Frank clutched his left hand tight in against himself, squatting down and pressing it between his thigh and belly. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just settle down and hurt. But just when he thought he'd gotten used to it, it'd start throbbing again. And he'd get to thinking about the fact that he had only three fingers on his left hand now.
That was better than poor Benito, who had a splinter of one of the tables he'd waited take one of his ears off and rip his cheek down to the bone. Dino had taken a nasty crack to the head diving for cover when they sent the last volley of musket fire into the building. Both of them were sitting in back, watching the cellar stairs and feeling sorry for themselves. Everyone else had various cuts and bruises and there was a lot of coughing going on.
Sure, no one had been killed yet, on either side, as far as Frank could tell. And the two near-things they'd had with fires starting about the place had been put out before they did more than make the air in the place foul and vile to breathe. It had all just been one little accident after another. They had plenty of furniture to hide behind, and that, behind sold brick walls, made pretty effective protection against musket balls. Some of the ricochets were a little scary, but by the time they'd made a couple of bounces they were pretty much spent. One of Piero's friends had gotten hit in the ass, which had made him yelp, but the bullet hadn't even gone through his coattails. There was a bit of a scorch mark and he'd have a bruise, but everyone had gotten a laugh out of it.
They'd run out of lamp oil on the upper floors nearly an hour ago now, and the soldiers out front, who'd got themselves into positions in the house across the street so they weren't standing in the open to shoot, had settled down to occasionally letting fly with a few shots, as far as Frank could tell, just to let everyone inside know they were there.
"Time, yet?" Piero asked, "Only it's getting late, and there's this girl—"
"There's always a girl," Frank retorted, grinning back with only a slight flinch as another couple of musket balls splintered through the increasingly threadbare shutters to ping and whine around the room. "But, yes, it's getting about that time. Nearly dusk." They'd decided on that, earlier, so that when the women and kids and invalids were making their getaway they'd have the best chance they could. And the guys who surrendered could say they'd only been doing it to buy them some time to get away. That was assuming they hadn't got out already. There probably wasn't anything stopping anyone in one of the other houses on this street from just going out and walking away. None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any attention to them, either as places to sack or possible routes into Frank's place.
"Do we even have a white flag?" Piero asked.
"Bound to be a shirt we can use," Frank said. "And I think there's a broom handle behind the bar. That ought to do it."
"You realize we're probably going to get a beating even before the Inquisition starts asking us questions, right?" Piero was looking serious for a moment.
"Yeah, I'd figured," Frank said, although he hadn't. Made sense, though. These guys could've been off robbing the Vatican while they'd been trying to get in here, and a couple of them had been winged or scorched right at the start of the day. They'd be pissed. And Frank knew all about what jocks did when they got pissed. They found someone smaller and weaker than them to take it out on. Somehow Frank didn't think he'd be running any pranks on these guys, either.
It was, as his dad would say, a bummer. Still, it beat being dead. "I'll get the white flag and tell the wounded guys to get out," he said. "You remind everyone that when we get taken to the Inquisition, we tell 'em everything. No sense getting tortured, and we haven't committed any heresy, so the worst they can do is lock us up for a while."
"I wish I shared your confidence that that would stop them," Piero said. "I have heard stories about the Spanish Inquisition."
"It's that or total despair, right at the moment," Frank said.
"Despair has this to say for it, Frank: why did they come straight here?"
Frank heaved a sigh. He'd been hoping that the silence on that subject was because no one but him had noticed. "They want me, Piero. When I go out, I'll ask if me surrendering will mean the rest of you get out, okay? I wasn't going to say anything, and don't tell anyone because I don't want anyone trying to be a hero on my account."
Piero frowned. "What? And let you be a hero on our account?" Frank's expression must have been all the answer he needed. "Fine, fine. Whatever, we've saved nearly everyone, yes? Do what you feel you have to, but I'll not be running if it comes to it."
Frank shook his head. "Nuts, all of you," he said, and scuttled off to find a white flag.
