The Dinosaur Knights (17 page)

The shot having gone off properly, the seven Companions gathered on the hilltop turned their attention back toward their commander, who had paused in reading from a parchment in his hand to eye the trebuchet warily when the command to launch was given. The Nodosaur engineers were fully as proficient as the élite browned-iron infantry. But the trebuchet was a trickish beast. Sometimes, inevitably, things went wrong. Which was why, two days before, a hundredweight boulder had flown, not toward the castle walls, but almost straight up.

And landed square on the unprotected head of their fellow Companion, Mor Étienne. In a way that was a blessing from the Lady: had the rock struck his armor-clad body the excellent plate might have protected him from immediate death, allowing him to linger in agony for days before finally passing—or requiring of one of his brothers the terrible duty of speeding him on his way with the misericordia, as Manfredo had done for his lover Fernão after the Battle of Terraroja. Thus had the Companions lost one of their longest-serving brethren.

“So that's it, then,” Manfredo said. He had his square, handsome face turned to the stiff morning breeze and his blond hair blowing out behind. “His Holiness is dead.”

Drovers tapped the haunches of a brace of nosehorns with long willow switches. The dinosaurs obediently plodded forward, drawing the trebuchet's long arm back down by means of a pulley staked to the ground to cock the machine for its next shot.

“Long live his Holiness,” said Florian sardonically.

Timaeos uttered something between a wail and a moan and collapsed onto a nearby granite outcrop. Cradling his face in his hands he began to sob disconsolately and mumbling in his native Greco.

His heart full of conflict, Jaume watched the stone strike. It gouged a puff of ochre dust from a crater that looked as if it had been crudely peened into the sandstone curtain wall by a giant hammer. Above it, the flag of Ojonegro fluttered from the rampart. It was a visual pun. The county was named for the nearby Black Springs, where the town stood. But “ojo negro” also meant “black eye”; the Count's insignia was a staring black eye on a field of gold. Whether a clever sleight on the artist's part, or simply of Jaume's admittedly energetic fancy, when the wind whipped it just right the banner seemed to wink derisively at the besiegers from the ramparts. As it did now.

“What's he on about, then?” Wil Oakheart of Oakheart asked with a nod to Timaeos. They all wore their white-enameled breast-and-backs with the Lady's Mirror in orange on the fronts. The Imperial artillery had smashed every ballista the defenders shot at them from the rampart. But none of them was virgin enough to assume that the canny Conde might not be holding one back to impale one of his key tormentors if opportunity offered. “Pío hated the Eastern Church. And he particularly hated the fact we took in some of its adherents as knights-companion.”

“All faiths are one in the Creators' eyes,” said Manfredo.

“Ah, but in the eyes of the late and not universally lamented Pío,” Florian said, “perhaps, not so much.”

The crunch of stone hitting stone reached the men's ears.

“Pío was a holy man,” sobbed Timaeos, in Francés even more broken than usual. “He was our Holy Father.”

The Companions' other giant, the Ruso knight Ayaks, had come to loom at Timaeos's side. The two were best friends, and occasionally lovers, although both preferred slighter men. With a bare hand like a fatty hamhock he patted the paldron that protected the red-bearded Greco's mountainous shoulder.

“You big baby,” he said, not without affection.

El Condado de Ojonegro lay on the border between Spaña and Francia, squarely athwart the Imperial High Road—which led to the troublesome County Providence, object of the recent war-hysteria in La Merced. Its ruler, a small and skinny man with more than a touch of the ferret to him despite being named Robusto, was less odious than the Count of Terraroja had been. But legally speaking the Fangèd Throne had a much stronger bone to pick with him: he was charging tariffs, steep ones at that, of travelers and traders along the High Road. That was a clear and serious violation of Imperial Law.

Black Springs had prospered moderately, whether through its liege's road piracy or, possibly, in spite of it. Lying in the transition zone between the arid Meseta and the immense forest, Telar's Wood, that spanned most of the Tyrant's Head, Ojonegro boasted mines, fields of flax, hemp, and cereal grains, and rolling lands covered thickly in enough grass and ground cover to support decent-sized herds of fatties and domesticated nosehorns.

