CHAPTER ELEVEN
TURN OUT THE WATCH
The fist pounding on the front door woke Lucia Michaeli.
It wasn’t late, only a couple of hours after the Firestealer had set, so she drew on a robe and went to find out what the racket was about. The downstairs part of the house was still partly lighted with oil lamps, and she heard her father and Professore Clavell shouting. Professore Clavell stood in the doorway. Her father, still dressed, had answered the door himself, which was an unusual thing for him to do. And the servant standing behind him held the old battle ax that had hung on the front room wall all of Lucia’s life.
There were armed men outside the door—a mixed group of Nikeis workmen and soldiers. Professore Clavell’s companion, the star man Harrison, with a hook instead of a hand. A dozen of the Doge’s halberdiers. A senator stood with them, and—she put her hand to her mouth. Bart Saxon was there. And Ginarosa Torricelli, roughly dressed as if for traveling, stood very near Professore Clavell. What was she doing out there?
“We need workmen,” Clavell was shouting to her father. “Timbers, nails, men, carpenters—anyone who can help build defenses at Palazzo San Marco. I’m told that many of those we need work for you. This is by the order of the Doge and the Signory.” He gestured to indicate Ginarosa, who held up a signet ring. “It’s all approved.”
“It is by order of my father,” Ginarosa added, waving the ring. “He is meeting with the Doge. I represent him.”
“I don’t question that, Ginarosa, but all the timbers will be in the Arsenale,” Lucia’s father replied. “And all the carpenters will be there or at their homes, not here! I have no men here.”
“We know. We’re going to the Arsenale now,” Ginarosa said. “There’s something else there we must have. We stopped here to ask you to gather all the men you can find and take them to Palazzo San Marco.”
Ginarosa stepped up to the doorway. She looked very serious, but she turned her head slightly to grin at Lucia before she smoothed her expression and turned back to Lucia’s father.
“Signore Michaeli, what we ask is that you designate the men we’ll need. You are empowered by the Council of Ten to exempt all you designate from their duties with the watch and the militia. You are yourself exempted, but you are ordered to accompany us to the Arsenale, then to Palazzo San Marco where we prepare our defenses.”
There were other shouts outside now, and Lucia ran to look out the window to the street. There was a militia officer with an escort of citizens with spear and shield, accompanied by apprentices carrying short spears—or drums. Lucia recognized the younger brother of one of her friends from Professore Clavell’s classes. Plutarco. His father was a wealthy goldsmith. Now Plutarco and four other youthful drummers marched to the middle of the street, beating a tattoo, while criers shouted.
“Turn out the watch! Turn out the militia! All those with arms, turn out in arms. Turn out to defend the city! To arms, to arms! Gather in the palazzos! Report to your officers! Turn out the watch! Turn out the ban! Turn out, turn out!”
“The pirates are here!” her father shouted. “Lucia, Lucia, hide—”
“Hold,” Ginarosa said impatiently. “The pirates won’t be here before daylight, if then. We prepare our defenses, but we have little enough time to do that. Now come with us—”
“Most of my workmen are at the Arsenale. Many sleep there now as we launch ships.”
“Yes, yes. We go to the Arsenale at once,” Ginarosa insisted impatiently. “There’s little time. Come with us.”
“Ah, but wait! There are work crews not at the Arsenale,” her father said. “Guido Facione and his sons and nephews. One of our best carpenter crews. They’ll be swept up with the band and the watch. You need workmen?”
“Yes, at San Marco’s, to aid in constructing defenses,” Ginarosa repeated, and Lucia’s father turned back into the house.
“Lucia!” he shouted. Then he saw her. “Lucia, get dressed. You must go to the house of Facione and tell him that he and all his work crew are summoned to Palazzo San Marco with their tools. Say that they’re excused from the watch and the ban by order of the Council of Ten. Hurry, and wear traveling clothes. Do not disguise yourself; you must be recognized so all will believe you speak for me.” He turned to his valet. “Marco, you’ll accompany Lucia on her errand. If anyone tries to interfere, say you have the orders of Councilor Torricelli. Lucia, hurry!”
