The Dinosaur Knights (23 page)

“That's why you hate them,” Karyl said.

“Aye. Everything I love, the blue-blood bastards take from me.”

“They're good at that. It's what they do.”

“And yet you're a noble yourself.”

“And you see the good I've done.” The bitterness in Karyl's voice matched that in Rob's throat.

Rob shook his head. “Karyl Bogomirskiy, I'll never understand you.”

“That makes two of us.”

They rode for a time in silence. Karyl had packed Melodía, much chastened, off to the Garden villa—protected by an armed escort, but not under guard. Rob protested: how could they know she hadn't intended to sell them out?

Karyl asked what coin the Count of Crève Coeur could possibly offer an Imperial Princess? Sanctuary, perhaps—but even as naïve as Melodía had proven herself to be, she knew perfectly well that if the Empire demanded Guillaume turn her over, he'd have no choice but comply or face attainder. With the best will in the world—which few had ever accused the Comte Crève Coeur of possessing—there was no way he'd do that for a stranger who was no kin of his.

And the Princess had proven laughably naïve indeed. Had one a sufficiently cruel sense of humor.

Despite her shock and grief at the enormity she had brought upon her friends, Melodía had kept herself under strict control as she replied lucidly and fully to Karyl's interrogation. Nor could even Rob Korrigan, who had slight reason to give her slack, deny her contrition was real.

She had, she explained with her face ashen and fingers writhing together like snakes, intended to try talking to the enemy in hopes of finding common ground; and failing that, to appeal to his better nature.

Unfortunately, Guillaume had none.

Karyl looked to Rob.

“It's time,” he said. “Let loose your own human raptor-packs. Have them run down Guillaume's scouts and spies and foragers. Kill them hard, but kill them fast.”

“All of them?”

“All. I want Guillaume blind. Completely. We can't stop him foraging altogether. We can make him send out big, slow parties, clanking with armored escorts.”

Rob nodded. “My kids'll be glad to hear those orders.”

“Well, tell the woods-runners to restrain their more … elaborate impulses when it comes to paying off the Rangers. It's not that I'll waste any tears on them, though atrocity isn't how I make war. But we don't have time for games.”

“We should be square there, then,” Rob said. “Lad Gaétan's been ever so civilizing an influence on Stéphanie. And her brother does what she says, I notice.”

“I should talk to the boy, then. I don't want her getting too civilized on me. Otherwise she'll be no more use than that poor pampered little fool of a princess.”

Rob started to chuckle. It came out a grunt.

“I still say we rescued the wrong girl.”

“Tell your scouts, especially the light-horse, to take as few risks as possible. That said, the more they sting Guilli's broad ass, the better. Have them burn a few tents, run off some coursers, put arrows in a few of his war-duckbills. They won't do much real harm. But that's not the point. The point is, anger makes people stupid.”

“Bucketheads are stupid to start with, Captain.”

“So they are. But I want them as stupid as theoretically possible. Especially the Count. And don't forget—Salvateur is anything but stupid.”

“Oh, aye,” Rob said. “That he is, the black Sasanach rogue.”

“So then, tell your people that's how much I want them to annoy Count Guillaume,” Karyl said. “Until he's angrier than Salvateur's voice of reason is persuasive.”

Despite himself Rob found himself laughing. Longer and louder than strictly called for, perhaps.

At last he got hold of himself. Wiping a tear—mostly of mirth—from his eye, he shook his head in admiration.

“Ah, Karyl Bogomirskiy,” he said. “They ought to rename the old song for you.
You're
a man you don't meet every day.”

“No doubt Paradise is a better place for it,” Karyl said. “Now, go. We'll face Crève Coeur tomorrow, most likely. And when we do, I want him mad enough to charge Big Sally head to head.”

Chapter 18

Dinero
, Money
—While regional names vary, our coinage is standardized throughout the Empire of Nuevaropa: trono of 32 grams of gold, equaling 20 pesetas in value; Corona, 16 grams gold, equaling 10 pesetas; Imperial, 8 grams gold equaling 5 pesetas; peseta, 32 grams of silver, valuing 1/20 trono or 4 pesos; peso, 8 grams silver, equaling 1/4 of a peseta; and the Centimo, 8 grams copper, valued at 1/100 of a peso.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“All right,” Rob said in disgust. “You win.”

He flipped a silver peso to Karyl. The other caught it without so much as glancing around.

They stood on a low rise with their army around them. Rob's Traveler fancy made it a barrow, soil mounded over some ancient battle's dead. In front of them a valley of tall green grass and blue and purple wildflowers sloped gently down to where a line of tall, feathery-topped reeds marked the course of a small stream half a kilometer away. Then the land angled up again for perhaps eleven hundred more meters to a ridge, taller and sharper than this one.

It was no superstitious fear of ghosts that rippled a chill down Rob's spine. From the woods that crowned the ridgeline dinosaur knights appeared. Steel chamfrons glittered in midmorning sun that already stung Rob's exposed arms through a scrim of cloud. Pennons fluttered from upraised lances, blue and green.

Crève Coeur's colors.

“So you were right, my Captain,” Rob said. “It really was that easy to bait Guilli into coming to us.”

“So far.”

The slaughter of his beloved hunting horror pack, along with a handful of Rangers and some of his favorites—to say nothing of the personal humiliation of having it done right under his tuber-shaped nose—had stung the Count's pride the way a woods-runner arrow had stung his horse's fine white fanny. He had rousted out his army and marched them east toward Providence town straightaway.

They had made slow going. Naturally enough, since the good Count refused to leave the vast unwieldy tail of baggage wagons his buckethead vassals and allies dragged behind them. Rob's scouts had feted them en route with showers of taunts and arrows. Although delivered at such a range that the one did about as much harm as the other, they did what they were meant to do.

