The Dinosaur Knights (20 page)

“I am Master Gardener Absolon,” said the tall, lank man who knelt on Melodía's right. “I speak for the Council.”

“And these others?” Guillaume asked. He had a voice surprisingly high-pitched for a man of his size.

“Good Gardeners,” Melodía said. Three young women and two men, some of the most passionate believers in Melodía's cause, had ridden hard with her from Providence town the day before. They camped the night in the forest, and set out at first light to kneel at the feet of the Count of Crève Coeur.

“And my friend Pilar.” Melodía was keenly conscience of her companion hovering at the edge of her vision, half-surrounded by spearmen with blue and green tabards over their mail hauberks. The gitana looked most uneasy.

You worry too much, dear friend
, Melodía thought.
I've seen the way. You'll see
.

Behind the supplicants stretched fields left fallow by farmers who fled the invading army as they would any natural disaster. Paradise had moved quickly to reclaim them with green grass and flowers in white and blue. Before them stood old hardwood trees with trunks stout as boulders. Around them Melodía heard the ruckus and rumble of a large army. Men shouted, sang, or cursed. Hornfaces grunted. Huge feet stamped. Weapons clacked on weapons and ladles in pots. War-duckbills droned and piped at one another as they fed on mounds of grain and vegetation fresh-cut by bustling grooms.

“It's a trick, Lord,” said the tall, bulky-bodied man who stood at Guillaume's right. Black brows glowered over a fleshy nose and heavy blue-shadowed cheeks.
This must be the infamous Baron Salvateur
, Melodía thought.

Guillaume waved a beefy hand at him. “Do they look threatening to you, Didier?”

“It's not these poor nosehorn-calves who worry me,” the Baron said, “but the mind that may have sent them.”

“If you keep on like this,” Guillaume said, “next thing I know you'll be checking beneath your cot before going to bed each night, to see if this bugbear Karyl is hiding there.”

Melodía's cheeks flushed hot. “Captain Karyl hasn't got anything to do with our mission, my lord. If he did, he'd hardly approve.”

“So. You offer surrender,” Guillaume said.

“I offer peace. Once we agree in principle we can discuss terms.”

“What do you offer me,” he said, “that would lead me to agree to give you peace, if not full submission? The Garden is the most troublesome neighbor, you know. They keep trying to infect my realm with their twin plagues of anarchy and egalitarianism. A Grey Angel has been seen Emerging in your county. Do you think those facts are unrelated?”

She frowned. “I heard a rumor to that effect in La Merced.”
But why would I have taken it seriously?
she did not say. But only so as not to anger the man she was trying to reason with.

“Which no one in Providence has heard,” Absolon said. His voice faltered a trifle. “I—the Count must be misinformed.”

“Your lack of order may have affected your intelligence-gathering,” Guillaume said.

“We offer you love, Count Guillaume,” Melodía said hastily.

For a moment they seemed to inhabit a bubble of silence that stilled even the invading army's clamor.

“‘Love,'” said Guillaume, as if the word was some unfamiliar, funny-tasting food.

“Love,” she said, striking again while the iron was—she hoped—hot. Also she hoped to proceed quickly to the sit-down phase of negotiations; the bumpy hardness of the ground was beginning to tell on her knees. “The
B
OOKS OF THE
L
AW
bid us love one another. If we act in a spirit of love, obedient to the Creators, what grounds can that give the Grey Angels to act?”

As if they existed, she thought. But she wasn't here to argue theology—much less insult the Count's. No matter how deeply mired he was in superstition.

Guillaume frowned. He sat up straight and scratched his clean-shaven chin as if genuinely intrigued.

“You're serious,” he said.

“I am, Lord.”

“Wellll … what can love win me that force of arms can't?”

Feel free to chime in any time now
, Melodía thought furiously at her companions. They seemed unwilling to preempt a princess.
We may need to work on this egalitarian thing
.

“Perhaps nothing,” she admitted. “But at how much less cost to you than war?”

“And are you, or the people you claim to represent, willing to let my troops plunder and rape, with maybe a bit of torture thrown in?”

She recoiled. It felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. “This isn't something to joke about!”

“Who's joking?” He held out a hand, took a swig of wine from a pewter flagon a lackey thrust into it. “The boys and girls have had a hard campaign; they need to take the edge off. And that seems a lot to ask people to undergo voluntarily. Which may have something to do with why it customarily isn't.”

Melodía's thoughts whirled like a wind-hada behind eyes that suddenly blinked at hot tears. “But—how can you take this so lightly? I offer peace. I offer
love
.”

“Haven't you been listening to me, girl? I can impose peace, on my own terms. What do I want with love?”

He drained the mug and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before tossing the flagon over his shoulder without looking. His servant fielded it deftly.

“In any event,” the Count said, “I can always find more peasant levies and mercenaries to make good my losses. Granted, peasants are more easily come by. But then again, dead mercenaries are notoriously lax about insisting on their pay.”

His retinue laughed uproariously at that. Except for Salvateur. He was staring at Melodía with what seemed to be increasingly narrow focus. With her heart sinking faster than it was already, she remembered his reputation for astuteness.

“If you'll pardon me, Lord.”

“Oh, what's that? Speak up, Baron; you've no need to wait upon ceremony with me.”

“Aren't you Melodía Delgao Llobregat, Imperial Princess and scion of the Archduchy of Los Almendros?” Salvateur asked. “And isn't that other woman your maidservant?”

Defiantly she tossed back the lock of hair that had escaped her Francés braid and begun to tickle her forehead.