Waiting for a lull in the shooting was a nervous few moments for Frank, because to get where he could poke the flag out through a ruined shutter he needed to get in front of the barricade of furniture. Someone over the street must've spotted the movement, because suddenly every single bullet that came over came through the window he was crouched under. Bits of glass and splinters of wood fell all over him and he couldn't help screwing up his eyes and trying to burrow in to cracks in the plaster. Muskets might not be real accurate weapons, but across the width of a street they did just fine. A few seconds pause, and he thrust the broomhandle with its dirty dishrag attached out into the evening sunlight.
A couple more shots and then there was shouting from outside. No more shooting. He got up and looked out of the window, holding the flag out and waving it as vigorously as he dared. Every last bit of him wanted to dive back behind the barricade and cower there like a mouse.
Someone across the street leaned out of his window and shouted something at Frank. Problem number one, he thought. "No hablo español!" he shouted back, hoping that that was the right language, and at the same time using pretty much the whole of his vocabulary in it.
"Momento!" came the shout back, followed by something that included what sounded like "capitan." Were they telling him to wait for an officer? He hoped so.
A nervous wait. Five minutes? An hour? The soldiers across the street were leaning out of their windows and hollering to where, Frank could now see, they had a barricade of their own up. Somewhere to watch the action from shelter. Their barricade was a lot more professional looking than the ones Frank had been squatting behind all day, and there seemed to be a fair number of horses down there, too.
Frank squinted against the glare of the setting sun, which had now moved around to shine the other way along the street. Definitely horses, maybe two dozen. What use were cavalry going to be? Or maybe they just had a lot of officers here. And then Frank remembered what else horses did on battlefields. He couldn't see them from where he was, but he was willing to bet there were at least a couple of cannon waiting behind that barricade. Looks like we did this just in the nick of time, he thought.
Then a couple of guys emerged from behind the barricade and began walking briskly up to where Frank was. One of them was holding a pole-arm of some sort, Frank couldn't remember which name went with which weapon, but it was the one with a big spike and an axe-blade. Some sort of white cloth had been tied to it.
Frank sighed in relief. They were willing to talk, then. Best news he'd had all day. When the two soldiers got closer, Frank saw that they were an officer-type, all fancy clothes and waxed moustaches and wearing a sword, and another, older guy who, if you cut him in half, probably had "sergeant" written right through him. When they reached Frank, the sergeant immediately planted the staff of his weapon and began to lean on it with the air of a man who could, in that position, loaf all day. The officer took a considerably more martial stance, feet apart, hands clasped behind him.
"I am Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas, Captain in the army of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain," he said, in good, if accented, formal Italian. "To whom do I have the honor of speaking?"
"Uh, Frank Stone, of Lothlorien." Frank was impressed in spite of himself. This guy was being polite and civil even though he and his men had spent all day being shot at and firebombed by Frank and his guys. Maybe the fact that no one had gotten badly hurt yet helped. "I was hoping we could discuss surrender," he went on, realizing as he did so that, hippie upbringing or not, sensible tactical decision or not, he felt deeply ashamed.
Don Vincente's iron mask slipped a moment. He seemed, for just an instant, genuinely saddened. When he spoke again, he had softened his tone still further.
"Señor Stone," he said, "I am a man under authority. I have orders to accept no surrender and to reduce your resistance by force of arms. Apparently the Inquisition does not want you to surrender voluntarily. The most I can say is that I have no orders to ensure the death of you and all your comrades, and, more, that I would refuse orders to fire on a flag of parley. But I cannot take your surrender."
Frank looked back at Don Vincente. The man seemed genuinely upset by what he was being ordered to do. "Is there some way around your orders?" he asked, "We've only held out long enough to let the women and children get away."
"Some of them," Don Vincente said.
Frank just looked at him, hoping like hell that that didn't mean—
"We discovered a woman, a cripple and some children attempting to escape from where you had hidden them along the street, there." Don Vincente shrugged. "One of them was identified as your wife. If there were more, and note that I carefully do not ask that question of you for I would not have you stain your honor with even a ruse of war, the search the inquisitor ordered me to make did not reveal them."
