The Dinosaur Lords (48 page)

Which was a tactic, he reflected with a certain grim satisfaction, he’d almost certainly had more experience using than the noted war captain Karyl.

Karyl simply stood and let the furor blow past him. Behind the table, Bogardus had his arms crossed and chin sunk into the square-cut neck of his yellow-trimmed green gown, looking every centimeter the ex-priest of Maia rumor made him out to be.

At last the Eldest Brother spread his arms out to his sides. It was as if he smoothed a rumpled sheet. In a moment the hall was still.

“Please, my friends,” he said. “It’s as good as no one having their say, if everyone speaks at once. This is a grave matter, which concerns us all. If I may presume to speak for the Council—”

He looked to Telesphore, who pressed palms together before his wishbone and bowed.
And what would Bogardus have done had that dead trout said no?
Rob thought. But he couldn’t see it happening.
No more than could Bogardus, I do not doubt.

“—those who have contributions to make may make them. Each in turn, if you please, and briefly, so that all who wish to be heard may be. And then the Council shall deliberate.”

He looked to Karyl. “This may take some time, Voyvod. If you’d care to take a seat?”

Rob thought he actually might prefer to stand. But he misjudged an old campaigner.

“I thank the Council,” Karyl said with another bow. He turned and walked into the thicket of hostile eyes.

Rob half stood. “Ho, Karyl,” he called, making motions with his left arm as if reeling in cloth. “I saved a space for you beside me.”

Actually there was none but standing room around him. But he reckoned that once he made his invitation, space would rapidly become available. Nor was he disappointed: by the time Karyl reached the table, Rob sat alone.

Karyl took a seat beside him. He propped his stick against his chest, folded his arms across it, closed his eyes, and to all appearances went instantly to sleep. Unlike at night, this slumber seemed untroubled by demons.

The speeches began. Mostly they were sheer vexer-screeches, shrill effusions of resentment and fear. Rob took to drinking with a single mind, and that mind was to tune it all out.

*   *   *

“Karyl, please draw near.”

Bogardus’s sonorous words gave Rob a jolt. He lifted chin from clavicle to see his friend rising to his feet. He shook his head, spattering droplets of mingled ale and wine from beard, eyebrows, and the tips of his hair.

“I’m not asleep!” he declared, glaring fiercely around, daring one of these mooncalf fatties to challenge him. “Just composing … sonnets. The right word’s key—”

He let the sentence run down because no one was listening to him. Every face was fixed on Karyl as he walked up to stand serenely before the dais.

“The Council has decided that we must direct you to change your proposed methods,” Bogardus said. “You must engage the foe forthrightly, not bring dishonor on the Garden by skulking in ambush. And under no circumstances can we go along with your deliberately allowing the enemy to ravage at will before striking at him. It is imperative that you do your best to prevent raids before they happen, not just avenge murdered children and burned homes.”

Karyl nodded sharply.

“I resign,” he said.

He turned his back on the Council and walked away.

Chapter
39

Jinete,
light rider
—Skirmishers and scouts, often women, who ride horses and striders. They wear no armor, or at most a light nosehorn-leather jerkin, with sometimes a leather or metal cap. They use javelins or feathered twist-darts, and a sword. Some also carry a light lance and a buckler. A few shoot shortbows or light crossbows, but mounted archery is very difficult, and not much practiced in Nuevaropa.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“What’s this?” Longeau exclaimed. “Impertinence!”

Sitting two places down, Sister Violette smiled like the proverbial horror who’d eaten a vexer.

“Peace,” Bogardus said. “Explain yourself if you please, Lord Karyl.”

Halting among the tables of shocked-pale faces, Karyl turned. His own expression was one of complete surprise.

The stage lost a brilliant actor when that magnificent bastard chose to walk the warrior’s road,
thought Rob with honest admiration.