Count Robusto possessed neither the army nor the allies the wicked Leopoldo had. Unfortunately, he did possess an almost equally sturdy and well-supplied stronghold. Faced with the overwhelming onslaught of the Army of Correction he had retired behind the thick walls to thumb his nose at his besiegers. Literally. Daily.

The place was simply too strong to take by storm without breaching the walls. The Nodosaur pioneers reported that, though the castle was built of relatively soft local sandstone, it stood on bedrock of granite. The pioneer captain, a man as formidably competent as he was literal-minded, had informed Jaume that his experts, working the clock around, could mine the walls sufficiently to cause a breakthrough in almost exactly twenty-five weeks. Since Jaume doubted he had eight days over a year to reduce the fortress, he'd set the trebuchets to work, and the army to lay siege,

Unfortunately, it wasn't just political practicalities that dictated Jaume didn't have eight months and more to conquer Ojonegro. The army was already straining the resources of the surrounding countryside. Not to mention that the Ordinaries and the Knights proper found themselves forced to spend much of their energy controlling the depredations of the rest of the army. As Jaume had predicted to Tavares, the knights' and house-troops' taste for plunder, rape, and sheer vandalism was inclining the peasants to torch their fields and food stores, poison their wells, and simply run away with their livestock, without even waiting to be subjected to forced sales of supplies.

What the wily Count Blackeye was counting on was that hunger and thirst would simply drive the besiegers off before their engines could knock a hole in his walls.

Before reading more of his uncle's letter, Jaume paused to dab away moisture that blurred Felipe's overly minute and finicky penmanship. Pío had been among the bitterest enemies of Jaume and his Companions—certainly the most influential. Only Felipe's unswerving patronage prevented the Pope from dissolving the Order.

But he was a good man, in his way
, thought Jaume.
And harsh though his views could be, in person he was kind
.

He read more aloud. He paraphrased. His Imperial uncle had a tendency to overelaborate.

“His Eminence Victor del Vallegrande has been elected Pope, and assumed the name Leo.”

Unlike the news of Pío's demise, revelation of his successor produced an entirely unmixed reaction from his listening Brothers. Manfredo actually smiled—an act that had grown even rarer with Fernão's death.

“He is highly orthodox,” he said.

“I'm astonished,” said Florian. “Even more than at finding I agree with Manfredo. Vallegrande's a young man. Barely eighty. Usually the factions of the Colegio won't agree to seat a pontiff who's not scratching feebly at Death's door, so that none of them enjoys supremacy for too long.”

Even Jacques's prematurely aged face was alight with satisfaction. “The Cardinals were clearly eager to repudiate the old man's warlike policies,” he said. “So they set aside their differences to rush in the candidate furthest from old Raúl del Pico Alumbrado.” Which had been Pío's birth name.

“If we're living right,” Oakheart said, “he may even talk sense to Felipe, and get him to negotiate an end to this fiasco.”

The others nodded. Machtigern turned to look at Castle Blackeye as a rock hurled from another of the battery of three trebuchets bounced off the walls.

“The Count would have surrendered by now,” he growled, “if those rabid horrors we're saddled with hadn't worked treachery in Terraroja.”

Jaume sighed. Ojonegro was just grabby, not a sadist or murderer. Unlike the army's first target he hadn't forfeited his head. Technically his were capital crimes as well, but in practice they were always settled by public contrition and payment of a hefty fine to the Fangèd Throne. Indeed, if it wasn't for Felipe's mad new spirit of adventurism, Don Robusto would probably have capitulated had Jaume done no more than show up at his gate with a Companion or two.

But now Ojonegro knew what happened to those who trusted the Ejército Corregidor. Everyone knew. And old Pío had indeed encouraged his crony the Emperor to make war on his own subjects.

And then Jaume read further, and felt as if he'd taken a ballista bolt to the belly.

He stopped, moistened his lips, read the lines over again.

“Captain?” Florian asked. “Are you feeling well?”

“No,” he said. It came out as a croak.

“Ahh—no, as in you don't feel well?”

“That,” Jaume agreed. “And also—his Holiness Pío was preaching a great Crusade against Providence for heterodoxy, to the masses at Creation Plaza. He dropped dead at the very climax.”

