Brasyl (41 page)

"You must give them time to rest and hunt and regather their
strength."

"We cannot, we must go on, I have seen."

In the end the people walked from insane desperation. There was no
other choice than to swing up the hammock-pack, slip the strap over
the blistered brow, and push the children before. Caixa freely
permitted Falcon to share her load. The chests of war flour were
emptied and cast aside. Falcon cut up instrument cases, bookbindings,
shoes and laces, and satchels to boil soft enough to chew out a
little sustenance. The people starved, but the frogs were fed; the
sacred curupairás in their pierced ceramic jars. Old men sat
down with a sudden sigh at the side of the track, unable to move or
be moved, left behind, the green closing around them and the look on
their faces relief, only relief. Falcon pushed one foot in front of
the other, scourging himmself in intellectual guilt: his tools, his
instruments, the brass and the ebony and the glass; the iron and the
lead shot, the books half gone to mold without their covers, the
clothes and keepsakes—he must set them down and forget them.
Each time he returned the same thunderous denial. No he would not,
never, for when all else was reduced to the animal, to the
mechanical, they were the dumb witnesses to this indifferent
vegetable empire that this was more than a march of ants.

Then Quinn—a haggard, bearded, Deuteronomical patriarch leaning
on his stick—declared, This is the place.

Falcon had barely been able to frame the question.

"What have you seen?"

"Enough, my friend." Then he had turned to his people as
they filed into the small, sunlit shard where a tree had fallen,
revealing the sky. "This is the Marvelous City. We shall build a
church and raise crops and live in peace and plenty. No one who comes
to this place shall be turned away. Now, let's burn."

That night, in the smoke and the embers, Caixa came to Dr. Robert
Falcon and never again left.

The Mass was ended. Women, men, children with their heads bound in
the wood and leather casings that forced their still-soft skulls
splashed barefoot from the church through the silver twilight rain,
through the narrow lanes between the malocas shin-deep in liquid mud,
touching their foreheads in salutation to the Aîuba as he
passed. Falcon ducked under the dripping thatch. The iâos, the
brides of the saints, still danced in the foot-polished clay ring,
each bearing the emblem of his or her saint: the three-bladed sword;
the hunting bow; the peccary's tusks; masks of the tinamu, the
catfish, the frog. The musicians on their raised dais had worked
themselves into trance; drums, clay ocarinas. They would play for the
rest of the night, the iâos swirling before them, until they
fell over their drums and the blood started from their palms. The
great pillared hall of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos reeked of
incense and sweat and forest drugs. Falcon passed through the dancers
like a specter, pausing to cross himself and kiss his knuckle before
the crucified Christ, at his feet a woman, face upturned in
marvelment, orbs in each hand and upon her brow, her own feet resting
upon a golden frog: Our Lady of All Worlds. Out again into the rain
and across the fenced compound to the vestibule. Pagés waited
on the verandah, golden faces naked in their suspicion of Falcon,
jealous of his privileges.

"I did not see you at the Mass, brother." Quinn removed his
stole, kissed it, hung it on the peg.

"You know my opinion. I see little of Christ there." At the
climax of the Mass, after hours of drum and dance, Quinn was carried
around the throng of worshipers, passed overhead hand-to-hand,
spewing prophecies. Not even in the grimmest privations of the Long
March had Falcon seen him so drained.

"It is like there are no lids to my eyes. I see everything,
everywhere. It consumes me, Falcon. The apostles were sterner men
than I; the gifts of the Paraclete burn those who bear them."

"It takes more every time, does it not? Give it up. It will
destroy you, if not in body, certainly in the seat of reason,"
Falcon said in French.

"I cannot," Quinn whispered. "I must not. I must take
more, and greater, if I am to be able to turn passive observation
into action and join the others who walk between the worlds."

"You talk arrant nonsense; you are deranged already. Already the
quilombo suffers from want of a guiding hand on the tiller."

"I am not the only traveler—how could I be, when on
countless worlds similar to this one, Father Luis Quinn, SJ, has
taken the curupairá and held in his hands the warp and weft of
reality? Throughout history there have been—and will be—ones
who travel between worlds and times."

