The Dinosaur Lords (18 page)

He fell silent, his beautiful features set in a look of pain. Once again Melod
í
a saw evidence that something troubled him. It hurt her that he wouldn’t share. But she was too sensible of his feelings to ask. Or perhaps, she admitted to herself, too proud.

She ground her teeth against what she
really
wanted to say.

“You really want to join the Companions?” he asked.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Well, it’s, it’s—it’s dangerous.”

“Of course it’s dangerous! You’ve got more Brothers in the ground than active, and as many more retired by wounds. It cost us Pere. But at least it’s
active
. I can just sit on my
culo
in the palace and still be stalked by assassins, as it turns out.”

“I don’t think the assassin was sent for you.”

She slumped. “Of course, you’re too kind to point out the Parasaurolophus in the parlor: that I’m merely an Imperial Princess, so why would anyone bother to send the Brotherhood after me?”

Jaume looked grim.

“So why
shouldn’t
I become a Companion?” she asked, her heartbeat quickening. “It would give me a chance to do something real.”

They rode at a walk through glorious sunlight obscured by just the thinnest scrim of cloud, down toward the dinosaur hunt. The air was almost cool, fragrant with winter flowers and green growth moist from predawn rain. Birds trilled and chased bright lizards among soft-spined boughs.

“It’s not all songs and glory,” he said. “Being a Companion is arduous, sometimes boring, often terrifying. It can grind like a millstone.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I hear the ballads. It’s hard not to.”

He laughed. “
That’s
unimpeachable testimony.”

“But Pe—your Brothers tell me stories. I know what it’s like.”

Jaume frowned. Melod
í
a felt an urge to kiss it away.

But no. That would hardly be
decorous
. Their inferiors might see.

“I hardly know how to say this, love,” he said. “I know you’re brave and strong. You’re well trained in combat, and show a gift for it. But becoming a Companion isn’t easy. You have to qualify. You’ve got the character and spirit, as much as any Brother. That’s part of why I love you as I do. But it demands great physical prowess as well as endurance. And—you’d have to win admission by deeds.”

“And you don’t you think I can?”

“When would you have the opportunity?”

“I can be your squire! Your page! Whatever you call that boy who follows you around making calf eyes at you.”

“I call him Bartomeu. He’s my arming-squire, which is why he follows me. And—our rules forbid us taking lovers among juniors. It’s unjust. Would you want to live in enforced celibacy?”

“How am I living now? Like a Life-to-Come cenobite who hasn’t bathed since last Qian! I could sign on as a mercenary—become an Ordinary, carve my way into the Companions with my blade!”

Her hand made sword slashes in the air. Meravellosa tossed her head and snorted. In eagerness, Melod
í
a reckoned.

“Like that pretty French boy Florian! He was common-born, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Jaume said. “But they’re all pretty boys.”

“Is that the problem? That your Companions are just a boy’s club? No
concha
allowed?”

Jaume opened and closed his mouth repeatedly without actually emitting sound.

“Your father would never let you join,” he managed at last. “Especially not with us due to lead the Army of Correction to war.”

She drew in a huge breath and sighed mountainously. “This stupid war! Half la Familia’s aroused against my father over it, afraid that if he stirs up too much trouble, we Delgaos will lose our precious monopoly on the Fang
è
d Throne.”

“I’ve tried to talk him out of it.”

“He’s good at not hearing what he doesn’t want to hear.”

“Expert.”

“I wonder if this allegedly reformed rebel Falk isn’t a bad influence.”

Jaume shook his head. “He does tell your father what he wants to hear, no question. But I don’t really think he’s much to blame. He’s just a boy, really—not much older than you. He is a redoubtable fighter, and shows promise as a field captain. I think his loyalty’s sincere, new as it is.”

“Well … he seems to play quite the lad with the more hotheaded court hangers-on.”

“Few of whom are stepping up to volunteer for the Terraroja campaign.”

