The Dinosaur Knights (52 page)

Chapter 39

Nodosaurios Imperiales
,
Imperial Nodosaurs,
Infantería Imperial
(Official), Imperial Infantry
—Élite armored infantry, backbone of the Empire of Nuevaropa. Their colors are brown, black, and silver. Their basic formation is the
tercio
, a phalanx of three thousand pikes supported by more lightly armored hamstringers, arbalesters, artillerists, and pioneers.
Tercios
have died in battle to the last man and woman, but never broken.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Like a lake of flesh the Grey Angel horde seethed, half a kilometer distant across a field of gently waving brown grass. A human cataract poured continuously from the north over a forested rise to join it.

If they can be called human
, thought Jaume, Comte dels Flors, Constable of the Imperial Army, as he stood watching from the brow of the low, loaf-shaped ridge called La Miche that stood between the Fortunate River and the High Road. Around him his fourteen remaining Companions stood in their beautiful white plate, with the Lady's Mirror red on their breasts.

“In the name of our Lady and all the Eight!” Dieter von Grosskammer exclaimed.

Machtigern laid a big, square hand on the younger Alemán's shoulder. “Steady.”

Jaume stood with arms folded across his breastplate. The sun, just-risen over the forested Petits Voleurs ridges to the west, had already perceptibly heated the steel despite dense black-hearted clouds. The wind ruffled his long hair. Around him stood the pitiful handful that remained of his Companions, their white-enameled armor shining.

“One thing we can be grateful for,” Florian said.

“What?” asked Ayaks.

“The wind's not blowing in our faces.”

Ayaks's frown turned into a disgusted grimace. If some of the Emperor's grandes were indifferent to the Creators' commandments on hygiene, the horde seemed to have abandoned them entirely.

“One other thing,” said Wil Oakheart of Oakheart dryly.

“So many blessings,” Florian murmured.

“Raguel seems in no damned hurry.”

That being so, Jaume took stock of his preparations. Fifty meters away, across the High Road, a lone hill rose to a height of about thirty meters, somewhat taller than La Miche. It was known as Le Boule. At its crown a great banner snapped defiance at the Grey Angel and his Crusade: the Imperial flag, golden tyrant skull on a field of blood.

Beneath an open tent stood like a red-and-yellow mushroom. In its shade sat His Imperial Majesty Felipe. He wore plain armor of polished, clear-enameled steel with the Imperial arms, colors reversed from the flag—red skull, gold shield—painted on the breastplate. A bare longsword lay across his knees. Pages and squires hovered around, waiting to run messages to his commanders. A score of Scarlet Tyrants guarded him.

Lower down the hill Falk stood like an ancient monolith. He wore his personal harness of royal blue, silver, and black armor today, not Tyrant gold and scarlet. Beside him Snowflake squatted like a broody scratcher, glowering in red-eyed malice held in check by his master's will.

The bulk of the Tyrants stood at the hill's base: five hundred élite Imperial bodyguards in gilt cuirasses and pot-helmets with tails of overlapped plates. Each held a curved, oblong shield and a spear with a short heavy haft, a long skinny black-iron neck and an evilly barbed head. A short sword rode in a scabbard at each man's hip. Each would die fighting before he allowed an enemy near the Emperador's person. Even Raguel himself.

Off on the army's left waited a wing of two hundred dinosaur knights with a thousand heavy cavalry behind, commanded by the youthful Archiduc Antoine de la Lumière. His uncle the Francés King had sent him to serve in the campaign against Providence—reluctantly, the rumor ran.

To Antoine's right stood the three thousand pikemen and -women of the Twelfth Tercio of the Brown Nodosaurs, the “Steel Wall,” who had marched with Felipe from La Merced. Their hamstringers, arbalesters, and stingers were arranged in front of them. From their right to the High Road stood, sat, or shifted nervously in place the bulk of the Imperial foot: seven thousand peasant levies, all that remained of a high of over ten thousand. The army had lost some conscripts to the rampaging passions of their ostensible betters, and far more to desertion, including several hundred who had sneaked through the pickets the night before, apparently to join the enemy horde. In front of them stood a bloc of three to four hundred armored house-bows, and another of around five hundred common archers.

