The Dinosaur Lords – Chapter 02

Chapter 02

Casco, Helmet-Crest, Helmet, Morion. . . . – Corythosaurus casuarius

– The Book of True Names

Racing across a craterland of slick, piss-stinking mud proved almost as challenging as evading skittish three-tonne duckbills, if not half so hair-raising.  Rob tripped once and slipped once, getting well coated in reeking brown gesso before reaching ground where enough grass survived to stabilize the mud.

Even before he mounted a low rise to see the rude log pen he had built to hold his pets he heard grunts and evil muttering compounded by the odd squeal of annoyance.  His five-meter long Hook-horned hornface Little Nell had her toothed beak with its short, thick, forward-curving nasal horn stuck happily in a berry-bush by the woods upslope.  The two slender, inward-curving horns at the top of her frill seemed to bob like insect antennae as she ate.   A stout Strider-leather rope secured a hind leg to a nearby tree.

On the palisade perched four local youths.  Rain molded threadbare smocks dyed by the dirt and flora of every place they’d ever been to washboard bodies.  They craned frantically up and downriver in an effort to watch the whole terrific spectacle at once.

Rob had felled the trees for the enclosure in the woods behind the Princely camp.  His Einiosaurus had dragged them into place.  Any Dinosaur Master worth his silver was a capable jackleg pioneer.  And on a world abounding in huge, powerful dinosaurs, hardly anybody lacked for raw muscle.

He had built and pegged the log walls well.  The pen’s two dozen occupants were nearly blind, with brains as weak as their eyes.  Like most dinosaurs they wouldn’t customarily challenge a barrier that looked solid.  But they might blunder into it.

Fresh trumpeting and banging brought Rob’s head up.  The Count’s Dinosaur Knights had pounded willy-nilly into the river, raising big rust-shot wakes.  Most of the Brabantés mercenaries and half a dozen knights had been left on the bank as reddish highlights in the mud and the odd steel crumple.  Injured duckbills had smashed through the Augenfelsen riders like boulders tossed by improbably vast trebuchets.  Instead of a stone-solid mass they were a straggling herd.  But still that invincible buckethead aggression carried the survivors forward.

Clean onto the horns of Karyl’s Triceratops.

Splendid Morions and gaudy Sackbuts shrieked agony as file-sharpened steel impaled chests and throats.  Some reared away from the awful horns, only to have unarmored bellies ripped open by them.  Never shy about fighting, the trikes put their gigantic heads down to gore and toss with savage joy.  Squealing like entire dying brass ensembles, stricken duckbills fell in the water, raising splashes higher than the fighting-castles strapped to their destroyers’ backs.

Meanwhile the archers in those lath and wicker howdahs, hung with slabs of Nosehorn hide for armor, kept up their high-intensity arrow storm.  Their missiles now carried nail-like bodkin points, forged of extremely hard steel by nomad Gitano specialists.  At this range they penetrated even plate, pinning cuirasses and rerebraces to bodies and limbs.

Hornbowmen and women aimed especially for helmet eye-slits and the weak points at joints.  Some took up lances themselves as targets offered to the sides where their mounts could not engage.  All the while the Struthio Lancers swarmed around the Princely flanks, stinging like hornface-flies with their arrows and darts and javelins.

Voyvod Karyl rode his terrible mount in among the foe.  Rob saw Shiraa rip an armored sword-arm right off a knight’s body and toss it away like a dog playing with its bone.  Karyl’s longsword flickered like silver flame.  Where it struck, armored nobles fell.

Rob shook his head.  Rain and mud flew from his hair.  “I told you so, you great git,” he muttered.  Who was too far to hear, not to mention too preoccupied.  And wouldn’t have listened anyway.

He felt as if a mass of ashes had been heated red and was being stirred inside him.  It was a Dinosaur Master’s classic dilemma:  above all things he loved dinosaurs, the greatest and most majestic of all the Creators’ works.  Yet it was his fate to set them to destroy each other.  As always when watching a battle he had helped to wreak, Rob Korrigan both exulted and despaired.

Worse – far worse – was soon to come.  He knew because he would bring it.

