The Dinosaur Knights (38 page)

She wondered whether it might be residual guilt at having led so many of the Gardeners to terrible deaths, which made her feel so separate from what she had once believed would be her new family. Or was it something … here?

Melodía recognized Jeannette, Gaétan's sister, seated nearby toward the rear of the crowd. She had been among those who most warmly welcomed Melodía to the Garden. Ironically, Melodía had felt wounded when Jeannette had smilingly refused to accompany her on her embassy to Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur. At the time made her wonder if the Garden gossip might be true, that her attachment to her merchant family stunted her growth into full spiritual beauty.

Now she reckoned it proved Jeannette had common sense.

The young woman's auburn hair was wound in a severe bun at the back of her head. Her face was pale and strained.

On the dais, Sister Violette leaned toward Bogardus's ear, her face pinched with passion. The Eldest Brother's brow rumpled in an uncharacteristic frown.

The Councilwoman looked up and down the head table, polling the other six men and women with her eyes. Each nodded, some eagerly, some slowly. Bogardus seemed to deflate in his chair. Despite poor light, Melodía thought to see despair engraved in his face.

Violette stood up. Her hair hung unbound about the shoulders of her simple white gown like the ripples of a frozen waterfall. The light of myriad flames turned her hair from ice to blood and fire.

In a throbbing voice she began to preach. It was as if she spoke some language alien to Nuevaropa; Melodía's mind could only accept and parse pieces of it. To the extent she could wring out any sense at all, the sermon was all fire and blood itself, sacrifice and purgation.
What does the Garden grow now?
Melodía wondered, as sickness welled in her soul.

The Gardeners around her, once so soft and sweet and languid, now leaned forward with flame-glittering eyes, keen as raptors. Melodía felt her skin creep. Their quivering eagerness reminded her of Guillaume's horrors.

Bogardus rose. His flesh sagged grey on the strong, square frame of bones his face. His eyes were like caves. His shoulders, once broad and manly, slumped in a linen shift that seemed, even in this orange gloom, slightly grubby. Melodía's heart and gut both clenched to see him this way.

When he spoke his voice was halting, so quiet she had to strain to hear. But as he went on it swelled in volume and conviction, until it rang from the dulled rafters.

“All things that live grow,” he said, “or die.”

“We grow, and that is good. Plants in our worldly gardens can only wait for our hands, guided by our hearts and minds, to shape them. We alone can shape our own growth.

“Yet how can it be beautiful to try to seize for ourselves the shaping of the growth of our fellow humans? Do they not deserve to exercise their Creator-given ability to grow as they will?

Sister Violette laughed wildly. It shocked Melodía like a blow to the face. Not just because her laughter sounded like the cry of a dragon, kiting above the landscape on colossal wings seeking prey. But because of the sheer disrespect she showed the Eldest Brother.

“How can we not?” the Councilwoman cried. “When we look around at the world what do we see? Weeds, noxious weeds, springing up in profusion!

“What do weeds do? Choke beauty. Weeds leach vital nutrients from the soil, starving beautiful blossoms and healthful fruits and herbs. Does our human Garden differ so much from the world of green growing things?”

“No!” the Gardeners cried.

Frowning, Melodía settled back against the cool wall, with long legs stretched out before her and arms folded tightly beneath her breasts.
What's happening? What
is
this?
Her danger-sense, so late in arriving, began to tingle.

And then the Short-Haired Horse Captain thought,
Well, I've got a good sword and a fast horse. What can a bunch of pacifists do to me?

Something began to seethe within her mind like a hidden monster in a mire. It wasn't just her perception of a threat that stirred. It was something in her memory.

But something her memory couldn't pull out of the concealing muck. Somehow she felt certainty that she didn't want it to.

She was starting to be damned sure she needed to, though.

Violette stood up smiling. “Bogardus is our Eldest Brother,” she told the breathless crowd, “our Master Gardener. As always his words are wise. They grow from the greatest heart in all Providence—in all Nuevaropa. And yet something has misguided that growth. It is the branches of his thought that are twisted, now, and seek to entangle our limbs as we grow to the future. With the greatest of love and admiration I can only say: we must grow past this obstacle, and every obstacle.

“The time has come, my flowers of Beauty and Truth. To sow that Truth far and wide. And to begin the process of weeding and pruning the garden our World cries out for!”

The onlookers took up the cries of “Weed!” and “Prune!” Melodía's lips peeled back from her teeth. She'd heard such terms increasingly tossed around on her recent visits to the Garden. She'd never liked the taste they left on her tongue.

Now they burned like poison.

“Gardeners, hear me!” Violette cried, flinging out her arms in ecstasy. “For months the Eldest Brother and I have been blessed with the guidance of a mystic creature of perfect beauty and grace.”

Beside her sat Bogardus, looking bleak. His face was haggard with fatigue spiritual as well as physical. As if he had stayed up late for many nights, listening to awful wisdom poured into his ear by some inhuman being.

“Until now it has been our holy secret,” Violette declared. “Now it's secret no more: I bring forth the Blessed One whose hand shall help our Beauty and Truth grow to embrace the world! I bring you our Bright Angel, Raguel!”

At the far ends of the globe, north and south, the maps showed not just constant snow, but ice. Melodía felt as if she had been turned by magic into a block of it.

Nowhere in the Creators word, teachings, books, or legends, was there any mention of such a thing as a Bright Angel. Nor did the histories, however fanciful. She may not have believed them all, as anything but useful if sometimes wishfully thought precepts for a virtuous life. But she had read them, as part of her education.

They spoke only of the Grey Angels, the seven guardians of the sacred Equilibrium between Black and White, whose very touch brought death, their breath terror. Who sometimes sallied forth in Crusade to purge the human world of sin. Largely by purging the world of a large number of humans.

