Ruled Britannia

by Harry Turtledove

  High and shrill and blazing with excitement, a voice cried out in English: "Death to the dons!"

  And, as if that one voice were a burning fuse leading to a keg of powder, a whole great chorus took up the shout. "Death-Death-Death to the dons!" In a heartbeat, the cry echoed up and down the streets of London. "Death-Death-Death to the dons!"

  Lope's mind went clear and cold as the ice he'd imagined he felt. Suddenly, the patrol that had seemed so reassuringly strong felt tiny and helpless as a baby. He nodded to the sergeant. "This is it. They are going to rise." His own voice held eerie certainty.

  The sergeant tried to peer up at all the windows overlooking the street. Smoke still eddied in front of one.

  The shot had come from there, but what odds the pistoleer still lingered? Slim, slim. He didn't order his men after the assassin, as he would have without that daunting cry. Instead, nodding to Lope, he asked,

  "And what do we do now, senor?"

  "We win or we die-it's that simple," de Vega answered. But it wasn't, quite. He looked around, too, as the sergeant had, trying to see every which way at once. Plainly, the patrol would never get to the Theatre, nor even to Bishopsgate. He wished that soldier hadn't been wounded. He couldn't bear to leave the fellow behind, but bringing him along would hamper them. "We'd better get back to the barracks," he said reluctantly. "We'll have numbers on our side there."

  "Yes, sir." The sergeant sounded relieved. Now that he had orders, he knew what to do with them.

  "JosA©, Manuel: bandage Pedro's leg and get him up with his arms over your shoulders."

  Both soldiers knelt to do as he told them, but one said, "We can't do much fighting that way, Sergeant."

  "We'll worry about that later. Quick, now!" To punctuate the underofficer's words, another stone thudded down into the street. It hit no one, but could have smashed a skull if it had. Seeing it, hearing it, made Lope acutely aware he wore a felt hat with a jaunty plume, not a high-combed morion.

  Pedro howled again when they hauled him upright. And the sergeant proved cleverer than de Vega had suspected: one of the soldiers supporting the wounded man was lefthanded, so they both had their swords free even with his arms draped over them.

  "Let's get moving," Lope said, and they started back the way they had come.

  "Death-Death-Death to the dons!" The cry seemed to come from everywhere at once, from near and far. More stones and more reeking waste flew out of windows. A furious trooper fired his arquebus at one of their tormentors, but only a mocking laugh rewarded him. And then the patrol had to pause while he reloaded: an empty arquebus was nothing but an awkward club.

  Lope hated every heartbeat of delay. How long before the Englishmen nerved themselves to fight in the streets, if they weren't already elsewhere in London? How long before weapons long hoarded in hope came out of hiding? Not long, he feared, and he didn't have enough men at his back.

  Half a dozen Englishmen, a couple armed with swords, the rest with bludgeons, came out of St. Mary Woolnoth and formed a ragged line across Lombard Street."What do we do, senor?" the sergeant muttered.

  "We fight if we have to, but let me try something first," Lope answered in a low voice. Then, in English, he shouted, "Stand aside, in the name of the Queen!"

  He hissed out a great sigh of relief when they did stand aside. One of them doffed his cap and made a clumsy leg at de Vega, saying, "We cry your pardon, sir, but we took ye for a pack of stinking Spaniards."

  "God bless Elizabeth!" another Englishman added.

  They all nodded. So did Lope. He led the patrol past them without another word. If he spoke too much, his accent would betray him. And betrayal enough was already loose in London this day. If they dared speak imprisoned Elizabeth's name, if they believed he, leading soldiers, also spoke of Elizabeth and not Isabella. If that was so, treason ran far deeper than even de Vega had dreamt.

  Behind him, one of the Englishmen said, "Come. Let's to the Tower, and help to set her free." Their departing footsteps were quick and purposeful. They thought they could do it. Whether they proved right or wrong, their confidence chilled Lope.

  "Sergeant!" he said sharply.

  " Si-, senor? "

  "Who garrisons the Tower of London? We, or the English?"

  "Why, some of each, sir. We both want to make sure Elizabeth the heretic stays there till she dies, eh?"

  The sergeant hadn't understood any of what Lope or the street ruffians said in English. De Vega's dread only grew. In times like these, how far could any Spaniard trust an Englishman?

