Eric Flint: 1635: The Cannon Law

They slipped unseen to the boats, while behind them the fires in the ruins of the Castel Sant'Angelo began to take hold and light the night sky once more.

Rome

Giovanna peered into the earthenware jug that the jailer had brought in that morning. She could manage the night despite the thirst. There would be another jug in the morning, as there had been for the last two mornings. She had had to use most of it to get Frank clean, since she had been allowed to share a cell with him. They had let a doctor at him, and the bandages were clean, at least. It was the rest of him, the cuts, the bruises, the scrapes and gouges. And the soot and the dust he'd been covered with, and the dried blood.

He was still breathing, for which Giovanna thanked God. They had left Giovanna her rosary, which had been her mother's. She'd been trying for years to follow her father's revolutionary precepts but she'd not been able to bear to throw the thing away. Here and now, it was a great comfort. She even remembered the right prayers to say.

Would it do any good? They'd told her there was to be a new pope soon, that the old one was dead in the ruins of the Castel Sant'Angelo. The last light of a summer's evening came through the tiny, barred window, and she stared up at the indigo sky in which stars were starting to appear. Outside she could hear the sounds of soldiers marching about. She'd heard only snatches of the sack of the city that was going on outside. Sometimes there was screaming, and earlier in the day she'd heard the grisly sounds of an execution outside. From the window, she'd just been able to see that someone was being garroted. Someone in a priest's clothes. She'd tried to think of it as the inevitable bloodshed when the forces of reaction fell to fighting among themselves, but what she'd seen had been an old man being strangled.

It made thinking about anything beyond the next jug of water and loaf of bread… hard. The last of the daylight was falling on Frank's face now. His eyes were twitching a little under his eyelids, and his breathing had the rasp of his soft snores. She hoped that was a good sign. The linen of the bandage around his head was crusted with blood, and she had not dared try to change it. There was a finger missing from his left hand, the ring finger. That seemed to have stopped oozing now, and she hoped she'd kept it clean and dry enough. The broken leg seemed to have been set well enough, but she could not tell under the splint and the strapping.

They'd told her that he'd been shot, but only grazed by two bullets, and the rest had happened when the building collapsed. That he had not been beaten, or shot by anyone's order. That the shooting had been an accident in the tension of surrender and the bruises from being buried under rubble.

Why Spanish soldiers should care that she thought of them any better than she did, she had no idea. But they had put her in here to nurse her husband, which was worth far more than any apologies. She had been weeping, barely able to breathe for grief until they told her Frank was alive. They'd also told her they did not have enough jailers to nurse all the injured prisoners, and needed the cell space anyway.

It helped that the Spaniards were using Roman jailers, who didn't seem all that enthusiastic about keeping prisoners for the Spanish Inquisition. They were doing their best to keep everyone in the cell block healthy and comfortable.

And Frank still slept. She had heard stories of people who never awoke after head injuries, and every hour Frank slept made her think about them some more. He had the beginnings of a fever, too. If any of his wounds became gangrenous, only the mercy of her jailers would bring a doctor to save him from it.

There was a rattle of keys in the corridor. Someone was coming.

"Senora?" The voice wasn't the usual jailer, a native Roman, but a Spanish-accented voice. Giovanna put down the jug and stepped away from the door when the spyhole clacked open. There was murmured conversation outside and then another rattle of keys. The door opened and it was the Spanish captain who had had her captured but let everyone else go. And who had had Frank shot.

She choked down the urge to hurl herself at him and try to choke the life from him. Getting herself killed would not help Frank and, anyway, the man had been under orders from that foul priest who had spent hours making her feel filthy with his eyes.

"Yes?" she said, after taking a deep breath, and then stopped. What else to say to such a man?

"It is no large thing I can do, Senora Stone y Marcoli," the captain said, "but I felt I must make at least some small apology, however humble, for my part in what has happened."

"My husband is still alive-" Giovanna resisted the urge to spit Spaniard! at the man in lieu of a name she did not know. "-Spanish soldier. He may awaken any time now."

"I pray for this happy outcome," the man said, and Giovanna wondered to see that he clearly meant it. There was sincerity written all over his face, despite his somewhat cracked Italian.

"Thank you, sir," she said, wondering what the man's name was. She'd caught that he was a captain when she'd been held there on that street, watching them shoot cannons at the place she'd made home for all those months, the place where her husband had been hiding and had come out of to be shot. "He sleeps now. He has slept for days. I worry, but they will not send a doctor again. I have asked and asked, but they will not send a doctor, and I have done all I can."

She ached to ask for his help, and pride would not stop her. What stopped her was fear of what the answer would be. She could keep herself warm with hope in a cold cell. If he said no, even that paltry rag of comfort would be taken away.

The pleading must have shown in her face. "I will ask on your behalf, senora," the captain said. "And while the pleas of Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas may count for little, I will not have it said that they were not entered in the right ears. I do not know if you are military prisoners, civil prisoners or in the hands of the Inquisition, senora, but it may be that I can sow some little confusion and see to it that the standards of the military are upheld. Even the standards of the Inquisition would be an improvement, I think."

Giovanna bowed her head in gratitude. Gratitude and not a little fear-would he demand-?

She looked up, and saw no lechery in what she now realized was the face of quite a young man. Thirty-five, no more. And yet a face lined with cares. She had seen him argue with the other Spaniard, the priest, and realized that the argument, and what he had had to do when he lost it, had both cost him in their own way.

"Thank you," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

"I would say that what happened was entirely against my will, senora," he said, "but this is no comfort. Please, accept my apologies nevertheless. There is little about this business"-he waved a hand in the air, taking in the whole of Rome in one weary little circle-"that I can atone for in any way save what was placed in my hands to do. I did it, but there is no honor in it, no pride."

There was nothing Giovanna could think of to say. Could she even say she forgave him, when she felt no forgiveness, no pity? Even as recompense for the crumb of charity he had offered? The words would not come. After a long and uncomfortable silence, the captain left.

She went to sit by Frank. "Do you hear, my love?" she whispered to his sleeping ear. "They may send another doctor to help you. I pray they will."

"I pray they will too," he whispered back. "I feel like shit."

"Frank?" she cried aloud, "Are-"

He hissed, and she fell silent. "Not so loud," he said. "I figure so long as they think I'm out they won't do anything. I think I woke up when that guy was in here."