The Dinosaur Knights (16 page)

And what's this, then?
he wondered, settling his rump comfortably on the edge of the stage.

From Pilar he knew Violette liked playing with Gardener girls as well as boys, which he did not begrudge her. He liked the lasses too. And Melodía was a tasty morsel, no question, although too full of herself for his taste. He also knew from Pilar that Melodía had resisted frequent sexual overtures from some of her ladies-in-waiting. But they were mere girls, and made pests of themselves. Whereas in Sister Violette Rob recognized an accomplished player of the game.

But ah
, he thought,
what game does she seek to play with our rogue Princess Imperial? A game of pleasure, or a game of thrones?

*   *   *

“What's your pleasure, my lady?” he asked Melodía as she joined him on the terra-cotta tiles in front of the head table. She wore a frock of purple linen, embroidered around the bodice with pink roses on green vines. A modest enough garment in cost and cut, to be sure. But it did little to hide her altogether grown-up charms from Rob's accomplished eye.

“Melodía, please.” She smiled. “There's no lord or lady here. It's one of the reasons I love it.”

“Suit yourself. What song would you like me to play?”

“‘Amor con Fortuna.'”

He nodded. It was a favorite of his, and said to be more ancient still than the tune he'd played earlier.

“Be warned, lass,” he said, “I play it lively. Some there are as play it like a dirge. Which I suppose suits such crabbed souls as deem either love or fortune a thing to lament. Of which there are none here, I trust?”

She laughed. A little wildly, he reckoned, and a little brassily; there was a tint to her cheeks and a glint to her eye.

“That suits me as well, Master Rob,” she said, prettily enough.

I used to think love a subject well-suited for dirges, myself, once upon a day
, he thought.
But now
—

He shook the thought away like a three-horn dislodging a drill-fly from its eyelid. He was only ready to stray so far down that path.

He played the song as promised, fast and merry. To his mild and pleasant surprise Melodía sang not just with a clear lovely voice, but technically quite well.

When they were done he complimented her singing. “It's not to be remarked on, I suppose,” he added, “given you're half Catalan. Of which folk I hear it said, if you pinch them, they cry out in pitch.”

Again Melodía laughed. Her face was even more flushed than before.

“I can't really credit my mother's heritage for more than the inclination,” she said. “Whatever skill I have, is a gift from my cousin Jaume, my teacher.”

“Teacher of us all,” added Bogardus.

Rob blushed hot to the roots of his beard.
Walked into that with eyes open, didn't you?
he jeered at himself. He dreaded going back to sit beside Karyl, who still hated the Imperial Champion for destroying his White River Legion.

But, dismissed, he had to. He replaced the instrument and resumed his seat, studiously not looking at his companion. Who of course said nothing.

But Melodía had stayed where she stood. She swept the hall with an imperious glance.

“Master Rob has given us beautiful music,” she said. The diners clapped. “I wish that was all he gave us.

“By itself, his playing would be a worthy gift indeed for Providence and its Garden. Our Garden, if I may be so bold. But he, and his companion, bring us something far less beautiful: the curse of war.”

Violette and her claque at the Council table applauded briskly. The hall reacted with less enthusiasm. Some applauded. At least as many murmured rebelliously.

Rob's reaction wasn't mixed at all. He sat up sharply. The Princess's preamble washed away his embarrassment at indirectly bringing up Karyl's nemesis Jaume like a bucket of cold stream-water to the face. Ale-induced fuzzy-headedness went with it.

“I thought it was Count Guilli who brought us the curse of war,” one of their companions said.

Rob ignored him. Seriously pissed and seriously fuming, he now doubly feared to look at Karyl. Then, forcing himself, he met a dark, sardonic eye.

“It would appear our juvenescent Princess has set you up,” Karyl said.

“Like a duck-pin,” Rob admitted sourly.

“Can't be much dishonor in that,” Dugas said, evidently trying to be helpful. “She was nursed on court intrigue, after all.”

“If she's so bloody good at intrigue,” Rob muttered, “what's she doing here?”

“I have treasured the few short weeks I have spent among you,” Melodía was saying. “I hope to pass many more here, and contribute what I can of Beauty.

“And of Truth. And one truth troubles me, though I hesitate to bring it up—”

“Please,” Bogardus said, after only a beat or two. “You're our sister now. Please speak freely.”

Rob thought he had gone a little grey around the jowls, though he spoke as graciously as ever. He wondered why.

“In just in the short time I've passed in the Garden,” Melodía said, “I have noticed a … a hardening. Of hearts and minds. I wish I could say otherwise.”

Even Violette frowned at that one. Rob smiled bitterly.
Ah, youth
, he thought, frisky as a filly—and heedless as a fifty-tonne titan ambling through a village. If the silver-haired Sister thought she could control Melodía, she had a better think coming.

“You have hired hard men to protect you,” she said. “I understand that. You face a cruel enemy.

“But can you really defeat cruelty with cruelty? I've studied war—in books, and at the feet of a man who's mastered it along with many gentler arts. And that's what war is: cruelty.

“The Garden preaches nonviolence. Jaume doesn't; you know that. Bogardus, who brought my good cousin's teachings here, has never hid the fact. As he himself says, Jaume has planted the seeds, he has cultivated them, and the flowers have grown in their own ways. Beautiful ways.”

She paused a moment, her lovely face troubled. Whether it was show or not, Rob had to nod. The girl performed masterfully at more than singing.

“But—perhaps the edges of the flower wilt. Poisoned soil can't long nurture Beauty, can it? And by bringing the practice of war into our Garden, do we not risk poisoning our own soil?”

Violette's violet eyes positively lit. She made to clap like a mad thing. Yet Bogardus, who played a crowd like Rob his lute, raised his right hand. It was a slight gesture—but it froze Violette.

