by Victor Milán
“What’s the plan?” she asked.
Chapter 45
Estólica, Spear-thrower—also Atlatl, or Lanzadardos, Dart-thrower. A stick, usually about half a meter in length, with a nub or cup at one end that fits against the butt of a spear or dart. It is used to launch such projectiles with greater speed and accuracy than a person can throw, and is popular among the mounted skirmishers called jinetes.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
The morning was still bright and cheerful as a traitor beneath thin, high clouds. It was warm by upland standards, enough for sweat to beset Rob’s eyes from beneath his helmet’s bill and tickle his ribs inside the thick nodosaur-hide cuirass in spite of leafy shade. A light breeze stirred the bell-shaped blue flowers that cloaked the hill to its crest a couple hundred meters north. It blew out of the east and smelled of the flowers’ faint perfume and green growth. The fragrance was as soothing and pretty as the scene.
“That’ll change, soon enough,” Rob Korrigan muttered to himself.
Beside him Little Nell shifted from foot to foot. He wasn’t sure whether that was because she was picking up the tension among the hundred or so men and women Karyl had spread out under cover of the shoulder-high growth at the edge of the forest between them and the derelict village, or from the fact that her archnemesis Asal stood browsing for tasty shoots just a few meters away.
Karyl and Rob stood between their saddled mounts, just inside the screen of brush. Without glancing Rob’s way, Karyl nodded. He knew what Rob meant. And he knew even better than Rob how ghastly true that was.
He held his hornbow in both hands before him, and stood gazing straight ahead as if he could see what was happening.
And like enough he can, Rob thought. He knows this song as well as I. Better.
The Providence army’s cheering had been met with first scattered cries and then a hoarse distant shout as soon as they hit the hillcrest. The Providentials’ voices had merged with those of the lead Crève Coeur element into an inchoate chorus. Now the clamor rose an octave. Trumpets blared.
A muscle at the edge of Karyl’s jaw twitched. Screams shot up like startled fliers.
Well away to the left, a mounted quartet appeared. They rode their three horses and tan-ruffed russet strider not at a panic run, but at an easy lope. They were some of Rob’s scouts, not fleeing but doing their jobs.
He looked at Karyl. Karyl nodded.
“It won’t make any difference if the Brokenhearts realize we’re here,” he said.
Rob put fingers in his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle. The horses’ ears perked up. The four turned their mounts and clucked them into a gallop toward where the forest met the road.
On the road a single beast crossed the summit, heading their way. It was Yannic’s green strider, riderless, its golden ruff distended, running as fast as its long legs could pump. Its toothless beak was open in a cry unheard for the greater tumult of pain and fear rising behind it. Rob was interested to note it still hadn’t shat itself out.
The scouts drew rein near Rob and Karyl’s hiding place.
“It went like the captain said,” said Gilles, a rare townsman among the light riders, whose black hair clung lankly to his skull at all times, not just in the heat. “The whole army started to falter the moment they saw the first Brokenhearts crest the next hill.”
“Rangers,” said the strider rider, a woodcutter’s daughter named Françoise who hailed from this very region. “Guilli let them trot ahead to find the game for the lords.”
“Who showed up to hunt quick enough,” Gilles said. “Our own noble masters rode straight ahead, never even looking around to see they’d left the foot behind. We only saw five Brokenheart war-duckbills, and maybe twenty-five horse. But they were enough to swamp the town and country lords. Baron Ismaël was unseated promptly by a pair of knights riding morions. A sackbut rode Stalk-Neck Percil down straightaway and squashed him.”
“It crushed his great black charger too,” said Marie, a farm girl who was sturdily built for a light rider. She had black hair done up in ringed pigtails to either side of her head and a gap in her top teeth. “That was terrible.”
“We reckoned we’d seen enough then,” Gilles said, “and came back to report.”
“Any sign of Longeau?” asked Karyl, to Rob’s bafflement. The scouts shook their heads.
It struck Rob that he clearly recalled seeing Councilor Cuget riding off all full of vainglory with the three town lords, and the pair of barons following on their monstrous mounts. But he could not recall seeing so much as a feather from Longeau’s downy tail after he finished his spew of rousing piffle.
