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SUNSET OF THE PORTUGUESE


CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Ribeira Palace, Lisbon, 23 October 1755

Even in the gaudy depths of the baroque Ribeira Palace, one could hear the Spanish army celebrating, even as they besieged Lisbon. 7 years before, the people of Toledo had seized the Castle of St. Servando, sparking the fires of revolution that now consumed Lisbon.


Lisbon had swelled with refugees, from all classes of life and from all parts of Portugal. General Froilan Urteaga was at Lisbon’s gates -- and word of his Rape of Santiago de Compostela on July 25th had filtered across much of the world.

People were terrified of Urteaga’s army; his liberal attitude to pillaging, his libertine tendencies and his resolute antitheism were by this point well known. For a city as religious as Lisbon, the siege was fraught with meaning -- a godly city led by a pious king, facing the forces of evil.

Sancho VI sat in his personal chapel, alone. Just hours before, in a secret ceremony in front of what remained of his court, he had abdicated his throne in favor of his son, Pedro, Prince of Porto. And afterwards, the remnants of Portugal’s navy escorted Pedro and the rest of the court out of Lisbon and out of Portugal, to temporary (he prayed) exile in the Senegal.

He was alone now. Only his most faithful friends, his guards and his confessor, his closest nobles… only they remained. Sancho could have easily fled, and they along with him. He could have sent his heir and his court abroad earlier, if not for the sin of wrath and the sin of pride. Pedro had begged him, certainly, but Sancho would not leave his people.

His faith in God steeled him for rule. His anger at the death of his sister, Queen of Spain, and at the Rape of Santiago sustained him in this futile war. And now, his stubborn pride kept him here, shorn of most of his finery, trapped in a city doomed to fall. He was a king without a crown, but a king nonetheless. His people believed in him and believed in God’s justice, and he would not leave them to die while he fled in safety.

As night fell, and the yells of the Spaniard camp grew louder, Sancho sat in waiting and contemplation. He thought of his martyred siblings and his exiled children, scattered to Senegal, Peru and France.

In the soft grasp of the moonlight, Sancho almost allowed himself to weep.

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HANNIBAL ANTE PORTAS
Lisbon, 28 October 1755/74 Unidad 5 E.R.

What good was the false God against an army clad in pure Reason? Prayer couldn’t stop cannonballs -- and General Urteaga had already conquered old Matamoros. The defense of Lisbon had collapsed before Spain and before the Republic -- now it was time to crush the vanguard of superstition and Reaction.

Carlos saw the great General, the new Bacchus and virs militarus, charging in ahead of him on a horse. The entire army, the victors against the Asturians, the conquerors of Santiago -- all of them were chanting “¡Victoria y Razón, España!” and “¡Viva la Revolución!”

Some were incoherently yelling “Libertad”, or other such slogans; of all the Republican armies, none were so ideological as that of Urteaga, who lectured to his troops while on march and distributed radical pamphlets supported the Reign of Fire and radical action.

And as Carlos marched behind his general, among his comrades, he felt like a warrior. A hero. A man. The cowering clerics -- they were mere children, cowering at the dark! The nobles were nothing more than toothless cuckolds! Only Republicans were men -- these slaves and lords were made children by their foolishness.

Carlos, a man at 14, sped off to the center of the supine city, the Ribeira Palace. Stories from older soldiers had spoken of Lisbon’s riches, brought from all over the world. To a man of La Mancha, born with a wooden spoon in his mouth, the prospect of wealth -- and of glory -- was irresistible.

Carlos didn’t know it at the time, clad in youthful ardor, but he was about to make history.

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120 HOURS OF SODOM
Lisbon, Occupied Portugal
Festival of Autumn, 77 Unidad 5 E.R. (31 October 1755)

There was no truer liberty than in the midst of disorder. A riot, a sack, a revolution -- in the midst of the destruction of the old, the libertine was at last free to do as he wished.

It helped, of course, when said libertine was at the head of an occupying army ruling over a rich, conquered city. Froilan Urteaga had risen far from his censored ignominy as a younger, minor noble -- from a cell in San Servando Castle to being the new Bacchus, conqueror of the Portuguese!

All throughout the city, one could here the conquerors and the collaborators celebrating. Prisoners and slaves freed of bondage, poor people freed of hunger, whores and drunkards freed of constraints -- there were many who joined in the Bacchanal. Where sack ended and party began was uncertain.

