The Dinosaur Lords (19 page)
Nariz Cornuda,
Nosehorn, One-horn
—
Centrosaurus apertus
. Quadrupedal herbivore with a toothed beak and a single large nasal horn; 6 meters long, 1.8 meters tall, 3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s most common hornface (ceratopsian dinosaur); predominant dray and meat-beast. Wild herds can be destructive and aggressive; popular (if extremely dangerous) to hunt.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Melod
í
a and Jaume rode their horses downslope through the undergrowth as fast as they dared. Her heart hammered. The sharp scent of crushed ferns filled her head.
They emerged onto an outcrop of limestone boulders. As they drew rein, something big came crashing and snorting toward the clearing below.
Bellowing fury, a monster plunged forth: a wild nosehorn, a mighty patriarch seven meters long, black and green, with a bristle of hairlike feathers above mountainous shoulders. He swung his huge head left and right, looking for foes.
Melod
í
a’s breath caught in her throat. He had been raiding
estancias
, killing herd bulls and stealing the cows for his harem. He’d killed two peasants and a house-archer who’d made the mistake of trying to stop him, and a herd-girl who hadn’t gotten out of his way fast enough.
Now her father was hunting him.
“Jaume!” Melod
í
a exclaimed. “His horn.”
The dinosaur’s neck-frill and bony face were strikingly patterned, indigo on yellow. The horn on its massive snout was curved, a meter and a half long. Half its length gleamed wetly red.
“Probably a horror’s blood, or tracking-dog’s,” Jaume said.
Melod
í
a searched for a quick way down. She was terrified of what was to come. Her only thought was to help her father.
Somehow
.
From a cycad thicket near the base of the outcrop sprang half a dozen scarlet-feathered horrors with black eye-stripes. Squalling, they spread their taloned arms like wings, showing golden bellies.
Tossing her black-and-silver mane in alarm, Meravellosa sidestepped and whickered. Everything on Nuevaropa feared deinonychus, except matadors and titans.
The bull dug blunt-toed feet into the springy turf and bellowed. The horrors hopped and sidled, chattering angrily in reply. Wild ones might hesitate to attack a full-grown nosehorn, especially such a huge one, but not a human-trained pack. Some of the horrors might be gored or trampled, but once one or two got on the nosehorn’s back, their killing-claws could cut through its tough hide. Even if they didn’t manage to eviscerate the bull, it would rapidly bleed to death.
“I don’t like those things,” Melod
í
a said. These horrors were a specially prized breed known as los Cardenales de la Muerte: Death’s Cardinals. Prince Harry had gifted her father with the pack the year before. “They’re cruel.”
“It’s their nature,” Jaume said. “That said, its beauty isn’t easy to see.”
Cudgel-armed gamekeepers kept the horrors from closing in. The kill wasn’t meant for them. To the baying of hounds and trumpets and hoarse halloos, Felipe himself burst from some saplings behind the nosehorn, mounted on a green-and-yellow great strider and carrying a hunting spear. He wore a splendid silver casque cast to resemble a horror skull, trailing long yellow and scarlet plumes, and a short red hunting cape.
As usual, the Emperor rode like a grain sack, pumping his elbows to the sides like stubby wings. Despite that, Melod
í
a thought to see a curious touch of dignity along with a childlike joy that turned his cheeks red.
Behind Felipe came two of his favored hunting cronies. Count Esmond, the castellan, rode a big cream-colored mule, his long face even in the heat of the chase looking as if he suspected someone of dipping into palace accounts. Prince Harry, Heriberto himself, flanked him, looking as dashing as a portly man could on a black marchador. Around them a pack of hounds came quickly to a halt, prudently out of range of trampling feet and slashing raptor-claws.
Uttering a wild whoop, Felipe couched his spear like a lance and booted his unhappy strider to a charge. Melod
í
a’s first thought was that Felipe’s cry was a misplaced act of chivalry—warning his target of his attack. But the instant the Centrosaurus began spinning in place with frightening alacrity, she saw the cunning behind it.