“Why, Eldest Brother,” Karyl said, “I thought I had. Very well: if the Council wants its army led out to be butchered futilely, you’ve got to do it yourselves.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Rob smiled to himself.
Unused to the role as he probably is, Bogardus plays the shill well. But then you’d expect acting skills from a fallen-away priest, no?
He tried to refill his wineglass, found the bottle empty, and signaled the diligent ex-Count
É
tienne for another.

“All our volunteers together could scarcely stand up against just the three dinosaur knights who visited you today. Give them a handful of house-soldiers and they’d flatten us as easily as they did that poor mother and her child.”

“Absurd,” Longeau said. “You’ve got town lords.”

Karyl just looked at him. Longeau flushed and looked down at the table. His fellow Councilors passed an uncomfortable glance around. Not even the fondest peace-lover, so Rob took it, could seriously imagine that Yannic, on his buffoonish great strider that weighed no more than a palfrey, stood any chance against four war-trained tonnes of monster and armored rider.

“Even with the sound arms and armor we’ve got from the town armory,” Karyl said, “we can’t hope to stop a single raiding party in open combat. Now consider what Guillaume and his friends might think to do to you if you try to thwart him and fail.”

That
quieted the Council right down. A sort of sickroom whisper rippled through the hall. Bogardus’s handsome face was ashen. Rob judged that likely wasn’t acting.

“Have we any chance, then, whatever you do?” the Eldest Brother asked.

“A chance, and more than a chance.
If
we use the land and our wits to our advantage, and take our foe in small bites. I’d be staking my life on it.

“You need to choose which is the greater honor: to protect your homes, your loved ones, and yourselves? Or fight with your hands tied by some half-mythical code your enemies don’t apply to you anyway? There seems little place for
honor
in a philosophy that preaches peace and resorts to war.”

Sister Violette shot to her feet, her eyes like furnace vents. “I for one will not sit here and listen to this—this
vagabond
insult our Garden!”

“I will, Sister,” Bogardus said calmly. “Or stand and listen. I’ll always hear the truth, and that’s what he speaks. Doesn’t the divine Jaume of the Flowers himself teach that Truth and Beauty are one thing, inseparable?”

Karyl’s shoulders slumped ever so slightly
. Ah, that’s twisting the knife, now,
Rob thought.
But Bogardus can’t know it.

The Eldest Brother fastened a steady gaze on Violette. It seemed slowly to force her back down in her chair.

“What is to be, Sisters, Brothers?” Bogardus asked. “We have brought this man—these men—here precisely because they are highly skilled artisans. And we appreciate the craftsman as well as the artist, in this our Garden.

“Karyl has told us the only way we can fight with a chance of winning. And after all, we’re not knights, are we, hot for glory and thirsting for blood? We fight to free our people from the terror the invaders bring. We agreed to hold our principles in abeyance—largely at my urging, as I freely acknowledge—and fight, or allow others to fight in our names, to prevent a greater evil.

“Will we let this acknowledged master ply his craft as best he knows? Or shall we take the field and lead the battle ourselves?”

That
got them to lower their eyes and look everywhere but at him. Bogardus fixed each Councilor in turn with dark, steady eyes and spoke his or her name, until each assented to amending their earlier decision and permitting Karyl to fight his battles his way.

“But we won’t relent on his stopping the raids before they begin,” Longeau said. “We can’t, for our people’s sake.”

“It’s too cynical, Bogardus,” Telesphore said dolefully. “If we ambush the raiders on their way home we can recover stolen goods. But what of the lives destroyed or damaged?”

Bogardus turned to Karyl. “So the Council decides, and I concur: you may employ ambush or whatever means you see fit to defeat our tormentors. But by the Lady of the Mirror and all seven other Creators, you cannot let the reavers reave, however good a tactic that may appear to those of us who aren’t being burned out of our homes.”

Karyl met him eye to eye for a long breath. Then he bowed.

“I shall fight on your terms, Eldest Brother,” he said.