Frank suspected there was a whole other story behind that little summary, not least because the sergeant there was grinning his head off, but he was too overtaken by shock to process it properly. Giovanna captured!
Don Vincente must have figured out how Frank was feeling, because he went on to say, "Alas for my good name with the inquisitor, the cripple and the children made good their escape. The sergeant here, you will note, is being punished for it. I am making him carry that heavy burden"—the sergeant flicked the white cloth tied to his weapon to show which burden was meant—"in the hopes that it will cure his most unmilitary sloth. I fear the man is irredeemably lazy. Had I known of his shirking tendencies earlier, I might have ordered some other man to search the building. Who knows what he missed?"
The wide, eagle-wing mustachios flickered once, briefly. Even Frank, standing close enough to smell the man, could not swear that he had smiled.
Giovanna captured! He could see how it had gone. They had tried to sneak out in small groups. Giovanna would have insisted on making the first, riskiest, run. And someone, probably someone who'd been a regular at Frank's Place, had taken money to point her out to the inquisitor. And if the inquisitor hadn't pissed this Captain Don Vincente-whatever off, everyone else would've been caught too. Or maybe the inquisitor hadn't done it by himself. Everything about Don Vincente said he was a man who might be a first-class bastard any way you looked at him, but he had his honor and orders could go right to hell. Ordering him to knowingly slaughter civilians—especially cripples and children—probably grated like a bitch with the guy. Yay for hidalgo honor, Frank thought.
Frank reckoned he'd probably have got on okay with the guy, another time and place. Hell, Ruy was a nice guy once you got past the weirdness and the constant stream of wisecracks. He took a deep breath. "Don Vincente, is there any chance your inquisitor would be satisfied with just my surrender?"
"My orders are for everyone," Don Vincente said, his eyes narrowing, like he was weighing Frank up afresh. "I will inquire as to the specifics. I will offer no great hope in the matter, please understand." He turned and barked a stream of Spanish at the sergeant, who snapped up straight, brought his weapon up in some kind of salute, and marched off at a surprising turn of speed for a man supposed to be such a layabout.
"I see you brought cannon," Frank said, trying to combine small talk and intelligence-gathering in one fell swoop.
"Indeed," Don Vincente said, apparently not too troubled about what Frank knew. "Only the horses can be seen from here, but I have been given three medium field pieces with which to blast a way into your dwelling. A shot or two through your front door, now that your burning oil is exhausted, will open it handily. Except, of course, that this street is not wide enough for the gun to recoil without smashing against the house behind me. But, the inquisitor ordered cannon, so cannon I must use. I will fire on the oblique, from along the street. No more than a few hours cannonade will create a small breach, certain to be a death-trap to any man attempting to force it. But force it we shall. I have nearly three hundred men in this neighborhood now, as various parties of men have been sent to reinforce my company."
"Right," Frank said. "And, maybe, if those guys got through the breach and didn't get slaughtered doing it, they might be inclined to take prisoners?"
"Indeed," Don Vincente said, not cracking his face one bit. "And the inquisitor would be most disappointed if we did not take one or two prisoners. I will order a most careful search of the remainder of the premises for anyone who might be hiding, for example on an upper floor or in a cellar. It might be that my sergeant will redeem himself of his besetting sin of sloth? I certainly pray God that the fellow takes the path of righteousness."
Frank smiled, then. "He has an excellent example to follow, Don Vincente," he said. "I see that you follow every order you are given to the letter."
Don Vincente inclined his head briefly to acknowledge the compliment. "I see that my worthless layabout of a sergeant is returned."
Another exchange of Spanish, and Don Vincente turned back to Frank. "I must regretfully inform you that this parley is concluded. The inquisitor demands to know why I have not shot or arrested you. May I request a further half-hour's truce while I explain to the tiresome fellow what a white flag actually signifies?"
"By all means," Frank said, grinning in spite of himself.
"I shall have a bugle blown at the end of the half-hour, Señor Stone. Until we meet again, I wish you much joy of the day."
With that, and no further ceremony, Don Vincente and his sergeant walked away.
"Shit," Frank said, and went inside to tell the other guys.