Castelnuovo's Tercios

Synopsis

Castelnuovo's Tercios Series Blood, sweat and iron - Book XIV The year of the Lord from 1539. The Magnificent Soliman governs an empire that stretches beyond the confines of the horizon. Barbaroja, his sombre Admiral, drags after him the most tidal tide the Mediterranean has seen. And, with them, resisting as a rock lost in the middle of the ocean, only four thousand Spanish. Four thousand men against an entire world. The Tortios de Castelnuovo tells about the last defense of a convicted third, a resistance that no mortal would have thought possible. That's where kings and emperors parlay, and Jenizare born slaves, and corsaries that govern the sea, and Spanish soldiers who, hungry and wounded and abandoned by them all, have decided never to kneel. The novel goes through the Istanbul palaces light with oil lights, the dark rooms of Yuste where Charles I felt the weight of the world, the cover of gallees that smell as a beret, sweat and prayer and finally Castelnuovo, a stone grave where every street is taken and lost a thousand times, where every man struggles till his name breaks into blood. There's no salvation here. No retirement here. There's no dawn here that doesn't smell of gunpowder and burned flesh. But there's something more powerful than life: the freedom to choose death. The final words of Master Sarmiento are heard on these pages, and the ground tremor is felt as the Turkish mines devour the wall, and the final figure of less than a hundred men advanced against thousands because they have a breath and an oath. And as soon as the silence comes, that silence that only the great tragedies leave, remains the only thing that neither Soliman nor Barbaroja could conquer: The memory. Castelnuovo's Tercios are an iron and ash song, a glorious funeral, a flame that doesn't shut down. A true story told with the crudeness, beauty and pics of a world that bleeds... but doesn't lean. Because there are defeates that are crowns. Because there are deaths that are foundations. Because there are names that never die.