by Victor Milán
“If you say so,” Rob said.
“You’re most welcome, both of you,” Bogardus said, shaking Karyl’s hand. “Aphrodite told me she’d sent you.”
Rob blinked. “Aphrodite?” Karyl said.
“Indeed. She visited us here several weeks back. She said she’d engaged not just one but two champions to help us.”
“How in Fae’s name did she get here ahead of us?” Rob burst out.
He instantly covered his mouth in alarm. He knew it made him look foolish. But question the Creators’ existence as I might, I know the Faerie Folk are real. And not lightly to be invoked.
“You know her ways,” Bogardus said cheerfully. “She’s a witch, you know.”
Rob chuckled unkindly at Karyl’s frown.
Bogardus gestured at the bandage covering Karyl’s left hand. “You’re injured?”
“Nothing of consequence.”
“It’s so good of you to come to us in our hour of need. I’m honored to meet you, my lord.”
“Thank you, but I’m no lord,” Karyl said, and belied it with a bow of perfect courtliness.
Bogardus smiled with what seemed warmth rather than amusement. He turned the sun of that smile on Rob.
“And you, Master Korrigan,” Bogardus said, taking Rob’s hand likewise in both of his own. They were surprising hands, square and strong—hands that did things. “An honor to meet you as well. I hadn’t dared hope that we might acquire two such warriors of note. Truly the Creators smile upon us in our need.”
“The pleasure and honor are mine, Lord Bogardus,” said Rob.
Bogardus shook his head. “I’m no lord either, my friend. A simple philosopher, rather. And a teacher—that I consider my highest accolade.”
“But I do have to say,” Rob said, his tongue dragging its feet in his mouth, “I’m no mighty warrior. A dinosaur master, aye. Also a minstrel. A dab hand in a tavern brawl, I admit, but a champion never.”
“He’s my comrade,” Karyl said. Rob looked at him in surprise. His cheeks felt unaccustomedly warm beneath his beard. “He’s got more talents than he’s confessing. You’ll need them as well as mine.”
“So Aphrodite told me,” Bogardus said.
He turned to the acolytes. “Sisters, Brothers, business beckons, of a nature with which I’d rather not burden your souls. Please excuse me to speak with my guests.”
With a marked lack of the graciousness that radiated from their leader, the gaggle broke up and flocked into the villa. Rob caught more than one look of startling virulence shot toward him and his companion. Not all the Gardeners welcome our warlike gifts, he thought.
The chestnut-haired woman paused on the marble steps. The glance she cast over her bare shoulder at Rob was not at all like her companions’.
Rob thumbed his moustache as she vanished through finely glazed doors. It’s a frightful job we’re taking on, he told himself, but it may yet have its compensations.
* * *
“It’s hard for me to admit this,” Bogardus said, “but we need help. Specifically, we need your help.”
They sat at ease on curved marble benches surrounded by garden. Out of consideration for their host’s sensitive nose, Rob resisted the temptation to take off his boots. It was a pleasant break to be off his feet after so many weary days on the road.
The setting sun shone through scarlet-flowered vines lacing the arbor that sheltered the table, dappling Bogardus’s care-seamed face. Water sang gently in a nearby marble pool, spilled from a ewer on the marble shoulder of the Creator Maris, goddess of Fortune and the Sea. Both of which, Rob knew too well, were notorious for their changeability—and capacity for sudden destruction.
“We’re men of war,” Karyl said. “The Garden is devoted to peace, if I’ve heard correctly. What help can we give you?”
“You’ve heard correctly. From my friend Aphrodite you’ve also heard how sorely beset we are.”
The young woman with the chestnut hair and deep reddish-purple gown materialized from the dusk to place a silver ewer and three flagons before them on the round marble table. Rob caught her eye and grinned, leaning back and cocking one bandy leg over the other.
“A servant?” he said sidelong to Bogardus.
Bogardus smiled as he poured Rob’s flagon full. “We all serve the Garden, in our ways.”
“We gladly do what we can, Master Korrigan,” the woman said, her voice low and thrilling. She turned and walked away. If she made an effort to subdue the movements of her buttocks beneath the thin fabric, it was not apparent to Rob.
