The Cold Fear Lifts
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Destarte a gente força e esforça Nuno, Que, com lhe ouvir as últimas razões, Removem o temor frio, importuno, Que gelados lhe tinha os corações. Nos animais cavalgam de Neptuno, Brandindo e volteando arremessões; Vão correndo e gritando a boca aberta: Viva o famoso Rei que nos liberta!
In this way Nuno presses and emboldens his men, who, once they have heard his final arguments, throw off the cold, nagging fear that had been holding their hearts frozen. They mount the animals of Neptune, brandishing and whirling their javelins; they go running and shouting with their mouths wide open: "Long live the famous King who sets us free!"
Canto 4. Nuno Álvares Pereira has just finished haranguing the wavering Portuguese captains on the eve of Aljubarrota (1385). This stanza shows the speech landing: the fear breaks, the men mount, and they ride out cheering for João I.
This is the stanza where a speech turns into an army. The whole action is one reversal: the fear that had their hearts frozen is removed, and the same men who were arguing about odds a moment ago are on horseback, throwing their spears in the air and yelling. Camões marks the change in the grammar as much as the sense — the stanza starts with two verbs of effort aimed at reluctant men, and ends with the men's own voice, shouting.
The line a first reader stumbles on is "the animals of Neptune." They are horses. Neptune made the horse in the old myth, so Camões can name a cavalry mount without saying "horse," and the epic machinery keeps running over a plain military fact. Watch the last word too: liberta. In 1385 João I of Aviz was a claimant, not an heir — a bastard son of Pedro I elected by the Cortes against a Castilian king with a better legal case. Calling him the one who frees us is the whole argument of the war, compressed into a shout.
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