Not five minutes passed before, indeed, the sound of arquebuses and a brief surge of cheers told of a breach in the walls. Mined for building materials, over the decades, the walls of Rome were as much breach as defense in any event, for all that the current pope had begun many repairs and improvements. They were obviously being carried against minimal opposition.
The defenders at this gate worked on, oblivious. Sanchez wondered if he should warn them, and then reminded himself that he was not involved. He had orders to return safely with intelligence, and would like as not be shot by some nervous boy handling an arquebus for the first time if he ventured closer. So, he waited.
The assault on the defenders' rear, when it came, was short, sharp, and efficient. Sanchez marked their alertness to the militia officer's credit. When the company of pike and arquebusiers formed on the piazza almost exactly where Sanchez had been sitting only moments before, the defenders turned around, snatched up their weapons, and formed a ragged line on the near side of the defenses they had so painstakingly constructed, anchored at one end on a pyramidal tomb that had been incorporated into the wall at some remote date. The Spanish troops—from the look of them, more than likely Italian mercenaries—lowered their pikes and advanced at a fast walk, and halted for the arquebusiers mixed among them to present and fire.
Perhaps twenty pieces discharged, scarcely enough to obscure Sanchez's view of the defenders. Four of them were down, and the rest began to look shaky. Whether any of the defenders had returned fire, and with what effect, was not apparent. The militia officer was waving his back-sword vigorously, and the men nearest him lowered their weapons to countercharge. To either side, however, the men bearing their various aged or improvised pole-arms at the ends of the line began dropping their weapons and running. When the Spanish line advanced at the slow, grim pace of men determined to engage in press of pike, the amateurs simply melted away and the professionals let them. A small knot of defenders remained and, their chances of running lost as the wicked points closed almost to touching, they dropped their weapons and raised their hands.
The leader of the mercenaries called out the command to halt, and the little battle was over. Even from fifty paces away, Sanchez could see that the militia officer was openly weeping, while to either side of him, mercenaries went to dismantle his barricade. Down the Via Ostiensis, the makeshift tercio began breaking up into column of march to advance once more on the city.
As he rode away to secure a vantage to see more of the action develop, Sanchez began to feel hopeful. An army that had not had to bleed to enter a city would not be maddened enough to make serious work of a sack. The city would be comprehensively looted, of course, but in all likelihood the whores and tavern-keepers would earn most of it back over the coming weeks.
"I wish the bells would stop," Benito said, squatting on his heels under one of the windows.
"Me too," Frank said, sitting on a low stool and keeping one eye on the deserted street through a slit in the boards over the window. "I mean, we already know the city's about to be invaded. The only people who don't are deaf. Don't the bellringers have something better to do? Nothing else, all the folks sheltering in churches are getting deafened."
"I'm going deaf and the nearest church is three streets away." Benito was idly whittling at a piece of scrap wood, betraying his bad nerves. Everyone in the place was a little on edge, hardly any of which was due to getting no sleep the night before. In the end, there were twenty guys and twenty-eight women in the place. The women and the disabled folks were all upstairs, and had pulled the ladder up after them through the gap where they'd taken the stairs out. While a lot of folks had gone and sheltered in churches, even Rome didn't have enough church buildings to hold the whole population at once. A lot of people were hiding in cellars or attics, or out of town. The ones in the Committee who'd come and hid were the ones who would likely get grief off respectable folks if they tried sheltering in a church, or who couldn't move very far. Three of the people upstairs were bed-bound, and had had to be carried up.
Downstairs, they had all the doors and windows nailed shut and boarded outside and in, and barricaded. Three rows of barricades, in fact, and with a little luck at least one of the back ways out would be left unguarded. There was a route out through the cellar that came up two doors down the street; with the city under siege Frank had lost his compunctions about knocking cellars through and taking advantage of the centuries-old excavations under the city. He'd wondered if there was any possibility of getting down into the catacombs, which he'd vaguely heard about but never seen. No one had any idea where they might be, or how one got into them, so he'd abandoned the idea. And it was too late now.