Brasyl (51 page)

Quinn scrambled up the buttress of earth that joined the dam to the
high terra firme. He felt Falcon's bamboo cylinder pressed next to
his bosom. Quinn withdrew it, weighed it in his hand. He imagined it
in the shatter of the great flood, that flood in time subsiding, the
cylinder bobbing unregarded among the greater bulks of the forest
trees, Rio do Ouro to Iguapáni, Iguapáni to Catrimani,
to Rio Branco, to Rio Negro, to Amazonas. To the sea, on the currents
to the shores of Ireland or the coast of Portugal, wavelets rolling
it up a white strand. More to tell in this story. He slid the rube
inside his black robe.

Canoes had been beached on this earthen ramp, run up above the
floodline, light pirogues.

"Waitacá, would it be possible to make headway against
the flood?"

Waitacá studied the river, the flow changing with every second
as Father Gonçalves's dam was scoured away.

"It could be done through the varzea, with caution."

"I have need of speed."

"It could be done with both of those."

"Very good, then. Waitacá, I have need of your help at
the paddle. I still have an admonishment to visit upon Father Diego
Gonçalves."

Soldiers' boots, the bare feet of indios splashed into the water as
the canoes ran through the flooded stake-lines onto the shore.
Archers threw away their bows, took their knives in their hands to
grapple hand to hand with the attackers. The hillside was a landslide
of yelling, whooping indio bodies part running, part slipping, part
falling in their charge; Zemba at their head, flinging light javelins
as he charged, more airborne than earthbound as he leaped over bodies
and half-filled trenches. And among them, Dr. Robert Falcon, sword
held out ahead of him like a cuirassier's blade, screaming hate and
obscenities never to be thought of a Fellow of the French Academy.

The two lines met with a shock that quailed Hope of the Saints Hill
to its roots. Falcon found himself sword to bayonet with a charging
Portuguese infantryman. He sidestepped and cut the man's legs from
under him. Caixa finished the work with her spear. Falcon threw her
the bladed musket, took the man's sword for himself. As he tested its
weight and mettle, a Guabirú spearman lunged out of nowhere:
Caixa caught him full on her bayonet, twisted the musket. The man
gave a terrible wailing shriek and slid from her blade. She nodded in
approval.

Two-bladed, Falcon did a demon's work along the front line, cutting
halfway to the enemy's battle standard of a naked woman entwined in
green, but for every man who fell three sprang up and more canoes
packed in behind those run onto the shore, indio conscripts in
half-uniform—a jacket, breeches, sometimes only a tricorn
hat—running lightly from hull to hull to leap into the fight.
And still the water rose.

Zemba led the nation like some relentless forest legend; the cross of
Our Lady of All Worlds surged across the battlefront, a daring drive
here, a feint and full-blooded attack there. But Out Lady of the
Flood Forest commanded the waters, and the attackers were a red tide.
The City of God drove the City of Marvels back across the first and
second trenches. Beyond all thought, all reason, all language, Dr.
Robert Falcon worked wrath and slaughter with his twin blades, and it
was good. It was very good. He knew Luis Quinn's abiding sin in all
its ecstasy and horror. To be so present within the moment and one's
skin, the immediate and imperious liveliness of all the senses, the
precipice of every second wherein one might kill or die, the luxury
of such complete control over another. The Art of Defense, even the
foot-boxing tricks he had learned from the waterfront men, were pale
eunuchs of the ecstasy of battle.

Feathers waving upon the bloody hillside. Blood and buff and a
shining sword.

"Araujo!" Falcon called through the clatter of war. "Now
you shall have your contest."

The colonial officer ran to meet him as Falcon threw down his second,
looted sword. Abruptly Araujo pulled up, whipped a pistol out of his
sash of office. And Caixa was there between Falcon and the ball. A
discharge, a gust of smoke, and Caixa went tumbling headlong. French,
Portuguese, lingua geral, Iguapá—Falcon's shouts were
incoherent. Caixa rose unsteadily to her feet, then grinned and
opened her left hand to show her bloody stigmata where the ball had
passed through.

"Kill him, husband!"

Araujo flung the useless pistol at Falcon, who deftly sidestepped.
Falcon spread his hand in invitation, then dropped into the stance.
Araujo saluted and returned the attitude. A new round of mortar fire
howled down onto the hilltop, but nothing remained there but
shattered flesh and wood. Falcon feinted, then attacked. Araujo, for
all his European airs, was no practitioner of the Art of Defense. In
five moves Falcon had sent his blade whirling away across the red
earth and the Portuguese captain found a sword-point at his chest.