Urteaga himself said on a platform unraised in the main square, close to the Ribeira Palace, itself the scene of a great deal of plunder and rapine. One young soldier, now crowned in pillaged finery and laurels, had valiantly killed the fraud-king of the Portuguese, Sancho VI.

The king’s head now adorned a pole in the center, surrounded by the orgiastic crowd. Wine flowed here faster than the Tagus, faster even than the blood of the nobles and clergymen being executed near the Casa dos Escravos, center of Portugal’s ancient trade in human flesh.

Urteaga’s attentions were not undivided as he fondled the young lady on his lap. For the past few days, an untold number of women -- and boys -- had passed through his room in the Ribeira Palace, as he drowned himself in freedom and in pleasure. It was if his books had come themselves to life, and all the dour restrictions of the old had fallen away.

The religious people, cloistered in the monastery of St. Vincent and other such unspoiled churches, whispered to themselves about All Hallow’s Eve and the Day of All Saints, but those were the echoes of the defeated. Today was about the harvest, the blooming of new life and new liberty, a new Saturnalia made real across all of Iberia.

As he looked out on the square, Froilan Urteaga couldn’t help but smile. Lisbon and its king had been known for piety. Now, his men and the Lisboetas made a mockery of such pretensions; the nuns had become Salomes, the gold melted and beaten into sheets, clad upon, of all appropriate things, a golden calf.

Lusty cries and lustful deeds consumed all those present, and reverberated in the neighborhoods, where his faithful soldiers -- as he called them, his sons -- confiscated property and tore down the symbols of the past.

Perhaps Cachon and the spineless moderates would condemn him, as the Athenians had condemned Alcibiades. The secret royalists balked at Santiago, and they would balk at this, traitors that they were. They’d call him a criminal, a pervert, an abomination before God! But crimes of pleasure were not crimes, not to Urteaga nor to his men.

As Urteaga watched the orgy, and heard the music emanating through all of Lisbon, and smelled the fires of burning churches and burnt Bibles and roasted monks, he cracked a smile.

This was the regime of liberty, of Reason, bereft of lords and kings and gods. And General Froilan Urteaga was its master.

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RUE THE WAVES
Atlantic Ocean, SW of Cape Vincent
9:30 AM, 1 November 1755

Francisco was a good sailor, a good Christian, and a loyal subject of the King of Portugal. Even in the darkness of his impending exile, he was happy. He had no wife and no children; he was not close to his family. To hell with Republicans -- the sea was where his freedom lay.

King Pedro IV had not yet awoken, nor had the rest of the passengers. Francisco and others had gotten to work early, hoping to avoid the Spanish boats that had already claimed the Flor do Mar and the flower of much of the Portuguese nobility.

Today was the Day of All Saints, and Francisco, thumbing his rosary, once again stopped to pray. First he had prayed to Mary, but now he prayed to St. Elmo, patron of sailors. Elmo had not failed him in the North Atlantic, nor off the Terra do Fogo -- why would he be deaf to Francisco now?

But as Francisco prayed, a great, cataclysmic rumbling erupted, from the depths of the sea. The ocean whirled with energy, as the Earth far beneath it groaned and shuddered. There was an earthquake, more terrible than had been seen in centuries.

And with earthquakes came, as everyone knew, the maremoto. Francisco had no time to react -- the boat was ripped apart by the waves beneath them, assaulting the flotilla on all sides. His passengers had only just awoken, only to drown in their fineries in the middle of the ocean.

The wood was pulverized, the decks flooded, the gunpowder useless against the wrath of almighty God. No sailor, not even one as capable as Francisco, could have prepared for the very ocean to rise up and destroy them.

The last hope of Portuguese government had paid for Sancho VI’s bullheaded stubbornness. These ships, containing his court and his heir, could have gone out earlier -- and yet his faith prevented him from acting.

The exiles in Senegal -- to say nothing of the Duke of Guimarães in far-off Peru -- would have no idea of what had become of Pedro, nor of Lisbon, nor of their father, nor of the court.

For the first time, it was the metropole that was cut out of the global Portuguese empire. Its colonies were bereft of a King, its princely rulers bereft of a King to legitimize them and to organize the exile and eventual return.

The past glory of Portugal lay above the waves. The hope and future of Portugal lay drowned and dead beneath it.

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SWALLOWED BY THE EARTH
Lisbon, Occupied Portugal
9:36 AM, 78 Unidad 5 E.R. (1 November 1755)

In the main square of Lisbon, General Froilan Urteaga had already begun a busy day of sexual depravity, iconoclasm, senseless violence, and the pretense of “governance”. Currently, he was rather preoccupied with a servant boy from Cantão and a rather tawny, tawdry woman dressed in what had once been a nun’s habit. No rest for the wicked!

