The Dinosaur Lords (15 page)
Felipe beamed. “Splendid, boy, splendid,” he said. “Such spirit! Was there ever an Emperor so blessed in his servants?”
In the belly of the clock that stood in the corner, a miniature portcullis opened. A silver sackbut with gilded crest emerged to mark the hour with a mournful hoot. Mondrag
ó
n’s face twitched in irritation.
“Blast. I’m late to another meeting with those confounded Trebs. Forgive me, Majesty—”
Felipe waved a plump hand. “We know how sticky these Griegos are about protocol. Go, and feel free to blame me for delaying you. It’ll annoy them more, and that’s always worthwhile.”
Mondrag
ó
n bowed to the others. Then he departed with a brisk black and brown swirl.
Jaume rose as well. “I beg your leave as well, Majesty.”
“To be sure, to be sure. On your way, nephew. And thanks for your counsel, as always.”
“My duty and my pleasure.”
As Jaume left, Felipe was turning to Duke Falk with eagerness sculpted in every contour of his face. Jaume felt a pang.
Is it wise to leave them alone together like this?
But a duty no less pressing for being far more pleasant summoned him. And after all, nothing he could do could keep Falk from speaking to the Emperor in private, should the Emperor wish.
For all his soft appearance and mild manner, Jaume knew Felipe Delgao Ram
í
rez possessed an iron whim.
Bocaterrible
, Terrible Mouth
—
Pliosaurus funkei
. Short-necked, large-headed, predatory marine reptile; 13 meters long, 40 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s most feared sea monster, a menace to small boats and even prey ashore.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“My Princess.”
Heart in throat, Melod
í
a spun. He stood behind her, smiling.
Surrounded by trellised honeysuckles rioting with yellow and white blooms, a table sat in a courtyard garden inside the palace itself. A modest collation awaited on it: petite roasted scratchers, a cold haunch of red-tailed springer, goat cheese, flat bread, and bowls of fruit.
“I wondered why Pilar brought me here,” Melod
í
a said. She had bathed away the dust and sweat of the morning’s exercise and was dressed in a skirt of purple and yellow tr
ö
odon feathers with a matching gorget hung around her neck.
“I arranged it,” Jaume said as they embraced. To her frustration he quickly pulled away. “A little cuatralas told me your guardian tyrant might be indisposed for a while.”
“Do
ñ
a Carlota? Yes. She came down with a toothache during morning practice, and had to rush to the apothecary to have a tooth pulled. Wait—surely you didn’t arrange
that
?”
“I’m not that clever. I merely saw my chance, and took it.”
“She’s so
unreasonable
. Abigail’s due
ñ
a makes sure she has a stock of contraceptive herbs. I have to sneak around like a thief.”
“We’re lucky she doesn’t supply the girl with poisons too.”
“I don’t think Abi needs help with that. They play for serious stakes in Sansamour’s court.”
“They do everywhere,” he said. “Even here in the pleasure dome of La Merced.”
She laughed. “You can’t mean that! Intrigues here are harmless. They’re all about which duchess is sleeping with whose hadrosaur-groom. Or which duke is.”
“No court has only harmless intrigues,” Jaume said. “Ask the man found in your apartments last night.”
Her face stiffened. She turned away.
“I’m sorry,” Jaume said.
She made herself smile and turn back. “You taught me the truth is always beautiful, no matter what it is. So I shouldn’t be afraid to face it.”
They sat across from one another. During her lover’s half-year absence, Melod
í
a had at times felt as if she was going to become the first person in history to actually die of lust. With him here before her, smelling of clean, warm male flesh, sounding like music, and looking like a dream, she found herself reluctant to spoil the delicious anticipation. Now she wanted to draw this out, allow the tension to build, slowly, slowly.
She poured golden wine from a silver ewer. She handed him the goblet. His turquoise eyes met hers.
“You seem troubled,” she said, feeling miffed at the fact.