"Senhor, as a fidalgo to a fidalgo, I cast myself on your
mercy."

"Senhor, alas, I am no fidalgo," Falcon said, and ran him
cleanly through in one lunge.

A tumult from downslope; Falcon glanced up from cleaning his sword on
Araujo's coat to see the great cross of Nossa Senhora de Todos os
Mundos teetering madly in the center of a ring of Portuguese
indio-conscripts. Zemba leaped and whirled, his spear and hide shield
dashing and darting. Men fell, men reeled away bloody and ripped, but
every moment more piled in. Falcon ran, sword ready. He could feel
Caixa at his back, her wounded hand bound in Araujo's neckcloth, her
spear held underhand to stab up into an enemy's bowels. Terrible,
wondrous woman. The cross wavered, the cross went down, then Zemba
snatched it up again, clutched against the back of his tattered
shield.

Falcon threw himself into the circle of soldiers, cut and cut again.
Zemba gave a cry, arched backward, and went down on his knees in the
water, blood gouting from his severed hamstrings. His face wore a
look of immeasurable sadness and wonder.

"Get them out of here, lead them, we are done for here," he
gasped, and flung the cross on its pole like a javelin. Ribbon and
streamers fluttered in the train of the Lady of All Worlds; then
Caixa's bloody hand reached up and caught it.

Zemba smiled, eyes wet with tears. An auxiliary in a tanga and
infantryman's jacket stabbed with his spear. The blade point burst
from Zemba's throat and he fell forward into the flood, still
smiling.

A pillar of smoke and fire stood over Cidade Maravilhosa, a sign for
leagues up and down the Rio do Ouro. Again the great guns of the
Nossa Senhora da Varzea fired. Quinn and Waitacá paddled
steadily, stealthily, by root and branch. Quinn had glassed the
basilica from the cover of a felled tree half a league downstream;
Gonçalvesthought the mortar crews-Portuguese gunners with
Guabirú loaders-sufficient garrison. The east end of the
basilica was undefended, and the flying buttresses and baroqueries
afforded ample concealment. Waitacá and Quinn handed along the
basilica's waterline to the cable eye they had agreed wordlessly from
telescope-distance as the best entrance. Waitacá seized the
mooring cable, slung his legs up, and climbed it like a golden sloth.
Quinn's sword jammed momentarily on the narrow eyelet; a rattle and
he was inside, in the reeking, oozy gloom of the stern bowser.

"Free the slaves before anything," Quinn said. "You
will be able to easily overpower the mortar batteries."

Waitacá dipped his head and drew his steel knife. He knew the
rest by heart. Cut the anchor lines, then take the galley slaves to
attack the rear of Gonçalves's army.

I have given you the task most difficult
, Quinn thought.
Mine
is the task most necessary
. Boys' voices from the lavabo;
chalice and paten were being cleansed for the celebratory Mass. Black
on black, Quinn spirited past.

Quinn was prepared for the spiritual assault of Nossa Senhora da
Varzea, yet his attuned, attenuated senses reeled as if from a
physical blow. He walked down the center of the nave, heaven on his
left hand, damnation on his right, judgment all around. Christ spread
his arms wide across the titanic choir screen. His thorn-pierced
heart stood open. Quinn freed his sword. Beyond the choir stalls a
shaft of light fell on the altar, the crucified Amazonian Christ's
head crowned with strange sufferings. Before the stellar glow of the
Lady of the Flood Forest a figure in simple black knelt. The thunder
of mortars beat the basilica like a drum. The Lady's dress of lights
quivered; debris shook loose from the ceiling and fell in a snow of
gold and Marian blue. Quinn strode up the choir, sword held low by
his side.

"Would you murder me in my own cathedral, like St. Thomas à
Becket?"

"I am the admonitory of Father de Magalhães, and I
command you in the name of Christ to submit to my authority."

"I recall I refused you, as I refuse you again now."

"Silence. Enough of this. You will return with me to our Order
in Salvador."

"The Order in Salvador. Yes. Some of us, however, are called to
a higher service."

Gonçalves rose to his feet and turned to his admonisher. The
Lady of the Flood Forest seemed to embrace him in her cope of
verdure. "Still you persist in this, you ridiculous little man."

"Then I must compel you," Quinn said, and lifted his sword
to let its blade catch the many lights of the reredos.