“Yes, Father!”
Lucia rushed up to her room. Her older sister’s door was open and Catarina was up, as well.
“I heard,” she said, throwing on her clothes haphazardly.
“Where you going?” Lucia demanded.
“To the Arsenale!” Catarina shouted and ran out of her room and down the stairs.
Dressed like a servant girl, Lucia thought. She wasn’t surprised that her older sister was going to the Arsenale. Catarina practically lived there anyway. She knew more about bronze and iron casting than anyone else Lucia knew—almost as much as their father and far more than their brother. It was nearly unheard of for a woman to manage a trade or be accepted into a guild, but there was talk of allowing Catarina to have guild status. Their brother wasn’t interested. He worked as a salesman, as a factor, as a procurer and trader, and he was very good at that. He spoke four languages and could read and write them all. He would be a good proveditor, but he had little interest in the work at the foundry and probably didn’t know the formula for bronze, or how to add the charcoal to iron to make steel. Catarina knew all that and more, and the workmen respected her.
Lucia selected her own clothes with care. Time was short, but it was important she not look like a servant. She chose a thin linen skirt, elegant enough with a few beads and careful embroidery, but light in weight—a skirt she could run in if she had to. Thin cotton hose and her walking shoes with low heels and ankle straps so they wouldn’t fall off. They didn’t show off her trim ankles very well, but it would be dark out, and the cobblestones were rough. She dressed as swiftly as she could without showing that she’d dressed in haste, then went downstairs.
Marco Salata waited patiently by the front door.
“I have a lantern, Signorina,” the valet said. “But I don’t know the way to the house of Guido Facione.”
“I do.”
She looked around. There was no one else in the entry hall but older servants and women.
“Lucia!”
It was her mother, calling from the top of the stairs. She was dressed in nightclothes without a robe, and her voice was thin and strained.
“You shouldn’t be out of bed! Maria, put Mother back to bed. Immediately!” Lucia commanded.
“In due time,” Signora Michaeli said. “What do you intend, girl?”
“As Father commanded. I will summon Facione and take him to Palazzo San Marco,” Lucia said carefully.
“Take. You will go with him. To what purpose? They don’t need women for the work they must do there.”
“I’ll find ways to be useful.”
Her mother frowned, then nodded.
“No doubt ways that will be noticed by the star men,” she said, and Lucia looked up, startled.
“Do you think I haven’t seen you since you met the star men?” her mother asked. “Be off with you. I would rather you here than your brother, but the militia will defend this house if it needs defense. And if they don’t, God’s will be done.”
Lucia stood dumbfounded.
“Now be off, girl!”
“Be safe, Mother.” Lucia turned to Marco. “This way.”
* * *
Some of the local militia fell in behind as Lucia hurried through the streets to the house of Facione. Someone had passed the word that she spoke for the Council of Ten, even for the Doge, and the militia officers followed her for want of other orders. Soon more than two score hurried in her wake. All of them were young, inexperienced. Probably of no use in defense of the city, but perhaps useful in whatever the star men needed constructed in the Palazzo San Marco. She took a guilty pleasure in having such a large escort, but—
She halted the ragtag column and eyed it critically, then spied Pietro, a boy not much older than she but far more richly dressed. His father, she remembered, was a senator.
“Pietro!”
“Signorina?”
“Are you in charge of these men?”
He looked around blankly, then back at her.
“I see no one of higher rank, Lucia.”
“Then command them for me. I have orders from the Council of Ten. You will assist me. Now get them into some order so that we don’t look like a band of robbers!”
The boy—he really isn’t a lot older than I am, Lucia thought—looked around in bewilderment. Then he drew himself into a military stance.
“Attention!” he shouted. “Form two files! Follow me in a column of two! Signorina, where are we going?”
“To the house of my father’s foreman, where we gather workmen and tools, then we take them to the Palazzo San Marco to aid the Professore and his star man companion.” She spoke loudly enough for the others to hear her, and she kept her voice serious and, she hoped, commanding, as if she expected to be obeyed. Pietro nodded, and the others arranged themselves into two straight lines behind him.
