1635: The Papal Stakes

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

John O’Neill was able to keep back the tears until the barge drew round the last bend in the Tiber and he saw the Ponte Emilio, which Romans were now starting to call the Ponte Rotto, or Broken Bridge. It had been broken forever, like most things in Rome, but there was something particularly forlorn about it now. Its single proudly-carved arch, the only one remaining, now led boldly to nowhere. As if cut by the cleaver of a giant, the bridge no longer spanned the Tiber, but stopped in its midst; there was no way to tell whether it commemorated a dream abandoned before completion, or one that had fallen into decay.

John wiped his eyes on his sleeve and wondered at the changes that had come over Rome. He had only spent a few weeks there, and his ostensible reason for going-studies-had been both a threadbare excuse and a dismal failure. But the city had left its mark on him, had whispered to him of empires. And with all the exuberance of youth, he embraced only half of the timeless lesson about empires: that they did indeed rise. The sad truth that empires also fell was of concern only to those who were born to be beaten, who lacked the valor to take what was theirs, who doubted that God was on their side and guiding their sword and scepter.

Luke Wadding, along with the other priest-lecturers at St. Isidore’s, had striven, mightily, to temper Johnnie’s embrace of such mundane glory and destiny. They offered him visions of the divine Empire of God and Trinity, of the Christian conquest of hearts not bodies, of the power of the cross-and yes, the pen-over that of the sword.

But John O’Neill, third earl of Tyrone, had remained dubious of these pacifistic pieties. For him, the story of God’s role in the fate of man lost its appeal after the Old Testament, and did not regain it until the records of the Crusades. His one complaint with military life was that there was entirely too much thinking and talking over what to do, and how to do it, and who might be angered. Soldiering was in the doing of deeds, not the conceiving of them. And, being a soldier born and bred, he knew well enough how and when to act.

But seeing Rome this way-sullen, gray, singed around the edges-left him uncertain how to act or feel. Rome had never been a quiet city, or a clean city, or a kind city. It had been loud and crowded and tempestuous-but it had always been very much alive. The average Roman never stopped long enough to look at the monuments of their past; they were too busy scavenging them for pieces with which they could build their future. John liked that about Romans, and so the ruins had never seemed sad or melancholy.

Until now.

As the barge moved toward the left bank, making easier headway in the lee of the current that accelerated as it swept around the Isola Tiberina on both sides, Owen Roe came to stand by his first cousin, once removed. “Are you feeling quite well, Johnnie?”

John nodded. “My body is fine, but my heart; my heart… My God, look what they’ve done, Owen. The Spanish bastards. First, playing us as fools for years, and now this. Look at all the burned houses, the broken walls. It will be years-no, decades-in the fixing. Damn us, damn me, that I ever served the Spanish. If I could do it over again-”

“Calm now, Johnnie. As Isabella said, not all the Spanish meant to mislead us. Just as I doubt many of the Spaniards arrived in Rome thinking they’d do this-” He glanced in the direction of the decapitated bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo.

“No, maybe this wasn’t what they intended, or even what they wanted, but they did it right enough anyhow, didn’t they?

Owen shook his head as the barge bumped to a stop against a row of hawsers and the warm-weather stink wafted down to them from where the effluent of the Cloaca Maximus dumped the city’s wastes into the Tiber. “Can’t say that we always made much better distinctions than the Spanish did during our own campaigning, Johnnie. I’m sure enough regretting things we did in the Provinces. Orders notwithstanding. Might well have been the same here.”

“Maybe,” said John, watching a half-dozen morion-helmeted occupiers stagger off in the direction of the Borgo, bottles of wine dangling loosely in their fingers. “But I’m not exactly sensing an undercurrent of regret.” He hopped over the low gunwale of the barge. “Have the men gather their gear and be ready.”

“Are we in a rush, John?”

“Aye. We need to find lodging, rest, and then move as soon as possible.”

“Why?”

“Why?” John looked around at the sagging skyline of Rome, the almost empty streets. “Because that damned battle-axe Isabella was right about something else: if the Spanish did this to a lovely old city, who knows what they might do to a lovely old priest like Luke Wadding?”

Once the door closed behind the invariably sour doctor, Frank turned to Giovanna. “See? I told you my fever was gone.”

Giovanna-small, dark, curvaceous, part-Madonna, part-hellion, and just starting to show-pouted. As only she could. “So. Very well. Maybe he is right.”