Ah well, he thought, that’s not a one I care to remember. Even compared to that treacherous toad Melchor.…
“You’ve done your jobs,” Rob told his riders. “Fade back into the woods and rest your mounts.”
The scouts laughed. “They’re just knights,” said Marie. “Their beasts are fat and slow. Can’t we give them a hard time?”
For emphasis she brandished a feathered twist-dart with its thong of strider hide wound around its meter-long shaft, to give it spin when cast from a spear-thrower.
“Go ahead,” Rob said. Then he let his eyes slide sideways to Karyl. Karyl’s neatly bearded chin dipped once, which made Rob feel warm inside like a gulp of brandy.
The scouts rode away to the right, so they could sting the pursuers’ eastern flanks. The terrified strider ran right up the road past the defenders, still squalling cacophonously.
To the right—east—of the road, a lone man topped the blue-flowered hill. He ran in great ground-eating bounds the way the strider had, despite the tails of his mail hauberk slapping like lead weights at his legs. A household soldier, Yannic’s man by the arms on his tunic, he had thrown away shield and weapons alike in his frenzy to escape.
Next came a few clots of men. And then the army of Providence, in one great wave of fear.
“Steady,” Karyl called to his small, concealed force. They were woods-runners, dismounted scouts, volunteers who had chosen to defy their hereditary overlords. Most had bows, though some carried spears, axes, or swords and bucklers from the town armory. To Rob’s surprise, even a handful of armored house-archers and house-shields had opted to remain with Karyl. Rob honestly didn’t know whether cowardice or courage motivated them.
Karyl had spaced them far enough apart to allow their fleeing comrades to pass freely between them, although he expected the bulk of the routed to choose the road’s quicker path.
“Stay out of sight until I give the word. All our lives depend on you.”
Rob vented a long sigh. “You were right all along,” he said to Karyl. “Courage is overvalued. It betrayed them all. They let it drag them off to die for the unworthy. Just as you said it would.”
“But at least they won’t let it lead them astray so easily, next time.”
Rob had to bite down hard on the obvious rejoinder that next time appeared to be in no good prospect.
Ah, but isn’t that what we’re all about here, with even Ma Korrigan’s son getting ready to face off with mounted and armored knights, contrary to all good sense and prior practice? To make a next time?
As the broken army swept down the slope toward the woods, a horseman appeared, already among them. He speared a running man through the back as casually as he might a fallen leaf off the forest floor. The mountainous forms of war-hadrosaurs rose over the crest. They rolled down like a living avalanche, crushing men like flowers.
The Brokenheart nobles’ arrogance made Rob’s blood burn in his veins like lye. Most riders wore helmets without visors; those who had them didn’t deign to close them. They were prepared not for battle but for slaughter: for an encounter that would involve at most a short, sharp shock, and then panicked flight. They anticipated that Providence’s defenders would have their hearts and taste for glory crushed in their torsos at the first sight of armored men on horses, let alone three-
tonne dinosaurs, and would run before their enemies got within shortbow shot of them.
Which had happened.
As Karyl surely knew it would, if the army he had so carefully grown and nurtured with the care of an actual master gardener tried to fight the battle the town lords wanted to lead it into. Even though those who had fought with him in the ambush at Whispering Woods knew something most commoners did not—that even a high-and-mighty dinosaur knight could be pulled off his high-and-mighty dinosaur and done to brutal death by the meanest hands—they were in no way prepared for the emotional shock of facing such knights in the middle of open ground, with nothing but air and flowers to keep their powerful mounts from grinding them to screaming paste.
Still, Rob couldn’t help but feel almost as much disgust as fear as the mobile massacre rolled toward him. This is nothing more than Count Guilli’s advance guard, he thought. Were any of us—even the great captain, Karyl—any less daft than Longeau and that lot to think we stood any chance against them?
“We have to help them!” Gaétan cried. Rob could clearly see him sitting astride Zhubin, behind the screen of bushes on the other side of the road.
“Stand where you are and use your bow, and you will,” Karyl said.
“But they’re being slaughtered!’
