The Dinosaur Lords (17 page)
She nodded to Jaume, who sat listening politely on Felipe’s right. She felt sorry for him. The Pope-Metropolitan openly disapproved of Jaume’s hedonistic philosophy. He considered his predecessor’s recognition of the Companions as a holy order a mistake.
Jaume noticed Melod
í
a looking his way and returned a quick, tight smile.
Monta
ñ
azul became suddenly engrossed in the sizzling slices of nosehorn roast that had just been served him. He was an accomplished duelist, and fancied himself a jouster of the first rank. Jaume was a legendary fighter.
He’s not
a
total
fool,
Melod
í
a thought.
The rest of the meal passed uneventfully. Monta
ñ
azul fell to discussing war-duckbills, always a safe and welcome subject to the aristocracy, with the Duke of Alba, which was the large island down-Canal from La Merced. A ferocious old matador, Duke Luis was a former Imperial Constable with only one eye on one side and one leg on the other.
Countess Rinc
ó
n monopolized Duke Falk. Melod
í
a ate with her usual voracity, which helped her pretend not to notice how the young Alem
á
n’s eyes kept straying her way.
As she finished she became aware of a shadow hanging over her head. For no readily intelligible reason, some ancestor of Prince Heriberto’s had chosen to hang a stuffed cuellolargo above the banquet board by black iron chains. Though only a small one, ten meters long or so, the long-necked sea monster had scared Melod
í
a into fits the first time she’d seen it as a child. Montserrat, on the other hand, had even as a toddler regarded it as the most wonderful thing
ever
.
Melod
í
a had long gotten over her terror of the toothy beast. She had a harder time shaking off a foreboding that one of La Merced’s frequent earthquakes would drop the wretched thing on her head one day while she drank her soup.
Felipe stood. Silence fell like the plesiosaur unchained. The Pope squinted up at his friend in keen interest. Jaume leaned back in his chair, empty-faced.
“Your Holiness,” Felipe said with a bow to the Pope. “My lords and ladies. I should like to announce a most momentous decision at which I, after much prayer to our Creators and consultations with my wise counselors, have just arrived.
“I hereby decree an Imperial Army of Correction, to march upon the Condado de Terraroja and restore that realm proper obedience, to the Empire and to the Holy Church!”
Applause and cheers flew up. Melod
í
a squeezed her eyes shut.
She opened them to look at Jaume. His face was rigid. Out of loyalty to his lord and kinsman, Jaume was swallowing his misgivings, though she knew they burned his belly.
Wouldn’t you serve Father better by speaking out against this lunacy?
she wanted to shout at him. Yet, twisted this way and that by her own loyalties and convictions, she couldn’t find voice either.
Felipe stood beaming brighter than the dozens of torches, hundreds of lamps, and thousands of candles that lit the banquet. He looked transported, as if, against everyone’s expectations including his own, he had achieved something great in his own right. A deed to match those of Manuel the Great—progenitor of Torre Delgao, who killed the fabled Tyrannosaurus imperator, made its skull into the Fang
è
d Throne, and founded the Empire to rule from it.
Melod
í
a could only shake her head
. My father makes war on his own people, and thinks it’s the grandest thing he could ever do.
Chief Minister Mondrag
ó
n sat beside Jaume. His hands applauded, but his face looked as if he had had just bitten into a medicinal root. Melod
í
a and Jaume weren’t the only ones to disapprove the Emperor’s latest fancy.
“Preparations will begin at once,” Felipe piped. The hall fell silent. “The army will march five weeks from now. As for its commander”—he swept his smile like a beacon to his right—“I can conceive of none more fitting than Count Jaume, Knight-Commander of the Companions of Our Lady of the Mirror, Champion of the Empire, and my own strong and trusted right hand!”
“No.”
The single syllable echoed like a trumpet blast. The diners turned to stare.
Duke Falk von Hornberg had risen. He was the tallest man in the hall.
“I mean no disrespect, your Majesty,” he said. “Neither to yourself, nor to His Holiness, nor to noble Count Jaume. Yet I must humbly claim consideration for command of your army. By right of precedence as a duke, if not my deeds.”
Old Alba slammed a big fist down on the table, making cutlery jump for a meter in either direction. “A rebel vexer-whelp commanding an Imperial army? Intolerable!”
P
í
o turned him a pinched look. “Might I remind your Grace that Duke Falk has received plenary pardon from both the Emperor’s hand and our own?”
Conversation commenced to sizzle like grease on a stove. Falk stood unspeaking, head high, no more moved than a monolith by mist. Jaume looked pained, but still said nothing.
At length Felipe raised a hand. The babble stopped.
“We honor our kinsman Count Jaume as a great and proven champion,” he said. “Yet we have also heard a great deal about the battlefield prowess of this strong young Alem
á
n. I can see but one course of action.”
He grinned as if to split his head in half. “We shall have a Grand Tourney, and the winner will command the Ej
é
rcito Corregir!”
Mondrag
ó
n recoiled in his chair. Jaume pressed two fingers to his brow.
Duke Falk smirked as if he’d won already.
I hate him
, Melod
í
a thought.
Brincador,
Bouncer
—
Psittacosaurus
ordosensis
. Bipedal plant-eating dinosaur with a short, powerful beak; 1.5 meters, 14 kilograms. Distinguished by quill-like plumes. Common Nuevaropan garden pest.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Once we’re married,” Melod
í
a said, “I should join you.”
With barely a flinch at that, her lover, in theory if not recent fact, finished raising his right arm. His left hand, gloved in fine springer suede, pulled a release. A half-meter-long dragonfly, red from bulbous eyes to the vein lacework of transparent wings, took off from the leather bracer on Jaume’s forearm and shot forward.