“He is a doctor,” Frank pointed out.

“He is a Spaniard and a tool of the Inquisition,” Giovanna countered.

“Okay, so he’s one of the bad guys, but he seems pretty conscientious. And besides, I think they want me well enough so they can move us again.”

She eyed the valises and chests that had been brought in during the doctor’s visit. “Because they gave us some containers in which to put our clothes?”

Frank shrugged. “That. But only partly. I was thinking more of the good doctor’s visits. Four in the past week, one of which was yesterday, and then today’s. That’s not just medical prudence; that’s a detailed assessment of our readiness to relocate. That’s why he wanted to examine you, too.”

“The pig. As if I would let-”

“I don’t think the Spanish brought any midwives with them, Gia. And I don’t think they’re going to permit any contact between us and the locals. They’ve created what we used to call an information firewall.”

Giovanna’s wonderful, alluring pout was back. “What does this mean, an ‘information firewall’?”

“It means that they are making sure that there’s no communication between us and the outside world. I’ll bet even the guards are specially selected for this duty: probably bunked apart from the others, so that there’s no word of us even in barracks gossip-which frequently winds up repeated in bordellos.”

Giovanna’s head rose to a condemning (if modest) height upon her shoulders. “And how would you know what transpires in bordellos, husband?”

“I read about it. In books. A long time ago. Before I hit puberty. When I was thinking of becoming a priest.” She couldn’t help but smile. “Is that okay, then?”

“Just barely,” she allowed, and then curled up against him like a cat that has decided to use its favorite person as a private cocoon.

After they had enjoyed that closeness for a few minutes, Frank stirred a bit. “Hey. I’d better start packing.”

“You? And what makes you think you are ready to pack chests and valises?”

“Gia, I’m not a cripple-”

“No, but you could be!” She got off him like a cat, too: one fast jump and she was four feet away, glaring down, hands on hips. “You will not put weight on your leg. Not yet. No, do not argue. This is not open to discussion.” And with that, she turned her back on him sharply and set about the task of packing their sparse belongings with an energy that would have put a sugar-infused ten-year-old to shame. After a time, once her histrionic ire had abated a bit, she asked over one hurrying shoulder. “Why do you think they are moving us again?”

Frank shrugged and put his arms behind his head. “Not sure.”

“Do you think it is to make us harder to find? Are they playing a version of-what have you called it? — the shell game?”

“Yeah, but every time we get moved, it calls attention to us. And why move us during the day?”

“I do not know. Could they mean to advertise our presence in Rome?”

“I don’t know.” Frank sat up, feeling irritability attach itself to him like a small dog that had affixed itself to his trouser leg. “Damn it, I just don’t know anything, sitting here. Which is the worst part of being a prisoner. It’s not so much that you can’t get out, but that you have no knowledge of what’s going on out there-” he waved a hand at a wall “-and no way to let them know that you’re in here. Wherever ‘here’ is. It makes me feel, well-I don’t know: helpless.”

“Well, you are not helpless. You must be strong, so first you had to regain your health. And you have accomplished that. Almost.”

“Yeah, well I’m not as strong as you, yet.”

“Of course not. You never will be. I am a woman. Except for your arms and chest, we are in all ways the stronger sex. We can endure far more than you can.”

Frank discovered that the way she said it-gaze imperious, head and shoulders back, and therefore, other anatomical highlights thrust forward-had been at least as arousing as it had been informative. Almost before he was aware of it, Frank’s body pushed forward its own, suddenly awakened anatomical highlights.

Giovanna noticed the reaction with a smile. “We can endure more of that, too. Much more.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Stop! Stay where you are! You will not move! Not without your crutches. And if you are very cooperative, I may agree to test your-endurance-tonight. All in the interest of ensuring your return to health, of course.”

“Of course.” He loved it when she smiled that way: the sweetness of an angel infected by the leer of a demon. And a hotter temper than the two put together. But it wasn’t just temper: it was passion. Passion “Frank! No! And I mean it! Now, we must think what to do after you have made your recovery.”

“What to do?” He looked at the walls. They were clean, with some reasonably comfortable pieces of furniture pushed up against them. But they were still prison walls. “I think it will take us a pretty long time to tunnel out of any prison. Hey, maybe that’s why they move us, to make sure we don’t make too much progress digging our way out with the soup spoons we’ve cleverly hidden from our warders…”

Giovanna grinned widely and Frank decided, for probably the third time that day, that he really did love her wide, full, lips. “Very funny, Frank. You do have a way with words.” She thought. “Which is probably the next thing you should be doing.”

