The Dinosaur Knights (30 page)

“Come,” Bogardus said, squeezing Melodía's arm. The contact was thrilling on her bare arm, even in her current gloom. “We must acknowledge Karyl's genius. Verging on artistry, if not the thing itself.”

Melodía was not so sunken in despair that she didn't suspect the Eldest Brother of trying to head off a lengthy disquisition on Imperial dynastic politics. Frankly, she couldn't blame him. She also wasn't so self-consumed as not to realize how quickly the details of Delgao intra-family politics could bore an outsider stupid.

“You must, perhaps,” Violette said, crossing her arms pointedly beneath her small breasts. “It's only money. And he should have insisted Crève Coeur embrace the Garden's principles and guidance! Why else did we pay him to win this gaudy slaughter these fools are glorifying?”

Melodía frowned. She liked the Councilor, in a mildly guarded way. Certainly she felt a warmth toward her. She was grateful for the acceptance and affection Violette had shown her. And almost foolishly so, to Bogardus as well, for not rejecting her for what she had done in the name of their Garden, and of love.

Somehow, she felt an impulse to defend Karyl. That shocked her into holding back whatever retort had quickly shaped itself into a dart on her tongue before it was launched. She couldn't despise Karyl anymore for what he stood for—not when he had stood between her and the terrible death she had brought upon Pilar.

How she now felt about him, and whatever he was, she could not say. But what disarmed her vocal weaponry was simply the notion that such a man as Karyl Bogomirskiy could need defending at all.

The apprentices chanted lustily past, no doubt enjoying the day off from their arduous routine as much as they did celebrating their salvation. Melodía turned her head to watch them. As she did she met the sad gaze of the Mayor, his moustaches drooping more pronouncedly than she ever remembered seeing them. He nodded gravely. She nodded back,
noblesse oblige
, and marveled how the two town guards, male and female, who stood flanking him, with cuirass-cased chests pushed out and chins held as high as if they'd had the slightest thing to do with the victory being celebrated, seemed more like wardens than bodyguards.

She felt Violette's thin body stiffen beside her. Melodía looked around to see the Councilor lean forward like a tröodon spotting a bouncer in a berry-bush.

Marching toward them was a phalanx of children, several score, ranging from around twenty—the age at which bodies began to visibly ripen into adulthood—to those who could just toddle unassisted. All wore pure white linen gowns. Each carried in its right hand a thistle, symbol of Providence—Melodía had never figured out why it wasn't a cornucopia or some such; having been raised to the art, she knew heraldry made sense rather less than half the time, and the rest of the time made rather less sense than none at all. In the other hand each child carried a flower, brilliant and gay in scarlet, blue, yellow, white. Their high voices rose in the traditional “Song of Thanksgiving to the Eight” in archaic Spañol.

Hands gripping the arms of her folding wooden chair so tightly the veins stood out blue through milk-white skin, Violette watched the procession go by.
Why such interest?
Melodía wondered.

According to château gossip, Violette had left two grown children behind when she left the land of her birth, a highborn widow dispossessed by a late husband's scheming heirs. Unlike her friends Lupe and Fanny back home, who loved to chat gaily about the day politics would at last let them have babies, Melodía didn't yet see the attraction of spawning. It was a messy, painful business, she knew well enough; and what did you get for all that grunting and screaming? A squirmy, wet-faced bundle of noise and poop. That would, Creators willing, someday grow up into a pest like her little sister. Which, dearly as she loved (and missed) Montse, Montse assuredly was.

Perhaps Violette was feeling the aftershocks of the maternal urge, or missing the presumed grandchildren she might never know—Melodía just had time to think that before homesickness and grief and self-pity rose up in a wet mass to smack her in the face, and she had to snatch out her kerchief and feign a sneezing fit to hide the traitor tears.