Running a hand over his face to clear his eyes of muck, Rob turned and yelled for his helpers to fetch the reed torches he’d laid by in tarred, covered baskets to keep dry, and the cheap tin horns he’d bought from a camp-following sutler’s cart.

“My turn, laddy bucks,” he said.

#

“Do you really find it beautiful, Jaumet?” Pere asked.  Despite wearing full white-enameled plate armor he seemed slight.  His eyes were large and dark in a pale gamin face, the lashes long.  He wore his jet-black hair shorter than his captain’s, finger-length.  Rain plastered it to his forehead.

Jaume Llobregat, Count of the Flowers, raised his face to let the warm rain beat on it.  He ran both hands up long, fine features and back through shoulder-length orange hair the wet had turned to an auburn mat.  He relished it all:  the feel of skin on skin, moisture squeezing back beneath his palms, the texture of sodden hair and the flow of water through it.  Even the smells of a score of nervous duckbills:  all.

Sensuousness was, for him, a religious duty.

He sighed.

“I really do,” he said.  Standing apart from the other Companions and their giant mounts mustered halfway down the face of the ridge called Gunters Moll, they spoke català, the language of their homeland. “The Lady Bell forgive me, I do.  We all know how ugly war is up close.  But at this remove –”

He gestured at the abattoir river. “ – yes.  A terrible beauty.  But beauty withal.”

Pere shook his head. “You’re better at finding beauty amidst ugliness than I.”

Though he carefully tried to keep his tone conversational, Jaume heard the sullen undertone.  They had grown up together, best friends long before they became lovers.

He smiled, hoping to lighten Pere’s mood. “Perhaps.  After all, isn’t life always a matter of picking the beautiful out from the hideous?”

“If only all things were beautiful,” Pere said.

“What then, dear friend?  We strive to increase beauty in this world of ours.  But we’ll never eliminate the ugly.  Should we even hope to?  You’re a master painter.  Isn’t the figure meaningless without ground?  Without ugliness for contrast, how can we perceive beauty?  Isn’t it ugliness which gives beauty meaning?”

Pere gave his head a peevish little shake. “You’re always right.”

Jaume put a hand on the pauldron that protected his friend’s left shoulder, enjoying the feel of the steel and the raindrops beading on its smoothly-textured surface.  Like all the Companions, Pere had a large Lady’s-mirror symbol painted in red on his breastplate, with his own personal white-on-black horse emblem, smaller, above and to his left.

“Don’t I wish that were true?  And anyway, when I’m lucky enough to be right, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, does it?”

Pere looked away.  He always brooded before combat.  He had no taste for battle.  He was merely very good at it.

But Jaume knew there was more at work on his friend’s composure.

Respecting Pere’s need to withdraw, Jaume looked to his nearby Companions.  Before action he liked to drink them in with his eyes.  It might be the last time he ever saw some of them; for all their prowess, none was invincible.  In its brief career the Order had already lost far more knights than the twenty-four who, by Church charter, were all that could serve at any one time.

It might be the last time I see anything at all, he thought, if my time’s come to rejoin my Lady.

Next to Pere stood Jürgen, big, blond, blue-eyed, passionate, sweet-talking his cream-and-gold female Halberd-crest duckbill Gerlinde and blowing gently up her nostrils.  Most Companions deemed him the most beautiful among them – except Jaume himself, who had a bias toward Pere.  Beyond him the two Pedros, the Greater and the Lesser, stood talking.  Pedro de Silva, el Mejor, tall, slim, and dark, with an exquisite Imperial;  peacock-vain, seemingly disdainful, and the most generous man Jaume had ever met.  El Menor, Pedro de la Luna:  short, intense, focused on perfecting weapons-mastery to the exclusion of most else.  Montador Jacques, slight, with thinning, prematurely greying hair, absently stroking the neck of his white female Sackbut Puretée.  The least comely of the Companions, he was among the dearest of the dear to Jaume – and indispensable for his gift of handling vital administrative duties none of the other Brothers, least of all Jaume, cared for.  Blunt-faced Mor Bernat, Jaume and Pere’s countryman and the Company’s chronicler, held hands with his lover, the tousle-haired, brooding Vasco knight Iñigo, and sang a soft duet with the Anglaterrano Owain de Galés.

