The Dinosaur Knights (43 page)

“What happens then?” Élodie asked.

Karyl uttered a soft laugh. “I believe in planning,” he said, “but that risks taxing our powers of prophecy into penury. Let's survive the end, and make assessment then.”

“If there's aught left to assess,” Rob said.

“There's that,” Karyl said.

The shadow Melodía thought to see cross his martyr's face seemed darker even to her than the Irlandés's words would merit. She wondered at that.

But the war-council began breaking up, and her people and animals needed her. Plenty of healing remained to do, and not just to wounds of the body. Taking herself as dismissed she left to hurry to them.

*   *   *

As the captains returned to their own fires Rob stood up from his squat. He picked up his lute, which lay beside him, by its slim crooked neck.

“A word with you, Master Korrigan,” Karyl said softly.

Rob cocked a brow. The others dissolved into the night. Karyl stood quiet, compact, dark and self-contained, until they were out of earshot.

“What do you think of her?”

“Beg pardon, Colonel?”

“Our fugitive Princess. Melodía. Though I suppose we're all a legion of fugitives now.”

Rob laughed. “Truth to tell, I hardly think of her as that at all anymore. Everyone calls her the Short-Haired Horse Captain now. I guess I do too.”

“What about the job she does for you?”

Rob laughed. “She's a marvel, and I don't lie. She's taken to the light horse like a great-crested dragon to the air. And they to her. Spoiled princess or not, there's nothing at all, no matter how dangerous, dirty, or arduous, she'll ask her troop to do that she doesn't jump to do herself. If anything she's a bit too heedless of her own safety. And that works wholly to her favor with the sort of mad things who are Travelers, or become jinetes.”

Karyl nodded briskly. “What would you say to giving her your light-horse, then?”

“Beg pardon?” Rob said again.

“Put her in command of all mounted scouts.”

“The little Princess? You can't be serious?”

Karyl cocked a brow at him.

“Think back on what you just said, my friend. It seems to me you made her case most compellingly.”

“Huh,” Rob grunted. “Ah. Well. So I did. And given they all clamor to ride with her, even after she lost so many of them fighting to keep the horde off our backsides, I'd say she has the lot in her well-bred palm already.”

“Splendid. Give her the news yourself.”

“Gladly, Lord. Gladly indeed.”

Something about the way Karyl continued to look at him held him longer.

“What will you do now?” Karyl asked.

Rob laughed. “Find a rousing song circle and some beer, get me inside the one and the other inside of me, soonest. Then off to bed to snatch what poor rest I can before some messenger lout awakens me to the latest catastrophe.”

“Ah,” Karyl said. “I—wish I had your easy facility with others.”

“What on Paradise can you mean, man? You've wandered the length and breadth of Aphrodite Terra, rubbed elbows with paupers and emperors. What's a bunch of your own people?”

Especially ones who'd throw themselves in molten lava if you so much as crooked your little finger,
he added mentally.

“I have. I've even passed time with rogues like Travelers and dinosaur masters. But easy camaraderie—” He shook his head. “I seem to lack that gift.”

“Gift? It's the same gift as falling backward drunk off a rock. It's not something you do, it's something that happens. Come on. Join me. You'll be welcome, and that's an evil understatement, so; your men and women think you float two meters in the air and glow all on your own, and that's plain fact.”

“I'd be like a matador peering in the window at a banquet. Not for me, I fear. You go and enjoy.”

“You, fear?” Rob scoffed.

“I fear,” Karyl said. “More than I hope you ever know.”

He turned and walked away. Rob thought him the loneliest thing he'd ever seen.

Chapter 33

Hogar
,
Home,
Old Home
—When they were done making Paradise, and found it good, the Creators brought humans, their Five Friends, and certain useful crops and herbs here from the world we call Home. Ancient accounts teach us it is a strange place. It is cold, and we would feel heavier there, and find the air much thinner. The year is 1.6 times as long as ours. We must admire the fortitude of our ancestors in dwelling on such an inhospitable world, and always praise the Creators for bringing us to our true Paradise!

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“All these kids in the procession wore white,” Little Pigeon said between horror-sized bites of a meat pie. “They all had candles. They all looked … funny. Some had frozen faces, some looked crazy-happy.”

In the shade of an ancient spreading oak, the child sat on a camp stool at one end of a heavy table of well-polished walnut. Scouts had found it tipped in a ditch up the High Road from Belle Perspective, where the army continued to rest, recover, and assimilate the volunteers who kept streaming in to join. Nobody knew whether it had been looted from some abandoned manor, or carried by its fleeing rightful owners until they saw fit to abandon it. Rob couldn't quite fit his mind around why anyone would dream of lugging the great brute along in the first place.

At that, it was easier than shaping his mind to fit the tale his former chief spy in Providence town unfurled.

“There were like forty of them, walking in pairs. The oldest were just shy of fully grown—twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. The youngest could barely toddle. I was hiding out in Mare's Alley next to the old counting-house when I saw them march down Peacock Walk. I wondered what was going on, so I followed them.”

Little Pigeon had arrived in early afternoon on a farm wagon with ten other children piled into the bed. When Karyl heard his first uncharacteristically halting words about what he'd witnessed in the province's capital—Rob was thinking of the androgynous child as “he” today—Karyl had convened an immediate council of war.

“I didn't know what was happening—it all seemed just a lark, at first. But then I started feeling like a weight pressing on my mind. Like a hand pushing me to join the parade.

“They went from house to house down the street. At each door a child would knock. When the door opened, the child demanded the householders let them in to look for signs of sin.”

