"The cross's light is infinite! The Lord bless the Queen!..."
At the port docks of Seville, the cries of the holy-war veterans were like thunder, and the prayers of the priests and their retinues were like lightning. Yet after the thunder and lightning flashed past, the dust of the earth remained as ever. The port of Seville was still a tangle of prosperity and filth.
Carriage wheels rolled over bluestone and packed manure, leaving a fresh trail of horse dung behind. Iron-nailed wooden wheels struck the jumbled gutters, splashing up muddy piss. Hearing the sounds of their own kind, herds of pigs grunted toward the cargo ships by the sea, only to be met by the pig drivers' cursing lashes and shouts. Reeking salted fish piled beside wooden barrels, and the swarming flies could not be driven off; some even became part of the fish flesh.
"Cough, cough! Pah!..."
Passing merchants and pedestrians moved with practiced ease through the filthy harbor streets and alleys, spitting now and then and stamping the dung-mud stuck to their boots. They had long grown used to the crowded prosperity of a commercial port city, and to the dirt born alongside that prosperity, as if these were the two natural faces of a coin, unchanged from antiquity to now.
In this late medieval age at the end of the fifteenth century, the drainage ditches of ancient Rome had long been forgotten for a thousand years on the European continent, and municipal management had become a legend no one remembered. Priests loathed and resisted bathing, fearing that evil qi and plague miasma would enter their bodies while they washed and bring the devil's curse. The nobles were much the same, using all kinds of heavy perfumes to cover even heavier body odor.
Only in the last