The Dinosaur Lords (43 page)

“Zhubin,” Karyl said. “That’s Parso for ‘spear.’”

The newcomer regarded him a moment, then swung a leg over the bow of his saddle on the hornface’s tall back and dropped to the road. He was a burly lad, not over-tall, with green-hazel eyes and unruly brown hair that fell onto his square, tanned face. He said something to Karyl in a language that sounded to Rob both guttural and liquid, somehow. Karyl answered in the same tongue.

“So it’s true,” Ga
é
tan said. “You really are the Voyvod Karyl, famous from song and story.”

“I was,” Karyl said. “Welcome, Ga
é
tan. Have you come to join us?”

“If you’ll have me.” He walked forward to clasp forearms with Karyl.

“Gladly,” Karyl said. “This is my lieutenant, Rob Korrigan. He’s a dinosaur master by trade.”

“Ah. That explains why he asked about my mount before me.”

“You brought weapons, I see,” Rob said, nodding to the sword, round shield, and suggestively waterproof sea monster–hide case that hung from the spiky dinosaur’s saddle. The case might have fit a bardic-style harp. Somehow Rob doubted it did. “Can you use them?”

The young man shrugged. “I can take care of myself. I’ve traveled with my father’s caravans since I was a toddler. I’ve had to fight a time or two.”

“Is that a hornbow?” Karyl asked.

Rob raised a brow.
He actually sounds eager.

“It is indeed.” Ga
é
tan took down the case, opened it, drew out an object shaped like a huge letter C. Karyl said nothing, but his eyes lit.

Ga
é
tan slipped a looped string over one end of the bow. Taking the other in his left hand and the string’s free end in the right, he swung the C around behind his left leg. Stepping through between string and stave, he braced the bow against the back of his right knee and straightened, grunting, forcing the C back against itself. When it was bent far enough, he slipped the other loop of the bowstring on, completing its transformation to a capital D. Then he stepped out of the bow and raised it.

By now he’d acquired a large and wide-eyed audience, Rob among them. The closest he’d ever come to one of the legendary recurved bows of the Turano and Parso nomads was watching Karyl’s mobile flesh-forts advance through the river mists beneath Gunters Moll, and the terrible whispering death launched in clouds from the fighting-castles on their backs.

Ga
é
tan drew the bow. Muscles rippled in his thick, bare arms. He eased off on the string and turned to Karyl.

“Would you care to heft it, Seigneur?” he asked.

“Please. If you’d be so kind. And if you feel a need to call me by a title, ‘Captain’ will serve.”

Rob was mildly startled. Even though he had first laid eyes on the man as a one-handed beggar, playing mute in a village square, it was the first time he’d heard Karyl sound
humble
.

Karyl turned the bow over in his hands, seeming more to be
savoring
than inspecting. “They make these of sinew and horn glued together, layer by thin layer,” he explained to Rob.

“Now,
here’s
a lad who seems to have some substance to him,” Rob heard Guat say from behind. The chunky farmer had been a thorn from the outset. Having his liege Yannic on hand hadn’t made him less of a prick.

“And what might that mean?” Rob asked.

“Merchant lad comes with weapons. And he can use ’em. Can you and your outlander friend say that?”

Rob laughed incredulously. “Have you never seen the inside of a tavern, these last ten years? All they sing of are the exploits of the great Voyvod Karyl.”

The ones that didn’t sing about Jaume dels Flors, anyway. He thought that unnecessary to mention.

“Tavern songs,” scoffed Reyn. The townsman carpenter and Percil employee was another problem child. “Fancy fables, nothing more. Oh, this Karyl’s noble-born. Fine. We bend the knee to him ’cause that’s the Law. The Creators made the world with the high above the low, so the base would be wider than the top and things’d stand firm. But can he fight? All he’s done since he came here is talk. And order us around.”

