The Dinosaur Lords (40 page)
“Let’s not make this harder than it has to be, my friend,” Karyl said quietly.
To the newcomers he called, “Welcome, gentlemen. You come just in time. The morning’s exercises are about to begin.”
The Bestiary of Old Home
—A late-first-century book that describes in words and pictures over a thousand creatures claimed to be native to Home, the world from which humans and their Five Friends (horses, goats, dogs, cats, and ferrets) came to Paradise. Though superstitious people believe it was directly inspired by our Creators, educated folk think that many of the animals in it are imaginary. It does provide a rich source for art and heraldry.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“R
í
u, r
í
u, ch
í
u, la guarda ribera.”
The voices rumbled like distant thunder from inside browned-iron sallet helmets. Snare drums kept time, as did the tramp of boot soles crushing tender pale-green grass into the eponymous soil of Terraroja, the Redland.
“Dios guard
ó
el lobo de nuestra cordera.”
The ominous conjoined voice repeated the second phrase. A double beat of the vast, cart-mounted kettledrums that accompanied an Imperial tercio to pound out battle signals marked the end of each measure.
A single voice, high and clear, sang a verse of the Nodosaur battle-song:
“El lobo rabioso la quiso morder
“M
á
s Dios Poderoso la supo defender—”
Jaume guessed it was a drummer boy singing. He stood on the brow of a low ridge in the morning sun with his sixteen Brothers-Companion. All wore their full plate, simple, white-enameled, unadorned except for the orange Lady’s Mirror painted boldly on each chest piece. The scents of dust, dung, and wildflowers filled the air.
By long-standing custom, the tercio’s purest soprano got the honor of singing the verses. Although her face and form suggested a dray nosehorn, their commander, Lieve van Damme, possessed a strikingly beautiful coloratura voice. When she had served as a simple pikewoman, she’d sung the part for years.
“Quizo la hacer que no pudiese pecar
“Ni aun original esta virgen no tuviera.”
Mor Bernat, good Catalan that he was, had put aside the notebook in which he wrote and sketched his impressions of the coming battle to sing tenor harmony with the distant Nodosaur vocalist. Owain, his longbow strung and slung over his armored shoulder, sang baritone—a Gal
é
s would no sooner yield to a Catalan in the matter of
singing
than a Catalan would to a Gal
é
s. Ayaks added his giant-bronze-bell bass.
Jaume joined them in his own famous tenor. He was Catalan too, after all, albeit more famous as a lyricist than as a performer.
The Imperial infatry column began to split left and right, flowing outward into ranks of pikes interspersed with halberdiers and greatsword-wielders. A dozen two-horse teams pulled stingers on their light carts into position before the grim lines. Nodosaur skirmishers in springer-leather jerkins and caps trotted to the fore, carrying arbalests and javelins. Each had a brown iron buckler slung about the neck, bouncing on his or her chest. In contrast to the tercio’s perfect lines, the light infantry fought in swarms like biting insects—a comparison that the Redlanders would soon find all too apt.
To either side of the Nodosaurs milled a peasant levy about a thousand strong, to use the word loosely, carrying pikes, billhooks, hunting spears, and whatnot. Even from up here Jaume could tell they were none too eager for what was to come. He couldn’t blame them. Their own feudal masters despised them. And given the chance, the enemy montadors would hunt them down laughing as if they were bouncers.
The levies didn’t even matter much to the outcome of the impending battle. They were there to impede the enemy, like walking caltrops. All glory would go to the men-at-arms on their gorgeous horses and war-dinosaurs. And to the extent the fight was decided on the ground, the decision belonged to the brown Imperial elite and their fearsome melody.
“What a stirring song!” Dieter exclaimed. His blue eyes shone. “What does it mean?”
“No one knows,” said Bernat. “It was almost certainly ancient before the world was made. The language is a dialect of Spa
ñ
ol, probably a predecessor. It’s about a raging river, at least. It mentions a powerful god defending a lamb from a rabid wolf—both creatures that most people consider mythical, though they’re listed in
The Bestiary of Old Home
.”
“Also virgins,” said Florian. “Which, while not mythical, are certainly rare in Nuevaropa.”
“And the ‘powerful god’ can only mean Chi
á
n, King of the Creators. As for the rest—”
“It’s meant to scare people,” Machtigern said.
“It works,” said Florian.
“Why not join the song, Goldilocks?” Ayaks called to him.
Florian laughed. “Thank you, no. I have a voice like a frog in a tin bucket. It would be cruel to inflict it on your tender ears.”
They watched the armies move into position from atop a red lava flow, mounded soft by grassy soil, called La Dama Rosa, the Pink Lady. Behind them their hadrosaurs grazed and drank from buckets lugged by sweaty arming-squires. The Ordinary hombres armaos waited in reserve farther back.
A road ran north up a broad, gentle slope toward Terraroja’s castle on its red granite crag and its attendant town of Risco Rojo. Both armies had deployed athwart the road in conventional formation: infantry in the center, cavalry to either side, and outside of them small, powerful blocks of dinosaur knights. Estrella del Hierro commanded the Imperial left wing. The right, under Monta
ñ
azul, was drawn up at the foot of the Pink Lady.
The Companions’ builders and fortifications experts, Fern
ã
o, I
ñ
igo Etchegaray, and Wouter de Jong, stood together admiring the distant keep. The usually taciturn Gallego Fern
ã
o, a master of siege warfare, was actually animated. His brown-green eyes glowed as he pointed out its various excellences—and shaped with his hands how he’d defeat them.
“It wouldn’t be easy,” he said, “but, Torrey and Telar, what a challenge!”
“What’s Terraroja’s castle called?” asked Dieter, drawn by their enthusiasm.