*   *   *

Melodía tossed her head on the satin pillow. Her hands clutched clumps of satin sheets. Violette knelt on Bogardus's bedchamber floor with her buttocks, white as Eris, the Moon Visible, in the air and her face pressed between Melodía's wide-spread thighs. After seemingly endless teasing, first of the soft skin of Melodía's inner thighs, then the lips of her sex, Violette's tongue had discovered the center of Melodía's pleasure and now played it like a musical instrument. The tune she played was different from what Jaume might have done—but the pleasure it gave Melodía was no less intense.

It had all happened suddenly, that afternoon when they came back to the Garden villa from the victory parade in Providence town. The three had dined together, quietly, in Bogardus's chambers—simply but beautifully decorated with sprays of flowers in elegant faces, discreet sculptures, and miniature paintings. That was unusual but seemed natural to her, somehow. Or perhaps that had merely been her relief at not having to face the other members of the Garden she had left alive, whose faces would cause her to reproach herself the more that they were smiling and accepting.

When a new Garden acolyte with respectfully downcast eyes had cleared away the dishes, Violette had stood by Melodía and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. By the time the boy bowed and withdrew with his tray, the Elder Sister was speaking confidentially in her ear.

Melodía could not have said what she had talked about. Because first as if by accident, then with firm purpose, Violette's lips had touched her cheek. She had not resisted when a hand on her chin turned her face toward the other woman's.

And when the kiss came to her mouth, she felt herself responding.

She felt weight shift on the bed beside her. She opened her eyes, shock wide in passion, to see Bogardus kneeling over her. Actually what she saw was his cock by low lamplight, dominating her field of vision like a pink obelisk in the flicker of many candles, and his strong face beaming down on her from beyond her eyes' focus. Love and authority seemed to resonate from his penis. With something like gratitude she reached up to take its hot hardness in her fingers, guide it to her suddenly avid mouth, the salty, meaty taste to her tongue.…

*   *   *

Falk had her again. His hands were like manacles, hard and huge. His frenzied thrusting felt like a red-hot spear in her bowels. She was helpless, and violated, and would never be free
.…

Melodía's own raptor-scream of outrage and anguish snapped her conscious in the act of sitting violently upright. Long, unbound hair whipped her bare shoulders. She was striking out with one forearm to knock away the faint touch that had wakened her.

Freed me from nightmare
, she realized suddenly. The panic began to ebb.

Jasmine-scented evening air blew cool on her bare sweat-drenched skin. By the soft yellow glow of candles in brass bowls she saw Bogardus's head on the pillow next to her. His right hand was held open and held away from her, where he had evidently pulled it when she reacted so precipitously to his touch.

His face held an expression just the smiling side of neutral. But concern had stamped the corners of his grey eyes with tiny compito feet.

She studied him. Her hair promptly fell forward to either side of her downturned face like curtains, so that the vertical slice of the world including his face was all she could see. It was a soothing sight, dark and strong and square-jawed.

“This isn't the first time somebody's wakened screaming beside you,” she said.

“No.”

Deliberately he lowered his hand. He slid it under his own head to meet its mate. His chest rose and fell in a sigh.

“It's a terrible world, this place we call Paradise,” he said. “I've seen so much ugliness. It's why I decided to dedicate myself to bringing what beauty I could into the world, to counteract the pervasive ugliness I saw.”

That's what I chose too
, she thought,
when Violette kissed me this evening
. Hunger for intimacy—for sheer human contact—had flooded her. And even as she let herself yield to the woman's implied request, she had felt defiance.

I won't let Falk define me anymore. Nor the fear he gave me. My life has fallen to ruin again. But I'm going to start rebuilding by taking it back from
him.

Bogardus drew in a deep, deliberative breath. “Sometimes I wonder if I haven't come arou…”

He stopped the flow midword. His eyelids came down, not quite closing all the way. It seemed to Melodía as if they were trying to shut something in, not vision out.

When his eyes opened they were calm, clear. In a different tone he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

She smoothed the loose hair back over her shoulders. After a moment, accepting that they were both awake now, she crossed her legs and sat gazing at her mentor and lover.

