Ruled Britannia

He was right, in terms of distance. In terms of time, in terms of effort and lives lost. 'I beg pardon, your Excellency,' Lope said, 'but how much good will we do if we get there tomorrow with three men still standing?'

'I command here, and I must do as I think best,' Captain Guzman replied. 'If I go down and you take charge, you will do what you will do, and the result will be as God wills. In the meantime, we have a job to tend to here in front of us'

Lope found no answer to that but pushing forward once more. A dead Spaniard lay just in front of the barricade. Lope scrambled up onto his corpse. A man behind him shoved him onto a dirt-filled barrel blocking the street. An Englishman thrust at him. He beat the spearhead aside with his blade. A pistol ball whined malevolently past his ear.

If I stay up here, I'll surely die, he thought. He couldn't go back, either. Shouting, ' A?Santiago! ' at the top of his lungs, he leaped down on the far side of the barricade. An Englishman partly broke his fall. He rammed his sword into the man's chest. It grated on ribs. The irregular let out a bubbling shriek and crumpled, blood pouring from his mouth and nose. Lope had a bad moment when he couldn't clear the blade, but then all at once it came free, crimson almost to the hilt. ' A Santiago! ' he yelled again, and slashed wildly, trying to win himself a little room, trying most of all not to be killed in the next instant.

He wasn't the first Spaniard down on this side of the barricade. A couple of soldiers were down indeed, and wouldn't rise again till Judgment Day. But others, like him, cut and thrust and cursed and fought to clear space for their fellows to follow them. An arquebus-a Spanish arquebus-went off right behind him, from atop the barricade. That bullet almost killed him, too. Instead, it smashed the left shoulder of the Englishman with whom he was trading swordstrokes. As the man yowled in pain, Lope thrust him through the throat and stepped forward over his writhing body.

Here, though, more and more foes rushed into the fray, shouting, 'Death to the dons!' and 'Elizabeth!'

and 'God and St. George!' Most of them were unarmored. Many of them were unskilled. But their ferocity. Having sown the wind with ten years of harsh occupation, the Spaniards now all at once reaped the whirlwind. If the Englishmen could stop them from reaching the Tower only by piling up a new barricade of their own dead flesh, they seemed willing-even glad-to do it.

A stone, luckily a small one, clattered off Lope's snatched-up helmet. He stumbled, but kept his feet. To go down, here, was all too likely to die. He howled an oath when a knife slashed his left arm. His own backhand cut, as much instinct as anything else, laid open the face of the burly man who'd wounded him.

Opening and closing his left hand several times, Lope found muscles and tendons still worked. He laughed. Much he could have done about it if they hadn't! He couldn't even bandage himself. He had to hope he wouldn't bleed too badly.

The Spaniards would gain a step, lose half of it, gain two, lose one, gain one, lose it again. Then a dozen or so arquebusiers got up onto the barricade together and poured a volley into the English-again, a ball just missed de Vega. As wounded enemies toppled, Spanish soldiers pushed past them.

A sergeant tugged at Lope's wounded arm. He shrieked. 'Sorry, seA±or,' the sergeant bawled in his ear. The fellow was also wounded; he'd had his morion knocked off, and sported a nasty cut on his scalp. Gore splashed his face and his back-and-breast. 'What are your orders?'

' My orders?' Lope shouted back. 'Where the devil's Captain Guzman?'

'Down, sir-a thrust through the thigh,' the underofficer answered. De Vega grimaced; a wound like that could easily kill. The sergeant went on, 'What now, sir? We've got more of these fornicating Englishmen coming up behind us now, and more and more on the rooftops, too. What do we do? What can we do?'

He sounded frightened for the whole Spanish force.

Till then, Lope had been too busy to be frightened for anyone but himself. He called quick curses down on GuzmA?n's head. If the captain hadn't taken them to the Tower the most obvious way. It might not have mattered at all, de Vega thought. He couldn't change routes now. He couldn't split his force, either, not when it was beset from all sides. He saw only one thing he could do.

