here.
Falk could hear his servant’s sardonic voice in his head: Remember the plan.
Yes. He remembered.
But he would see what this living legend was truly made of. And then—who knew?
Could my mother really cavil at victory? he asked himself.
Of course she could. Somehow Dowager Duchess Margrethe could always twist whatever he did, however triumphant, into failure of some kind.
Simmering, twitching his two-kilo axe in his right gauntlet like a willow withe, he began to stalk the waiting Conde dels Flors.
* * *
Warily Jaume watched his foe approach. His right kidney and hip hurt from his landing. He’d wrenched his right knee. It would soon swell, he knew. But he trusted it to carry him long enough.
He frequently practiced falling off Camellia in full armor. Unfortunately, mere practice never fully matched real combat. Despite his acrobatic skills and Camellia’s well-trained help, he’d hurt himself. If not badly enough to slow him down.
He felt chagrin. No enemy had ever unseated him from Camellia before. He’s good, he thought. But I knew that already.
He grinned inside his bevor. This will keep me from getting complacent, at least.
It was neither the young Duke’s size nor strength that most impressed Jaume as Falk closed in. It was the easy, fluid way he moved despite the way his armor constrained the play of his joints. It reminded Jaume of a stalking matador.
Just out of weapon’s reach Falk stopped. He let his axe hang from its thong, which he had wound around his vambrace, while he undid the straps of his falcon shield. He threw the shield aside and raised his head to meet Jaume’s gaze.
Seen through the visor-slits, Falk’s eyes were calm as sapphire chips. Jaume began to remove his own shield.
* * *
“Breathe, Día,” Fanny urged.
Jaume sprang back away from yet another axe-stroke that looked as if it could take his head off.
“Ohh,” Melodía moaned.
The crowd cheered Jaume’s escape. They’d sat down again, to Melodía’s relief, since her legs didn’t want to support her. But it sounded as if the applause was getting fainter.
“He keeps running away,” Llurdis grumbled.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Lupe said.
Llurdis rounded on her, face clouding. “Ladies,” Fanny said warningly.
“Don’t you see?” asked fight fan Fina. “Jaume’s trying to tire him out.”
“Also that big Northern brute will smash him in half if he ever connects,” Lupe said, with perhaps unnecessary fervor.
Fanny gave her a look. “Sorry,” Lupe said.
Melodía forced herself not to look away. Jaume did move with phenomenal agility and speed. But his armor was heavy, and hot, although the sun had fallen so low that attenuated shadow-warriors acted out the duel against the garish screens at the lists’ western end. From her own martial training Melodía knew how rapidly just being in a fight drained a person.
And despite his bulk Falk was no mere lumbering titan. The first time she saw him, Melodía thought the Duke thick around the middle. Having seen more of him around court, she realized the reason he didn’t have a wedge-shaped back like Jaume was that he had wide hips. His torso was a slab of muscle that gave him strength to maneuver almost as quickly as his slighter foe.
And the crowd, inclined as it was to love the handsome young Imperial Champion, was getting impatient with his delaying tactics.
As was the young Duke. He lunged, swinging a two-handed blow. Jaume danced back. This time he leaned forward to tap Falk’s breastplate with his sword before he could recover.
Falk roared. He swung backhand. The Catalan took a skip-step back, leaned his upper body away. The axe swished harmlessly past. Jaume closed again.
This time he tapped the top of Falk’s round armet with the end of his longsword.
Bellowing like Snowflake in full fury, Falk cocked his axe over his right shoulder. Rocking his weight onto his rear foot he made ready to bull-rush his foe.
Jaume charged him first. Grasping his sword hilt with one hand and the unsharpened ricasso above the cross guard with the other, he used the leverage that added to slam Falk across the visor. The blow toppled the already off-balance Falk.
He fell with a sound like a chest full of pots and pans thrown off a castle wall.
The crowd fell silent. Then it surged to its feet like a cresting wave, shrieking adulation.
Melodía’s ladies were dancing in place, hugging each other, cheering. Melodía still sat huddled around the knot of misery in her belly. It felt as if she’d taken a quarterstaff thrust.
Falk seemed genuinely stunned. He might have shaken off a much greater fall from tyrant-back. But Jaume had given him no chance to prepare. He’d landed flat on his back and driven the air from his lungs.
Jaume stood over him. “Do you yield, your Grace?” he shouted above the din.
The Alemán stirred as if trying to sit up. Jaume’s coal-scoop sallet turned toward the knight-marshal, who ran up with a brace of assistants.
Sieur Duval’s square, hard face was stern. He was known to disapprove of Jaume as a frivolous fop. But his exchange with Falk over the cocksure Gallego de Viseu had clearly soured his blood toward the Duke. Still, Duval was famed for ironbound, if not iron-headed, probity; otherwise he would never have endured two decades in command of the Imperial bodyguard.
