The Cannon Law—ARC(33)

Behind them, a clatter of hooves on cobbles became audible over the hooting and jeering. "Militia," Ruy remarked, without turning around. "About five minutes too late, if my humble opinion is worth anything."



Sharon chuckled. "Can an opinion informed by forty years of soldiering be called humble?"



Ruy raised an eyebrow and flared his mustachios magnificently. "Humility is a thing of the spirit, woman. The mere possession of uncommon skill and discernment boots nothing to the pride I take in my humility." Absolutely deadpan, save for the slight twitch of the left moustache, that anyone who did not know him would miss.



Sharon chuckled. "Why late?" she asked.



"Because five minutes ago they were simply a crowd of street-trash hired to be noisy. Now, they are minded to see a little blood. A sensible militiaman will simply chivvy them along to disperse into the taverns such normally haunt. What will you wager me that those eager hoofbeats are marshaled by someone who lacks experience?"



Just then the militia came in to view, wheeling prettily into the street Sharon and Ruy were on. They looked, to Sharon, like they were a cut above the usual seventeenth-century soldier—well turned-out, wearing something that came close to uniform, their back-swords held at the ready and gleaming in the spring sunshine. "They look okay to me," Sharon said.



Ruy's sneer was a pale thing compared to what he was capable of. A demonstration, in truth, of the contempt he had in mind—not even worth the breath to call them dogs, was one phrase she'd heard Ruy use a few months before. "Well drilled, well provided for, and badly led. Observe as the cretin on the lead horse—clearly, the horse has the brains and he has the money in that partnership—forms his men up for a saber-charge."



"How can you tell?" Clearly, Sharon thought, Ruy could see more than she could in the details. A lot more. They looked prettified, certainly, and not like the kind of riot police she was used to seeing on the TV news, but there didn't seem to be any obvious reason why they'd not be able to get the job done. The sabers were, perhaps, a bit nastier than she'd have expected from twentieth-century cops, but then these were rougher times.



Ruy sniffed. "Town guards, militia. You can spot the ones who know their trade by the fact that they look as little like soldiers as they can. The ones who break up a tavern fight, rather than making it worse, tend to look little smarter than the participants—ah, did I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, not predict this?"



The militia horsemen were lining up for a charge in the street out of sight of the rioters, just around the corner Ruy and Sharon were standing on. The officer on the lead horse—Ruy had picked him out correctly, for all he was attired similarly to his men—leaned down. "Signora, signor, move aside, if it please you. We shall clear this riffraff from the street directly."



"Come, Doña Sharon," Ruy said, adopting the form of address she had never been comfortable with. "Let us move to a less insecure vantage point."



"I thank you, signor. It would grieve me most greatly if the dottoressa was hurt in the unpleasantness to follow." The officer touched the hilt of his sword to the brim of his hat as he spoke, while behind him his men chivvied out into a column of fours. At least he's up on current gossip in this town, Sharon thought. As the wealthiest and most prominent black woman in Rome, she was distinctive enough that pretty much everyone recognized her on sight.



Before she'd arrived in Rome, Sharon had assumed that she'd be the only black woman in the city. But, to her surprise, she'd discovered there were a considerable number of black people living in several cities in the peninsula. Having black servants was considered fashionable by wealthy Italians. The same was true in southern France. There were a lot of African women in Marseilles, for instance. In fact, there was a subspecies of charity in France that consisted of orphanages for the out-of-wedlock children of African domestic servants whose masters would not allow the kids to be reared in the household, along with an order of nuns who ran them. In due time, she imagined, these children—or their children—would just merge into the general population.



But few if any of them looked the way she did—wearing very well-made and expensive down-time garments and accompanied by an armed caballero. She also knew that her bearing and comportment would be quite different. She still found the idea peculiar—downright bizarre, in fact. But she'd eventually accepted what Ruy and every down-timer told her, that she acted as if she were nobility, and high-ranked at that. A veritable Queen of Sheba, as Ruy had once put it.