The Dinosaur Knights (54 page)

On the right the Third Tercio stingers loosed a volley into the war-dinosaurs bearing down on them. No armor could stop the black darts. Two war-duckbills tumbled into avalanches of flailing tails and giant bodies. A second pair stumbled over them, fluting in pain and dismay. A dart shot transfixed a dinosaur knight on a mostly orange sackbut, pinning shield to chest.

Seeing his left move prematurely, Jaume ordered the Imperial right wing forward. Pennons fluttering from upraised lances, the dinosaur knights sent their duckbills jogging after the Duque de Mandar, followed by the men-at-arms on their coursers.

As the west wings of the two armies closed, each let go a terremoto that raised the hair on the Duke's nape. He could see no effects from the inaudible hadrosaur killing-cries before Antoine's dinosaur knights and their enemies spurred to the charge.

They met with a terrific crash. Squealing morions slammed breastbone to breastbone against sackbuts. Lances splintered. Knights hurtled from high-cantled saddles. Breast-and-backs crumpled beneath monstrous feet with weird musical warbles.

Masses of war-dinosaurs interpenetrated with a sliding clangor of sword on shield and plate. Screams skirled to Falk down the stinking wind. The heavy-horse swung wide of the monster scrum to replicate their battle in miniature.

To Falk's right, the Crusader dinosaur knights struck the Duque de Mandar's duckbills between the High Road and the Fortunate River cut in a sustained thunderclap.

A cloud of feathered shafts rose hissing from the Imperial shortbows. They fell like steel rain among the scarcely protected Crusaders. They ignored the arrows as they did the quarrels and bounding boulders and fireballs. Those who fell or even faltered were crushed without qualm. The wounded screamed no more loudly than the unharmed.

A cheer rose up from the Imperial foot ranks as the whole of the horde's first several ranks fell. And died away as the horde swept forward, heedless as surf.

Seemingly as little concerned with their own survival as Raguel's slaves, the Imperial artillery crews and missileers shot, reloaded calmly, and shot again as the horde rolled down on them. But though hundreds were killed, the Grey Angel Crusaders showed that reports of their fanatical ferocity were if anything understatements.

Yet as Falk watched his fear turned to terrible exaltation. So fiercely did the pre-battle energy surge within him that he tapped his horseman's axe against his greave like a drumstick. Despite the fact that he was about to fight against an undeniable servant of the Creators, a sense of righteousness filled him.

Whatever else is happening
, he thought,
I am defending the principle of Order. It's what I was raised to do.

If Raguel wants to use disorder to His ends … so much the worse for Raguel
.

Imperial pikes swung down in a ripple. At last the archers and arbalesters turned from their Faerie-poles to race for the safety of the heavy infantry lines. The trebuchet crews unhitched their beasts and joined them, driving the nosehorns before them. Those serving the lighter engines hitched them to horse-teams waiting in harness. Jumping on the animals' backs and clinging to catapults and stingers they rode the wheeled weapons-carriage for shelter.

One catapult's wheel hit a rock hidden by a low bush and overturned. Most of its passengers sprang free; a woman shrieked as the frame crushed her leg. The crew halted the horses long enough to uncouple them. Then as the riders whipped them on the other artillerists hoisted the upset carriage enough to yank the victim free. With two of them holding her under the arms they all ran on. She howled as each step jarred her broken limb. But Falk felt sure she'd rather that than what the horde would do to her.…

Coming hard after them the horde hit the Imperial line. Falk clearly heard the Emperor grunt in sympathy. Snowflake growled. He smelled blood.

Once more the enemy front ranks died in droves. Some silently, some shrieking and wriggling like hooked worms on the pikes. Those behind kept running as if to a combined feast and orgy.

For the moment even the Imperial peasant ranks looked steady; all they had to do was hold up their five-meter polearms and lean forward. Reassured, Falk looked to his left to see the outnumbered horde riders had broken before Archiduc Antoine and were streaming back north as fast as horses and hadrosaurs could run. Grey Angel Crusaders might not flee—but clearly that didn't apply to their mounts.