“But there's no evidence they deny the Creators!” Pedro the Greater exclaimed, shocked from his usual elegant reserve. “How can they be condemned as heterodox?”

“Arguably they're less so than Pío himself was,” Florian said. The late pontiff's—
sympathy
, Jaume preferred to think it—for the hyperascetic, hence heresy-skirting, Life-to-Come sect had been an internal Church controversy that bordered upon scandal.

“The Imperial Court's possessed by terror,” Jaume said. “They fear the errors of the Garden of Beauty and Truth are so grave and extreme as to risk incurring a Grey Angel Crusade against the Imperio.”

That brought a momentary silence: the Companions knew little enough about the Garden, but they all knew the Garden at least claimed to base its aesthetics-based philosophy on Jaume's own.

“Our new Pope Leo will put paid to that nonsense, quick enough,” Machtigern said.

The parchment crumpled in Jaume's hand. “Leo has endorsed his predecessor's last sermon,” he said through a throat that felt as if it had inhaled flame. “Felipe has acceded. We are ordered to gather up the Ejército Corregidor and march to join the Imperial Army by the quickest routes and fastest marches.”

“But how is that possible?” exclaimed Bernat, shocked out of his usual amiable stolidity. “Victor—Leo's orthodox in his views. He's not one of these crabbed Life-to-Come cranks, with their hatred of pleasure and cleanliness, and their love of militarism for its own sake. How could he of all men go along with this Crusade insanity?”

Florian smiled a mad smile and shook his head, so wildly his golden locks fluttered like banners in a shifting wind.

“Don't you see?” the Francés knight said. “Our freshly minted Pontiff had no choice. He couldn't renege on the cunning old Velociraptor's final sermon, when it culminated in his own most public death.

“Gentlemen, we are screwed.”

*   *   *

“I'm troubled,” Melodía said.

She was walking with Bogardus alongside the same stream where, a few days earlier, she'd been surprised and horrified when the compsognathus had suddenly devoured the tiny, colorful flier.

It was another of what she'd learned to regard as a typical Providence autumn afternoon: warm, smelling of flowers and the trees that dappled the ferny green and lavender ground cover with shadow. The nearness of the mighty Shield mountains lent just the slightest touch of cool to the breeze that rustled the leaves overhead. Small fliers chirped and cawed from the branches.

“What about, Sister?” The Eldest conversed with her in Spañol, as he frequently did when they were alone. He seemed to be doing it as a courtesy to her native tongue, although his accent convinced her she'd been right in her initial surmise it was his as well.

A spotted frog uttered a croak of annoyance. Even after spending a couple of weeks amidst the Garden of Beauty and Truth, Melodía smiled to hear Bogardus call her that. It felt good to be appreciated for herself, not for her titles, or as a conduit to influence.

But her smile faded on the outside as it did within. “I thought the Garden stood for freedom as well as equality,” she said.

“So we do.”

“But the Council's begun trying to extend its rule to the city,” she said, “instead of just running the Garden.”

Bogardus frowned. She shied away slightly, emotionally, then recognized the look as pensive, not angry.

“Some of our members have begun exerting their influence, yes,” he said. The ground cover crunched softly beneath their sandaled feet, releasing their sharp, ferny fragrance. “But doesn't there have to be authority of some kind?”

Melodía agreed that this was so.

“And which would you rather feel: the Gardener's gentle, guiding hand? Or the fist of command?”

“The first,” she admitted.

She wore standard Garden garb: a modest muslin frock, off-white, with flowers embroidered on the bodice by Sister Jeannette. Pilar had braided her hair that morning, and wound it around her head. Despite the fact she didn't want her friend playing “maidservant” to her anymore, she hadn't resisted too hard. Pilar seemed to enjoy doing it.

Bogardus had on his usual long, grey academic gown trimmed in purple. He looked like a priest. Though he never spoke of his past, she had heard that's what he had been: of Maia, some said. Others claimed he had been a votary of Torrey the Law-Giver, and still others that he was a nonsectarian who served all Eight impartially. Although he based his teachings on those of Jaume, the Empire's most famous devotee of the Lady Bella, he seldom referred to individual Creators. Indeed he seldom referred to the Creators at all, invoking mostly Beauty and Truth as his guiding principles.