“This was just children?” asked Melodía. Since she'd been named field captain of all the light-horse no one questioned her right to sit in council. Not that Rob thought anybody'd incline to, since the tribute she'd wrung out of Métairie Brulée had begun to roll in.

“No. They had some adults along too. Like, I don't know, fatty-herders or something. If somebody resisted letting the kids in, they dealt with it pretty mean. Some of the grown-ups walked as if they were asleep. But they pounced quick as vexers if anybody pushed back.”

“How long are we going to waste listening to these childish fantasies?” demanded Garamond, who'd been hitting the ale a little hard this morning.

Baron Côme had his elbows on the table and he pressed either side of chin to prop up his face. He cocked a brow at the mercenary man-at-arms.

“We're up against a Grey Angel Crusade, here, Luc,” he said. “I don't know about you, but that makes me uncomfortable calling anything ‘fantasy' anymore. I want to hear what he says. Uh—her. Whichever. Anything that might keep the horde from peeling and eating me like a shrimp, the way they did Count Raúl, I'm interested in.”

“I'm listening,” Karyl said directly to Petit Pigeon. “What happened when the children entered a house?”

“I couldn't really see. I was trying to hang in the shadows. Not as if anybody was looking around or anything. Stuff they found they didn't like they passed outside. It got carried off and thrown on the big bonfire in the Old Market Square. Like I said, anybody resisted got beaten down pretty hard. But that wasn't the worst. That was when we came to this house—nice house it was too. Simon and his wife Mathi, the silk sellers, lived there. Their youngest daughter Nicole accused her elder sister Muriel of sin. Muriel wasn't even twenty yet, but what they did to her—”

Little Pigeon looked at Rob with black eyes brimming with tears. “Do I have to tell that part, Master Rob? I don't want to. I so don't want to.”

Rob glanced to Karyl, who shook his head once. “No,” Rob said gently, letting relief hum in his voice. “You don't have to tell any more about that.”

Melodía went to kneel by the child, to wipe his eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief.

“Who did these bad things?” Gaétan asked. As usual since their escape Jeannette haunted his shoulder silently from behind. “Not the children, surely?”

“Uh-huh.” Little Pigeon nodded. “But it was the preachers who told them what to do.”

“Preachers?” Rob said. “Who were these, now?”

“Two of them. A man and a woman, both stiff necks from that Garden Council. They were encouraging the kids, spouting all that crazy-talk the Gardeners have been shouting all over town for weeks. Self-denial, purity, pruning the world of wickedness, on and on. That kinda shit.”

“‘Pruning,'” echoed Melodía faintly.

“Weeks, you said,” Karyl said.

“Oh, yes. It got really bad when the Princess went over to the army. They got all upset. As if scared they were losing ground. Their sermons started getting shriller and fiercer.”

Rob frowned at Melodía. She shook her head. “I never knew anything about this,” she said. “Bogardus and Sister Violette were pleased when I told them I wanted to join you.”

She seemed to deflate. “Acted pleased. I guess.”

“So why didn't you tell us all this, then?” Rob asked the child.

His eyes got huge. “But I did, Master Rob! I did too!”

Rob rocked back on his own salvaged milking-stool. “Did you, for a fact? How could I've missed it?”

“Reports go astray,” Karyl said. “You've seen that often enough by now. Probably you disregarded such reports—I confess I might have done. With Castaña pressing against the border like a titan on a village fence, and Célestine lurking in the weeds awaiting her chance to pounce, our employer's noisy rhetoric was the last thing on our minds.”

He sighed. “After all, it was a foregone conclusion they'd betray us.”

Rob frowned again. It came to him to wonder if his friend's very fatalism on the subject might have hindered them getting a
trifle
more warning of catastrophe rushing down on them like a volcano's glowing cloud.

“It's all right, Little Pigeon,” he said. “You did your best. What happened next?”

“I ran away. Nobody noticed me. Nobody followed me, anyway. They couldn't stay with me in the alleys if they did. Especially not the adults. Adults are stupid and clumsy.”

Gaétan had risen and begun to pace. He was too full of frustrated energy, barely contained rage and grief and the Lady of the Mirror knew what else crackling inside him like static in a fleece cloth, to sit still for any length of time.

“So this Angel … controlled them all?” he asked.

The child shook his mop of black hair, which looked to Rob as if he haggled it off with a dagger whenever it bothered him. Which was no doubt the case.

“No,” he said. “I never saw any Angel. Everybody was talking about him, though. Some of them were so scared they could barely stand up. Others seemed … all happy, I guess. Excited.”

Rob cocked a brow at Melodía. Her cinnamon skin looked overlaid with ash.

“I hid out in this place I know,” Petit Pigeon went on. “Stayed there three days. Lived on scraps I stole from busted-open houses. Lots of the people didn't even seem to care about stuff like eating. I saw … things. Horrible things. They kept the bonfire burning all the time in the Square. It smelled awful. I could see … people in it, all burned up and black and all.”

Élodie turned away, gagging.

“The Old Market was always full of people, all listening to that silver-haired lady from the Garden. The real hoity-toity one, used to be some kind of noble.”

“Violette,” Melodía said, in a tone that suggested spitting out a bite of rotten meat.

“Finally I figured things were just too crazy, and not gonna get better. By then I'd pulled in some other kids I found wandering. Some of them had managed to get away from the crazies, some hid out all along. We snuck out by night. By then I heard you guys had hit the road south. So we followed you. It was pretty tough; the crazy people're everywhere, eating up all they can and burning the rest. But we're pretty good scroungers, and sly. And here we are.”

“You didn't see the Angel,” Melodía said, picking words as if they burned her fingers. “But I think you felt his power touch you, when you were watching that children's parade. I felt it too, just a little. It was—terrifying. How did you manage to keep free?”