In any battle, war-beasts formed factions of their own. Whether mammalian or dinosaurian, most were herd animals, and all had keen senses of self-preservation. If they suffered enough casualties they'd run away, no matter exhaustively and expensively trained they were.

Behind Falk, the runners clumped around the Emperor suddenly twittered like a flock of frightened fliers. The Imperial Herald, who had somehow returned virtually intact to Felipe's side, shouted at them to be still in a voice as loud as any trumpet. He failed to silence them.

Falk quickly saw why: The Imperial right had routed. Its beasts ran flat-out along the riverbank. Some toppled over screaming. The great duckbills ran down and crushed any horse or human that got in their way.

Felipe rose, looking aghast. Falk trudged up the hill to his side, hoping to reassure his liege with his own blue-armored bulk. “Wait, your Majesty,” he said through a throat dry as a chimney. “Your Constable will handle it.”

As if his full suit of plate hampered him no more than a silken breechclout, Jaume had raced to the east end of La Miche. He shouted instructions and pointed with his famous longsword, the Lady's Mirror. Over the epic noise of battle Falk could no more hear his rival's words than if he had shouted them from the far side of the moon Eris.

But at this moment they were rivals no more. Felipe himself had overridden Jaume's insistence on serving in the forefront: el Condestable was needed to command the reserve—and the battle itself, as long as he was allowed. Certain nobles had subsequently muttered about the too-nice Jaume and his pretty-boy Companions hanging back from the fight.

It had pleased Falk greatly to inform them that, if they uttered another such syllable, they could try speaking their minds around a rope dangling them by their throats.

For all that had passed between them, Falk all but worshipped Jaume, as warrior and war captain. No better man existed in all Nuevaropa to lead the brutally outnumbered Imperial Army against the Crusade and its superhuman Master. In any event the plain fact Jaume was the battle leader, as Felipe was the spiritual, was enough to earn Falk's whole obedience. For now.

There was no turning a rout of dinosaurs. Not before they ran themselves out. Jaume didn't try. Instead he called into motion the plans he'd laid for just such a necessity.

The defeated wing fled out of Falk's sight, around the far end of the loaf-shaped rise. As soon as they went by, nosehorns lunged to pull wagons to block the gap between ridge and riverbank. Some drovers released the animals and led them back behind La Miche, as others wrestled the wagons into a makeshift wall of several layers. A body of the mailed spearmen in reserve took up position a few cautious paces in back of them.

The brunt of the horde's foot-charge had so far landed on the Twelfth Tercio and the peasant pikes. They hadn't yet flowed around the Third's currently unprotected right flank. Had the Crusaders tried to rush through the opening left by Mandar's advance, house-shields stood ready to stop them.

As the pursuing enemy bore down, dinosaur knights precariously mingled with gendarmes, whistles shrilled from the Nodosaurs' brown ranks. With practiced precision the right end of the Third Tercio phalanx pivoted back to anchor against the foot of La Miche, forming two sides of a bristling pike-box.

Nodosaur crossbows pumped bolts into the onrushing dinosaurs. A splendid green and scarlet sackbut with yellow speckles on flanks and belly took a lucky hit the right eyehole of its chamfron and went down. The horde riders were able to swing around the ten-meter monster's death thrashing, but inevitably lost momentum. Some swerved toward the tercio. Others continued rushing upon the wagon-wall.

But neither warhorse nor dinosaur would willingly impale itself on a hedge of long spikes, or crush itself against an apparently impenetrable barrier. The charging duckbills stopped short, shying and crying alarm, when they saw what awaited them.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, dinosaurs weren't terribly precise judges of their own momentum. And even in a cloth caparison in lieu of metal and hornface-leather armor, with a saddle and steel-clad rider on its back, a war-hadrosaur weighed almost four tonnes.

Even as they dropped thick tails as drags to help slow them down, duckbills crashed into wagons. Shattering wood squealed as deafeningly as the monsters themselves. Splinters whirled upward in a cloud of yellow dust. Wagons flew up like kicked toys.