Rob laughed harshly. “So why add your futile blood to theirs? Some bleed, all run; now’s when all the murder’s done. When men flee like bouncers but less expertly, and more easily ridden down from behind.”
“Poetic,” Karyl said. “But accurate, withal.”
He swung aboard Asal and held up his hornbow. “So we’ll cover our friends’ flight with flights of our own.”
Gaétan’s eyes blazed. Tears gleamed on his cheeks. But he nodded, as if slamming his forehead into a wall.
It’s a shocking bad idea, Rob thought, but except for abandoning all and getting out while we can, it’s the best of a bad lot. Or so I suppose, not being the great captain here.
The first refugees reached the woods. Some crowded together onto the road, seeking the swiftest possible escape from the death that pursued them. Most just ran straight ahead, taking the most direct route away from their pursuit.
The distinctive towhead of Lucas the painter turned sword prodigy appeared over the rise to the left of the road, followed quickly by the rest of him. Though he ran with the rest, having little choice if he didn’t want to be summarily ridden down, he still carried his longsword. Most of the routed men had jettisoned their arms and such armor as they could easily detach on the run, to speed them on their way.
Maybe he saw Karyl mount his mare. Maybe he simply knew the master he’d turned his back on would be just inside those woods, watching and waiting. Because just a few meters down the slope he stopped and turned to face his pursuers.
He reversed his longsword, gripping it with both hands near the tip. Rob knew the meter and a half blade wasn’t honed to shaving sharpness, and that this was why: so it could be safely grasped. Though Rob wouldn’t have wanted to do so barehanded as Lucas did. Any more than he’d care to stop and stand in the open with a blood-bent knight sure to bear down on him at any moment.
One did. Rob could see his bearded face laughing in his open helmet. He carried no shield, and held his spear with its bloody point to the clouds, clearly expecting to have to ride farther before he made another kill.
Lucas swung the sword like an axe and caught the knight full in the face with the cross-shaped hilt. Of all the heinous things a body could do with a longsword, that was the one that men called the “murder-stroke.”
The Brokenheart’s face exploded in red. He flopped backward over his courser’s croup. Lucas turned around to Karyl, whom he knew waited in the woods, and brandished his sword triumphantly over his head.
“You fool!” Karyl shouted. “Guard yourself!”
The head of a spear stood suddenly out from the young man’s chest as another horseman loomed up behind.
Lucas stretched an agonized hand toward Rob and Karyl. He opened his mouth. All that came out was a torrent of blood, shining in the cloud-filtered sun. He fell forward among the blue flowers he’d never get the chance to paint.
The horseman let go the spear and drew an arming-sword as he rode over Lucas’s prostrate form. Rob glanced at Karyl. Behind his beard Karyl’s face was hard and white as bone as he drew an arrow back with his left thumb. The recurved bow of Triceratops horn droned deep as he let go.
Rob whipped his head left to see it avenge Karyl’s wayward sword-apprentice. Instead it struck through both scarlet and blue cheeks of a magnificently brindled sackbut. The nearest of the Crève Coeur war-duckbills, it had turned its head to the side for some reason at just that instant.
Rob’s astonishment that Karyl had shot something other than Lucas’s killer was almost overridden by amazement that he had missed the monster’s eye. Of course, it would have taken a master Anglysh longbowman to make such a shot, and never mounted; but Rob trusted Karyl, Ovda-trained, to do it. Has grief gotten the better of his aim? he wondered.
Across the now-crowded roadway Gaétan’s bow boomed as if to echo Karyl’s. The Brokenheart who had speared Lucas was raising his sword over his shoulder to strike down another fleeing Providential. It was as if the motion carried him on backward out of his saddle—but for the fact that Rob’s eye had just registered the young merchant’s arrow smashing through the center of his forehead, just below his helmet-rim.
Blatting shrill distress, the Parasaurolophus Karyl had shot turned and bolted back the way it had come. Two more Crève Coeur monsters followed closely behind to either side. The wounded sackbut slammed keel-to-keel into the halberd-crest following to its right. Both dinosaurs went down in a thrashing, musically discordant chaos of limbs, vast bodies, and massive tails. Their cries could not drown out the agonized bellow of the Lambeosaurus’s rider as their combined mass crushed him like a cherry.
