The Dinosaur Lords (8 page)

“Oh, don’t be a ninny,” said Lupe’s due
ñ
a. “Let girls be girls. If you weren’t a superstitious old baggage, you’d do your duty and teach her how to have fun and not get pregnant.”

“I already
know
that,” Melod
í
a said indignantly, to titters from her friends. Except for Fanny, who as always blushed when sex was discussed.

“It’s the clear word of the Creators that we’re meant to enjoy the bodies They gave us,” Fanny’s due
ñ
a told Melod
í
a’s, “despite the gabble of those crazy preachers you listen to.”

“Poor Carlota never had many volunteer to help her enjoy hers,” said Abi’s due
ñ
a in her smoky Slava accent.

Do
ñ
a Carlota scowled and muttered something about hada wickedness. Melod
í
a rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe in demons—in the Fae. Much less the bizarre asceticism of the Life-to-Come sect to which Do
ñ
a Carlota so inconveniently belonged. She was always interfering in Melod
í
a’s love life.

Not that
that
had kept the woman busy of late.

As if reading her mind, Llurdis said, “See, that’s your problem, D
í
a. You just need to get fucked.”

Melod
í
a crossed her arms tightly beneath her breasts. “Don’t I know it.”

“It’s nobody’s fault but your own,” said Lupe. “You won’t so much as look at even the handsomest stableboy.”

“I don’t like
boys
at all.”

“There are plenty of young knights and lords at court who’d be more than happy to take the edge off for you,” Abi said.

“Courtiers.”
Melod
í
a shook her head. She felt Pilar let go of her hair to avoid pulling it again. “Nosehorn-flies, the lot of them.”

Lupe said, “You could always—”

“No. Not you, not Llurdi, not both of you at once. I don’t have the energy for the dramas
that
would cause.”

“Well, it’s not as if Jaume’s rushed back to you,” Llurdis said. “The Princes’ War ended four months ago. He’s been cooling his heels in Alemania a whole half year!”

“He isn’t ‘cooling his heels.’ He was making sure there was no more trouble up North. With peace secured he’s coming back to La Merced to report.”

“And that’s why you’re so testy,” said Abi. “Horniness, plain and simple.”

“You’ll dry up like your due
ñ
a if all you do is read about war and politics,” Lupe said.

“I’ll make my mark on one or the other,” Melod
í
a said. “Someday.”

“I wonder where your sister is, Princesa,” Do
ñ
a Carlota said pointedly. If she knitted her vegetable-wool any more furiously Melod
í
a thought it would catch fire.

“No doubt she’s down in the hornface stables,” Llurdis said, “squatting on her heels and peering like a sea-skimmer at the grooms and monsters.”

“Best watch her close, Do
ñ
a Carlota,” Lupe said with a crooked smirk, “or she’ll wind up carrying a stable hand’s chick.”

Melod
í
a’s eyes narrowed. “That’s
quite
uncalled-for, Princesa,” she said. “She’s just a little girl. She’s
fourteen
.”

And a half
, she narrowly stopped herself from adding—as Montserrat inevitably did, even though it wasn’t even true yet.

A knock forestalled further sniping. Do
ñ
a Carlota’s imposing brows bunched, and her eyes flicked suspiciously to the door.

“Enter,” Melod
í
a called.

The door opened. An under-chamberlain in red and yellow Imperial livery stood there jittering.

He drew in a breath that seemed to double the size of his narrow young chest.
“His-Imperial-Majesty-the-Emperor-Felipe-respectfully-requests-the-presence-of-his-daughter-Her-Highness-the-Princess-Melod
í
a-at-an-audience-in-the-Great-Hall-in-half-an-hour’s-time!”
he declaimed in a rush.

Melod
í
a’s eyes widened. She waved Pilar away and stood. Fanny played a quick triumphant coda and set aside her bow, smiling.

“Tell my father I’ll be there,” Melod
í
a said. The under-chamberlain nodded and fled.

“Guess who’s finally home?” Lupe singsonged as the door closed.

“Hoo!” said Llurdis, fanning herself. “Did it suddenly get humid in here?”

Chapter
5

Matador,
Slayer
—Allosaurus fragilis.
Large, bipedal, carnivorous dinosaur; grows to 10 meters long, 1.8 meters at shoulder, 2.3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s largest and most-feared native predator.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

Shiraa opened her eyes.

She peered through a screen of fronds into the heart of a forest. Down here it was still dark, but dawn light glancing off the tops of trees across the little valley struck them alight with green fire. Around her the forest breathed with the sounds of a thousand small creatures, all fervently hoping she wouldn’t notice them, and the rustle of ferns and flowering bushes in the morning breeze. She could almost see the prey-smell strands in the cool air.

Swinging her long balancing tail and powerful hips, Shiraa strode into the open. Fronds thrashed. Branches clashed. A flock of small tailless fliers exploded from the trees, azure and gold, raising raucous cries.

For a time Shiraa had known nothing but pain and the blackness of loss. She hid. She was good at that.

Eventually hunger overcame the agony of the wound the white monster had given her. When she set out painfully from her hiding place, she found meat lying all around in dizzying abundance. Between gorgings, the smell of rotting flesh lulled her to sleep with its song of plenty.

The great feast ended as the meat turned to slime sucked down by the soil. Shiraa could easily eat the tailless two-legs who continued to roam the killing-grounds, small and slow and weak as they were. But she had been taught to respect them since she hatched and first laid eyes on her mother, who was herself a two-legs. Unless they attacked her, she must not harm them—not without her mother’s permission.

So she limped away from the battlefield to forage, and heal, and await the strength to search for her lost mother.

Now she had recovered. It still hurt to move in certain ways. She endured.