Today was the second day of the Festival of the Autumn, and to the blind sheep of the Church it was also the Day of All Saints.

In the name of Reason, a number of treasures had been piled up where the nobles had been executed the previous day, ready to be burnt along with those clergymen who, unlike their more free-spirited companions, had neither the good sense to flee nor the inclination to conveniently stop believing in God.

From a higher point in the city, looking out of a window with a looking-glass, Benjamin Disraeli sat repulsed by what he saw. Many of the Jews of the city had fled to Peru with their main ally and benefactor-in-court, the Duke of Guimarães -- but Disraeli’s family, and many others, stayed, hoping that the end of the Spanish Inquisition would augur good treatment for their people.

The Bairro Alto had already been pillaged, as had the main synagogues of the Alfama juderia. The Torahs had been hidden, along with the menorahs and the community finery in people’s homes, which had yet to be fully inspected as the army’s focused turned towards the churches and the major buildings.

Suddenly, a great roar filled the air, drowning both the revelry by the Tagus and the All Saints marches elsewhere in the city, where the soldiers were still hungover or plainly lax. The ground itself seemed to shift, becoming like water, flowing to and fro without rhyme or reason. It was an earthquake.

Benjamin was flung hard into the wall, his telescope falling to the ground, the walls shaking and crumbling around him. Here in the juderia, in the Alfama, no one had left their houses yet, fearful despite their hopes about the possibility of a pogrom. Some people darted out, fearing that they’d be trapped in rubble, only to be crushed by falling stones and bricks.

Disraeli managed to crawl to the window and look upon the square, the building apparently secure enough to avoid collapse. As he gazed in awe, he remembered his boyhood Torah lessons, and the tale of Passover.

The very Earth opened up, like a gaping maw, and swallowed the main square and its celebrants whole, with fissures fifteen feet wide. The Ribeira Palace was already burning, crumbling into itself, the soldiers and Lisboetas alike made equal in their powerlessness. They had sinned a great sin in the eyes of God, and had made a mockery of the Lord and his word. They had prayed in jest to a golden calf, and elevated falsehoods to the realm of Truth.

And like Dathan, Urteaga was consumed by the Earth, sent to the depths of Sheol. Disraeli’s view panned across the city -- outside of the area where the Casa da India and St. Elmo’s Tower stood, everything was collapsing before him. Fires soon raged, and joy had given way to the old despair of being conquered and the new despair of being damned by God’s natural wrath.

The Lisbon of wealth and glory was passing from the world, like Sodom and Gomorrah. Neither reason nor prayer, nor any of man’s artifices, could stop the fury of nature and the fickleness of Fate.

As Benjamin fell again to the floor, his telescope shattered, the roar of the Earth deafening all his senses, he prayed to God that he would live through this.

###

THE DELUGE
Lisbon, Occupied Portugal
10:10 AM, 78 Unidad 5 E.R. (1 November 1755)

Even now, Carlos Jaime de Cojuango y Quijos was wearing his laurels, clad in some of the finery of his late foe, King Sancho VI of Portugal.

When the earthquake had broken out, he had been guarding the Casa da India, preventing looters from breaking into the valuable building. Urteaga had been a permissive General, but the government needed valuables to sell in order to fund the national defense.

As soon as the tremors had stopped, Carlos and a couple of other young soldiers commandeered horses and rode out to stop looters or religious zealots believing it was the act of God. And, most importantly, to save and help their brothers-in-arms, many of whom lay crushed beneath rubble or otherwise dead and injured.

At last, Carlos had reached the main square, his companions having split off. He saw many of his friends, but he could not see the General. In the bay, the ocean’s floor had been revealed, clad in shipwrecks and cargo that could also be looted.

Carlos began to urge his horse into the square, and paused alongside those who had survived the great trembling. The ocean now joined the earth in its rumblings, and a great wave rushed up the Tagus, ready to consume those sinners who had not yet paid their due.

Carlos quickly, desperately turned his stolen horse around and rode for the highest ground. He couldn’t look back, not at his fellow soldiers nor at the civilians, all of whom were being drowned by the waves. He urged the horse, faster and faster, up the winding streets strewn with rubble.

Even a Republican, a man of valor, could fear that which he could not control.

###

THE CAMP OF ALL THE SAINTS
Lisbon, Occupied Portugal
80 Unidad 5 E.R. (3 November 1755)

Being trapped under rubble was terrible. Being trapped under rubble in a hospital, unable to save your dying charges, was even worse.

