1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [181]
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. "Señor 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, Señor Simpson. In this place, señor, 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,