The Dinosaur Knights (26 page)

She had scarcely registered when, a few kilometers up the Chausée de l'Ouest from the town, the smallest of her four-rider escort had booted her chestnut gelding to a run to carry word of their coming to the château ahead of them. The other three, two boys and a girl, none older than Melodía if indeed as old, continued at the sedate pace they'd maintained since Karyl had dispatched them. They treated her, as they had all along, as if she was an unfortunate child—possibly one with eggshell skin.

To her relief, one thing they didn't treat her as was a traitor. What they thought her purpose in going to seek audience with Count Guillaume was, she had no notion. They hadn't spoken to her beyond necessities.

From the pitying glances her escorts had cast her way, and the hushed tones in which they conversed on subjects other than how much they hated missing the big fight with Guilli, she gathered that Valérie and the rest who had been in on her rescue had told her of the state they'd found her in, desperately facing down the Count's own horror pack. And of Pilar's horrible death.

The party reined to a halt a few paces short of the quietly waiting crowd. Without anyone saying a word, Melodía swung down from the saddle of her borrowed mount, a buckskin High Ovdan pony, with long black bangs hanging in its eyes and a surprisingly placid disposition. Overhead the clouds were breaking into long horsetail streaks, white or pink, across a sky that shaded east to west from turquoise to a deep blue. The air smelled sweet with freshly cut hay in a nearby field. From somewhere a bird trilled.

It was the hardest thing she ever remembered, making herself stand erect, square her shoulders, and walk right up to the grim-faced Bogardus. Lady Violette stood by his side, the sunset breeze molding her thin white gown to her slim body. Absolon had been her close friend and occasional lover as well as ally, Melodía knew.

I'd rather face the horrors, without even the false hope of Pilar's knife
, Melodía thought.

But she made herself do it. Then, face-to-face, she tried to meet Bogardus's gaze. She couldn't. Instead she dropped to a knee and grabbed the purple-trimmed hem of his simple grey smock.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I killed them. I killed them all. It was all my fault.”

And the tears erupted, and dissolved her like lava.

She felt two strong hands on her arms. She quailed. What would he do to her? What could he do to her that was one-tenth the punishment she had deserved?

He hoisted her to her feet, with that often-surprising strength of his—she couldn't bear to remember just how she'd learned of it. She raised her face, then, made herself blink away the tears, and look squarely into Bogardus's face.

He smiled.

“We know you acted out of love for us,” he said, “however mistakenly you did it. We are in a war, and sadly, there are casualties in war. You are welcome here, as always.”

“We're only glad you made it back to us safely,” Violette said, with curious intensity.

Melodía scarcely noticed. Because Bogardus enfolded her in his powerful arms, and cradled her against the rock of his chest, and she surrendered to a sorrow that seemed to flow from the coldest depths of Paradise.

*   *   *

Irresistible, an avalanche of muscle and gaily painted steel tipped with fluttering pennons and death, the Crève Coeur cavalry thundered down on the Providence pike-ranks. And stopped.

Neither horses nor dinosaurs were intellectual giants. Rob knew it; everybody knew it. But they were living creatures, and the tendency of such is to do their level best to continue to
go on
living.

Neither horses nor dinosaurs would, unless panicked completely senseless, dash themselves to bags of bone-shards against immovable objects, or what they took for same. Nor were these coursers, exhaustively and expertly war-trained though they were, about to impale themselves on a four-deep hedge of iron thorns.

So … they refused.

Of course most of the horses running behind the front couldn't see the obstacle: no one was going to confuse a horse's vision with a long-flying dragon's. So just as had happened when they bogged down in the mire, the rear ranks piled into the ones who had shied and halted meters short of the pike-heads. Which had the effect of driving most of them into the pike-heads.

The force of the impact of dozens of heavy, powerful equine bodies physically drove the Providence line back into an irregular wave. Some of the kneeling front rank had to let go their weapons and jump back to avoid being crushed.

But both sides instantly discovered a very important fact: unlike most weapons, a steel pike-head backed by four meters and four kilos of hardwood shaft would penetrate the finest plate—whether a knight's cuirass or a horse's barding.

