The two walked down the dark cobbles. As luck would have it they ran into a bored, small-minded guard, who refused to accept their week-passes and insisted on taking them to his guard commander at gunpoint. The guard commander was in the throes of waking the next shift, and it took a great deal of Umberto's patience to get them, late, heading for the guard barracks on the north curtain-wall. The bells were already chiming for midnight before they were halfway down there.
"That bastard of a guard commander will probably make us sleep there next time," panted Alberto.
"He'll just chew us out," said Umberto, and saved his breath for running. The two arrived at the guard barracks.
Both realized immediately that something was very, very wrong.
The guard barracks was silent. It should have been full of people getting their gear off and lying down to rest, earlier watches griping about the noise.
Umberto looked at Alberto. Then he took the issue rapier out of its scabbard and walked forward into the lamplight.
The guard commander wasn't going to chew anyone out. Or make them sleep in the barracks. He lay in a pool of his own blood.
"Merde!"
said big Alberto, in a very small voice. "What the hell do we do now?"
"Raise the alarm!" Umberto took a deep breath.
"Keep quiet or I'll shoot," said a voice from the shadows.
Umberto yelled.
"ALARU . . ."
He felt rather than heard the shot.
As he fell he saw in a sort of strange slow way how the big caulker had grabbed someone with a pistol. He saw Alberto fling the willowy, elegantly dressed young man at a second man. And Alberto was bellowing at the top of his vast lungs.
Knight-Proctor Von Desdel and his patrol of ten knights were within a hundred yards of the guard barracks when they heard the shout, the shot and the yelling.
"That's inside the wall!" He was already urging his charger forward. "Sound that trumpet!"
Over on the Spianada, the Croats had heard the midnight bells without getting restive. The plan allowed the guards on the western outer walls to be changed and settle down before the northern postern would be seized. The biggest danger was the bastion on the northwestern corner. The king's artillery and the arquebusiers in the trenches were due to start a barrage on that when the charge started. The occasional cannon fire with its loading lulls allowed the sounds from the sleeping Citadel to carry well in the silent times.
They heard the trumpet. And the answer. And the bells begin to ring.
"Into those saddles!" yelled their captain. There was no time now to swing this whole thing into planned action. Now they must seize the moment—if it was there to be seized at all.
The Croats were some of the finest light cavalry in the world, with only the Ilkhan Mongols in serious contention in their portion of Eurasia. In many ways the Croats had the advantage over the Magyar—in speed, as scouts, and in tactical flexibility. The Croats had the first hundred and twenty men across the mole causeway before the Venetian cannon and arquebus fire began to make crossing it without heavy losses impossible. By the sounds above them, there was fighting on the north wall. But the traitors had at least prevented the barrage from above falling onto the galloping Croats.
And the gate was open! There were battle sounds from the watchtowers but they'd done it! If the Croats could get inside, they'd hold those towers, keep the gate open somehow, until the huge mass of Serb and Slav infantry who were waiting got in past the Venetian guns.
Yelling, the Croats spurred desperately forward, galloping horses spread out in a long race along the shingle. Then the first were in, under the raised portcullis, into the narrow roadway that led up into the Citadel.
And hurtling down on them, horses virtually shoulder to shoulder, were the famous Knights of the Holy Trinity. The sound of the metal shoes of those heavy horses on the cobbles was like thunder in the confined space.
In the moonlight and house-shadow-darkness, in the narrow lane, the Croats didn't know there were only ten.
There are places and times when light cavalry is superior to heavy cavalry—when maneuverability and rough terrain are factors, for instance. But one advantage that heavy cavalry always has is momentum. And armor—which adds to the momentum. In the narrow lane, neither terrain nor maneuverability offered any advantage to the Croats.
The Knights of the Holy Trinity hit them like a ten-pound hammer hitting a pin. Literally smashed the Croats back through the gate, riding down those that could not turn. The Knights wheeled and rode back in, preparing for another charge. A few of the later arrivals and some of the better horsemen who'd turned their mounts followed in on their heels, showing the advantages of the Croats' speed and maneuverability.
