The Cannon Law—ARC(166)

"Indeed, Your Eminence, and I tender my most humble apologies. However, the constraints of time and hands to turn to the task have meant that in many cases those guarding the prelates in question have felt themselves able to make a show of defiance. In all cases, either the subject has died in the fighting or was killed to prevent his escape, a point on which Your Eminence was most forceful. There were to be no fugitives."



Borja sighed, again. "So be it. It seems the Holy Spirit has sentenced each of these men to death, for in the wager of battle is the providence of the Almighty most clearly to be seen. Let us turn to a more happy chance. Is it confirmed that Barberini is within the Castel Sant'Angelo?"



"It is, Your Eminence. The man I set to watch the Leonine wall is most reliable, and positively identified Barberini as he passed from the Vatican to his current redoubt."



"Good, good. I will ask, Quevedo, that you go personally and see to it that there is no escape there, either. I would desire greatly that the man publicly answer for his crimes against the church, but not at the price of his being granted any period of liberty during which he may wreak further mischief."



"I am Your Eminence's to command." Quevedo withdrew with a bow.



Borja turned back to watch over the roofs of Rome, and tried to guess whether the confusion and tumult about the Castel Sant'Angelo meant he would see success before the dawn.





Chapter 45

Rome



Tom rubbed at his eyes. The courtyard between the inner keep and the wall was sheltered from the wind and there were two hundred men in it and on the wall around it doing their level best to burn their own weight in black powder. A few bombards were still firing, lobbing shells out over the walls in an attempt to drive off the crowd of Spaniards at the walls. The assault had been going on for nearly twenty minutes, now, and everyone who could work a gun was doing so. The Swiss Guard knew that an attempt was being made to get the pope to safety, and a few of them had grinned savagely at Tom and Ruy as they cast about for a way to get out.



They'd tried the riverside wall already. By the time they'd got up onto the upper level of the walls and gone along to find a place to rappel down, there was a spillover from the assaults on the north and south walls, and there was only a narrow gap that was not now covered by Spanish soldiers awaiting their turn at the ladders. For all the bravery of the Swiss Guards, there was no driving them off, now.



The grenades had been exhausted in minutes. There were more in the armory, but with everything else that had had to be done to get the fortress into a condition fit for even the little defense they could manage, there had been too few hands available to fill many of them with powder. The men on the walls were reduced to tossing rocks and cannonballs over the walls in an attempt to put the attackers off, but it was unlikely to achieve much.



Possibly, if the defensive works had actually been finished, the fortress might have held longer. Or at all. For now, there were small parties at the top of each ladder who had beaten off three concerted rushes at the wall, but the attackers were not retiring after each attempt. They were ranged at the bottom of the wall and any man who showed himself over the battlements received a hail of bullets for his trouble. There were already forty or fifty casualties, most of them dead. They wouldn't want for last rites, either. The place was full of priests. Tom had stayed with the pope by the river gate while Ruy went to discuss the escape further with the commander of the Swiss Guard. Hopefully, there would be some kind of diversion, but Tom couldn't imagine what.



Another man fell from the wall above them, and hit the ground with the boneless finality that could only mean one thing. The pope started forward. Tom was about to restrain him, when he saw the elderly cleric kneel down by the corpse and make the sign of the cross.



Tom went to one knee beside him. "Your Holiness? Please be quick," he said as gently as he could over the noise of battle. "The man is surely gone beyond any comfort you can bring him."



"I know," he said, and Tom saw in the firelight that the pope's eyes were bright and shining, his face blank with distress. "But he will not go there without my prayers to speed him on his way. He—will—not."



Tom realized that what he had taken for distress was, in fact, overwhelming fury. "It's all wrong, isn't it?" he said, embarrassed at the banality of the sentiment in a place where men were dying every second.



"All wrong, yes," the pope said, closing the dead guardsman's eyes and crossing himself again after a briefly murmured prayer. Tom didn't know enough Latin to understand what he'd said.