Brasyl (11 page)

"She's called Fia Kishida."

And it is as if Captain Superb has been struck by a White Event and
been turned into a real superhero, for he flies off the bed. Miracle
Boy sees him clearly suspended in midair. Captain Superb leans over
Miracle Boy, spandex puffing and sucking around his mouth. He fumbles
for the zips, pulls it down, shakes his graying, wavy hair out.

"What did you say? Fia Kishida? Fia Kishida?"

"So you're the swordsman," the bishop of Grão Pará
said as Luis Quinn touched his lips to the proffered ring. "Younger
than I'd expected. And bigger. Most of the swordsmen I've met were
small things, scrawny chickens of things. Effete. But then many big
men are light on their feet, I've found."

"The sword belongs to another life, Your Grace." Luis Quinn
regained his feet and stood, hands folded in submission. Bishop Vasco
da Mascarennhas's chamber was dark, furnished in heavily carved woods
from the Tocantins, deep reds and blacks. The ornate putti and
seraphs had African mouths and noses, Indio eyes and cheekbones. The
heat was oppression, the light beyond the drawn shutters painful.

"Yours is a military order, is it not? Of course I cannot compel
you, but it would be no bad thing for your society to be seen to be .
. . muscular. Brazil respects power and little else. There are
fellows here aplenty—big idle lumps, up from the captaincies to
make their fortunes—who fancy themmselves a rip with the blade.
Yes, the very thing: I shall arrange a sport."

"Your Grace, I have foresworn-"

"Of course you have, of course. Wooden swords, a good poke in
the arse, that sort of thing. It would be good to show those arrogant
turkey cocks a thing or two. Teach them a little respect for Church
authority and keep them away from the indio girls. We get little
enough novelty here, as you might imagine." The bishop rose from
his ornate chair. Wood scraped heavily over stone. "Are you a
man for the sport, Father? I tell you, there is a great game they
have here, the indios brought it, played with a ball of blown latex,
though the blacks have the best skill at it. It's all in the feet;
you're allowed to use the head as well, but not the hands, never the
hands. You steer it to the enemy's goal purely by foot. A splendid
sight. You'll come with me to the cloister garden; the heat is
intolerable indoors this time of the day."

Bishop Vasco was a big man and not at all light on his feet. He
sweated luxuriously as he ambled around the shaded garden. Decorative
panels of handpainted blue-on-white Portuguese tiles depicted
allegories of the theological virtues. A fountain trickled in the
center of the worn limestone Bags, a sound as fragile and deep as
years. Birds peered and whooped from the eaves.

"I wish they had sent you to me, Quinn. Sometimes I wish Belem
were a dog, that I might shake it by the throat. Carnality and lust,
I tell you, carrnality and lust. Lust for gold; not merely the Vila
Rica gold, but the red gold and the black gold, especially in this
time of plague and madness. You know what I speak of. Oh, for a
dozen—half a dozen—stout mission fathers: even just one
examiner from the Holy Office! That would set them about their ears.
I have heard about your railing at the porters of the Cidade Baixa.
That is exactly the type of thing we need here, Quinn, exactly. A
tedious enough passage, I take it?"

"Contrary winds and currents, Your Grace, but I am no sailor. I
spent the time in prayer and preparation."

"Yes yes, my captains say it is faster and easier to sail to the
Island of Madeira and then Belém than the uncertain seas off
Pernambuco. Pray, what is it the Society requires so urgently it must
have an admonitory sent from Coimbra? I am aware of the Frenchman—how
could one not be, fluttering around the promenade like a butterfly
with his fripperies and gewgaws."

"Your Grace, it is a matter of some delicacy within our
Society."

Bishop Vasco stopped in his tracks, face red with more than afternoon
heat. He rapped his stick on the stones. Birds flew up in a clatter
from the curved eave-tiles. Faces appeared in dark doorways.

"Wretched Jesuitical ... It's that Gonçalves, isn't it?
Don't answer; I wouldn't make a liar of you. Keep your Jesuitical
secrets. I have my own informations." He ducked his head; sweat
flew from his long, curled wig. "Forgive me, Father Quinn. The
heat makes me intemperate, aye, and this country. Understand this one
thing: Brazil is not as other places. Even in this city the Society
of Jesus, the Franciscans, and the Carmelites are in the scantest of
communions with each other over the status; high on the Amazon, it is
naked rivalry. The Holy Church is little more than an engine fed with
the souls of the red man—and his flesh also. What's this,
what's this?" A secretary bowed into the bishop's path and
knelt, offering up a leather tray of documents. "Hah. My
attention is required. Well, Father Quinn, I shall send with
instructions for that diversion I mentioned. I may even risk a little
wager myself. I very much look forward to seeing you in action."

