by Victor Milán
“What of the other?”
“The nosehorn? That’s his brother Benedicto. He follows Gonzalo’s lead, is all. I don’t think he’s stupid, as such. But he’s slow, and that makes him fear he is stupid. So he’s afraid to think for himself.”
It had come to her to ask what bloody business it was of his. What with Falk not just a relative stranger, but her father’s recent enemy. But she blurted the truth anyway. It felt good to get out.
Anyway, if I’m ever going to take my proper place in politics, as Father’s successor in Los Almendros if nothing else, I have to accept that yesterday’s enemy can become today’s close ally.
And a mischievous voice at the back of her head asked, How close?
The pavane ended. After a pause to allow the dancing pairs to break from the line again, the band struck up another gallarda. Once more Melodía found herself face-to-face—or face-to–broad chest—with the Northerner. It took some deftness to keep from pecking Melodía with his beaked mask; off to their right, servants raced to disentangle a matador who’d gotten his fangs caught in the spikes of a hornface’s frill. Falk handled the task with the aplomb with which he seemed to handle everything physical.
Including me, she thought as he swept her up again and turned her effortlessly in the air. She felt herself responding to his nearness, his strength, his smell. His overwhelming maleness.
Her lovemaking with Jaume had been wonderful as always, despite its heartbreaking aftermath. But after so long a drought, it had only roused her appetite. The effort it took to refrain from answering Jaume’s daily letters—for principle!—made her hunger worse.
Again: lift, twirl, set down. Her breasts brushed his chest. His thick muscles were so different from Jaume’s lean ones. A thrill ran down her belly to her groin.
She looked up. His eyes burned like lamps behind the midnight mask. He wants me, she thought. And what do I owe Jaume? We have no pact of exclusivity. And besides, he left me, on a mission I begged him not to go on.
Her lips fell open.
Someone’s shoulder jostled her from behind. “Your pardon, your Grace!” a male voice stammered from behind.
Melodía spun to see a tall, weedy figure dressed in a jeweled strider-leather loincloth, body paint, and glitter. Eyes showed white inside a false bocaterrible face.
“Oh, and Highness! Ten thousand pardons!” Belatedly Melodía recognized a local shipping magnate, a great gaming crony of Heriberto’s. Occasionally they drew her father into their evenings of cards and weichi, although Felipe had little appetite for gambling. She didn’t know his name.
The dance ended. The moment ended. With a last cryptic smile, Melodía spun away from Falk and lost herself quickly in the gorgeous crowd.
* * *
“Highness.”
Hurrying up the back stairs to the Imperial apartments, Melodía stopped and turned back. Her heart sped up. It wasn’t with anticipation.
Duke Falk’s bulk blocked the narrow stairwell behind her. Melodía felt anger, and a touch of apprehension. Honored guest he might be, friend of her father even, but he didn’t belong here.
“Your Grace, have you lost your way?” she asked haughtily.
He had discarded his heraldic mask. His black hair was tousled in the candlelight. His cheeks were flushed. He smelled strongly of wine.
“I’ve found you,” he said, “so I’ve come the right way.”
She tried to freeze him with a glare. When he failed to freeze, she hesitated, uncertain how to proceed. She wondered how she had ever found him attractive before. He seemed coarse as a dray beast now, drunk and sweating in the cramped stairwell.
Despite his size and state, he was fast. Melodía found him right beside her on the narrow way. His body pressed her back against the cool stone wall. His nearness failed to excite her as it had before.
This can’t be real, she thought. She was scared. She wanted to duck under his arm and race up the steps. She knew she should.
But I am the Imperial Princess, and heir to a duchy in my own right. I am a Delgao. It isn’t right to flee the likes of him in my own home!
“Don’t run away so fast, Alteza.” He put a hand to the wall over her shoulder as if to support himself.
“I’m not running. I’m going to my private apartments, your Grace. Good night.”
“You really want to stay,” he said, and leaned in close. “You want me. Don’t lie.”
She dodged past him. She couldn’t pretend any longer that disbelief or outrage would get her out of this. She ran.
