by Victor Milán
Despite the loss of productivity yesterday’s tourney caused, multitudes of Mercedes had roused themselves from sleep to trudge through the murk before dawn up the promontory west of the city. Some had never gone to bed at all but roistered the night away in anticipation of this final extravaganza. Efficiency, the Mercedes would call that.
Trumpets blared from the battlements above the immense bronze-bound gates. The crowd cheered wildly. With a seismic groan, the gates swung open.
Out rode the newly minted Constable on his beautiful dinosaur Camellia. The crowd went mad. The other Companions followed Jaume, no less resplendent than their Captain-General in their white-enameled armor with the Lady’s Mirror blazing red from their breastplates.
Jumping up and down, Montse screamed, “Cousin Jaume! Camellia! I love you!”
Turning his bare head ever so slightly, the Constable caught Montse’s eye. He winked. Camellia bobbed her round-crested head and snorted greeting.
The Ejército Corregir had spent the night noisily mustering in the palace grounds. Behind the Companions came the Conde Montañazul, his face like thunder above his breastplate, leading his own knights. After them rode the other nobles and knights who had sworn to carry the Imperial banner against the obdurate Count Terraroja. Then came the Companion auxiliaries, the Brothers-Ordinary: five hundred mercenaries and aspirants to Companion with white tabards over their armor, led by the veteran Coronel Alma. In a clearing half a kilometer into the woods, Montse knew, they’d swap their heavy coursers for simple, durable marchadors, as the dinosaur knights would do with their war-duckbills.
Last out the gate tramped the Ninth Legion of the Imperial Nodosaurs. First came the skirmishers and arbalesters in nosehorn-leather jerkins and steel caps, followed by artillerists with heavy gauntlets and shovels. Bringing up the rear of the whole great procession marched the main body of pikemen and women, at once stern and almost defiant in their browned sallet helmets and breastplates, their pikes trailed over their shoulders. Consigned to the rear as lowly foot soldiers, they treated that position as a place of honor, reflecting their status as the last to leave the battlefield.
Montse loved a good show like the Merced she was at heart. She hopped and waved and yelled herself hoarse. But exhilarated as she was by the spectacle, she couldn’t quite forget the one figure who was missing from the great event.
* * *
Falk’s arm ached like lost hopes.
He ignored it. He was accustomed to ignoring pain. He had a lifetime’s practice at it.
But he couldn’t ignore the emotions warring inside him: frustration, anger, disappointment. Fear that his trick might be found out.
Not that he’d heard a breath of that happening. Instead, his so-called servant Bergdahl had told him, when he came to wake his master with his usual unconcealed glee, that La Merced buzzed with the rumor that Jaume’s victory was soiled: that he had performed a foul deed, striking and injuring a foe who had yielded.
Bergdahl, of course, had spent the night assiduously spreading the rumor himself.
Falk caught sight of the man now, a gallows figure looming above the mob of Mercedes on the far side of the road. Instead of watching the gorgeous cavalcade, he was watching Falk with a goblin grin.
Bastard, thought Falk. For a moment resentment of the man—and, yes, of Falk’s mother, who pulled Bergdahl’s strings—threatened to overwhelm him.
As if reading his master’s thoughts, Bergdahl grinned wider. Once more Falk could hear the words he had spoken as Albrecht helped prepare the Duke for his appearance.
Don’t be a fool, Bergdahl had told him. Enjoy it. You’ve got free rein, just as we intended. With the Emperor—and his cock-teasing daughter.
Despite himself, Falk felt his lips extending in a smile. Yes, he thought, I should enjoy those things. I’ve sacrificed so much for them.
* * *
Alone in a tower that flanked the Imperial Gate, the Princess Melodía stood watching through the pointy-arched window until Count Jaume and his great cream-and-orange mount vanished among the trees.
Turning away, she collapsed onto a stool and wept.
Part Three
El Jardín de la Belleza y la Verdad
(The Garden of Beauty and Truth)
Chapter 21
Raptor irritante, Irritante, Vexer—Velociraptor mongoliensis. Nuevaropan raptor; 2 meters long, 50 centimeters high, 15 kilograms. Commonly kept as a pet, though prone to be quarrelsome. Wild vexer-packs are often pests but pose little threat to humans.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
FRANCIA, COUNTY PROVIDENCE
“I thought this Garden of Beauty and Truth was supposed to be a new thing under the clouds.”