The bishop mimed a sword-lunge with his stick as Luis Quinn bowed,
then, before objection could be mouthed, hobbled heavily after his
whiterobed secretary into the sweating shadows of the chapter.

The Ver-o-Peso roared with laughter as the red-faced youth in the
torn shirt went reeling across the cobbles from the boot-shove to his
arse. Red laughter, black laughter from the roped-off wagons and
drays on the city side of the wide dock where ships and rafts from
the high Amazon and Tocantins moored four deep. White laughter from
the chairs and temporary stands set up on barrel and planking. From
the street and the steps and all around Luis Quinn, the laughter of
males. From the wooden balconies on the macaw-colored façades
of the feitores' houses and inns, immodestly open to heat and regard,
the laughter of women. Luis Quinn stood victorious before the stone
slave block. The young pretender had been dragged away by his friends
to the jeers and fruit of slaves; a fat, arrogant son of a jumped-up
cane-grower with pretensions to gentry, humiliated in two plays,
spanked around the quadrangle like a carnival fool by the flat of
Luis Quinn's mock sword, jipping and whining before the convulsed
audience. Then, the final boot: Out of my sight. Luis Quinn took in
the faces, the wide, delighted faces. Many skins, many colors, but
the open mourhs were all the same: red, hungry. Looking up he saw
eyes above fluttering fans and beaded veils. Luis Quinn strode around
the ring, arms held high, receiving the praise of the people of Belém
do Pará.

"Some men wear their sins on their faces," said Bishop
Vasco, lolling in his chair, sweating freely despite the fringed
canopy shading him from the molten sun and the work of two boy-slaves
with feather fans.

"The women?" said the royal judge Rafael Pires de Campos. A
noble-brother of the Misericordia banished to a pestilential
backwater, he was keen on any sport that might break the monotony of
striving feitores. It was widely known in Grão Pará
that Pires de Campos financed the bishop's foray into private
mercantilism, and that the Episcopal fleet had suffered repeated and
expensive drubbings from Dutch pirates whirling down from Curaçao.

"No, the pride, man, the pride. Yes, I am quite sure that our
admonitory there was quite the blade before he took his first
Exercises. And that's another fifty escudos. How did you ever imagine
that fat bumpkin could beat the Jesuit? Cash or offset?"

"Stroke it from the tally. Where
is he from, the Jesuit? His accent is exceedingly rare."

"Ireland."

"Where is that? I don't know of any country with that name."

Bishop Vasco explained the geography and briefly the country's
represssive heretical laws. Pires de Campos pursed his lips, shook
his head.

"I am little wiser, Your Grace. But I do think it is a good
thing your Jesuit there is leaving Belém soon. Cloth or no
cloth, there are a few would cheerfully have him pistoled in his
bed."

Quinn washed his face and sweat-caked hair in glinting handfuls of
water from a street seller's cask. The sport was over; the people
would have to wait for the next auction from the block. The crowd
stirred, dusted itself, reached to close its shutters, its brief
corporate life dispersed when a movement at the port end of the
market sent a ripple of turning heads around the rope ring. Applause
swelled to full-throated cheering as a slight, slender man entered
the ring. His dress was formal to the edge of foppishness, European,
overrefined for Brazil. Eccentrically, he wore green-tinted circular
eyeglasses, a source of comment and hilarity among the spectators.
The man bowed elaborately.

"Father Luis Quinn?"

Quinn dipped his head. Water mingled with sweat dripping from his
face; he stood in the arena, and under the terrible noon sun he
realized how it had drawn the old hot joy high in him, like a tide,
heat calling to blood heat. Cease now. But he could never walk away
from a challenge from God or from a man.

"Your service, Father. I am Dr. Robert Francois St. Honore
Falcon, a geographer and geometer of the French Academy of Sciences
in Paris and guest of this colony. I understand you have some
facility with a sword. I myself trained with Master of Defense
Teillagory himself in Paris and very much relish the opportunity to
try my skill against yours."

