by Victor Milán
Rob winced. Between Little Pigeon, the horse-scouts, and the woods-runners, little went on in Providence town or its environs that he didn’t know about. But the Garden villa’s stone walls so far defied all his prying. Not even Jeannette—for whom his ardor had cooled somewhat, since he found out who her brother was—nor the normally complaisant Nathalie would whisper a single tale out of school. Little Pigeon’s spies could only have figured out what was afoot after the procession set out.
“You’ve done well,” he told the boy. “Thanks. Run off to the commissary and get some food.”
Rob turned right back toward the farmhouse. Off by some outbuildings, Karyl was walking Lucas through longsword counter-and-attack techniques using tree limbs as weapons. Both men were stripped to the waist.
Rob frowned, mostly at himself. For all his many duties, Karyl was devoting a lot of attention to the painter. Rob wasn’t sure why that bothered him, but it did.
Karyl raised his stick to the level of his forehead, “point” forward. Sweat plastered Lucas’s almost-white hair to a forehead fisted in concentration as he painstakingly mimicked every movement. The tip of his tongue stuck out of his mouth. He’d become even more fanatical about sword practice since he’d gotten a taste of battle.
“Karyl,” Rob called as he approached. “Our lives are about to get interesting again.”
Karyl lowered his stick. “Enough for now,” he told Lucas. “Remember, spiritual development is as important to your training as physical techniques are. Skill without self-mastery is hollow. A set of clever tricks, no more.”
It was as if shutters closed behind Lucas’s blue eyes. As it always was when Karyl talked to him that way. And as always Rob thought to see Karyl’s shoulders slump ever so slightly, and a look of pain pass over his fine, ascetic features.
* * *
The procession was nearly as grand as Timothée described it, though Rob thought it a bit of a stretch to call a pair of female Garden acolytes beating a drum and tootling a fife a “band.” Bogardus strode resolutely in the lead, and close on his flanks came Ludovic with his lugubrious moustache and Sister Violette, looking surprisingly good in white silk robes and smiling in a way Rob thought couldn’t possibly bode well. Bogardus’s strong oblong face said neither yea nor nay. Which came as no surprise: he’d been a priest, and was now a politician.
Half a dozen Town Guards brought up the rear, slouching in breastplates-and-backs still slightly shiny from the grease they’d been packed in. An unprepossessing lot, they consisted of skinny young men and stoutish older ones. They had their morions pushed back on their heads and toted their halberds haphazardly over their shoulders. Rob had never seen them do much, and couldn’t imagine what they might be meant to do here.
Behind Violette walked her crony Longeau, tall and somewhat ungainly, smirking most fatuously.
“Great news,” he called. “Thanks to your notable victory, the Council has decided to order you back into the field at once, to defeat our foes for good and all. I shall join you. In a strictly advisory capacity, of course.”
“We’re nowhere near ready,” Karyl said, drying his hands of sweat on a twist of straw.
“You said an army was never ready,” Sister Violette said. “But you won.”
Yannic, Melchor, and Percil came up to exchange hearty forearm-clasps with Longeau. “He’s a town lord too, you know,” said Gaétan at Rob’s elbow. “Longeau. He’s well off, though he didn’t buy his patent like Percil.”
“We have to wait,” Karyl said, speaking straight to Bogardus. “Our numbers are increasing. The volunteers are learning rapidly. But we still can’t face a real army in the field.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Longeau said, with a huge smile smeared all over his face. He turned to the crowd. Most of the army had turned out to see the show, over two hundred men and women who’d flocked to the silver thistle on green banner of Providence.
“What do you say, good people?” he asked in a voice that boomed like a veering wind. “Shall we take the battle to the evil ones who have tormented us so long?”
From the back of the crowd came a hearty, “Hip—hip—huzzah!” Rob looked around to see knots of town lord soldiers, pumping their fists in the air in unison and shouting. A handy claque they make, he thought sourly.
By the third time through the chant they had the whole militia with them: “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah for victory!”
