1635 The Papal Stakes (2 page)

But not in the twentieth century, evidently. When a child or a mother died during birth, it was deemed an uncommon tragedy. In Ruy’s world, the same event was simply a reminder that the attempt to create life often ended in death.

The up-time elimination of risk had even extended to war itself. The Americans’ medical knowledge and practices made many mortal wounds survivable. Ruy himself was alive only because of these up-time skills. A lethal belly wound from a sword—he had been horribly outnumbered by those assassins, after all!—had turned out to be simply a morning’s challenging surgery for the second, or maybe only third, ranking physician among the three-thousand-plus up-timers.

Ruy looked over at the third-ranked surgeon who had performed the medical miracle to which he owed his continued existence and smiled. Sharon Nichols was a medical prodigy in this world. The surgery that had saved Ruy had been performed before the cream of Venice’s medical community, ensuring her immediate stardom as a
Dottoressa
of international renown. But in the world she had come from, she had held a relatively lowly post, furnished with a suitably humble label: she had been an Emergency Medical Technician. But, being the daughter of the greatest doctor now alive—her ex-street thug, ex-Marine Corps father, James—had no doubt given her advantages and experience beyond those normally possessed by other EMTs. Or so Ruy presumed.

However, regardless of their skills, the up-time physicians routinely cursed themselves upon losing a patient, as if they expected the power of the Creator Himself to be manifest every time they treated a patient. And this, Ruy realized as his wife continued to squeeze his hand tightly, was the key to the up-timers’ “risk-aversion”: they had become utterly unaccustomed to taking the chances that were unavoidable in this “down-time” world. Most of the threats they faced now had been eliminated by the sciences of their future world, so they had to continually remind themselves that they were dwelling in a much more dangerous time—and that adjustment did not come easily to most of them.

As an attitude, it shared common psychological roots with the frustration he had observed among many of the more accomplished up-timers. Although they did not intend to demean down-timers or the technical limitations of the world of 1635, one could often hear Americans mutter deprecations upon its crude tools, interspersed with bitter longing for the devices of the future. Except, of course, that the future they remembered would never come to pass, now. In their world, no American town had ever arrived in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, radically changing its outcome, and the history and technology of Europe along with it. So whatever the coming days held, they would not lead to the future the Americans had come from. Their own arrival had undone the possibility that the world they called home would ever exist.

From out of the radio’s washes of static emerged a single, clear click. Ruy felt his wife’s hand flex quickly—and then grow still, tense, as two more, longer clicks sounded, followed by a rapid patter of them as the interference diminished to a sound more akin to bacon frying in a distant room.

“Is that them—the group in Chiavenna?”

Odo smiled. “Yes, it’s my friend Matthias.”

Ruy smiled too, half out of his own gladness, half simply to see his wife’s radiant joy and relief. “What is Matthias sending, Odo?” he asked.

“That they are still in Chiavenna. The rest of the group is on their way to the rendezvous point with the cardinal.”

Ruy raised an eyebrow. “Well, our courier apparently caught up with the cardinal while he was still traveling along the Spanish Road in the Valtelline. Meaning that the holy father’s information was accurate.”

“Accurate enough to save the cardinal’s life,” appended Sharon. “And he might be the only cardinal loyal to the pope who’ll be saved, at this rate. Unless, maybe, some of the other cardinals which Borja has ‘disappeared’ might still be alive somewhere, waiting for—”

Ruy shook his head. “Kings, like criminals, cover their misdeeds with great finality, my beauteous wife. And Borja is both a king of the church and a criminal of the basest kind. He will not leave any evidence if he can help it.”

The room was still. The threat to the lives of the incognito refugees who were with them here outside Padua—Pope Urban VIII, his nephew Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and Father Vitelleschi, the father-general of the Jesuit Order—seemed suddenly very close. Glancing at the countryside outside the room’s small window, Ruy found it distressingly easy to imagine it filled with shadowy assassins and informers. The sooner they could get His Holiness on one of the up-timers’ wondrous airplanes, the better.

Odo leaned forward as the snarling static returned. “Matthias indicates they have not been detected by the Spanish or Milanese on their journey north, and that they will depart as soon as—” He stopped, moving his head quickly from side to side.