  As he and the patrol turned down into St. Swithin's Lane, a sharp volley of gunfire came from the south, from the direction of the barracks. He wanted to order a charge. With the wounded soldier slowing everyone else and hampering two healthy men, he couldn't.

  Englishmen swarmed up the street towards them. They were fleeing, not fighting. No cries of, "Death to the dons!" burst from their throats. They'd met death, and didn't like him. When one of them spied de Vega and his comrades, he cried, "Here's more o' the foul fiends! We are fordone!" But he and his friends pounded past before Lope and his little force could hope to halt them.

  Bodies lay in the lane, some unmoving, some thrashing in pain. Spanish soldiers moved among them, methodically putting to the sword any who still lived. More Spaniards, pikemen and arquebusiers, formed a line of battle in front of the barracks. One of the soldiers with sword in hand looked up from his grim work and growled, "Who the devil are you?" as Lope led the patrol towards him.

  "Senior Lieutenant de Vega," Lope answered.

  The other Spaniard's face changed. "Oh! You're the fellow who knew this mess was coming. Pass on, seA±or-pass on. If we hadn't had a few minutes' warning of trouble, those damned Englishmen might've taken us unawares."

  "De Vega! Is that you?" From one end of the line of battle, Captain GuzmA?n waved.

  "Yes, your Excellency." Lope waved back.

  "God be praised you're all right," GuzmA?n said. "When Enrique came running back here with your report, I feared we'd never see you again. I was about to go after you to the Theatre when we were attacked ourselves."

  "Never mind the Theatre, or me." Even Lope, far from the least self-centered man ever born, knew some things were more important than he was. "The English are going to try to free Elizabeth from the Tower.

  If they do-"

  Always the courtier, GuzmA?n bowed to him. "I am the senior officer present right now. I was going to hold the barracks against whatever they threw at us. Now you've given me something more urgent to do.

  Muchas gracias." He shouted orders. More Spanish soldiers came tumbling out of the building and rushed up from the south: a few hundred all told, Lope judged. Guzman said, "Form a column, boys.

  We have to get to the Tower, and it's liable to be warm work. Are you up to it?"

  "Yes, sir!" the soldiers roared. By the way they sounded, no Englishman could stop them or even slow them down.

  Baltasar GuzmA?n bowed again. "May we have the pleasure of your company, Senior Lieutenant de Vega?"

  "Of course, your Excellency. But I have a wounded man here, and-"

  "Leave him." GuzmA?n's voice was hard and flat. "We can't bring him, and we can't spare men to guard him. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. Will you tell me I'm wrong?"

  He waited for Lope's reply. Lope had none, and he knew it. At his nod, Jose and Manuel eased Pedro to the ground. What is he thinking? Lope wondered. He shook his head. Better not to know.

  Captain Guzman raised his voice: "To the Tower, fast as we can go. For God and St. James, forward- march! "

  "For God and St. James!" the soldiers shouted. Off they went, a ragged regiment against a city. To see them strut, the city was the outnumbered one.

  Perhaps half a mile separated the barracks from the Tower of London. Moving as fast as they could, the soldiers might have got there in five minutes: they might have, had nobody between the one and the other had other ideas.

  Guzman marched
the Spaniards towards the river to Upper Thames Street, which became Lower Thames Street east of London Bridge and which led straight to the Tower. That the street close by the Thames led straight to the Tower, though, quickly proved to have been obvious to others besides him.

  No sooner had his men turned into Thames Street and started east than bricks and stones flew down from rooftops and windows: not the handful of them that had greeted Lope's patrol in Lombard Street, but a regular fusillade. The missiles clattered from helmets and corselets. Men cursed or howled when stones struck home where they weren't armored. A soldier who got hit in the face crumpled without a sound. A moment later, another went down.

  "What do we do, Captain?" a trooper cried.

  "We go on," Guzman answered grimly. "If we stop and kill Englishmen here, we have great sport, but we don't get where we need to go on time. Forward! " Lope admired the nobleman's discipline. Had he himself commanded the Spaniards, he knew he might have yielded to the sweet seduction of revenge against the cowards and skulkers who plagued them. GuzmA?n had better sense.