Violette and Longeau grinned as if they’d just seen Count Guillaume off himself. Bogardus’s face was stone, Karyl’s polished bone.
All Rob could do was shake his head and mutter to himself, “This’ll not end well.”
* * *
The vexer trotted past, impudently close to Jaume and his two Companions on the tufa-graveled road, proudly carrying a severed human forearm in its mouth.
Florian aimed a kick at the Velociraptor. The little creature veered clear without even looking at him. From its flashy green-and-yellow plumage Jaume guessed it was a domestic gone feral; the local tribe of wilds was streaked brown and grey.
“They have their tasks to do, as we do,” Manfredo said reprovingly. “The dead belong to Paradise. Scavengers help us return.”
“I don’t like seeing the little bastards so smug about it.”
Jaume frowned at the burned-out ruins of the town of Terraroja ahead. “Did it come from there, I wonder? I thought we’d pulled out the last of the bodies.”
Though he could not bring himself to intervene, once the sack and ruin was well under way, out of what it would cost the Empire, he had led his Companions and a number of volunteer Ordinaries to the survivors’ succor before the breaking of dawn. As a matter of course, they had gone armed—as a few lingering looters, who in particular had chosen to carry off liquid booty in their bellies, had found to their dismay. Briefly.
But killing a handful of straggling evildoers had been little more than their help in putting out the burning shops and houses, and escorting shocked refugees safely home from the Redland hills: palliative.
Manfredo sniffed as the town itself came into view. His nose wrinkled.
“They’ll be some time yet, retrieving the last of their dead, by the smell.”
Jaume’s gut tightened. That was plain enough even through the thick stinks of the damage done by fire, and by the water used to put it out. But that was why he had come here: to drink in, for one last time, the results of the other night’s treachery. The fire-gutted buildings. The strewn garbage, broken chairs and crockery, ripped-up feather screens and hangings, the things that had been cast aside in the hunt for valuables to steal—or simply vandalized from frustration or fun. The smaller, less stoutly constructed buildings that showed unmistakable sign of war-hadrosaurs having been ridden right into them. The wretched knots of survivors working to clear the rubble of what had been their lives.
“It looked as if the arm was scorched, anyway,” Florian said. “It may well have been filched from the burn pit outside of town.”
He showed a lopsided smile. “I doubt the only naked and plundered bodies being cremated belong to helpless victims.”
Jaume felt bad for the flickering gratification the suggestion caused. When he’d led his relief force here, he’d brought with them a manipulo of Coronel van Damme’s Nodosaurs to guard the town. Disgruntled at missing out on the plunder, they were more than eager to take out their frustrations on any blue bloods or their hirelings who gave them the pretext by trying to sneak through their lines. Or bluster or bully their way through.
He halted atop a low rise overlooking the ruin. Terraroja had been a fairly large and prosperous town. It was amazing how much devastation the runaway army, whipped on by Papal Legate Tavares, had managed to accomplish in so short a time. Even to a campaigner as seasoned as Jaume, who had seen the like before.
“Have you finished your penance now, Captain?” asked Manfredo. “You—we—couldn’t have helped them. We were already too late.”
“Thank you, my
friend,” said. It was never easy for a man of the sort to qualify as a Companion to acknowledge error; as much humility as service to the Lady required, it needed that much pride. “But this happened under my command, so it is my fault. I felt the need to see and smell and feel what my carelessness caused, one final time.”
Florian made a disgusted sound low in his throat.
“I cannot see,” he said, “why the Emperor refuses to do the sensible thing, and let us march the army back home straightaway and muster it out, now that its task is done.”
“Felipe has decreed that we continue our campaign, against a new target,” Jaume said. “I can only obey.”
“It’s our job to bring law,” Manfredo said. “Conde Ojonegro is no less lawless than Terraroja was.”
Florian swept his arm to encompass the town. “Is this the law we bring?”
Manfredo looked pained, and found no words to say in return.
“I fear for the Empire,” Jaume said. “Troubled times are coming. You all know that I think what we’re doing is likelier to bring them on than head them off. And still—I have no choice.”
Florian laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’re with you.”
