User:Luciano/Source/Noche del Zombi

La Noche del Zombi, Part I

The summer of 1856 was the long summer of despair for our Federalists fighting under president Keum to preserve our young Federation. The Autonomists kept winning battles, and seemed to have failed to take the capital mainly out of a lack of interest. The merciless General Guang would lead his well-organized militias on forays deep into La Costa, while the harried Federalist troops seemed to retreat and lose at every turn.

After the disaster at Cerro Sombrero in October, 1855, when Coronel Sanpedro was killed, Brevet Coronel Persson led her Apofénicos in several near-suicide missions down into the Delta del Au, but always at great cost in soldiers, horses and materiel. In the unusual rainy gloom of the winter of 1856 she took the hill at Petronio Robilyle and held it for several months, using it as a base for operations further south. But the Federalists always seemed outnumbered and outmanoevered by the Autonomist units, who seemed to move freely through the entirety of Comuna Constitución that year, several times feinting toward Caracol but inevitably rampaging straight north, instead. Their strategy seemed to be one of destruction rather than capture, which suited their character as bandits and pirates under the nefarious Ordon-Grabb and the blackhearted McQueen. The trail of tears left by farmers and merchent families fleeing their homes throughout the south Costa for the relative safety of the Distrito, and their squalid refugee camps stretched the charity of the Chogué monks and lay workers trying to help.

In November, as the temperatures warmed but the rain refused to abate, Coronel Persson's regiment was ordered by General Kim to defend the town of Santo Domingo, nestled along the eponymous Santo Domingo creek at the base of the Cientoocho. The esteemed lady from San Pedro del Amantes politely refused. Her regiment was at less than quarter strength, and furthermore had almost no ammunition. Of course, General Kim was uninterested in such things. So off to Santo Domingo the soldiers trudged. They camped on the northern bank of the Río Yucái, just upstream of the little floodplain from the tiny Quebrada Duraznos.

Their chances of surviving an encounter with Guang's forces, known be camped in the town of Colofón just a dozen kilometers southeast and clearly headed toward Santo Domingo, seemed slim.

Now, there was a small Chogué monastery that had been built just a few years prior at Santo Domingo, on the west bank of the Duraznos and close to the town square. In this monastery there lived an elderly monk named Gabriel Ghiuletti, who typically went by the nickname "Fin", after his mother's family name, Finlay. He was not an ordinary monk. In fact, he was a rogue, and he had been a pirate. Even worse, he was a native child of the rebel capital, Cabo Inglés. But some years ago, he had decided he regretted his roguish past and, with genuine repentance after a very long night drinking, he had converted to the Way of Gautama and had adopted the grey and saffron robes. The order, in its wisdom, had placed him in an as-out-of-the-way-place-as-possible - namely, this Templo de Duraznos in Santo Domingo. And he was happy there. He had become the caretaker of a substantial tribe of parentless war orphans, who seemed to roam into the regiment's camp with all the finesse of feral animals.

Coronel Persson is a military woman, and she had little patience for children. Angrily, she and her Cabo, Takayama, rode over to the temple and demanded to see the person in charge of the children.

Instead of arguing, the rogue Fin Ghiuletti invited the commander and her sergeant to dinner. Over plates of pande, cabbage and beans, and with children swarming around, Persson found herself recounting her regiment's difficult straits. Ghiuletti, being a former pirate, had some notion of tactics and his questions were intelligent and perceptive to the extreme. He asked when Guang's forces might be expected - how long did they have? He asked how many soldiers the "Beast from Boreal" had - it was nearly 10 times the number in Persson's underpowered regiment.

And slowly, as the night grew late and the moon crawled over the looming Cientoocho, Persson and Ghiuletti formulated a plan.

- byline Luciano de Samosata for the Globo Ardiente, July 7th, 1857.

La Noche del Zombi, Part II

- byline Luciano de Samosata for the Globo Ardiente, July 9th, 1857.