Chapter 216: The Bourbon Blood

“So this is why the Europeans can make so much steel…”

He began studying the blueprints piece by piece, his brow slowly tightening in confusion. At one point, he pointed to a complex arrangement of water-powered bellows meant to force air into the furnace and started murmuring to himself.

“These papers say we must drive the wind into the fire using these heavy machines. But the wind from a machine is cold. My people—the children of Ogun—know that fire must be fed with breath that has already tasted heat. If we blow cold air directly onto the iron, as these lines suggest, the metal will shiver and become brittle like dry bone.”

He had instinctively identified what the Göttingen design lacked: preheating.While the European plans relied on sheer mechanical force, Ogundele’s tradition understood that the temperature of the blast mattered as much as its strength.

He continued muttering, raising more questions than answers, until Krugger—standing silently beside him—found himself completely unable to intervene.

At last, Ogundele noticed another detail: the entire mechanism depended on something called a steam engine. He looked up.

“I understand the blueprint, and we can try to copy it. I will send my questions to Francisco in a letter later. But this requires a steam machine. I have heard of such things from him, yet I have never seen one—and I doubt there is any place here where we could buy it. Did he give you the plans for that as well?”

Krugger slapped his forehead, suddenly remembering.

“He did. But I left those blueprints in San Andrés. He told me they were extremely important, so I locked them in a safe where we landed. I can send word for them to be delivered with the next batch of soldiers… though without weapons and ammunition, that will not be easy.”

Ogundele understood immediately: Krugger was seeking supplies from Patrón Carlos.But that was not his concern.

“We can forge enough weapons for another hundred soldiers,” he said calmly. “But you must speak with the patrón if you want them sent to San Andrés. The most I can do is explain how important those blueprints are.”

Krugger allowed himself a brief smile, already picturing the arrival of reinforcements.But the thought quickly stirred another memory—his agreement with Carlos—and the question he had been avoiding rose quietly to his lips.

“Sir… I know you were once a slave. Could you help me with something else?”

He explained his plan to free Carlos’s slaves and forge from them a more loyal, cohesive army—yet confessed he needed help convincing them.

Ogundele, who had returned his gaze to the fields, suddenly went still.His eyes rested on the workers among the rows of crops. He did not smile. Instead, a long, weary breath escaped him, as though it carried the weight of two continents.

“Mr. Krugger,” he said at last, his voice like grinding stone,”you speak of freedom as if it were a coat one can simply put on to stay warm. For me… it was. I remember the forests of my home. I remember Ogun. The rituals of my people—my family—and the small happiness that lived there. So when that boy Carlos offered me my papers, I accepted. I knew what I had lost… and I wanted it back.

I am a man only recently forced into slavery. And I was fortunate to meet Señor Carlos—and the young Francisco—who did not treat me with cruelty, but with the deep respect owed to a craftsman.”

Then he stepped closer to Kruger, his dark eyes piercing the General’s cold Prussian stare.

“But these people… the people under Carlos are different. They were born in the shadow of their master. To them, food, a roof, and the protection of a master who does not whip them—this is the only world they know. You wish to give them a flag and a gun, but what they see is a cold winter without a master to feed them. They do not fear the chains; they fear the silence of an empty stomach with no one to fill it.

“They have forgotten most of their old skills. Their only skill now is obedience. So if you truly wish to eradicate slavery, you cannot begin with the old or the grown. You must begin with their sons. The young may still learn to remove their shackles. My advice is this: offer freedom to the new generations—as a possibility, not an obligation.”

“No,” Kruger barked, the word cutting through the humid air like a gunshot. “In Prussia, we do not mend a broken wall by waiting for the stones to grow back. We tear it down and build anew. You speak of waiting, of possibilities—but we stand in the middle of a civil war.

“The end is simple: either Carlos wins and a new nation is born, or he falls and his people are killed or imprisoned. For Carlos and my grandson, the worst case is exile—Germany, perhaps some forgotten island where no one knows our names.”

He began to pace the wooden floor, his boots striking with rigid, rhythmic authority.

