The Dinosaur Knights (47 page)

“Take him somewhere else,” Jaume said, gently steering David to his master. “And maybe keep a better eye on him, hein?”

Jacques gave him a stricken look. Jaume's heart fell. He anticipated the words about to spill from the moustached lips. “No, it's not your fault either. Now go. I'll talk to you soon.”

He turned back to the repentant giants. “As for you: you are the ones most responsible. Grown men. Men of unparalleled strength. Champions. Knights.
Companions
. Whatever the boy said or did, you are responsible for what took place.

“You raised your hands against each other. Don't you see, that's one of the very reasons we prohibit romance with servants and Ordinaries? That, and to spare all parties from the ugliness of exploitation.”

He swung an arm in an arc encompassing the bulk of the Imperial Army—no longer calling itself a Crusade, since a Grey Angel had preempted the word. Shouts, screams, the clash of arms floated on a wind that stank of wastes human and animal. And blood, mostly human.

“And
that
. Random duels aren't enough for our fellow nobles anymore. Now they fight melees to the size of minor battles, while wallowing in their own filth—and wondering why they sicken and die in droves, as if the Creators themselves didn't promise just that punishment for disobeying their Laws of hygiene. Do we want to let that inside? Do we want to give it entry into the sacred circle of our Order and the Lady?”

He exhaled heavily.

“It's my fault. The disorder, the murder and atrocity, the plague. I am Marshal and Constable; I command the army. Yet I don't know how to control it. It's the greatest defeat of my life. But I do not have to let the general foulness and discord breaks our ranks. And I will not. Especially as we're called to the most vital service to Empire and people of all our lives!”

“They don't let you bring the blue bloods to heel,” said Machtigern. “It's not your fault at all.”

A ripple of consent ran around the circle of watchers. It held an ugly undertone. Everyone knew whom the Alemán meant by “they.”

Jaume held up a hand. The muttering stopped.

“I command,” he repeated. “What happens in the army is my responsibility. Leave that for now. Brother Ayaks, Brother Timaeos, you have broken not just our law, but your faith with one another. What have you to say for yourselves?”

“Kill me,” Ayaks said, his voice more a tyrant-growl than usual with his chin pressed to his clavicle. “Or … exile me. I deserve no better.”

Timaeos emitted a startlingly shrill whinny of despair. Mor Dieter stood near him. With a speed that had fatally surprised many foes from a man his size, Timaeos snatched the dagger from the young Alemán's belt, held it out at the extent of both his tree-trunk arms, and aimed its point at his heart.

Then he fell forward on his face. His vast body actually bounced a couple of centimeters back into the air amidst a cloud of khaki dust. He made gobbling sounds.

Behind him stood Machtigern. No small man himself, the taciturn and practical Companion had clipped the suicidal giant behind the ear with the flat of his war-hammer.

“Is that Beauty, to deny a man's choice to take his own life?” Florian asked.

Machtigern shrugged gallows shoulders. “He can always kill himself later, when he gets his wits back. Such as they are.”

Florian laughed and clapped his shoulder. “Fair enough, my friend.”

His cheeks flushing pinker than normal Dieter retrieved his poignard. Timaeos picked himself up. He made himself meet Jaume's gaze.

“I'm sorry, Captain,” he said. “I've failed you and all our brothers. I accept your judgement. Whatever the punishment, I've earned it.”

Jaume stared at them a moment. They wilted beneath the unaccustomed heat of his gaze.

“We know from the poor refugees that we've two days, three at most, before the Grey Angel horde lands on us. They've got three times our numbers, at least. And you've all heard the stories again and again: that they think of neither survival, nor avoiding pain, nor least of all of pity, but only of destroying every living thing in their path. What greater dereliction could you perform, than to deny us your strength in the battle to come?”

As if two could make a difference against such a horde
, he thought with a spasm of bitterness.
Or all of us, knights and Ordinaries together. Against pure horror
.

“So hear my judgement: I do not permit that you die, nor go into exile. Clearly, you've too much time on your hands and minds: you will busy yourselves from waking to sleep. At exercise, at drill, at your art—which, now of all times, we must not neglect—and barring those things, at mucking the duckbill paddocks! And when you go to bed, it will be alone. For one year you shall remain celibate.

“Above all: you will continue to serve. And you will
fight
. The horde, not one another!”

They started to respond. He stilled them with upraised palms.

“Understand: there are no more chances. Fail again of your oaths, any of them, and you will be cast out. Let your eyes linger too long on one of your juniors, and out you go.

“You are good men. You will redeem yourselves, and atone for your actions, and heal our sacred circle of Companionship, in the name of the Empire and of the Lady. Do you understand me, brothers?”

Both of them looked at him squarely. “Yes, Captain,” they said, a beat apart.

Their very bluntness heartened him. He'd suspect a greater display of emotion as mere histrionics.

“Then turn, apologize to each other as brothers, clasp arms and embrace. And then get busy, in Bella's holy Name! The battle of our lives awaits.”

*   *   *

He found Jacques standing apart, on the brow of the hill where they'd made camp, hugging himself tightly and weeping like a lost child. He looked up at Jaume's firm grasp on his shoulder.

“Come back to us, old friend,” Jaume said softly. “We can't afford to do without you. Now less than ever.”

Jacques shook his head violently. A teardrop flew from lank greying locks, struck Jaume's upper lip and ran into his mouth. It tasted of salt and sorrow.

“What's the use?” Jacques said. Not very far away, in the turbulent camp below, somebody screamed in bubbling final agony. “Isn't it all lost already? The ugliness wins at the end. It always does.”

