by Victor Milán
“They just charged right into town down the Brokenheart Highway with their Crève Coeur badges painted on their chests, bold as you please,” Little Pigeon said. “Kicked carts and kiosks to splinters, knocked ladders all flying. Dumped old Quentin Wen-Nose the housepainter on his ass so hard he cramped right up and had to scuttle for the gutter on all fours, like a bug. Everybody had to step lively to get out of the way.”
Between sentences the child stuffed more of the handful of dried figs Rob had given … it … into its mouth. Rob sympathized. When your cheeks were that hollow, beneath wide cheekbones suggesting a naturally full face, eating took priority over even the most thrilling news.
Or the most horrific.
“This one kid, he’s maybe five, he didn’t move fast enough. The Brokenheart leader, this big guy with a shaved head and black beard, knocked him ass over elbows with his sackbut. Achille, kid’s name is. Snot-nosed little bugger, but he didn’t deserve nothin’ like that.
“His mom, Mathilde, she’s this journeyman potter in Fat Vincent’s studio by the river, she was haggling with Crook-Backed Adèly the feather-monger. She’s married to Igon, this Basque leatherworker from up in the mountains. She saw her child go flying and ran to help him, screaming like her hair was afire.
“So the woman knight on the green morion, she had short yellow hair and a green cross on a white shield painted on her breastplate, she runs Mathilde right through with her lance. Then the third guy, had on a cape that looked like scarlet horror feathers, his red sackbut steps on both of them and just grinds ’em into paste on the cobbles.”
“Buckethead assholes,” Rob said. “Pardon my Anglysh.”
In went more figs. Hardened though he thought he was, Rob felt his stomach turn over at that. You’ve been there yourself. Remember how real hunger feels.
“What happened next?” Karyl asked gently. His arms were folded over his deceptively skinny bare chest. He held his staff in one hand.
“They rode right up to Town Hall,” Petit Pigeon said, dribbling bits of fruit from his mouth—Rob was tired of trying to think of a child as it. “Black Beard hollered for the mayor. Old Ludovic came out. He’s a dick; anybody official is gonna be one, it’s just natural. But he showed some big ones, I got to tell you. He looks like this brown rat, scarcely bigger than that kid who got squashed, with hardly a hair to his head, a big old nose, and these droopy moustaches. He’s quivering all over. But he faces them, up there on those giant monsters of theirs. Demands to know why they’re violating his town and everything and stuff.
“So Black Beard laughs all evil and everything. ‘We bring you a message from my Lord the Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur,’ he says, all grand. ‘The rightful Count of Providence having abandoned this fief, suzerainty lies open for any noble hand to claim.’”
Rob caught Karyl’s eye and raised a brow. For an uneducated alley-runner, Little Pigeon rattled off the big words with enviable aplomb. Perhaps he was just a natural mimic.
“‘The good Count Guillaume now graciously steps forward to save you from anarchy and the unnatural vice of leveling,’ the guy tells Ludovic. ‘In one week’s time he comes. You will welcome him as your new lord.’
“‘Or be crushed like the lice you are,’ the woman yells.
“Then they turned around and trotted out of town like they didn’t have a care in the world.”
“You’ve done well,” Karyl said.
Rob flipped the child a peso. Little Pigeon bit it skeptically and grinned. Rob grinned back. He knew the taste of silver, and the way his teeth sank ever so slightly into the true metal.
The child turned and vanished at once into the green underbrush. He might be a town rat, but he knew how to lose himself in the countryside as well.
“So that’s torn it, then,” Rob said. “What do we do now?”
“Fight,” Karyl said. “I’ll order the volunteers to get ready to march on a moment’s notice. Then you and I are heading off to the villa. I suspect the Garden Council is going to want to have its say. At considerable length.”
“Aye,” Rob said ruefully, rubbing the back of his neck. “They’re just the sort to all want to piss in the soup to make it taste the better.”
