The Dinosaur Knights (15 page)

He shook his head. “I honor Power above all things. It's what separates us from beasts, who have only muscles and teeth. But sometimes it's like water: the harder I try to grasp it, the faster it squirts through my fingers.”

“Perhaps my lord could learn the patience to cup his hands.”

“You know what I mean! Anyway, Felipe understands power. He intends to really
rule
. Perhaps it's the iron in his good Alemán blood.”

Instead of coming back sarcastically Bergdahl stiffened. He leaned forward, like a raptor tipping forward and raising its counterbalancing tail to spring to the chase.

“What?” Falk demanded.

“Something.”

“That's no answer. Tell me plainly—”

Bergdahl raised a peremptory hand. “Hush.”

The Pope's voice had risen to surprising volume and clarity. The crowd actually quit shuffling its collective feet and stilled. For the first time the old man's words reached to the balcony.

“—divine retribution hanging over us!” he was crying. “We must prove ourselves worthy of the Creators' mercy! Our only reprieve from the Grey Angels' soul-reapers is to leave them no work to do! Our only hope, to cut down the foul shoots of heresy ourselves, trample them into the dust, and burn the remains! Providence must be—”

He clutched his sunken chest and reeled back from the rail. Cardinals rushed forward to his aid.

He lunged away from them to lean far out toward the crowd.

“—destroyed!” he screamed.

His body jerked. His head snapped up. Then he pitched forward over the railing to plummet ten meters to the yellow limestone flagstones below.

For a moment the crowd stayed still as stone. Then with a single many-voice roar it surged forward, pressing the halberdiers back upon the body of their fallen master.

“Outstanding,” Bergdahl breathed.

Falk's stomach lurched. A moan escaped his lips.

“What's the matter, Lord?” demanded Bergdahl, who'd already turned to enter the apartment behind. “You look as if you'd seen the Old Duke's shade.”

“Oh, Chián, King of All Thrones, protect us,” Falk all but sobbed. “We're well and truly fucked.”

Bergdahl arched a brow. “You really think so?”

“What else can I think? The loudest voice in favor of our enterprise just cut off with a croak and fell on its head. Those weak sisters in the College of Cardinals despise Pío's militancy. They'll stumble all over themselves in their haste to elect someone who'll disavow our Providence Crusade and everything to do with it. Don't you see, you fool? It's over. We've lost!”

Bergdahl put his head back and cawed with laughter, like a harvester-of-eyes flier perched above a battlefield of dead stares.

“Your Grace, you know so much, yet understand so little! Do you truly not see? We haven't lost. We've won it all!

“All I need do now is to scatter a handful of silver into the right pockets, a few words in the proper ears, and by sundown all of La Merced will know it's just witnessed a miracle. And know for a fact the Creators Themselves endorsed the Pope's last wish.”

He shook his head in something akin to admiration.

“To think the ineffectual old Fae-spawn did most of our work himself. By somehow contriving to martyr
himself
!”

Chapter 12

Año Paraíso
, AP,
Paradise Year—
A year contains 192 days each of twenty-four hours (reputedly longer than those of Old Home). The year is divided into eight months named for the Creators' domains: Cielo (Heaven), Viento (Wind), Agua (Water), Montaña (Mountain), Mundo (World), Trueno (Thunder), Fuego (Fire), and Lago (Lake). Each month consists of three weeks of eight days, each named for a Creator: Día del Rey (Kingsday), Día de Lanza (Lanceday), Día de Torre (Towersday), Día de Adán (Adamsday), Día de Telar (Telarsday), Día de Bella (Bellesday), Día de Maia (Mayasday), and Día de Maris (Marisday).

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“So come fill up your glasses

“With brandy and wine.

“Whatever it costs, I will pay.

“So be easy and free,

“When you're drinking with me,

“I'm a man you don't meet every day.”

Applause bounced off the vine-painted rafters of the Garden Hall as Rob struck the last chord on his lute.

It was an ancient ballad. Older, some said, than Paraíso itself. It seemed to stir something atavistic within Rob and his hearers alike, at a depth nothing born of this world could touch.

Or maybe that was just the ale he'd drunk to lubricate his vocal cords.

Smiling and nodding he rose from the foot of the dais where the Council table stood, and walked—not any too steadily—back to the chair awaiting him at a table in the front row. Karyl nodded gravely to him as he dropped down into it.

Rob wasn't sure whether he believed Karyl lacked any appreciation for music or not, despite the way he claimed he had tried to suppress the arts when he was voyvod of the Misty March. But one thing was sure: the man admired a thing well done.

Rob felt a warm glow of more than applause and a bellyful of alcohol. The army marched with the dawn. Which meant he was marching, yet again, and quite irrationally, straight toward danger.

But he wouldn't be carrying around the dreadful weight of responsibility. At least, not for the quartermaster's job.

A young man took Rob's place and began to declaim bad poetry badly. He seemed to have trouble keeping black bangs out of his eyes.

Two days earlier Gaétan's cousin Élodie had joined the army to take Rob's place in charge of logistics. Évrard was miffed with Karyl and his son, since Élodie had been his bookkeeper-in-chief up until the point she marched into his office and demanded a leave of absence to join the fight against Crève Coeur in her own special way.

Gaétan said he hadn't even asked her. He claimed she was outraged when she found out a minstrel was in charge of the militia's supplies.

I'd take that amiss
, Rob thought with amiable muzziness,
save for the fact it outraged me most of all.
Anyway, being scout-boss as well dinosaur master took as much as he had, if in a far more congenial way.

