by Eric Flint
"True," Sanchez said. "We may count on a certain delay while ladders are found or made. The besiegers have men enough to assault the whole wall of the inner ward at once, and that will ensure success."
"The butcher's bill's going to be… bad," Simpson said. "Even with only two hundred men that wall's a tough one to get over."
"True," Sanchez said. "The assault will likely be at dawn tomorrow."
"So soon?" Barberini asked. Hearing about the need for enough ladders to go all the way around the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo had given him hope that the fort might hold a while yet.
"So soon," Sanchez said. "Were I commanding that siege, I would have the docks raided for every timber in the boatyards and press every carpenter I could find. The ladders need not be perfect, just good enough. A mast with planks nailed to it is all that is needed, with some ropes to steady it. One ladder at every five to ten paces, and the besiegers have men enough to man them. The first few hundred men over will be a forlorn hope, but eventually grenadiers will reach high enough, an establishment will be made, and then the defense will collapse quickly. They will lose perhaps a thousand men, but they have ten thousand and no fear of counterattack."
"I thought sieges took longer," the Ambassadora remarked.
"Ordinarily, yes," Simpson said. "Sounds like these guys have a massive advantage of numbers and nearly all the resources they could want. And they're already inside the outer defenses, trying to take the citadel."
"Oh," the ambassadora said. "Can we get the pope out of there?" She addressed the question to Sanchez. Knowing what he knew of the man, Barberini would have done the same.
Sanchez shrugged. "Maybe. I would perhaps be able to bring a small party within the inner ward and attempt something. This is not to say that the same idea will not occur to Quevedo, of course."
"He'd assassinate the pope?" Simpson's expression was one of honest curiosity. For all their cheerfulness and generosity, these Americans could take a bloodthirsty turn at times, Barberini reflected. The first thing he had thought of when Sanchez mentioned an infiltrator into the fortress was a gate being surreptitiously opened to let the besiegers in.
"Likely enough," Sanchez said, shrugging. "My heart," he went on, addressing the ambassadora, "this may be something we can do, or it may not. I will need to take a party of men back to Rome tonight and look more closely. With your permission?"
The ambassadora frowned a moment, then looked around the room at the other members of her party. "Comments?" she asked.
"Do it," Dottoressa Simpson said.
"Only if you can manage it without getting yourselves killed," Dottore Nichols added. "Forlorn hopes do no one any good. And I'll come along. Not in the raid itself, but you'll need someone holding horses outside, and a trained medic."
"You sure, Dad?" the ambassadora asked.
"I'm a shoo-in for this one," he said, leaving Barberini slightly confused. The sense of it was clear enough, though. "I've been a Marine, and I know my trauma medicine well enough to play corpsman. Although I could wish we had Harry along here."
"He's got a good resume for it," Signora Mailey added, smiling at some private joke, doubtless connected with the fact that she had escaped a similar fortress only the year before. Perhaps the infamous Harry Lefferts had been involved in that? "But like James said, don't do it if it looks too risky."
There were no further objections. "Do it, then," the ambassadora said. "I'll go and compose a dispatch for Magdeburg. They won't be able to tell us not to, fortunately."
Naturally not, Barberini thought. He wondered what diplomacy would be like when the day came that the great radio towers were built all across the world, and princes could speak to each other directly. Would peace result, once everything could be discussed at length, directly between rulers? More likely, Barberini thought, that such ease of communication would make it more likely that they would take offense more easily. A plenipotentiary could be disowned, deratified, apologized for. Insults direct from the prince's mouth were less easily remedied. The radio diplomacy his uncle had engaged in the year before had certainly caused plenty of trouble.
Magdeburg
"I thought you should see that before anyone else," Francisco Nasi said.
Mike was rereading the lengthy dispatch. "You weren't wrong. Did we have any warning of this?"
