The Cannon Law—ARC(170)

In the time it took him to work the slide for a second shot, the two soldiers had gone down under a flurry of knife-thrusts and one pistol-shot, a guardsman was bent over and clutching a wound in his side, and Ruy was booting Quevedo in the face to free his sword from the man's neck, into which it had gone nearly three quarters of the width. Blood was spurting everywhere, and Quevedo's face had gone slack as his head flopped to one side.



"I never did cure him of that fault in his guard with the back-sword," Ruy remarked, casually, as he flourished an already-bloodstained handkerchief to clean his blade. "And I am now glad I did not."



Quevedo thumped to the floor as he spoke the last words, and was clearly dead by the time Ruy sheathed his blade.



Tom turned and saw that the pope was assisting his wounded guardsman. "Not bad," the pontiff remarked when he saw Tom looking. "And you have good doctors, not so?"



"Three of 'em," Tom said, grinning. "Let's git."



They slipped unseen to the boats, while behind them the fires in the ruins of the Castel Sant'Angelo began to take hold and light the night sky once more.





Epilogue

Rome



Giovanna peered into the earthenware jug that the jailer had brought in that morning. She could manage the night despite the thirst. There would be another jug in the morning, as there had been for the last two mornings. She had had to use most of it to get Frank clean, since she had been allowed to share a cell with him. They had let a doctor at him, and the bandages were clean, at least. It was the rest of him, the cuts, the bruises, the scrapes and gouges. And the soot and the dust he'd been covered with, and the dried blood.



He was still breathing, for which Giovanna thanked God. They had left Giovanna her rosary, which had been her mother's. She'd been trying for years to follow her father's revolutionary precepts but she'd not been able to bear to throw the thing away. Here and now, it was a great comfort. She even remembered the right prayers to say.



Would it do any good? They'd told her there was to be a new pope soon, that the old one was dead in the ruins of the Castel Sant'Angelo. The last light of a summer's evening came through the tiny, barred window, and she stared up at the indigo sky in which stars were starting to appear. Outside she could hear the sounds of soldiers marching about. She'd heard only snatches of the sack of the city that was going on outside. Sometimes there was screaming, and earlier in the day she'd heard the grisly sounds of an execution outside. From the window, she'd just been able to see that someone was being garroted. Someone in a priest's clothes. She'd tried to think of it as the inevitable bloodshed when the forces of reaction fell to fighting among themselves, but what she'd seen had been an old man being strangled.



It made thinking about anything beyond the next jug of water and loaf of bread . . . hard. The last of the daylight was falling on Frank's face now. His eyes were twitching a little under his eyelids, and his breathing had the rasp of his soft snores. She hoped that was a good sign. The linen of the bandage around his head was crusted with blood, and she had not dared try to change it. There was a finger missing from his left hand, the ring finger. That seemed to have stopped oozing now, and she hoped she'd kept it clean and dry enough. The broken leg seemed to have been set well enough, but she could not tell under the splint and the strapping.



They'd told her that he'd been shot, but only grazed by two bullets, and the rest had happened when the building collapsed. That he had not been beaten, or shot by anyone's order. That the shooting had been an accident in the tension of surrender and the bruises from being buried under rubble.



Why Spanish soldiers should care that she thought of them any better than she did, she had no idea. But they had put her in here to nurse her husband, which was worth far more than any apologies. She had been weeping, barely able to breathe for grief until they told her Frank was alive. They'd also told her they did not have enough jailers to nurse all the injured prisoners, and needed the cell space anyway.



It helped that the Spaniards were using Roman jailers, who didn't seem all that enthusiastic about keeping prisoners for the Spanish Inquisition. They were doing their best to keep everyone in the cell block healthy and comfortable.



And Frank still slept. She had heard stories of people who never awoke after head injuries, and every hour Frank slept made her think about them some more. He had the beginnings of a fever, too. If any of his wounds became gangrenous, only the mercy of her jailers would bring a doctor to save him from it.



There was a rattle of keys in the corridor. Someone was coming.



"Señora?" The voice wasn't the usual jailer, a native Roman, but a Spanish-accented voice. Giovanna put down the jug and stepped away from the door when the spyhole clacked open. There was murmured conversation outside and then another rattle of keys. The door opened and it was the Spanish captain who had had her captured but let everyone else go. And who had had Frank shot.