"Very well, monsieur," Luis Quinn said in French. "It
is especially pleasing to fight someone who can pronounce my name
correctly. I trust you have no issue with being beaten by a priest."

The crowd hooted its appreciation.

"Do not think your collar will protect you," Falcon said,
passing cane, hat, wig, and heavy coat to his slave, retaining his
curious, soul-screening glasses. "I come from a family of
notorious freethinkers."

Luis Quinn raised his wooden stave in salute. Falcon picked up the
disscarded baton and returned the courtesy. Each man folded his free
hand into the small of his back and began to circle. The Ver-o-Peso
fell silent as if struck by an angel.

"Another fifty on the Jesuit," Bishop Vasco said.

"Really? I think this Frenchman may yet surprise him."
Pires de Campos delicately dabbed his perspiring face with a scented
handkerchief. "See?" The encircling faces let out a great
gasp and cheer as Quinn made a mistimed lunge that Falcon deftly
sidestepped; Falcon rapped the priest across the back as he stumbled
past. Quinn shook his head, smiled to himself, recovered. The two men
resumed their circles in the afternoon heat.

"Your man has been seeing off rapscallions all morning. The
Frenchman IS fresh as a nosegay," Pires de Campos commented,
then found his fist clenched around his kerchief, throat tight to
yell as Falcon made a series of dazzling feints that drove Luis Quinn
across the ring before launching a flying fleche that had even
breathless Vasco out of his chair. Tension turned to wonder to a
thunder of amazement as Quinn threw himself back, under and away from
the spearing staff. Both men fell heavily to the cobbles and rolled,
Luis Quinn first to his feet. The tip of Quinn's stick struck a point
from the back of Falcon's stockinged calf.

"That would not count in Paris," Falcon said, rolling into
his stance and dancing away from Quinn.

"As you can see, we are not in Paris," said Quinn, and,
laughing joyously, innsanely, launched a flurry of curs that drove
Falcon back to the edge of the water.

"Even for a Jesuit, that is subtle," cried Falcon, catching
Quinn's blade and turning it away. As space opened between the two
combatants, the little Frenchman leaped and kicked the priest in the
chest. Quinn reeled back toward the center of the ring. The
Ver-o-Peso was a circle of roaring voices.

"Teillagory never taught that," Quinn answered. The two men
faced each other once more in the garde. Action upon action, lunge
and parry, circle and feint. The barbs and witticisms of the
swordsmen devolved into grunts and gasps. Bishop Vasco's knuckles
were white as he gripped the golden knurled head of his cane. The
cheers of the spectators softened into mute absorption. A true battle
was being fought here. Luis Quinn circled in front of the dapper,
dancing Frenchman. The rage flickered like far summer lightning,
haunting clouds. Luis Quinn pushed it down, pushed it away. He
flicked sweat from the matted tips of his hair. Tired, so bull-tired,
and every second the sun drew the strength from him; but he could not
let this little man beat him before these slaves and petty masters.
Again the old rage called, the old friend, the strength from beyond
comprehension, from beyond right and wrong. I will come. I have never
failed you. All the sun of the square was gathered up and burning in
his tight, nauseous belly. Luis Quinn saw himself bearing down on
this prancing fencer, with one stroke snapping his ridicuulous srick,
driving him down, punching the tip of his wooden sword through his
rib cage and out rhrough his back, organs impaled and beating.

Luis Quinn snapped upright, eyes wide, nostrils flared. He unfolded
his left hand from the garde position and let it fall. He lifted his
sword to his face, touched his nose in salute, and threw the stick to
the cobbles. Falcon hesitated.
Behind that green glass, what do
your eyes read?
Luis Quinn thought. Falcon nodded, harrumphed
through his nose, then swept his own sword into the salute and threw
it down beside Quinn's.

Whistles and jeers swelled into a thunder of disapproval. Fruit began
to fall and burst fragrantly on the sun-heated cobbles. In the edge
of his eye Luis Quinn saw Bishop Vasco's slaves hasten him away on
his litter. Some of his household remained, arguing strenuously with
the retainers of a fidalgo in pale blue.
You set me a test and I
beat it, Luis Quinn thought. Brazil respects only power, but power is
nothing without control.