"None at all. Shortly after we last spoke on this subject, I received intelligence that confirmed our initial assessment. Borja's orders were to create political confusion in Rome, to prevent Urban from taking any further effective action. To create, as you remarked, a lame-duck pope. The troops came from Naples, but our news from there has been concentrating on the domestic turmoil. The troops were there to suppress trouble in that part of Spain's possessions, and moving them is a strategic error unless they can be returned swiftly enough that the rebellion is not encouraged by their absence. And plans to move them were closely held enough that we got no wind. I will admit that our assets in that part of the world are not as comprehensive as I would like. We are still not sure what Osuna is up to; he has become remarkably quiet these few months past."
"So basically the situation is that Borja got a wild hair up his ass and Olivares is going to be as surprised as we are?"
Nasi chuckled. Some rulers would not have been so understanding. A failure on this scale-and Nasi planned to light a few metaphorical fires under several figurative backsides come the morning, on general principles-would have seen him personally lucky to be allowed to resign alive. "Most succinctly put. More surprising still is the response of our embassy in Rome. Without for one moment wishing to ensure the embarrassment is spread as widely as possible, I think State will be responsible for the brick that will be found, come the morning, in the royal privy of Gustavus Adolphus. But we do have some radio time left. Do you wish me to instruct Sharon to call it off?"
Mike closed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking very hard and very fast. "No, she's done the right thing. She's given me a fait accompli that I've pretty much got to play along with. Remember, my sister signed off on that deal as well. Be kind of hard to go back on it now, and I'd prefer us to have a good name for keeping our bargains. We're helping the only friends we're likely to have in Italy for a long time to come, if Borja pulls this off, and we're trying to toss a wrench into the works for the biggest enemy we've got. I can't see that anyone's going to blame us, or even be surprised, much."
"So we go with it?"
"We go with it," Mike said. "Get a message back to Sharon, tell her that all her actions to date are ratified, to ask for a list of persons desiring asylum as soon as she can plausibly claim to have had a message back to us and, uh, wish her and the team she sent in to Rome luck."
"Luck?"
"Yep." Mike grinned, broadly. "How many divisions has the pope? Right now, quite a few, even if they're in the wrong place to do him any good. Next week, if he gets out of Castel Sant'Angelo, none. I think the results might be, ah, interesting. And very embarrassing for Spain."
Chapter 39
Rome
Frank clutched his left hand tight in against himself, squatting down and pressing it between his thigh and belly. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just settle down and hurt. But just when he thought he'd gotten used to it, it'd start throbbing again. And he'd get to thinking about the fact that he had only three fingers on his left hand now.
That was better than poor Benito, who had a splinter of one of the tables he'd waited take one of his ears off and rip his cheek down to the bone. Dino had taken a nasty crack to the head diving for cover when they sent the last volley of musket fire into the building. Both of them were sitting in back, watching the cellar stairs and feeling sorry for themselves. Everyone else had various cuts and bruises and there was a lot of coughing going on.
Sure, no one had been killed yet, on either side, as far as Frank could tell. And the two near-things they'd had with fires starting about the place had been put out before they did more than make th
e air in the place foul and vile to breathe. It had all just been one little accident after another. They had plenty of furniture to hide behind, and that, behind sold brick walls, made pretty effective protection against musket balls. Some of the ricochets were a little scary, but by the time they'd made a couple of bounces they were pretty much spent. One of Piero's friends had gotten hit in the ass, which had made him yelp, but the bullet hadn't even gone through his coattails. There was a bit of a scorch mark and he'd have a bruise, but everyone had gotten a laugh out of it.
They'd run out of lamp oil on the upper floors nearly an hour ago now, and the soldiers out front, who'd got themselves into positions in the house across the street so they weren't standing in the open to shoot, had settled down to occasionally letting fly with a few shots, as far as Frank could tell, just to let everyone inside know they were there.
