Brasyl (52 page)

"A cunning idea," Gonçalvessaid, with a lunging cut
that left an arc of smoking blue in the air. "But quite
ineffectual."

But Quinn had seen the fire leap up the open fretwork of the choir
screen, a Christ wreathed in flame. He circled away from the blade,
all the while keeping Gonçalves’s back to the growing
blaze.

"When did the Enemy seduce you?"

"You mistake. I am not the enemy. I am the Order. They have
engines and energies beyond your imagining; did you think I built
that dam unaided?"

Feint, slash, the tip of the blade cut a slit in the fabric. Quinn
permitted himself a flicker of multiversal vision. In too many he saw
himself kneel, gutted, on the floor, his entrails around his knees.
Out there in the cornucopia of universes was the answer to Father
Diego Gonçalves. The Spaniard lunged, the blade from beyond
the world shrieking down to cut Quinn shoulder to waist. Quinn leaped
back and saw the moment, the single true searing instant. He flung
the cloth over Gonçalves’shead, blinding him, seized the
loose end and swung him around. Gonçalves reeled backward into
the burning altar screen. The fragile screen swayed. Gonçalves
ripped the cloth from his face, fled from the fire. Too slow, too
late; the huge burning Christ, haloed in flames, heart ablaze, fire
streaming from his outstretched fingers to turn both heaven and hell
into purgatory, crashed down and drove Diego Gonçalves to the
floor.

Quinn shielded his face and edged toward the inferno of blazing wood.
Nothing could survive that pyre. Flames were leaping up the piers
from angel to angel, licking across the clerestory screens, caressing
the ceiling bosses. The choir stalls and screens were already ablaze;
at the end of his strength, numb with awe, Luis Quinn watched the
flames coil up and engulf Our Lady of the Varzea. The basilica was
disintegrating, blazing timbers and embers raining from the ceiling,
the smoke descending. Choking, Quinn rushed from the wooden hell. In
a rending crash the roof fell and flames leaped up among the guardian
angels, igniting the sails. Quinn marveled at the destruction. With
every moment the current was taking the church farrther from safety,
closer to the falls at the destroyed dam. Quinn dived lightly into
the water. Canoes pushed out from beneath the flood-canopy; a golden
face glinted among the Guabirú. Quinn stroked toward Waitacá;
then the fire reached the powder magazine. An apocalyptic explosion
sent every bird flapping and screaming from the flood forest. Quinn
saw the angels of Nossa Sennhora da Varzea ascend, flung high into
the air by the blast, and fall, tumbling end for end. Fragments of
burning wood plunged hissing into the water around Quinn; as hands
helped him into the canoe, he saw the blazing hulk of Nossa Senhora
da Varzea spin slowly away on the current.

It was a rout now. The cross of Our Lady of All Worlds stood in the
trench beneath the shattered hilltop, a sign and hope for the people.
Portuguese snipers let fly with musket-fire; the Guabirú
dispatched the wounded. Falcon leaned on his sword, the weight of the
worlds suddenly upon him, a desire to lie down among the dead and be
numbered with them. The floodwaters were thick with already-swelling
bodies. He bowed his head and saw that the water was tunning away
from around his sodden, cracked shoes. The water drained away from
around his feet. The bodies were stirring, moving, drawn together
into the recesses of the varzea. And the angels, the terrible
visitants of wrath upon the mast tops of Nossa Senhora da Varzea,
were moving. Very slowly, but with gathering impetus, moving
downstream.

Falcon stood on firm land now.

I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood
, the Mair had said.

"But not here!" Falcon shouted. "Not this world!"

Now the army of Nossa Senhora da Varzea became aware of the water
ebbing around their canoes and turned to stare as their patron angels
vanished behind the treetops. Smoke rose, blacker, denser by the
second. A great flash of light lit up the southern sky, momentarily
outshining the sun. A plume of smoke in the shape of a mushroom
climbed skyward; a few seconds later the explosion shook Hope of the
Saints Hill. A grin formed on Falcon's face, broke into wonderful,
insane laughter.

"At them?" he roared, circling his sword over his head.
"One last charge for the honor of the Mair! At them!"