The morning air was cool and still, enriched by the smells of moist soil and fresh growth. A pair of robins flew across La Rue Impériale, the Imperial High Road that led from the distant Channel coast to the not-at-all distant Shield Mountains with their peaks still white with snow. Beside it flowed a wide stream called the River Bonté, or Bounty.
The travelers had left Telar’s Wood for easy hills and wide fields green with early-season crops. Ahead waited Providence town, the county’s seat and principal settlement. Rob Korrigan rode Little Nell, holding his tattered paisley parasol over his head. Trudging alongside, Karyl failed to respond to his leading statement. Nothing new in that.
Rob forged on regardless. “I see that peasants still sweat in the fields,” he said, waving at mostly bare brown bodies, shaded by wide woven-grass hats, bent over a field of stakes twined with bean plants. “Doubtless to feed the nobles who stroll in their gardens and philosophize at their ease. It’s all still the same.”
“You’ve tilled the soil yourself, have you?” Karyl asked.
“What difference does that make? I too am a son of Paradise. Her soil made my flesh, her rock my bones.”
“The nobles could say the same.”
Rob scoffed. “The difference is, they’re born high, I low. I’m one with the toilers in the fields.”
“If you say so.”
Rob retreated into a slightly sullen silence. He knew he’d come off second best.
Nothing new in that either.
The pumice metaling the Imperial High Road crunched and squeaked beneath Nell’s feet. Even for Nuevaropa, the way was wide and well maintained. Rob said as much.
“Providence is a wealthy province, even if it’s a small one,” Karyl said. “They do well from trade across the mountains.”
“Not all of it licit, I warrant!”
Karyl laughed a rare, soft laugh. “I’d be shocked if it were.”
“But you’re a nobleman! I’m shocked that you’re not shocked.”
“Ex-ruler of a March, don’t forget—as close to the Shields as Providence. And I was thrown on my own resources at an early age. I’m no more a stranger to smuggling than I suspect you are.”
Rob chose to let that pass in dignified silence.
“If it makes you feel better, as voyvod I did do my best to stamp out smuggling.”
“Whatever for?”
“It conduced to disorder.”
“And how do you feel about it now?”
“That if this current job falls through,” Karyl said, “running the border pays better than juggling begging bowls.”
A wagon appeared over the hill in front of them. It was tall and narrow, piled high with crates and bails precariously fastened with a drunken spiderweb of hemp rope, swaying behind a single gaunt nosehorn with a forward-curving horn. An old woman and a much younger man, perhaps a boy, sat in the box.
As they passed, both wagoneers scanned the travelers closely, with looks of suspicion on faces shadowed beneath their conical hats. The youth clutched a pitchfork across his washboard chest like a talisman.
“These people must be deeply frightened,” Karyl said when the wagon was well behind them, “if they’re made that nervous by a pair of ragtag wayfarers.”
“You noticed,�
�� Rob said.
It was a cheap shot. And utterly unjustified: Rob knew those dark raptor eyes missed very little. He wasn’t even sure why he was trying to provoke his companion just now. It wasn’t a particularly good idea, for a multitude of reasons. But ah, when has that stopped me before?
In any event, as usual, Karyl ignored the bait.
“Our services might actually be needed here,” he said. “A good sign, I suppose.”
* * *
“Just take this street that leads southeast from the square,” the laborer said.
He rested his brick hod beside him on the main square’s cobbles. His hair was spiked and his face, well seamed and cured by the sun, streamed from a ducking in the water that spewed into the central fountain from the mouth of a fancifully carven fish. Between the stone fish stood figures of naked people, who appeared to be representing allegories that Rob had no clue of. A circle of life-sized statues of the Eight Creators stood at the fountain’s center, at the focus of all the piscine water sprays and nude adorations.
The fountain struck Rob as redundant, given that the Bonté ran right along the northwest edge of the square. Nell just stuck her big beaked face into the water.