“He does not yield,” Duval bellowed in his parade-ground voice. Even the poor folk away high up in the cheap seats must have heard him clearly. “Fight on!”
At last Falk sat up. Jaume raised his sword high, brought it whistling down toward the heavily reinforced crown of Falk’s helmet.
And Falk threw up his left arm, shouting hoarsely, “I yield me!”
Too late. The longsword hit his forearm. The steel vambrace buckled loudly. Though not as loudly as his forearm breaking.
For a moment it was as if everyone had turned to stone. Then the bubbling began: “He yielded! He had yielded! Foul, foul! The Imperial Champion struck a yielded man!”
Duval hesitated. Then he stepped up to seize Jaume’s sword wrist.
“His Grace waited too long to yield,” he cr
ied. “There was no foul.”
He flung Jaume’s arm skyward. The Count’s sword stood up against the sky.
“Bravo!” Princess Fanny shouted in her loudest voice. It had a nice edge of brass to it. “Bravo!”
“Bravo!” the crowd echoed. “Bravo!”
Melodía jumped to her feet. She was screaming now too. She was proud of Jaume. He had fought brilliantly, triumphed despite the desperate setback of being unseated. But mostly she was wild with joy that he survived.
But still she heard—was it really in her ears, or just her mind?—the invidious whispering: Dishonor. He struck a yielded foe.
It was a lie. But somehow she knew it would cling to her lover like a foul smell, and haunt him like the memory of loss.
Chapter 19
La Vida-que-Viene, Life-to-Come—A radical sect of the Church of Nuevaropa that preached self-denial, holding that the Creators’ mandates in The Books of the Law were metaphorical, and sometimes even meant the opposite of what they said. Despite its heterodoxy, which crossed the line into heresy when some sectaries claimed that sin could lead to eternal damnation, the Life-to-Come enjoyed a substantial following in the early eighth century.
—LA GRAN HISTORIA DEL IMPERIO DEL TRONO COLMILLADO
She heard him knock, late that night. Heard the clatter of the latch and the hinge-creak as Pilar admitted him. With a silent smile at her mistress, the maid withdrew to her own room and softly shut the door.
Her lips suddenly dry, Melodía looked up from the window table where she read by the glow of a brass lamp. He wore a loose robe, and his orange hair hung unbound about his shoulders. Lamplight from the corridor outside surrounded him with a golden nimbus until he pulled the door to behind him.
Laying down her book, she rose to meet him. “Jaume,” she said, feeling her voice vibrate low in her throat.
He smiled. “My love,” he said.
She drew her long white gown up her body. She felt the slight breeze through the window, faintly cool on the fine coating of sweat on her skin.
Jaume helped her pull the gown off over her head. Beneath she wore nothing but the fine silver and polished-coral ankle chain he had given her when first they lay together. She had asked him for a token.…
As he tossed the gown over the back of her chair, she unbound her hair. It slid down over her shoulders in a dark cascade.
He caught her in a powerful embrace. Kissing her deeply, he ran a hand down her ribs. At the point of her hip it changed course. His fingertips tracked across her lower belly and down to her bush.
He cupped his hand over her and began to tease his finger through the dense, curly hair. Melodía shivered when its tip brushed her inner lips. The finger pressed in and up. It found the pearl of flesh in its folds at the upper juncture, pressed, began to revolve.
She moaned around his tongue and began to rotate her hips in time with his manipulations.
He slid the finger down, thrust it inside her. It hooked and began to press upward.
She uttered a small scream into his mouth. The pleasure exploded inside her. His fingertips exerted such delicious pressure as to almost become pain.
She went up on the balls of her feet. Keeping the pressure on, he leaned into her and began to walk her backward.
The hard table edge caught her just below the fold of her ass. Holding her by a hand across her shoulder blades he guided her down onto it. She barely noticed when she bumped her head on the whitewashed wall beside the window. The smell of night flowers blooming in the yard below flowed across her face like cool ointment. Fireflies as long as her hand winked at her through the fine netting over the open window.
His right hand never relenting, he urged her thighs apart with his left. She eagerly complied. He dropped to his knees. He smiled almost mischievously up the naked length of her, his dear face framed by her breasts and bearded by her pubic fur.
He buried his face in her and began to lick with long, powerful strokes. She moaned and grasped the sides of his head.
After Melodía’s long drought, her champion knew exactly what she needed. She came quickly and loudly. He kept licking her as she screamed and climaxed again and again.
When she could take no more, and pleasure reached the verge of pain, he stopped. Pulling away from her, he rose to his feet—with only a twinge from the stiffness in his joints—and quickly undressed.
When he was nude, she smiled and tried to sit up, reaching for his hard cock. He intercepted her face with his. His weight bore her back down.