He smiled sadly. “You’re most perceptive.”
“Jaumet, I’ve known you since I was a child! What makes you think you can hide things from me?”
He laughed. “Folly. But I didn’t want to distress you. I just … wanted to delay the inevitable. Cowardice, I admit.”
Not deigning to dignify
that
absurdity with a rebuttal, Melod
í
a said, “What kind of bad news are you trying to shield me from?”
“Pere’s dead.”
“Oh, no.” She set a forkful of ensalada back on her plate. “I’m so sorry! How did it happen?”
He sat a moment before answering, “In a way that still haunts me.”
“Tell me,” she said.
* * *
Jaume set down his scratcher leg and dabbed his mouth with a linen napkin. He paused a moment to collect his thoughts.
“After the fighting ended, your father ordered me to stay and straighten matters up in Alemania. When that was done, he commanded I return as quickly as possible and report in person. So, leaving most of my Companions and our dinosaurs to follow in a carraca, Pere, Luc, Dieter, and I took passage down the Channel on the Imperial war-dromon
Melisandre
.”
“Montador Dieter?” Melod
í
a asked. “I don’t know him.”
“Our newest Brother, accepted as a full Companion after the … after the War ended. Still has a bit of the egg stuck to him, but a good and talented boy. He earned his tabard.”
“Sorry for interrupting,” she said. “Go on.”
“We were crossing the Great Bend, the wide water off the jut of Anglaterra called the Hinge. It’s where the northern Canal, the Tyrant’s Stripe, veers southwest to become the Maw.”
“I’ve seen a map,” she said dryly. Like most people, Jaume thought Nuevaropa—the peninsula at the western end of Aphrodite Terra—resembled the head of a Tyrannosaurus. The continental part formed its head and lower jaw, Anglaterra the face.
“A ship appeared from a squall northwest of us. A larger one, a cog with red sails.”
“Corsairs?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe they dared!”
“Piracy’s still a lively occupation in the islands. It’s not unknown for certain coastal grandes to sponsor corsairs, even now.”
Melod
í
a’s nose wrinkled. “I know. They catch them sometimes, and execute them publicly. Mercedes are usually easygoing, sweet even. But they’re so bloodthirsty about pirates. It’s awful!”
“Can you blame them? Angl
é
s corsairs killed tens of thousands of their ancestors during the Rape of La Merced in 370. And their attacks on shipping hurt commerce.”
“Ah,
s
í
. Mercedes hold their purses very near their hearts. But aside from the idiocy of taking on the Sea Dragons, why bother with a skinny little war-galley, instead of a poorly defended merchantman with a hull full of plunder?”
“Captain Gaspard said they could tell the
Melisandre
carried important cargo by the course she plied. Dispatches they could sell to the highest bidder, or important persons they could hold to ransom.”
“If only they’d known the cargo was you and three Companions! They’d have turned right around and run.”
“Maybe. There were a lot of them, and they seemed intent. And there was no way we could evade them.”
“But aren’t galleys supposed to be agile? How could a lumbering cog catch you?”
“I know nothing of the sea,” he said, “and if it were possible, I’d know less about naval warfare. Our hosts told us the pirates held something called the ‘weather gage,’ meaning they were upwind of us, and could run us down with all those sails no matter where we turned. They overtook us quite rapidly. For all their skill, the Sea Dragons only got a single flaming pitch-ball into them from the stern catapult before they started arrowing us. Then they grappled, and we had some hot work.
“My Brothers and I barely had time to buckle on breasts and backs before the pirates started swinging aboard. Only half the Dragons wore armor. They can’t row in it, so the oarsmen were unprotected. It didn’t keep them from turning to with a will. They can fight, those marines.”
He wet his throat with wine. “Big as she was, the cog seemed to overflow with pirates. They showed no fear of marines or us. Luc took an arrow in the eye early on.”
Melod
í
a winced.