Rob’s eyes widened. Karyl’s aim had been as true as his mind was clear. That shot had been neither accident nor mistake.
Off to his left Melchor rode into the woods. Though his marchador’s ears were pinned and fear-foam trailed from its mouth, it kept up the steady fast-walking pace it was trained to that gave it its name. The beast must be sturdy indeed to keep up its amble despite carrying an ashen-faced Yannic as well as its stout owner.
The farmer Guat ran toward the undergrowth to Karyl’s right, weeping as he tried to cradle his spilled guts in his filthy blood-soaked arms and doing a bad job of it, trampling and tripping on their shredded loops that had fallen free. As Rob watched, some woods-runner gave him the only mercy available: an arrow through the temple.
More arrows arced from the trees as strung-out Crève Coeur horsemen came in range of short continental bows. Most stuck in mail coats or colorfully painted nosehorn-hide breastplates. One rider fell. A stricken horse reared screaming, and its knight scarcely managed to throw himself clear before it crashed to the ground.
Karyl loosed again. The Brokenheart who had steered his sackbut wide of the fallen duckbills went down with the shaft through his gullet. The remaining two dinosaur knights turned about and headed back the way they’d come. They were in this chase for the joy of slaughter, not to suffer pain or death themselves.
The field was theirs in any event. Nothing Karyl could do would change that, for all his genius.
Which was why his genius meant he wouldn’t bother to try.
The horsemen were too hot for the chase to notice their dinosaur-riding comrades retiring. They converged on the road. Why thrash about in the underbrush when the easy meat lay that way, packed in ahead of them?
Rob reckoned the woods-runners, scouts, and volunteers of Karyl’s scratch covering force could show them plenty of reasons, and pointed ones. But Gaétan suddenly rode his spike-frill out to block the Brokenhearts’ path.
He hadn’t had time to set his own recurved bow aside and take up shield and sword. He loosed a final shot. Links sprang open wi
th a chiming sound as the arrow stormed into the hauberk of the lead rider, not four meters distant, and cut his heart in two. As the knight pitched off to his right, Rob saw the arrow tenting out back of his mail for a handspan.
The next rider speared Gaétan through his chest.
Chapter 46
Gran Canal, Grand Channel—The body of water separating mainland Nuevaropa from Anglaterra. The top leg, running southeast, is called La Raya (the Stripe) of the Tyrant’s Head for its resemblance to an eye-stripe. At the gulf called El Bocado (the Gullet or Gulp), it turns southwest into La Fauces, the Maw. Also called La Canal Corsaria, the Corsair Channel.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
At least they put me in a north-facing cell, Melodía thought, so I have the breeze off the Gran Canal to comfort me.
She withdrew the hand she had reached between the black iron bars that were the only visible manifestations of cage to push open her window. Outside, the thirty-centimeter insects that gave the palace its name performed their intricate three-dimension dance, their green-yellow glow leaving bloodred streaks to linger briefly in her eyes. Eight or ten meters below, Prince Harry’s house-shields trudged the ramparts between torches whose light flickered orange on their peaked helmets, and on engines pointing out to sea, ready on the instant to defend against an attack only insanity would launch.
Away far off on the white cliffs of Anglaterra, hidden by the night, a single blue light shone. The daytime clouds had unraveled, leaving the sky to black and stars. Out on the Channel, the minute orange gleams of a ship’s lanterns at prow and stern crawled from east to west. From within the palace walls came the sounds of someone strumming a guitarra, the hot-iron smells of the unsleeping palace forges, the kitchens’ steamy scents. The commonplace nature of it all almost reassured her.
And then it all turned like a knife in her belly as she remembered why she was here.
She sighed and turned back to her small, spare room, high up the northwestern tower of the Firefly Palace. They’d brought her clothes. She only bothered to wear a green silk loincloth. She’d been locked up a night and a day. Some robed men she didn’t recognize had shouted questions, accusations, and threats at her. She answered the first as best she could and ignored the rest, all with simmering dignity.