“What can we do, Melodía?” he asked. “The threat is real. If it wasn't, we—I—would never have risked breaching our doctrine to bring these men here to teach, and practice, war.”

“But where's the greatest danger? War is seductive, my friends.”

She waved a hand at the rafters and the muraled walls. Rob cringed. He saw it coming, like a trebuchet-flung boulder tumbling lazily toward the bridge of his nose.

“Didn't you lose the incredibly gifted artist who brought these flowers and forests to life all around us, because he followed Karyl to war?”

The grumbling that had answered her question about the greatest danger turned into a sort of moan of shared pain. These Gardeners had no way of knowing Lucas's death had wounded Karyl more deeply than any of them.

Still—“Credit where it's due,” Rob said, “the lass has a positive gift for denunciation, and no mistake. Hearing her I'd be after condemning myself, if I hadn't long since forgiven myself worse.”

He glanced at Karyl. His face looked more like that of a marble statue than normal. The scar down his forehead was bright white on ivory. Rob used humor like a shield. But it wouldn't protect them both.

Doesn't do me that well, truth to tell
, he thought sourly, and tossed back the last of the ale in his stoneware mug. It had gone stale. It figured.

“What would you have us do,” a man's voice shouted from the hall, “lie back and let Guilli have his way with us?”

Melodía froze, and her dark eyes went wide in her cinnamon face.

“Be still!” snapped Councilor Absolon at the unidentified questioner.

That brought Melodía smartly 'round. “Wait,” she said. “I'm a guest here. Please correct me if I misunderstand: doesn't everyone have an equal voice here? I thought that, in the Garden, there was no such thing as high and low?”

“It's a Council matter,” the lank-haired Absolon blustered. “We're the Master Gardeners. We're in charge of keeping the Garden clear of weeds.”

“Is asking a fair question a weed, then?” Melodía challenged.

“Faith, she has sincerity,” Rob said quietly aside. “Once a body can fake that, now, the rest is gravy.”

Absolon blinked and looked for support to Violette. She kept staring at Melodía.

“Melodía has the floor,” Bogardus murmured. “Courtesy is a beautiful thing.”

“To answer your question,” Melodía told the man who'd challenged her, “I don't know. I don't pretend to have the answer. I only know—meeting violence with violence can't be the only answer!”

Her eyes misted, and in a clouded voice she said, “If, in the end, Beauty and Truth can't enough to survive on their own, what does it say about the world? What does it say about us?”

She lowered her face and slumped her shoulders, clearly finished. Violette leapt to her feet, shouting “Brava!” and clapping furiously.

An eyeblink later her surviving Council allies jumped up. They put Rob in mind of a toy he'd seen offered for sale by a Traveler band his own wayward group had encountered in his childhood. You turned a crank and small painted wood dolls, the size of clothespins—which they probably were—bobbed up and down through holes in a board.

Simple as it was, the toy entranced young Rob. Of course his mother had met his pleas to buy it with a cuff to the side of the head. Not that they had the coin to spare. And when that night he tried, naturally, to steal it, he learned an even sorer lesson on the risks of trying to rob a fellow Rom.

More deliberately than Violette had, Bogardus got up clapping his big square hands. The hall applauded too, but more tentatively.

Rob's initial admiration for the girl's performance was evolving into outrage. The warmth that spread from his gullet through his gut after a hearty draft from his refilled mug kindled the embers.

He turned to Karyl. “How can you just sit there passively listening? Could you not be bothered to defend yourself?”

Karyl cocked a brow. “I don't bother defending against words.”

“Don't you see? Truly? It's not what's
real
that moves people. It's not even what they think. It's what they believe. Else how would minstrels make our living? The right words can twist even the plainest action in people's minds, so that what they remember is something other than what happened. Didn't you learn that in your father's court?”

“I did,” Karyl said. “I also learned I cannot win such wars of words. And I try never to fight when I can't win.”

Rob drained his mug again. He shook his head and blew like one of his magnificent new three-horns.

“But you cannot deny the heart, man,” he said. “Didn't you learn that, when you were voyvod, Karyl, me lad? If you try to do so, it becomes your worst enemy. Especially when it's your own.”

But he was talking to an empty chair at an empty table. Karyl had risen, picked up his staff, and walked unhurriedly from the hall. Around them the crowd was breaking up. Whatever the Gardeners thought of Melodía's impassioned speech, it had well and truly doused the festive mood.

The story of my life
, Rob thought. Rising uncertainly to his feet he stumbled off to steal what comfort he could from a final few hours in Pilar's sweet arms.

Chapter 13

Artillería
, Artillery
—Missile weapons too heavy to be carried by an individual person. Types commonly used in Nuevaropa include the stinger or ballista, a large, cart-mounted crossbow for shooting spears, which may be easily and quickly moved about the battlefield by teams of horses; the catapult, a generally heavier engine using a large bow or twisted rope to power a lever-arm, which casts stones or fireballs; and the trebuchet, a huge machine with a long, hinged wooden beam, in which the dropping of a metal box filled with massive weights propels a throwing-arm to hurl large missiles up to 300 meters. Devastatingly powerful, the trebuchet cannot be moved, and is used almost exclusively in sieges. It requires teams of large draft-dinosaurs such as nosehorn to cock it between shots.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

With a moan of wooden axle in bronze bushings, the three tonne counterweight fell toward the yellow soil. The trebuchet's stout framework, held together by rope windings and the bronze brackets Maestro Rubbio had produced from the vaults beneath the Firefly Palace above La Merced, groaned and bucked and clattered amidst a cloud of dust. The longer arm hit the top of its arc, whipping a hundred-kilogram chunk of granite in a high arc against the grey-clouded afternoon sky.