"Three more should suffice," Ruy said, momentarily at a loss for words, which Tom judged entirely worth the grazed knuckles he'd picked up.
Tom looked across. It was maybe two hundred yards, and the river didn't seem to be in full flood; there was a little mud showing under the jetty on this side, and the same on one a little upstream of the fortress on the other. It wouldn't be so bad. From here, with a little effort, they could get across to the shadows under the bridge on the other side. Hopefully, the boats wouldn't be noticed, because with only Captain Taggart and three Marines to keep an eye on them, they were relying entirely on stealth for that part of the mission. Tom couldn't help feeling that maybe, just maybe, they needed a bit more planning than they were doing. On the other hand, Ruy had been pulling crazy stunts like this for longer than Tom had been alive, so maybe he was approaching this as just another routine rescue of a major spiritual leader against thousand-to-one odds. Done it a dozen times before. Could do it again in my sleep. Suitably embellished with appropriately Catalan curlicues and declarations of honor and willingness to dare all in pursuit of his goal, of course.
Tom couldn't help thinking, as he helped drag the boats off the mud and into the water, of Sean Connery in all those action-movie roles he had played well into his fifties or sixties. Not that that was any guide to reality, but it was getting remarkably easy to imagine Ruy with a Scots accent.
The paddle across the river, the sweating, sore back and blistered hands apart, proved to be fairly easy. Pulling the boats up on to the mud below the river wall, only a little trickier. Tom's boots, filled as they were with a hair over two hundred and seventy pounds of footballer, sunk a bit deeper than everyone else's, and it was all he could do not to lose one of them.
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.