Jaume gripped the hand.
“At least Melodía’s safe from the chaos to come,” he said.
Chapter 42
Libro de los Nombres Verdaderos, The Book of True Names—A book, said to have been given us by the Creators themselves, that tells us the true names from Old Home of the creatures of Paradise, dinosaurs, fliers, and sea monsters, along with the names we commonly call them by. However, we are not listed, nor are our domesticated Five Friends.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
The arming-sword clanged against the two-headed black falcon painted on the blue-bordered white shield. Watching the duel from her chair on the shaded loggia above the small limestone-flagged palace courtyard, Melodía winced. Duke Falk von Hornberg struck back with his axe as the two combatants charged past one another. His opponent warded off the blow with his own shield.
Both combatants wore full armor. Falk had his royal-blue plate. His opponent wore a red feather cape, a gilded breastplate figured like a muscular male chest, and a gold barbute helmet with bobbing red and yellow plumes: the armor of an officer of the Scarlet Tyrants.
Their commander, in fact.
“I think it’s terrible,” Princess Fanny of Anglaterra said.
It took Melodía a few rapid heartbeats to realize her friend didn’t mean the duel to the death between her father’s new favorite and his chief bodyguard. Her face felt as if it had been stuccoed and allowed to dry in the noonday sun.
A few meters away Felipe sat watching. He talked animatedly with Mondragón, who stood as always at his elbow.
“What’s terrible about it?” Lupe asked. “Those rebels got what they had coming, didn’t they?”
“But Terraroja had surrendered,” Fanny said. “To hang him without trial was dishonorable. The rape and murder of his wife and servants was criminal. And the poor villagers!”
“The peasants always suffer,” said Abigail Thélème dryly. “I suspect in future the Emperor’s foes will think twice about surrendering to his Army of Correction.”
Metal rang on metal in another rushing flurry. Most fights ended in seconds—a single quick exchange and one was down, injured or dying. Or both were.
But these two fighters were unusually skilled. And shield combat put a special premium on circling to take advantage of the fact that a shield blocked vision as well as blows. Those things protracted a duel. But as always, both fighters moved constantly, whether around each other or toward.
“And now your father’s ordered the army to march on Condado Ojonegro over a tariff dispute,” Fanny said. “Poor Jaume. To think he never really wanted any of this.”
Melodía had to keep herself from cringing. Her heart ached for her lover. She wanted nothing more than to comfort him, by letter if not in person.
But I can’t. He has to apologize first. I’ve taken this too far to back down.
She refused to read the letters herself. In part for fear she’d weaken: she better than any of his myriad admirers, in Nuevaropa and across all Paradise, knew the power of the poet Jaume dels Flors’s words. But she had Pilar read his daily missives, each and every one, to see whether Jaume said he was sorry for what he’d done to Melodía.
And he still had not.
Falk rushed Duval. His axe hit the Riquezo’s helmet but glanced down its peak.
Duval struck at Falk’s leg. Falk’s shield came down. But the cut was a feint; Duval spun toward the taller, younger foe and hammered his sword pommel into Falk’s visor. Falk staggered. Pressing into him shield-to-shield, Duval got just far enough behind him that Falk couldn’t hit him. Then he got three ringing hacks into Falk’s head before Falk shoved him away.
The Scarlet Tyrant commander was built like an ankylosaur, wide and low to the ground. Though he’d just turned one hundred, the center point of middle age, Duval kept himself rigorously fit. Like all his men, he hailed from Riqueza, a mountainous fief of Sansamour whose folk were famed for their ferocity in battle—and their belligerent insistence on exercising more autonomy than Archduke Roger was willing to grant them.
Falk’s round helmet showed dents. Though he kept trying to power his opponent down with nosehorn-bull rushes, Melodía didn’t think he was stronger than Duval. And the older man had the edge in skill.
She wound a handkerchief tightly in her hands. She didn’t know why she felt so unbearably tense. She didn’t even know whom she wanted to win.
What she wanted was that the fight wasn’t happening. She didn’t even know why Falk had challenged Duval. What she knew was that nothing good could come of it.
