The Dinosaur Lords (49 page)
The jinete laughed wildly. “Who else but the holy man?” he said. “I heard the house-soldiers talking on the road as they made their way to the sack. The Bishop fired up the grandes. Told them they should reward themselves and punish the wicked at one and the same time.”
“The wicked?” asked Jacques, his voice quavering with passion. It distressed Jaume to see how grey his friend’s face looked by far flame light. “How would they tell them from the innocent? Surely the ladies and the servants had nothing to do with Leopoldo’s crimes!”
“Ah, but the Lord Bishop had an answer for that too,” the mercenary said. “He’s a man of many answers, that one. He told them,
¡m
á
tenlos todos, porque los Creadores reconocer
á
n a sus propios!
”
“Kill ’em all and let the gods sort ’em out,” Wil Oakheart the Angl
é
s echoed in his own rude language. “And don’t the bucketheads half love that shite?”
“Ah, that they duw, mai lord,” the jinete replied in frightfully accented Anglysh. He drank deeply from a wineskin someone had handed him. Wine trickled down a gaunt cheek.
“And Monta
ñ
azul and Estrella del Hierro?” Florian asked.
“They led the party that talked its way into the castle, of course.”
“What about Don Leopoldo?” asked Jaume.
“They hanged him from the top of his keep. He should be roasted to a turn now.”
“And the Countess?”
“As I heard it, she proved uncooperative at her own rape. So—” He pulled a forefinger across his throat.
“Let’s mount and ride, Captain,” Manfredo said, his eyes bright. Jaume saw the flush in his cheeks as shadow stains. “With the Ordinaries to back us we’ll make short work of these vermin.”
“Thank the Lady, a miracle!” Florian exclaimed. “Mor Stiff-Neck and I agree for once. We can teach our bumptious bucketheads the lesson they love to give their peasants: to fear their betters well.”
“Could be tough,” Machtigern said. “They outnumber us considerably. Even with the Ordinaries.”
“They’re disorganized,” Manfredo said. “And Coronel van Damme will be only too happy to set her Nodosaurs on them.”
“If they haven’t joined in the plundering themselves,” Wil said.
“Last I knew, the scar-faced Colonel still had them in their cantonment,” the jinete said. “Once they’re let loose, the Emperor Pipo himself couldn’t stop them. But while they’re still on the leash, they’ll obey their mistress, no matter how hard they strain.”
“We don’t need them,” Florian said. “The bastards are drunk, or distracted both. It’ll be like slaughtering fatties. If rather more gratifying.”
“You can’t be talking about murdering knights and noblemen!” exclaimed Dieter. “Not from our own side.”
“Not all of them,” Wil said. “Just the ones who resist. The rest we’ll thump soundly and round up. The worst actors we can hang at our leisure tomorrow.”
“With Ironstar and Bluemountain swinging highest of all,” Florian said with a laugh. “Think how that’ll improve army morale, Dieter!”
“Brothers, gentlemen!” Jacques cried. “I beg you, listen to yourselves. You can’t fight disorder with disorder.”
“It’s not disorder,” Manfredo said. “It’s bringing law. It’s what we do.”
“Not law, disaster!” Jacques sounded near to tears. “Attacking some of the most powerful grandes in Spa
ñ
a, to say nothing of executing them—do you want to start the civil war we’ve all been dreading?”
“If that’s what it takes to end that kind of ugliness,” said Florian, “perhaps we should risk it. I don’t like it either, Jacques, but there it is: soon or late, it’s got to be done. And when did putting off a stable cleaning make it smell better?”
“At your word, Captain,” Manfredo said.
Jaume felt his Brothers’ eyes on his skin like insect stings. He drew a deep breath. Willing down the fury that boiled his own belly, he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Stand down, my friends.”
His Companions stared at him with something like horror. “It’s too late to stop this evil,” he said. “And Jacques is right: punishing it could bring an evil ten times worse.”
“They’ve defied your lawful commands!” Manfredo said.
“What about your honor, lord?” asked Pedro the Greater, as usual speaking little and to the point.
