The Dinosaur Lords

by Victor Milán

  “They make war on us!” a peasant shouted. “Let the bastards suffer!” Many cried agreement and waved fists in the air.

  “They make war on you because their lords order them to,” Karyl said. “It’s not peasants raiding your lands and pillaging your homes. It’s nobles, and their knights, men-at-arms, and mercenaries.”

  “Then why should we fight them, if not for a reward?” Reyn demanded. “They haven’t troubled the city yet. They wouldn’t dare!”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Rob said. “Who’s to stop them, if not you?”

  The “volunteers” looked at him in confusion.

  “But they’ve got great nasty spears and horses,” old Pierre said. “And armor.”

  “And war-dinosaurs,” another man said. “How can we face dinosaur knights?”

  “In all Nuevaropa,” Rob said, “there’s no one better to teach you that than Lord Karyl.”

  He was immediately afraid his lapse would get him yelled at. Instead Karyl said, “We can follow the example of friend Emeric, here. Strike from ambush. Never fight fair. I’ve … been a nobleman myself. We bleed and die as readily as you do. You just need to learn the chinks in our armor.”

  The crowd fell to squabbling with one another. Some seemed outraged at the notion of not fighting fair—which struck Rob as flat insane. Others more sensibly wondered what good a handful of defenders might do against Crève Coeur’s might, however cunningly they fought. And some demanded to know why they should risk loss of limb and life while others sat home getting fat.

  The woods-runner stepped up beside Karyl and Rob. “I’ll fight!” he cried.

  Lucas shouldered through the bickering mob. He had the shoulders for it too, Rob noted.

  “I’ll fight too, Lord Karyl,” he said, blue eyes shining. “Just teach me how! It’s all I ever wanted.”

  “Beware getting what you want, son,” Rob said gruffly. If the boy-prodigy painter heard him over the crowd, he showed no sign.

  The dispute continued as if it would never end. “They’ll never come ’round at this rate,” Rob told Karyl. “Why not just order them? Force them to heel!”

  “Remember what I told Bogardus? If the people here need to be commanded to defend themselves, I can’t help them. Anyway, I’m done with compelling people to follow me, even if I could. I can’t handle the responsibility. I doubt any man can.”

  Rob shook his head in disgust. “Maybe we should just cut our losses and go. We can’t bloody fight Guillaume and his steel-shelled friends by ourselves!”

  “We’ll find the means,” Karyl said. “If not these men, something else. There’s always another weapon to hand, if only you look.”

  He’s actually starting to enjoy this, Rob thought. And they say I’m bloody mad?

  “Besides,” said Karyl with an oddly gentle smile, “look to the west, my friend.

  “West? Whatever are you on about?”

  Rob turned. The farmhouse roof was steep. Above it a plume of smoke rose dirty brown against white clouds. It didn’t seem close, which meant it sprang from a substantial blaze.

  “What, you’ve eyes in the back of your head, now?”

  “I keep my eyes moving,” Karyl said. “I find it cuts down on unpleasant surprises.”

  Some of the crowd had noticed the smoke now too. Fingers pointed. The word fire began to be spoken with the customary dread.

  “Ho!” a voice cried from the High Road’s elevated right-of-way, beyond the neglected house. “Hey there, you men!”

  A strider with its green feather ruff drooping and brown sides lathered with sweat came spraddle-legging around the stone flank of the farmhouse. A middle-aged woman in a torn, bloody smock rode it bareback. Her grey hair and eyes were wild. Soot smudged her haggard cheeks.

  “Blood! Fire! Murder!” she cried. “Count Guillaume’s men have burned St. Cloud! The people are scattered, slain, enslaved!”

  “St. Cloud!” the carpenter Reyn exclaimed. “Impossible! That’s not ten kilometers from here.”

  “I told you so,” Rob told him. But he was staring at Karyl as if his companion of the road had just made lightning flash from his fingertips.

  “We’re lost!” the woman wailed. “We’re helpless to stand against them!”

  “Don’t worry, madame,” Pierre called out. “The free folk of Providence will set the bastards straight!”

  The whole crowd cheered.