Across the Chausée Imperial the Third Tercio, “Imperial Will,” was arrayed in the same way as the Twelfth. Between them and the riverbank's steep drop one hundred and fifty war-duckbills, steel chamfrons, and rainbow caparisons shifted from hind foot to hind foot, muttering to one another in low dulcian hoots and farting. Another thousand gendarmes on coursers waited behind. Duque Francisco de Mandar commanded that wing.

The peasant mass, no more happy than their kind ever were, were stiffened by the presence right behind them of a short, wide wedge of two thousand five hundred house-shields—like the armored archers, retainers of the various lords taking part in the campaign. A second formation of five hundred backed up the Third Tercio.

Behind the two heights waited the reserve: Jaume and his fourteen remaining Companions, their five hundred Ordinary men-at-arms, and six hundred cavalry in plate and chain. These latter were adventurers, second sons and daughters or hedge-knights, too poor to afford full plate. Two hundred fifty more House infantry lounged on both sides of the road to the south, their spears and shields beside them in the grass.

Past them the Imperial wagon train had been drawn into an immense circle on the road's west side. The wagons were chained together tail to tongue to form a rough-and-ready wood-walled fort. The drovers and wagoneers and camp followers within could be relied upon to put up a stout defense of themselves and their livelihoods.

Out in front of the army were ranged artillery engines: mostly the Nodosaur stingers and some others, plus some catapults. Four trebuchets Jaume had brought with his Ejército Corregidor stood with long arms poking toward the overcast. They reminded him most unpleasantly of gibbets.

Jaume drew a deep breath and willed his heart to slow. It had a tendency today to race far out in advance of the rest of him.

He had an excellent anchor for his right flank in the Fortunate River. But his left flank was up in the air. Dense forest stood five hundred to a thousand meters off to the west; beyond it he could he could see the blue line of the Petits Voleurs. If he'd tried to stretch his forces to cover the distance they'd be thin as an embezzler's excuse; the horde could blow through them and scarcely break stride.

He felt a pat on the pauldron that guarded his left shoulder. He turned to see Jacques smiling sadly at him.

“Leave it, Jaumet,” the lank-haired knight said. “What humans can do, you've done. We couldn't find better ground to fight on, in the time the Angel left us.”

“Mor Jacques, the pessimist eternal, telling me not to worry?” He laughed in genuine delight. “A miracle!”

The Francés shrugged steel shoulders. “Don't count on us getting another.”

Still, he stood straighter than Jaume had seen him do in months. That reassured Jaume—some. His old friend's air of resolute resignation would serve everyone better than despair.

“They're deployed in conventional array,” Florian said. “Infantry in the middle, dinosaurry and cavalry on both wings.”

In battles of this scale mounted wings customarily consisted of dinosaur knights before, heavy-horse behind, rather than each constituting a single wing. Just as with horses, war-duckbills required a certain concentration to be effective.

“Where did they get so many dinosaur knights?” asked Owain de Galés. He carried his longbow strung. A quiver of meter-long arrows in a flier-skin quiver rode his back.

“They've cleared the provinces between here and the mountains,” Jacques said. He stood taller than Jaume had seen him do in months. Jaume was little reassured. His old friend's air was one of resolute resignation. Still, it would serve everyone better than despair.

Including, Jaume hoped, the man himself.

“But knights?” persisted Ayaks. “Why would they join in such abomination?”

“Nobles certainly aren't any less susceptible to a Grey Angel's compulsion than common folk,” Florian said. “And as for evil natures, have you forgotten the Via Dolorosa we rode down to join our Emperor? Terraroja's fate, and the murder and disorder every day in our army's camp?”

“I remember,” the blond-bearded Ruso rumbled. “Too well to sleep well.”

“We're their equal in armored riders, anyway,” Machtigern said. “Or superior even.”

“If only there,” Wil said. “Even allowing for defeat-induced exaggeration, refugee reports make Raguel's Horde a hundred thousand strong.”