He caught her arm. She tried to jerk free, wishing she had ignored her dueña’s demands and worn her dagger tonight—a noblewoman’s prerogative as much as any nobleman’s. She opened her mouth to scream for the Scarlet Tyrants, knowing they couldn’t hear her over the music and the merriment.
“My lady.”
The words, in a feminine voice with a hint of accent, came soft and deferential. Yet they rang quite loudly in the narrow stair. Falk’s hand jerked away from Melodía’s arm as if her skin had gone white-hot.
Both looked down the stairs. Melodía’s maidservant, Pilar, stood below, in a loose white blouse and dark-green velvet skirt.
Falk’s face reddened. His chest swelled as he drew breath for a bull-hornface bellow of rage.
He deflated. His massive shoulders sagged. He stepped back against the curving wall.
Smiling, eyes coyly downcast, Pilar trotted past. Melodía stood waiting, her heart still pounding. When Pilar reached the step right below her, Melodía turned and marched regally up the stairs. Her maidservant followed.
A warm rush of gratitude flooded in over Melodía’s fear. I have sorely underestimated this woman, she thought.
* * *
Rob found her sitting on a stone bench. Candles set in stone lanterns cast a faint and fitful light. Terror-moths fluttered around them with no fliers to afflict them now.
“I thought you’d never come,” Jeannette said matter-of-factly. Standing, she reached behind her shoulders to do something to her gown. It promptly fell away.
She was naked beneath.
Rob felt his eyebrows rise.
“What of my reputation, then?” he started to say. But she grabbed him behind the neck, reeled him in, and muffled his mouth with hers.
Chapter 30
Bella, Belle, Lady Li—Countess of the Creators: Li ☲ (Fire)—The Middle Daughter. Represents Beauty (and its inevitable withering), the arts, truth, lust, passion and obsession, time, and Fire. Also cats. Known for her passion. Aspect: a beautiful red-haired young woman in an orange gown garlanded with white flowers, holding a flame in her right palm and a mirror with a crossbar in her left hand. Sacred Animal: cat (depicted as an orange tabby tom). Colors: red and orange. Symbol: Beauty’s Mirror (a circle on a handle with crosspiece).
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
Young Dom Xurxo de Viseu couched his lance and dug long-roweled silver spurs into his sackbut’s green-and-gold flanks. Tossing its long-crested head, the dinosaur dropped to all fours and rolled into a gallop toward the matador that waited, head low and dripping saliva from its fangs, at the clearing’s far side. The onlooking knights and nobles cheered lustily.
It was all very beautiful: the gorgeous display of Bluemountain, Ironstar, and their knights; de Viseu’s gold-on-green pennon flickering from his lance-head; morning light slanting in shafts through the boughs of tall red-boled conifers, dappling his plate and his mount’s pebbled hide as great muscles bunched and released beneath; the musty smells of monsters, lent piquancy by pine; the footfalls of the three-tonne beast, muted to distant war-drum beats by the greyish-brown carpet of fallen needles; the sackbut’s seismic grunting to the rhythm of his strides; the matador’s long, sinuous body striped black over brown, shading toward a yellow belly.
As he reined in Camellia, Jaume felt his brow furrow in dismay. He himself had decreed this hunt. But he had failed yet again to account sufficien
tly for the strong-blooded and weak-brained valor of the nobles under his nominal command.
“This isn’t good,” he told his quartet of dinosaur-mounted Companions.
* * *
“No!”
Rob clacked his hardwood axe haft up between the tree limbs the two recruits were whacking each other with. A couple score more recruits stood or sat around them in the blue wildflower meadow, watching.
At least no one seemed bored by the spectacle. Some entertainments had a universal appeal.
“The object is to stop your opponent from hitting you, and then try to hit him,” Rob said. “Not just stand there like complete gits, pounding each other’s foreheads until they get mushy!”
The combatants stood back. They were naked but for sweat and sweaty loincloths. One swiped with the back of a hand at the blood and perspiration that drew a network down his brow.
“That was getting to be something of a trial,” he admitted. “It hurt.”
Rob slapped his own forehead. You think it’s a trial, he thought.
Like them he wore only a breechclout, the simplest possible linen loin wrapping. At least it had started the day fresh and clean. Which was more than he could say for these men’s garments.