“As soon as what?” Sharon tried to sound calm; Ruy was sad to admit that his beloved was failing miserably.

“I could not make it out; I’m only receiving fragments now. And given the trapdoor codes built into this cipher, I cannot be sure if the letters I think I’m hearing are still accurate. I might have missed a trapdoor character.”

“Which changes the code, right?”

“Yes, Ambassador Nichols. But, from the rest of the message, I would say that Captain Simpson’s group plans to leave Chiavenna immediately after meeting the cardinal.”

Ruy’s and Sharon’s eyes drifted to the window; the sunlight was no longer yellow, but late-day amber. “That had better be one quick meeting,” observed Sharon.

“Do not worry, my love. I’m sure all will go well.”

She half turned, looking at him over her thickly graceful shoulder. “Oh? Really? And why would you say that, Ruy?”

Ruy shrugged. “To ease your mind, love.”

She touched his arm lightly, then turned back to encourage Odo to check other frequencies.

As Ruy studied his wife’s wide, watchful eyes in their fixation upon the radio, he silently conceded that Sharon was, of course, entirely correct: his assurance that “all will go well” was merely hopeful nonsense. The simple truth of the matter was that he
hoped
all would go well.

But of course, it rarely did
.

CHAPTER TWO

The proprietor of the rustic
Crotto Fiume
leaned a bit closer to Tom Simpson and almost crooned: “Are you sure you won’t have the soup, signor? It is a local specialty: black cherry and game. A favorite of men who are large like you—who are so, so…
robusto
.”

“Oh, puh-leeze,” Rita Simpson whisper-groaned down at the tabletop.

As much to taunt his wife as satisfy the culinary curiosity that the stew’s description had piqued, Tom assented. “
Si, grazie
.”

“
Brego
,” replied the innkeep, cook, and owner—for that was the arrangement in most of these small, informal
crotti
—who bowed himself out to prepare their meals.

As soon as he was gone, Rita leaned against Tom’s Herculean bicep, “My
robusto
hero,” she cooed, “He can eat with the best of them.”

And while it was true that Tom had a healthy appetite, the era into which he had been thrown—the end of the Thirty Years’ War—had also trimmed off any small residual fat that might have originated with meals taken in the fast-food eateries and saturated fat emporiums of the very late twentieth century.

Melissa Mailey looked at Tom and seemed less amused. “Did you really have to have the soup?”

“Uh…no, but it sounded good. And I get to see all of you roll your eyes.” He leaned back, stretching his immense arms outward from his even more formidable chest and shoulders.

“I’m not rolling my eyes.” Melissa’s voice was devoid of jocularity. “I’m worried about our rendezvous.”

“What? You think the soup takes half a day to cook?”

“No, Tom: I think that we should not spend a second more in towns than we must—not since leaving Lombardy, at any rate. We don’t have a lot of friends in these parts.”

James Nichols broke open a small loaf of bread, not much bigger than his thumb; it sent up a fragrant puff of steam. “Now, Melissa, we’re on neutral ground, here. Chiavenna is an open city.”

“Which is a very nebulous term here, James. This isn’t simply Casablanca with the Alps instead of the Atlantic, and with snow instead of sand. These folks don’t define ‘neutral’ the way we do, and they’ve not had much success with co-dominium—excuse me,
tri
-dominium—arrangements like this one.”

Diminutive Arcangelo Severi leaned over so that he could see past James’ large, prominently veined black hands to the people farther down the table. “The Signora Mailey, she speaks correctly.” Two weeks on the road with the group had almost ironed the idiomatic peculiarities out of his English—almost, but not quite. “The Spanish now guard Chiavenna instead of the Milanese? It is a black wolf replacing a gray wolf: same breed, same teeth, just a slightly different coat.”

“And the French observers are hardly our friends, either.” Melissa tapped her fork for emphasis. “Officially, we are still every bit almost-at-war with them as the Hapsburgs.”

“Well, not with the Austrian Hapsburgs, at least,” temporized James. “And they also have a guard detachment here, right?”