“It’s not half a kilometer out of town,” the hod-carrier said over the dinosaur’s cheerful slurping. “Can’t miss it: it’s Count Étienne’s old château. He gave it to the Garden when he became a convert.”
Rob thanked him. He and Karyl set off down the broad avenue, away from the stall vendors’ clamor. Chuckling placidly to herself, Nell trailed after at her rope-lead’s length.
Providence town’s buildings were tall, narrow, and whitewashed, crowned with steep roofs of ceramic tiles that glistened blue, yellow, red, orange, purple, green, white. Music tinkled from a dozen directions. Between them folk bustled along about their lives. Children darted everywhere, laughing and yelling. Dogs chased scratchers under carts and between the legs of the nosehorns who drew them; in turn the smaller dogs were chased by domesticated vexers, squalling, toothy bundles of bright feathers and fury. Wafts of local herbs, exotic spices, and hot olive oil announced a thousand suppers cooking.
“It’s all so ordinary,” Rob said. “Masons pile stones on one another. Carpenters hammer. Merchants and customers haggle. The idle gossip on corners. Housewives shout to each other across window boxes filled with insipidly pretty flowers. It’s as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.”
“Life goes on,” Karyl said. “Even in the midst of war. Although I suspect this Count Guillaume’s depredations have yet to reach this far.”
A cat with long white fur slouched atop a garden wall. It paused in its toilet to regard the pair with green suspicious eyes. Rob favored it with a ferocious scowl, which it ignored.
“And that damned insouciant beast’s the only one to pay us the least attention!”
“Providence sits astride a major trade route,” Karyl said. “It’s used to outsiders. Far stranger sorts than we wander down out of Ovda, my friend.”
“Shouldn’t a patrol have stopped us by now? Or at least given us the hard eye? The bastards can’t resist leaning on outlanders. Especially ones as trail-worn as we.”
“You sound disappointed,” Karyl said.
Rob grimaced. “Well—at the very least the Providencers strike me as over-casual for people suffering regular raids.”
They passed a stall where an elderly man selling dried fruit was arguing with a middle-aged woman with short tawny hair and a carpenter’s apron of many pockets.
“You can have your strict representationalism,” the vendor said. “Give me a painting with allegory. Beauty to the eye and a moral to match.”
Rob cocked a brow. “Pardon me,” he said, “but are you adherents of the Garden of Truth and Beauty?”
“Beauty and Truth,” the woman corrected.
“Whichever.”
The Providentials laughed. “Of course not!” the man exclaimed. “We’re working folk. Do we look like we have time for such frivolity?”
As he and Karyl went on, Rob let his breath slip out between pursed lips. “I begin to see why the Garden found Providence such fertile soil.”
A swath of worn granite slabs, with grass sprouting between them, marked the edge of town. They were evidently remnants of an ancient wall, anciently torn down.
As the hod-carrier had said, there was no missing the villa housing the Garden of Beauty and Truth. The setting sun, a red ball through the clouds, cast diffuse shadows of the great house, with its three stories, multiple gables, walls, and outbuildings, in the travelers’ faces. Farther east stretched cultivated fields, flowering fruit-orchards, a rumpling of gentle tree-crowned hills.
Outside a sun-faded blue wood gate, a meter-high stone hitching post stood beside a blooming fig tree and a mossy watering tank. Little Nell rubbed her brow affectionately against Rob’s ribs as he tied her tether to the tarnished brass ring. He scratched the skin stretched drum-tight over her frill. She clucked appreciatively. He hung a nose bag over her horn and she settled into munching oats and millet.
“What about your belongings?” Karyl asked, nodding at the baggage piled on the hook-horn’s back.
“People are trusting here, my friend,” said Rob. “They left valuables unattended all over town. Didn’t you notice?”
“And you’re just the man to disabuse them of their naïveté?”
Rob laughed. “If you can restrain your impulse to revert to smuggling until necessary, I can keep my light fingers on a leash.”
Karyl leaned his own pack against the post. Rob drummed his fingers thoughtfully on his lute case, slung behind Nell’s saddle. He took up his axe instead, and unsheathed its head.