Jaume laughed, bitterly and briefly.
“There’s been enough bloodshed,” he said, and the effort of keeping his voice level matched his hardest exertion in battle. “I won’t spill more, much less risk breaking the Empire apart, over so trivial a thing as my honor.”
Spada,
sword
—The most common swords in Nuevaropa are two-edged and used for cutting and thrusting:
spadacorta
, short sword, to 60 centimeters long, half a kilogram, used one-handed;
spada
or arming-sword, 100 centimeters, 1 kilogram, one-handed;
spad
ó
n
, longsword, to 150 centimeters and 1.5 kilograms, used with one or both hands;
Spadataliana
, rapier, 120 centimeters, 1 kilogram, one-handed and used mostly for thrusting;
Dosmanos
, greatsword, 180 centimeters, 2.5 kilograms, used with both hands.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
With a groan and a crackle of branches breaking, the tall red-boled conifer fell across the trail.
From a knob overlooking the trail, just beyond the tree that blocked the raiders’ forward progress, Rob Korrigan sat astride Little Nell and watched in excited satisfaction. Sweat streaming down his forehead from beneath the padding of his steel cap stung his eyes. The solidity of his axe haft in hand bolstered his morale. A round shield hung from his saddle.
Nell wagged her head and rolled her eyes. Her nervousness wasn’t down to anticipation, but rather fear of the wicked creature beside her. Karyl was mounted on an Arabaya mare named Asal, whose first act on arriving at S
é
verin farm had been to bite a chunk out of the hook-horn’s inoffensive ass. The name meant “honey” in Parso, which Rob took for typical heathen cheek: her temperament was corrosive as quicklime.
A beautiful young strawberry roan, scarcely more than a pony at a finger under fifteen hands, Asal had come as a gift from Ga
é
tan’s father, along with the fine Ovdan hornbow Karyl now held ready, and certain other tokens. Karyl and Master
É
vrard had made some deal Rob wasn’t privy to; he reckoned it involved a hefty chunk of silver from the former Count’s coffers, to make the merchant so expansive.
Around them waited half a dozen militiamen on foot, including Lucas, who wouldn’t be separated from Karyl. A thornbush thicket screened them all from the marauders’ view.
Around the residual rumbling and crackling as the tree bounced on its springy, sap-rich limbs, silence swelled to fill the narrow valley. The sounds that gave this forest its name, the Whispering Woods—the soft sighing of breeze in boughs and drowsy insect hum—seemed to stop. As did the intruding noises: the rough too-loud banter of men bent on joyous hatefulness, the thud of footfalls on dirt, the jingle of metal links against each other.
The leading Cr
è
ve Coeur spear-and-shield man stood gaping at the tree’s still-shaking boughs, stunned by the disaster that had missed him by centimeters. Belatedly apprehending the danger, he turned to flee. It saved his life, however momentarily: the green-fletched arrow aimed for his eye stuck in his temple instead. Howling and trying to yank it, out he ran stumbling back along the strung-out raiding party.
Another serial crashing announced another big tree falling behind the column. Horses reared, neighing in alarm. Men shouted. Bearded faces snapped to and fro in confusion already shading into panic.
The raid consisted of ten mailed men-at-arms on horseback and twenty or so foot soldiers, led by a dinosaur knight on an orange-and-green bull sackbut. The fallen trees had trapped them on a path scarcely two meters wide. Above them rose a steep slope. Below them it dropped twenty meters to a rocky stream.
Screams began to peal from the column’s tail. Emeric had split the woods-runners he’d managed to talk into joining the militia into two groups of six, one led by him and the other by his sister St
é
phanie. They raked the column with arrows from cover at either end. A hail of rocks and javelins fell on the Brokenhearts from the scrub above.
Emeric’s forest phantoms and a handful of daring lads and lasses on horseback who’d joined them scouting for Rob had spotted the raiders just before they made camp last sunset. Consulting local peasants who had turned out to fight the invaders, Karyl judged the band was making for a village two kilometers west of the ambush site.