“Yes, comprised of about a dozen reprobates that the commander down in the Valtelline didn’t want rousting Protestants any more.” Melissa sniffed. “So he sent them up here, a region where almost six hundred Protestants were massacred only fifteen years ago. Another typically deft move by another typically tactful servitor of Imperial Viennese spleen and incompetence.”

Tom smelled a medley of rich foods approaching as the door to the kitchen opened. “Aw, c’mon, Melissa: the Austrian Hapsburgs are a country mile better than the Spanish. And their new ‘Emperor,’ Ferdinand III, is way more open-minded than his parochial pappy. You know as well as I that there have been plenty of positive overtures traded with Vienna in the past year.”

“Wonderful,” was Melissa’s wooden reply, as their meals—cold wheat polenta shot through with small chunks of cheese, boiled potato, spring vegetables, and what looked a lot like salami—emerged from the kitchen. “I’ll be charitable and assume our diplomatic nattering with the Austrian Hapsburgs is the promising harbinger it seems to be. But what good does that do us here?”

James smiled sideways. “You sound nervous, hon.”

“I am.”

“A shame. And you always lose your appetite when you’re anxious, so I’ll just help you with th—”

James’ reach for Melissa’s plate was deflected by a prim and well-aimed slap at his hand. “I’m not
that
nervous. But I am dead serious. And I hope that doesn’t prove to be an ironically apropos choice of words.”

A multi-vocal and multi-lingual exchange that was more of a mélange than their entrees poured out of the kitchen door as a young fellow brought them their drinks. Waves of Italian splashed against two dialects of Lombard, all capped by a gull-like screeching in Romansch. At an adjoining table, two men ceased their mutterings in Savoyard French in an attempt to eavesdrop. They gave up as the babel of languages became too fluid and dense for untangling. At which point, Arcangelo leaned forward, and under the cover of the multi-tongued cacophony, stressed at both Tom and James: “You will do well to heed the words of Signora Mailey. We should have simple food only.”

Tom slurped his thick soup with defiant gusto. Nichols smiled and spoke around his mouthful of polenta and cheese: “Relax, Arco: with the exception of the high-protein fodder selected by Captain Kodiak, here”—his merry eyes flicked over at Simpson’s immense torso—“we bought the cheapest, least conspicuous meals that would also sustain us for the last leg of our journey.”

“
Si
, true, it only cost a few quatrines more, but maybe it would have been better to buy food we can carry, hey? So that when the cardin—eh, when our ‘last companion’ arrives, we can leave
molto presto
.”

Tom chewed a piece of what tasted like smoked venison. “Why in such a rush now, Arco? I would have thought you would have been more nervous on the way up here.”

Arcangelo shrugged. “Before yesterday, we were on lake boats with a dozen other foreigners, all bound over the Alps. Some were even traveling without the benefit of a native to guide, and speak for them, such as I have done for you.” His smile, gap-toothed, was nonetheless full of quick, light charm. “So: from Garlate, to Lecco, to Como, then up the Mera to the north end of Lago Mezzola, it was a long day, but still, only
one
day. Thirty of your miles, at most. And a boat owned and crewed by Bergamaschi, so except when paying the tolls, when did we even see the Milanese?”

Tom felt the eyes of the other Americans focusing on spare Arco as he spoke, realizing just how much more than a simple native guide he was. He had come to them from their fiscal partners in Venice, the Cavriani family, and that clan’s proclivities for subtlety, mild self-deprecation, and invisible shrewdness were rapidly becoming evident in the almost elfin Arcangelo—

—Whose description of their earlier journey continued unabated. “And yesterday, we walked along with scores of others, following the Mera road up here. But we were already in Milanese territory, so no checkpoints, no further tolls. I’m not sure we even saw a soldier.”

“We saw two.” James Nichols’ tone was not confrontational, but quite sure. “One as we got started in the morning, but he was looking north, up the valley, and not along the road. Then another just as we passed the intersection with the Via Valtelline. He was on the crest of a defile, watching the road.”

“
Si
, with a few cavalry out of sight in the defile below, I’ll wager.”

“That’s not a bet; that’s a certainty. But I must say, Arco, you are starting to seem more like a—well, yet another Cavriani factotum, not a guide.”

Arco smiled. “A guide? I never said I was a guide.”

“Yes, you did. You just said—”