She uttered a shuddering groan as he plunged deep inside her.
He fucked her hard and fast. His philosophy of art allowed for embellishment, but prized directness.…
Her months of anxious waiting spent themselves in shuddering waves. Then he was gripping her hard with his wiry-strong arms, crushing her with his chest as he drove himself into her again and again.
He roared like a tyrant bull as his release joined hers.
* * *
Afterward they lay gently tangled on her bed, barely conscious of moving to it, in the shared soft glow of pleasure and amber lamplight.
“I’m surprised your guardian matadora allowed us this time alone,” he said.
“She’s sleeping soundly in her chambers down the hall,” Melodía said. “I’m surprised you don’t hear. She snores like an old nosehorn bull.”
“Is that what that sound is? I thought it was an old nosehorn on the palace grounds somewhere. Maybe dozing at his capstan.”
He raised a questioning brow. Her eyes tried to drink him all in. She actually blessed the dimness in the room: it made it easier for her mind to gloss over the bruises, already turning a dark rainbow of blue and green and yellow and black, that mottled his hip and thigh and arm as merely shadows.
“She’s got a taste for wine,” Melodía said. “Maybe too much. She resists it with her usual steel will. Mostly. Tonight her fellow dueñas encouraged her to drink as freely as she wished.”
“Did they, now?” He grinned like a schoolboy to her earlier schoolgirl. “So we’ve got them to thank?”
Melodía nodded. “Uh-huh. They tease her, mercilessly sometimes, that if everyone believed as she does, the race would die off from failure to reproduce.”
“Ah. So she’s a follower of La Vida-que-Viene, then?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s a frightful bore.”
“How sad for her. I can’t see the attraction of the Life-to-Come sect’s doctrines, myself. I’d never deny their right to believe what they wish: there’s nothing uglier than trying to punish people for their thoughts. Still—I can’t help but see the irony that they whisper the loudest that the Garden of Beauty and Truth in Providence is heretical, when it’s their beliefs that contradict The Books of the Law.”
“They also criticize you. Old Pío is one of them, though he can’t admit the heterodoxy.”
“I know too well. He hates my order. He’d revoke our charter in a heartbeat if your father would let him.”
“I’m glad Daddy won’t. I don’t know why my father pays attention to him, Pope or not.”
“Because Pío tells him what he wants to hear. If you’ll forgive my talking that way about your father.”
“It’s only true. An understatement, really.”
She peered intently into his face. “Is that what’s been bothering you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Since you’ve been back—it’s as if there’s some kind of barrier between us. We’ve always talked freely. It’s why I fell in love with you. Well—one reason among many.”
His brow furrowed. She pressed a finger to his lips.
“No. Please don’t try to tell me it’s just how preoccupied you’ve been with readying the army to march out. Please.”
“Forgive me, my love. There are things I’ve been reluctant to burden you with.”
“Do you think not trusting me hurts less than hearing what you don’t want to tell me would? Aren’t we betrothed?
Well—nearly?”
He took her hand in both of his. “Of course I trust you, my love. And of course we’re betrothed—in spirit at least. I wanted to spare you pain.”
“If I wanted to be spared pain,” she said, “would I have let myself fall in love with the Imperial Champion?”
He laughed. “I never could outflank you mentally. Very well. You remember my glorious victory that capped the Princes’ War? My defeat of the renegade mercenary?”
“Karyl Bogomirskiy? The Slavo who commanded the White River Legion? The servants tell me people are still singing about that in every tavern in the city.”
“It’s all a lie. Down to the punctuation.”
It felt as if a ball of cold wet ash had materialized inside her stomach. “What do you mean?”
“In the months I spent in Alemania after the war,” he said, “I investigated Voyvod Karyl as thoroughly as I could. I found many things not to admire about him. He was a harsh man. I heard reports, well attested, that he was trying to squeeze pleasure itself out of his domain.”
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not. Crazy as it seems, he hated all passion with a passion. He blamed emotion for the sum of human misery. So he tried to enforce a grey uniformity on the Misty March, and force all its energy toward creating and sustaining his mercenary war machine.”
“But that’s monstrous. Shouldn’t you have destroyed him for that alone?”
“I’ve fought monsters my whole life, mi amor. But so far as I could ascertain, ruthless though Karyl was, he was never cruel. The mother of the man who usurped his throne, now, she was a monster, by all accounts. She murdered Karyl’s father and his friends, and tortured people for sport. But when he reconquered his March, he simply had her beheaded. The usurper himself, his own half brother, he allowed to go unharmed into exile. No, in his own way, Karyl was forbearing. Even merciful.”
Melodía made a skeptical sound deep in her throat.
“He was a remarkable field captain,” Jaume said. “Probably the best in Nuevaropa.”
She frowned. “But that’s you!”