The Dinosaur Lords (47 page)
Segador chistoso,
Ridiculous Reaper
—
Therizinosaurus cheloniformis
. A large, bipedal, mostly herbivorous beaked dinosaur from Ruybrasil; 10 meters long, 5 tonnes. Possesses large, brightly colored feathers prized throughout Aphrodite Terra. Most Nuevaropans consider their usual description—short-legged, swag-bellied, possessing terrifying foreclaws a meter or more long—a ludicrous invention.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Light though they were, hood and cloak stifled Falk, Herzog von Hornberg as he rode his rented horse through early-evening woods several kilometers inland from the Firefly Palace. Spring had come to the Principality of the Tyrant’s Jaw. While seasonal variations were even less noticeable here on this tropical coast than inland, the weather had grown warmer.
He endured. Any knight was trained to do so from earliest adolescence. And of course, Falk had forced himself to learn to endure more than most. Not that it was ever enough to please his mother.
Not that anything ever was.
The locals called these el Bosque Salvaje, the Savage Woods, although they weren’t a bit more savage than anyplace else on the Tyrant’s Head. To be sure, you might get gored by a surly nosehorn, or rent limb from limb by a wild raptor-pack. What was special about
that
?
He suspected these decadent Mercedes, urban creatures to the core, distrusted nature and stayed as clear of it as they could. Still, he wasn’t enjoying the
natural
way sweat sluiced down his broad face, stung his eyes, tickled down his sides to soak the felt-lined leather sword belt and silk loincloth beneath his cloak.
How inconspicuous can I be, with my size and noble bearing?
A blue blood, a knight especially,
carried
himself differently from any other beast that walked Nuevaropa. And everyone raised on the Tyrant’s Head knew the look.
He also didn’t know why it had been necessary to rent a horse at a dodgy livery in town, instead of borrowing one of the fine mounts freely available in Prince Harry’s—Heriberto’s—stables. But Bergdahl insisted on it, as he had the hood.
Falk wasn’t sure the man wasn’t just toying with him. But he had done as Bergdahl insisted. As always.
In the underbrush around him, the insect choir began its preliminary voice exercises for the night to come. The setting sun pushed Falk and his mount’s shadow well ahead of them along the shell-paved path as the bay trotted briskly west through a tunnel of overarching limbs. The air smelled of day-warm dust and fallen leaves.
Falk sniffed the tangy woodsmoke of the roadhouse’s cookshack and the savory aromas of meat roasting over coals and open flames long before he turned a bend and the establishment came into sight. His stomach growled. A whole roast scratcher capon, a rack of barbecued fatty ribs with sweet-hot sauce, and to wash all down a liter mug of the house’s famous beer would go a long way to setting him right.
If only something would still the butterflies in his stomach. In his mind he could hear Bergdahl sneer:
Why so timid, your Grace? You could take out these fops you’re meeting with fists alone.
And his mother saying,
You’re a smart boy, Falk. Why do you always act so stupid?
He shook his head like a horse trying to chase a fly from its ear.
Of course I’m afraid,
he thought by way of rebuttal.
If the wrong people spot me, I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for.
His scarcely healed forearm twinged at the thought.
Not to mention that trifling thing, my head.
The Nosehorn Bull at Bay was a solid sprawl of fieldstone, a single story with a roof of green-painted cypress shakes. Its sign was imposing, a placard a good three meters long, hung by bronze chains from a stout tree-trunk frame. It luridly depicted the titular beast—a splendid dinosaur, with extravagant yellow-and-black eyespots on its frill, and gore dripping from its horn—confronting a quartet of mounted huntsmen with spears and a pack of snarling green horrors. The outcome seemed considerably in doubt.
Falk nodded approval to himself when he halted his horse by a polished green-granite post and dismounted. He liked to see a thing well done.
He tethered his gelding to the greened-bronze ring hung from the post. Half a dozen horses were hitched to similar posts near the stone channel, fed from a nearby stream, that ran in front of the roadhouse. Striders pecked and clucked in a pen. You couldn’t leave the ruffed riding-dinosaurs tied for any length of time. They were so highly strung they’d panic and break a leg or scrawny neck.