Lucia nodded and set off with fresh determination. Before they’d gone a block, at least ten others had fallen in behind her column. She smiled in satisfaction, and her smile widened as more added themselves to it. It wasn’t much of a fighting force, but it was all hers.
* * *
Lucia watched with pride as her workmen constructed the fortress in front of Palazzo San Marco. The three steel containers—the best steel Lucia had ever seen—stood squarely in front of the palace, about fifteen yards apart, raised on timbers which would keep them above water even when high tide flooded the square and well back from the fortifications taking form before them. Teams of men pried up paving stones, levering them out of the Palazzo’s pavement, for other men—supervised by her father, Guido Facione, and their workmen—to heap in a shoulder-high barricade reinforced with massive, seasoned timbers from the Arsenale. Wherever possible, the timbers were protected by fireproof bronze sheets, also brought down from the Arsenale with the container that had been there.
And that had been a fight! Even the star woman had opposed it! And Lucia had heard that much of the Signory had argued against placing all the containers in one place. The Warlord Rick had insisted, and one of the boys said he’d brought men with star weapons when he went to confront the Signory. That must have been a great scene, and Lucia would have given much to have seen it.
But now the containers stood in their row, behind the stout parapets. Vats of water and buckets of sand stood ready to control fires, and still more men had used some of the precious gunpowder to demolish much of one of the smaller palaces. Not just for additional stone for the fortifications, either. Lucia had heard one of the star men talking about “fields of fire,” as well. It was astonishing how quickly men could work when a pirate fleet was at the door, she thought.
“Good job, I’d say.”
Professore Clavell had come up behind her. He didn’t look like a professore now. He was dressed in the same odd-colored clothing Lord Harrison always wore, and although his vest didn’t look much like armor, the rumor was that it would stop arrows or even spears as well as bronze would. Perhaps better, even though it looked like cloth that was flexible, not like metal at all. He carried what he called his battle rifle and wore another star weapon in a scabbard under his left arm. He also had a very wicked looking dagger, not locally made. In fact, it was unlike anything Lucia had ever seen, and it fascinated her. It would require very good steel, a lot of charcoal hammered into the blade, but her father could sell daggers like that to half the Signory.
“Your classmate, the Councilor’s daughter—”
“Ginarosa Torricelli,” Lucia said, a bit puzzled by the Professore’s difficulty recalling his own student’s name.
“Yes, that’s her. She was at the Arsenale when we went up to get the container that was there. Very helpful she was. There were some who didn’t want us to take it, including your sister, but Ginarosa seemed to have a lot of people behind her when she said she supported us. And she was waving her father’s ring, like it gave her a lot of power.”
“It would, with her father’s men,” Lucia said. “Rosa can be very determined when she’s sure she’s right.”
“Yeah, I saw that. So did Mr. Saxon.”
“The star man?” She tried not to let her face show her emotions, but it was hard to be calm. “Do you know him well?”
“Not very. But he’s pretty smart. He was here earlier. After we retrieved the last container from the Senator’s house, he went inside one of them and brought out some things to help us fight the pirates.”
“Yes.” Lucia was annoyed. The star man was here, but she’d been so busy gathering and encouraging the workers that she hadn’t seen him! Now—
“Professore, do you know where he’s gone?”
“Last I saw he was heading to our palace to make weapons.”
“Oh. And Ginarosa? Signorina Torricelli?”
“Haven’t seen her since we brought the containers here,” Professore Clavell said with a frown. He looked away, glancing around the Palazzo as if searching for her.
“Where is the safest place to be when the fighting begins?” Lucia asked.
“Right here,” the Professore said. “Well, in the Palace there, where arrows can’t hit you.”
“But— Won’t the pirates be coming here?”
“Eventually, Signorina. We hope to kill a lot of them here.”
“But there are so many! Or so people say. What if you can’t kill enough of them?” she asked, and Professore Clavell looked serious.