“What?”

“Writing. For the cause.”

Frank stared at her. At times, she was very much activist Antonio Marcoli’s daughter: passionate, charismatic, and wildly impractical. “Uh…Gia, assuming I could even get writing materials, just how do you expect me to get the word to the waiting masses?”

She ignored his gentle facetiousness, rode over it with a raised chin. “The greatest revolutionary tracts have often been written by person unjustly imprisoned by an oppressive state.”

Hmmm…maybe not so impractical, after all. “Okay, but there are problems.”

“There always are. We shall overcome them. What are they?”

God, how he loved her. “Well, let’s see. There’s the whole ‘nothing to write with’ challenge. And once I’ve written something, how do we keep it? And if I’m writing revolutionary tracts, I’m not sure that liberal-minded jailers like our Inquisitional pals will do anything other than carefully file it in the nearest live fireplace. And then there’s the little matter of what to write: I don’t think my inner author is very inspired-or even alive.”

“See? You have already detected the major impediments to this plan. That is half the battle; now, we only need to solve them.”

Only need to solve them. As if real-world situations were like Rubix cubes; you just fiddle with them long enough and eventually, they work out. Unfortunately, the real world was full of changing conditions and changing minds. And not all problems had solutions. But, he had to admit, the notion of writing a revolutionary tract while cooped up had a kind of romanticism to it-probably because his leg felt better, they were warm and well-fed, and their accommodations were no longer shared with several families of rats. Absent any one of those improvements, and the whole enterprise would probably seem a lot less diverting. But for now, Giovanna had a point: it was something that he could do, and he’d read more than once that lethargy was a prisoner’s worst enemy. So it would be good to have a project, and this one promised to be challenging enough. If only there was some way to…

“Signor and Signora Stone?”

Frank woke from his daze, found Giovanna, eyes opened wide, pointing at the door. Castro y Papas, she mouthed silently.

“Hello?” Frank responded.

“It is I, Don Vincente.”

He was actually Don Vincente Jose-Maria de Castro y Papas, captain in the Spanish Army of the Two Sicilies. And not at all a bad guy, considering it was he who had taken Frank prisoner. “Yes?”

“I regret troubling you, Signor Stone, but I must enter.”

“Come on in, then.”

The Spaniard, a well-formed man hovering at the edge of his thirties, opened and flowed through the door with an elegant efficiency of motion. If Spain’s fathers hadn’t made him a swordsman, he could probably have become one hell of a dancer. His calm-always calm-brown eyes surveyed the scene. “I see you have already begun to pack. Most excellent. I am sorry for the inconvenience, but we must move you. Yet again.”

“Yeah, about that: what’s with all the moving? We still like the view from this room.”

Castro y Papas glanced briefly at the windowless walls. “Despite the singular charm of the scenery, we must house you elsewhere.”

“‘House.’ What a lovely way of saying ‘imprison.’”

Castro y Papas may have blushed a bit; it was hard to tell, given his complexion. “It is good to see you have kept some sense of humor about your situation, Signor Stone. I have not been able to do so.”

Frank immediately felt sorry for the captain. He noticed that even Giovanna looked away as the Spaniard’s tone conveyed bitter regret. And Frank suddenly realized why the regret was so bitter: because, clearly, Don Vincente was not allowed to show any more overt sympathy than he just had. Even that measure of commiseration was probably tantamount to treason. Or maybe heresy. In Borja’s army, the line separating the two seemed less than distinct, at times.

“Hey, listen, Captain, I’m sorry if I got a little snarky, there-”

Don Vincente’s left eyebrow rose. “‘Snarky’-I do not know this word. It is dialect? Scottish, maybe?”

“Uh…maybe. I really don’t know where it came from. It was a word we used up-time. It means-oh, I don’t know, ‘testy’ and a little rude, I guess.”

“Ah. But ‘snarky’ sounds more appropriate somehow. Perhaps because it sounds so similar to ‘snarl.’”

You’ve been a pretty good guy-as oppressive conquerors go, that is.”

That brought a smile to Castro y Papas’ face. “I endeavor to be the nicest villain that I may be,” he explained with the intimation of a flourish. “And I am truly sorry you must be moved again. And that I may not tell you why. In part, because it would be a violation of orders.”

“And the other part of your reason?”