Stepping up onto the little stone bridge over the watering-channel, Falk tossed a few copper centimos to the skinny girl in a black smock, thong sandals, and shallow-cone hat who squatted by the door, to give his mount a handful of oats. It was a small act of rebellion: he could hear his mother and his servant deride him for his soft heart and head, coddling someone else’s nag. Anyway, Falk regarded pointless cruelty as indulgence, a giving in to weakness.
Inside, the air was thick with the smoke of several kinds of pipe-stuffing, the dull reek of spilled beer, and the sounds of roistering. The publican seemed to expect him. Her manner was obsequious even though she had the face of an ancient granite statue and the proportions of a good oak gate. With his hood up he towered over her by a good sixty centimeters, but he doubted an innkeeper as seasoned as she looked to be was intimidated by mere size.
Down a stone-walled hallway, a door that clearly led to a proverbial back room opened promptly to a rap of the hostess’s brawl-scarred knuckles. An aristocratic face appeared. It unwrapped itself from around a look of annoyed disdain when its owner saw Falk looming behind the woman.
Without a glance at the publican, the man who opened the door pressed a coin into her palm. He was slight of stature, carried himself like a scratcher cock, and had a head that looked the more outsized for sitting on a white ruff like an egg in a cup.
“You’ve come,” he said. At least he had wit not to blurt out an incriminating
your Grace
into a public hallway. From the look of him it pained him not to be able to drop such an exalted title. “Excellent. Please come in.”
He bowed Falk into the room. It was larger than Falk expected. Woven-feather panels lined the walls. Like the sign, they were worked with surprising skill.
Three men sat at a table set with pitchers, mugs, and bowls of fruit. One man was as bulky and oddly proportioned as the fabled Therizinosaurus, or ridiculous reaper, of distant Ruybrasil, an immense two-legged herbivorous dinosaur with a swag belly and sickle claws a meter long. Another was your standard Spa
ñ
ol courtier, lean, with waxed moustaches.
“… hear how you Delgaos always call Felipe ‘that bastard of a Ram
í
rez,’” the third man at the table was saying. He was only a little larger than the man who was just now shutting the door and feverishly waving for him to shut up. “Well, let me tell you something, gentlemen: if he kicks his family off the top of the heap with his mad antics, he’ll take Torre Ram
í
rez down with it.”
And he smiled insouciantly at Falk.
The first man bustled forward as if afraid he might be late to something.
“I am Gonzalo Delgao,” he said to Falk, who knew it. “This is my brother Benedicto—”
The Therizinosaurus smiled shyly, despite the fact he was at least as big as Falk.
“—our brother-in-law Don Ren
é
Alarc
ó
n—” The courtier. “—and our
dear
ally, Mor Augusto Manorqu
í
n, who comes of a cadet house of Tower Ram
í
rez.”
The last was the vehement and irrepressible speaker. He reminded Falk of a ferret, sleek and slender. Though clearly nowhere near as circumspect.
“Mis compa
ñ
eros,” Gonzalo said grandly, “allow me to present his Grace, the inestimable Duke Falk von Hornberg.”
Pulling back his hood with relief, Falk nodded acknowledgment.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “what can we do for each other?”
* * *
“—and so this slight, thin boy, injured and covered with blood,” Rob told rapt listeners at his table near the front of the Garden Hall, “his own, and that of his dead duckbill, and the still-hot gore of the monster he had just slain, was the first thing the hatchling matador saw when she opened her bloodred eyes and screamed, ‘Shiraa!’ She thought he was her very mother, and in that instant bonded to him for life.”
He punctuated the story’s end with a gulp of the local ale. His pipes were dry again, though not for want of prior lubrication.
A masterful telling, if I do say so myself, and I do,
thought Rob, gazing around at the young Gardeners. A few mouths, he saw, were tightened against skeptical titters.
I could see why a body might doubt such a wild story, if it wasn’t Karyl’s own, and known throughout the land.
Then again, these people were scarcely the sort to spend much time in taverns.
All my best material’s fresh as a newborn babe here,
he thought smugly.
I’m going to mint coin.