Horses and humans screamed as the pikes plunged deep into their torsos. The ones that had been braced against the ground did the worst execution. Not only since they didn't depend on mere human mass and muscle to stay firm, but because some of them actually angled up under the horses' chest-armor.

Perhaps it was Rob's perfervid imagination—which, as a jongleur, was generally his stock in trade, if less in demand for a dinosaur master. But it seemed to him he could literally see a wave of resolution and confidence pass among the ranks of Providence pikes.

They had done the impossible: plain lowborn men and women had stood against the invincibly armored chivalry in full charge. And they not only lived—they were doing the killing.

They liked it. And they began to push back. The impaled mounts began to fall. The pikes of mostly the latter three ranks began to dig into the pushing, milling mob the rest of the Crève Coeur cavalry had become. Pikes thrust through horses' neck-armor and even the chamfrons protecting their faces. They punched holes in knightly steel and the privileged hide—and entrails—behind.

But not all the line had held. And it wasn't the pike-pushers' fault.

Blame momentum: Rob did. A handful of the charging coursers, perhaps slower on the uptake than their kindred, had left it too late to stop. Instead of pulling up before the pikes, they stumbled, and hurtled like living missiles of meat and metal, each weighing just north of a metric ton, screaming and leg-flailing through the foot-soldier ranks. Their riders flew off like discarded dolls.

Rob sucked in his breath as the following knights blasted through the gaps their hapless comrades had made. Though only a dozen or so made it through the painfully thin Providence line, they could now wheel to fall upon the backs of the pike-pushers. Who, engaged from the front already, could do little to protect themselves.

It was one of the most dearly desired outcomes in battle: to strike your foe on the flank, or better from behind. Such attacks struck panic in their victims far out of proportion to their actual danger. Even the hearts of the stoutest veterans—which these Providential amateurs were not—would quail, almost certainly causing them to break and rout in terror as human nature asserted itself.

Instead true buckethead nature reasserted itself. While the peasant infantry's impertinence in defying their betters merited punishment, they remained intrinsically beneath contempt.

Riding equated to nobility. In most tongues the one literally meant the other, hence the use of montador and montadora—“mounted ones”—as the universal Nuevaropan honorifics for knights. Gaétan, who had ridden apart from Rob while rallying the pike to stand firm, was of course a mere merchant. Rob was defiantly proud of being lower-born than
anyone
.

These were peasants mounted. And on
dinosaurs
. Conspicuous horned monsters bigger than any warhorse, even the huge (and currently out-of-vogue) destriers.

So naturally, honor and outrage drew the horse-borne knights to the two men like flies to fresh wounds.

To his eternal if secret pride, Rob's first impulse when three of the knights spurred straight up the barrow at him was to yelp like a dog with a stepped-on tail, wildly think,
What the sod am I doing here?
, and turn Nell's big, frilled head to run away.

But before her ponderous body could start to turn to follow, Rob saw that at least a pair of riders was coming on both flanks. He kept Nell turning left. Then booting her wide sides he sent her bulling toward the rider closing from that side.

The knight rode a white horse and bore a black shield with a raptor's hind foot, gold, complete with upraised killing-claw in silver. A striking design, really. Not that Rob had leisure to appreciate it.

The knight's lance-head glanced off the iron boss of Rob's own shield. The horse shied off from Nell's bizarre stout, front-hooking horn. The Einiosaurus slammed the courser shoulder to shoulder and sent it staggering back on its haunches.

Despite the opening Rob wasn't foolish enough to try making a break for it. While Little Nell was lighter than burly Zhubin, despite being longer she was never built for speed. Much less acceleration. She could no more outpace a galloping warhorse than a springer could a dragon in full dive.

Instead he spun her back clockwise toward the trio he'd first spotted attacking him. Corner-eye motion, reflex, and the Fae's own luck sent his axe wheeling over and down to his right. Its long beard caught the blade of a sword descending toward his own shrinking flesh. The force of his blow knocked the weapon from a gauntleted hand. Then, roaring rage, Rob thrust the spike sticking from the axe's business end into the eye-slits of the knight's armet.