  Just past the church of All Hallows the Less, a barricade blocked Thames Street: planks and carts and rubbish and rocks and dirt. The Englishmen behind it brandished a motley assortment of halberds and bills and pikes and swords. Two or three arquebus muzzles poked over the top, aimed straight at the oncoming Spanish soldiers. "Death to the dons!" the Englishmen shouted.

  Captain GuzmA?n's lips drew back from his teeth in a savage smile. "Now we can come to close quarters with some of these motherless dogs," he said. "Give them a volley, boys, and then show them what a proper charge means."

  The front rank of arquebusiers dropped to one knee. The second rank aimed their guns over the heads of the first. On the other side of the barrier, the Englishmen fired their few guns. Flames belched from the muzzles. A bullet cracked past Lope and smacked wetly into flesh behind him. A soldier shrieked. Puffs of thick gray smoke clouded the barricade.

  Then Captain Guzman yelled, "Fire!" The end of the world might have visited Upper Thames Street.

  The roar of twenty-five or thirty arquebuses was a palpable blow against the ears. More smoke billowed.

  Its brimstone stink and taste put Lope in mind of the hell to which he hoped the volley had sent a good many Englishmen. Screams from in back of the barricade said some of those bullets had struck home.

  Baltasar GuzmA?n gave another order. "Charge! St. James and at them!"

  " A?Santiago! " the Spaniards cried. Swordsmen and pikemen swarmed past the arquebusiers towards the barrier blocking their way. They scrambled over it and tore openings in it with their hands. The English irregulars behind the barricade chopped and hacked at them, trying to hold them back. A pistol banged, then another. The irregulars yelled as loudly for St. George as Guzman's men did for St. James.

  As the Englishmen held them up at the barricade, more bricks and stones rained down on the Spaniards from the buildings on either side of Thames Street. The pikeman next to de Vega dropped his weapon and staggered back, his face a gory mask. But, even with the help of the barrier, the English couldn't stop GuzmA?n's men for long. Lope sprang up onto a cart and then leaped down on the far side of the barricade. A halberdier tried to hold him off. He rushed forward and ran the Englishman through. In the press, a polearm was too clumsy to do much good.

  After the irregulars lost the barricade, the ones still on their feet tried to flee. The Spaniards cut and shot them down. "Forward!" Captain GuzmA?n shouted again, and forward his men went. The bulk of London Bridge loomed to Lope's right. But, before he and his comrades got even as far as the bridge, another barricade loomed ahead. This one looked more solid than the one they'd just overwhelmed.

  And, from the east, Englishmen rushed to defend it. Sunlight glinted off armor over there. De Vega cursed. At least some English soldiers who had served Isabella and Albert were now on the other side, the side of rebellion.

  Arquebuses and pistols bellowed: more than had defended the first barricade. A Spaniard near Lope who'd turned his head at just the wrong instant staggered back, half his jaw shot away. Blood fountained.

  His tongue flapped among shattered teeth. Horrid anguished gobbling noises poured from that ruin of a mouth.

  "A volley!" Captain GuzmA?n commanded. But, in the disorder after the first fight and pursuit, the volley took longer to organize. Meanwhile, those English guns kept banging away at the Spanish soldiers in the street in front of them.

  Indifferent to the enemy fire, the arquebusiers elbowed their way forward and into position, some kneeling, others standing. They might have been one man pulling the trigger. De Vega wondered if he would have any hearing left at the end of the day. Crying, " A?Santiago! " the Spaniards rushed at the second barricade.

  The fight at the first barrier had been savage but brief. The English hadn't had enough men there to hold the position long. Things were different here. Real soldiers with corselets and helmets of their own were far harder to down than irregulars had been. They wielded pike and sword with the same professional skill as Lope and his countrymen. And the irregulars who battled alongside them seemed altogether indifferent to whether they lived or died. If one of them could tackle a Spaniard so another could stab him while he was down, he would die not only content but joyous.

  As before, the English had set up the barricade between tall buildings. Stones and bricks and saucepans and stools-anything heavy and small enough to go out a window-rained down on the Spaniards.

  Pistoleers fired from upper-story windows, too.