No matter how pissed their commander was, the invaders were not about to march all night, especially through the deep forest they found themselves in when the sun sank away in the east. They bivouacked. Not all their sentries had survived the darkness. A dozen or so tents and supply wagons had gone up in flames.

Again, no more than wasp-stings. But Guillaume and his troops had not passed a restful night. Nor was Guilli in a calm, contemplative mood when he marched again in the morning.

Light-horse dart attacks and arrows from covert had promptly met the Brokenhearts. Guillaume pressed with determined fury in the very direction he was stung from the hardest. In his eagerness to get to grips with his foe he even forsook the wide, well-tended Western Road, now two kilometers south, for what was basically a goat track.

“How could he be so easy to bait?” Rob demanded. “Guilli's a dolt, right enough. But Salvateur, now—he's got a long head on him, as our Northmen brothers say.”

That was bitter Irlandés irony: the wild Northmen with their sea-serpent drawn dragon-boats were neither subjects of the Empire nor its friends. For the better art of a century they had held the islands north of Ayr-Land, which territory they traded with constantly and raided barely less often. They were as cruel a curse upon the Ayrysh as their Anglysh overlords—almost.

“Crève Coeur's injured pride moans louder than Salvateur can speak wisdom,” Karyl said. “Give the Count his due: his best move has always been to find us and destroy us, so totally and viciously the province loses not just the means, but even the will to resist. He wants to fight us, wherever we stand. And after all, he knows in his heart he'll win.”

And Karyl smiled. Rob fervently hoped Karyl would never smile that way while thinking of him.

The day was fine. The sun shone halfway up the sky, an intense white round in the overcast. The Shield Mountains made a jagged blue rampart away to their right, seeming deceptively close. The breeze blew stiff and from the north, across the shallow valley, covering most of the army's thousand noises, mutter and rumble and clink of metal, with the rustle of grass and scrub and its own native hiss and boom. It also brought Rob and Karyl the musty smells of the war-dinosaurs mustered to the right of their vantage point. Karyl ran a clean camp, meaning that was the worst smell they were likely to encounter. Until blood and even less savory substances began to spill, of course.

The smell of autumn flowers held a curious note of cinnamon.

“I thought no plan survived first contact with the enemy,” Rob said with a certain sourness.

“We've not made contact,” Karyl said. “Yet.”

He had arrayed the Providential foot in ranks down the valley's gentle slope, athwart the enemy's path. Most sat among the yellow wildflowers with their weapons beside them. A murmur and agitated motion rippled over them like those flowers in the breeze as they saw the enemy knights appear.

His senses honed keen by the need to follow audience reactions, Rob detected both eagerness and apprehension among the waiting men and women. Peasants and townsfolk simply did not stand against noblemen mounted on steel-clad horses. Much less three-tonne armored monsters.

They're a fearful sight, for true
, Rob thought, even as his dinosaur master heart thrilled to the beauty of the thirty or so war-duckbills lumbering slowly down the distant ridge toward them at a two-legged walk. The chivalry's coursers, winged out either side, were another thing: heavy cavalry scared him to the marrow. He knew the dinosaurs were deadlier, that a hadrosaur could trample a fully caparisoned warhorse almost as easily as a naked man, and smash them three at a time with its tail.

But war-dinosaurs were to Rob as the sea to a mariner: he knew their dangers, and respected them well. But they were still his element. Horses were alien.

Little Nell stood on the barrow's backslope, cropping ferns beneath the eye of a waifish farm-girl with a mop of brown hair. Rob had a proper staff now, dinosaur-grooms youthful and eager, whom he terrorized joyously, if without the genuine mean-spiritedness that had seemed to animate his own old mentor. Morrison was a Scocés dinosaur master, scarcely older than Rob was now, who had fists like sledgehammers and used them as his primary teaching-tools. Karyl's dinosaurs, at least, were as ready for war as they could be, and Rob knew with certainty that would have soothed him better had he seen any other good news at all.

Rob's axe Wanda, a round shield, and a steel hat hung from either side of the saddle on Nell's steep-sided back. Rob wore a heavy cuirass of sackbut side-leather with rows of black-iron bosses on the front, and divided skirts of enameled leather with smaller bosses on them to cover the fronts of his otherwise bare thighs. They chafed something fierce, especially the breastplate's stiff armholes and the upper ends of his hobnailed boots. But they'd help keep stray bits of metal from wandering into his own personal body when the shitstorm came down. He was just glad he wasn't boiling like the knights in their steel shells.

Absently Karyl tucked the coin Rob had tossed him in a pouch hung from his sword-belt. He wore a stout tan jack of hornface hide and a visorless burgonet, basically an open-faced steel helmet with a bill to protect his eyes from down-bound mischief. A conventional cross-hilted arming-sword rode in a scabbard at his waist. He wore loose white silk trousers and tall boots. In all, he could have been an especially well-off rider in Rob's light-horse scouts.

“You don't really care about the money, do you?” Rob said. “What kind of a mercenary are you, anyway?”

Sergeants began shouting the militia to its feet. On the right flank their meager force of a dozen dinosaur knights bestrode their war-hadrosaurs, which began to bob their gorgeously crested heads and blow booming dulcian greetings to their distant kin. On their left waited fifty men-at-arms on horseback. In between half a thousand pikemen and women rose grumbling and hefting their unwieldy weapons, four meters of sturdy ash haft each tipped with half a meter of polished, pointed steel.

Out front stood a hundred or so men and women with shortbows. Most wore no more than loincloths, and none of them armor. With them waited twenty-five arbalesters, armed with powerful but slow to operate cranequin-cocked heavy crossbows, and fifty house-archers in mail. To guard them a hedge of Faerie-poles had been driven into the turf: stakes with sharpened ends slanted forward.