“I do not seek to grant freedom for empty ideology. I seek it because freedom brings soldiers, and soldiers bring survival. I cannot train five-year-olds to fight this war, nor can I wait ten years for them to grow.”

Ogundele only shrugged.

“If you want free men, you must guarantee them food, shelter, and a future. Those are difficult promises when even you do not know what future awaits us. As free men fighting for you, they may die—and their families with them. As slaves, their worst fate is merely another master. Freedom, without certainty, lowers their chances of survival.”

He paused, his voice softening into weary finality.

“My advice? Let it go. Carlos already has enough enemies. Offer unconditional freedom now, and some of those men may become your first new foes.”

Ogundele turned away.

“If you will excuse me, I must speak with my partners. These blueprints demand precision, and I see parts that will not be easy to craft.”

Without another word, he walked toward the mountain path behind the plantation. Though Carlos had revealed the existence of his armory, the true workshop still lay hidden among the rocks—protected from prying eyes, sabotage and the chaos of this war

Krugger was left with a dull pain behind his eyes, struggling to understand why everyone he spoke to—even Ogundele, a man born of the same people as the slaves—believed that granting freedom was so difficult, almost impossible.

Far across the ocean, Spain trembled under storms of its own.

The king, Carlos IV, who had reached Madrid in December to spend Christmas and the winter, received news from France that shattered what remained of his composure.

The loss at Toulon was an open wound—humiliation tasting of copper and ash.Carlos stared at the portrait of his cousin, Louis XVI, and felt the tremor of a collapsing world.

“The French rabble… they execute their king and then drive my finest regiments into the sea,” Carlos hissed, fingers trembling on the back of his chair. “Every throne in Europe watches us bleed, forgetting that if we fall, they are next. They see us retreat from the Pyrenees and laugh. They think the Spanish Lion is toothless. But the French Rooster no longer crows—it hunts.”

Yet France, painful as it was, remained a war among equals. Defeat there only proved the growing brilliance of a new French colonel—Napoleon Bonaparte.

The news from the Americas, however, transformed grief into sharpened hatred.

The punitive expeditions to New Granada had collapsed in disaster. Soldiers drowned by rivers, survivors hiding without supplies in the capital of Antioquia like hunted animals, destroying what little goodwill remained among the city’s people

“And now this!” the king roared, hurling a blood-stained dispatch across the table. “My dragoons—the pride of Cartagena, the iron fist of the viceroy—gone! Swallowed by mud and the blades of those God-fearing fanatics!”

Carlos paced like a caged beast, shadow trembling against velvet walls.When he turned to Manuel Godoy, his voice had fallen to a jagged whisper.

“But it is not their steel that haunts me. It is the silence in Madrid’s cathedrals. The streets whisper that we lose because God has abandoned the House of Bourbon… that the Lion bleeds because it dared to bite the hand of the Church.”

His fist struck the table.

“It is Lorenzana and his black-robed vultures. They still resent the expulsion of the Jesuits. They never forgave my father for stripping their lands and schools. They see the fanatics of New Granada not as rebels, but as divine punishment—proof that I am unworthy of this crown. Rome smiles at every Spanish defeat, teaching me that no king is greater than the Pope.”

Godoy, the “Prince of the Peace,” had remained motionless in the velvet shadows, watching the monarch unravel. Only when the echoes faded did he step forward, silver spurs whispering against marble.

“Your Majesty,” he said softly, voice smooth as oil over a wound, “your anger is the anger of a lion who senses jackals at his heels. And you are right to look toward the cathedrals. The whispers in Madrid are not born from common mouths, but placed there by men in black who still mourn what the Crown took from them.”

He lifted the blood-stained dispatch, eyes scanning the names of the fallen.

“They use the fanatics of New Granada as a puppet theater, Sire. Every rebel victory is proclaimed as divine judgment. If the Crown fails to crush them, the Church will say Bourbon blood has grown thin… cursed. Through the so-called expansion of Bishop Esteban and those pious peasants, they seek to reclaim the power we seized when we placed the Crown above the altar.”

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