The canoe lightly rode the white water. A gray morning of low cloud
after rain, scarves of mist clung to the trees. On such a dripping
day they shouldered close to the river, dark and rich with rot and
spurt. The canoe skipped among great boulders and the trunks of
forest trees, smashed and splintered, wedged across rocks, half
buried in the grit. The paddlers steered it down a channel that
poured gray and white between two tumbled rocks each the size of a
church. The golden cross set up in the prow wavered but did not fall.
It shone like a beacon, as if by its own light.

The man on the shore raised his arm again, but the smoke from his
fire was unmistakable now.
Heaven knows how he found anything
combustible on such a day
, Robert Falcon thought. But his
intent, he suspected, was always smoke, not heat.

The steersman ran the little pirogue in. Falcon splashed over the
cobbles to shore. The strand was littered with leaves, twigs, whole
branches and boles, drowned and bloating animals, reeking fish. He
heard the grind of hull over stone. Caixa waded ashore and firmly
planted the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds in the gritty sand.

"Dr. Falcon."

Luis Quinn sat on a boulder, a smoldering cigar clenched in his fist.
A flaw of mist waved between the trees.

"Father Quinn."

The two men kissed briefly, formally. "Well, we live,"
Falcon said.

On a plaited strap around his shoulder Quinn wore the bamboo tube
that held the history of the Marvelous City.

"I am most glad, friend, that you ignored me and did not consign
this to the waters," Falcon said. "The history of the
Marvelous City may be finished, bur that of the City of God has yet
to be started."

"With your permission, that will be a new history from this,"
Quinn said. "This story has far to travel."

"Of course. You know they are already making legends of you. The
Mair can foretell the future. The Mair has a knife that can cut
through anything, even men's hearts and secrets to read their deepest
desires. The Mair can walk between worlds and from one end of the
arch of time to the other. The Mair will come again in the hour of
his people's sorest need and lead them away from this world to a
better one where the manioc grows in all seasons and the hunting is
always rich and bountiful, a world the bandeirantes and the pais can
never reach."

"I had expected tales, but not that last one."

The vanguard of the Cidade Maravilhosa's fleet appeared around the
widely incised river bend, bobbing on the white water.

"What do you expect when you destroy the enemy's stronghold and
then, the tide of battle turned and on the verge of victory, you
disappear from the field of battle?"

Falcon had shouted his voice red raw, standing on that hill, sword in
hand. Caixa waved the ragged cross of Out Lady of All Worlds, taking
up Falcon's rallying cry in her own tongue. The destruction of Nossa
Senhora da Varzea held the army of the City of God in thrall. Many
Guabirú were on their knees in the bloody mud, rosaries folded
in their hands. Some had already fled the field of battle. The
Portuguese regulars faltered, conscious of how grossly they were
outnumbered. And the water was running, away from the feet of the
soldiers, eddying around the bodies of the dead, draining from the
trenches in fast-running streams and little torrents, flowing out
from under the beached canoes.

"At them!" A lone cry, then the last of the quilombo's men,
red and black, came over the crest, arms beating, war-clubs, swords,
captured bayoonets waving, all roaring, all cheering. Caixa was swept
up, Our Lady of All Worlds flying over their heads; then Falcon was
caught up and carried away. The Portuguese formed defensive lines,
but as the counterattack crashed into them a second wave of warriors
broke from the varzea, brushed past the dazed Guabirú, and
piled into their rear. Tribe won out; the vacillating Guabirú,
seeing the charge of their liberated brothers, took up their weapons
and joined the attack. Falcon glimpsed a figure in Jesuit black at
the forest's edge. The Portuguese lines broke; the men fled for the
gunboats. The Iguapá gave chase, slashing and clubbing at the
soldiers as they tried to run their big canoes into deeper water. Now
the women and children were coming down the hill, the women executing
the wounded, the children picking the bodies clean. The flame of
battle was snuffed out. Falcon rested on his sword, weary to the
marrow, sickened by the slaughter under the dark eaves of the flood
forest. None of those men would ever see São José
Tarumás again. In that cold understanding was a colder one:
Falcon would never see Paris again, never tease Marie-Jeanne in the
Tuileries, never again climb the Fourviere with his brother
Jean-Baptiste. His world would now be green and mold, water and heat
and broken light, mists and vapors, and the flat, gray meanders of
endless rivers. Canoes and bows and creatures heard but seen only in
glimpses, a world without vistas, its horizon as distant as the next
tree, the next vine, the next bend in the river. A vegetable world,
vast and slow.

