If they do-'
Always the courtier, GuzmA?n bowed to him. 'I am the senior officer present right now. I was going to hold the barracks against whatever they threw at us. Now you've given me something more urgent to do.
Muchas gracias.' He shouted orders. More Spanish soldiers came tumbling out of the building and rushed up from the south: a few hundred all told, Lope judged. Guzman said, 'Form a column, boys.
We have to get to the Tower, and it's liable to be warm work. Are you up to it?'
'Yes, sir!' the soldiers roared. By the way they sounded, no Englishman could stop them or even slow them down.
Baltasar GuzmA?n bowed again. 'May we have the pleasure of your company, Senior Lieutenant de Vega?'
'Of course, your Excellency. But I have a wounded man here, and-'
'Leave him.' GuzmA?n's voice was hard and flat. 'We can't bring him, and we can't spare men to guard him. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. Will you tell me I'm wrong?'
He waited for Lope's reply. Lope had none, and he knew it. At his nod, Jose and Manuel eased Pedro to the ground. What is he thinking? Lope wondered. He shook his head. Better not to know.
Captain Guzman raised his voice: 'To the Tower, fast as we can go. For God and St. James, forward- march! '
'For God and St. James!' the soldiers shouted. Off they went, a ragged regiment against a city. To see them strut, the city was the outnumbered one.
Perhaps half a mile separated the barracks from the Tower of London. Moving as fast as they could, the soldiers might have got there in five minutes: they might have, had nobody between the one and the other had other ideas.
Guzman marched the Spaniards towards the river to Upper Thames Street, which became Lower Thames Street east of London Bridge and which led straight to the Tower. That the street close by the Thames led straight to the Tower, though, quickly proved to have been obvious to others besides him.
No sooner had his men turned into Thames Street and started east than bricks and stones flew down from rooftops and windows: not the handful of them that had greeted Lope's patrol in Lombard Street, but a regular fusillade. The missiles clattered from helmets and corselets. Men cursed or howled when stones struck home where they weren't armored. A soldier who got hit in the face crumpled without a sound. A moment later, another went down.
'What do we do, Captain?' a trooper cried.
'We go on,' Guzman answered grimly. 'If we stop and kill Englishmen here, we have great sport, but we don't get where we need to go on time. Forward! ' Lope admired the nobleman's discipline. Had he himself commanded the Spaniards, he knew he might have yielded to the sweet seduction of revenge against the cowards and skulkers who plagued them. GuzmA?n had better sense.
Just past the church of All Hallows the Less, a barricade blocked Thames Street: planks and carts and rubbish and rocks and dirt. The Englishmen behind it brandished a motley assortment of halberds and bills and pikes and swords. Two or three arquebus muzzles poked over the top, aimed straight at the oncoming Spanish soldiers. 'Death to the dons!' the Englishmen shouted.
Captain GuzmA?n's lips drew back from his teeth in a savage smile. 'Now we can come to close quarters with some of these motherless dogs,' he said. 'Give them a volley, boys, and then show them what a proper charge means.'
The front rank of arquebusiers dropped to one knee. The second rank aimed their guns over the heads of the first. On the other side of the barrier, the Englishmen fired their few guns. Flames belched from the muzzles. A bullet cracked past Lope and smacked wetly into flesh behind him. A soldier shrieked. Puffs of thick gray smoke clouded the barricade.
Then Captain Guzman yelled, 'Fire!' The end of the world might have visited Upper Thames Street.
The roar of twenty-five or thirty arquebuses was a palpable blow against the ears. More smoke billowed.
Its brimstone stink and taste put Lope in mind of the hell to which he hoped the volley had sent a good many Englishmen. Screams from in back of the barricade said some of those bullets had struck home.
Baltasar GuzmA?n gave another order. 'Charge! St. James and at them!'
'
As the Englishmen held them up at the barricade, more bricks and stones rained down on the Spaniards from the buildings on either side of Thames Street. The pikeman next to de Vega dropped his weapon and staggered back, his face a gory mask. But, even with the help of the barrier, the English couldn't stop GuzmA?n's men for long. Lope sprang up onto a cart and then leaped down on the far side of the barricade. A halberdier tried to hold him off. He rushed forward and ran the Englishman through. In the press, a polearm was too clumsy to do much good.
After the irregulars lost the barricade, the ones still on their feet tried to flee. The Spaniards cut and shot them down. 'Forward!' Captain GuzmA?n shouted again, and forward his men went. The bulk of London Bridge loomed to Lope's right. But, before he and his comrades got even as far as the bridge, another barricade loomed ahead. This one looked more solid than the one they'd just overwhelmed.
And, from the east, Englishmen rushed to defend it. Sunlight glinted off armor over there. De Vega cursed. At least some English soldiers who had served Isabella and Albert were now on the other side, the side of rebellion.
Arquebuses and pistols bellowed: more than had defended the first barricade. A Spaniard near Lope who'd turned his head at just the wrong instant staggered back, half his jaw shot away. Blood fountained.
His tongue flapped among shattered teeth. Horrid anguished gobbling noises poured from that ruin of a mouth.
'A volley!' Captain GuzmA?n commanded. But, in the disorder after the first fight and pursuit, the volley took longer to organize. Meanwhile, those English guns kept banging away at the Spanish soldiers in the street in front of them.
Indifferent to the enemy fire, the arquebusiers elbowed their way forward and into position, some kneeling, others standing. They might have been one man pulling the trigger. De Vega wondered if he would have any hearing left at the end of the day. Crying, '
The fight at the first barrier had been savage but brief. The English hadn't had enough men there to hold the position long. Things were different here. Real soldiers with corselets and helmets of their own were far harder to down than irregulars had been. They wielded pike and sword with the same professional skill as Lope and his countrymen. And the irregulars who battled alongside them seemed altogether indifferent to whether they lived or died. If one of them could tackle a Spaniard so another could stab him while he was down, he would die not only content but joyous.
As before, the English had set up the barricade between tall buildings. Stones and bricks and saucepans and stools-anything heavy and small enough to go out a window-rained down on the Spaniards.
Pistoleers fired from upper-story windows, too.
Lope grabbed a morion someone had lost and jammed it onto his head. It was too big; it almost came down over his eyes. He didn't care. It was better than nothing. He pushed his way forward, trying to get to the barricade. A wounded Spaniard, clutching at the spurting stumps of two missing fingers, stumbled back past him, out of the fight. He slid forward into the place the other man had vacated, and found himself next to Captain GuzmA?n. 'Ah, de Vega,' GuzmA?n said, as if they held wine goblets rather than rapiers.
'Can we get to the Tower?' Lope asked.
'I hope so,' Guzman answered calmly.
'How many more barricades in front of us?' Lope went on. The captain only shrugged, as if to say it didn't matter. But it did, especially if every one of them was held this stubbornly. Lope persisted: 'Should we try some different street to get there?'
'This is the shortest way,' Guzman said.
