The Dinosaur Knights (51 page)

She shrugged. “It's stand and fight, or move and fight. The only other choices—”

“Die passively,” Karyl said, “or join the horde. Yes. I think we can discard those. So what would you do? Leave the Imperials and the horde to one another's good graces?”

Daddy!
the little girl within her cried. She tried to moisten her lips. But her mouth was dry.

She looked at him helplessly and spread her hands. “I can't make that choice. I don't have the … standing. I don't have the right. People have flocked to join this, this agglomeration because you command. We don't have a banner of our own. Not even a name. And we haven't needed those things. Because you're our beacon. You define us. Karyl, the hero of legend.”

He winced. “The very burdens I've tried to shed.”

“You admitted that wasn't an option right now. Please, Colonel. We'll follow you no matter what. Only, command us!”

He deflated. Seemed actually to shrink. Her heart stopped soaring like a bird hitting a high tower window, and plummeted. Then, as if his head weighed as much as a mountain, he looked up at her.

In the near-dark of the tent his eyes were black beacons of despair.

Chapter 38

Gordito,
Fatty
—
Protoceratops andrewsi
. A small Ceratopsian dinosaur: a frilled, plant-eating quadruped, 2.5 meters long, 400 kilograms, 1 meter high, with a powerful toothed beak. The only “hornface” to lack horns. A ubiquitous domestic herd beast, not found wild in Nuevaropa. Timid by nature.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

The Allosaurus woke to the smell of something good: a hadrosaur haunch, roasting over flames.

She stirred herself, then slipped from the bed she had made in a patch of nettle scrub, to which her pebble-scaled hide was impervious, in a wood of fragrant spruce—not too close to a game trail to a small stream, but not too far either. As was her custom, she made little noise or commotion for an unfriendly eye to see, despite her size.

She knew the smell from being raised by her mother. She was normally fed fresh flesh of plant-eating dinosaurs. Or at least dead. Occasionally she was allowed to hunt her own prey, under her mother's supervision. But sometimes she got to eat cooked meat, fresh off a fire placed in a big pit the two-legs had dug for the purpose. Which was how she knew which smell went to which beast.

Her stomach rumbled. She had not eaten in suns. How many—more than her mind would hold. Such details concerned her little, anyway. Hunger, however.…

She smelled the breeze cautiously. It came from up the trail. She would have to be careful approaching the stream, lest she run into two-legs or another great meat-eater. But that didn't bother her much. She could give them slip. Or if not, kill them, for then they'd threaten her.

She had the brook to herself, except for a scurry of the usual small forest creatures, all hurrying to be elsewhere. After drinking her fill she followed the aroma. She felt uneasy doing so. Her mother had taught her to avoid two-legs whenever possible, as well as to refrain from killing the small, vulnerable, so-tasty creatures, without her mother's express command. Or when she had no choice.

She knew the smell of that much flesh roasting meant many two-legs gathered together in one of their camps, or the clusters of above-ground dens of wood and stone they liked to raise for themselves. That meant added danger.

But hunger drove her. And not for tasty Hadrosaurus alone.

She was lonely. She had been with her mother constantly from the moment of her hatching on—her mother was the very first thing she had laid eyes on, emerging from her egg. Which of course was how she knew that was her mother. They had never been parted for very long—until that terrible day, now seasons past, when a cowardly sneak-attack by a white Tyrannosaurus bull and the two-legs who rode him left both Shiraa and her mother wounded.

The sneak who had struck down her mother had too many two-legs mounted on war-hadrosaurs and horses with him for Shiraa to contend with. She had been forced to flee splashing through the water, which was rich with the smells of blood and fresh shit, while her mother floated helplessly away downstream, stunned.

She had laid up until she healed, then come out and fed. Her mind was fixed on one thing: reunion with her mother.

And lucky matadora that she was, she had smelled faint traces of her mother and begun to follow them. That had begun even longer ago than her last meal—much longer, she felt—but her determination never faltered. Her love was too great.

In time she learned to associate a strange two-legs, silent and peculiar of head, with the wisps of scent that led her on. She sensed, somehow, it was steering her toward her mother. That was enough for her, though not for the ache in her loving heart.

That tantalizing food-cooking smell led her out of her thicket and around the hip of a gentle swell of the ground. The land fell away before her, flattening into a shallow valley, natural meadows interspersed with the oddly regular ones with all the same kinds of plants in them that she knew the tailless ones tended to live next to.

Sure enough, not far away lay a cluster of the boulders made of wood and stone she knew she would see. Even more curiously regular than the one-plant meadows, though far from uniform, their mostly peaked shapes resembled rock crystals. Yet they were hollow, she knew. The tailless two-legs dwelt in them.

As her mother had. Except when they were traveling on the great, noisy hunts her mother took her on, filled with metal clashing and screams. Then her mother lived in an angular shelter made of plant matter.

Turning her head from side to side, she tested the air. As expected, the scent of roasting meat came from the cluster. She could see smoke rise from several of the crystal-like outcroppings, as often happened when the air was as cool as it was today.

She was pleased that the wind blew toward her. The two-legs had little sense of smell. But they kept beasts, especially the small, baying four-legs, whose hides bore small filaments like the ones on two-legs' heads, instead of feathers or scales. They had keen noses indeed.