  Chapter 25

  Volador chato, Chato, Bug-chaser, Snub-nosed Flier—Anurognathus. Common small pterosaurs; up to 9 centimeters long and wingspans of 50 centimeters. Short tails, short muzzles with needlelike teeth; insectivorous. Like almost all fliers, covered in short fur.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  The road marched at an angle up one side of a narrow, densely wooded valley. Hours after the intense dawn rain the air still lay thick and heavy as a feather-felt blanket. Moisture beaded on big splayed leaves.

  Steam rose from the backs of dray beasts, nosehorns and horses, and wisped from the sodden slouch hats and feather yokes of the drovers who kept them trudging up toward La Meseta. The humid air muted their whipcracks and curses. The wheels of heavy-laden wagons crunched on the broken seashells that covered the road. The morning’s rain kept the dust down, but on the right-of-way, the smells of sweat, urine, and dung almost choked Jaume.

  With relief, he turned the cream-colored marchadora he rode at the brisk amble she was bred for off the road into a clearing on a level stretch. But his relief was short-lived.

  “Strange fruit grows in these woods,” called Wouter de Jong as Jaume rode up with several Companions.

  Mor Manfredo stood with his lover Fernão the Gallego, Wouter, and a quartet of husky Ordinaries in mail and white surcoats at the base of a great white-boled plane tree. He gave his head an irritated shake. The sturdy Brabantés with the short, almost white-blond hair seldom said much. When he did, he didn’t always choose his words as well as he might. He and Manfredo remained best friends, though, no matter how Wouter exasperated the Taliano.

  Jaume winced as well. The two men dangling by the necks from two stout branches still kicked spurred heels with the final fading reflexes of broken necks. Their white, grey, and black liveries were stained and sticking to their faintly tinkling hauberks. The Ordinaries were shouldering the axes they’d used to break the ladders from beneath the condemned knights, preparing to return to their comrades.

  “Ominous fruit,” called Florian, swinging down from his mule. “This’ll bring trouble.”

  Jaume dismounted. Upslope from the clearing, two hands of Nodosaur skirmishers in springer-leather jerkins and browned steel hats filed along an unseen trail. They patrolled with crossbows cocked to discourage trouble from leaping out of the undergrowth at the vulnerable supply train. They glanced incuriously at the hanged men before disappearing into the undergrowth.

  Manfredo scowled. His pride was as prickly as his rectitude was stern. Florian’s sense of humor particularly chafed the Taliano knight.

  “Do you object, Brother?” Manfredo asked. He didn’t mention that Jaume himself had ordered the executions. Jaume doubted it occurred to him to do so.

  “Not at all,” Florian said. “It’s trouble we were soon due in any event. Speaking of which, I do believe I see it coming down the road.”

  Taking a few steps back toward the causeway, Jaume saw a small party of knights trotting down the landward side of the traffic. Their colors matched the dead men’s. At their head Jaume recognized Desmondo, Conde de la Estrella del Hierro himself. Even a hundred meters off, Count Ironstar’s big face was visibly twisted and mottled with rage behind his imposing iron-grey moustache.

  “This is a sorry affair,” Jaume said. “I wish there’d been some other way of handling it.”

  Manfredo’s long, exquisitely sculpted features showed distress. “Captain! They committed rape and murder!”

  “Yes. And you’ve done a good thing well. I ordered them hanged with a clear heart.
Our charter mandates us to punish evildoers, after all. But I can acknowledge the necessity of the thing without liking it.”

  The irate Ironstar rode up with a pair of his barons in tow. Jaume inclined his head courteously. “Count Desmondo.”

  The Count was a big man, with long grey-shot hair framing a face whose square jaw had begun to blur beneath the weight of years of easy living. His tunic was black, with his arms—an iron-colored falling star on white escutcheon—sewn on the breast. He had a reputation for preferring massive force to subtlety. It worked for him: an immense nickel-iron meteorite had fallen on his province centuries before, and its ore still gave him the wealth to support enough knights, dinosaur-mounted as well as horsemen, to bring it off.