Felipe fielded a vast army by Nuevaropan standards: almost twenty-two thousand fighters, as nearly as Jaume could reckon. Notwithstanding their own unhappy residue of peasant infantry, they probably had more well-trained and equipped fighters than the whole Grey Angel Crusade. And those were interspersed among half-starved, half-naked lunatics armed with hands and teeth. Yet even though the enemy captain—Jaume had to guess that was Raguel himself—had deployed mounted wings like a proper army, the legends, and ancient histories everyone including Jaume had assumed were legendary, said that a Grey Angel horde relied on size, speed, and ferocity instead of tactics.

The point of a Grey Angel Crusade, after all, was the wholesale destruction of human life. Raguel's casualties would gratify his unknowable desires scarcely less than his enemies'.

“Wait, now” called Jacques.

Jaume shook his head, smiling with gratitude for his friend snatching him back from an abyss of black despair.

The Francés knight had a shiny brass spyglass pressed to one eye. “Something's happening. The mob is clearing a path.”

The horde's front ranks flowed apart like the early morning river-mist that was slowly yielding to the feeble sunlight. A figure rode between them on a pure-white sackbut. It was a woman with a wild mane of silver-white hair. She was naked except for a cape of white feathers thrown back to lie over her back like folded wings.

Bartomeu cleared his throat. He stood holding his mare nearby. He and the Companions' other arming-squires waited to serve as message-runners.

Jaume shook his head. He didn't need to send a message for his commanders to hold in place. They had orders too clear for even the most willful buckethead to misconstrue. Also the Emperor's personal assurance that anyone who disobeyed would be relieved of his command at once, as well as his head.

Down the road the white Parasaurolophus trotted on its hind legs, holding its pawlike fore-hooves daintily to its chest. It was a huge animal, Jaume saw, bigger than any sackbut bred for war. Midway between the armies its rider reined it to a stop.

“I am the Herald of the Grey Angel Raguel of the Ice, Bringer of Divine Justice, Scourge of the Impure,” she called, brandishing a metallic staff that bore a circular emblem like a grey mirror at its top.

Her words carried clearly to La Miche despite the distance. “She has a loud voice even for a woman,” Timaeos muttered. Though the Griego was a confirmed misogynist, no Companion was more devoted to the Lady's service. Not even Jaume.

“No doubt her patron gives her help with some Angel trick,” said Florian.

Several Companions made the sign of the Lady's Mirror at their comrade's flippancy. Even Jaume felt a thrill of dismay.

“You have offended the Creators,” the nude woman cried. “You must submit now to the will of great Raguel, or else expiate your sins in blood.”

Jaume looked to Le Boule. Felipe signaled. The Imperial Herald mounted his white marchador and rode past the nodding Scarlet Tyrants' plumes to the road. Spearmen rolled aside the wagons that blocked it. He set forth at an amble with bare head held high.

“He's got stone,” Machtigern said, rubbing his chin. Like most Companions he shaved clean.

“Heralds are protected by convention,” said Dieter.

“And do Grey Angels feel bound by our conventions, I wonder,” murmured Florian, “any more than we do by compacts made by ants?”

“Oh,” said the youngest Companion.

The Imperial Herald stopped twenty meters from his opposite number. All Jaume could hear was the fact of his voice, no words. “It seems you're right about Raguel helping the woman,” he told Florian.

“That brings me little enough pleasure. As usual.”

“
Then look and see your fate!
” Raguel's Herald cried in response to the Imperial envoy.

She turned and gestured dramatically at the heights behind her.

“Behold the Angel Raguel. Behold your doom!”

“Trite,” grumbled Bernat, who was scribbling furiously on a piece of paper he held pinned to a slate with his thumb. “But you can't expect any better from fanatics, I suppose.”

Through the trees on the far heights emerged a colossal silvery-grey shape. Even the Companions gaped: it was a Tirán Rey, a bull Tyrannosaurus rex, most feared of all Aphrodite Terra's dinosaurs. Even at this range Jaume could see the monster dwarfed Falk's albino adolescent Snowflake.

“Beautiful,” murmured Rupp. “He must weigh seven tonnes!”

Jaume found a smile inside himself. “You shame us, my friend, finding Beauty where even we find only terror.”

The slight Alemán shrugged. “I'm a dinosaur master,” he said simply, as if that explained it. Which it did.

“And only a dinosaur master,” muttered Wil, “would notice the bloody beast first.”