The portcullis crashed down behind them. The great gates were still open, but the heavy metal grid now had some thirty Croats trapped inside. Men were running out of alleyways, hacking at them, hacking at their unprotected mounts as they tried to fight the Knights. And more Knights had suddenly arrived at the fray. Some half-armored . . . but too many.
The Croat captain knew the moment had slipped away. He never even saw that the great gates were closing. He did hear his lieutenant outside the gates yelling for a retreat. Inside the walls they'd die, he knew. But then, very few would live through the retreat either.
Umberto awoke to a blurry vision. At first he thought maybe he was dead and that Maria's mother . . . God, he'd loved her . . . was there, waiting for him. But would Heaven have so much pain?
Then he realized it was in fact Maria. Maria as he had never seen her. Maria with tears on her face, holding his hand as if she never wanted to let it go, with something so warm shining in her eyes that she looked like an angel. She'd looked at the baby like that; never at him. Until now.
"Maria?"
"Thank God!" He felt the pressure of her hand on his. "Umberto, don't you dare die on me."
"Try . . ." Things slipped away again.
It was some hours later that he awoke enough to make sense of his surroundings. He was in the hospital tended by the monks of Saint John, up on the hill.
"Did we beat them off?" he asked, wishing his head would stop spinning. "Alberto . . ."
"We did. We lost nearly fifty people, though. Alberto is fine, other than a broken finger. You two raised the alarm—because you slept at home. I am going to keep you there," said Maria, fiercely.
The seven surviving Libri d'Oro plotters attempted to look defiant when they were hauled before the captain-general and the governor. Only Flavio Dentico really succeeded.
"Kill us, then. You will get nothing out of us!"
The captain-general scowled. "We have torturers of sufficient skill to get the entire story out of you."
The old governor cleared his throat and turned to Eberhard of Brunswick. "Perhaps you would like to explain to them?"
The
Ritter
nodded. "Your families and the families of the dead we have identified have been taken into custody. You may be fools and decide to wait for torture. But if you wish to save your families further pain . . . well, we need to know just who the spy is. Who in here has contact outside? This plot was orchestrated. I'm afraid we need to know this. And I'm afraid you
will
talk."
There was something really terrifying about the urbane, calm way he said it.
"What are you going to do with our families?" asked one of the younger men. It was plain that this effect of their actions had not been considered.
"They're in the dungeons below the fortress."
"They knew nothing of this!"
Eberhard raised his eyebrows. "Then suppose you tell us who did know of your treason. Singly, so we can check your stories against each other. At the moment the real reason for holding your families is to keep them alive. The people out there know who betrayed them. They're baying for Libri d'Oro blood right now."
Piece by piece the details of the plot appeared. A scant hour later troops were scouring the Citadel for Petros Nachelli, the glib, greasy former rent collector.
They found him, and the two cousins who served him as enforcers. But they weren't going to talk, not even under torture. Not without necromancy.
Captain Querini was tied to the chair. Commander Leopoldo was still half dressed, his face bloody, his tunic-jacket torn. He'd led the assault that had retaken the tower that held the portcullis levers, and he was furious about the loss of some of his finest men. He held the roster up to the cavalry captain's face and shook it furiously.
"You
testa di cazzo
! If it wasn't for a couple of
scuolo
sleep-at-homes who didn't come in to find they weren't on duty, we'd have lost the Citadel. As it is, I lost twenty-three men because of this!" He shook the piece of paper again. "You—!"
The captain gave a low moan. "I never knew. I was in my bed! I wouldn't have been in my bed if I known. I never meant any harm. . . . They tricked me. They lied to me. It was Dentico."
"You'll still hang."
Maria hadn't realized just how much the fireboat project had come to mean to Umberto until she'd sat with him the day after he'd been shot. Umberto was not a great communicator. His job and his home life—except when things were really boiling over and he would tell her—were two separate worlds. She'd followed progress in the yard more by snippets than anything else.
