The sounds of men yelling and the sharp, solitary reports of rifle shots echoed in the distance.
Sorry, Sal. You need to learn to be nicer to the ladies.
She turned and hurried back up the alley, across the now-empty square beside the large church, and then around the smaller streets back to the Swallow. Her horse was waiting for her.
It took several precious minutes to get the blanket and saddle in place, and though she’d done it a hundred times, she still rode out into the cold morning streets with the nagging doubt that she’d done something wrong. She dismissed it. When it came to horses, something was always going wrong.
Dumb animals.
She rode as swiftly as she dared back across the square and then began listening for the sounds of violence. Six soldiers with rifles against one man with a knife and one boy with a cold. Shifrah worked her tongue across her teeth as she listened to the quiet murmurs of the street, of people walking and talking and working.
Maybe this is a bad idea.
Three rifle shots echoed over the rooftops and she spurred her horse into a gallop, angling across the street and around the corner at the next intersection. People on foot scattered before her and it wasn’t long before she spotted a knot of chaos in the middle of the road ahead. People were shouting and scattering, dropping baskets and sacks in the middle of the street to make way for the squad of men in blue mechanically firing and reloading their primitive rifles. Shifrah grimaced. At least they’re only Espani rifles. If they were Mazigh weapons, they’d be spewing bullets non-stop. Never mind Mazigh revolvers.
She shuddered at the thought of bullets, weapons flying faster and smaller than the eye could follow, tearing down a strong woman, or even a man for that matter.
With a knife in one hand, she charged the back of the soldiers’ line and cried out, “For God and good Prince Valero!” in her best Espani, which sounded a great deal like her best Italian. But the soldiers all froze at the cry and glanced up at her as the horse clattered into the center of their loose formation in the street.
“Where are they? Where are the spies?” she shouted, waving her knife.
“Get out of the way!” The soldiers poured around her, surging on down the street. Only the mustachioed captain bothered to catch her eye and give her a properly dirty look.
She grinned back. “Let’s get them!” She kicked the horse into another dead run down the street and from her elevated seat she caught a glimpse of the major’s head darting to the right around a corner at the far end of the street. “They went left! Down there!” She pointed with her knife and to her relief three of the soldiers stumbled to a halt and then veered off to the left. The other three shouted back, “No, no, they went right! Right!”
The confusion was brief but real. Blank looks all around and uncertain fingers pointing in different directions. But the captain’s shouting soon had them back on the trail.
Unwilling to risk another transparent interruption to the chase, Shifrah turned down another street running parallel to the one the major took and emerged on the next avenue to find it almost completely deserted. Nowhere to hide. “Not what I wanted.”
She trotted down to the next street, the one the major should have been about to come out of, but she found it empty except for the echoing shouts of angry men. Halfway down the lane she saw a front door kicked in.
“What the hell are they doing?” She stayed on the wider avenue and headed south, peering down the narrow gaps between the houses and shops at the small gardens behind them.
A flash of brown leather.
A rifle shot.
“Hell, kid, keep your head down!” the major roared.
Shifrah squinted down the narrow alleyways and suddenly a flock of blue uniforms flooded through a small garden right in front of her and a half dozen male shouts echoed back out to her, “Shoot, shoot! He’s right there! Get him! No, the other one!”
She dashed down the avenue parallel to the men, separated from the chase by a row of houses that seemed to have no paths between them wide enough to admit a horse. Looking ahead, she spotted the next side street and raced around the corner. The men were still running through the back gardens, crashing through fences and tearing down laundry lines, shouting and shooting. Bullets ricocheted off brick and stone, and shattered glass windows. Every few seconds, a woman would shriek inside one of the houses.
Shifrah nudged her horse back and forth, trying to guess which house the two Mazigh officers would come barreling through.
To her right, the front window of a small house exploded in a rain of broken glass and wooden splinters. The major landed on his shoulder, rolled slowly, and stood up, clearly favoring his right leg. The kid tumbled out of the window after him, collapsing to the street and looking like a sweaty corpse, his face pale and bloodshot eyes set in dark eye sockets.
Zidane hauled the kid to his feet just as his eyes met hers. “What the hell are you doing here? Are you with them are not?”
“I might be with you, but now is not the best time to chat, major.” Shifrah jerked her head at the sound of the pursuing soldiers crashing through the house. She pointed down the street. “The south gate is that way, assuming you’re still heading for warmer places to run and play.”
Zidane hesitated a moment too long. Two faces appeared in the broken window just as the front door of the house swung open. The major dropped his friend and lunged at the two men in the window, grabbed their jackets, and hauled them out into the street where he dropped them on their heads and stripped them of their rifles. He tossed one gun to the kid as he spun around and cracked the butt of his own rifle into the head of the man rushing out the front door.
Shifrah spotted another rifle poking through the broken window and she screamed in her highest screeching voice, “My baby! Someone save my baby!”
The rifle jerked back inside, replaced a moment later with two more confused faces.
Zidane grabbed the sick kid and they both took off down the road, rifles in hand. Shifrah wheeled her horse around just as the Espani captain charged out the door, hollering, “Arrest that woman!”
“Oh, hell.” Shifrah kicked her horse and sped away in the opposite direction of the two Mazighs. “You’re on your own now, big man. But I’ll be seeing you soon enough.”
Chapter 16. Lorenzo
The night in Ariza passed without incident, though they did keep everyone together in one farmhouse and rotated guards in the dining room throughout the night. As long as everyone was within sight of someone else, Lorenzo wasn’t worried. Even Salvator Fabris was only one man, and they wouldn’t pass by any forts before reaching Zaragoza, so the Italian was unlikely to find help before then. More importantly, Atoq stayed close that night and it was easy to feel safe and secure with eight hundred pounds of saber-toothed cat sitting just outside the door.
All day he had worried about the boys’ morale after leaving Enrique behind, but they appeared to rally quickly, especially when Qhora and the Mazigh pilot told them about their little adventure with the water-woman.
At least I was right about this trip being an experience the boys won’t soon forget.
The following day, the weather turned and they made poor time against the heavy sleet and freezing winds. Still, they pressed on for the full day and reached Zaragoza shortly after sunset. Deep within the city, the familiar arches and towers of the Cathedral of San Salvador rose above the surrounding buildings like an ancient, crumbling mountain. Many claimed that once this massive cathedral, often called La Seo, had been adorned by the most elegant of carved buttresses topped with stone gargoyles and marble angels and bronze saints, and each facade had been covered in triquetras of every size and style from Vlachian to Numidian. But now, after centuries of exposure to the screaming north wind and driving snow and shattering ice, there was precious little beauty left outside the cathedral. And what limited money and manpower there once had been to protect and maintain the building had sailed away to the New World and never returned.