1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [113]
The Marines seemed to have a fair bit of Italian between them, Sharon had found. Every single one of them could order drink, and probably less savory pleasures, within hours of arriving in Rome, and most of them had a working vocabulary. Several of them had spent years, before the Ring of Fire, in the notoriously polyglot armies that fought the wars in Germany, and would have gone back and forth between the loosely defined sides as the tides of battle ebbed and flowed. Colonel Mackay, who had brought most of these cavalrymen to Grantville originally, had a distant cousin whose mercenary regiment, raised originally to fight for the Protestant powers, had been on each side at least twice. "Can you tell which gang is winning?"
"Them as is angry at all foreigners, I think, mistress," he said. "A' wouldnae go oot, mistress, 'tis awfy rough." Again, a slightly wistful tone that he was missing the fun.
Sharon had no intention of opening the door. There was at least one pair of fighters not three yards away, and between the knife one had and the cudgel the other one was swinging wildly, anyone who got near them was in as much danger as their mutual opponents. "Dad?" she said. "Can you have your emergency kit ready? Only I think we're going to have casualties. One of you Marines get word to Captain Taggart—"
"Here, mistress," the captain said, behind her.
"Oh. Well, we'll want an aid station set up. I think the ballroom will be best. It's at the back and there's plenty of space," she said.
"As many lanterns as you can find," Dr. Nicols added, "and at least two tables big enough for a man to lie on."
"Aye," Captain Taggart said, "We've a field manual for the such as that these days, and I've lads here who assisted the lady doctor in Venice when she mended the guts of the señor."
"Good," Sharon said. "Hopefully this will—"
Stars flashed before her eyes and she flung herself back from the grille. She felt, rather than heard, the resounding clang of a rock hitting it, and chips of stone stung her face and eyelids where they spattered.
Shouts of alarm, steadying hands, and she got her eyes open. "I'm okay, okay, really, I'm okay," she said, "more surprise than anything. Someone threw a rock at the door."
There was a volley of thuds and crashes as more and more rocks hit the front of the embassy.
"Permission to return fire, mistress?" Captain Taggart asked.
"No," Sharon said, hearing her dad, Melissa and Rita say it at the same time. "Not unless it looks like they might get in, please. I don't want any more casualties than we've already got. I don't think it's safe to bring in any of those wounded quite yet, but let's have that aid station anyway."
Another series of crashes. "Aye, mistress," the captain said, sounding dubious, and left to give the orders.
"Last thing we want's a massacre," Dr. Nichols growled. "Surest way to make this last longer than it has to. Eventually they'll get tired and go home to sleep it off."
"This is most likely," Ruy said.
It was the dawn of a sleepless night before the last of the hooligans began to drift away, not notably pursued by any militia presence. Sharon hoped that that was because they had been busy with worse trouble elsewhere. No one else on the same street had been much troubled, from the looks, and certainly the armed retainers in those houses would likely have a lot less compunction about firing into a crowd. The casualties were few in number, in the end, and if there had been fatalities, someone had removed the bodies under cover of darkness. Those that were left were being helped away by others by the time Ruy and Captain Taggart would let her or her dad open the door and go out, so in the end there was nothing to do. Sharon wondered if any of them would have refused treatment after a night spent hurling stones at her residence, and supposed she would never know.
Then she then realized that the rioting had probably gone all through Frank's neighborhood, and she had no way of knowing whether he was even alive.
Frank shoved the broom across