“Is that I really do not know why you are being moved. I have only suspicions. I may safely say that your situation, both in terms of immediate security and larger political implications, is being handled at the very highest levels. Directly.”

Well, no surprises there. “You mean the same levels that gave orders for you not to accept my surrender when you showed up at my bar with a cannon?”

Castro y Papas considered his response carefully. “I was not present when those orders were issued, but my commander tells me that both directives came from the most senior command echelons here in Rome. But it was fortunate that events transpired such that you were taken prisoner.”

“Yeah, I’ve wondered about that. You, uh, skated pretty close to the line on that one, didn’t you?”

“If I understand your idiom correctly, I may only say this: I scrupulously found a way to obey the letter of the law. And yet, miracle of miracles, here you are!” His concluding smile was both mischievous and-what? Vengeful? Vengeance against whom? Against whoever had given him orders that he had openly professed were devoid of honor? Because honor clearly meant a great deal to Captain Vincente Jose-Maria de Castro y Papas.

Behind Castro y Papas, his apparently inseparable sergeant, an independently minded fellow answering to the name of Ezquerra, appeared in the doorway. “I am told that the coaches are here, Captain.”

“Coaches?” Frank wondered aloud, conducting a quick survey of their sparse worldly goods. “I’m thinking the two of us and our goods could all fit in a donkey cart, with room to spare for two of your guards.”

Castro y Papas smiled. “My sergeant is so indiscrete that I sometimes think he must be working as a foreign agent provocateur and informer within our ranks. Ezquerra, perhaps you would like to share with us the final destination of each of the coaches?”

“I’m sorry; I cannot oblige you in this, Captain.”

“And why is that?”

“I was not told the destinations.”

“You show entirely too little resourcefulness and energy to work as a spy, Ezquerra. I suspect you shall be no more successful in your new covert endeavors than you are as a sergeant.”

Ezquerra almost bowed. “The captain’s wisdom is widely renowned. Even unto the end of this street.”

Don Vincente was clearly trying very hard to suppress a smile, and Frank discovered-suddenly, impulsively-that he was no longer merely sympathetic to this nice enemy; he actually liked him. Which could be dangerous.

Perhaps Giovanna had felt the same thing, or had simply seen the reaction flow through Frank’s features. She shut the last trunk with a sharp crack and announced, “We are ready. If we must go, let us go.”

As the coaches lined up in broad daylight, and with full-length blinds and canopies erected to obscure the identities of whoever might be handed up into each vehicle, Don Vincente was conscious that he was grinding his teeth.

Audibly, apparently. Ezquerra coughed lightly. “This must be the best-publicized secret prisoner transfer in Roman history.”

Castro y Papas nodded sharply. “Yes. Which I do not like at all.”

“Well, who wants to share in a secret that everyone knows?”

“This isn’t incompetence, Ezquerra. This is an occasion where Napoleon’s axiom does not hold.”

“Who is Napoleon?”

“A famous up-time general who advised, ‘Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.’ Except the flaws of this prisoner transfer are not the product of incompetence: they reek of malice. Or rather, malign plotting. These instructions we were given-to follow at a distance and remain watchful for any attempts to surreptitiously follow the coaches-means that our masters are trailing the hostages like bait in the water. Which could get the two of them-no, the three of them-killed.”

“By whom? Their own people?”

“Sergeant, how long have you served before the cannon?”

“Almost an hour now, sir. Or perhaps eight years. Honestly, I’ve lost track; serving under you is such a singularly pleasant experience, that time just seems to fly by.”

“So, you have been a soldier for a lifetime and a half. And so you have seen how often casualties are inflicted upon one’s own side: inaccurate fire, confusion, poor visibility. The causes are legion, but the lesson is all one: if weapons are used, people die-and the wielders of the weapons rarely, if ever, have complete control over who dies.”

Castro y Papas jerked his head at the second coach. “They are playing passe-dix with the lives of hostages whose safety is their responsibility. One of whom is a woman with child.” Don Vincente spat. “It is a stain upon the honor of every one of us who must take part.”

Ezquerra shrugged. “Maybe, but would you not agree that it is also a clever plan?”

Castro y Papas sighed. “Perhaps. If the audience for which they intend this show is here to see it.”

“And do you think they are?”

Don Vincente sighed. “We shall find out soon enough, perhaps.” He snagged the reins of his horse, jumped a foot up into the waiting stirrup, and mounted with fluid ease.