Now, weak and slipping into fever, he talked of little else but this. Maria passed an anxious day and an anxious, sleepless night listening to it. He was much the same the next day. She still dared not leave. Stella had come up to take Alessia for a few hours. Old Mrs. Grisini's Corfiote girl had come up with some food. A group of the Corfiote laborers' wives came with a small pot of sour cherry spoon-sweets. They were quiet—as befitted a hospital with a sick man—but each came and embraced her.
Maria sat there, biting her lip. She had never been hugged by this many people. They plainly thought he was going to die. The small pot of spoon-sweets sat there on the table beside her. She stared at it, eyes blurred with tears. She knew just how little they had, what sort of a sacrifice this was. She'd married Umberto to give Alessia a father. Now . . . she was going to lose him, too. For days he clung there, growing paler, growing weaker. Maria prayed. She prayed as she'd never ever prayed for herself.
It was late evening four days later, with Umberto tossing and mumbling, when two of the Corfiote women came in to the hospital. "You must come with us, Maria."
"I can't. I can't leave Umberto."
"If you don't, you will leave him at the graveside," said one of the women, brutally. "We have heard from Anastasia—the girl who works for Mrs. Grisini—that your house has been cursed."
"But what about Alessia?"
"The priestess said to bring her."
It was only when she got outside and well down the hill, that she came to realize that it was well after sundown. She was, she realized, dazed with exhaustion. "What about the curfew?"
The older of the two women shrugged. "We know where they patrol. And there are ways to pass. But it is difficult."
Maria was too tired to try to make sense of it all. She followed them to the cliff with the tall Italian poplar beside it. Ascended the ladder. Walked the winding cave trail into the inner chamber with its two altars, one white, one black. Looked at the cracked dry rock-cut pool where the water from the tiny waterfall now fell into a clay bowl drifted with flower-petals. At the huge, eminently female statue, terrible in its primitive beauty. Looked at the priestess in her simple white robe, with her long white hair in great waves around her. Looked into the compassionate eyes of . . .
Renate De Belmondo, the wife of the Podesta.
"Welcome, Daughter. The Peace of the Mother, the great Goddess be with you."
And the strange thing was that she'd felt just that. The hurt, the anger, the sadness had all receded, just as in her distant childhood memories, they had on those rare occasions when she'd turned to her own mother's arms.
The rest of the ritual, the soft refrains had not meant much to her. Except the priestess—who was also Renate De Belmondo in another life—had done her best with curse-exorcism.
"It may be best if you could move house, dear. There is lingering evil around you. Someone hates you very much, enough to spend a great deal of time cursing you. She is no witch, I think—but there is a great deal of magic here, and magic—"
She shrugged. "It is a tool. It often comes to the hand of those who do not know how to use it, yet succeed in doing
something
with it even in their ignorance."
Maria sighed. "Right now I'm living up at the hospital anyway. If Umberto lives . . . well, I'll try. I don't know how possible it will be."
"For your sake, your husband's sake, and for the sake of that lovely daughter of yours, you should."
When they returned to the small building on the north slope that was the monks' hospital, Maria fearfully hastened to Umberto's side.
He was still.
Maria felt as if her heart would stop. She put a trembling hand to his forehead. When she'd left it had been fire-hot.
It was cool.
Not deathly cold. Just . . . unfevered.
Maria didn't know how to thank the Mother. But she did it with all her heart anyway.
Umberto might have turned the corner, but to start him climbing the steep stair required a sickbed visit from Alberto, with his index finger strapped.
"How do you use a hammer with that?" asked Umberto weakly.
"Um. Haven't much, lately."
"What about the fireboats?"
"Old Grisini had another relapse and he's gone home. And well, Balfo, he's senior master after you, he said he couldn't see the sense of it. We'd never use them."
"What?"
Umberto was struggling to sit. "I need to get down there! I'll tear his ears off, I'll—"