The Dinosaur Lords (22 page)

“Let’s not do anything rash, dear,” Fanny said.

“It
would
be entertaining to watch, though,” Abi murmured. “If not from any closer than Laventura.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Imperial Herald bellowed from the lists. “I now call your attention to our next contender, the champion of many mighty contests before: the great and puissant Don Roberto, Conde Monta
ñ
azul!”

That
was something that could change Fina’s course. She clutched at Melod
í
a’s arm, her tears forgotten even as they still shone on her cheeks. “Jaume’s up next!”

Abigail Th
é
l
è
me sniffed through her fine nose. “He’s a fool.”

“Jaume?” Melod
í
a asked sharply. She seldom looked for a fight, and least of all with the Sansamour scion, who might well poison her pudding. But her emotions were boiling, pressed for release.

Fortunately Abi was enough her father’s daughter to keep her own passions tightly reined. Or possibly just hidden beneath that cool, perfect porcelain mask of a face of hers.

“Bluemountain,” she said. “He’s convinced he’ll command the Army of Correction. He’s been strutting around like a young cock-horror for the last week, crowing about it to anyone who’d listen.”

“He won his first bout handily enough,” said Fina. Briskly, for her. Pink shone on her olive cheeks. Her eyes, usually sunk in dark despairing pits, glittered like obsidian buttons. “He’s a great lover of tournaments. He fights frequently, and almost always wins.”

“That doesn’t mean he can beat that magnificent Alem
á
n beast,” Lupe said.

“Or Count Jaume,” Fanny added pointedly.

“Sure,” Lupe said. “Him too.”

Abi Th
é
l
è
me looked thoughtful. “A wealthy fool, though—now, that has possibilities.”

“You mustn’t mock him!” Fina said, starting to cloud up. “He’s a great champion!”

“So much the greater fool,” Abi said, “for fighting where there’s no need. But I’m not mocking, child. He may need … consolation … once Melod
í
a’s lover trounces him.”

“Isn’t Montador Fournier carrying your favor on his lance?” Fina asked, naming one of the younger and more vacuous of the stray knights who had flocked to the palace in the wake of Felipe decreeing his tourney and its remarkable stakes.

“A girl’s allowed to change her mind, isn’t she?”

The herald’s tabard swelled to an extra-deep breath. “
Comes now the Imperial Champion, the Knight-Commander of the Order of the Companions of Our Lady Bella, el Conde dels Flors, JAUME!
” he bellowed.

The crowd erupted in ecstasy as Jaume rode onto the field from between the gaudy silk banners that screened the waiting contestants. It thrilled Melod
í
a to think that her lover might be the most popular man in all Nuevaropa. Certainly the Mercedes adored him.

And why not? He was young and beautiful, his orange hair streaming, his armor and his glorious orange-brindled morion, Camellia, gleaming white. Even better, his philosophy exalted as high virtues the very sorts of pleasures the Mercedes most loved to indulge in, as pleasing to his Lady and productive of moral good.

Melod
í
a saw no reason
not
to adore her handsome knight. Her heart beat a quick march on her ribs, and she found it hard to breathe.

Scowling, Monta
ñ
azul stroked his moustache with a thumb. He seemed to find plenty not to adore about Jaume.

Tournament Knight-Marshal Duval, his head bare, the gold-trimmed red feather cape signifying his command of the Scarlet Tyrants draped over broad shoulders, stepped out onto the thirty meters of bare ground separating the combatants. He held out his staff and in a trumpet voice ordered both to make ready.

From the
historias
Melod
í
a had always loved to read, she knew the Iron Duchess hadn’t indulged in fripperies like tourney grounds when she raised her great fortress on its white stone headland to watch over the city she was rebuilding after its destruction by the pirate fleet. Felipe had ordered his lists set up in the middle of a kilometer of ground kept clear between the Firefly Palace’s white stone walls and the green wall of forest inland. Wooden stands rose on either side of a field fifty meters long and thirty wide. Panels of red and blue and yellow and green fabric shaded dignitaries on the north side—nearer the palace—and the less elegant but no less festive common crowd on the south. Bright pennons bearing the contestants’ insignia flapped to a moderate breeze from staffs around the yard.

It was a grand sight, surely. Melod
í
a could see none of it now. She could only switch the narrow window her vision had become between the man she had been in love with her whole life, and the man intent on doing him all the harm he could.

The onlookers quieted. Jaume took his scoop-shaped sallet helmet from the crook of his arm and put it over his head. He clamped it to the bevor, bolted to his armor that obscured the lower half of his face. With a final sneer, Monta
ñ
azul donned his own great helm, quartered blue and gold.

“That great helmet’s safer,” Fina said. “But the small eye-slits will be like trying to fight with a box on his head. He obviously intends to win this fight without dismounting.”

“I know that!” Melod
í
a snapped. Normally that tone would have caused Fina to drown in her own tears. Now she didn’t blink.

Both knights took the five-meter-long lances from the holders beside their saddles, tucked the butts under their arms, and raised their shields.

“Go!” the knight-marshal shouted.

Melod
í
a’s heart momentarily forgot to beat.

The two duckbills dropped onto all fours and rolled into gallops that made the stands rattle and the plank seat vibrate through Melod
í
a’s cushion and up her tailbone. Camellia and her opponent were well matched in size: Camellia slightly bulkier, the sackbut longer.

They met in the middle, almost directly in front of Melod
í
a. Monta
ñ
azul’s lance struck Jaume’s white-enameled shield right on its red Lady’s Mirror and shattered. Jaume’s hit where his opponent’s breastplate met the flared steel pauldron guarding his right shoulder. His lance broke too. But the impact lifted Monta
ñ
azul over his saddle’s tall back and sent him rolling down the sackbut’s cruppers.