  Lope grabbed a morion someone had lost and jammed it onto his head. It was too big; it almost came down over his eyes. He didn't care. It was better than nothing. He pushed his way forward, trying to get to the barricade. A wounded Spaniard, clutching at the spurting stumps of two missing fingers, stumbled back past him, out of the fight. He slid forward into the place the other man had vacated, and found himself next to Captain GuzmA?n. "Ah, de Vega," GuzmA?n said, as if they held wine goblets rather than rapiers.

  "Can we get to the Tower?" Lope asked.

  "I hope so," Guzman answered calmly.

  "How many more barricades in front of us?" Lope went on. The captain only shrugged, as if to say it didn't matter. But it did, especially if every one of them was held this stubbornly. Lope persisted: "Should we try some different street to get there?"

  "This is the shortest way," Guzman said.

  He was right, in terms of distance. In terms of time, in terms of effort and lives lost. "I beg pardon, your Excellency," Lope said, "but how much good will we do if we get there tomorrow with three men still standing?"

  "I command here, and I must do as I think best," Captain Guzman replied. "If I go down and you take charge, you will do what you will do, and the result will be as God wills. In the meantime, we have a job to tend to here in front of us"

  Lope found no answer to that but pushing forward once more. A dead Spaniard lay just in front of the barricade. Lope scrambled up onto his corpse. A man behind him shoved him onto a dirt-filled barrel blocking the street. An Englishman thrust at him. He beat the spearhead aside with his blade. A pistol ball whined malevolently past his ear.

  If I stay up here, I'll surely die, he thought. He couldn't go back, either. Shouting, " A?Santiago! " at the top of his lungs, he leaped down on the far side of the barricade. An Englishman partly broke his fall. He rammed his sword into the man's chest. It grated on ribs. The irregular let out a bubbling shriek and crumpled, blood pouring from his mouth and nose. Lope had a bad moment when he couldn't clear the blade, but then all at once it came free, crimson almost to the hilt. " A Santiago! " he yelled again, and slashed wildly, trying to win himself a little room, trying most of all not to be killed in the next instant.

  He wasn't the first Spaniard down on this side of the barricade. A couple of soldiers were down indeed, and wouldn't rise again till Judgment Day. But others, like him, cut and thrust and cursed and fought to clear space for their fellows to foll
ow them. An arquebus-a Spanish arquebus-went off right behind him, from atop the barricade. That bullet almost killed him, too. Instead, it smashed the left shoulder of the Englishman with whom he was trading swordstrokes. As the man yowled in pain, Lope thrust him through the throat and stepped forward over his writhing body.

  Here, though, more and more foes rushed into the fray, shouting, "Death to the dons!" and "Elizabeth!"

  and "God and St. George!" Most of them were unarmored. Many of them were unskilled. But their ferocity. Having sown the wind with ten years of harsh occupation, the Spaniards now all at once reaped the whirlwind. If the Englishmen could stop them from reaching the Tower only by piling up a new barricade of their own dead flesh, they seemed willing-even glad-to do it.

  A stone, luckily a small one, clattered off Lope's snatched-up helmet. He stumbled, but kept his feet. To go down, here, was all too likely to die. He howled an oath when a knife slashed his left arm. His own backhand cut, as much instinct as anything else, laid open the face of the burly man who'd wounded him.

  Opening and closing his left hand several times, Lope found muscles and tendons still worked. He laughed. Much he could have done about it if they hadn't! He couldn't even bandage himself. He had to hope he wouldn't bleed too badly.

  The Spaniards would gain a step, lose half of it, gain two, lose one, gain one, lose it again. Then a dozen or so arquebusiers got up onto the barricade together and poured a volley into the English-again, a ball just missed de Vega. As wounded enemies toppled, Spanish soldiers pushed past them.

  A sergeant tugged at Lope's wounded arm. He shrieked. "Sorry, seA±or," the sergeant bawled in his ear. The fellow was also wounded; he'd had his morion knocked off, and sported a nasty cut on his scalp. Gore splashed his face and his back-and-breast. "What are your orders?"

  " My orders?" Lope shouted back. "Where the devil's Captain Guzman?"

  "Down, sir-a thrust through the thigh," the underofficer answered. De Vega grimaced; a wound like that could easily kill. The sergeant went on, "What now, sir? We've got more of these fornicating Englishmen coming up behind us now, and more and more on the rooftops, too. What do we do? What can we do?"