He gulped wine. Even he recognized at once it was too good for such cavalier treatment. So he gulped a bit more and slipped a glance at Karyl.
Though the day was still warm, Karyl sat with his cloak held close about him. An arm clamped his walking stick with its concealed swordblade propped against his shoulder. His right hand held his bandaged left as if to hide it.
“We still believe in peace,” Bogardus said. “But our neighbors seem bent on forcing us to choose between it and life.”
“I understand your Garden follows the philosophy of Count Jaume,” said Rob, helping himself to a refill. It was really excellent wine, and his throat was parched from travel. He carefully did not look at Karyl. “Who happens to be the Empire’s foremost warrior. And surely no pacifist, so?”
“Indeed not. We do follow Jaume’s precepts on beauty and morality. They’re wise and beautiful themselves.”
He reached to caress one of the woody vines. “And as we’ve grown our own version of them, we shape his teachings to our own needs. As gardeners do.”
“And now you’re reshaping them to encompass war,” Karyl said.
“Purely in self-defense.”
“Fair enough.” He tossed back the last of his own wine and set the mug down with a tunk. “What’s your situation?”
“As you no doubt saw on your journey, ours is a fertile land, placid and well-favored. Our people are prosperous and cosmopolitan, thanks to trade caravans passing along La Rue Impériale. Peace was the norm here for many years before our Garden’s seeds were ever planted in Providence’s soil.”
“So why haven’t your neighbors overrun you before?” Rob asked.
“Providentials may never have been warlike, but they have a tradition of standing up fiercely against invaders.”
“I note you say ‘they’ instead of ‘we.’”
Bogardus shrugged. “I’m a relatively recent arrival. I’ve come to love this land and its people. A good thing, I suppose, since I now somehow seem charged with responsibility for the welfare of both.”
“Does Providence still have any kind of army?” Karyl asked.
“The Counts’ income has always enabled them to maintain a small but well-equipped force of house-shields.”
“But no longer,” Karyl said.
“No longer. Count Étienne has accepted our Garden doctrines and joined as a humble Brother, leaving a Council of Master Gardeners—the Garden Council—in charge of the province. A few of his men accepted our ways. Most sought their fortunes elsewhere. And some”—he sighed—“some have joined Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur or his allies.”
“Crève Coeur,” Rob said. “Broken Heart. Appropriate, if they’re back of the raids.”
“Knights and barons?” Karyl asked.
Bogardus sighed.
“They have to look to their own lands and castles, they claim. In truth, I don’t think all of them look with favor on our experiment here. Egalitarianism is a key tenet of our beliefs. And without a seated count to compel them with oaths of fealty—” He ended with a shrug.
“Threats?” Karyl asked.
“Guillaume’s the strongest and worst of our bad neighbors. The Shield Mountains protect our northeastern frontier; Grand Turan currently finds trade with the Empire more profitable than war, and the neighboring pasha suppresses raids across the passes. Which are difficult propositions at the best of times.
“Three Imperial
provinces surround Providence: Guillaume’s to the north, Métairie Brulée in the west, and Castaña south across the Spañol border.”
“Natural boundaries?” Karyl asked.
“If you came in by the High Road you passed over the Lisette River. It’s our border with Crève Coeur as well as part of the frontier with Métairie Brulée. The other half of our Métairie Brulée border is L’Eau Riant, the Laughing Water, which also divides us from Spaña and County Castaña.”
“I see.”
“Since Providence is now without a ruler, as they see it, our neighboring magnates believe its wealth—and its people—are free for their taking. For now it’s mostly Guillaume’s knights who afflict us: raiding incessantly, plundering, burning, raping, butchering. Lately they’ve taken to capturing our people for slaves.”
“Slaves?” Rob said. “But that’s forbidden by both Creators and Imperial law!”
“Ah, but you see, my friends, no one cares. After all, we are merely heretics. We’ve even heard of voices being raised in the Imperial Court to wage war against us, lest our beliefs bring a Grey Angel Crusade down on the Tyrant’s Head.”