She made her way down toward the cluster. On the fringe of a field a field where a flock of fatties browsed on dry stubble, she flattened herself among weeds, waited. After bit the pair of small two-legs who tended the plant-eaters turned away to look at something. She slipped by them downwind, and in among the hollow, peaked-top boulders.

A broad path ran through the midst of them. She stayed away from that, though her senses told her no two-legs moved abroad through the gathering twilight. Until by lesser ways she reached a boulder larger than the rest, whose sides were as if made of lesser stones, smooth-polished as if by running water, of dark and pale grey, and dark blue.

Tall, narrow openings with pointed tops pierced its sides. From its pinnacle smoke flowed up into the cloudy sky, as though it were a miniature volcano. This was what she smelled: not a stink like rotting nosehorn eggs, but succulent roasting dinosaur-flesh.

She pressed her snout to one of the arched openings. A lattice, cool, hard, and grey, blocked it from poking inside. Some kind of clear but slightly sight-distorting membrane like a bubble's skin was stretched across the aperture behind it.

Nonetheless she could see well enough, by the glows of the small, pet fires the two-legs liked to keep in clear objects near them, and the bigger fire-cave by a far wall. There were propped-up slabs and a pack of two-legs sitting at them, making happy noises at each other while some of their young moved among them with high-heaped platters.

Some of these held merely heated plants, and as such had no interest to her. But then she saw one, so huge it had to be upheld by four two-legs spratlings, which carried a whole roast thigh of duckbill. She thought she could smell it growing nearer. She could definitely hear the crackle of hot grease.

Her stomach growled.
I'm starving!

But she could not burst in and take the food by force. Her mother would disapprove most strongly. And she was a good Allosaurus.

Anyway, if she did that, she'd have to fight them. Aside from having been strictly trained not to do that, she didn't
want
to. Almost as fierce as the emptiness in her belly was the emptiness inside her. It hurt her now as much as the pangs in her stomach.

She knew the hole could only be filled by soft words and stroking by their oddly smooth, soft hands. She missed, then, not just her loving mother, but the friendly attention of the grooms and others who had helped care for her.

Maybe they'll be nice two-legs
, she thought.
Maybe they will give me food and pet me. Like my mother and her friends
.

She heard a high, shrill sound: a two-legs' mouth-noise of distress. A male rounder than most, sitting at the farthest table, was pointing an arm at her. His eyes and mouth were circles of fear.

More two-legs turned to look at her. They uttered many terror-cries. Even through the thick, hard membrane and the tang of smoke and roasted meat, she could smell their fear.

She turned and fled.

She felt mostly sorrow.
Why are they so mean to me?
She only wanted to be friends. She hadn't even eaten any of their fatties, though they were delicious, and could see that these in particular lived up to their name.

But two-legs were dangerous. She rejoiced in fighting and killing, when the time came. That was the way she was, just as she ate and drank and voided. But she had a keen sense of self-preservation. She was no foolish hatchling.

Despite their puny size and strength, the two-legs when aroused could swarm even a mighty hunter such as herself, like ants devouring a fat grub. And she knew especially to fear the way they could even sting her at a distance.

So without hesitation—nor further attempts as stealth—she ran through the rest of the boulder-cluster as fast as her powerful hind legs could drive her. From behind her came sharp ringing that stabbed at her ear-membranes. She recognized a distress call often made by tailless two-leg flocks from their hollow-rock huddles.

It spurred her on even faster. It might bright out a pack of two-legs encased in metal and carrying long stings to chase her on the backs of their four-legged beasts, which had smooth hair like fliers. She wanted no part of them. Nor of their weird ability to sting at a distance.

I don't want to leave!
But she had to. And so she did, racing on with the sun lowering beyond her left shoulder, out into the fields that lay outside the cluster. As she made her escape, she cried out a bitter and triumphant “
Shiraa!
”

As she passed through a grassy meadow she did veer aside to make a quick dash through another fatty flock on the far side of the village. Initially frozen by sight of the giant meat-eater thundering toward them, they scattered too late. Her jaws snapped shut behind a yearling's frill. She carried it, not slowed at all by her burden as it thrashed futilely against the poignard teeth clamped on its neck and bleated through a wide-open beak.

She spied another pair of two-legs young. They were running away as fast as their spindly little legs would bear them.

Serves you right for being so mean!
she thought.

She slid through the brush of a woodlot and away over small hills until she reached an opening on the flank of a wooded ridge that felt safe enough. She killed the feebly struggling fatty with a quick head shake, dropped it, and pinned it among the low plants with a hind foot on its shoulder. In case some impudent tröodon or horror tried to snatch her prize away.

She turned her head from side to side, senses questing. She could found no sign the two-legs had pursued her.

But on a ridgetop the way she had run, the way the low sun was casting her shadow, she saw a solitary shape that might be the strange-headed two-legs she had so often seen. She smelled her mother's scent, then.

It was stronger than it had been since she lost her mother, that bad day.

Mommy close!
she knew with ferocious joy.
See Mommy soon!
She raised her head and roared the only thing she said, or ever had: her name,
Shiraa
.

This time it meant, “Shiraa coming, Mommy! Shiraa good!”

Then she dropped her head. Not all hungers could be assuaged by dining on a fresh-killed fatty calf.

But then, some could.

 

Part Five

Dubious Battle