She laughed. “No. They’re just straw-stuffed silk doublets with sticks up their butts. But I do blame this confessor of his, Jer
ó
nimo. My father’s changed since he turned up. I’m sure this current
guiso de caca
is his idea.”

“How did he come into your father’s service?”

“Will it get you in trouble if I say he was recommended by that horrid old corpse-tearer the Pope?”

Jaume laughed. “Only if I repeat your description,” he said, “and then, only if His Holiness hears of it. Fortunately, my men are discreet. And they can use a good laugh themselves, after their own trip home from Alemania.”

He’d spent the last two days overseeing the unloading of his Companions, their war-dinosaurs—including his beloved Camellia—and their five hundred Ordinary auxiliaries with their horses from a fleet of round-bottomed cogs. They would form the spine of the Ej
é
rcito Corregir, whoever won her father’s ridiculous tournament.

“What’s he like, this mystery monk?” Jaume asked.

“I’ve no idea. I’ve never laid eyes on him. I’ve only ever been in the same room with him twice, and both times he was behind a screen.”

She paused. When she’d encountered Jer
ó
nimo, she had felt a strange unease, in the pit of her stomach and beneath her skin, as if sensing
wrongness
somehow.

“Pilar tells me none of the servants have seen him,” she said. “I don’t think my father has, even.”

“Curious indeed.”

An agonized scream pealed over the hills. As it died out, a nosehorn bellowed triumphant rage. Barking and deinonychus-screeches rose to an uproar. Men shouted confusion.

Melod
í
a and Jaume looked at each other, and kneed their horses to a fast trot downslope.

*   *   *

“You know,” Rob said, through the veil of rain sluicing off his slouch hat brim, “you were a perfect romantic hero.”
Maybe even more than Jaume
, he thought, but with rare discretion chose not to say.

It was your typical Nuevaropa thunderstorm. The sky warred with itself and the land, volleying rain, hurling howling wave-attacks of wind and jagged blue-white lightning spears, beating thunder war-drums. Despite having to punch through many layers of leaf-laden branches in the old oak forest, raindrops stung Rob’s bare skin.

“Not my fault,” said Karyl.

Holding his paisley parasol gamely aloft, Rob rode swaying atop the luggage piled on his hook-horn’s back. Rob could feel his friend muttering disconsolately to herself. Normally stoic, Little Nell didn’t like when weather got
on
her. Which, sadly, it often did.

Karyl walked point. His lack of class-consciousness sometimes truly exasperated Rob: despise nobles he might, but they by-Torre should
act
like nobles. Karyl’s most recent outrage to Rob’s propriety was buying a conical woven-straw peasant hat for a few copper centavos from one of the vendors who sprouted like toadstools along the better-traveled roads.

He wore it now, its string tied beneath his chin, his head bowed as he trudged into the storm. It made him look more than a little like an ambulatory mushroom himself, to Rob’s admittedly fanciful eye.

“How do you know what I was, anyway?” Karyl said.

“The songs!” Rob said. “I’ve heard the songs for years—cut my teeth on ’em. Read the romances. Now I’m dying to hear the truth from you. You know how balladeers lie.”

“Present company excluded?”

“By no means! I worst of all!”

Karyl seemed to mull that over for a bit. “Keep talking. I’ll let you know when you stray too far from truth.”

“What could be a lovelier tale?” Rob asked. “You defeated a rampaging matadora before you were twenty, a mere stripling without so much as fuzz on your chin. Its offspring hatched before your eyes and bonded to you. Which happens to be the only way to get a wild meat-eating dinosaur to serve as a mount. And they’re far better than captivity-bred ones.

“You won knighthood from your Archduke, fair and square. But more important, you won Shiraa, nearly as fabled as you are yourself!”

Karyl produced a sound like a siege-engine stone rolling down a rain gutter.

“Ah, forgive me!” Rob exclaimed, flash-contrite. “I didn’t mean to prod a sore spot, surely I did not. You still mourn her.”

