Eric Flint: 1635: The Cannon Law

He stopped, remained silent, and turned around on the spot taking in the view of the piazza. He sighed gently. "This is a thing of some sadness for me, Sharon. I have passed many years in this world and made many enemies and many friends. And many of those friends, too many as I now recall, cannot come to our wedding."

Sharon realized, not knowing quite how for nothing showed on the old soldier's face, that Ruy was close to tears. She stepped closer and hugged him. His embrace in return was fierce and strong, like everything about Ruy. And yet there was that core of grief and burden, at being what he was not and the pretense that made his life possible. On top of which, the friends he must have buried, and the wives. Somehow she felt it would not be right to cry for him, though. Don Quixote-on-steroids that he was, a weeping Dulcinea did him no justice at all.

"And I suspect most of the enemies couldn't come even if they wanted to, hey?" she said, quietly. Ruy could see through flattery, and took it in the spirit in which it was intended.

He stepped back, holding her at arm's length by the shoulders, grinning fiercely. "Those few that live would not dare!" he sneered, surfing over a moment's melancholy on a wave of braggadocio. "But there are some few friends remaining who might yet come to see me marry again. I shall write letters, a chore I have, I confess, avoided until now. The pen may indeed be mightier than the sword, but I find it considerably more tedious to wield."

And wasn't that the truth. It wasn't until they were living under the same roof on a semiformal basis that Sharon had discovered that there was more to being a swordsman than just owning a sword. Or, even, a couple of swords. Ruy's career had seen fashions in dress and military swords change several times. He had kept up with fashion, but seemed unable to bear to part with old weaponry. Racks of the things, and other weapons besides. Had Sharon not known that Ruy hailed from a rural region, she'd have pegged him for a hillbilly from that alone. His collection of lethal hardware was eye-popping stuff that was cousin in spirit to the racks of guns one still saw in the backs of trucks around Grantville and the arsenals many of the townsfolk maintained beyond anything they could ever actually use.

And all of Ruy's weaponry, apart from a few collectors' pieces, was used, some of it to the point of near collapse and most with at least one outrageous story attached. A fair bit of it was for ornamental as well as lethal purposes, too. He had more dress swords than Sharon had dresses, although she was working on remedying that condition now that the actual cash from the previous year's trading successes in Venice was starting to filter through.

"I think," she said after they had strolled along in companionable silence for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the street bustle of Rome in the spring, "I'll see what the hired staff at the embassy know about whatever the local version of wedding planners might be."

"Most excellent, my heart. You may approach the day of our nuptials knowing that matters are in professional hands, and I in the sure and certain knowledge that I merely need stand in place and recite my lines in order to have my heart's desire."

Sharon decided on a change of subject. "We've not heard back from the Vatican about a proper meeting, yet," she said.

"I misdoubt you will, my lady. His Holiness could not refuse to receive your credentials as ambassador, but more would be inopportune."

"Mike and Don Francisco warned me as much. Not that we've a lot to talk about with the pope, as it happens. It'd just be nice to do some proper ambassadoring to go with all the other work we're doing here."

"If I may make the pretense of being a judge of diplomatic skill, your other work is no cause for modesty, Sharon." He wagged a finger at her. "Let it not be said that the ties you make and break in this city do less than the utmost good for your country."

"Flatterer."

"Deserved flattery, for your modesty, becoming as it is, ill-serves your talents and finer qualities. I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, say it is true."

She slapped his arm. "Enough, already," she said. "I'll get a swelled head."

"Ah," he said, after a few moments' more stroll. "Here is a contact that, if it is offered, you should cultivate."

They were passing the Palazzo Barberini, much of which was shrouded in scaffolding and busy with workmen. It was a constant reproach to the Barberini pope Urban VIII that his relatives were leeching on the church's revenues for projects such as the grandification of their house in Rome, a project that would result, according to Larry-now Cardinal-Mazzare, Grantville's former catholic parish priest, in the place having been one of Rome's foremost art museums outside the Vatican when the then Father Mazzare visited it in the twentieth century.

"I've thought about trying to get a foot in that door, yes," Sharon said.

"Most astute," Ruy said, "indeed-"

Sharon cut him off before he could deliver another dump-truck load of praise. "-as I was saying, I was thinking about getting a foot in that door, but I figure that whatever's holding the pope back's got to be holding his relations back as well."

"True. Although I suspect that there are younger members of the family-Antonio Barberini, for example-who might be less constrained. A matter, of course, for your judgment."

For a wonder, he seemed to be offering plain and simple advice, not heaping on the praise and flattery that Sharon, for all her protests, secretly rather enjoyed. Perhaps he genuinely was trying to hint that she could make an end run around the official attitude of noncommittal that the Vatican's equivalent of the State Department was maintaining.

The year before, when there had only been a consulate relaying radio messages from Magdeburg and the Low Countries, there had been messengers to and from the Vatican the whole time. Of course, between the business with Don Fernando and the pope's refusal to help Spain by interfering in Naples, Spain was profoundly annoyed with the pope. Not least because of what it cost them to move as many troops as they had in to Naples and Calabria-and what it had cost them to get the duke of Osuna to desist from open rebellion was anyone's guess, as was how firm his newfound loyalty to Madrid might be. And what with all those troops in Naples right now, His Holiness was probably a little more nervous of Spanish displeasure than he'd been before he'd had a medium-sized army just across the border "suppressing internal dissent."

"Well, maybe," she said, as they came level with the grand entrance of the palazzo. "For the moment, I don't really have any reason to be urgent about cultivating any contacts there, so it can wait a while. Maybe we can invite this Antonio-he's a cardinal, isn't he?-to some function or other just to test the waters. Meantime, I've got other chickens to pluck. This stuff about Cardinal Borja, for one. And getting married to a disreputable old Catalan, for another."

"Ah, wounded to the quick," Ruy groaned.

The Piazza Barberini, as the guidebook named it-Sharon wasn't sure if it bore that name quite yet, although the palazzo had been there long enough that it might-gave on to several little side streets that looked as though they might prove to be a shortcut through to the neighborhood where the USE embassy now stood. The road that should have led directly there seemed not to have been built yet. According to the guidebook, Mussolini, Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel had remodeled large amounts of Rome among them. So the relationship between the street plan in the back of the guide book and the streets Sharon and Ruy were actually walking was sketchy at best.

The attempt at a shortcut turned in to a rather confusing series of lefts and rights through increasingly narrow streets-alleys, to give them their right name-and it became obvious that even in the good parts of Rome there were places where the company was less than congenial. Sharon had no particular difficulty with that. While she had grown up in a nice part of town, her dad's ghetto clinic had been a place she'd gone with him from time to time. With him being so familiar with that kind of neighborhood Sharon had never really gotten the idea that the other side of the tracks was alien territory. So she wasn't more than mildly concerned-it being a bright morning, after all-until Ruy halted in mid-chat and stopped her with a hand on her arm.