“How I love this rain!” a sardonic voice called from behind Jaume.  He turned to see Florian approaching, looking only slightly awkward as he negotiated the slanting mud and wet grass-covered slope in his metal-soled sabatons.  His blond hair, normally kinked, hung like a wet banner past his shoulders.

“How can you like this foul rain?” demanded Timaeos.  One of the two largest Companions, over two meters tall and built to match, the Greco ran to the literal-minded.  Unlike his equally huge friend Ayaks, who spoke like thunder, he had an incongruously high-pitched voice.

Florian grinned “Consider the alternative.  Which would be, broiling alive in the sun in our steel finery.”

The others laughed.  Even Pere relaxed.  His hand at last sought Jaume’s and was happily received.  Although delicate in appearance it had the strength of steel wire, and the telltale calluses left by the tools of his three excellences:  the paintbrush, stringed instruments, and the blade.

I know what troubles you, old friend, Jaume thought. You dread our return to the Imperial Court at La Merced.  But if Uncle Felipe accepts my suit, and I marry my Melodía – my other best friend and lover – things needn’t change between us.

He shook his head.  That was foolish, he knew.  The problem wasn’t with the Princesa Imperial, quick-witted and spirited, with her cinnamon skin and laughing dark-hazel eyes and wine-red hair.

Jealousy was considered a vice on Nuevaropa, particularly in the cosmopolitan south.  It had always gnawed at Pere.  Now it threatened to consume him.  To Jaume’s regret and helpless foreboding, it ate relentlessly away at their friendship.

“Dispatch for my Lord Count Jaume!”

Down the flank of Gunters Moll, past the plate-and-chain armored ranks of Brother-Ordinary gendarmes waiting by their coursers, rode a young page in von Rundstedt livery.  His blue Great Strider seemed to fly across wet grass. “Give way!  I bring a change in plans to the worshipful Captain-General!”

“It’s time,” said Jaume. “Guillem, if you please?”

He headed toward his own mount, the beautiful butterscotch and white Morion Camellia, who stood tipped onto her forelimbs plucking daintily at the weeds with her narrow muzzle.  Hers was an oddly graceful species, despite the way their low-set necks emphasized their bodies’ bulk.  She had carried Jaume through many desperate adventures; he loved her like a daughter.

Blond Guillem, his arming-squire, trotted up to strap Jaume’s bevor shut at the nape of his neck to protect his lower face and throat.  Then he urged Camellia to her belly with soft words and pressure on her reins to allow Jaume to mount.

“What could this mean, Jaumet?” asked Pere, as his own arming-squire brought his strikingly patterned white-on-black Sackbut Teodora to the ground.  The other knights’ squires all did the same.

“A change of battle plan?” said Florian.  “How?  It seems pretty straightforward:  wait until the White River Three-horns break the Princely knights, then chase the survivors into the hills.  Easy, for a Lady’s miracle.  What’s there to change?”

“Whatever our Marshal commands, we must obey,” intoned Manfredo.  The red-haired Taliano hailed like Timaeos from the far empire of Trebizon.  His beauty was marred by a somewhat over-square chin, and a tendency toward the sententious – especially where law was concerned.  His lover Fernão, black-haired, green eyed, a master of stonework and siege, stood behind him, quiet and constant as a shadow.

The Strider’s long-toed hind feet scrabbled to halt it on the rain-slick surface.  Its young rider, with blue eyes and a peaches and cream Northern complexion beneath near-white hair, simpered at Jaume as he handed over a wax-sealed scroll.

“If you think you’re going to seduce your way into the Companions,” Florian called, “think again.”  The boy blushed furiously.

“Florian, be kind,” said Jaume. “Well done, lad.  Thank you.”

The courier stammered thanks and rode back uphill as fast as his long-legged steed could carry him.  Jaume frowned at the Prinz-Marschall’s signet stamped into indigo wax and wondering the same thing as Florian.  With a curious apprehension creeping up his neck from his shoulders and into his cheeks he broke the seal, unrolled the scroll, and read.