They had a shock coming, once Karyl started to really crack down on camp hygiene, as Rob knew he soon would. Rob tended to attribute their lax attitude toward cleanliness less to their possibly being followers of the loony Life-to-Come sect, which no one he’d met in Providence seemed to favor, and more to their being louts.
“A damned good thwacking’s all you deserve, Dion,” said the second trainee, Fredot, who’d been getting the better of it. No surprise: he was three fingers taller and a good twelve years younger. “Claiming that poseur Erasto’s quatrains are better than Félix’s. Pah! Erasto wouldn’t know decent octameter if it bit him on his dangly—”
“Enough!” shouted Rob. “This isn’t real fighting, you twits, it’s sodding practice. If this were real battle you’d both be lying with your skulls split open and the random mud, straw, and mouse-turds that currently keep the tops of them from caving in leaking out to feed the daisies. So leave your little literary disputes at home with your clean smocks—you own clean smocks, don’t you?—and concentrate on the bloody business at hand!”
When he and Karyl had returned to the farmhouse midmorning, they’d found it cleared of rubble and rubbish and swept out. It wasn’t yet in perfect shape. But Lucas and whomever else he’d cajoled or coerced into helping him had done a surprisingly good enough job overnight to make Karyl nod and rub his chin in approbation.
It had been the equivalent of a normal man turning handsprings. Lucas had reacted like an overeager puppy, minus the wetting himself.
Karyl had reason for good spirits today despite a night rough enough that his screams had awakened Rob in his room clear down the hall. Rob was alone by then. In the morning’s small hours, when he and Jeannette had spent their energies as delightfully as possible, she had kissed his nose and slipped away.
The two men enjoyed a splendid breakfast of fruit and local cheese. It had been soured for Rob only by the absence of coffee, or even tea. Not because of expense, especially of the former, but because some Council member had a bee up his butt over stimulating drinks. Or her: Rob couldn’t help but suspect that rachitic old dragon Violette.
From there Rob and Karyl had gone to visit the Providence town armory, where the ancient keeper showed them a treasure trove of arms in pristine shape. What especially lit the beacons in Karyl’s dark and hooded eyes was the spectacle of a whole subterranean chamber full of crossbows, from small ones you could cock by hand to great whacking behemoths you could almost stick cart-wheels on and call ballistas.
The weapons, it seemed, were well beyond what Karyl had hoped for. Rob had certainly never seen the man show so much delight at the prospect of pay.
The noonday break approached, and with it the personal swordplay-tutoring Karyl had promised Lucas. The sun shone high and hot despite the near-perpetual clouds. Rob ladled a big draft of water from a bucket and emptied what he didn’t drink over his head.
He turned to watch Karyl supervising quarterstaff practice, which was intended to break the recruits in gently to pole-arm combat. Emeric helped. He looked capable enough, but even across half the field Rob could see townsmen and farmers scrunch their faces and tense their shoulders whenever the woods-runner got near them.
Karyl wore only sandals and a black kilt. Sweat sheened his rib-ridged torso, slashed across by long white scars and dotted with pink, long-healed punctures. With his constantly turning head and intent gaze, he resembled nothing so much as a bighead flier perched at the pinnacle of a lightning-killed tree, scanning for his next prey.
The hair atop Karyl’s head was tied at his crown, to fall across the free-hanging hair at the back in a curious two-tiered horsetail. The unusual style gave him an exotic look, lending credence to the ballads that claimed his mother had been a princess of a wild tribe of Ovdan horse-archers.
Letting his own two overzealous if under-apt students reclaim their breaths, Rob recalled the rest of the legend of Karyl Bogomirskiy. A matador attacked a caravan in the Misty March hinterlands, scattered or killed the guards, and tore apart the maids, Karyl’s mother, and his elder brother before Karyl’s eyes. Then the meter-long jaws had turned to a fear-frozen Karyl, not quite six, dripping an evil soup of spittle and his loved ones’ blood onto the roadway as they came closer and closer to his face.
The songs, of course, dwelt most lovingly on the goriest and grimmest details. Bards knew what customers paid to hear.