The monster’s turn allowed the Emperor to drive his leaf-shaped spearhead in behind its right shoulder with a butcher-shop
thunk
, rather than into its rump.
“A heart shot,” Jaume said. “Well struck.”
Letting go the reins, Felipe waved off his noble companions. A mule-mounted flock of Scarlet Tyrants pounded into the clearing, faces understandably grim beneath horsehair-crested gilt helmets at their charge’s complete incaution. They dismounted speedily to Felipe’s either side, unlimbering cocked and loaded arbalests slung over their scarlet-caped backs.
The nosehorn squalled. Yellow eyes as broad as Melod
í
a’s palm rolled beneath bony flanges not unlike a matador’s. Bloody froth bubbled from its nostrils. The powerful beak snapped futilely toward the spear’s stout ash shaft.
Smelling blood, Death’s Cardinals shrieked and lunged. Harry’s keepers whistled them back, by the authority of meter-and-a-half staffs tipped with lead bulbs. These they used sparingly. Raptors tamed and trained to the hunt were costly. Peasants, on the other hand, came cheap.
The nosehorn kept turning. Though it inexorably drove the spear deeper into its own chest, it ignored the pain. It saw its attacker clearly now. It was determined to return the favor with its own horn.
The crossbar behind the hunting spear’s head kept the bull from pushing its body all the way up the shaft to get at the hunter. Felipe clung with both hands. His mount was about the same length as the Centrosaurus, but weighed a fraction as much. Four-leg force drove two-legs back.
The bull torqued the Emperor right out of his saddle.
Melod
í
a screamed. Whipping out her falchion, she made to nudge Meravellosa into a risky plunge down to the clearing. The mare recoiled as Jaume’s hand snaked out to catch her reins.
“Let me go!” Melod
í
a shouted. “I have to help him.”
“We can’t,” Jaume said sharply. “It’s too late. We’d just get in the way.”
She snarled at him, feeling a raptorish urge to take a bite out of his face.
“Besides,” he said, more gently, “don’t underestimate your father. Watch.”
He dropped the reins. Melod
í
a let her sword arm fall. Sheepishly she realized the most she could do with the short, heavy blade would be to distract the nosehorn long enough for it to gore her before finishing off her father.
Although he’d landed on his broad bottom, the Emperor had immediately sprung to his feet. Now he had the spear haft clamped under his right armpit and gripped in both gloved hands. His round face showed no fear, only utter absorption.
Inevitably the gigantic hornface pushed Felipe back and around. He shifted his boots just enough to keep leaning into the spear without falling. A beat late, Melod
í
a remembered that in his youth her father had fought Northman sea raiders and Slavos as a common pikeman in the army of his cousin the King of Alemania.
The monster groaned. It kept straining to get his huge, bloody horn into Felipe. The Emperor kept shooting quick glances over his shoulder. He worked the spear up and down, twisting the deeply driven blade to do more damage inside the vast, sweat-streaming body.
He sidestepped. With a grunt of effort, he swung the spear haft to plant its brass-shod butt against the bole of a stout bloodwood tree. His weapon thus braced, he leaned forward and held on hard.
The nosehorn uttered a vast wheezing gasp that wrenched Melod
í
a’s heart despite the eagerness and filial fear that hummed in her blood. Pink froth jetted from beak and nose. It fell onto its side.
The Emperor just managed to let go the shaft and dance aside in time to avoid being flipped into the trees. The fallen dinosaur thrashed three times and then, with a final seismic sigh, lay still.
While Emperor fought monster, more mounted courtiers had arrived. Now they flocked around him, chattering congratulations. Muttering darkly, the Scarlet Tyrants reslung their crossbows. Felipe stood smiling in quiet satisfaction, half-surreptitiously massaging his right elbow where the spear haft had given it a good crack as it was torn free.
Jaume nodded. “Now we can let your marvelous mare find us a gentle way down to join the rest,” he said with a smile.