'Forward!' he said. 'We have to go forward. Tell off a rear guard to hold back the Englishmen behind us. Come what may, we must reach the Tower.' Captain GuzmA?n had been right about that.

Forward they went, half a bloody step at a time. Every soldier they lost was gone for good. Fresh Englishmen kept flooding into the fight.

Even through the din of his own battle, Lope heard a great racket of gunfire from ahead, from the direction of the Tower of London. He didn't know what it meant, not for certain, but he did know he misliked it mightily. Then an Englishman he never saw clouted him in the side of the head with a polearm-this one, unlike the fellow de Vega had killed, found room to swing his weapon even in the crowd. The world flared red, then black. Lope's rapier flew from his hand. He swayed, shuddered. fell.

Ravens. The great black birds had always roosted on, nested on, the Tower of London. Now, careless of the swarms of live Englishmen flooding into the Tower, the scavengers settled on the sprawled and twisted bodies on the battlements and in the courtyard. Most of the dead were Spaniards, but more than a few Englishmen lay among them. Every once in a while, the birds would flutter up again when someone pushed too close, but never for long. They hadn't enjoyed such a feast in years.

Shakespeare shivered to see the ravens. He'd been sure the carrion birds would peck out his eyes and tongue and other dainties after he was slain. And it might yet happen-he knew that, too. He had no idea how the uprising fared in the rest of London, in Westminster, elsewhere in England. Here by the Tower, though, all went well, so his fears receded for the moment.

'The Bell Tower!' people shouted. 'She's in the Bell Tower!' They streamed towards it. No need to ask who she was. Hardly any need even to call out her name, not now. Were it not for her, this throng never would have come to the Tower.

Beside Shakespeare, a graybeard said, 'She was in the Bell Tower aforetimes, too. Bloody Mary mewed her up there, forty years gone and more.'

Bloody Mary. Amazement prickled through Shakespeare. Who, since the Armada landed, had dared use that name for Elizabeth's half sister? No one the poet had heard, not in all these years. Truly a new wind was blowing. May it rise to a gale, a mighty tempest, he thought.

Soldiers in armor-dented, battered, blood-splashed armor-stood guard at the base of the Bell Tower.

Their spears and swords and arquebuses-and their formidable presence-kept people from rushing up into the Tower to the rooms where Elizabeth had passed the last ten years. Ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, beards of light brown and yellow and fiery red proclaimed them Englishmen. Shakespeare wondered if any Spaniards were left alive here. He hoped not.

'Back! Keep back!' an officer yelled. Half the plume had been hacked off his high helm, but his voice and his swagger radiated authority. The crowd didn't actually move back-impossible, with more folk flooding into the courtyard every minute. But it did stop trying to push for ward. In those circumstances, that was miracle enough. A peephole in the door behind the officer opened. Someone spoke to him through it. He nodded. The peephole closed. The officer shouted again: 'Hear ye! Hear ye me! Her Majesty'll bespeak you anon from yon window.' He pointed upwards. 'But bide in patience, and all will be well.'

Her Majesty. Again, Shakespeare felt the world turning, changing, around him. Since 1588, Philip II's daughter Isabella had been Queen of England. Maybe Isabella still thought she was. But this swarm of Englishmen thought otherwise. God grant we be right.

'Elizabeth!' Sir Robert Devereux's voice boomed out, even more full of command, more full of itself, than the officer's. 'Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come forth, Elizabeth!'

At once, the crowd took up the chant: 'Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come forth, Elizabeth!' It echoed from the gray stone walls of the Tower. Shakespeare shouted with the rest. 'Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come forth, Elizabeth!' The rhythm thudded in him, as impossible to escape as his own heartbeat.

The shutters of that window swung open. The chanting stopped.

A sharp-faced, gray-haired woman in a simple wool shift looked out from the window at the suddenly silent