Others began to echo the pair’s words. Rob’s brows had squeezed down over his eyes until he could barely see through them.
I hear the heavy hands of town lords pushing this talk to the fore,
he thought.
Right treacherous bastards, the lot of them.
Although Melchor at least seemed willing to give the foreigners an honest chance to prove themselves.

Emeric said nothing in Karyl’s defense. But he had little to say at the best of times, especially around townsmen and peasants, whom he referred to as “sitting-folk.” Only Lucas raised his voice in support, and that so high it cracked, which did his case little good.

No one questioned
Rob’s
prowess, he noted. He was almost sorry.

How will himself respond?
he wondered.

“Might I use your bow, Master Ga
é
tan?” Karyl asked mildly.

Ga
é
tan grinned. “I’m master of no one and nothing except myself. Plain ‘Ga
é
tan’ is fine. And sure, be my guest.”

He turned back toward his spike-frill, which was pulling up a beakful of yellow daisies. He unslung a quiver of fine-grained dinosaur hide, springer or even bouncer. The arrows were fletched with black and yellow feathers.

“I’ll need just four,” Karyl said. Ga
é
tan held out the quiver. Karyl drew the arrows out one at a time by the notch end and clipped them against the bow with the first two fingers of his right hand.

“Do you want me to set up a butt for you, Captain?” Lucas asked, seeming more eager than ever to make himself useful with Ga
é
tan on the scene. “A bale of hay, maybe?”

“No need.” Karyl nocked an arrow. Drawing the string smoothly to his ear he tipped back and loosed upward, just a hair off straight upward.

Everyone followed the arrow’s flight. Except Rob and Ga
é
tan. They both watched Karyl calmly yet quickly take another arrow and shoot again.

The first arrow had just reached the top of its arc. The second arrow struck it midshaft.

That made even Rob’s eyes bulge. As the
tick
of impact reached his ears, another arrow struck the first one, kicking it farther away. Four meters off the ground, the final arrow hit the first.

For a moment everyone just stared. Then they started shouting at once. “I told you! I told you he was just the man for us!” Guat yelled hoarsely.

Rob looked around. No town lord was in sight.
Pity, that,
he thought.

No one dared clap Karyl on the back. He was a grande, after all. Rob reckoned, though, that even if he were the lowest peasant, people would be leery of laying hands on him after that little display. Instead they danced about like loons, slapping each other’s shoulders and punching arms.

“Poor technique,” Karyl told Rob, quietly aside. “They should follow because of my field skills, not skill at arms. But time presses hard.”

“Great Mother Maia, man, you needn’t justify yourself to me!”

Karyl showed him a fleeting smile. “I’m justifying it to myself,” he said. “You, I’m trying to teach.”

Lucas, his face a reverent child’s, ran to fetch the arrows. Karyl handed the hornbow back to its owner.

“A fine bow,” he said. “Sorry for damaging your arrow. I’ll pay for it.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Ga
é
tan exclaimed. “Or rather—if you please, my lord, just give it back to me. Otherwise my family’ll think I’m lying when I tell the story!”

Emeric stepped up to ask if he might try the hornbow. The woods-runner had mightily impressed the townsmen and farmers with the prowess he showed with his own weapon. Ga
é
tan nodded.

Karyl handed Emeric the weapon. The woods-runner tried to draw it. He could bend the string no farther than a hand’s width from true, no matter how he strained or how maroon his face turned behind his long yellow moustache.

Rob nodded knowingly.
And that’s your problem with these heathen mainland shortbows. They lack the range and punch of either a good Anglysh longbow, or one of these fiendish Ovdan contraptions. They’re not much use against knight or dinosaur beyond twenty paces, unless you nail an eye.

“You found it light, didn’t you?” Ga
é
tan asked Karyl as a visibly chagrined Emeric returned the bow.

“Yes,” Karyl said. “But any twenty-year-old of the Ovdan horse-nomad tribes, girl or boy, could’ve done what I did, horseback at full gallop.”

“That’s a grown-up bow,” Ga
é
tan said, “for a nomad woman, that is. Up on the plateau I barely rate as novice, myself, although on this side of the mountains I’m reckoned fair.”