She grinned back in mad relief.
A thought struck her. He’d made a pun: “Meravellosa”
meant
“marvelous” in Catalan, her mother’s birth tongue as well as his. Jaume had taken the trouble to remember the name of Melod
í
a’s mount because he knew how much she doted on the dark-silver mare with the black-and-silver mane and tail. She’d wager her fancy headpiece that he never thought of asking the name of his own lovely bay mare, on loan from Heriberto’s well-stocked stables.
Melod
í
a had always loved horses. She and the young Araba were devoted to each other. And as Melod
í
a felt about horses, Jaume felt about dinosaurs.
To Melod
í
a, Camellia was a large, admittedly gorgeous and friendly, but ultimately rather ungainly beast. Jaume, who would never speak or pen a word in praise of himself, had written an entire volume (albeit a slim one) on the beauties and excellencies of his Corythosaurus. He treated horses kindly—he found kindness beautiful—but to him they were simply
animals
.
Instead of following his suggestion she turned Meravellosa and let her pick her way back up the ridge they’d ridden over.
“Where are we going?” Jaume asked, though he followed her at once and was elbow to elbow with Melod
í
a by the time he finished the sentence.
“We’re slipping away,” she said firmly. “Just you and me.”
Considering the look he sent her, she was half exasperated and half amused to see that for all his justly famous lightning wit, he didn’t get it.
“I’ve missed you,” she said.
“And I you.”
“I mean, I’ve
really missed
you.”
“Oh.” His answering smile made warmth trickle all down the center of her. “Lead on, my lady.”
But no sooner had they returned to the clearing where the ruby dragonfly had killed the bouncer than Melod
í
a heard a drumroll of hard-driven hooves approaching. She scowled. Then sighed.
“Your page, Bartomeu, is coming,” she said. “To call you away to the apportioning, no doubt.”
For downing the wild nosehorn the Emperador would claim the best meat for his kitchen. He had earned the frilled, horned head for a trophy as well. But Felipe didn’t care much about such outward trappings of power. He loved the real thing too well.
The best of the remaining meat would go to Prince Harry’s gamekeepers to feed their families. What fair amount remained Heriberto would distribute among the needy. While under normal circumstances only the wretchedest urban poor—or serfs of exceptionally cruel lords—went hungry amidst Nuevaropa’s bounty, fresh flesh was always a welcome visitor to lower-class tables.
“And once again I’m being robbed of the meat I want most,” she muttered.
“Pardon, my love?”
“Nothing.”
Bartomeu came loping from the woods on his white mule with his golden hair blowing behind him like a pennon.
“He’s smitten with you, you know,” said Melod
í
a.
“He’s a beautiful boy and a dutiful squire,” Jaume said. “But remember what I told you. We only permit love between those of the same rank in our order.”
“So long as he’s not getting anything
I’m
not.”
“
¡Mi amor!
” Jaume exclaimed. “Don’t even
think
that. If I had a spare moment, a spare breath, I’d share it with you.”
“I know,” she said sulkily. “Preparing for this war you don’t even believe in consumes your every moment and all your energy. I know.”
She held up a palm to his protest. “I know. Duty comes before mere personal desire. How well I know that.”
Before more could be said—which was probably for the best—Bartomeu reined in the mule with a gratuitously showy curvet.
Show-off,
she thought.
I could ride rings around you on any mount you care to try.
“My lord,” the boy proclaimed, cheeks flushed and voice bronzed with importance. “His Imperial Majesty sends his fondest regards.”
He reeled in the saddle and had to suck air then. He was so worked up he kept forgetting to breathe.
“He requests your presence at the ceremony of apportionment.”
Melod
í
a wondered if Bartomeu could see, as clearly as she, the rueful twist to her lover’s smile.
“My sword is ever at His Majesty’s service,” Jaume said. He turned in the saddle and bowed to Melod
í
a. “And yours as well, Highness.”
“If only,” Melod
í
a said.