“He kept fighting, but was quickly swarmed and killed. They were overwhelming us.”
“But Maestro Sunzi’s book says numbers mean nothing in war!”
Jaume smiled. His true love was fierce as a matadora—in her untried way. He prayed she’d never have to put her book knowledge to the test of real battle.
“Indeed,” he said. “In a way that’s the reason my Companions exist: to master quantity with quality. But … sometimes numbers
do
matter, when the disparity’s great enough. We killed them like ants, and still they came.
“But Pere had noticed how panicky
fire
made the pirates, even though our pitch-ball barely glanced off their stern rail and didn’t set anything alight. So we left Dieter to command Bartomeu and our other arming-squires and servants, fighting alongside the Sea Dragons, and clambered across to the cog.
“The corsairs gave us a brisk welcome-aboard. But we cut down enough of them to make them stand back, and put fire to their rigging and their bloodred sails.”
“That sounds like you two,” Melod
í
a said, smiling.
“When they saw the merry blaze we set, with the
Melisandre
still not captured, the corsairs panicked. The fear of having their retreat cut off brought them scuttling back like handroaches.”
“So you two saved the day. Again.”
“Our bonfire turned the trick. Pere and I grabbed ropes to swing back home.”
He stopped. The pain was like a dagger in his guts.
She reached across their forgotten meal to take his right hand in both of hers. She lifted it, kissed it, pressed it to her cheek.
“Tell me, Jaumet. It’ll take some of the sting away.”
“Maybe. You deserve to know, in any event. During our fight on the cog, Pere was wounded in the arm. I didn’t even know. The bleeding weakened him—and made his hands slick. He slipped from the rope and fell into the sea.”
“Oh, Maia,” Melod
í
a said. “Was his armor too heavy to swim in?”
“I doubt it. He always was a strong swimmer. And it wasn’t as if we had full twenty-kilo suits of plate weighing us down. But—we’d been followed for several days by a bocaterrible.”
Melod
í
a’s dark-amber eyes went wide. That breed of sea lizard grew to thirteen meters or more, with jaws bigger and more powerful even than a tyrant’s. Everyone who lived near a coast or even a sufficiently deep river feared the monster called “terrible mouth.” It more than pirates or invaders was the reason stout nets guarded the mouth of Bah
í
a Alegre.
“Pere went under,” Jaume said. “He looked up through the water. Our eyes met. He reached out to me. Then a great shadow engulfed him from below, and whirled him away into the depths.”
Melod
í
a began to cry. He moved around to hold her. Her cinnamon skin was dear remembered warmth. He stroked her dark-wine hair.
As she sobbed into his chest, he thought,
To think the last words Pere and I exchanged as friend to friend—instead of in the midst of battle—were a bitter argument over whether I was betraying and abandoning him. For you, Princesa.
May you never learn it, love. That burden cannot be lightened by sharing.
* * *
When Melod
í
a had cried herself out, Jaume slid his arm from around her and returned to his chair. They ate awhile in silence.
Eventually Jaume found voice again, and asked how things went with her. Awful as she felt over Pere’s fate, she did her best to lighten the mood with trifling anecdotes of goings-on at court: how Lupe had caught Llurdis in the dinosaur stables with Lupe’s favorite page, and chased them both out naked into the yard with a whip. Of a hidalgo visiting from King Telemarco’s court in La Fuerza, who made a fool of himself over a priceless ring he’d given Abi Th
é
l
è
me for favors she never got around to bestowing on him. Of the suit by the importunate Trebizons for Melod
í
a’s own hand, on behalf of their obese and unwashed Prince.
Jaume smiled, and nodded, and laughed where appropriate. She wasn’t fooled. He was holding something back. Something that ached like a wound.
It hurt that he wouldn’t tell her.
Maybe he thinks he’s sparing me further pain. Give him time.
Besides, the nearness of him, after so long and all alone, awakened sensations that made it hard to stay angry at him.