“He’s better than
fair,
” Emeric said. When Rob looked at him, he added, “We have regular matches, you see. All the archers in the province know each other, whether woods-runners or sitting-folk.”

“Can you get the archers to join us?” Karyl asked.

Ga
é
tan looked at Emeric, who shrugged. “Worth a shot,” Ga
é
tan said.

Shortbowmen?
Rob thought.
What good can they do us?
The question burned in his gut, but he had more sense than to ask it in front of the woods-runner.

Karyl showed him the quickest sliver of a smile. “Give it a go, then, Ga
é
tan,” he said. “We need whatever we can get. And soon. Women too. They can shoot crossbows, if they don’t know archery already.”

Ga
é
tan shrugged. “I’ll pass the word around. Our family’s got some adventurous womenfolk. They go on caravan just like us boys do. My older sister Jeannette used to be a pretty fair shot with a bow, but she’s not likely to be interested, now that she’s gotten all inward with the Garden and all their talk of peace and love. She won’t go even out with the trains to Ovda anymore.”

“Jeannette, then?” Rob eyed Ga
é
tan’s chest and the girth of his tan upper arms, alike impressive and left bare by his short feather cape. He swallowed hard. “Would she be tall and auburn-haired, by chance? A trifle on the willowy side?”

Ga
é
tan grinned. “That’s my sis, all right! You know her?”

“Passably,” Rob said.

Ga
é
tan punched Rob’s biceps. “Well, there you go! Any friend of Jeannie’s is a friend of mine.”

Rob suppressed a wince.

“Honored,” he said in a strangled voice.

Chapter
36

Lanza, Lance
—Count of the Creators:
Kan
☵
(Water)—The Middle Son. Represents War and Peace, aggression and mercy, victory and defeat; and Serene Water (ponds, pools, rivers). Also war beasts. Known for his valor. Aspect: a handsome young black man in full blue plate, with one foot on a corpse, holding a longsword point-down. Sacred Animal: Triceratops. Colors: black and blue. Symbol: an inverted longsword.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Jaume saw what to do. He waved his lance to signal for his Brothers to loose their single terremoto. As he finished the gesture, he snapped shut his visor with the thumb knuckle of his lance hand.

His world became a tiny, echoing metal chamber and the impacts of Camellia’s two-legged trot jarring up his spine. He poured his vision like water through the eye-slits. His breath whooshed in his ears like a blacksmith’s bellows. He smelled the lavender-flavored pumice-and-saleratus paste with which he’d brushed his teeth.

Obedient to his command, Camellia stretched forth her neck and silently screamed. So did his Companions’ mounts behind him. Their side-blasts stabbed pain through his temples. His stomach rebelled. Dizziness spun his world. He was prepared to feel those things, and found them no more than momentary discomforts.

But unlike dinosaur knights, cavalry mounts and men-at-arms spent little time training to endure the terremoto. Dinosaurry seldom deigned to waste it on mere cavalry. War-duckbills needed little more than
mass
to destroy warhorses.

The small but intense Companion terremoto caught the Terrarojanos unexpecting. The effect almost shocked Jaume. Half a dozen chargers directly in front of the Companions went down as if shot. Others put their heads down and bolted straight ahead. Some reared, so that those racing behind slammed into them and all crashed down. Others turned and fled, back into the faces of their own comrades, or straight away from Jaume’s monsters, toward the Redlands dinosaurry chasing the routed Imperials.

The path the murder-cry opened to Jaume’s Companions wasn’t perfectly clear, but it was clear
enough
. Jaume pulled his lance from the scabbard that held it upright beside his saddle. Turning, he brandished it.

“
For Beauty and the Lady!
” he cried. His voice rang above the drumbeat of hooves and splayed dinosaur feet, squealing horses, and screams of broken men. He shook free the white pennon tied to his lance, revealing his personal orange camellia badge and the Lady’s Mirror symbol.