1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [196]
Just targets, he repeated to himself each time he pulled the trigger, trying not to think about it. Sanchez had stood back.
And then men in Swiss Guard uniforms surged across the doorway, taking advantage of the hole Tom had opened in the melee.
"We need to find another way," Ruy said.
"Reckon you're right," Tom said. "Let's get upstairs, go along the wall."
Chapter 44
Rome
"News, Ferrigno!" Cardinal Borja barked as he stared out over the rooftops of Rome. The terrace atop the Palazzo Borghese afforded a fine view of the Vatican, the Castel Sant'Angelo and the district within the Leonine wall that was the focus of effort of the troops he had wheedled out of the viceroy of Naples.
For hours the Castel Sant'Angelo had spat its defiance at the surrounding troops. The ring of bonfires illuminating its walls and the crash of the bombard shells it was firing lighted, by turns, the assorted vile and filthy little alleys around it. Borja had been assured by some military functionary or other—not one of the generals, he was sure, but some under-officer detailed to keep the prelate happy, in the mistaken belief that Borja would not notice the implied slight in fobbing him off with a second-rank myrmidon. Doubtless it was to do with their embarrassment at the fact that this simple assault on a fortress whose defenses had been out of date a hundred years ago was taking hours, that an operation that had been planned to be complete during a single day had now proceeded beyond sunset. The cardinal-infante had managed the reduction of an entire city in not much more time than this, scarcely two years before.
Borja had grown weary of the excuses some hours before. The just execution of the Barberini was now long overdue and the final prize, the completion of God's holy work in righting the wrongs done Holy Mother Church was close, tantalizingly close. And so he had bid Ferrigno shut his weaselly little mouth and hold the reports this half hour past, while Borja watched the shells fly and prayed furiously for calm.
Now, though, something seemed to be happening. Only a small part of the outer defenses of Castel Sant'Angelo was visible from this vantage, but there seemed to be movement there.
"Well?" he barked again. What was keeping the man?
"Your Eminence," Ferrigno said, coming to his side, "word reached us some moments ago that the ladders required for the escalade on the inner ward were prepared and the assault would proceed momentarily. The courier assured Colonel Don Pablo and myself that the first ladders would be reaching the walls only a few moments after he himself arrived here, and indeed—"
"Enough!" Borja held up a hand. Ferrigno was a good enough secretary, if kept well-whipped by his master's tongue. But the man's besetting sin was a tendency to prattle when nervous. Raised to the priesthood from a family barely removed from the common sort of folk, the man had not had the proper composure of a gentleman under fire. Nor, he being from some middle order of persons, did he have the brute indifference to peril that marked the true lower orders. Thus, with the fire of great guns echoing over the tiled roofs of Rome, the man seemed in near danger of soiling himself.
Christian charity bid Borja silently recognize that his own impatience had contributed nothing to helping the man's temerity. Still, it was unseemly. He sighed. "Fetch this Don Pablo"—it was a help, at least, to know the man's name; since Borja had not troubled to remember it past the initial instruction—"and bid him explain to me, as will undoubtedly be the case, why the Barberini will not be in our hands before dawn."
"Yes, Your Eminence," Ferrigno said, his relief evident. Where Don Pablo might be was anybody's guess. Borja had made his boredom with the technicalities