“I’m surprised,” Karyl said. “They’re art lovers here. What if they’d prefer you to play for them?”
“What?” Rob scoffed. “These Gardeners have famously refined tastes. They’d never fancy the likes of my ribaldry and thick-fingered fumbling.”
He brandished the axe. “No, it’s necks they pay us to strum with steel, not strings.”
Slinging Wanda over his shoulder, he knocked on the gate. A young woman in a straw hat and a linen smock with green and soil stains by the knees answered. She showed neither surprise nor reluctance at their request to see the sect’s leader. Instead she led them around the villa to a handsomely carved side gate. She opened it and went back to her weeds.
Inside, the head of the Garden of Beauty and Truth strolled among profuse greenery and blossoms and the buzzing of bees. Even without Aphrodite’s description, there would have been no mistaking Bogardus. The erstwhile priest of Maia was a tall man, dressed in a simple grey silk gown trimmed with dark purple. He had a large, fine head, brow high and wide beneath hair the color of unpolished iron. His eyes were grey, his nose straight, his mouth wide, with lips thick enough to be sensuous without being coarse. Despite his professed pacifism, he moved with a grace that to Rob suggested a trained warrior.
As he walked he spoke in a mellifluous baritone, cradling an orange rose in his hands. After him, rapt as scratcher chicks following their mother, half a dozen young male and female acolytes trooped along an aisle with roses on one side and lilac fountains on the other. Their garments were as simple as their leader’s—and like his, Rob couldn’t help noticing, made of expensive material. No grubby sackcloth here.
In the normal course of life, Rob Korrigan was not a diffident man. Yet he stood by the gate shifting weight from boot to boot, uncertain how to proceed. Karyl gave him no help. He stood holding his grounded staff, a distant look on his face. Rob felt a flash of concern that he might be straying from the here-and-now.
Bogardus noticed them. “Gentlemen,” he called. “Welcome to my garden. How may I serve you?”
He let his right hand drop from the rose. A thorn caught at the palm heel. Crimson welled against pale skin.
Chapter 22
Maris, La Dama Fortuna, Lady Fortune—Baroness of the Creators: Dui ☱ (Lake)—The
Youngest Daughter. Represents Fortune and the Sea; justice, fate, mariners, gambling; balance and imbalance; Equilibrium; and Wild Water. Also fish and swimming reptiles. Known for her caprice. Aspect: a slight albino woman with blue eyes and long, windblown white hair, dressed in a white robe, with the taiji-tu in her raised left palm. Sacred Animal: terrible mouth sea dragon (often shown devouring a man). Color: white. Symbol: a silver eight-spoked ship’s wheel.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Eldest Brother,” gasped the brown-haired young man who stood nearest Bogardus, “you’ve hurt yourself.”
“It’s nothing,” Bogardus said with a smile, “except for a reminder of a truth. Here, lend me a kerchief, if you will.” Several were thrust immediately toward him. He accepted one with a nod and thanks and began to wrap it around the wound.
“It’s a rare rose,” he said, handing it to a young woman with chestnut hair bound up in a silver fillet. Her green eyes lingered on Rob in a way he liked. “A variety developed by the former Comte Carles dels Flors, father of our own dear preceptor, Mor Jaume.”
“Imagine that,” said Rob, impressed and trying not to show it.
Recalling his mission, he puffed himself up and took a step forward.
“I am Rob Korrigan, and this is my lord the Voyvod Karyl Bogomirskiy.”
Bogardus’s followers looked at him with handsome faces as blank as fresh writing scrolls. Rob raised a brow. Karyl was a celebrated captain, his exploits widely sung. Even here in the South, only his nemesis Jaume’s fame surpassed his.
“So I reckon you don’t spend much time in taverns,” Rob muttered under his breath.
But Bogardus nodded and smiled. “Your arrival is warmly anticipated, gentlemen,” he said, stepping up with forthright stride and hand extended.
“No gentleman I,” said Rob, abruptly feeling even more contrary than usual.
“The Eldest is just being courteous,” piped up the youth who’d pointed out the wound to Bogardus’s hand. “All are equally gentle in the Creators’ eyes.”