Part Four
La Cuenta
(The Reckoning)
Chapter 37
Arrancador de los Muertos, Corpse-tearer, Bloody Bill—Caulkicephalus trimicrodon. A pterandon, a crested, tailless flier, with a toothed beak that flares at the end; 5-meter wingspan, 20 kilograms. Slate-grey-to-black fur, mottled red on head, neck, and shoulders, as if blood-splashed. Which it often is. Feeds on corpses. Unwelcome but necessary habitué of battlefields.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Mor Manfredo knelt in the pale-green grass at the center of a circle of Companions, still in armor except for their helmets, who looked on in shared agony. Fernão lay across his lap. The Gallego had his neck arched convulsively back. Wheezing whimpers came from his wide-open mouth and his spurs kicked grooves in the tough red dirt as he fought to drag air into a chest crushed by his collapsed breastplate.
It was obvious to Jaume he would lose. It surprised him his friend had lived so long with such a terrible injury. It saddened him as well.
A knight in full plate was largely invulnerable. It usually took consummate skill or stupid luck to hit an eyehole or a weak point at a joint and bring one down. A dinosaur knight’s greatest danger was his greatest weapon: a war-dinosaur. No armor a human could carry could protect him from being crushed by a multi-tonne monster stepping on him, falling on him, or slamming him with its tail.
When that happened armor was a false friend. Instead of bursting like a full wineskin hit by a hammer and promptly dying, you got to linger with your metal carapace crumpled into you, cruelly pinching your smashed limbs and torso, as you waited to die from internal bleeding and the failure of abused organs.
As their beloved brother Fernão was experiencing now.
Manfredo looked up. He had taken off his armet and the padded coif he wore beneath. His red hair was plastered to his forehead, where blue veins stood out, and hung lank over the flared pauldrons of his armor. He looked up at Jaume with eyes full of tears. His square chin jutted with the effort of clenching back a scream.
“Help him,” the Taliano gritted. “By the Lady, by the Mother, please help him.”
Timaeos, kneeling beside the fallen Companion, looked at Jaume and shook his head.
“There’s no point even trying to get the armor off him,” the big man said. “It will only make him suffer horribly to no end. We cannot help him.”
“No!” shouted Manfredo. Seeing his friend’s stern reserve torn apart by grief stung Jaume like a wasp. It sorrowed him almost as much Fernão’s torment.
Which was, at least, about to come to an end.
Jaume stroked Manfredo’s sodden hair. “Beloved brother. You’re as battle-seasoned as any of us. You know he won’t make it.”
For an instant Manfredo glared up at Jaume with such glowing rage and hatred that Jaume, physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted as he was, could barely keep from flinching. Then the Taliano squeezed his eyes shut. Tears rolled out the long, red lashes.
“I know,” he whispered.
Though his losing struggle for breath had to be filling Fernão’s mind, he seemed to track what was being said. A brown hand gripped Manfredo’s pale one.
Manfredo drew his misericorde. Cradling his lover’s head with his other hand, he bent down and kissed the darkened, sweat-coated brow.
The other Companions turned away. Not even Timaeos the healer could watch.
But Jaume did not avert his eyes as Manfredo stabbed the slim, straight dagger expertly into Fernão’s ear. The Gallego stiffened. Then with a whistling sigh he fell back, and was at peace, and free of pain.
* * *
A meter-long shaft transfixed the tailless flier, whose crest and head looked as if they were splashed in blood. It snapped its toothy be
ak at the arrow, and fell off the chest of a helmetless Terrarojano knight who lay with blood trickling down his bearded cheeks to beat the ground with black-furred wings.
“Why did you shoot, Owain?” Manfredo asked the Galés. The Companions walked among the fallen, giving what succor they could to both sides’ wounded. They had gratefully shed their armor and the sweat-sodden jupons they wore beneath as padding. “The corpse-tearer was only doing what the Creators made it to do.”
The lanky Companion nocked another arrow. “That one’s still alive,” he said in his curious lilt, “and the flier was going for his eyes.”
Florian stooped to examine the injured knight. The man’s skin was sallow and beaded with sweat. He moaned as if trying to speak beneath his breath. He seemed unaware of his erstwhile enemy’s nearness.
“He’s done for,” Florian said, straightening.
There came a whir, and a thunk like an axe hitting wood. Another arrow sprouted suddenly from the mortally wounded man’s right temple.