The instant before the Allosaurus bit off Karyl’s face, a patrol of mercenary horse-archers arrived and drove the monster away with a shower of arrows. Irrationally, Karyl’s father always blamed Karyl for the deaths of his beloved Countess and his heir. Voyvod Vlad never forgave his son for surviving.
Small wonder the man has nightmares yet, Rob thought. But something beyond that childhood ordeal must drive his screaming dreams. Folk far weaker than Karyl Bogomirskiy had endured far worse without paying such a savage nightly toll decades after the fact.
Rob forced his attention back to the task. “All right,” he said, grinning his wickedest, “you two sit down. Who’s next in the barrel, then, you lot? Somebody volunteer, smart quick. Or the toe of my boot will volunteer some backsides!”
He was starting to enjoy this. From earliest childhood he had endured not just slights but tragedy at the hands of the nobly born. Now he got to spew a lifetime’s fury and frustration all over his pupils and call that “motivation.”
His pair of fighters eagerly ditched their stripped branches and scampered to the stream that crossed the field, where they drank and splashed like hornface calves. A wide-eyed pair of ’prentices from town stood up and faltered forward to replace them.
“Ah, victims,” Rob said, “front and center, now. Sharply, sharply, that’s the way to do it. For your sorry sakes I hope you show more wit than the last lot. Or I may just smarten you up with dear Wanda, here.” He slapped the head of his axe, which was cased in thick, time-darkened nosehorn leather with tarnished brass rivets.
Not quite trembling, the youths picked up the sticks out of the dew-damp grass. They promptly began the good old hesitation-dance—two steps forward, two back—common to inexperienced fighters everywhere.
Rob was drawing in a breath preparatory to further motivational speech when a voice shot up from around the farmhouse flank: “Alert, alert! Armed men approaching down the road!”
* * *
It was no surprise the matador had found them, Jaume knew. The Ejército Corregir was a walking feast for carnivores. Pickets and angry drovers had killed dozens of the raptors, dog-sized harriers, and man-sized horrors that daily dogged their tracks or crouched in ambush. The pack-hunters still managed to leave their marks on dray horses and nosehorns, and drag the odd one down. Every couple of days they got a camp follower or scout as w
ell. That was life on the road in Nuevaropa: the packs were like flies, to be driven off or killed as possible, and otherwise endured.
But the young bull Allosaurus posed a much more serious threat. It had stalked the great procession for several days as it ground its laborious way at last onto La Meseta in County Mariposa, next to Terraroja. The woods up here grew taller and sparser than in the humid coastal regions below. The ferns and scrub oaks growing between the tall, straight trees looked too small to hide a man, much less ten meters of meat-eater. But matador stealth was infamous.
Having found the army, the monster would never voluntarily leave it.
At first it had contented itself cutting out the young and the weak from the vast herds of fatties the army drove alongside to feed itself. Even the guards feared to challenge it. Jaume didn’t begrudge them that; a matador could tear a lightly armed patrol to pieces.
Then the inevitable happened. A sutler’s seven-year-old daughter chased a butterfly with thirty-centimeter purple-and-yellow wings across a meadow toward a stand of saplings. And the monster rose up from weeds that severely shaken witnesses swore couldn’t hide a dog, and sprang.
* * *
The Gallego knight’s lance-head arrowed toward the matador’s yellow chest. The Allosaurus darted to its right. It struck with viper speed.
Teeth clattered on steel plate. Jaume winced as several broke with loud squeals. A terrified trumpet blast from the sackbut quickly drowned out the other sounds. The monster’s flashing attack had overwhelmed the rigorous training that suppressed the duckbill’s instinctive fear of big meat-eaters.
The bugling could not overwhelm the young knight’s screams as the Allosaurus plucked him from the saddle.
The panicked sackbut ran into the woods, blundering into thirty-meter-tall trees and cracking their trunks. The matador reared high. It tossed Mor Xurxo skyward. As he fell back down, uselessly milling, it caught his helmet in its mouth.
Jaws clamped shut with a crunch of terrible finality. The screaming stopped. The matador whipped its head sideways. Xurxo’s body came away. Trailing a gusher of blood from the stump of its neck, it cartwheeled twenty meters to slam into a tree with a sound like a barrel of cutlery dropped onto cobblestones.