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!"
" A?Santiago! " the Spaniards cried. Swordsmen and pikemen swarmed past the arquebusiers towards the barrier blocking their way. They scrambled over it and tore openings in it with their hands. The English irregulars behind the barricade chopped and hacked at them, trying to hold them back. A pistol banged, then another. The irregulars yelled as loudly for St. George as Guzman's men did for St. James.
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, " A?Santiago! " the Spaniards rushed at the second barricade.
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.
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?"