Falk had been busy since the Ejército Corregir marched. He’d even found followers among the younger Scarlet Tyrants. Melodía didn’t like the smell of that at all. But whenever she tried to mention her misgivings about a recent rebel acquiring so much influence to her father—who himself was leaning increasingly on Falk in Jaume’s absence—he just smiled and said, “Of course, dear,” as if she were a child.
As usual.
Another surge and clangor. Falk struck savagely at Duval’s thigh. He was using an infantryman’s axe, both head and haft longer and heavier than the battle-axe he carried when mounted. Many knights would’ve disdained it as a peasant’s weapon; Falk was clearly a man who cared most for results.
Melodía didn’t think he got the one he desired this time. Though the axe left a groove in the steel cuisse that guarded his opponent’s thigh, the Riquezo’s shield didn’t twitch downward by a millimeter. Instead Falk had to snap his head aside to avoid a thrust to the eye-socket of his helmet. The tip of Duval’s sword left a bright silver scratch on the blue-enameled visor.
“What do you think about all this fuss over the Garden of Beauty and Truth?” Josefina Serena asked, looking everywhere but at the brutal contest on the yellow flags a story below. In her beloved tourneys, death or even serious injury were accidents, neither intended nor desired. Here they were the point. Which clearly upset her. “Is Providence really full of heresy, the way everybody says? My father says all of La Merced’s abuzz that they’re going to bring a Grey Angel Crusade down on us.”
“Curious,” Abi said with a frown. “Mercedes are an easygoing lot, leaving aside the odd riot for sport. They’re not normally the sorts to get worked up over doctrinal differences.”
“But a Grey Angel Crusade is more terrible than anything!” Fina had a broad superstitious streak, which she hadn’t gotten from her father, an all but overt agnostic. “That would scare anybody.”
“Wouldn’t that make Melodía’s boyfriend a heretic too?” asked Llurdis, biting into a peach. “They follow his doctrines in Providence, don’t they?”
She lowered the fruit and looked around at her fellow ladies-in-waiting with juice running down her chin. “What?”
“Tactful, Llurdi,” Abi murmured.
“Brainless bitch,” Lupe hissed. “I’ve a mind to—”
Melodía slammed fists down on thighs left bare by her emerald-green silk loincloth. “Enough!”
Duval had pressed Falk back until his shoulders almost touched the ivy-covered courtyard wall. As he rushed in to press his advantage, Falk thrust his axehead at his opponent’s eyes.
Reflexively Duval whipped up his shield. Even as he did Falk was casting his own aside. While Duval was blinded by his shield, Falk gripped the axe with both hands, swung it high, and brought it down in a brutal woodcutter’s chop.
It caved in Duval’s shield. The arm beneath broke with a loud crack.
The Anglés ambassador, Sir Hugo Hugomont, broad as a castle gate and jovial, started to step forward to thrust his staff between the men and end the fight. He was acting as knight-marshal. With Duval’s obvious injury, honor was now satisfied. The Scarlet Tyrant commander could concede without disgrace.
But Duval did not yield. He stabbed at Falk’s belly so hard his sword-tip broke through the Herzog’s breastplate. Falk raised his axe overhead again.
It hacked through the crown of Duval’s helmet. Blood squirted from his eyeholes. A scarlet plume, severed, floated gently to the ground.
He landed before it did.
Using only his alarming strength, so as not to dishonor his fallen enemy by stepping on him, Falk wrenched his axe free. Melodía heard someone vomit behind her. Maybe more than one. She held her breath; if she smelled puke, she’d throw up too.
She had not been able to watch when Jaume fought Falk. She’d made herself watch this fight to the end. Now she wondered why.
Stumbling-eager, Falk’s arming-squire Albrecht brought his master a cloth to clean his blade. The Duke did a rough, quick job of it. Then, as nimble as a dancer despite heat, exertion, and twenty kilos of plate, he walked up to kneel beneath where Felipe sat, and lay his weapon symbolically at his Emperor’s feet.