"Time, yet?" Piero asked, "Only it's getting late, and there's this girl-"
"There's always a girl," Frank retorted, grinning back with only a slight flinch as another couple of musket balls splintered through the increasingly threadbare shutters to ping and whine around the room. "But, yes, it's getting about that time. Nearly dusk." They'd decided on that, earlier, so that when the women and kids and invalids were making their getaway they'd have the best chance they could. And the guys who surrendered could say they'd only been doing it to buy them some time to get away. That was assuming they hadn't got out already. There probably wasn't anything stopping anyone in one of the other houses on this street from just going out and walking away. None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any attention to them, either as places to sack or possible routes into Frank's place.
"Do we even have a white flag?" Piero asked.
"Bound to be a shirt we can use," Frank said. "And I think there's a broom handle behind the bar. That ought to do it."
"You realize we're probably going to get a beating even before the Inquisition starts asking us questions, right?" Piero was looking serious for a moment.
"Yeah, I'd figured," Frank said, although he hadn't. Made sense, though. These guys could've been off robbing the Vatican while they'd been trying to get in here, and a couple of them had been winged or scorched right at the start of the day. They'd be pissed. And Frank knew all about what jocks did when they got pissed. They found someone smaller and weaker than them to take it out on. Somehow Frank didn't think he'd be running any pranks on these guys, either.
It was, as his dad would say, a bummer. Still, it beat being dead. "I'll get the white flag and tell the wounded guys to get out," he said. "You remind everyone that when we get taken to the Inquisition, we tell 'em everything. No sense getting tortured, and we haven't committed any heresy, so the worst they can do is lock us up for a while."
"I wish I shared your confidence that that would stop them," Piero said. "I have heard stories about the Spanish Inquisition."
"It's that or total despair, right at the moment," Frank said.
"Despair has this to say for it, Frank: why did they come straight here?"
Frank heaved a sigh. He'd been hoping that the silence on that subject was because no one but him had noticed. "They want me, Piero. When I go out, I'll ask if me surrendering will mean the rest of you get out, okay? I wasn't going to say anything, and don't tell anyone because I don't want anyone trying to be a hero on my account."
Piero frowned. "What? And let you be a hero on our account?" Frank's expression must have been all the answer he needed. "Fine, fine. Whatever, we've saved nearly everyone, yes? Do what you feel you have to, but I'll not be running if it comes to it."
Frank shook his head. "Nuts, all of you," he said, and scuttled off to find a white flag.
Waiting for a lull in the shooting was a nervous few moments for Frank, because to get where he could poke the flag out through a ruined shutter he needed to get in front of the barricade of furniture. Someone over the street must've spotted the movement, because suddenly every single bullet that came over came through the window he was crouched under. Bits of glass and splinters of wood fell all over him and he couldn't help screwing up his eyes and trying to burrow in to cracks in the plaster. Muskets might not be real accurate weapons, but across the width of a street they did just fine. A few seconds pause, and he thrust the broomhandle with its dirty dishrag attached out into the evening sunlight.
A couple more shots and then there was shouting from outside. No more shooting. He got up and looked out of the window, holding the flag out and waving it as vigorously as he dared. Every last bit of him wanted to dive back behind the barricade and cower there like a mouse.
Someone across the street leaned out of his window and shouted something at Frank. Problem number one, he thought. "No hablo espanol!" he shouted back, hoping that that was the right language, and at the same time using pretty much the whole of his vocabulary in it.
" Momento! " came the shout back, followed by something that included what sounded like " capitan." Were they telling him to wait for an officer? He hoped so.
A nervous wait. Five minutes? An hour? The soldiers across the street were leaning out of their windows and hollering to where, Frank could now see, they had a barricade of their own up. Somewhere to watch the action from shelter. Their barricade was a lot more professional looking than the ones Frank had been squatting behind all day, and there seemed to be a fair number of horses down there, too.
Frank squinted against the glare of the setting sun, which had now moved around to shine the other way along the street. Definitely horses, maybe two dozen. What use were cavalry going to be? Or maybe they just had a lot of officers here. And then Frank remembered what else horses did on battlefields. He couldn't see them from where he was, but he was willing to bet there were at least a couple of cannon waiting behind that barricade. Looks like we did this just in the nick of time, he thought.