A chill swept over him like the winter wind that blew down from the Shields into his homeland.  He read the few lines of obsessively neat penmanship three times over, blinking at the rain.  The letters did not rearrange themselves into more pleasing order.

Crumpling the parchment, he threw it to the ground.  He felt the startled gazes.  It was an uncharacteristic gesture.

“Jaume, what is it?” Pere cried.

Not trusting himself to speak, Jaume turned and vaulted into the saddle on Camellia’s back.  Clucking gently he got her to her feet.  She raised her head with its great round orange-dappled crest and sniffed the air eagerly.  Like any good war-duckbill, Camellia welcomed battle.

Jaume leaned down to take his sweep-tailed sallet helmet from Guillem.  A page stood by holding Jaume’s shield and lance.  He took them.  Then cradling his helmet in the crook of his arm he faced his knights.

“Gentlemen,” he called, pitching his voice to carry. “Follow my lead, no matter what.”

The others stared. “What else would we do?” Florian said in disbelief.

Jaume shook his head. “I’ve never asked you to follow me on such a mission before.  And I pray our Lady, never again!”

#

“Come on, girl!  That’s the way!”

Whacking Little Nell’s green-mottled rump with a willow withe – which didn’t hurt her; that would’ve taken an axe-handle, or better, an axe – Rob urged the tonne-and-a-half hook-horn into the river.  The chains he’d yoked her with clattered taut.  With a groan the wall-section tipped outward, then fell with a splash and a slam.

The penned dinosaurs raised bleats of alarm and annoyance.  In their case those came to the same thing.  Rob steered Nell far enough upstream to clear the logs from the opening.  Then he unhooked the chains and let them fall in the water.

He slapped the Einiosaurus’s broad fanny.  Snorting and tossing her head she trotted twenty meters, splashing maroon, then turned and hightailed up the bank.  She would wander into the woods a short ways and graze; Rob knew his beloved mount well.

“All right!” he yelled to his young helpers. “Chase ’em out!”

On the inland wall the four Eye Cliff youths blew enthusiastically on toy horns and waved torches that popped and smoked and sparked in the now-sparse rain.  The discord made Rob’s eyes water worse than pitch-smoke.

Can’t the little blighters try to find the pitch, even on such lousy instruments? But now was no time to play the artiste.  He pulled a tin horn from his belt and blew it as thoughtlessly as they.

The herd of wild Lesser Mace-tails he’d been catching and gingerly herding along behind the Princely army this past eight-day week streamed out the gate.  The Book of True Names dubbed them Pinacosaurus.  A smallish breed of Ankylosaurus, no more than five meters long, with rounded bony-armored backs no higher than Rob’s shoulder, they carried really terrifying two-lobed bone maces at the tips of their tails.

Which they swung ominously from side to side.  They were well and truly pissed.  In that state their first reaction was to smash something.  Also their second and third.

Above all the Mace-tails feared two things:  fire and noise.  By means of both the urchins drove them into the river.  Rob hoped his terrible tootling, plus the keen sense of when to jump and which way that was a vital part of any Dinosaur Master’s repertoire, would keep the monsters from venting their rage on him.

Blunt armored heads held low, the Lesser Maces churned across the Hassling.  Hoping the youths would remember what he’d told them to do, and actually do it, Rob ran alongside the herd, honking like a mad thing.

A cry of many voices but one single note – droning despair – rose from the Princely right.  Men-at-arms, dismounted and helmetless, sloshed up the near bank.  On a silken banner stretched between them, its once-glorious colors smirched unrecognizably, they carried the limp figure of the Count.

The black shaft, fletched with the White River Legion’s two grey feathers and one white, jutting from the right eye-slit of his bascinet told all.

The handful of Princely Dinosaur Knights who had survived the Three-horns were in full retreat.  A hundred meters from the river a thousand men-at-arms sat war-horses who fidgeted and rolled their eyes as the musically bellowing monsters stampeded past them to the east.  Poised to chase and butcher foes fleeing the Count’s war-duckbills, they now found themselves facing the full jubilant wrath of the White River Legion Triceratops.

Karyl rode Shiraa along the front rank of trikes, re-ordering them into a compact horn-bristling bloc.  Though some of the fighting-castles had lost crewfolk, so far as Rob could see not a single Three-horn had fallen.