“She was my friend,” Karyl said. “The only one to survive
being
my friend. Until the Hassling.”

Rob shook his head sorrowfully. It was a song so sad it would be years before he could bring himself to sing it.

Little Nell’s strong toes thumped logs sawn in half lengthwise and buried round-side down. The local grande kept his road well corduroyed. Hardwood logs came as cheap as dinosaur power hereabouts.

If the lord charged for passage, Rob had seen no sign. Rob had a dragon’s eye for toll stations; he refused to pay on principle, as an Irland
é
s and a Traveler. Some nobles, though, were actually smart enough to be content with the proceeds from the commerce good roads brought.

“A conspiracy of barons treacherously murdered your father,” Rob went on, since Karyl hadn’t told him not to. “And shouldn’t that be the collective phrase for them, then? ‘A conspiracy of barons.’ Like
a murder of crows
or
a rending of
horrors
. They supplanted you with your bastard half brother and chased you into exile with no more than Shiraa and the shirt on your back.”

“Breeches and barefoot. No shirt. It was raining then too.”

“For years you wandered. Decades. If the legends are true, you traveled the length and breadth of Aphrodite Terra, studying the arts of war and personal combat, gathering your strength.”

“The legends aren’t all wrong,” Karyl said, “so far as they go. Surprising.”

Rob chuckled. “And then—ah, what could be finer?”

“Not this, surely.”

“You returned from exile with an army,” Rob said, undeterred. “Oppressed by the usurper, the peasants rallied to your flag.”

“By the usurper’s mother, actually,” Karyl said. “Al
ž
b
ě
ta Alexandrovna, Baroness Stechkina. My half brother Yan-Paulus the Bastard isn’t such a bad sort. But he was utterly under her thumb.”

Rob waved an airy hand through the rain. “
Detail
. Legend cares naught for quibbles. The fact is, no tale’s taller nor grander nor more beloved than that of the displaced nobleman seeking to recover the throne that was foully and unjustly stolen from him. And what did you do? Exactly that!”

He shook his head in admiration, flinging water in all directions from his hat. “That’s what makes your story so compelling, Voyvod. You actually
lived
the storybook ending.”

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

“What?” Rob said in horror. “You broke the barons’ petty, cruel rule and made men equal! Such a thing as has never been known before. And you raised the finest fighting force we’ll see in all our lifetimes, the White River Legion!”

“Which you destroyed.”

“Much good it did me. It’s sacked I was, for upstaging the bucketheads and their precious scheme to do you down themselves! So here I am, wet, vagabond, and penniless.”

“And I find myself in the same state, for much the same reasons. What do you think of my ‘storybook ending’ now?”

“But you brought years of enlightened rule!”

Karyl glanced back at Rob. Beneath the sweep of his hat, his eyes appeared so dark and deep, Rob half imagined if he looked closer he’d see the stars.

“So you believe,” Karyl said.

“Isn’t it true? The whole Empire still buzzes with it. It’s why your own employers turned on you! They feared the example you set their own downtrodden serfs.”

“Perhaps. I suspect they mostly feared I was getting too powerful.” He shrugged. “They may’ve been right. If not the way the Emperor believed.”

“That makes no sense,” Rob said. “Are you saying you weren’t a wise, enlightened ruler?”

“Yes.”

Rob threw up his hands theatrically. The gesture caused his parasol, momentarily forgotten, to brush a hanging branch and dump pent-up rainwater on him. His hat brim collapsed around his head.

“I don’t understand,” he said, not deigning to acknowledge the mishap.

“Maybe someday I’ll explain it to you,” Karyl said.

“How about now?” asked Rob. “I hate waiting for a story’s end.”

Raindrops exploded on Karyl’s hat and ran off the back like pale streamers. He said nothing.

“Faugh!” Rob exclaimed. “You’re no easier to reason with than a cat.”

That got him a laugh.

“Of course,” Karyl said. “I’m a nobleman.”