1635: The Cannon Law

Chapter 40

Rome

"Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, you are just plain freakin' nuts ."

Even in the gathering gloom, Tom could see the man's grin and the way the mustachios flared like the wings of a bird. Tom knew what kind of bird, too. A loon. "No, my way is perfect sanity. I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, am perfectly sound of wits. It is those who would turn down the chance for such a magnificent adventure who are, as you say, freakin' nuts. And if we succeed, it will be spoken of in a thousand years."

Tom snickered. "Yeah, they'll be saying jeez, were those guys nuts, or what? Or possibly, man, that was a horrible way to die! "

Darkness had all but fallen, the sky a pale and purplish hue and the sun well down behind the skyline of Rome, if not fully over the horizon quite yet. And here they were, loafing about in plain view on the left bank of the Tiber, looking across the river at the Castel Sant'Angelo. The Ponte Sant'Angelo was out of the question, but Ruy was talking about boats as a way out of the city, and, now, a way across to the Castel itself. Two birds with one stone.

They'd left Doctor Nichols and a couple of Marines downriver a ways. They'd ridden around to the south, right through the gate as bold as brass, and left the horses, the doctor, and a small guard with orders to pick their way out of the city. The doctor had gotten away with his rather distinctive appearance so far by being dressed up as a Spanish soldier. They didn't have many black soldiers, but there were nevertheless a few who, through one misadventure or another, ended up bouncing around Europe. Tom had seen a couple as far north as Thuringia, although hadn't had much chance to talk to them. Ruy said that in a soldier's outfit, Doctor Nichols would attract mild curiosity, but would pose no particular problem.

Now, though, having seen what Ruy thought amounted to a perfectly reasonable proposition, Tom was beginning to doubt the man's sanity. To start with, there was the Castel Sant'Angelo itself. The walls were, from the looks, thirty to forty feet high. And guarded by enough men to keep up a constant cannonade from behind them. There was no telling if, or when, they'd take it into their heads to lob a few shells over to this side of the river. For now, they were pasting the general area around their fortress with a bombard shell every thirty seconds or so.

There didn't seem to be any pattern to it. Just, every now and then, a loud crash and, against the softly glowing evening sky, a trail of sparks would shoot up from somewhere inside the fort, arch over, and drop with a crash somewhere in the buildings around the fort. About every fourth shot was a dud, but otherwise there would then, a moment or two later, be a crack and a puff of smoke shot through with a flare of yellow flame. Sometimes, if the bombardiers got lucky, a few screams.

Which was bad enough. But to get a chance to get blown up on the way to the sheer walls and alert guards, they first had to get past what looked like, allowing for the dim light, the entire Spanish army. All of whom had their attention very, very firmly fixed on the aforementioned sheer-walled fortress and its alert guards, et cetera.

The plan to get across the river seemed sound enough. Most of the wall was pretty well lit up with bonfires that the besiegers had lit, just outside accurate shooting distance. The exception was on this near side, where the fortress stood right at the riverside. The main defense here was the river itself, and getting across the river to the esplanade under the fort walls basically meant coming right under the fort's guns. So there were no fires there, and the fires to either side cast long, deep shadows right along the wall. Once they got that far, they would be all but invisible. The Spanish commander had apparently decided that sending men over there was a waste, a certain slaughter as there was no cover anywhere on the Ponte Angelo. He had simply left a guard force on the near end of bridge to contain any sally the defenders might make.

Those guys, apart from a couple of sentries watching along the bridge, had taken the sensible view that two hundred Swiss Guards weren't going to be attempting a daring breakout any time soon and had gotten comfortable, with small fires here and there and a fair few of them stretched out either side of the road exercising a soldier's privilege of racking out when nothing interesting was happening.

Meanwhile, down on the river, there was actually still some river traffic. There were boatmen who ran a taxi service, and a few were still plying for hire. Tom had no doubt that some of those boats were carrying refugees, sneaking out of the city by one of the many routes the invaders couldn't watch. There weren't many, though. Just enough for cover. The rest of the boats were clustered at piers up and down the river, tied up against the day when the shooting stopped and people wanted rides again. If they could just get the pope on one of those boats and downstream out of the city, they could retrieve the horses and get the hell out of Dodge a lot faster than any pursuit could be organized and get after them. That would give them a chance to break contact, and once they did that and lit out across country, the chances of getting caught before they had the pope well on his way to whatever sanctuary his people thought best were actually pretty small.

The trick was going to be bringing that happy outcome about without indulging in what looked like a messy and elaborate suicide.

"Did we even bring a rope?" Tom asked, trying to figure out how the hell they were going to get over that wall.

"Have faith, Senor Simpson," Ruy said. "We are about the Lord's work."