“Wait!” Rob shouted, shooting to his feet. He knocked the whole bench over with a bang, and upset his most recent wine-bottle, now empty. Faces turned to gape at him with eyes and mouths like Os.

“Lord Karyl!” he roared, swaying with booze and outrage. “Why are you giving in to these mewlers, who aren’t fit to eat the road mud off your boots? They don’t have half your birth or worth. Stand up, man! Spit in their eyes! Defy them to the end!”

Strong arms locked his. He was hoisted bodily to his feet. He managed to wrench an arm free and land a knuckle in someone’s eye with a mad swing of his fist. Then he was secured again, lifted so his boot soles swung futilely above the tile floor, and carried out of the hall still raving.

Who knew these soft-hand Gardeners possessed such strength? Ah, but it took a round half dozen to handle him. One at least would be nursing a black eye in the morning, and there’d be more than one sore shin, or his name wasn’t Rob Korrigan.

They threw him in the ditch. He sat up among the wet weeds, still sputtering in fury as cold water seeped up his ass crack. Little Nell, grazing nearby, saw her master’s distress. She broke her tether effortlessly, waddled to Rob, and licked his face with her great slobbery tongue.

“At least it’s lavender you’ve dined on, girl,” he said, pushing the beaked snout away, “and not anything worse-smelling. And didn’t my mother always tell me to look at the bread’s clean side, when I picked it up off the floor?”

*   *   *

“Captain! Wake up!”

Men shouted outside Jaume’s tent. As an adolescent campaigning against the miquelets, Jaume had learned the knack of coming instantly and fully awake. His dream vision of Melod
í
a, naked with her hair unbound, spun away as he reached for her, just shy of his outstretched fingers, and vanished.

As she would have had the dream continued. As she did most every night. He grabbed his scabbarded sword from a rack near his cot and went out naked.

The stars and just-risen Eris, the Moon Visible, shone brightly in a cloudless sky. Meseta nights were cooler than on the coast, and drier. The air didn’t hit him in the face like a wet blanket. Nor did it stink of mass decomposition, since he’d ordered the army to camp up the prevailing wind from the day’s battlefield.

And there’s my final blessing for the night,
he realized as he saw flames gouting from the top of the distant red crag as if the ancient volcano that had extruded it had roared back to life. A yellow glow behind the horizon suggested fire walked the streets of the town as well.

Companions in states of dress ranging from full plate to as naked as their captain surrounded his tent, all talking at once.

“What is this?” Jaume asked, of no one in particular.

“Treachery,” rumbled Ayaks.

“But whose?” asked Wouter de Jong, trying to rub the sleep from his blue eyes.

A voice called the friend-word from up the road that led toward the blaze. A moment later an Ordinary rode up escorting a leather-armored mercenary aboard a wheezing strider.

The jinete, a young man with wild hair and a scrub of beard, hopped to the ground. Bartomeu twitched a feather cloak around Jaume’s shoulders. Another squire brought a bucket of water for the winded dinosaur, which stuck its beak inside and slurped noisily.

“The bucketheads are inside the castle,” the jinete announced. “They raped and plundered to their hearts’ content, and fired the place for spite. While they were plucking the ripest cherry, they let their house-soldiers harvest from the village below.”

“How did they get in?” Machtigern asked.

“Who knows? Some say this ruse, some another. My guess is, they claimed to bring a message from the good Count Jaume here.”

Jaume winced.

“Who is responsible?” Manfredo asked. His face was a thunderhead.

“Tavares,” Florian spat. He slammed his sword, which he had half drawn to examine, back into its sheath. His squire, a Spa
ñ
ol war-orphan named Marco he’d picked up somewhere and who always looked and acted famished no matter how much he ate, was busily doing up the latches on his breast-and-back. “Who else?”

“We can’t accuse the Pope’s Legate without evidence,” Manfredo said sternly.