Manfredo jerked and shot the Galés a mad-eyed look. After a moment he visibly reasserted self-control. Jaume relaxed.
Lover-bonding was encouraged among Companions—as had existed between Jaume and Pere before there were Companions. Jaume believed it helped inspire the Brothers to fight even more fiercely for each other. They were forbidden to take lovers among the order’s lower ranks, the squires and the Ordinaries. But Companions were equals. Even Jaume, their very charter notwithstanding, who led only because the rest chose to follow.
But the loss of a lover was even more brutal than loss of a Brother. They would all carry the wound of Fernão’s loss; when it healed, it would leave a scar. Manfredo’s wound was deeper than anyone’s. It would take longest to heal.
The bodies of men, a few women, and animals lay strewn like storm debris over the better part of a square kilometer of the shallow flat slope. Some still moved, and the chorus of groans and cries sounded half like the moaning of the wind, half like a rookery of seabirds on a desolate, rocky shore.
The smell was … what you’d expect. And the bodies hadn’t yet properly begun to rot in the midday heat.
Others moved about the battlefield on the same errand as the Companions. Men and women robed in Queen Maia’s brown and gold, and the blue and black of Lanza, the Middle Son. Both Creators’ sects emphasized training in the healing arts. For the most part they worked in pairs, one from each sect. Since they served the gentle, healing side of the Mother, rather than her complementary aspect of destroyer, the Maian sectaries preferred to leave mercy killing of humans and animals to their partners. The war-god’s devotees saw delivering the final grace as little different from splinting a broken limb or suturing a wound.
Far more carrion-fliers and birds ministered to the fallen than humans. And the insects, the buzzing flies with their cobalt-blue bellies glinting in the cloud-screened sun and endless files of ants, outnumbered all. Inevitably the slaughter attracted swarms of two-legged scavengers as well, feathered and otherwise. Patrols of Nodosaur light infantry and mercenary light horse kept them away.
“Once the sun goes down,” said Florian, falling into step beside Jaume, “our money-troopers will be out robbing the dead before the clouds have broken up.”
With a grimace that might well be taken for a sour smile, Jaume nodded. In comparison to his own bone-aching fatigue and soul-sickness, Florian seemed almost chipper. His cheeks were pink and his step springy.
At one time Jaume would have worried once more that the lowborn Francés was shallow, or worse, lacked a conscience, and that he had made a terrible mistake by admitting him. But in the weeks since Pere died, Jaume had come to know him better. Florian replied to hardship with a smiling face and a jaunty stride. And he was genuinely resilient.
He feels as deeply as any of us. He just heals quicker. Jaume wasn’t sure whether he envied him that or not.
A cry passed from throat to throat across a breeze that blew from the east, alerting Jaume that a small mounted party approached from the direction of the hidden town and the all-too-visible castle. Hands went to sword hilts.
“They fly a black flag,” Florian said. “This should prove interesting.”
Jaume strode toward the road. “Captain,” Manfredo called, “shouldn’t some of us mount up to guard you? Do you trust these unknowns?”
Jaume laughed. Almost to his surprise it was genuine, despite the pain it caused the ribs the matador had cracked for him. Now that the battle fever had subsided and the letdown begun, it was as if every wound he’d suffered came back to haunt him at once.
“No, my friend,” he called back over his shoulder. “But I want them to see I’m not afraid of them.”
* * *
“… when many Imperial grandes, with the connivance if not open support of their liege lords, the kings of Alemania, Francia, and even Spaña, rebelled against Manuel’s increasingly iron-fisted (and erratic) rule, and laid unprecedented siege against his capital city of La Majestad, which was still undergoing construction. But el Insurrecto came to an end when his daughter Juana, then called la Roja for her flame-colored hair, walked alone—without so much as a single house-shield to guard her—to the end of the lone bridge that ran across the abyss to the capital to announce her father’s death of lingering ill health.…”
“Ho, my daughter dear! How are you, this fine day?”
Melodía shut the history book she’d been reading with a decisive thump. “I’m fine, Father,” she said, looking up and trying not to sigh. “How are you?”