Meanwhile the dinosaurs who had refused before the four-deep array of browned-iron pike-heads were rammed from behind by their fellows and impaled regardless. They fell among the Nodosaurs like flailing, bellowing trebuchet stones.

Three-deep, the wagon-wall buckled but held. And the Nodosaurs knew what to expect from a charge of dinosaur knights. Though scores of pike-wielders were squashed to crunchy brown-and-red pulp, the Imperial phalanx stood firm. The ranks behind lowered their pikes and pushed forward to fill the gaps.

Blocked by walls of pikes and wood, what had been victorious pursuit decayed into a vast and noisy traffic jam. The house-shields waiting behind the Third Tercio charged out to strike the stalled knights, jabbing duckbill bellies and courser flanks with their spears. Beasts and riders alike wailed as they tumbled over the seven-meter drop to the river below.

Nodosaur auxiliaries in light dinosaur-leather tunics and browned-iron caps, with bucklers strapped to their forearms, darted among milling war-beasts to hamstring them with their hatchets. It was risky work. Many were ridden down, smashed to rag dolls by frantically swinging duckbill tails, or crushed beneath massive falling bodies. But they fought with the same fatalistic fury as their fellows in the phalanx: they were all Nodosaurs.

When he knew the right would hold, Falk ran his eyes back along the lines. Against general expectations the peasant masses of the Imperial center not only held, but fought. The terror inspired by a Grey Angel and his horde could take two forms: panic or desperate resistance. The latter emotion prevailed among the hard-pressed Imperials.

So far.

On the west the Twelfth Tercio stood like its namesake: a Steel Wall in truth. They had killed a whole rampart before them. Screaming as though afire, the Crusaders swarmed over their fallen comrades, to die in their turns on the obdurate pike-heads.

Beyond the Nodosaurs and their artificial berm of bodies a less pleasant sight met Falk's gaze. Archduke Antoine had chased the horde riders from the field. Unfortunately his force had also slowed, tired, and gotten strung out, as pursuing riders always did. Crusaders afoot attacked the knights in soldier-ant swarms. Falk saw a yellow and blue morion pulled down by barehanded men and women. Their easy victory had put the Imperial dinosaur knights and gendarmes in deadly trouble.

Men- and women-at-arms in plate and chain rode from the left to aid their bogged-down heavy brethren. Jaume had thrown his cavalry reserve into the fight. Falk expected to see him lead his own Companions and Ordinaries shortly to support them.

Four men in gashed plate and bloodied rags of feather capes trudged up the back of Le Boule. Sweat-lank hair framed grimy, sagging faces. Falk recognized the Conde de la Estrella del Hierro and several others from the quickly defeated Imperial right wing. They dropped to their knees to kiss Felipe's hands, sniveling excuses and pleas for forgiveness.

Sneering at their disgrace, the Duke turned his attention back to the battle as an outcry rose from the Imperial ranks. Tall as a two-story barn on the back of his tyrant, his soul-reaper poised at his side, the Grey Angel Raguel had begun to ride forward. His curiously colored monster walked with the characteristic tail-swinging gait of a big flesh-eater.

Screams of unmistakable horror made Falk snap his head left. To his surprise the horde on that side had pulled back fifty meters from the corpse-rampart the Twelfth Tercio had made of their brothers and sisters.
I thought the horde never quit coming
, he thought,
much less retreated
.

The flesh-floodwaters parted. Out ran two hundred horrors. Bodies streaked green and brown, wide-open mouths pink and rimmed with yellow saw-teeth, they sprang forth with their killing-claws daintily upheld.

On each feathered back rode a young child.

Chapter 41

Guerrero de Casa
, House-soldier
—Professional soldiers, usually well-armored infantry, who fight for a lord as retainers. Most are either
Scuderos de Casa
(house-shields), armed with spear and shield; or
Arcos de Casa
(house-bows), armed with shortbows or occasionally crossbows. Most are commoners. Widely hated because unscrupulous lords often use them to bully their serfs most cruelly.