Raguel was one such. In an ancient tongue his name meant,
friend of God
. It did not mean,
friend to mortals
.

Through the entrance to the kitchen stepped a figure bent nearly double. Melodía's eyes went wide.

I've seen him before
, she knew with sick certainty. She couldn't breathe.

The being unfolded to its full height. The audience gasped: it stood two and half meters tall or more. It was nude.
He
was nude; obviously, he. His hair was a cap of golden curls, his skin alabaster, his every contour the consummation of Beauty. Yet Melodía thought to see discolored mottling spread across His body like lichen growing on an ancient statue.

The same as before
. The growing horror tolled like a bell inside the block of ice her being.

He held out his arms to the Gardeners. They uttered a joint throbbing moan of joy and fear commingled.

It's all true. The words tolled in her brain like funeral bells. The Angels exist. The Creators exist. Those aren't just stories to frighten naughty children. They're true. All true
.

And I saw him before. In Bogardus's bedchamber that night I
—

That night she stumbled back to camp naked and confused as to why. It wasn't just the existence of the Seven that was abruptly proven true in the face of all her lifelong swaddling disbelief. It was that their fabled powers were real too.

Such as the one to fog minds—and memories. She had been Touched by the Angel. Her memory corrupted.

Violated. Again
. Anger began to burn hot inside her.

“Behold transcendent Beauty!” Violette screamed. She threw off her white gown and offered her white nakedness to the Angel.

Catching her frenzy like oil with fire the Gardeners jumped up. They tore their own clothing off and thronged forward. Melodía was gladder than ever she'd sat at the back, with none to push her toward the horror. And with every eye caught by that golden cynosure, no one noticed the way she hung back.

And no one seemed to see what she did: how chunks of rotting flesh fell away from that beautiful body, exposing a shriveled, skeletal frame covered in what looked like maggots solidified in midwrithe.

This is the beginning of a Grey Angel Crusade. This is how the Great Dying begins.
The shock and terror still held her limbs as if block-frozen. But a different fear now began to play the bellows to her anger-furnace within.

Naked, Violette straddled a grey and decomposing thigh, grinding her loins against its gnarled hardness and moaning orgasmically. The other Council members gathered 'round, male and female alike, naked and imploring. The other Gardeners flooded around them.

“Wait!” Bogardus's call rang off the repainted rafters. He stood alone on the dais, holding out his hands as if to will the faithful back.

“This isn't right. Don't you see what's happening here? This is a Grey Angel. He'll take your wills, your souls, turn you into mindless creatures who exist for one purpose only: to butcher your fellow humans!”

Violette lolled her head back over her shoulder. “The time has come to prune the Garden of Humanity!” she cried. “I embrace you, Lord Raguel! Take me! Make me your own!”

From the shadows of the Angel's groin his penis arose. When flaccid it was huge, as all of him was, but otherwise not unlike that of a normal Nuevaropan man's. Yet as it stiffened to its full half-meter length the skin split and peeled away like a snake's, revealing a member like decaying granite.

So potent was Bogardus's personality that the audience had actually paused. But sight of that rigid, misshapen cock now seemed to draw them like a magnet. They began to shuffle forward once more, moaning low in throats.

“Is this really what you want?” Bogardus cried. “Where is Beauty in pain and destruction and murder?”

The Grey Angel held out a hand toward Bogardus. Corruption had sloughed half its beautiful face away, leaving skull-like desolation. Something like a thunderclap rocked the chamber, though Melodía's ears heard nothing.

Bogardus stiffened. Stiff as a stick-puppet he turned to face the Angel. Visibly he fought him, muscles bunching, sweat pouring down his face. But step by desperate step he went to Raguel.

The Councilors fell back. Nothing stood between Bogardus and the jutting penis. Even Violette detached herself from Raguel's leg and stepped with head lowered resentfully, peering through tangled white-blond hair with eyes no more human than a matadora's.

Alone and quivering, Bogardus faced the Angel. Raguel rolled his hand palm up. He drew it down. As if attached to it by rods, Bogardus dropped to his knees before him.

He opened his mouth and bent forward. Howling like dogs the Gardeners swarmed forward, hiding his submission from Melodía's view.

The ice shattered. With it the building anger vanished too. What remained in Melodía was
resolution
.

Time to go
, she told herself. Well past time, no doubt. Yet despite overwhelming terror that threatened dissolve the bindings of her joints she didn't simply run for her life.

Instead, without quite knowing why, she snatched up her scabbarded talwar from where it rested against the banco she was sitting on dashed to the rear of the howling pack. An auburn-haired woman was ripping the tough green silk of her robe as if it were wet paper with more-than-human strength.

“Jeannette!” Melodía yelled.

Snarling, the girl turned on her. Melodía recoiled at the inhuman hatred that warped her features out of any human semblance.

When she was only a little older than Montse was now, Melodía had briefly been addicted to popular romances, overwrought epics like
R
OLDÁN THE
D
OOMED
and
T
HE
S
EVEN
M
YSTIC
W
ARRIORS
. Remembering them now she slapped Jeannette across the face. Hard.

Jeannette glared in such green-blazing fury that for an instant Melodía feared the might have to cut down the woman she was trying to save.

Then she blinked. “Melodía?” she said. “Did you just hit me?”

“Yes.”

Jeannette looked around. “Wait, what's going on? What's wrong with these people?”

Then she saw what loomed above the writhing throng. “Oh, sweet mother Maia!” she exclaimed. “That's a Grey Angel! They're real! They're really real!”

“Yes, they are,” Melodía said. She grabbed Jeannette's wrist.

“Run,” she suggested.

They ran.

 

Part Four

Crusade