The Dinosaur Lords (32 page)

“If we lit out now we might escape with our hides.”

Karyl shook his head. “Relax. They won’t attack the town. Not yet.”

“And what makes you so sure?”

Karyl gave him a look.

“Be that way,” Rob said. “Tell me how you managed that oh-so-convenient bit of business with the raid, then.”

“I wish I knew,” Karyl said. “The Witness did say she thought I was touched by destiny.”

Rob blinked. “You made a joke!” he exclaimed. “Next thing I know you’ll be turning handstands through the public square!”

“Unlikely,” Karyl said. “I left that behind in Pot de Feu.”

“So, d’you believe at last in destiny and magic and the touch of the Fae?”

“No.” But Rob saw the uncomfortable way his friend closed and opened the fingers of his new hand, as if stretching the still-tender skin.

They left La Rue Imp
é
riale before reaching the town, cutting across fields and through a woodlot. As they approached the Garden villa through the twilight, a figure stepped away from its shadowed western side. Rob raised his axe, Wanda, from his shoulder, ready to whip away its stout nosehorn-hide case in an instant. Karyl didn’t react.

Then Rob saw the pale-yellow hair and relaxed. “Lucas, me lad,” he said. “You gave me a turn.”

“My lords,” the painter called. “A moment of your time, please.”

Rob’s reflex was to disavow lordship. Out of politeness, or perversity, he deferred the task to Karyl. Instead Karyl said, “What do you want?

“Please teach me to fight.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Rob asked.

“I mean,
really
fight. Properly, with a sword, man to man. Not just in a bunch of other men with long, pointy sticks.”

Rob laughed. “Why should we?” Karyl asked.

“I’ll help you! Any way I can. Anything you want me to do, just tell me. But please—teach me swordplay!”

Karyl studied him. He seemed more attentive somehow than Rob had yet seen him, even when he was taking lives. Maybe
especially
then.

“It’s a lot of work,” Karyl said. “It will take time away from your painting.”

“I understand that. I’ll find time to paint and practice both. I’m not afraid of work. I’m told I’m good with my hands, although I’ve never really wanted to do anything but paint. Uh, until now, that is.”

“If you become more skilled than your comrades, you might find yourself asked to take more risks than they do.”

“I’ll happily take them. Please!”

“And you’re willing to do what we tell you without question.”

Lucas sighed. “Anything,” he said. “I … I just want to show I’m not the ineffectual dauber my father always said I was. Before he disowned me, that is.”

Rob grunted and scratched his chin.
Well struck, lad,
he thought,
whether you know it or not. Admitting you’ve a belittling prick for a father can scarcely hurt your case with our Karyl.

“Very well,” Karyl said. “I will train you in sword craft. Roust out some volunteers. Get a work gang together and clean out the farmhouse. Have it done by midmorning, when Rob and I assemble the troops again. Make it ready for us to live in.”

At that point Rob expected Lucas to back away quickly. In his experience, artists lacked a taste for hard manual labor. He wasn’t overfond of it himself, though as a dinosaur master he saw more than his share.

But the boy almost unhinged head from neck nodding his acceptance. “Thank you, lord! You won’t regret taking me as your student. You won’t!”

“See that that’s true,” Karyl said. And to Rob’s astonishment the young man straightaway set off at a trot for the High Road.

Chapter
26

Torre, Torrey
—Baron of the Creators:
Gen
☶
(Mountain)—The Youngest Son. Represents Order (yet he’s the Trickster), law, bureaucracy, priests, smiths, miners, masons, and Mountains. Also burrowing animals. Known for his authority. Aspect: a powerful blond youth with a gold mail hauberk over a brown tunic, holding a hammer and a shovel. Sacred Animal: ferret. Colors: brown and yellow. Symbol: a golden tower.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Look at this.”

Jaume trailed fingertips along the ruined wall, savoring textures. Red-veined vines had suckered their way up the remnant, which in places still stood twice as tall as Jaume. Round-arched windows pierced it, long bereft of glass. Jaume recognized the style as dating from the Years of Trouble: the first two centuries of known history, before the Empire rose.

“As always, the forest reclaims its own,” Florian said.

The two men walked at sunset through an abandoned temple. The ruin lay a short way down a thickly wooded valley from the clearings where the army had bivouacked for the night. The breeze rustled branches spiked with narrow leaves as cuatralas, tiny raptors, glided between them on front and hind legs that were feathered like wings. Insects trilled welcome to the coming night. The sounds of beasts bawling and men calling played faintly in Jaume’s ears.

Fortunately the wind carried smells of the nobles’ retinues down a valley away from this one. Too many grandes resisted both army regulations and the rather brisk words of the Creators on the subject of
hygiene
. Jaume resisted the urge to pity himself.

At least he found Florian’s company congenial. Surprisingly so. The golden-haired Companion seemed to understand that
silence
could convey as much beauty as sound.

“No,” Jaume told him. “Here.”

Despite thick forest canopy, the day’s heat still lived in the yellow sandstone. He touched a hand’s-width swath where the gritty surface had turned smooth.

“It’s vitrified,” said Florian, leaning close to look. “Melted to glass and then reset.” A skilled smith as well as painter, Florian well understood matters such as the casting of metal and glass, which were mysteries to Jaume.

“What could do that?” Jaume asked.

“A lot of heat,” Florian said, straightening. He smoothed back a lock of hair sweat-glued to his forehead. “But where could it have come from?”

“Any number of sources, couldn’t it?” Jaume said. “A forest fire, perhaps?”

“That wouldn’t get hot enough.”

“A nearby volcano? A meteor strike?”

“There’s no sign of either near enough and big enough to cause this. Even after centuries, even as fast as the undergrowth returns, we’d see some evidence. Anyway, how would heat sources like those just leave streaks?”

