Harry Turtledove - Ruled Britannia

Lope pretended not to hear that. He couldn't ignore the reproach in the sergeant's voice: "Sir, we might have taken you for an Englishman and blown your head off."

"I'm very glad you didn't," Lope de Vega replied.

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said. "You still haven't said, sir, what you're doing out so long after curfew. We have the authority to arrest officers, sir." He might have had it, but he didn't sound delighted at the prospect of using it. An officer with connections and a bad temper could make him sorry he'd been born, no matter how right he was. Lope didn't have such connections, but how could the sergeant know that?

"What was I doing out so late?" he echoed. "Well, she had red hair and blue eyes and-" His hands described what else Maude had. He went on, "While I was with her, I didn't care what time it was."

"You should have spent the night, sir," the sergeant said.

"I would have liked that. She would have liked that, too. Her husband. alas, no." Lope shook his head.

"Her husband, eh?" The sergeant's laugh showed a missing tooth. A couple of his men let out loud, bawdy guffaws. "An Englishman?" he asked, and answered his own question: "Yes, of course, a heretic dog of an Englishman. Well, good for you, by God."

"And so she was," de Vega said, which got him another laugh or two. With the easy charm that made women open their hearts-and their legs-to him, he went on, "And now, my friends, if you would be so kind as to point me back to the barracks, I would count myself forever in your debt."

"Certainly, sir." The sergeant gestured with his torch. "That way, not too far."

" That way?" Lope said in surprise. "I thought that way led south, down toward the Thames." The soldiers shook their heads as one man. He'd seen it done worse on stage. He gave them a melodramatic sigh. "Plainly, I am mistaken. I'm glad I ran into you men, then. I got lost in this fog."

"The Devil take English weather," the sergeant said, and his men nodded with as much unity as they'd shown before. "Yes, the Devil take the cold, and the rain, and the fog-and he's welcome to the Englishmen while he's at it. They're all heretics at heart, no matter how many of them we burn." The rest of the patrol nodded yet again.

"Amen," de Vega said. "Well, now that I know where I'm going, I'll be off. I thank you for your help." He bowed once more.

Returning the bow, the sergeant said, "Sir, I'm afraid you'll only get lost again, and the streets aren't safe for a lone gentleman. I wouldn't want anything to happen to you." If anything does happen to you, I'll get blamed for it-Lope knew how to translate what he said into what he meant. The underofficer turned to his men. "Rodrigo, FernA?n, take the lieutenant back to the barracks."

"Yes, Sergeant," the troopers chorused. One of them made a splendid flourish with his torch. "You come along with us, sir. We'll get you where you're going."

"That's right," the other agreed. "We know this miserable, fleabitten town. We'd better-we've tramped all through it, night and day."

"I throw myself on your mercy, then," Lope said. They wouldn't be sorry to take him back, not when it got them out of the rest of the patrol. He didn't know how long that was; he'd lost track of time.

They proved as good as their word, too, guiding him back to the big wooden building by the London Stone. Some Englishmen swore the great stone with its iron bars was magical; some Spaniards believed them. Lope de Vega didn't care one way or the other. He was just glad to see it looming out of the mist.

A sentry called out a challenge. The soldiers answered it. "What are you bastards doing back here?" the sentry demanded. "You only went out an hour ago."

"We've got a lost gentleman, a lieutenant, with us," the trooper named FernA?n replied. "Sergeant Diaz sent us back with him-couldn't very well leave him running around loose for some English cabrA?n to knock him over the head."

"I may be a lieutenant, but I am not a child," Lope said as he advanced. FernA?n and Rodrigo and the sentry all found that very funny. What sort of lieutenants have they dealt with? he wondered. Or am I better off not knowing?

The sentry did salute him in proper fashion, and let him go in. A sergeant inside should have taken his name, but the fellow was dozing in front of a charcoal brazier. Lope slipped past him and into his room, where he pulled off his hat and boots and sword belt and went to bed. Diego, his servant, already lay there snoring. Diego, from everything Lope had seen, would sleep through the Last Judgment.

I might as well have no servant at all, de Vega thought, drifting toward sleep. But a gentleman without a servant would be. Unimaginable was the word that should have formed in his mind.

What did occur to him was better off. He yawned, stretched, and stopped worrying about it.

When he woke, it was still dark outside. He felt rested enough, though. In fall and winter, English nights stretched ungodly long, and the hours of July sunshine never seemed enough to make up for them. Diego didn't seemed to have moved; his snores certainly hadn't changed rhythm. If he ever felt rested enough, he'd given no sign of it.

Leaving him in his dormouse-like hibernation, Lope put on what he'd taken off the night before, adjusting the bright pheasant plume in his braided-leather hatband to the proper jaunty angle. He resisted the temptation to slam the door as he went out to get breakfast. My virtue surely piles up in heaven, he thought.

He joined a line of soldiers who yawned and knuckled their red eyes. Breakfast was wine and a cruet of olive oil-both imported from Spain, as neither the grape nor the olive flourished in this northern clime-and half a loaf of brown bread. The bread was local, and at least as good as he would have had back in Madrid.

He was just finishing when his superior's servant came up to him. Captain GuzmA?n's Enrique was the opposite of his own Diego in every way: tall, thin, smarter than a servant had any business being, and alarmingly diligent. "Good day, Lieutenant," Enrique said. "My principal requests the honor of your company at your earliest convenience."

Gulping down the last of the wine, Lope got to his feet. "I am at his Excellency's service, of course." No matter how flowery a servant made an order, an order it remained.

No matter how much Lope hurried, Enrique got to Guzman's office ahead of him. "Here's de Vega," he told GuzmA?n in dismissive tones. As a captain's man, he naturally looked down his nose at a creature so lowly as a lieutenant, even a senior lieutenant.

" Buenos dias, your Excellency," Lope said as he walked in. He swept off his hat and bowed.

"Good day," Captain Baltasar Guzman replied, nodding without rising from his seat. He was a dapper little man whose mustaches and chin beard remained wispy with youth: though Lope's superior, he was a good fifteen years younger. He had some sort of connection with the great noble house of GuzmA?n-the house of, among others, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, commander of the Armada-which explained his rank. He wasn't a bad officer, though, in spite of that. Enrique wouldn't let him be a bad officer, Lope thought.

"And how may I serve you today, your Excellency?" he asked.

Captain Guzman wagged a forefinger at him. "I hear you were out late last night."

"She was very pretty," de Vega replied with dignity. "Very friendly, too."

"No doubt," Guzman said dryly. "Our job, though, is to hunt down the English who are not friendly to King Philip, God bless him, not to seek out those who are."

"I wasn't on duty then." Lope tried to change the subject: "Is there any new word on his Majesty's health?"

"He's dying," Baltasar Guzman said, and crossed himself. "The gout, the sores. Last I heard, those are getting worse. He may go before the Lord tomorrow, he may last a year, he may even last two. But dying he is."