"On a mission from God, eh? Put like that, I've no reason to worry at all. I'm certainly not thinking that, in fact, you don't have a plan of any kind at all for this. Not in the least."

"Plans? Faugh. The playthings of lesser intellects. I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, need no plan. Insult me no further with such talk, Senor Simpson. We must steal, I think, four boats."

"Four boats?" Tom looked around, wondering what kind of counting system the old guy was using. They'd started out with Ruy, Tom himself, Doctor Nichols, Captain Taggart and six Marines. Three of the Marines had stayed with Doctor Nichols, leaving six to get across the river. Either Sanchez was planning on stealing really, really small boats, or he was improvising madly and a spare or three were going to come in to it somewhere.

"Indeed. Four boats. To ensure that none of them sink. Listen, Senor Simpson, to the voice of experience."

"This is going to be good, isn't it?"

"The best advice always is. As you are aware, all pursuit of the profession of arms is attended by a most malign imp, a hell-spawn shat from the very asshole of Satan himself, whose sole delight is in ensuring that if, in the affairs of mortal men, it can go wrong, it will."

Tom nodded. "We Americans call him 'Murphy.' "

"Truly? Then you are not a people as wholly divorced from reality as I had thought. But no matter. Were we to steal exactly sufficient boats to accomplish our task, nothing is surer that one of them would spring a leak, or we should be struck by a random shot in the dark. Nothing, but nothing, would be surer. But if we provide ourselves with more boats than we need-"

"Then if all of them float, then we've gone to a lot of wasted time and effort, yes, I see what you're saying."

"Logic. Reason. I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, am truly a master of these disciplines. Ah, here are the very craft we require."

While they had been talking Ruy had been leading them down a set of steps to where a wooden jetty was home to a couple of dozen rowboats. Most of them looked like they could take a couple of passengers at least in addition to whoever was going to be rowing them. There were even a couple of bigger models. They were all unattended. And all lacked oars. Well, that made sense. Like not leaving the keys in your car. Tom looked around for somewhere that might be an oar-storage shed, but wasn't seeing one anywhere. And then he heard the sound of splintering wood over the sounds of the battle on the far side of the river.

Ruy's direct approach in action again. He had gotten the Marines organized ripping the simple bench seats out of several of the boats, to use as paddles, it looked like. They were using their forage axes to pry the things out, and had so far manage to free one of them. Well, if it's that simple, Tom thought, and stepped into one of the smaller boats that they almost certainly wouldn't be using. Now, the Marines were all well-built guys, tough, wiry customers that no one would want to mess with casually. Tom, on the other hand, still had the build of a nearly-pro footballer and hadn't stinted any on his exercise regime since the Ring of Fire. One swift tug, and a thwart came up in his hand. A twist and the pegs at the other end gave way. He ripped out three in quick succession, during which time the Marines had gotten one more out. "How many more do we need?" he asked brightly, noting the look on Ruy's face.

"Three more should suffice," Ruy said, momentarily at a loss for words, which Tom judged entirely worth the grazed knuckles he'd picked up.

Tom looked across. It was maybe two hundred yards, and the river didn't seem to be in full flood; there was a little mud showing under the jetty on this side, and the same on one a little upstream of the fortress on the other. It wouldn't be so bad. From here, with a little effort, they could get across to the shadows under the bridge on the other side. Hopefully, the boats wouldn't be noticed, because with only Captain Taggart and three Marines to keep an eye on them, they were relying entirely on stealth for that part of the mission. Tom couldn't help feeling that maybe, just maybe, they needed a bit more planning than they were doing. On the other hand, Ruy had been pulling crazy stunts like this for longer than Tom had been alive, so maybe he was approaching this as just another routine rescue of a major spiritual leader against thousand-to-one odds. Done it a dozen times before. Could do it again in my sleep. Suitably embellished with appropriately Catalan curlicues and declarations of honor and willingness to dare all in pursuit of his goal, of course.

Tom couldn't help thinking, as he helped drag the boats off the mud and into the water, of Sean Connery in all those action-movie roles he had played well into his fifties or sixties. Not that that was any guide to reality, but it was getting remarkably easy to imagine Ruy with a Scots accent.

The paddle across the river, the sweating, sore back and blistered hands apart, proved to be fairly easy. Pulling the boats up on to the mud below the river wall, only a little trickier. Tom's boots, filled as they were with a hair over two hundred and seventy pounds of footballer, sunk a bit deeper than everyone else's, and it was all he could do not to lose one of them.

There were steps up to the esplanade. Tom was just craning his neck to see if there was any cover at the top when Ruy started strolling up them, for all the world as if he was on a pleasant evening promenade without a care in the world.

"Are you nuts?" Tom hissed, wondering as he did so why he was trying to whisper. Between all the shouting and shooting and the regular firing of bombards from inside the fort, even if he could have been heard, anyone who might have been listening was probably halfway to deaf anyway.