“There's something other than your dream you do want to talk about, though,” he said. “What's troubling you?”

Forgiveness
, she wanted to say.
It should come harder. I should be made to pay penance
.

But perhaps that was weakness—cowardice. Perhaps she was hoping someone else would exact from her a price less than she was taking on herself.

“I was a fool,” she said.

“You're young,” he said. “Isn't that what being young's all about? If I recall my own youth correctly.…”

She shook him off. “I was desperate when I came here,” she saw. “Lost, and—broken. Desperate.”

“I know.”

“I was like a drowning woman, clutching for something to cling to. Anything. You gave—the Garden gave me that something. I'm still grateful; don't get me wrong. But—I misjudged. Badly. What I seized on most fiercely, most desperately, was love.”

“Love? We do teach that, yes. A treasured blossom in our Garden.”

She nodded to the edge of convulsively. “Yes. But—I took it for all. The be-all, the end-all. The panacea.”

“Ahh.” He blew a long breath through pursed lips. “I see.”

“It's a lesson we constantly hear from the Church, growing up,” she said, “especially Maia's Mother-sectaries. And—well, when I had to leave, when I had to flee for my life and freedom, what saved me then, was love. My sister's love. The love of friends I didn't realize loved me half so well. Pilar's love—”

She choked, then. Squeezing her eyes tight shut, clenching her fists, she willed the sorrow down. Her eyelids were moist when she opened them again and looked at Bogardus.

“Not now,” she said. “I need to say this now. It was the thing that caught my eye. The brightest flower in the whole Garden. So I seized on that.”

“And?”

She scowled so ferociously he raised both brows. “You know what happened,” she grated.

“Yes,” he said sadly. “I do.” Absolon had been his friend of many years, a friendship never touched by their frequent opposition in Council.

She sighed. “So—I've learned. Love isn't all you need. And it doesn't conquer all. It certainly wasn't what conquered that bastard worm Guilli!”

He waited a moment—to allow the fury-freshet to pass, she realized.

“So you no longer believe in the power of love?” he asked in carefully neutral tones.

She shook her head. “Not that. I—I may be callow, but I'm not that shallow. I love you. I love my fellow Gardeners. I love my sister Montserrat. I love—I love Jaume.”

It was hard enough to say that. There was one more name, the object of her longest and most devoted love. But she couldn't bring herself to name person or place, quite now.

“But yes, I see now it isn't what I called it before—panacea.”

“If nothing else, we can learn,” he said. “Even if that's not enough to atone for our mistakes. I—I like to think of it as the least we can do for those we've wronged, if all else fails: learn to do better the next time.”

She sighed. “I hope—” she said.

She sat upright. “I've decided to enlist,” she said.

“Enlist?”

“With the militia,” she said. “When Karyl returns, I want to join him, if he'll have me. We've still got Métairie Brulée and Castaña to deal with. They may be emboldened to act by a belief we weakened ourselves in taking down Count Guillaume.”

He frowned slightly, studying her. She peered hard to try to discern whether what creased his brow was disapproval or merely thoughtfulness. As usual she could see no further than his eyes.

“So, having grown disillusioned with love, you give war a chance?” he asked, not ungently. “Are you sure you're not overdoing in reaction?”

“No,” she said. “But isn't that part of finding the Equilibrium the Creators teach us to value above all? Going from one side to the other, from high to low and back? This is what I have to do now. To restore the Equilibrium in myself.”

She took his left hand in both of hers, pressed it first to lips, then cheek. “Please,” she said, despising herself for how lost and little-girl she sounded. “Please tell me it's all right.”

He sat up. Withdrawing his hand, he put it under her chin and raised her face to his.

“You don't need my permission to do what you feel is right,” he said. “But you have my blessing.”

He smiled, and she thought to read both joy and pain in the expression.

“I think Sister Violette is right,” he said softly. “It may soon come time to introduce you to the Mysteries. But now—act as you feel best, dear child. And know we love you too.”