Despite her lack of sympathy for Monta
ñ
azul, Melod
í
a winced at the sound of his impact.

“So much for his plan to lead the Army of Correction,” Abi said, languidly waving a fan of blue and white feathers at her face.

“Oh, dear,” said Fina.

Jaume let Camellia ease out of her gallop, then turned her around. He grounded her, swung a leg over his saddle, and dropped two meters to hard dirt as gracefully as if dressed in a loincloth rather than forty-odd kilos of steel.

He’d told Melod
í
a that a full suit of plate, though it could get brutally hot, felt neither heavy nor cumbersome. Not even jousting armor, fully half again as heavy as war gear.

Drawing his longsword—a tourney blunt, of course, not his famous Lady’s Mirror—Jaume approached his fallen foe with gliding raptor grace. Monta
ñ
azul stirred feebly, like a beetle on its back. When Jaume politely asked him to yield he spat back evident curses, though Melod
í
a couldn’t hear the actual words for the crowd’s raucous joy.

Monta
ñ
azul struggled to rise, failed. He kept trying, ignoring Jaume’s second call for surrender.

Jaume put his rounded sword-tip against the mail gorget around Monta
ñ
azul’s throat. Monta
ñ
azul slapped it away with a clang. The onlookers rumbled like far thunder at that breach of decorum.

Sneaking a sideways look, Melod
í
a saw a rare frown crease her father’s features at seeing his beloved nephew and champion treated so discourteously. Even Montserrat was watching now. But she didn’t look happy. In fact she looked as if she were about to be sick.

Jaume put his sword to Monta
ñ
azul’s throat again. The Count batted it away again.

Jaume poked the sword point into the left eye-slit of Monta
ñ
azul’s helmet. The audience gasped. Mor Duval stepped briskly in as if to knock the blade away.

With a quick wrist-turn, Jaume twisted Monta
ñ
azul’s great helm sideways on his head so he couldn’t see out. Then he tapped his blade twice on the helmet’s side, which now faced the sky. Duval grabbed Jaume’s sword hand and thrust it at the clouds it, proclaiming him victor.

Beneath a tempest of applause, Fina said earnestly, “He would’ve been within his rights to strike home, since Bluemountain twice refused to yield.”

“I wish he had,” Melod
í
a said. “Jaume will too someday, I’ll bet.”

Chapter
17

Montador, Montadora
—To honor knights we give them the title of
Montador
or
Montadora,
meaning a man or woman who rides in battle, on horse or dinosaur. Usually we call them
Mor
or
Mora
for short.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Stop!” the archer cried. “Hand over the hook-horn and your purses, and we’ll let you leave with your lives.”

Little Nell sighed resignedly as she came to a halt. Walking at her side, Rob Korrigan concurred.

The afternoon light dappled the leaf corpses that mostly hid the ruts in the indifferently maintained road, and filled Rob’s nostrils with a rich, dry smell as they slowly turned into humus. A cuatralas, black as a baron’s heart, glided from branch to branch, chasing a purple-and-yellow butterfly. Tiny birds twittered to one another among the leaves of tall gingkoes and false plane trees, which grew far enough apart to allow enough sunlight to filter down to sustain a thriving undergrowth of barberry, ferns, and scrub oak.

Which was in turn enough to hide brigands. Like the one who’d just stepped into the road ahead, drawing a shortbow to his chest. And the pair who emerged from the bushes five or six meters to either side.

“You take care of these two,” Karyl said, nodding toward the man with the spear and the one with the short sword who hovered menacingly on their flanks. “I’ll deal with the archer.”

“And isn’t that you all over, then?” Rob murmured as his companion walked calmly forward. He neither saw how Karyl Bogomirskiy, armed solely with his sword-staff, could possibly deal with a bowman twenty-five meters off, nor doubted that he somehow would. Rob was a man who believed in fate and the Fae, and he doubted either intended such a man as Karyl to die like a stunted vexer chick in such a crappy, random way.

Nonetheless he moved to interpose the patient grey-and-blue bulk of Nell’s butt between himself and the readied arrow as he pulled axe and round shield off her back.

He slid his arm through a broad swath of nosehorn leather fixed to the back of his shield to grip the narrower hand strap. He loosened the lacings of his axehead cover with his teeth and ditched it with a wrist flip.

The two brigands to either side of him seemed suddenly less eager for the encounter to proceed. His calm, crisp actions clearly took them aback. They seemed astonished that the threat of a drawn bow hadn’t frozen him in place.

Rob knew the type too well. They weren’t fighters, but bushwhackers, whose primary weapons were surprise and intimidation, not the implements they were suddenly holding in oddly tentative ways, as if trying to remember what they were there for. Most of their combat seasoning came from putting the boot in on a cowed or fallen foe.

Like house-shields
, Rob thought—the noble class’s hired, armored bullyboys, and occasionally girls. The comparison filled him with such righteous fury it pushed all trepidation right out of him.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded, turning left and right to flourish Wanda at each in turn. A showman through, he made sure to let shafts of sunlight glance off her bearded grey head. “Aren’t you eager to take what I’ve got, then?”

Nell snorted, twitched her big tail, and stamped a hind foot. It occurred to him that he might have just given the hook-horn a swat in the fanny and sent her charging straight at the archer. It would take more skill and stone than he probably possessed to get an arrow in her eye—the only way that puny shortbow could hurt her—before she knocked him down with her horn and trampled his ribs to porridge.

Too late now. He stepped right, toward the spearman, just enough to look past the hook-horn to see how his friend was doing.

Karyl carried his staff as if it was all stick and no sword. He advanced steadily toward the arrowhead aimed for his chest. He’d already made up half the distance.