Deep longing drove her now. She needed her mother’s love to feel
fullness
. To belong.

Her mother had gone away. But she knew her mother would never abandon her.

Shiraa hungered. She would eat. Then, following some
knowing
it would never occur to her to question, she continued her journey south.

Somewhere that way, she knew, she would find her mother again.

*   *   *

Racing each other into the market square, a pair of laughing children jostled Rob Korrigan. They seemed too intent on the entertainment that had already attracted a sizable crowd to the middle of this central Franc
é
s town called Pot de Feu to notice.

Rob put a quick hand to his pouch. A bump like that was a common trick to cover a purse-slitting; he’d done it himself, as a tad. The strider-hide bag was still flat as a titan-trodden vexer, of course. It was the principle of the thing.

“Barbarous continentals,” he muttered.

Folding his arms he leaned against the side of a victualer’s covered wagon to watch the show. He kept his axe, its head cased in stout nosehorn leather, propped close at hand. He didn’t think he had any enemies here. But he hadn’t kept his head attached to his shoulders—almost literally, since he could boast but little by way of a neck—by taking things for granted.

The busker was good, Rob had to admit. No taller than Rob himself, built like twine-tied sticks bundled in a tatty brown cloak, he sat before a patch of wall where the whitewash had peeled away from grey mud brick. Dark hair, silver-shot, hung to his thrown-back hood. His eyes were dark in a face from which it seemed all nonessentials had been crushed. Their raptor intensity struck Rob to the spine when their gaze brushed his.

Though he laughed often, he didn’t speak. He didn’t need to; his antics were eloquent. He pulled a handkerchief from the nose of a stout market lady in a red head-rag, and discovered copper coins in delighted children’s ears.

As merchants folded up their kiosks and crated their wares for the night, his audience grew. Sparrows and tiny tailed fliers hopped among sandaled feet foraging for scraps. A toothed raven and a similarly sized green-crested flier squabbled over a melon rind. A tame vexer perched on an onion cart cursed both in screeches.

Sunset came quickly, throwing light like fire-glow across the western faces of white stone towers and tall narrow buildings huddled close, and the slates of steep-pitched roofs. A rising breeze brought the rich damp smell of crops awaiting harvest, and the thicker scent of the woods that lurked beyond the constraints of axe and plow. In Nuevaropa the wild was never far away, and never more than held at bay.

The wind also brought an eye-watering whiff of sulfur from Vieux Charlot, the nearby volcano. They didn’t call this dump Firepot for nothing.

The busker finished his sleights and began to juggle.
And
now
I’m impressed
, thought Rob. The man lacked a left hand.

And therein lay Rob’s problem.

Splendid. The silly sod has gone and lost his bloody sword hand.

If a wound didn’t kill you, it healed quickly and well. That was common to all the creatures of Paradise. But once a part was gone, it was lost for good.

I wonder if my principal will dock my pay for delivering damaged goods. If it really is him.

First the busker tossed fired-clay bowls borrowed from a merchant at a nearby booth with his right hand, to catch them upside down on his stump and flip them back in the air. Next, he juggled ninepins plundered by giggling urchins from the village green a few streets over.

Sadly, he also blew enthusiastically on a fatty-herder’s reed pipes he’d stuffed in his mouth.
Once again I question whether my perfect pitch is a gift from the Creators, or a spite of the Fae,
thought Rob.

The busker’s next trick almost made Rob forgive his noise: he juggled daggers. His stump flipped them by their blade-flats as they descended, back to his right hand. He worked up to five at a time. Then he pretended to let one slip. Catching it by the tip he tossed it high to twinkle like a yellow spark in the last slanting light, to a rush of delighted applause. He sent the others after in fast succession.

He
looks
like him,
Rob thought, studying his target under the guise of watching, fascinated at his tricks. Though he was that too.
At least, he looks like the portraits I’ve seen, and the descriptions I’ve heard.

Rob had never seen the man he’d been sent to retrieve from closer than sixty yards. And the bugger hadn’t exactly been holding still at the time.…

The daggers fell to plant themselves in a line like daisies in the hard-packed soil before him. As the onlookers clapped and hooted, he took from his sack a shallow brass bowl and a stick about half a meter long. Laying the stick down before him, he placed the bowl on its tip. Then he sat back on skinny haunches, smiling beatifically through his beard.

Around Rob the villagers and passers-through speculated eagerly as to what the busker would do now. Some did so in Franc
é
s, which Rob understood passably well and spoke with a deliberately outlandish accent. Others used Spa
ñ
ol, which everyone in Nuevaropa theoretically knew. By order of the Creators, it was said, though Rob begged leave to doubt it.

Actually, Rob never begged leave to doubt. He seldom begged leave to do anything at all.
Doubting
was the very last thing on Paradise he’d ask permission for, except perhaps singing and playing his lute, laughing, drinking, wenching, and nursing sullen resentment against those who did him down.

A silver coin rang in the busker’s bowl. It made a nice musical sound.
More musical than his playing, in any event,
Rob thought sourly.

Another followed quickly, then a very cascade of copper centimes and Imperial centavos, plus a silver peso or two, as onlookers took the hint to encourage the performer. Rob couldn’t see which urchin had tossed in the first coin. He took for granted it was a shill, provided with two pesos and allowed to keep one. With perhaps the threat of a beating with the meter-and-a-half-long blackwood staff that lay beside the busker to keep him or her
committed
.

Once primed, the audience responded readily. The busker had a winning way about him, always smiling and laughing and getting others to join in. His deformity, and the ingenious use he made of it, aroused both sympathy and admiration.

To his left Rob noted three men who had appeared in an alley mouth. They stood watching the performance with folded arms and scowls. To his eye they looked like professional toughs. He’d encountered more than a few such in his travels.