"You will not find me unprepared." Father Diego swept back
his surplice to show the basket-hilted Spanish sword buckled at his
side.

"In God's house," Quinn said, backing away from the
treacheries of altar and choir stalls to the open nave.

"Come now, everywhere is God's house. If it is meet and right in
that pigsty you call a city, that Capitan de Araujo is reducing to
dust, then it is equally so here." Gonçalvescocked his
headáthat strange, infuriating bird-motion—at a sudden
clamor of voices, shots, and steel from outside. His eyes widened
with rage.

"Your former slaves, spiking your artillery," Quinn said.
"Come now, no more delay. Let us try it here, your master
against mine, Leon against Toledo."

He ran into the open nave. With a cry like a hunting bird,
Gonçalvescast off his confining surplice and drew his sword.
He flew at Quinn, blade dancing in a flickering flurry of cuts that
caught the Mair off guard and drove him back across the floor,
halfway to the narthex. Grunting with exertion Quinn formed a defense
and beat Gonçalvesback almost to the choir screen. The two men
parted, saluted, circled each other, blinded with sweat in the
stifling heat of the basilica.

And to it again. A crashing rally across the front of the roodscreen,
Quinn driving, scoring a tear on Gonçalves's side,
Gonçalvesrecovering and pressing Quinn back, trading the nick
for a cut along Quinn's hairline—an unseen, unstoppable cut he
had just managed to roll beneath, that would surely have taken the
top of his skull. Quinn felt the floor move under him, saw the
uncertainty reflected in Father Diego's thin, boyish face.

"The mooring lines are cut," he panted. "We are
adrift." They both felt the basilica turn in the stream, captive
of the ebbing waters. With a cry in Irish Quinn launched himself at
Gonçalves; a
jetée
with mass and brute power
behind it. Gonçalves slapped his spearing sword away; Quinn
went sprawling and the Spaniard was on him, Quinn saving himself only
by an instinctual block that struck sparks from both blades. He
regained his feet but was at once driven hard against the base of the
pulpit. Again Quinn rallied, and the two Jesuits dueled back and
forth along the line of the side chapels. But it was clear to Quinn,
with a chill clench in his testicles, that he had exerted himself too
far on the destruction of the dam and the pursuit of Nossa Senhora da
Varzea. His advantage in size and strength was used up, and in the
pure way of the sword Diego Gonçalves was master.

The counterattack was immediate. Quinn retreated back through the
open heart of Christ into the choir; his intention that the narrow
files of box pews would constrain Gonçalves's balletic style.
They battled up and down the choir stalls scattering psalteries and
missals until Quinn was backed to the very altar. He could not get
away. He could not escape. Fury swelled inside him; that he would die
in this stupid vain place, this pagan altar, at the hands of this
slight, effeminate Spaniard, that all he had wrought would be strewn
to the winds and the waters in this desolate, wordless forest. He
summoned the rage, his old demon, his old ally. It blazed hot and
delicious inside him. And with a thought he pushed it down.
Gonçalvesknew of his old thorn; he would have tactics prepared
for the rush of brute anger and unstoppable passion. Quinn opened his
inner sight to the worlds. A blink, a flicker, but in that vision he
saw all that Gonçalveswould do. He saw the expression of anger
and bafflement on Father Diego's face as he drove him back from the
altar, his sword-point always ahead of the Spaniard's, back down the
choir and through the gaping heart of Christ into the nave. Beneath
the Christ of the Varzea, his outstretched hands blossoming into the
twin apocalypses of the just and the lost, Quinn caught Gonçalves'
sword and sent it across the floor.

"Kneel and submit," Quinn panted, sword-point at Gonçalves
's eye. "Kneel and submit to the authority of the Society of
Jesus."

Gonçalveswent to his knees. Never once removing his eyes from
Quinn, he reached into the open neck of his cassock; a rosary, to
kiss and yield. Quinn saw a flash of light, and half his sword fell
to the ground. Gonçalvesheld up the blade.

"Do you imagine they would have called us to defend the Kingdom
without ensuring we are properly armed?" He came up in a
sweeping blow that sheared Quinn's sword down to a useless stump and
cut cleanly in two a stand of a tray of votives before the statue of
Nossa Senhora Aparaçida. The lamps fell and rolled, spilling
burning oil behind them. Tongues of fire licked toward the choir
screen. Gonçalvesleaned into a knife-fighter's crouch. Quinn
hastily ripped the sleeve from his robe and opened it into a cape,
which he held like a bullfighter's cloak.