  In fact, Ironstar commanded the army’s largest contingent of men-at-arms after Montañazul. He typified the grandes under Jaume’s nominal command. An aging but formidable fighter, he wasn’t actually stupid; he just exercised little control over his impulses, and saw less reason to learn the knack.

  “Don Hilario!” he cried, raising black-gloved fists to the patches of sky visible through interlaced branches overhead. “Don Cecilio! What has been done to you, mis hijos? Creators, who can be responsible for this outrage?”

  “No need to bother the gods, señor,” Florian said. He waved at the slowly twisting bodies. “There you see the guilty parties. Set your mind at ease: they’ve gotten justice, as you can see.”

  Jaume’s face tightened. Of all the men he had accepted into the Empire’s most exclusive military order, he had felt the most misgivings about Florian. He still did. The Francés knight had a flippant attitude, and trouble controlling his tongue.

  Ironstar’s grey-bristled lips worked in and out. It made him look like a large, exotic fish. Even Jaume had to bite down on laughter.

  “This is intolerable,” the Count bellowed. “You’ve murdered my knights! Madmen!”

  “These men raped and murdered a peasant woman,” Jaume said calmly. A sluggish breeze stirred his hair around the shoulders of his white tunic. It carried the perfume of magnolia blossoms as well as less pleasing odors. “My Brothers caught them in the act. They’ve paid the price under law.”

  “A peasant woman?” Ironstar’s face turned from maroon to white. “A peasant?”

  His words came nearly voiceless, as if squeezed out by a titan stepping on him.

  “How dare you?”

  “I’m quite expansive in what I dare, my lord. Especially when it comes to enforcing my lawful writ as Condestable Imperial.”

  “But—” Ironstar waved his hand wildly. “To hang belted knights, my knights, over some peasant slut? Dishonor—”

  His passion was getting the better of his elocution again; the last word emerged as a squeak that rose to inaudibility.

  Jaume nodded as if concurring. “Dishonor is exactly what their actions have brought upon the Ejército Corregir and the Empire itself. I’ve seen what happens when an army gives into lusts and lawlessness. It won’t happen in an army of mine.”

  “You dare prate about lust, you—you filthy libertine?”

  Easy, Jaume told himself. He forced himself to draw a deep breath.

  “Step aside with me, if you will, my lord,” he said. “Let’s discuss this discreetly, montador to montador.”

  Ironstar shied away, making his stallion toss its head and snort. “I won’t go off where you can work your black sorcery on me without witnesses!”

  “What?” Jaume exclaimed, taken utterly aback.

  “Mind your language!” said Manfredo, shocked. “Our captain’s a Prince of the Holy Church.”

  “Some mistakes ought be rectified,” the Count growled.

  “Here,” Jaume said, desperate to regain control of the conversation. “There’s no need for this kind of talk, caballeros! What I wanted to say to you, Don Desmondo, is that if we treat the people of the lands we pass through as enemies, they’ll soon turn into enemies in fact. You don’t want that, surely?”

  “You dare to lecture me? You salacious popinjay, I’ll teach you manners!”

  His hand dropped to the hilt of his arming-sword. Florian interposed himself with a matador’s liquid grace.

  “Draw blade on your commander,” he said silkily, “and you’re attainted.”

  Ironstar went pale. Attainder would make him an outlaw who could be killed out of hand. It would also reduce his entire family to commoner status, and forfeit all his titles and properties to the Fangèd Throne.

  “Draw sword on me, on the other hand,” Florian went on, covering the pommel of his rapier with his palm, “and you’ll have no problems at all.”

  Ironstar turned away. “I wouldn’t sully my blade.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, my lord,” Florian said. “Small risk of that.”

  “Bastard!”

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. And that’s the least of it. I had the basest of births: my mother was a street whore in Chanson, my father a stranger who cheated her. Yet here I am, made gentle and a montador by the hand of our Captain-General, as confirmed by His Imperial Majesty himself. A miracle of the Creators almost, no?”

  Estrella del Hierro spun his horse and spurred it back up the road. His barons followed.

  “We haven’t heard the last of this,” Wouter said. “Ironstar’s gone off to cry to Bluemountain. Whose hand he licks like a dog his master’s.”