For a moment it was as if a breath of ice had puffed down from the high peaks. Rob made the sign of the Lady’s Mirror. Not to avert evil, exactly: the Grey Angels were evil’s polar opposite, the supernatural avengers of righteousness.
It was the zeal—and the thoroughness—with which they avenged it that made them so well feared.
He glanced at Karyl. His companion wore an unaccustomed look of discomfort behind his beard. Rob couldn’t help a certain smug satisfaction. He felt an almost malicious glee in seeing Karyl’s distress.
Perhaps I owe him better, he thought, with a wisp of guilt—not the most familiar of emotions to Rob Korrigan. He knew that Karyl’s skepticism, his disbelief in Creators and Grey Angels and magic and the Fae and all that mystic lot, had formed the one constant in a life full of travail and uncertainty.
With the regrowing of his severed hand, now all but complete, even that bedrock had cracked beneath his feet. Talking about Grey Angels was like running a jagged fingernail over the ultrasensitive back of his budding hand.
“What do you want us to do, Eldest Brother?” asked Rob, belatedly remembering his role as mediator.
Bogardus laughed. “First, please, just call me Bogardus. I’m trying to break the Gardeners of giving me titles I don’t actually claim.”
“Fair enough.”
“And second—”
Bogardus leaned forward across the table, his eyes glittering like daggers.
“Teach my people how to fight.”
Chapter 23
Rasguñador, Scratcher—Various species of Oviraptor. Nuevaropa breeds: 1–1.5 meters, 5–10 kilograms. Bipedal; short, powerful, toothless beaks. True omnivorous dinosaurs, named for their habit of scratching with hind legs in farmyards for insects, grubs, and seeds. Breeds vary widely in plumage and color. Kept worldwide for egg laying and meat.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
The villa’s banquet hall had been painted with astounding skill. It appeared to have no walls at all. Instead sunlit meadows and hedges bursting with white and purple blooms surrounded it. Vines twined up to and across square roofbeams. Behind a dais at the front of the room rose a tree so realistic Rob half expected a breeze to stir its widespread boughs. Although the wine he kept putting away at a healthy pace may have had as much to do with that as art. Almost in spite of himself he found the effect enchanting.
Rob sat at the large table on the dais. At the other end Karyl sat next to Bogardus, with a dozen or so odd fish who constituted Providence’s ruling Council eating their dinners in between. For a pack of self-proclaimed egalitarians, they looked conspicuously better bred and better fed than your common ruck of Gardner, just as Rob, the ever-cynical, had cynically expected. For some unaccountable reason, a youth who was as obvious a grounding as he was occupied the seat beside him.
The young man nudged Rob in the ribs. The wine had so mellowed Rob that he refrained from giving the lout the clout that he deserved.
“See that servant over there?” the Gardener asked over the mosquito-buzz of a hundred diners. “The grey-bearded old fellow?”
A tall, spare man, elderly but straight-backed in an unbleached hemp smock, stood decanting golden wine on a sideboard by the kitchen door.
“What about him?” Rob asked.
“That’s none other than Comte Étienne, former ruler of all Providence.”
The talkative young man was of medium height, a bit shorter and less sturdy than Rob, though altogether serviceable. His face was blue-eyed, open, and square-jawed beneath a shock of white-blond hair. Rob had yet to catch his name and was disinclined to make an effort to. It had been a long day.
Even if this lad wasn’t playing the supercilious little prick the way the first lot had, Rob would rather have sat beside a female. The Garden grew some lovely specimens. Sadly they hadn’t thawed perceptibly toward the newcomers. Except for the green-eyed lass with the chestnut hair, who was nowhere to be seen.
“Is he, now?” Rob said.
“He gave it all up,” Towhead said, “to serve Beauty and Truth as a common Gardener.”
“Perhaps that accounts for his somewhat sunken-eyed look.” Much as he hated the nobility, Rob could scarcely conceive of any of them voluntarily giving up their status.
“Oh, he’s far happier, he says. Took the notion from Mor Jaume’s own father, Carles, you know. When Jaume was just a boy, all the court gossips claimed he was weak, unworthy to rule dels Flors. Then he defeated the mountain bandits, stilled all those wagging tongues, and the old Count abdicated in his favor. Now Jaume roves the Tyrant’s Head as Imperial Champion and leader of the Companions, and Carles administers the county in his stead as seneschal.”