Jaume put back his head and laughed. It was a full laugh, a hearty laugh that belied his lean frame and often-languid manner. Jacques blinked his brown eyes clear to stare at his lord in bewilderment.

“Why else do we fight?” Jaume asked. “Why continue to
live
, when death inevitably waits? Both for the same reason: to keep a little spark of life, and Beauty, alive against the black.”

Jacques still frowned. But he stood a bit straighter.

“Thank you for reminding me, my friend,” Jaume said.

*   *   *

But when he was alone in the paddock of handspan-thick pilings he himself had helped to cut and drive, Jaume let his own tears flow.

“I know how badly I've failed my Companions and my Lady,” he said as he brushed the supple pebbled skin of Camellia's graceful neck with soapy water. “I thought I'd picked men who wouldn't need to be commanded. Then I'm placed in charge of men who refuse to be commanded by anything but their impulses. Men who think they have the right to rule everything but themselves.”

He dumped a hornface-leather bucket of pure water over the dinosaur. She bobbed her cream and butterscotch–crested head with pleasure.

“I've no right feeling sorry for myself,” he said. “But sorrow has its beauties too, I suppose.”

And he wept freely, standing beside his morion's comforting immensity. She nuzzled his ear with her broad blunt beak, then rested her chin on his shoulder while he scratched her cheek.

They stood that way, man and dinosaur, until Jaume's arming-squire Bartomeu found them and told Jaume he was summoned at once to the Imperial presence.

Chapter 36

Orden Militar
, Military Order
—An Order chartered by the Church of Nuevaropa to defend the Faith, the Church, and the Empire. Usually small, élite military formations, usually, devoted to a single Creator, whose deeds range from individual feats of daring to acts of charity to decisive battlefield maneuvers. Most, such as the all-female Sisters of the Wind and the Knights of the Yellow Tower, consist wholly of knights. A few, like the mercenary Struthio Lancers, refuse to accept knights, and their members defiantly refuse knighthood. Many Orders are famous, most are rich, and some are powerful. Imperial Champion Jaume's all-male Companions of Our Lady of the Mirror may be the most of all three—occasioning resentment inside the Church and out.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Voyvod Karyl Bogomirskiy's still alive?” Jaume repeated in astonishment.

A curious sense of relief flooded his belly. Not that this in any way alleviates my guilt, he told himself. And many others certainly aren't, good men and women.

And good beasts too: a lover of war-hadrosaurs, he tended to deplore Karyl's living fortresses with their terrible goring horns. Yet they were living things as well, with beauties of their own, and not to be destroyed without cause.
In the name of duty I committed a great crime
, he thought.
I can't help feeling a certain gratification that my intended victim survived
.

The color fell from Duke Falk's face like sand from an upturned glass jar. “Impossible! I killed the man myself.”

“Apparently not enough, your Grace,” Jaume said with a small smile.

That got him a blue-hot glare. Instead of bursting out further the commander of the Imperial bodyguard slouched down with arms crossed over his gilded breastplate, with his massive bearded chin sunk to its rolled upper rim.

The Imperial council of war was gathered in a large chamber in the Emperor's personal pavilion. The morning sun laid red and yellow tints across the drawn faces gathered around the long oaken table. Vents near the roof let in sultry air from outside. Despite them the walls of bright cloth kept the worst stinks of the camp at bay.

But certain of the grandes assembled seemed to be trying to take up the slack. As for Tavares …
Does the man even deign to wipe himself when he shits?

“You're telling us a dead man's up and walking again?” asked Duque Francisco de Mandar. He sketched the symbol of Equilibrium before him, then touched forehead, loins, shoulders, the sides of his rib cage, and hips in the Creators' sign.

His Duchy contained the Spañol royal capital, La Fuerza. He had come in place of his cousin the King. He commanded a sizable force of vassal lords,
hombres armaos
, House troops, and peasant levies.

“Truly,” he said, “it's a sign of judgement upon us.” An immensely tall man, cadaverously thin, Francisco had short black hair, drooping moustaches, and a blue undertone to his skin which Jaume found off-putting. Jaume had heard it said he looked as if he were mourning when he was getting a blow job from one of his innumerable mistresses; his expression today was fit to sour milk.

“Or shocking bad management on somebody's part,” muttered Graf Rurik.

The beefy Rurik, noted for gruffness, valor, and a majestic tawny moustache, had brought his Knights of the Yellow Tower, an Order-Military devoted to Torrey, to serve the Emperor. So had Lady Janice Tisdell and her Telar-worshipping Sisters of the Wind. Neither Captain-General looked with particular favor on the upstart Companions, nor on Jaume's jumped-up status as Condestable. Still, Rurik manifestly thought even less of his countryman Falk's elevation.

“Can we really fight this horde?” asked a worried-looking Maxence. The Count of a neighboring province of Collines Argentées, he had arrived just today. Indeed, he had brought the news of Karyl's astonishing survival—along with regrets from his liege, the Duke de Haut-Pays, unavoidably detained by warding off the incursion of a whole army Karyl had somehow raised in Providence.

“A better question is how?” said Rurik.

Maxence shook lank brown locks. He was no devotee of the Life-to-Come Sect: in fact his hair was wet because the Imperial summons had reached him in the middle of his bath.

“I didn't mean that. I mean, is it morally permissible? Spiritually? Raguel is the Creators' holy servant. He works Their will. Can we resist that, except at risk to our souls?”

“Of course we cannot!” Tavares brayed.

His pet nobles bobbed grubby heads in agreement. The outburst made Duke Francisco start. Though he smelled too good to be a Life-to-Come votary, he deferred to the cardinal too much for Jaume's liking.

“Rather we should submit meekly to the just punishment our Creators have decreed for the wickedness we have wrongly permitted in Their names!”