  “It’s not as if they’ve been subordinate so far,” Florian said.

  Jaume sighed. “We don’t need more discord, my friend.”

  Several other Companions had come up to watch at a discreet distance, ready to back their Captain-General at need.

  “We’re passing through Noisy River,” said Bernat, the stolid, slab-faced Catalan who served the Companions’ as official chronicler. “We’re right next door to County Ironstar. Desmondo hates his neighbor the Conde del Río Ruidoso. That’s probably why he lets his men abuse the peasants.”

  Manfredo scowled thunderously. “When we were still in the Tyrant’s Jaw, they didn’t dare act up for fear of Prince Harry and the Emperor. Since we left, the whole army’s acted like invading Turanians. The captain was right. At this rate we’ll be lucky if we don’t have to fight our way through even loyal lands.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dieter wailed. Actual tears glittered in his long black eyelashes. “How can they do these things? What happened to the duty of the strong to protect the weak?”

  Even Manfredo the legalist shrugged at that. “It’s an ideal,” he said, “more than a practical reality.”

  Wouter dropped a big hand on Dieter’s shoulder. “Son,” the Brabanter said, “that’s the reason they have us.”

  * * *

  “Well, that tears it,” Rob said. “Why are we lingering, anyway? With the marauders striking that close to Providence town, we’ll be lucky not to have them on our necks before the sun’s all gone.”

  He glanced back down the High Road toward their farmhouse headquarters. They were heading to the Garden villa to report to Bogardus. Sunset stretched their shadows across the River Bounty toward Telar’s Wood to the west. The day had cooled quickly. The air smelled of the running water. Snub-nosed fliers skimmed a finger’s width above the river, hunting insects.

  “If we lit out now we might escape with our hides.”

  Karyl shook his head. “Relax. They won’t attack the town. Not yet.”

  “And what makes you so sure?”

  Karyl gave him a look.

  “Be that way,” Rob said. “Tell me how you managed that oh-so-convenient bit of business with the raid, then.”

  “I wish I knew,” Karyl said. “The Witness did say she thought I was touched by destiny.”

  Rob blinked. “You made a joke!” he exclaimed. “Next thing I know you’ll be turning handstands through the public square!”

  “Unlikely,” Karyl said. “I left that behind in Pot de Feu.”

  “So, d’you believe at last in destiny and magic and the t
ouch of the Fae?”

  “No.” But Rob saw the uncomfortable way his friend closed and opened the fingers of his new hand, as if stretching the still-tender skin.

  They left La Rue Impériale before reaching the town, cutting across fields and through a woodlot. As they approached the Garden villa through the twilight, a figure stepped away from its shadowed western side. Rob raised his axe, Wanda, from his shoulder, ready to whip away its stout nosehorn-hide case in an instant. Karyl didn’t react.

  Then Rob saw the pale-yellow hair and relaxed. “Lucas, me lad,” he said. “You gave me a turn.”

  “My lords,” the painter called. “A moment of your time, please.”

  Rob’s reflex was to disavow lordship. Out of politeness, or perversity, he deferred the task to Karyl. Instead Karyl said, “What do you want?

  “Please teach me to fight.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Rob asked.

  “I mean, really fight. Properly, with a sword, man to man. Not just in a bunch of other men with long, pointy sticks.”

  Rob laughed. “Why should we?” Karyl asked.

  “I’ll help you! Any way I can. Anything you want me to do, just tell me. But please—teach me swordplay!”

  Karyl studied him. He seemed more attentive somehow than Rob had yet seen him, even when he was taking lives. Maybe especially then.

  “It’s a lot of work,” Karyl said. “It will take time away from your painting.”

  “I understand that. I’ll find time to paint and practice both. I’m not afraid of work. I’m told I’m good with my hands, although I’ve never really wanted to do anything but paint. Uh, until now, that is.”

  “If you become more skilled than your comrades, you might find yourself asked to take more risks than they do.”

  “I’ll happily take them. Please!”

  “And you’re willing to do what we tell you without question.”

  Lucas sighed. “Anything,” he said. “I … I just want to show I’m not the ineffectual dauber my father always said I was. Before he disowned me, that is.”