“What's that got to do with anything? I still kneel before the Count in all humility, and beg him to make peace.”

“‘What's that got to
do
with anything?'”

The Count looked around at his retainers. After a moment they decided he was making a joke and laughed. Even Salvateur, who didn't seem much used to the courtier's role if Melodía was any judge (and she was), joined in.

“‘What's that got to do with anything?'” the Count repeated. “Oh, come on, girl. Your Imperial Highness: stand up.”

She glanced back to nod at her companions. All rose as one. Melodía's knees worked more stiffly than she liked, but she was glad to be off them.

“What it has to do with anything,” Guillaume said, “is that you're now my honored guest, while I negotiate with your Imperial father about payment for your safe return. As for the rest of you lot—”

He looked to his shield-bearers. “—take them away. Let the troops amuse themselves with them. It'll whet their appetites for the pleasures to come when we've whipped down these leveling Providence scum. Then bring out my hunting-pack. My horrors need the exercise; we could use the sport.”

“You don't dare—” Melodía shouted.

Hands grabbed her arms. Hard fingers dug deep. She smelled man-sweat and sun-heated dinosaur leather.

“My dear, silly little Princess,” Count Guillaume said mildly, “of course I dare. After all, you're a renegade and fugitive from Imperial justice, aren't you? Be grateful to me for sparing you and your serving-wench. I could send back both your heads to La Merced, you know. And your father would have to thank me for the gift!”

And he guffawed as if that was the grandest joke of all.

*   *   *

In the afternoon stifle of the tent, Melodía lay on her side and suffered.

Her arms ached from her wrists being tied behind her back. The physical was the least of her hurts.

Twice recently she had known what she felt like utter despair. First, in her cell after Falk raped her. Then on the road, when the exhilaration of her escape had faded and the terrible reaction set in.

Yet this was every bit as bad. It might be worse.

The tent smelled of horsehair, warm silk, her own sweat, and limestone-stringent dust. Outside the camp vibrated with the usual sounds of an army in the field. She strained her hearing, half trying to hear cries if her friends were being tormented, half dreading to hear them.

She didn't. The fact did not comfort her.

I brought them here
, she thought.
I got them into this
.

Though she had blamed herself a thousand different ways for her arrest on trumped-up charges, she knew, intellectually, it wasn't her fault.

But she had gone passive. She had trusted her father. Imperial justice. Her own innocence.

It had gotten her literally fucked in the ass.

Now innocence of another kind had dropped people who trusted her into deadly danger. Possibly herself as well. That remained to be seen, although she trusted Guillaume's assurances he meant her no harm. She was too valuable to him intact.

To think I thought
love
could sway a creature like that
. Her naïveté of minutes before now turned her stomach.

But even as she imploded into despair, pressing outward against that was the urgent desire to
do something
. She had to help her friends. She hadn't collapsed so far as not to realize that meant she had to do something for herself first.

But how?
She had been left with wrists and ankles tied in silk scarves—no doubt to further impress upon her that she was the Count's captive and must accept his will.

She couldn't think. Far easier to slump, to dwindle to a point in darkness and let the outside world do as it would.

But she couldn't. Quite.
They counted on you. You're their only hope
.

She recalled a conversation with Jaume. Long ago, long before romance was any more than a child's idle dream. Her father was still an Archduke, then, and Jaume a brash young hero/poet, widely celebrated, but struggling to build his newly chartered Order and to attract the best of Nuevaropan chivalry, the smartest, most talented, bravest, most moral, and most beautiful knights to become his Companions.

She mentioned—she forgot now why—that her dueña, Doña Carlota, had told her anger was bad and should be banished. Jaume smiled and said it wasn't possible. Nor even desirable.

How, she wondered, could anger can be good?

Is fire bad? he asked her. It can cause horrific pain and injury. It can destroy beauty faster than almost anything else. Yet how could we live without it? It also gives us beauty, and helps sustain the life to enjoy it.

Fire, she admitted, could be both good and bad.

Precisely! he exclaimed, with that happy enthusiasm she loved so well. Fire has two opposite values. It can be used for good or bad, like a knife. Like any tool. So with some emotions.

Some? she wondered.

Some, he said. Envy, worry, despair—these can't help us, only hurt. Think of them as Poison. Other emotions can be good or bad. Love is one. Hate another, albeit dangerous. And anger. Anger is the most, in ways, like fire.

Among other ways in this: the fire of anger can burn away such poisons as despair.

So now Melodía started getting mad.

And then a knife-blade poked through the silken wall of the tent a handspan from her eyes.

Chapter 16

Horror
,
Chaser
—
Deinonychus antirrhopus
. Nuevaropa's largest pack-hunting raptor: 3 meters, 70 kilograms. Plumage distinguishes different breeds: scarlet, blue, green, and similar horrors. Smart and wicked, as favored as domestic beasts for hunting and war as wild ones are feared. Some say a
deinonychus
pack is deadlier than a full-grown
Allosaurus
.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

Melodía's righteous anger, mostly at herself, evaporated in a mouse-terror squeak.
Soldiers! They've decided to disregard Guillaume's orders, sneak in and—use me.…

A dark-olive face thrust in through the cut. Green eyes looked at her in concern.

“Highness?”

“Pilar,” she breathed.

Pilar's face withdrew. A shaft of white lanced into the tent. Although the sun had passed the zenith and the cloud-filtered light was indirect, it dazzled Melodía's eyes, accustomed to the gloom. She screwed her eyes shut on big pulsing purple balls of afterimage.