He dared to breathe again after a moment, when some of the crowd began filtering away. Between the musketeers here and the cavalry there, many of the Neapolitans present were beginning to feel less enthusiastic about protest than they had only a few minutes ago. And there were several routes out of the square, none of which were blocked.
And then the screams started. Oh, shit—the thought was followed swiftly by the realization that the crowd was about to surge toward his men. Without taking further thought, he flashed his sword down.
As the powder-smoke and ball belched out and the crowd began falling and dying and milling and running and trampling its weaker members underfoot, Don Vincente looked on, numbly listening to his NCOs and Lieutenant Rojas barking the orders for the continuing volleys that flayed and hammered the nearest face of the crowd and drove the survivors away to the other exits. He told himself, over and over, that it had been the only action he could take. That not to act would have seen all his men dead. That the cavalry had been sent to the other side of the square had been sheerest bad luck. That surely it had been the hand of the Devil that caused some poor soul to be trampled by a horse at just that moment.
It was over in minutes. Any thought the crowd might have had of escaping through Don Vincente's company died under the constant hail of bullets, each volley more ragged than the last as men reloaded at different rates. Any thought that they might have resisted died as the cavalry brought their sabers in to play. Some few might have had the courage and the will to stand, but they were tossed on a storm of panic. The shooting had prevented them acting as a coherent mob, and had turned them into a crowd of frightened individuals. An ounce of leadership and they would have torn the soldiers apart, but that ounce was lacking.
When the crowd had cleared, the ground was littered with bodies. Don Vincente's men had, between them, discharged perhaps three hundred rounds. Many—most, even—would have done little damage. Missed, or done no more than cause a mild scratch. Of the ones that remained, a musket ball two-thirds of an inch wide did terrible injury to flesh. The cavalry had accounted for far fewer, the horsemen being limited to what was within reach of their arms. But for those first few seconds, the first fifty or so bullets, the crowd had been packed tight together, twenty yards away at their nearest. And at that range, a musket ball is accurate and deadly. Some would have wounded two or more. There was a ring of bodies around Don Vincente, and all of them seemed to accuse him of murder.
"Most commendable," Father Gonzales said, a note of warm approval in his voice.
Slowly, carefully, not making any sudden movements, Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas sheathed his sword without turning on the priest and hacking him into bloody hunks of tainted flesh. It was, he found, the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
PART THREE
April 1635
Chapter 13
Rome
The mid-morning sun was making the paperwork on Sharon's desk glow in a way that was getting close to inducing eyestrain. Most of it was tedious stuff, but while she would have been happy to delegate, Adolf was not very good at accepting delegation. Preparing drafts for her approval or signature was as close as he was prepared to get. She wondered whether she should just start signing things without reading them—approvals of accounts, bread-and-butter correspondence with the embassy's suppliers and responses to invitations. Nothing earth-shattering. That gave her a slightly guilty start, though, and to be fair to her chief of staff he did manage to whittle the admin down to, on the worst days, about an hour. She sighed, and reflected that if she'd ever actually qualified as a nurse back up-time she'd have had more paperwork than this to reckon with.
The state papers, the copies of the intelligence briefings that had come in via radio over night and from the few USE agents in Rome who actually reported direct to the embassy via various channels, had been brief today. The twenty minutes of interest they generated hadn't been enough to sustain Sharon through an uncommonly large stack of, well, crap.
There had been a couple more near-riots. Nasty things were being said in Rome's tavernas about the way that second one had been handled. More than one informant had heard rumors that the slaughter had been deliberate, rather than the result of outrageous stupidity.
And rent-a-mobs were turning up elsewhere as well. Information on those was starting to trickle in as well, and whoever was organizing them—three different descriptions so far—was claiming to be either with the Committee of Correspondence or the Sons of Joe Buckley, a group apparently devoted to avenging Buckley's death at the hands of the Inquisition. That had caused Sharon a moment of grim amusement. The man who had almost certainly murdered poor Joe had, at the time, been a member in good standing of the Venice Committee of Correspondence. If they were a real group—and so far no one could say for certain that there wasn't a genuine protest or two happening among the hired demonstrations—then they were wildly misguided.