“Then nobody in the city is safe,” he said. “We’re evacuating—moving—as many citizens to the upper city as we can. They should be safe there, at least for now. But if we lose down here, they won’t be safe for long. Maybe a few can hide, but—”
“Yes,” Lucia said. “Yes, I understand. Thank you, Professore. I will go seek my friend and be sure she stays here, also. I’ll put her in the Palace. Now where do you want me?”
“You? You can’t fight—”
“Do not be so sure of that, Professore. And whether I can fight or not, I can help put out fires. My father’s men obey me, or did you not notice?”
“We all did,” Clavell said. Lucia couldn’t be sure, but she thought star man was sincere, not mocking her.
“And Ginarosa’s father’s men will all be with her. And she’s my best friend.”
“It will be very dangerous here when the fighting begins . . . ” The Professore looked thoughtful.
“And you just told me that no place is safe if we lose this battle.” She shrugged. “Perhaps we can help win it.”
“Maybe you can,” Clavell replied, still deep in thought, then looked into the distance. “Hey, isn’t that your sister?”
Lucia looked in astonishment. It was Catarina, walking side by side and chattering with one of the star men who had arrived with the coronel. What was his name again? Ah, yes Warner! Lucia remembered hearing that he was a learned man who Lord Rick trusted and turned to for advice.
* * *
Lance Clavell watched Warrant Officer Larry Warner approach.
Clavell envied Warner’s advancement and obvious connection to the Colonel, but he didn’t resent it. Warner always seemed a little embarrassed about being promoted over his peers and rarely pulled rank, even if he did have a habit of lecturing. Besides, by all accounts Warner was working his tail off at the University when he wasn’t pulled back into uniform. No soft duty for him.
At the moment, Warner’s head was bent as he talked with the young lady walking beside him. Clavell had seen Catarina Michaeli on only a few, rare occasions. In fact, he’d seen more of her this evening than he had in all his previous time in Nikeis. Catarina was normally very shy and quickly disappeared after introductions. In fact, he’d heard she was a bit of a recluse who haunted the Arsenale and the family foundry. But tonight, she seemed enthralled by some tale Warner was spinning about a balloon ride.
A group of workers followed them, pulling carts full of barrels and other supplies.
“Mr. Warner,” Clavell said in greeting as he saluted.
“Sergeant Clavell,” Warner replied with a smile.
“Last I saw you,” Clavell said in English, “I thought Signorina Catarina was going to eat you alive. She seemed pretty pissed off that we stole her work crews to move the containers. Then we kept them to build fortifications!”
“Good thing Signorina Torricelli was there to intervene,” Warner replied in the same language. “Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you. But once Catarina heard my name, she suddenly started asking questions about my balloon rides and how it worked.”
Clavell hid a smile and nodded seriously.
“What’s in the carts?” he asked, shifting back to the local language.
“Oh, almost forgot. Catarina and her crew were very helpful in gathering together barrels of tar and other things. Including this.”
Warner motioned to one of several carts loaded down with barrels. A workmen lifted the lid from one of the barrels, and Clavell smelled the strong scent of guano.
“God, seagull crap!” He shook his head. “If you’re looking for Saxon, he’s in my place, making bombs. Came by here to grab a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, among other things.”
“Really?” Warner chuckled. “Man, could we have used that earlier! Lots of good stuff in there to make things go boom. Speaking of which, were you able to get the Signory to give up some of their gunpowder?”
“Yeah.” Clavell grimaced wryly. “I got it. And after taking the containers and asking for everything else the Colonel sent me after, they started to wonder if I was going to ask for the gold in their teeth.”
“They do realize all of this is to help defend them, right?”
“Sure. You didn’t expect them not to squeal about it anyway, did you?”
“Not so much,” Warner acknowledged with a smile. “Wanna bet they don’t have spies watching to see what we do with it all so they can copy us later?”
“Thanks, no,” Clavell said dryly.
“Alrighty, then,” Warner said. “I’m going to go join Professore Saxon in the bomb factory.”
“Try not to blow it up,” Clavell said, as he saluted again. “I kind of like the place.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Warner headed off, still talking with Catarina Michaeli, and Clavell noticed Lucia trailing along behind.