Ruy turned back and the low light of the evening, the moon not yet risen, revealed a wide grin. "Senor Simpson, nothing is surer to make a sentry want to shoot than the sight of a man creeping up on the fortress he guards. So, we do not creep up."

"But those guys," Tom said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the several hundred soldiers waiting on the opposite bank of the Tiber. "They're going to see you for sure."

"Are they? A man, two hundred yards away, in the dark, with fires there"-he pointed toward one side of the fort-"and there"-he pointed to the other-"to dazzle their eyes? I think not, Senor Simpson. In this place, senor, we are in the safest place in Rome this evening."

Put like that, it did make a twisted kind of sense. There was the old joke about walking confidently with a piece of paper in your hand. Tom hadn't ever tried it, and suspected that like a great many such things that "everyone" knew, it was a lot of hooey. Still "I hope you know what you're doing," he muttered as he followed Ruy up the steps.

"A' ken richt weel whit he's deein,' " Tom heard from behind him. "Bein' a mad bampot Spaniard, like always." It did nothing for Tom's confidence that the Marine who'd said it had known Ruy a lot longer than he had.

Ruy had got out of sight briefly at the top of the steps, and when Tom got to the top and saw what Ruy was doing, it was all he could do not to turn tail and flee, gibbering in terror. Ruy was striding across the esplanade, looking up at the battlements of one of the corner bastions where the wall was a little lower, maybe twenty feet, and waving his hat.

From above, a helmet was just visible, peering down at the apparent lunatic making a one-man, unarmed assault without a ladder on a battlemented fortress wall. There was a musket up there, and even in the dim light Tom could see that it wasn't leveled. Yet.

"Hello the fort!" Ruy called out, in what sounded like the Roman dialect of Italian that Tom had been hearing about the place this last couple of weeks.

Tom couldn't quite catch what got shouted back, being a few yards behind the lunatic Catalan and more occupied with looking around for the small horde of Spanish soldiers who were, he was sure, going to come thundering into view at any moment to do for the pair of them.

He heard Ruy's response, though. "My name is Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz. I'm here to rescue the pope. Please lower a rope!"

Tom groaned. The least they could expect now was to learn some Swiss swearwords. He strained his ears for the sound of muskets being cocked, peered into the shadows between the battlements for the glow of matches being blown on for a shot. He had maybe three, four paces to go and if he dived down the steps he probably wouldn't suffer more than minor scrapes and bruises.

Whatever the answer actually was, and again Tom didn't quite catch it, Ruy turned and smiled. "Did I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, not counsel faith? A humble trust in divine providence? He has gone to fetch an officer."

"He needs orders to shoot us?"

Ruy shrugged. "This they will not do. We are no threat. If there is an assault sent from across the bridge, then they will shoot us. For now, we are simply two men outside the walls. We are no threat, nor likely to be one."

"Can't you get them to open a gate for us?" Tom said, not liking the idea of climbing a rope to get up over that wall. Right here they were in fairly deep shadow, cast along the wall by the corner bastion from the bonfire further along the riverbank. They'd have to go into the light some to reach the door at the midpoint of the wall, but it looked like an easier bet all round than trying to get over the wall just here.

"It will be barricaded. They will suspect a trick if we insist on that being opened," Ruy said. "Besides, what cause have you to complain? You are young, and strong. I am the aged and infirm member of this party."

"Aged and infirm maybe," Tom muttered, "but with the mind of a teenager."

There was movement above, and a shout of " Who did you say you were?"

"Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, and with me is Signor Thomas Simpson of the Embassy of the United States of Europe. We are here to rescue His Holiness." Ruy was now standing right in the shadows under the wall, practically invisible even from five feet away where Tom was standing. Method in his madness, Tom thought.

The madness part had been spotted by whoever was on top of the wall. Tom didn't quite catch all of the idiom, but he figured "madder than a hatful of assholes" was probably a fair translation.

"Precisely!" Ruy shouted back, "No one will be expecting it! May we come in and discuss the matter like gentlemen, or will you keep us out here all night like unwelcome peddlers?"

A shout came back that they should wait. A few nervous minutes later and a pair of thick ropes dropped over the wall.

"See?" Ruy said, grabbing a rope and bracing one boot against the wall to begin the climb. "Now for the difficult part."

"Getting out alive?" Tom said, giving the rope an experimental tug. It seemed to be securely attached. It better be, given what he weighed.

"No," Ruy said, between grunts of effort. "Persuading His Holiness to come with us."

It would pretty much figure that the pope would be as nuts as everyone else was acting tonight and want to stay in here. He's nuts? Tom Simpson, you're going in there with him. "Right," Tom said, and began to climb.