1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [192]
"Next one! Come out now! Hands up!" It was a miracle Frank heard the shout over the sound of his pulse hammering in his ears. He stood up and made himself walk, not run, over to the gap. As he stood in the gap, blinking in the too-bright torchlight, something began to give way in the collapsing floor behind and above him. Nails began to rip free and timbers cracked. Sounds like gunshots, he thought.
The musketeers across the street thought so too.
The last thing Frank remembered was fire, blooming like time-lapsed roses across the street, and swirls of dirty white smoke that seemed to glow like pearls in the torchlight. And Piero's face, horrified where he stood between two soldiers, under guard.
It all went dark.
Chapter 43
Rome
There was shouting by the time Ruy, Tom and the pope reached the stairs down to the lower levels of the fortress. By the time they'd gotten to the main part of the old fortress, there was screaming.
"We must leave while the inner ward holds," Ruy said. "Over the wall or through the door?"
"Which door?" The pope asked.
"The one in the riverside wall," Tom said.
"It is barricaded."
"I saw as we entered." Ruy was negotiating the final turn of the staircase and emerging into the circular corridor that ringed the wall of the inner tower. "Without help, it will take much time to clear a way through."
"Can't we just climb over the blockage?" Tom asked, "His Holiness seems pretty spry."
Ruy chuckled. "The gate opens inward, Señor Simpson. The barricade keeps it closed. I did not examine closely—ah, excuse me." He flattened against the wall as a bunch of middle-aged men with arquebuses that looked like they'd had the rust hastily scraped off quite recently came up through the stairs they were about to use. "But I suspect that the barricade is nailed in place," he concluded.
"It is," the pope said. "I saw it done."
"Over the wall it is, I guess," Tom said. "We'll need rope."
"Rope we shall find," Ruy said. "Or anything that might serve. Please to be observant as we pass along."
Down two more flights of stairs, through a courtyard and a mad dash down the spiral corridor around the old tomb, and out in to the courtyard. They were on the east side, facing the river, which ran more or less due north-south by the fortress.
All along the wall ahead of them, Tom could see guardsmen on the parapet, hastening in either direction toward the walls that had been threatened, while others remained to guard against the possibility of a further attack taking advantage of the diversion. Although if an attack came in, with half the men on this wall gone, they were screwed. Still, it should be pretty much impossible to get ladders around to this side without bringing them over the bridge, and there hadn't been any when Tom had been over that side before.
To Tom's left, just visible above the storage houses built close under the wall in the northeast corner, he could see Guardsmen leaning out with guns to fire at targets right at the foot of the wall. As he watched, one of them jerked, his head fountaining up as someone below shot him. The body pitched back and then slumped forward. Beside him, he heard the pope mutter "Requiem aeternam dona eis domine . . ."
Tom felt his stomach heave. I've seen worse, lots worse, he told himself sternly. Somehow it still seemed to get to him.
Ruy was taking in the scene as well. "We have perhaps five minutes before they gain the walls," he said, in tones that spoke of a judgment formed from long experience. "The whole wall is engaged. There are no reserves. If the towers were not heavily engaged, those men would not need to lean over so. We may hope that the towers are protecting each other for the moment."
There was a loud cheer from beyond the wall, and Tom saw the head of a long, crudely lashed ladder slam into the wall close to the corner tower to their left. Seconds later, two more appeared farther along