Eric Flint - 1635 - The Cannon Law

There was a long silence, long enough for Piero to make it up next to Frank. "What'd he say?" he whispered.

"Just asked me to repeat it," he whispered back. "He hasn't answered yet, though."

"If they accept, let me go first," Piero said.

"Why?"

"You, they may shoot out of hand. Stay behind me until we are among them. They may not shoot if they do not realize who you are until too late."

"Uh, right," Frank said. There were any number of holes in that argument, not least of which was that if they were going to be shooting captives out of hand they wouldn't be getting picky. That Don Vincente guy had said there was an inquisitor trying to run the show for him out there, and wasn't it the Inquisition who'd come up with Kill them all, God will know his own? Besides, if they wanted to make sure Frank was dead, all they had to do was wait. Maybe toss in a couple of grenades to help matters along a bit. Something cracked in the timbers above, and the ceiling shifted a little, causing a shower of dust and grit. Frank could hear it pattering around him on the floor and on the broken furniture.

"How many of you are there?" came a shout from outside, followed by a white scarf on a stick poked in through a hole in the shattered wall.

"Two," Frank called back. "We're coming out, unarmed."

The white rag was followed by a face under a helmet, who looked into the darkened interior, said something over his shoulder and reached back for a torch. It turned out to be the sergeant Frank had met earlier, once it was lit up. Frank could see that the torch was a chairleg with some rags wrapped around it. Clearly these guys had had to improvise on the spot as well. Half of the sergeant's face was covered in black soot, the way soldiers got to be when they'd been shooting a lot with black-powder weapons. He was grinning, which Frank hoped was a good sign. He shouted something over his shoulder, out of which Frank picked out the word "dos," which he recognized as being Spanish for "two.

"The sergeant vanished, and after a moment-punctuated by another groan from the ceiling timbers-the shout came back: "Come out, one at a time! With your hands up!"

Frank heaved a sigh of relief. "You first, Piero," he said, looking nervously at the ceiling. Yeah, that's right, bartender's last to leave a sinking bar. Tradition.

Piero nodded. "There is nothing left to say, Frank, except that when we meet again after this, the drinks are very much on me, yes?"

"Get gone," Frank said, suddenly remembering what he was walking out into. At least most of the people who came here for shelter got away, he thought. Just me, Giovanna and Piero got caught. Then the little voice added, So long as the falling building doesn't kill the rest of the guys.

"First one coming out!" he yelled, as Piero stepped up to the gap the sergeant had used, his hands in the air.

Frank listened to Piero's scramble over the rubble. There were voices, and then a crash from somewhere up above. The ceiling groaned, and Frank hunkered down into the doubtful shelter of a broken table. He peered upward, nervously, squinting against the falling dust and grit, and then curled up tight with his eyes closed when he saw the ceiling began to drop again. A few seconds, and then he opened them again. In the middle, at the front, the ceiling was maybe five feet from the ground, where it had been nearly ten feet moments before. Please let that be where it gets stable, Frank prayed. Please.

"Next one! Come out now! Hands up!" It was a miracle Frank heard the shout over the sound of his pulse hammering in his ears. He stood up and made himself walk, not run, over to the gap. As he stood in the gap, blinking in the too-bright torchlight, something began to give way in the collapsing floor behind and above him. Nails began to rip free and timbers cracked. Sounds like gunshots, he thought.

The musketeers across the street thought so too.

The last thing Frank remembered was fire, blooming like time-lapsed roses across the street, and swirls of dirty white smoke that seemed to glow like pearls in the torchlight. And Piero's face, horrified where he stood between two soldiers, under guard.

It all went dark.

Rome

There was shouting by the time Ruy, Tom and the pope reached the stairs down to the lower levels of the fortress. By the time they'd gotten to the main part of the old fortress, there was screaming.

"We must leave while the inner ward holds," Ruy said. "Over the wall or through the door?"

"Which door?" The pope asked.

"The one in the riverside wall," Tom said.

"It is barricaded."

"I saw as we entered." Ruy was negotiating the final turn of the staircase and emerging into the circular corridor that ringed the wall of the inner tower. "Without help, it will take much time to clear a way through."

"Can't we just climb over the blockage?" Tom asked, "His Holiness seems pretty spry."

Ruy chuckled. "The gate opens inward, Senor Simpson. The barricade keeps it closed. I did not examine closely-ah, excuse me." He flattened against the wall as a bunch of middle-aged men with arquebuses that looked like they'd had the rust hastily scraped off quite recently came up through the stairs they were about to use. "But I suspect that the barricade is nailed in place," he concluded.

"It is," the pope said. "I saw it done."

"Over the wall it is, I guess," Tom said. "We'll need rope."

"Rope we shall find," Ruy said. "Or anything that might serve. Please to be observant as we pass along."

Down two more flights of stairs, through a courtyard and a mad dash down the spiral corridor around the old tomb, and out in to the courtyard. They were on the east side, facing the river, which ran more or less due north-south by the fortress.

All along the wall ahead of them, Tom could see guardsmen on the parapet, hastening in either direction toward the walls that had been threatened, while others remained to guard against the possibility of a further attack taking advantage of the diversion. Although if an attack came in, with half the men on this wall gone, they were screwed. Still, it should be pretty much impossible to get ladders around to this side without bringing them over the bridge, and there hadn't been any when Tom had been over that side before.

To Tom's left, just visible above the storage houses built close under the wall in the northeast corner, he could see Guardsmen leaning out with guns to fire at targets right at the foot of the wall. As he watched, one of them jerked, his head fountaining up as someone below shot him. The body pitched back and then slumped forward. Beside him, he heard the pope mutter " Requiem aeternam dona eis domine…"

Tom felt his stomach heave. I've seen worse, lots worse, he told himself sternly. Somehow it still seemed to get to him.

Ruy was taking in the scene as well. "We have perhaps five minutes before they gain the walls," he said, in tones that spoke of a judgment formed from long experience. "The whole wall is engaged. There are no reserves. If the towers were not heavily engaged, those men would not need to lean over so. We may hope that the towers are protecting each other for the moment."

There was a loud cheer from beyond the wall, and Tom saw the head of a long, crudely lashed ladder slam into the wall close to the corner tower to their left. Seconds later, two more appeared farther along the wall. "Ruy," he said, "I think we should be leaving. That's right next to our way out, if we're going over the lowest part of the wall."

"A moment." Ruy was rummaging among a pile of planks and spars roughly stacked against the fortress wall. Tom recalled that the whole place had been sheathed in scaffolding a few days before, and realized that half of the work of readying the place for defense must have been taking all that down. And in these days before steel scaffolding poles and other modern conveniences of the building trade, scaffolding was lashed together. He joined Ruy.