Wouter laughed. He was a sturdy, towheaded Flamenco from Brabant, a fiefdom of Sansamour’s Archduke Roger’s that straddled the border of Alemania and Francia.
“El Gallo Rojo,” he said, leaning on his battle-axe. “Which means both things you think it does.”
Dieter flushed. It meant “the red cock.” While the Companions did not mind each other’s business, especially where love and sex were concerned, in such a small group it was impossible for it not to be common knowledge that he had become the Flamenco knight’s lover.
“A castle is aggression made stone, boy,” Fern
ã
o declared. “Don’t ever forget that.”
“Still a powerful defense, though,” grumbled I
ñ
igo, scratching his beard with a thumbnail. “Leopoldo’s a fool not to squat inside and dare us to pry him out. We would, of course, but it would cost us more than even a set-piece battle.”
“If he was smart,” Florian said, “he wouldn’t be a buckethead.”
Jaume pulled a rueful mouth.
“Melod
í
a warned me we wouldn’t need siege-engines,” he said. “She said Count Leopoldo could never resist coming out to fight.”
If only I hadn’t dismissed her when she said it,
he thought bitterly.
Perhaps she’d be answering my daily letters now if I’d bothered to listen to her then.
“Terraroja sees war as a game,” Florian said, “a tourney on a grander stage. So he picked a field almost as flat and clear as the lists to fight us on.”
“Don’t complain,” said Machtigern. He began ticking the steel shanks of his war-hammer head against his pauldron. “It’s one reason we consistently beat the bucketheads.”
Ayaks threw up his hands and stamped off. Slight as it was, the clacking always drove him crazy.
“What?” Machtigern asked the huge Ruso’s back. He always did that right before battle, just as Florian laughed louder and more. He didn’t even know he was doing it.
“Count Leopoldo hasn’t done so badly for himself,” Manfredo said. “It wouldn’t be easy to provision the castle to stand a long siege, however strong its walls. This land is arid. It’s probably why banditry has such strong appeal for him and his barons.”
“He’s done us a bad turn,” said Jacques, walking up. “He’s managed to collect more men-at-arms than we have, both cavalry and dinosaur knights. Worse, to feed them all he’s sucked up most of the provisions available for twenty kilometers around.”
He shook his head. “It was a nightmare enough getting some of our nobles to pay for what they took when supplies were plentiful and cheap.”
Jaume frowned to see just how the travails of keeping not just the Companions but the whole fractious army tight, fed, and functional had worn his friend down. His lank brown hair had gotten sparser and greyer, as had his skin. Despite his armor, his shoulders were visibly slumped.
Jacques planned to retire soon from active service and return to the order’s motherhouse in central Francia to assume direction of its ever-growing holdings from Mor J
é
r
ô
me. J
é
r
ô
me had lost both legs when his morion rolled onto him after taking an iron ballista bolt through both lungs. Now, health failing, J
é
r
ô
me wanted to retire to his family’s vineyards in Sansamour. He had done well; Jaume anticipated Jacques would do better.
But the loss of any Companion left a hole in every Brother’s soul, as well as their battle-order. Even if it wasn’t death that took them. And Jaume could only wonder who would care for them the way Jacques had.
Sadly, the Empire’s most elite band of warrior-artist-philosophers of beauty tended to attract precious few candidates with any gift for organizing things.
“And thanks to our magnates’ obsession with their feudal ties and petty honor at the expense of everything else,” Florian was saying with unaccustomed venom, “our left wing’s significantly weaker than the right.”
Manfredo shrugged. “They’d outnumber us on both sides anyway, unless we put all our riders on one flank and left the other hanging. At least our right has a chance to hold its own against the Terrarojanos.”
Manfredo was an erstwhile law student, exiled for promoting Taliano independence from Trebizon. He’d become a virtuoso of mounted tactics, as he was of musical composition and various instruments. Jaume thought him more skillful than he himself was.
Not that Jaume considered himself a master tactician. As a face-up fighter, the next man he met who could match him would be the first. He inspired men to follow him, and had a knack for clever sleights and ruses. That he won larger battles was something he attributed to bringing better tools to the task, and to being less stupid than his foes.
“I’m not happy with our position,” he said. “I hate to accept battle on my enemy’s terms.”
“Hardly your fault, Captain,” Machtigern said. “Monta
ñ
azul and the rest barely listen. Tavares keeps telling them they don’t have to.”
“It is my fault, my friend,” said Jaume. “I command.”
Away to the west the Nodosaurs stopped singing.
* * *
“For a fat gob of phlegm, Melchor knows his way around a sword,” Rob admitted at the noon break. He sat on an old hay bale in the shade of the house, still sweating. The day was hot and he’d been exerting himself almost as heavily as the men had.
Tough work, this teaching business.
“I saw,” said Karyl, who squatted Eastern-fashion beside him. “Yannic will be competent if he can learn to control his incipient panic. Percil barely knows which end to hold, and feels too angry and challenged by circumstances to learn.”
Rob flicked eyes at him. Maybe more than at any time since he met the man, he felt like a small boy whose hero had stepped out of the ballads to become his companion. Serious about craft, if precious little else, Rob found himself awed in the presence of true mastery: the quiet mastery.
“Their house fighters could only be worth their pay among a people with a generation or two of peace under their belts. Still, they know the basics. It’s better than most we’ve got.”
“Young Lucas seems to be coming right along,” Rob said. Karyl had spent the midmorning break, and half this lunch period, instructing the young painter privately. “He’s mad avid for the blade, and that’s a fact.”
“He has a gift. Apparently his deftness with a brush translates to the sword as well. And it’s making him overconfident. I don’t like all the methods teachers use in Ch
á
nguo or Zipangu. But Lucas makes me think maybe it is a good idea, sometimes, to make an aspirant sweep the master’s studio for a year before teaching him technique.”