Beatriz had nearly suffocated on the dust and smoke, her rosary acting as her sole solace at her impending death. In the darkness, her mind had lost its grasp on the real and imagined, as her consciousness oscillated between living and death.

She had grown up a servant in the Ribeira Palace, and remembered the old King fondly from his time as the heir to the throne. Underneath the rubble of the Hospital of All The Saints, she saw Sancho VI, the Virgin, St. Vincent and St. Anthony. Beatriz prayed along with them, and learned from them, and her faith restored and renewed her.

When she was rescued from the rubble yesterday, she emerged anew, forged by her soujourn in the rubble. She knew what her mission was -- to drive out the invaders so that St. Sancho Seis would return to lead Portugal to permanent prosperity.

But she was no mere liberator. The servant girl, born of a slave and a priest, was divine herself. Little Beatriz was St. Anthony, patron of all Portuguese, reincarnated in the female flesh. The people had to learn of her mission, and seize the arms of the interlopers, and drive out the sinners and the Jews.

What had once been the main square and the Ribeira palace was now a sea of tents, where the poor had been driven by the few Spanish soldiers left alive in Lisbon. The city was wracked by anarchy, and the Spaniards had largely been driven to hide in St. Elmo’s Tower and St. George’s Castle, unable to enforce themselves on the people.

As she walked serenely to what was now being called the Camp of Saints, yet another explosion filled the city. St. George’s Castle was on fire, the gunpowder secreted away in its basement exploding, its stones flying everywhere, its Spanish occupants obliterated. Even now, zealots and patriots worked through God’s will. And as she approached the square and the tents, Beatriz readied herself.

The square was suddenly abuzz with worry, and the rest of the city had, after the silence in the aftermath of the explosion, returned to noise, with another panic roiling the survivors of Lisbon’s many neighbourhoods.

Her oratory was amateur and her voice raspy, but the wretched listened to her with rapt attention, cheering her points, their voices rising in righteous anger. They cried to kill the Jews and drive out the Spaniards, and to honor St. Anthony, St. Vincent and St. Sancho Seis.

The camp of the dispossessed was becoming an armed camp, the tents of the poor becoming the tents of God’s army. The Camp of All The Saints united behind a saint reincarnated.

St. Anthony had returned to save the Lisboetas, and all the Portuguese.

###

ORDER AND PROGRESS
Lisbon, Occupied Portugal
88 Unidad 5 E.R. (11 November, 1755)

In his military career, General Hernan Insulza had never planned for a catastrophic earthquake. Nor, it turns out, for losing a fellow Spanish army in a newly conquered city to said catastrophic earthquake.

The earthquake had also wracked the estates of the Duke of Guimarães, where General Insulza had been staying as part of the pacification of southern Portugal. When a runner finally reached him, he marched his armies to Lisbon, slowed down by bandits and the flood of refugees fleeing the ruined city.

His current accommodations were in some noble house, somehow untouched by the unending orgies of rape, pillaging, natural disasters, looting and messianic violence that had been seizing the city the past two weeks.

What remained of Urteaga’s army was pitiful, largely made up of lucky sonsofbitches and the luckier sonsofbitches who rode out the cataclysm in the Casa da India. He had found many of them in the main square, killing the crazy woman who called herself St. Anthony and her bands of ragtag bums and fellow Zealots. The scene was one of fire, rubble, blood, and much more than a whiff of grapeshot.

He found another group of young soldiers, led by a 14 year old in royal finery, patrolling and defending the Jewish neighborhood. Insulza was mainly concerned about order, although he had taken some Jewish notables or their children as hostages. They had been invaluable for information -- one had apparently seen Urteaga swallowed by the Earth, which settled the question of whether or not the new Bacchus had lived.

His own men had barely anywhere to stay, although many of them took up temporary residence in abandoned neighborhoods, the rest staying firmly outside the city in case of aftershocks.

As Insulza stood at the banks of the Tagus, he watched the sunset. For centuries, Lisbon had been a symbol of wealth and trade, the linchpin of the global trading networks that made much of Europe so wealthy.

Now, the sun set on the old glories of Portugal. Chaos had given way once more to order, and with every royalist or Christian zealot shot, the past gave way to progress.

Tomorrow was a new day. New provinces had to be incorporated, rubble had to be cleared, soldiers had to be recruited, the economy had to be rebuilt.

Reason demanded nothing less.
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