“Splendid, splendid,” he said. He kept his voice muted; the library’s stern guardian wouldn’t hesitate to hush even an Emperor. Felipe’s keen sense of justice kept that from offending him. Indeed, it amused him. Which was among the many reasons Melodía loved him more than he exasperated her.
Because it was a warm day, even here in the Firefly Palace library where immense fans powered by Centrosaurus-turned capstans kept the air flowing to minimize humidity on Prince Heriberto’s vast collection of books, Emperor Felipe dressed minimally. He wore brief yellow trunks, low boots of yellow feather-felt, and a shoulder-yoke of sweeping scarlet and gold plumes. Even his shadow Mondragón, looking grim and grumpy as usual from beyond the Emperor’s ginger-furred right shoulder, conceded to the heat by wearing a cloak of brown and black feathers over a brown kilt and sandals.
He nodded curtly to Melodía.
“Alteza,” he said, acknowledging her only with the slightest lizard’s-tongue eye-flick. Here I spent years thinking he disapproved of me as frivolous, she thought. Until I realized he took far too little notice of me to approve or disapprove.
Like most of Firefly Palace’s public spaces, the library had high, rib-vaulted ceilings. Unlike altogether too many of them, it was well lit by tall windows, as well as being well kept, dusted, and continually replenished. No aficionado of recreational reading—and less of parting with good silver—the Prince of the Tyrant’s Jaw nonetheless spent freely here. He approved of reading on principle, as being good for business; the library was a tradition dating from the Iron Duchess herself; the Firefly Palace was Felipe’s de facto Imperial residence; and keeping La Merced’s library at least a volume larger than its bitter rival Laventura’s was a goal held dear by every citizen, from the lowest to the highest.
“But why are you wasting such a glorious afternoon rusticated here among musty books, my child?” Felipe asked.
“I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the history of the Empire and la Familia,” she said dryly, “in order to better perform my duty toward both.”
She wore emerald silk trunks and plain brown buskins. Her maid, Pilar, who stood nearby, silently helpful, had wound her hair into braids and pinned it up in an intricate arrangement with beads and a feather or two. It looked fancier than it was. It was mostly meant to keep her hair off her neck.
Felipe tutted and shook his head. “You’ll get worry lines from all this studying.”
“I did take on many of the duties of running Los Almendros when my mother died,” she reminded him.
Instantly she regretted doing so. The loss of his adored Marisol remained an open wound for him. And the fact that Melodía’s mother had died giving birth to Montse—who likewise sat nearby, poring intently over a vast open book of her own—didn’t make it feel better.
But today’s good mood was invincible. He only beamed.
“And a splendid job you did too, Melodía. But now we’ve a fine seneschal in place to take care of our home duchy. You’re the Emperor’s daughter, girl. You’ve got no worries.”
She scowled. “Nor duties either.”
He laughed as if that was the grandest joke he’d heard this week, and clapped her on the bare brown shoulder.
“Indeed, indeed. So why not enjoy life while you’re young? Though I do regret to report that you must delay your upcoming betrothal and nuptials with Jaume for a while longer.”
That made her mash her lips together till she felt them stick out like a morion’s bill. It wasn’t as if she had openly announced the rupture between her and Jaume. But it was as if everybody else in the bloody palace knew about it. She hadn’t tried to hide it, certainly.
Then again, had she ordered her servants to paint it in red letters a third of a meter high on the wall of his bedroom, he still might not have gotten the message. The Emperor didn’t take hints, even if delivered on the beak of a war-hammer. And he was especially deaf and blind to tidings he didn’t care for.
Then it hit her she was being the same.
“Wait, why? What do you mean, ‘delay longer’?”
“Why, only that I have hit upon the splendid notion of sending our young champion on to bring other upstart grandes into line. Once he’s finished with the reduction of Terraroja, that is. But that’s certain as the sun’s rising in the west, and not that much further off, surely.”
“You can’t be serious!” she said, jumping to her feet.
He smiled fondly and patted her arm.
“So wonderful talking with you, mi hija,” Felipe said, patting her on the arm. “Do try to lighten up a little and enjoy your life. It’s so fleeting.”