Legion trumpets blew.  Howdahs swaying, the monsters came inexorably on again.

The Mace-tails were loping now, breaking water powerfully if not fast.  Rob and his yokel helpers stopped knee-deep in water to watch.  They didn’t want to be close to what was about to happen.

In the fighting-castles urgent hands pointed.  Focused on the Princes’ Party chivalry awaiting in reserve on the south bank, the Slavo mercenaries only began to notice the squatty dinosaurs approaching them.

Colossal three-horned heads tossed and bellowed.  The trikes’ eyesight wasn’t keen either.  But they smelled ancient enemies.  And the Mace-tails smelled them.

Paranoid, bellicose, rivals for the same graze, Mace-tails and hornfaces were uniquely suited to do each other harm.  Trikes could flip the low-slung monsters on their backs with their nasal horns to slash open tender bellies.  But in close, their foes could smash Triceratops knees with their eponymous tail-clubs.  They could even scuttle under a Three-horn to bash the vulnerable insides of its legs.

These things began to happen.  In an eyeblink the Legion’s iron discipline shattered.  Eyes rolling in terror, Triceratops bolted from those terrible tails.  Fighting-castles broke away from tall backs to topple into the water, carrying passengers to mostly horrible fates.

Laughing and weeping Rob Korrigan danced in bloody water.  What he felt was beyond even his jongleur’s tongue to describe.

He despised all nobles with a fine lack of discrimination.  With one exception:  Voyvod Karyl Bogomirskiy, the lord who was his own Dinosaur Master, the age’s unequaled artist in the use of dinosaurs in war.  His were the mightiest and most majestic of all war-beasts.  In the decade since he had returned from years of wandering to reconquer his March from those who had betrayed him, murdered his father, and forced him to flee to exile as a youth, neither Karyl nor his Three-horns had ever tasted defeat.

Now, with one frightful stratagem, Rob was bringing down the invincible White River Legion.  And crippling and killing the things he loved most on Paradise.  It was triumph and profanation all in one.

“What are you waiting for, you tin-plated cowards!” he shouted at the immobile ranks of Princely chivalry, who assuredly couldn’t hear him. “I’ve given you victory on a golden plate.  Take it!  Take it, and eat, damn you!”

Choking on sobs and giggles, he fell to his knees.  Snot streamed from his nostrils.  Warm water embraced him like a cesspool.

He noticed something strange.  To his left the fighting had died down.  The Princes’ peasant infantry streamed back south out of the Hassling, yet without a rout’s mad urgency.  The browned-iron Nodosaur ranks inexplicably continued to stand, wall-solid on the northern bank behind a berm of corpses.  They showed no signs of indulging in the customary pursuit plus slaughter.

Down the now-clear river rode several score Dinosaur Knights.  Rob blinked in amazement.  Leading them came the Princely hotspur, young Duke Falk von Hornberg.  His mount Snowflake was the most dreaded flesh-eating dinosaur of all Aphrodite Terra, a King Tyrant – Tyrannosaurus rex, not native to the Tyrant’s Head, the name notwithstanding.  An albino, Snowflake was small for his race, no longer than Shiraa though burlier.  Whether dwarf or merely adolescent Rob didn’t know.

Waving above the duckbills that forged nervously behind the big white carnosaur Rob saw Imperial banners implausibly mingled with those of the rebel Princes.

“What in the name of the Fae is going on here?” Rob exclaimed.  Weird ecstasy replaced by complete bewilderment, he sat back on his heels with his knees in the bottom-muck and the water gurgling around his butt and shrinking his loincloth up between the cheeks to watch.

From the north bank pealed a mighty fanfare.  White-enameled armor gleaming even in  the paltry sun, the Companions trotted to the aid of Karyl’s Legion.  That roused Rob’s soul:  if he could admire another noble than Karyl, it was Count Jaume.  If half the songs Rob sang of him were true, he truly was a hero.

Of course, that intervention by a handful of Dinosaur Knights, with five hundred heavy horse behind, could spoil the grand and perfidious success of Rob’s scheme.  But he’d shot his bolt.  Now he prepared to watch events unfold with a connoisseur’s eye – and a mind to the clink of silver in his cup from the songs he’d sing about this.