A few kilometers north lay a small yet rich silver mine. But the miners had fortified its entrance with the same skills they used to delve the meat and bones of Paradise, and defended themselves ferociously when attacked. The village, on the other hand, prospered mightily from selling the miners its produce, and was a
much
easier target.
An admirable sort of trap,
thought Rob,
where the bait’s been waiting years, and your quarry’s already on its way to take it.
A crossbow twanged metal music. A horse shrieked and fell as the bolt pierced its neck. Its rider jumped clear but rolled down the hill into the stream. Smelling horse blood, Asal tossed her head in agitation. But the Ovdan nomads had trained her well for war. She made no sound.
The Cr
è
ve Coeur knight’s longsword flashed high in sunlight filtered through clouds and branches as he reared his dinosaur and shouted to rally his men from their midst. They were blundering into each other, jostling, shouting, and waving their arms ineffectually as missiles pelted them.
Most of the missiles were no more effective than the Brokenhearts’ flailing. But not all. The woods-runners shot to deadly effect, and at a range close enough that even their shortbows had a chance of punching an arrow through mail. Rob saw figures on the ground, writhing or still, with arrows jutting from armored bodies or unprotected faces.
And now some of the militiamen, emboldened by the fact that the knight had arrogantly brought no archers of his own, emerged from the brush above the column. Rob winced as he saw a cantaloupe-sized stone strike a house-shield’s helmeted forehead full on. The steel cap caved in. Whether the
crack
Rob heard a beat later was the soldier’s skull breaking or his neck, the boneless way he slumped to the ground showed he was dead on the instant.
“Poor sods,” Rob said, bending down to scratch Nell reassuringly on the neck behind her frill. “I pity ’em. Almost.”
“How much mercy would they show you if the situation was reversed?” Karyl asked.
He wore a steel cap with a camail hanging to protect his nape, a simple nosehorn leather jerkin over an unbleached linen shirt, and jackboots to midthigh over brown linen trousers. He carried no shield. His arming-sword had been
É
tienne’s own, a splendid weapon forged from star-metal by Aphrodite Terra’s most cunning smiths, the wandering gitanos—Rob’s continental kinfolk.
Karyl preferred to leave his staff sword in camp wrapped in his bedroll, like a Hanged Man card up his sleeve.
That
blade seemed to Rob to possess some dark charisma. But then, he was a susceptible lad.
“Roast me on slow fire, and the Old Hell take the Creators and their Law!” Rob cawed a corpse-tearer laugh. “So I’ll waste no sympathy on the likes of them.”
A man-at-arms with more presence of mind than his fellows set his horse laboring up the slope at these peasants who had the temerity to throw things at their betters. Like the others, he couched a spear in lieu of a longer, less wieldy lance. The militia scattered. A middle-aged man in a loincloth, already hobbled by some old wound, tripped and fell. He threw a futile hand in front of his face as the spearhead darted toward him.
From nearby Rob heard a
thump
and a rustling hum. The rider straightened in his saddle. The spear dropped from his hand. He looked down in amazement at what Rob could see from sixty meters off was an arrow sprouting dead center from the broken-heart emblem on his surcoat.
Startled, Rob glanced right to see Karyl pull another arrow from the quiver by his saddlebow and nock it.
“Lively now,” Karyl said. “Company comes.”
Four Cr
è
ve Coeur riders scrambled their horses up the slope to get clear of the obstruction. Turning their frightened mounts to follow the road brought them straight at Karyl and his small group stationed to prevent just that.
Rob took up his shield as Karyl shot another raider from his saddle. Then a man-at-arms was riding straight for Rob, thrusting a spear at him underhand.
Rob turned Nell to meet the horseman and booted her into a forward spring. Her absurdly short, thick horn wasn’t as lethal as a nosehorn’s eponymous armament, and nothing Rob knew matched Triceratops’ terrible brow-horns. But in a pinch its forward-curving tip could dig in and gut a man or beast with a downward stroke. She used it mostly as a kind of battering ram. And fair effective it was at that.