Then a couple of guys emerged from behind the barricade and began walking briskly up to where Frank was. One of them was holding a pole-arm of some sort, Frank couldn't remember which name went with which weapon, but it was the one with a big spike and an axe-blade. Some sort of white cloth had been tied to it.
Frank sighed in relief. They were willing to talk, then. Best news he'd had all day. When the two soldiers got closer, Frank saw that they were an officer-type, all fancy clothes and waxed moustaches and wearing a sword, and another, older guy who, if you cut him in half, probably had "sergeant" written right through him. When they reached Frank, the sergeant immediately planted the staff of his weapon and began to lean on it with the air of a man who could, in that position, loaf all day. The officer took a considerably more martial stance, feet apart, hands clasped behind him.
"I am Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas, Captain in the army of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain," he said, in good, if accented, formal Italian. "To whom do I have the honor of speaking?"
"Uh, Frank Stone, of Lothlorien." Frank was impressed in spite of himself. This guy was being polite and civil even though he and his men had spent all day being shot at and firebombed by Frank and his guys. Maybe the fact that no one had gotten badly hurt yet helped. "I was hoping we could discuss surrender," he went on, realizing as he did so that, hippie upbringing or not, sensible tactical decision or not, he felt deeply ashamed.
Don Vincente's iron mask slipped a moment. He seemed, for just an instant, genuinely saddened. When he spoke again, he had softened his tone still further.
"Senor Stone," he said, "I am a man under authority. I have orders to accept no surrender and to reduce your resistance by force of arms. Apparently the Inquisition does not want you to surrender voluntarily. The most I can say is that I have no orders to ensure the death of you and all your comrades, and, more, that I would refuse orders to fire on a flag of parley. But I cannot take your surrender."
Frank looked back at Don Vincente. The man seemed genuinely upset by what he was being ordered to do. "Is there some way around your orders?" he asked, "We've only held out long enoug
h to let the women and children get away."
"Some of them," Don Vincente said.
Frank just looked at him, hoping like hell that that didn't mean "We discovered a woman, a cripple and some children attempting to escape from where you had hidden them along the street, there." Don Vincente shrugged. "One of them was identified as your wife. If there were more, and note that I carefully do not ask that question of you for I would not have you stain your honor with even a ruse of war, the search the inquisitor ordered me to make did not reveal them."
Frank suspected there was a whole other story behind that little summary, not least because the sergeant there was grinning his head off, but he was too overtaken by shock to process it properly. Giovanna captured!
Don Vincente must have figured out how Frank was feeling, because he went on to say, "Alas for my good name with the inquisitor, the cripple and the children made good their escape. The sergeant here, you will note, is being punished for it. I am making him carry that heavy burden"-the sergeant flicked the white cloth tied to his weapon to show which burden was meant-"in the hopes that it will cure his most unmilitary sloth. I fear the man is irredeemably lazy. Had I known of his shirking tendencies earlier, I might have ordered some other man to search the building. Who knows what he missed?"
The wide, eagle-wing mustachios flickered once, briefly. Even Frank, standing close enough to smell the man, could not swear that he had smiled.
Giovanna captured! He could see how it had gone. They had tried to sneak out in small groups. Giovanna would have insisted on making the first, riskiest, run. And someone, probably someone who'd been a regular at Frank's Place, had taken money to point her out to the inquisitor. And if the inquisitor hadn't pissed this Captain Don Vincente-whatever off, everyone else would've been caught too. Or maybe the inquisitor hadn't done it by himself. Everything about Don Vincente said he was a man who might be a first-class bastard any way you looked at him, but he had his honor and orders could go right to hell. Ordering him to knowingly slaughter civilians-especially cripples and children-probably grated like a bitch with the guy. Yay for hidalgo honor, Frank thought.