The poet had grown strident. He appeared to be delivering himself of a polemic against those who spurned the “purity” of the Garden's vision. Whomever they might be.

It struck Rob as a peculiarly harsh message for a movement devoted to appreciating Beauty. But he'd heard complaints recently that Gardeners were beginning to take undue interest in the everyday doings of citizens of Providence town. And Gaétan said the Council was trying to raise tariffs on certain goods, seemingly not so much to raise revenue as to discourage their importation.

Which struck Rob as poor sense, given the ease of smuggling over the Shield Mountains, formidable as they might be. And which in turn seemed right typical of the Council of Master Gardeners. Excepting Bogardus, of course.

He looked around the hall. It was even more packed than usual for the after-dinner entertainments. Most of the few actual Gardeners who had volunteered for the defense force had come to be seen off by their brothers and sisters.

He didn't see Pilar. Despite Melodía's insistence she was no longer a servant, the Garden mostly kept her acting as one. To Rob, she insisted she was happy to do so. He wasn't so sure. But he couldn't tell if she were lying or not.

He could usually tell if someone was lying. That presupposed they were less skillful than he. Which he had learned to take all but for granted.

But not this lass. Whether Pilar had learned the skill growing up a servant, eventually at the Imperial Court, or whether it was true what their enemies—which was most folk in Nuevaropa—said, that gitanos had a natural gift for dissimulation, or some combination, he didn't know. But if she lied about how she felt about the Gardeners treating her as a servant again, he couldn't tell. She did make clear Melodía insisted on being treated herself as just another acolyte, although if the Delgao chit thought they'd actually do that, she was even more naïve than Rob judged her.

Thoughts of his emerald-eyed witch-girl jabbed Rob most uncomfortably, like a sharp stone to the fundament when he sat to take a rest from tramping some forest trail. He hated to leave the relative comfort of the farm, with its reliable shelter—and reliable lack of dangers, dinosaur and human. Traveling with the army meant less privation than traveling as raw as he and Karyl had done on the journey here, but it was still an uncomfortable business. And danger at some point of the voyage was a certainty, not supposition.

But what he'd miss, more than a feather bed and the free-flowing wines and ales of Providence town, was Pilar. Not just the loving either. She was more than a mere bedmate. He loved her flashing wit and ready laugh—and her understanding nature, which seemed not to tolerate but embrace his foibles, for all that she could see them as clearly as anyone he'd met.

And maybe all that means I should be glad to be setting out with the clouds' return
, he told himself.

But he had learned to make the most of merriment when it came within reach. So he took a jolt of the hefty, chewy ale, and forced his attention back to his surroundings.

His and Karyl's tablemates were a handful of young Garden men who had recently enlisted. He hadn't got their names yet. Doubtless Karyl had. Few details of his command escaped his dark dragon eye.

“It's called ‘opera,' you see,” said the overly handsome youth called Rolbert. “Comes from Talia, they say. It's all the rage in Lumière. I heard about if from a Walloon come up the Imperial street looking to trade emeralds from Ruybrasil for spices from Turanistan.”

“So they sing, and tell stories,” said Dugas, who had eyes like currants crowded rather too close for comfort on either side of a long, skinny nose. “What's special about that?”

“Ballads tell stories,” offered a redheaded man whose name Rob didn't know.

“Well, but they act it out as they sing, you see,” Rolbert explained. “Kind of. They all play parts, or rather sing them. So it's like a play, but sung.”

“It's not new, this opera,” muttered Rob. “It's only just coming back in vogue, is all. It's been around for years and years. And blighted every one of 'em.”

The fiery young poet finished declaiming, to fevered clapping from Sister Violette and her cronies and pro forma applause from the rest of the hall. He didn't get even that much from Rob and Karyl's table.
Not that my lord Karyl would applaud the man who pissed on his pant-leg if it was afire
, thought Rob in fond exasperation.

Bogardus—and Melodía, who sat beside him—clapped hard but without evident conviction.

“And what have we here?” Rob said aside to Karyl. “I do believe our little fugitive Princess may have flown from one daddy to find another.”

His companion didn't deign to glance his way.

The clapping died away. The whole hall seemed to inhale in horrid apprehension that the polemical poet might feel called on to do an encore. The collective exhalation stirred torch-flames like a breeze when instead he dropped his eyes shyly and blundered back to his table.

Bogardus rose. He spread his wide-sleeved arms like white wings in what Rob had come to recognize as his characteristic gesture.
It works for the lad
, he thought.
Why would he change it?

“As most of you know, my friends,” Bogardus said in his roundest tones, “we're honored to have among us a charming visitor, whom I hope will consent to join our community in whole heart. I am pleased and honored to present to you Melodía Delgao Llobregat, late of La Merced.”

She rose, blushing prettily and thanking the diners for their applause.

“Sister Melodía has graciously agreed to sing a song for us,” Bogardus said. “She's asked that Rob Korrigan accompany her on his lute. Master Rob, would you be so kind, to her and to us?”

Rob stood up. To cover a sudden attack of nerves he plucked at his beard with both hands, once each, as if trying to pull point to two.

Then he bowed low. “I'd be a greater churl than even I am, to refuse such a gracious lady.”

He saw Melodía's pretty face tense up a bit at that.
She loves playing up to the Garden's egalitarianism
, he thought, amused.
And why not? It's her own lover taught them to believe in it
.

Although perhaps the dashing Count Jaume has himself a rival, now.

As he reclaimed his lute from the rack by the wall and returned to the dais, he noted Violette gazing keenly at the fugitive Princess. Her sharpish pallid features were drawn into a smile, half as if she'd invented Melodía, half of raptor intensity.