“You and the rest of the malcontents will get your ‘Wind of Change,’ right enough. You’ll all get more wind than you bargained for—a whirlwind of death and destruction looms over you even now, and it will commence its work even before our holy body is cold. You may outlive us, briefly, but we know that we shall enjoy the last laugh. Brother Prospero.”
Whilst the dying pontiff was conversing with his declared enemy, up the street beyond the tightly sealed window of the death chamber a Moorish guards sergeant and five of his minions were stalking along, seeking out men or women or children to beat. They did not hear the well-oiled hinges of the shutters covering a window above them, and by the time they heard the contrabasso thrrruuumm of the crossbow, its thick, stubby bolt had torn through the back and the front of a mail hauberk and the thickness of the body between them, then sped on to penetrate yet one more layer of mail and lodge finally in the hipbone of that man-at-arms.
Whirling about at the first noise from behind his patrol, the sergeant saw the two men go down, screaming in agony and surprise, even as the shutter was slammed shut.
Roaring his rage, the sergeant led his remaining three Moorish Guards in battering down the strangely unbarred street-level door to the house, then charged in with them, clubs and whips discarded, scimitars and pistols out and ready.
Presently, four gashed, headless, swarthy-skinned bodies, all stripped of anything of value, were thrown out the doorway. Slowly, a gaggle of men and women and children gathered in the street to further mutilate the bodies, revile them, spit upon them, and shower them with bits of dung from beneath the straw. Some followed the man with the bolt in his hip as he crawled away from the site of the ambush. Not a few of these folk bore signs of recent abuse inflicted by whip and club and pikestave, and they took thorough, sickening revenge upon their onetime oppressor before someone finally deigned to grant him the mercy of death.
Neither group dispersed until the thud-thud-clank-jingle of armed and running men announced the imminent arrival of approaching troops.
Dying Pope or no dying Pope, loud were the cries of rage and outrage when the new-come Moors saw the bodies—by then, all of them hacked, mutilated, and despoiled. Louder still were their howls when they entered the vacant houses and found the four severed heads, lined up neatly on a bench built into a wall, their slit-off penises jammed into the beard-fringed mouths. After searching and thoroughly wrecking the empty house, the section of Moorish Guards departed, seeking first reinforcements, then men to kill.
True to the dying Abdul’s vision, the Roman storm had commenced.
“That I ever met Carolyn at all was the purest coincidence.” Rupen continued his tale to the archbishop. “While the guest of a wealthy arms collector at a fashionable downtown-Richmond club, I had happened to meet a man who had been a fellow GI Bill student at the city college twenty-odd years before. When, in the course of our conversation, he learned that I was vice president of Confederate States Armaments, he told me that he was just then teaching history courses at that same city college and asked if I might visit one of more of his classes to show off some of my reproductions and tell of how they were made, loaded, and used. Being, at that point, brandy-jovial. I agreed to do so.
“Since by then we were stocking a wide variety of long guns, and single-shot pistols and more than a dozen different cap-and-ball revolvers, taking examples of every item was out of the question, and I limited my burden on the first such visit to four long guns—one flintlock musket, one caplock rifle-musket, a flintlock fuzzee, and a cap-and-ball revolving carbine—and four handguns—a flintlock horse pistol, a caplock derringer, a Colt-type dragoon revolver, and a Remington-type Army-caliber revolver, along with a big briefcase full of accessories.
“So well received was my demonstration that day, so warm was my reception by both students and faculty, that when I was asked to return and do it again. I agreed to do so. My initiaJ demonstration and talk had been in a classroom to about thirty students and a few stray faculty members; for my second appearance, I was requested to bring a larger selection of weapons and to be prepared to do a two-hour demonstration. Not until I arrived on campus did I find out that this one was to be in the largest lecture hall and that my audience was to number in hundreds and include not only students and faculty but also quite a few alumni and plain citizens.
“By the conclusion of that one, I had given out all of my business cards and, actually, sold many of the demonstration weapons on the spot, along with most of the accessories, so when the college offered me an honorarium, I politely declined to accept it … and this raised my stock with them through the roof.
“When I arrived at the lecture hall for my third demonstration, this time with Bagrat and two of my nephews. Al and Haigh, it was to find the hall and all of its approaches being picketed by a long-haired, scruffy, ragged, very smelly agglomeration of a type of scum peculiar to that period—’hippies,’ they were called. This particular batch were bearing signs and shouting slogans and singing off-key songs protesting the then-ongoing war in Southeast Asia. Although I could not imagine just what a demonstration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reproduction weapons and tools had to do with the protracted modern war clear on the other side of the globe, it was clear that the only way I would get the station wagon into the parking lot under the lecture hall would be to run its three-plus tons over some of the unwashed young lunatics who were stretched full-length, in several ranks, across the width of the driveway ramp. Bagrat, Al, and Haigh were in favor of doing just that, but I drove instead, to the administration building, and we ended up carrying everything into the lecture hall through a tunnel connecting the two buildings, thus avoiding any confrontation with the mob of protestors entirely.
“When I asked just what the hell was going on outside the lecture hall, my old friend and sometime fellow student, Paul Czemik, just shook his head. “These peacenik hippies and pseudo-hippies and out-and-out bums, alkies and dopers mostly, will protest at the drop of a frigging hat, Rupen, you know that. What set this off? Me. probably. Your demonstrations have been such a big hit that a reporter from the student newspaper interviewed me and asked about your background. I told him you were a retired infantry officer, a major, that your late father had been an important defense contractor and that your brother, Kogh Ademian, was president and chairman of the board of Ademian Enterprises, the international arms dealers.”
Rupen groaned. “And that was all published in the college paper? Hell, Paul, I’m lucky the little bastards didn’t drag me out of the car and lynch me.”
Professor Czemik looked rueful. “Open mouth, insert foot, leg, thigh, and asshole. I’m sorry, Rupen, I should’ve realized this bunch of freaks we have for students these days would blow it up out of all proportion. The way the published article read, you were either here recruiting for the Green Berets, preaching the joys of high explosives and napalm, or both at once.”
“Well, Hal.” Rupen went on to the archbishop, “when the protesters realized that we’d bypassed them and gotten into the lecture hall, along with a fair portion of our audience, despite them, they went wild, turned so ugly that the security guards who had been outside all came inside, secured all of the doors, shuttered all of the ground-level or easily accessible windows, and rang up the city police.
“By the time the first city cops arrived on the scene, the so-called protest was well on the way to becoming a full-blown riot. And while that mess was in process of being cooled down, a bunch of real revolutionaries occupied most of the administration building, barred and barricaded all the entries and exits, then threatened to set fire to it unless some score of ‘nonnegotiable demands’ were met at once. The long list of demands was delivered via bullhorn, and most of them were ridiculous to begin; not the college administration, not the city mayor, not the state governor, not even the president could have fulfilled those demands, especially not in the short time which the revolutionaries were allotting . . . and those fledgling Marxists knew the facts of the matter as well as did anyone else.”
Rupen approached Czemik and a gaggle of faculty members huddled together in whispered consultation. “Paul, I’ve got to get my station wagon out of that administration building parking facility, at once.”