“Lightning, then?”

“I don’t think so. The path is smooth, and meters long. If you look around there are other such tracks glazed along the walls. Also…”

He parted jagged vine leaves to reveal a small alcove. Carved beneath it was the glyph of the Youngest Son, a solid line above two broken ones. Empty now, it must once have held a small statue or icon of Torrey: tall, blond-bearded, usually shown cradling a ferret in his hands.

Torrey was the Creator associated with order, strength, and solidity. He was also the Trickster among the Eight. Each Creator embodied both sides of the coin, as it were: Maia was goddess of death as well as life-giver, and the Lady Herself, whose element was Fire, represented both Beauty’s flowering and inevitable decay.

“We’re inside the old walls,” Florian said. “Would lightning have struck here?”

He fingered his chin, which though somewhat long did not spoil the perfect symmetry of his features.
In ways it’s a pity he never takes men for lovers,
Jaume thought.
He’s probably the prettiest among my beautiful Companions.

Not that it mattered. As Captain-General, Jaume would take no lovers from among the Companions or their auxiliaries. The rule against sex with subordinates applied to him most strongly of all. Pere, of course, had been the exception; that was a continuation of a relationship bonded tight when both were youths.

Poor Pere,
Jaume thought.
I’ll always love you. I’ll always miss you.

“It may be irrational,” Florian said, “but this reminds me somehow of battle damage.”

Jaume shook his head to clear away the vision of his friend and lover’s eyes, huge and reproachful through the Channel water, and the great shadow swelling from below to carry him down and away forever.

“What weapon could score and melt stone like that?” Florian admitted there was none such. “No, my friend, you’re right: your fancy’s getting the better of you. Could lightning have struck after the temple collapsed?”

It occurred to Jaume that despite his misgivings, he felt comfortable calling Florian “friend.” He wondered when that had happened.

“Something’s preoccupying you, though, Captain,” Florian said.

He kept his tone light, on the edge of bantering, as he normally did. The fact he used Jaume’s title showed how serious his intent really was.

“It’s the army,” Jaume said. “The progress we’re making—or not making. It cuts up my stomach like broken glass.”

“I know what you mean. We’re a week on the march, with at least as long to go to reach our goal, and here Terraroja lies no more than a hard day and night’s ride on a good mount from La Merced.”

He shook his head. “And what can we expect? It took us two days to chivvy the bucketheads out of the clearing inland of the palace where the full army mustered. It’s like herding cats.”

Jaume laughed. “It’s a mystery: if my lord Bluemountain and his peers are so eager to get at the foe, why do they drag their heels every millimeter of the way?”

“Not that mysterious. Each is as reluctant to give up the slightest scrap of prerogative as he is eager to spill blood.”

“I don’t understand it,” Jaume said. “We’ve campaigned alongside nobles before. They always tend to be dense and impetuous by turns. But never like this.”

“It’s the Life-to-Come sect,” Florian said. “P
í
o’s Legate openly preaches it. And naturally the bucketheads love it: it turns all
The Books of the Law
on their heads, and gives free rein to their hunger for rape and blood and plunder at the expense of those they consider inferior.”

“You may be too cynical,” Jaume said.

“And you may not be cynical enough. No mistake, Captain: we love you for being too good for this world. But it’ll bring you heartache.”

Jaume’s smile was bittersweet.
My heart already aches as much as it can, I think.

“There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?” Florian asked.

Jaume sighed. “I should have been there for the execution today. If I order ugly things done, I should be there to witness them.”

“Ah, but you had to race off yet again to prevent Monta
ñ
azul and that fearsome woman who commands the Third from having at each other with dirks over right-of-way.”

“The Brown Nodosaurs are the finest infantry in the world,” Jaume said. “In five hundred years, they’ve never run from the field of battle. Yet the grandes despise them as mere peasant ‘residue’—no better than their own beaten-down levies.”

Florian laughed. “And our Coronel van Damme returns their contempt with interest.” The Nodosaurs prided themselves on being as prickly as their armored, spike-shouldered dinosaur namesakes.

“She’s got little more use for me than Bluemountain and the rest of the nobles do,” Jaume said. “She makes that clear enough. But she’ll give me no trouble on her own account. The Nodosaurs pride themselves on their professionalism. I’m her commander; she doesn’t have to like me to obey. It’s the same rule she’s lived by since she joined the ranks as a pike-pusher.” Which was rare. Usually women Nodosaurs served as skirmishers.

“The Imperial infantry looks down on everyone who isn’t one of them,” Florian said. “Except your uncle the Emperor.”

“He
is
one of them,” Jaume said. “At least, he’s a former pikeman. He’s the only occupant of the Fang
è
d Throne who’s ever known what it feels like to carry four meters of hardwood shaft and a meter of iron head on his shoulder all day in the heat, and the terror and exhaustion of fighting in the phalanx. They love him for it, as if he were both father and son to them.”

“Eloquently put, Captain. You should be a poet. But—are you sure that’s all that’s eating at you?”

To cover his wince, Jaume stooped beside a cluster of white night blossoms where the broken wall stub fell away to the springy mulch of the forest floor. Because there were several, he felt no hesitation in plucking one. He rose, holding it to his nose, savoring its thick perfume and the resiliency of the stem between his fingers.

“Isn’t that enough?” he said.

Melod
í
a,
he thought,
I write you every day. And all I hear back is silence. Have you really turned your back on me, my love?

He longed to relieve the pressure of pain in his heart, to let some out. But he didn’t feel close enough to this mercurial Franc
é
s yet for that much intimacy.

They left the confines of the ancient temple, moving up the game trail that led to their camp. At once the sound of rustling came through the gloomy growth ahead. Both men put hand to sword hilt.