“I’ve heard that’s the only way to get one of the great meat-eating dinosaurs as a mount,” a girl with a yellow smock and flowers twined in her brown hair said. Jeannette was missing tonight. Given what Rob had learned that afternoon, it suited him just fine.
Rob drained his flagon and set it on the table with a
thump
, more loudly than he meant to. Faces at other tables turned briefly his way, then pointedly away.
“And the best ones, lass,” he said, “are wild-caught. Those hatched in captivity have never the same fire.”
From the head table on its dais, a bell rang for order. Tall, lank-haired Telesphore rose to call in a faint monotone for the business at hand. Rob found him a limp and pale fish for a follower of a beauty cult.
Perhaps he hides his enthusiasm well, so.
In any event he seemed one of the better-disposed on the Council toward Karyl and Rob. Or at least, less actively hostile.
Heads turned as Karyl entered the hall. He wore his usual hooded robe and sandals, and carried his deceptive walking stick. His hair was tied back from his ascetic’s face, which despite the time he spent outdoors always remained pale. His expression was calm and his manner dignified as he walked up to stand before the head table.
The contrast between his garments’ rough simplicity and the Councilors’ expensive, faux-rustic clothes was like a voice crying fraud.
Bogardus rose. “Voyvod,” he said in his honey-rich baritone. “Welcome. I know you’re busy. We won’t keep you long. In the wake of today’s atrocity, the Council directs me to order you and your militia to take the field immediately against the enemies of the Garden of Beauty and Truth.”
A blond girl who had taken a special fancy to Rob put her hand on his arm and leaned in as if to whisper something intimate in his ear. He shrugged her off like a suck fly. He leaned forward, straining to hear, although the room had fallen silent.
“I shall, Eldest Brother,” Karyl said calmly. He bowed to the Council. If not very deeply.
“Are the soldiers ready?” asked Longeau, Violette’s best ally, in a voice that managed to mingle skepticism and contempt with a hearty helping of alarm, if Rob was any judge.
And drunk or sober, he was. Maybe the more so drunk.
What a good thing I’m that,
he thought.
“No army’s ever ready,” Karyl said. “We can take the field.”
That brought some dark looks and some confused. People commenced to mutter, not just behind the high table. Bogardus frowned ever so slightly around the hall. The burbling ceased.
“How will you fight knights?” asked Sister Violette.
“A fair question,” said Karyl, as if the silver witch wasn’t his greatest enemy in the vicinity not sporting Cr
è
ve Coeur green, blue, and gold. “We’ll catch them on the way home from their raids. They’ll be jubilant, off their guard, likely drunk, and loaded down with loot and captives. Which makes them ripe for ambush.”
The women at Rob’s table inhaled in horrified unison. Violette reared back as if the part-eaten bunch of grapes resting on the plate before her had turned into an adder poised to strike.
Longeau found his voice first. “That’s unacceptable!” he gobbled. “Totally unacceptable.”
“Let me see if I have this right,” said Violette, who seemed more pleased than taken aback. “You’re talking about allowing these marauders to rob, murder, and rape at will
before
you attack them? How is that defending us?”
“And this striking from ambush,” Longeau declared. “It’s barbaric! What happened to chivalry?”
“You might ask that of knights who trample children and spear distraught mothers for sport,” Karyl said. “For ourselves, we can’t afford it. We’re outnumbered, out-armed, and out-mounted. And as for skill, we might as well be eight-year-olds matching finger-daubs in mud against young Lucas’s murals all around us here. Our only hope is to use stealth and cunning. And what they can win us: surprise.”
“But how does that
defend
us,” Violette said again, “letting the marauders do their worst and ride away?”
“In the best way we have available. To hurt them, to teach them this lesson: that their sport shall cost them
pain
.”
The hall erupted in furious gabble. “He can’t be serious,” the blonde who’d been trying to drape herself on Rob kept saying, red-faced and not nearly so appealing as a moment before. He wasn’t sure which outraged her more: that Karyl suggested letting the raiders raid, or that he spoke of inflicting pain on them.
It’s a good job they’re pacifists, this lot,
Rob thought, his wits no longer as dull as they had been.
Otherwise they’d be pelting him with fruit at best. And at worst, we’d be racing for the exit this very instant.