Jaume, his face obscured by sallet and bevor but whose famous mount Camellia was unmistakable, couched his lance and charged.  After what seemed an eyeblink’s hesitation, his sixteen Companions did likewise.  As one the duckbills opened their beaks to bellow.

No sound came out – that any human could hear.  Rob rocked back with eyes wincing shut as the side blast of the terremoto struck him like an invisible fist.  When he opened them again he refused at first to believe them.

Not the approaching Dinosaur Knights but Karyl’s fighting-castle crews were reeling and clutching heads streaming blood from ruptured orifices.  Largely immune to the hadrosaurs’ silent war-cry from the front thanks to bony faces and frills, almost all his Three-horns had their backs and sides to Jaume’s monsters.  They too suffered the terremoto’s full effects:  fear, burst eardrums, even lesions in the lungs.  A Triceratops bull reared high, pawing the air and bleating like a gut-speared Springer.  Its howdah broke loose, spilling men and women flailing into the river.

The Companions charged straight into them.

Rob boiled to his feet. “What’s this?” he screamed at the air. “Treachery?” He hardly knew what else to call it.

Jaume lanced a lightly-armored archer from a howdah, wriggling like a bug on a pin.   He let go the lance to drop her in the water.  Then he drew his hand-and-a-half sword the Lady’s Mirror from its saddle scabbard and laid about.

The surprise attack caught the already-disordered mercenaries utterly helpless.  Even though by now the Mace-tails had bulled their way clear to scramble up the north bank and make for the woods, the Legion stood no chance.  Formidable as Triceratops’ horns were, they were effective only against an enemy to their front.  Even the Ordinaries worked wicked execution, their horses looking like toys as they hamstrung bellowing horned colossi with swords and axes.

Karyl rode Shiraa at a spraddling, splashing run, trying desperately to herd his surviving Three-horns east.  While most Northern rivers flowed north or west, the Hassling ran from a small mountain range west of the battlefield to the inland sea called the Tyrant’s Eye.  Not four kilometers east it broke over the sheer limestone precipices for which the county was named into a three-hundred meter cataract to the sea below.  Yet that way offered Karyl’s only prayer of escape.

The Matadora came flank to flank with a Companion Halberd.  The white and green brindled duckbill was bigger; Shiraa had teeth.  Though his eyes rolled in fear beneath a crest with rounded blade to the front and a spike angled to the rear, the Lambeosaurus bull didn’t give way.  The Companions trained their mounts to overcome even their instinctive terror of big meat-eaters.  Indeed, the much heavier Halberd could knock the racing-shell slim Shiraa down.

But Karyl’s blade struck unerringly through the eye-slit of the Companion’s close helmet.  The white knight fell.  His mount fled, trumpeting despair.

Falk and Snowflake fell on the mercenary lord from his blind spot.  For Rob it was a surfeit of wonder:  uncommon as carnosaurs were as war-mounts, they almost never faced one another in battle.

Somehow sensing danger Karyl wheeled Shiraa clockwise.  Snowflake struck first.  His huge jaws tore a strip of flesh from Shiraa’s right shoulder.

The Matadora screamed.  Her raw wound steamed in the rain, which had begun to fall heavily again.

Falk’s big double-bladed axe swung down to smash in Karyl’s morion.

Rag-limp, Karyl Bogomirskiy fell into the rising, frothing torrent and vanished.  For a moment Rob thought Shiraa would stand above her master.  She and Snowflake darted fanged  mouths at each other, roaring rage in voices like the Eight Creators’ own clarions, that seemed momentarily to still all other noise.

Dinosaur Knights Princely and Imperial alike closed in.  Reluctantly Shiraa backed away.  With a lost-child wail she turned and fled downstream.

The rain closed in, obscuring Rob’s sight.  Or was it tears?

Rob Korrigan dropped to his knees in the unforgiving river.  He mourned beautiful and mighty beasts, and the fall of true greatness.  And cursed himself for the part he’d played in all.

“What have I done?” he sobbed. “What have I sold?

He raised fists to a lead Heaven. “And what has it bought me?”

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