Jaume turned startled turquoise eyes to Melod
í
a. “Beg your pardon,
mi amor
?”
Seeing doom arrowing toward it across the clearing, a green-and-yellow brincador the size of a small dog jumped up from behind the fern sprig that had proven so inadequate to hide it. It bounced frantically away with tall powder-blue tail plumes bobbing.
The dragonfly hit the bouncer like a crossbow bolt. The little creature screamed as the insect sank spike-tipped legs into its body. Ruby mandibles bit deep into its neck.
Blood sprayed in arcs the color of the killer’s body. The bouncer kicked a final time and went limp.
“Are you all right, Melod
í
a?” Jaume asked. “Your cheeks are flushed.”
She shook herself like a wet dog. Her racing pulse made her fluttery.
“Sorry to leave you hanging,
querido
,” she said breathlessly. “I said that once we’re married, I should join you.”
He looked at her as if she had grown a colorful crest like the one his morion, Camellia, sported.
“How do you mean?” he asked mildly.
She nudged her adored silver-grey mare, Meravellosa, to a walk toward where the giant dragonfly ripped audibly at its victim’s feathered skin. A beat later Jaume’s white mare followed, perforce. Around them on the hillside inland of the palace rose a mixed forest of broadleafs and evergreens.
Discussion, even of their married future, wasn’t really what she wanted right now. But with four gamekeepers in Prince Heriberto’s livery converging on the kill, she wasn’t going to get a shot at
that
. Despite what Northerners thought, South Nuevaropans had some sexual propriety.
That the lovers got even this tease of time together resulted purely from Jaume’s ability to talk his way out of the main event. The Emperor was hunting today.
“You’re always off on missions,” she said when she heard his horse chuff up alongside hers. “Now that you’re finally home, you work around the clock readying the army for this ridiculous war.”
And my role as a dutiful little Imperial daughter is to keep meekly out of the way and do nothing useful.
“We never
see
each other!”
He sighed. “I feel that as keenly as you do. You know that. But—that’s my duty.”
“I’d never ask you to give that up,” she said brightly. The tips of the topknot that sprouted from Melod
í
a’s headpiece rasped quietly on the yellow silk stretched over bamboo frames to protect her shoulders from the sun’s sting. “I know it’s your joy as well as your duty. So I was thinking I could join you.”
“You mean, join the Companions?”
“Exactly!”
The gamekeepers approached the kill. The dragonfly flapped its wings and hissed a warning:
Stay away! Mine!
The three keepers hung back. They knew too well what those jaws and claws could do. The huge insect couldn’t kill a fit adult human. But like an angry house cat, it could rip up a person’s face pretty well.
Halting twenty meters upwind, Jaume took a small strider-leather bag from his belt. Pinching up powder ground from certain dried glands of the dragonfly’s kin, he brushed fingertips together, wafting it to the rising breeze. Its appetite suppressed by the dust, the dragonfly at once let go of its prey and thrummed into the air, following the scent-trail docilely back to its master’s wrist.
Melod
í
a and Jaume rode forward. The dragonfly settled with a buzz and a clatter on Jaume’s forearm. He looped a thong noose around the junction of abdomen and thorax and drew it tight, tying the creature to his bracer. Ignoring the proceedings, it began burnishing ruby mouthparts with its forelegs.
Melod
í
a boiled in lidded frustration. But her father had taught her that nobles owed their people certain dues, and such rituals as this one were among them, and had to be rigorously observed.
As they approached, the chief keeper, with a gap-toothed grin, held the dead bouncer up for Jaume’s approval. Melod
í
a fidgeted in her saddle and tried to distract herself by gazing out through the thinning trees downslope across a panoramic view of La Merced.
She truly loved the city, where she had grown to young adulthood in Felipe’s court. In her heart it could never match her birthplace, Castillo Golondrina, nor her father’s duchy Los Almendros, the Almond Plantation. But it beat La Majestad hands down.
Two great headlands enveloped the meteor-dug Bah
í
a Alegre like arms, defining and protecting the finest anchorage on La Canal. La Merced crowded the southern and eastern rim in colorful tile roofs and soaring cone-topped towers of white limestone, dominated by the Pope’s palace, Creators’ House. The docks teemed with ships of every size. Its streets, from capillary alleys to boulevard arteries, pulsed with traffic, human, dinosaur, and vehicular.
The eastern headland was mostly occupied by the enormous main base of the Imperial Navy, the Sea Dragons who protected the Channel commerce that fueled La Merced’s famed wealth and hedonism. Closer to hand at the bay’s west end, Melod
í
a could just see Adelina’s Frown, the high chalk bluff crowned by the Firefly Palace. From here the white stone pentagon looked a lot more like the impregnable fortress it was built to be than it did from inside.
The city sang to Melod
í
a of vitality, industry, a positive greed for the joys life offered. It offered many contradictions: respectable yet volatile, such that the Civic Guard frequently turned out for riots in cobalt-blue enameled three-quarter plate; spectacle-loving and bourgeois; tolerant and kindhearted, yet relentless and even cruel in its treatments of its ancient nemesis, pirates.
She loved La Merced. Even when it appalled her.
“Excellent, Lorenzo,” Jaume said at last. “A clean kill. Keep the meat for yourself and your crew.”
That won smiling thanks from the gamekeepers. They bagged the carcass and transferred the hunting-dragonfly to the lead gamekeeper’s wrist. Then they trotted off toward the clamor that indicated where the bulk of the hunt was going on.
As they vanished into the undergrowth, Jaume blew out a long breath. “That’s done.”
Thank the Creators!
Melod
í
a thought. “You don’t enjoy the hunt?”
He shrugged. “Part of me enjoys killing—or I wouldn’t do what I do. There’s a certain terrible beauty to it. But only if it’s needful.”