"Now this is nonsense, Luis. Travel across the ages as if
stepping from one room into the next? I give you an immediate
paradox: the simple effect of treading on a forest butterfly in the
past might set in motion a chain of events that make it impossible
for Luis Quinn, Society of Jesus, to even exist, let along gavotte
merrily through time."

Quinn pressed his hands together before his face as if in prayer.

"Of course. And where would I walk, but to the singular moment
in my life that shaped it beyond all other? I have stepped through
and in an instant returned to that lodge in Porto. I have looked on
my own face, and seen the look on that face to find itself confronted
with a spectral visitor beyond horror: his own gaunt, aged form
dressed in priestly black; the
'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin'
that having written, moves on. It takes little more to stay the hand,
to set the death-dealing mug down on the table, to reel away from
friends and comfort and warmth into the street. I have seen myself go
on my knees and beg my forgiveness, yet each time, when I flip back
to that page that is my own time, this time, I find nothing changed.
There is a law here; we may step back through time, but never to the
history of our own world. We always walk backward to another world,
that world where I appear to myself like a visitation and then vanish
never to return, for to do so would violate that great Censor who
requires that we may write the stories of others but never our own."

"Now you offend me," Falcon flared. "Now this is
indeed madness. If I had a piece I would pistol you so that your
insanity should not infect others. Airily you claim to breeze between
worlds and histories, by whim, by thought, by will-o'-the-wisp or
fiery chariot, and with a wave of your hand my world is abolished;
rationality, scientific inquiry, the knowability and preedictability
of the physical world merely a tissue of illusion over a void of . .
. magic. Divine fiat, the power of word and thought over mundane
reality."

"But, Falcon, Falcon, what if that is what the world is made
from? Word and thought?"

Falcon slapped the center pole of the hut. "This is real, Quinn.
This is reality." Quinn smiled weakly. "If the simulacrum
were detailed enough, how would we ever know?"

"Oh, for the love of God!" Falcon leaped to his feet.
Golden faces looked in at the door, withdrew at Falcon's hostile
glare. "The water is up again. That is what I came to tell you.
I want to take a canoe and a party of my Manaos away from the
cidade."

"Talk to Zemba. He is protector of the cidade."

"I desire to talk to you. I desire you to ask me why I want a
canoe and a party, why I want to investigate the rising water. You
have become remote, distant, aloof, Quinn. You have set colonels and
counselors between yourself and me, Luis; between yourself and your
people."

The bark curtain over the door twitched. Zemba entered, his skin
glossy wet from the rain.

"Is all well here?"

"Nothing has occurred here," Falcon said. "I was
merely telling Father Quinn that I am taking a reconnaissance party
onto the river to investigate the rising water."

"All such applications must be made to me as chief of security."

Falcon bristled.

"I am not your slave. Good evening, sir."

Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon: Expedition Log 8th August 1733

Often I feel that the only important feature of my journal is the
date in the heading. Too easily the days slip into an eternal
present; without past, facing a future indistinguishable from now,
disconnected from human history. But surely the first duty of a
chronicler is to establish his own history within the greater flow of
time. So I write
8th August 1733
and rejoin common humanity
.

How good it is to be abroad on the river, in a ten-man canoe with
Juripari before me, Caixa at my back, and all the vegetable riches of
the Rio do Ouro arrayed before me. Cidade Maravilhosa had become
oppressive and hostile; not in the physical sense—that would
not be tolerated, not even from Zemba and his military claque—but
to my qualities, my profession, my beliefs. The City of Marvels is a
City of Blind Faith. I had believed in the aîuri, that wise
body of indio morbichas and ebomis from the escaped black community,
to steer the community sanely and sagely, but it has been filled with
pages and young warriors under Zemba's sway. A council where older
and more careful heads—I count myself among them—are
shouted down by the zeal of young males is not beneficial to the
community.

