The Dinosaur Knights (25 page)

Terror and exaltation warred inside his chest as the glittering avalanche of steel and scale, color and noise, hurtled toward him. The four ranks of Providence pike-bearers before the barrow shifted and muttered nervously. He hoped they'd stand. He at least had faced the terrible power of armored knights and dinosaurs before. The militia couldn't possibly have imagined what it would really be like.

For their part the shortbow archers laughed and jested with each other as they came trotting back to the shelter of their Faerie-poles. Some kept catcalling at the foe, as if this was all some merry village festival, and the onrushing three-tonne war-dinosaurs no more than pantomimes of sticks and silk with drunken revelers within.

Rob hoped not too many would die of disillusionment.

But the bucketheads have themselves a surprise coming too
, so he thought with evil anticipation.

Just as, with a splashing audible above all the colossal hammer and clank and bugling, the proud Count Guillaume and his thirty dinosaur knights plunged into the marsh the tall stream-growth was hiding.

Muck sprayed high as the ramparts of a modest in rainbow-struck arcs. The duckbills reared, threw back gloriously crested heads to bellow their surprise. Several less-alert knights actually bounced against suddenly upraised necks thick as tree trunks.

Though slowed to a plod, the hadrosaurs continued. Despite being weighed-down by a good five hundred kilos of rider and their own armor, either heavy woven caparisons or thick dinosaur-leather plates that guarded breast and sides, a duckbill's big splay-toed hind feet could cope with mud.

Following hotly, the heavy-horse didn't fare so well. Hooves plunged as if pile-driven, deep into mud. Coursers shrieked as legs snapped. Knights tumbled over flying-maned necks to land with slogging splashes.

The rear ranks slammed into the stalled front ones with the sliding crash of two heavy-cavalry armies meeting at full charge. And to much the same effect. More equine legs broke. Horses and men were slammed into the bog. Then the ones who knocked them down tripped over
them
, and all got trampled by following riders who couldn't stop their mounts in time. The marsh erupted in screams and mud and thrashing.

Hornbow in hand, Karyl led his three-horns forward at a walk. The monsters bellowed belligerence. As dinosaurs, they had a simple outlook:
disturbance equaled possible danger
.

In Their wisdom the Creators had not gifted three-horns with a springer's speed, to run away from threats. Nor a tyrant's teeth, nor a titan's impregnable size. They had instead given Triceratops horridus a huge, strong body, equipped with a natural bony shield and lances.

To Rob in the—painfully temporary—safety of his imagined barrow mound, Karyl looked like a child on its stick horse alongside the ten-tonne behemoths.

Karyl drew, aimed, loosed. A dinosaur knight with a red and white lozenge pattern painted on shield and helmet toppled from a sackbut's saddle. With a rattle of steel bows the arbalesters loosed a volley from the fighting castles strapped to the three-horn's three-meter high backs. A grey and gold morion, hit through the brain, toppled thrashing into the swamp.

Lucky shot!
thought Rob.
Or not, if it's your leg crushed beneath the beast
.

The Providence heavy riders swept forward to the attack: dinosaurry on Rob's right, cavalry on the left. The hill vibrated beneath his boots. His heart played fanfares in his chest, though his mind knew their numbers were pitifully few to throw against Count Guillaume's might.

The Crève Coeur dinosaurs were beginning to emerge from the marsh onto solid land. But they straggled badly now. With the oncoming three-horns fixing their front, the Providence dinosaur knights had a chance to hit them in the flank.

And unlike the shortbows, Karyl's recurved Ovdan bow and the crossbows could punch through armor. Rob saw another dinosaur knight fall. Others cried out in pain as bolts struck through plate into their legs, and pinned shields to arms.

Then he saw something he liked a good deal less. That canny goblin Salvateur hadn't joined the headlong race into the quagmire. And now he was using his brindled black sackbut like a herd dog, driving the surviving cavalry out of the marsh, south to where it narrowed down to simple stream. They'd lost over a score of coursers to the inanimate ambush.

Which meant they still outnumbered the Providence men and women at arms three to two.

A fresh and terrible scream brought Rob's attention back to the field's middle. Big Sally, the Triceratops herd-queen, had buried her brow-horns in a morion's unarmored white belly. The duckbill dabbed brown forepaws uselessly at its tormentor's massive head. Its rider toppled backward to the ground. His cries and likely he himself died as a purple and gold dappled sackbut trod promptly on his head.

The three-horns were the most bellicose herd-beasts known, far more than even the wild nosehorns native to the Tyrant's Head. Trikes rejoiced in slaughter as much as any great meat-eater. More: a wild matador or tyrant fought solely to feed. Triceratops fought to defend itself and its herd-mates—and, or so Rob felt sure, for fun.

The other five trikes plodded into the disorganized herd of hadrosaurs, goring legs and spilling guts. Rob's eyes brimmed with tears to see such marvelous beasts suffering so. Yet at the same time his skin seemed to burn, not just from the poorly cloud-filtered sun on his confounded sweaty, chafing armor, but with pride at the sheer power of the living forts he had helped Karyl bring to battle today.

He saw an arbalester lanced by a knight on an ochre morion. She dropped her crossbow to grab at the haft through her belly. The Brokenheart didn't let go of his lance, then, as he should. Instead he thrust it deeper, cruelly driving his victim back against far wicker wall of the fighting-castle. One of her comrades shot the knight; Rob saw him reel. Or her—their breastplates were the same, and a woman's lesser strength was no true disadvantage for a warrior whose weapon was a dinosaur. Another crossbowman took up an axe and began whaling on the lancer's armor with a smithy sound.