“I didn’t know that,” Rob said. To his mind there seemed a sizable gap between scullion and viceroy. It surely didn’t sound as if Jaume’s dad had given up more than the title itself.
But what do I know? he thought. I’m a Traveler, a rogue, and a dinosaur master. To say much the same thing three different ways.
He turned his attention toward the table’s head, where Bogardus spoke earnestly to Karyl.
“Oh, Guillaume’s no fool. At least, not a total one. He leaves traffic on the Imperial High Road strictly alone. The Empire may wink at slave-taking among suspected heretics, especially out here on its fringes. The spice and spider-silk caravans from Ovda are another thing entirely.”
“That must be why Crève Coeur raiders never troubled us on our way,” called out Rob, would felt left out, loud enough to carry.
The intervening Garden Councilors shot him an assortment of disapproving glares and catfish mouths. He met them with a smirk.
Bogardus, calm as ever, simply said, “No doubt.”
Heroically refraining from showing the Councilors the Upraised Finger of Triumph, Rob simply narrowed them out of his focus and concentrated on the conversation in which he’d now been tacitly included.
“Are your other neighbors attacking you?” Karyl asked.
“Not as much as Guillaume is. Comtesse Célestine of Métairie Brulée is ruthless and more than ruthless. Her father won the fief by burning the former Count in his own farmhouse, thus the name. She’s his true daughter. Other people’s pain acts upon her, it’s said, the way poetry, painting, and song act on us. She isn’t allergic to money and power, though.”
“She’s a hunchback,” Rob’s painfully blond dinner partner told him. “It might sour her outlook.”
“Raúl of Castaña—” Bogardus shrugged. “He’s content to follow if others lead. So long as they lead him toward profit. In fact I suspect he and Célestine both are content to wait until Guillaume commits to invading us. Then when we’re engaged, they’ll happily fall on us from behind.”
“Are they capable?” Karyl asked.
“Count Guillaume is the ablest of the three, although he may be more cle
ver than truly intelligent. He’s ambitious. If he possesses any moral compass other than his belly and his peter, no one’s yet discovered it.”
Rob hoisted his wineglass. “You’ve the soul of a poet.”
Bogardus laughed. “If only I had the poet’s skill at words.”
Despite his disclaimer and the softness of his tone, Rob noticed how the conversation died away around them whenever he spoke. Most of the diners leaned forward to catch his words.
“You’ve also got some grip on strategy,” Karyl said, “which is more than most. Even those who make a profession of war. Are you sure you need us?”
“Do you like the way the hall is painted?” Bogardus asked.
Karyl shrugged. “I’m no one to ask such a question of. For all my eye and ear for art, I might as well be a lead statue of a hornface. Still, I can see it’s well executed. And I like to see a thing well done.”
“Fair enough,” Bogardus said with a regal nod. “Our finest musicians have skilled fingers indeed. But I’d never ask Jeannette or Robert to paint the hall. Following Jaume, we encourage everyone to find their own voices in the arts; and following him we encourage excellence.
“I know which end of a sword to hold. I know what battle feels like—and sounds and smells like too, much to my sorrow. And I’m no more suited to train or lead our defense force than I am to paint the hall with my feet. That’s your art, Mor Karyl.”
Rob broke off another chunk of bread and tore at its tough crust with his teeth. It was good bread. Somewhat to his surprise the fare was plain, if splendidly prepared: steamed vegetables, beans with onions, and no meat grander than roast scratcher and bouncer. He ate with appetite, as befit a minstrel who never knew when he’d get the chance again. Especially inasmuch as he and Karyl were here on sufferance, not yet guaranteed so much as a roof over their heads for the night.
Bogardus acted well disposed to his guests, and seemed very much in charge no matter how much he disclaimed formal authority. But Rob reckoned strayed priests weren’t much less subject to whim than any other sort of ruler. He certainly sensed ample sentiment among the other Gardeners in favor of sending the travelers off toward the border with a raptor-pack snapping at their calves.