This is the fifth day of the expedition, and we are now running
downstream. At good speed and in good heart we set off from the
cidade and made twenty leagues a day upriver, taking us into the high
Rio do Ouro beyond the exploration of any Paulista bandeira. Here are
indio nations that have never seen a white face before, yet the canoe
parties we encountered—Juripari found a simplified Waika could
effect basic communiication—knew of the Marvelous City and the
great caraiba who walked between worlds.

I was initially nonplussed to find the levels on the Alta Rio do
Ouro to be lower that at Cidade Maravilhosa, the precise reverse of
what one would expect for a flood descending from the headwaters. But
the scientist, in the face of conflicting facts and theory, always
modifies theory to reality. A set of measurements taken below the
cidade will confirm if the river is filling from the lower courses. I
have one set of measurements now, from a point some three leagues
beneath the quilombo as drawn on my rudimentary chart of the Rio do
Ouro fluvial system—some fifteen as the river wends—and
they seem to support my general hypothesis. A second set taken at
tonight's camp will put the seal on it. . . .

"Aîuba!"

Over floods and centuries the Rio do Ouro, rounding a prominent
ridge, had eroded a wide bow, almost a bay. Falcon's canoe cut close
to the bluff, doubled the point, and found itself bow to bow with a
fleet. Falcon saw paddles, bright brass, the glint of sun from steel,
plumed hats.

"Scarlet and buff!" he cried. "Portuguese soldiers!"

The Manaos swiftly, sweetly reversed their seating in the canoe, dug
at the water with their paddles. Falcon's smaller, lighter craft
could outpace the heavily laden war canoes, but there was headway to
be lost; and as he came about and seized his own paddle to lend his
speed to the craft, the pursuers bent to their blades. The chase was
on. A dull pop, little louder than a musket, and a plume of water
flew up some paddle-lengths to the left of the canoe. Another, and
Falcon saw the ball pass with fluttering howl and bounce three times
from the water before vanishing.

"Paddle for your lives!" Falcon shouted. He slipped the
glass out of his pocket. Six swivel guns bow-mounted in heavy,
thirty-man war canoes. As he glassed the soldiery—a dozen
colonial infantry in each of the lead boats, dress coats patched and
mold-stained after weeks on the river-the swivel gun spoke again. The
ball bounced from the river in a splash of spray that soaked Falcon
and cleared the canoe between ]uripari and a Manao deserter called
Ucalayf. A narrow target and the flat trajectory over which the
Portuguese were firing had served thus far, but soon the gunners
would load shot rather than ball and make murder of them.

"Caixa! The muskets."

She was already rodding the first of the two pieces that Falcon had
kept sacrosanct from Zemba's requisitioners.
A woman of skills is
a pearl beyond price
. Falcon drew on the red-and-gold division
flag in the stern of the center war canoe. Before it sat an officer
in dress uniform, his tricorn hat edged with feathers, grimly
gripping the sides of the canoe. Falcon recognized Capitan de Araujo
of the Barro do São José do Rio Negro. A simple shot,
but Falcon lets his sight slide forward to the buff-coated gunner
bent over his piece in the bow.

"Steady, hold her steady!" It was a delicate calculus; the
cease-paddling made the shot surer but necessarily brought them into
the range to the musskets of the colonial infantry. At his earliest
clear shot Falcon discharged in a crack and cloud of smoke. Zemba's
cartridges answered truly. The gunner jerked and went down into the
floor of the war canoe, shot clean through the crown of the head. A
roaring jeer went up from the pursuers; the body was rolled without
let or ceremony into the river. Full five swivel guns replied, their
shots falling all around the canoe, some so close water slopped into
the dugout. The paddlers bent to their task; dark river water peeled
away from the bow. Caixa handed Falcon the second musket and reloaded
the discharged piece. The musketeers in the indio canoes were risking
longer shots now, at extreme range and wildly inaccurate but
sufficient to keep Falcon off his aim. And it was as he had feared:
rounds of canister shot were being handed down the length of the
gunboats.

"Steady, I have him I have him .... "

"Aîuba, we cannot yield any more headway," Juripari
said. "Steady, steady ... "