The knight slumped to the ground, as limply as steel carapace allowed.

Then they were all around him. Only the first had used a lance, and that was now discarded for close work. Instead they belabored him with sidearms, swords, and a mace or two.

Individually, afoot or ahorse, any knight would make short shrift of Ma Korrigan's one and only son. They were raised to fight. Along with roistering and hunting, they did almost nothing but.

But they weren't trained to fight
him:
a canny opponent on an entirely unorthodox mount.

Little Nell was snorting and rocking her head side to side. But not in fear. Peaceable soul though she was—lacking the cheerfully murderous belligerence of her gigantic three-horned cousins—she nonetheless reacted to attack with outrage.

She was on her mettle now, and up on her short, thick toes for added traction, as well. The forward-curving tip of her eponymous horn could deliver a fearful downward rip, and drop the entrails of an incautious meat-eater on its hind-feet in an eyeblink. But it would never penetrate a warhorse's steel barding.

Its huge round top made an excellent natural battering ram, however. Little Nell had grown up practicing its use. Plus she weighed easily twice what the biggest courser did, knight, armor, and all.

And unlike Rob, the knights weren't used to
brawling
. Rob knew from literally having it pounded into his skull—or stomped—how to fend off multiple attackers. In particular, how to maneuver them into each other's way. If he used them more with vigor than skill, he did ply axe and shield effectively for offense and defense both.

The code chivalric did not apply to fighting an impudent peasant. The Crève Coeur knights had no compunction about stabbing Rob in the back.

If they only could. While Nell wasn't generally any more agile than she was speedy, she was compact. She could whip around quite smartly. Rob kept her turning this way and that, risking dizziness but keeping his hide unpunctured.

Mostly.

A voice that scarcely seemed his own tolled through Rob's skull as he tried desperately to see a way to stay alive for one more minute, one more second. It cursed him for every sort of fool.
What kind of romantic twaddle ever even brought you here, you git?
it sneered.
You're a performer, not a bloody warrior. Are you as besotted with that fey rogue Karyl as he is with Bogardus? Or it the Garden and its pretty principles you love more than your only begotten arse?

But Ma Korrigan had also beaten into him the lesson that when needs must, one did what one must. Or had it been life?

 … The voice's saying
love
brought in his mind a face whose mask of blood had blessed it, by hiding what claws and teeth had done to its loveliness. The mocking voice drowned in the brightness of simple rage.

He ducked beyond a mace's whistling arc, returned a clanging blow on the wielder's upper arm. Metal flexed with a twang. Flecks of blue enamel flew into the air, each glittering like a tiny jewel in Rob's exaggerated perception.

His axe Wanda, with the leverage over a meter of helve gave her, was one of the few weapons on the battlefield privileged to be able to harm an enemy wrapped in full plate. But Rob, naturally strong lad though he was, and kept burly by the hoisting and shoving attendant on a dinosaur master's craft, lacked strength to hack through metal one-handed. He could still deal almighty dents, though—with a lucky hit, enough to break bone beneath.

He handed his enemies whacks that left them reeling. But they were still five, and he just the one.
And while arithmetic was never my strong suit
, he thought,
I'm pretty sure that adds up to me right fucked
.

Amidst his endless evolutions Rob caught glimpse of the Crève Coeur dinosaurs in garish, high-tailed retreat. And Count Guillaume, unmistakable in his gilded armor on his royal-blue mount, either valiantly standing off a pair of trikes or trapped between them. One had lost its fighting-castle and crew; Rob couldn't see a mahout straddling its neck behind the frill. It plainly didn't matter to the beast. The killing-joy was on it.

Exertion burned Rob's arms and shoulders like fire. His lungs tried to turn themselves inside out, tearing themselves to pieces in the process. Metal clanging metal had him half deaf, he choked on the yellow dust their swirling dogfight wound them in, and the rim of his helmet, with the help of a sword-whack or two, had gashed his forehead so he must blink constantly to clear his eyes of blood that both stung and threatened to gum his eyelids shut.