Rob's guts seemed to bubble, then, and the skin bunched at the back of his neck. As they closed with the enemy, the Providence war-duckbills had bellowed a mass terremoto. Musician that he was, Rob marveled that a thing could be both unheard and loud: he felt its pressure like palms on his cheeks and thumbs in his eyes, and it was aimed away from him.

The Crève Coeur dinosaurs screamed and shied away from the silent sound-blast. Several toppled kicking and lashing out blindly with their immense tails. The knights' armor protected them from most of the terremoto's force. Small good it did them, with their mounts stunned or thrown into uncontrollable panic.

The Providence dinosaur knights charged home. Butchery ensued. For all their numbers, the Crève Coeur knights were helpless, crushed between plodding trikes and sprinting duckbills.

Not so the chivalry. For all his undoubtedly black character, Salvateur was a wizard field captain: against all odds he had his seventy or eighty heavy-horse forming to meet the fifty Providence lancers closing fast on them.

We've still a chance, though
, Rob thought. Once they'd goaded the Crève Coeur bucketheads into a rushing angrily into the hidden marsh, his light-horse had been instructed to keep biting them behind. Cavalry coursers were armored lightly in the rear. A few javelins stuck in equine rumps could go a long way to keeping the Crève Coeur knights in disarray. Which would mean, numerical advantage or no, the concerted Providence charge would shatter them like glass on an anvil.

He looked up and away, past the seethe of dinosaurs and horsemen to his own riders.

Just in time to see them vanish into the trees on the far ridgetop, bound for the Creators alone knew where.

Salvateur's rallied knights counter-charged the Providence horse. Steel masses crashed together. For a moment their impact drowned out the abattoir racket of the dinosaur scrum. Then in what seemed little more than the space of a few heartbeats the Providence knights broke, their horses racing back east with eyes rolled and manes and tails streaming.

Gaétan was yelling at the infantry to make ready. Under-officers ran along the front rank, trying to ensure all the pikes were pointing more-or-less the right way forward. The front rank knelt with the butts of their long spears grounded and the heads angled up. The soldiers behind them held their pikes level at their waists, the third rank at their shoulders, and the last line overhead.

An Imperial tercio would have several more ranks standing behind to take the place of those in front who fell. But a tercio was five or six times as strong, and the Nodosaurs professionals as painstakingly trained to their tasks as any other craftsfolk, carpenters or masons or blacksmiths. Whereas the Providence pikes were handled by hastily schooled amateurs, whose only hope was to stand firm against the terror the wave of armored horsemen bearing down on them sent bursting into every chest and yammering madness into every skull.…

Rob ran to Little Nell and climbed aboard. She never paused in her self-appointed task of eating a small spiky-leaved shrub down to the ground. He ran his arm through the leather sleeve fastened to the inside of his round wooden shield, gripped the leather sling. He put his steel hat on his head—swore as sun-heated metal scorched his fingers—and hefted Wanda. He found her weight but moderately reassuring.

Not even Salvateur's skill could get the Crève Coeur chivalry into proper order again after their melee with the Providential gendarmes, brief and victorious as it was. Clearly, they didn't care. Common foot soldiers always ran—the bucketheads made an exception in their minds for the Nodosaurs, Rob knew; something to do with the fact that noble second sons and daughters (a few, anyway) joined the browned-iron Imperial ranks.

They knew they'd win. The bastards always did.

But that doesn't mean I've got to sit by and let them have their way
, Rob thought. Sucking down a deep draught of air, he began to bellow the ballad he'd written on the road back from the bloody debacle of Blueflowers, which the minds of the Providence militia-folk had since turned to a song of triumph:

“
Now hear me sing
,

“
Of a wondrous thing—”

The Providence missileers let fly. Two horses in the front rank went down, the steel peytrels that protected their chests struck through by crossbow quarrels. At least one courser stumbled over a fallen mate, rolling over and over and crushing its rider. Rob thought to see another saddle emptied by the bolts, or even two. But there weren't many arbalesters. And though the archers' arrows fell thickly as raindrops among the gendarmes they did about the same amount of actual damage.

“
When men and women, though their birth was base
,

“
Nevertheless still dared to face—”

As the knights approached the Faerie poles, archers and arbalesters scattered, streaming north and south across the front of the pike array. They had to flee neither fast nor far; the Crève Coeur chivalry weren't interested in them. A few, perhaps the bolder and the more timid alike, crouched behind the Faerie-poles.

“
The iron knights of Brokenheart
,

“
That day on Blueflowers field!
”

The knights put their coursers to the gallop and dropped their lances level. They wove easily between the stakes, which weren't sown thickly enough to prevent their passing. That hadn't been practicable in the time they had to prepare. It did reduce their cohesion, slowed them ever so slightly. That made them no less terrifying to Rob, whose pulse thundered in his ears.

A few riders speared archers shrieking from behind the Faerie-poles. The rest stayed fixed on the infuriating and inviting target behind: half a thousand mere peasants with long sticks.

Rob heard Gaétan's bow twang. A knight in green-enameled armor dropped from the saddle of a lathered blood bay.

He let his song end. No one was listening to him anymore. Whatever good it could do, it had done.

“This is fucking gonna hurt,” he said aloud to no one in particular.

The steel-shod tide reached the pikes.

Chapter 20

Dinosauría
, Dinosaurry
—A military formation of dinosaur knights—as distinct from horse-mounted knights, or cavalry. All but irresistible at the charge, the dinosaurry are the main weapon of decision in Nuevaropan land warfare.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

For the whole ride back to Providence, Melodía's heart had steeped in cold shit, as if sunk to the bottom of a cavern-sized cesspool. But when she saw the whole of the Garden—
what my idiocy's left alive of them
, anyway, she thought in a wail—gathered before the blue château gates in the twilight to greet her, her heart sank and chilled and shriveled even more.