Luis Quinn prodded again at his smudge fire. "Have you thought
what you will do at the City of God?"

"Destroy it." He saw surprise flicker on Quinn's face.

Then the Jesuit said, "Yes, of course. It is too big, too
vulnerable. Break them up, send them off into the forest. How long do
you think you can hold off the bandeirantes?"

"A generation with luck. It is the diseases that will destroy
the red man before any slave-takers."

"All men are helpless before their legends, but do this for me
if you can: disabuse that story that I will come again and take them
to the New Jerusalem. "

The main body of the fleet was passing now, families and groups of
friends, nations and tribes, all riding the turbulent water through
the rags of mist; children in tiny frail skins of bark, peccaries and
pacas in bamboo cages loaded onto rafts, the sacred curupairá
frogs in their terracotta pots, sacks filled with what manioc could
be scavenged from the twice-ruined fields. The crazy yellow bill of a
toucan tied to a perch in the prow of a family canoe was a splendid
mote of color. It had taken many days to portage past the falls, the
canoes slid on vines down slick clay slides, the terrified livestock
lowered in cages or slings, the people winding down the paths,
treacherous with spray, hacked from the stub of the dam, still an
impressive barrage across the Rio do Ouro.

A raft of watercraft had now built up behind the flume, the gray
river black with them as one by one they entered the white water and
made the run between the two boulders. Some recognized the Mair on
his rock and raised their paddles in salutation as they passed.
Behind them the prison-rafts negotiated the run, the Guabirú
guarded by the swivel-guns of the captured Portuguese war canoes.
They might ransom their lives by negotiating a union of cities:
Cidade Maravilhosa
with war-weakened
Cidade de Deus
.

"As you rightly say, we are helpless before our legends,"
Falcon said, for he was no longer Aîuba, the yellow-head, the
Frenchman, but protector of the City of Marvels, the zemba; and
Caixa, war hero, the Senhora da Cruz, standard-bearer of the new
nation.

"I will return as often as is safe," Quinn said. "I am
still a novice in this; there are disciplines and arts of defense of
which I know nothing. It is a war, but mine has always been a martial
order."

Warm gray drizzle gusted in Falcon's face. He blinked and opened his
eyes on a kaleidoscope. Each rock, each tree, each bird and wisp of
mist, Luis Quinn and his stick and fire, were shattered into a
thousand reflections that seemed to lie behind the objects they
mirrored and at the same time beside, each adjacent to every other
image, yet differing in greater or lesser detail. Even as he
struggled to comprehend what he was seeing, the vision was lifted
from him.

"It can be manipulated," Quinn said. "I am less than a
novice in this compared to some walkers of the worlds; I possess
enough skill to share my vision."

"This chaos, this uncertainty and clamor of the eyes, how can
you ever know what is real and what is false? How can you ever find
your way back to the true world?"

"They are all true worlds, that is the thing. We live in the
last whispered syllable of time, dreams within dreams. Our lives, our
worlds, have been lived a thousand, ten thousand times before. The
Order believes that we must dream on, that all else is cold and
death. But some believe that we must wake, for only then will we see
a morning. For though our lives have been lived ten thousand times,
our world reborn time after time after time, in every rebirth there
is a flaw, an error, something copied imperfectly. A trick of the
enemy, if you would have it. In our world, our times, that flaw is
the curupairá, a window on the plethora of worlds and the
reality that lies behind it, and thus our hope."

The greater party of the Cidade Maravilhosa had passed down the
white-water gut; now the children, grinning and wet in their little
skimming pirogues, took to the run. They waved to Caixa; she stood
fast, the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds gripped in her wounded
fist. Falcon shook his head.

"I cannot believe in such a world."

"The world persists whether you believe it or not." Quinn
rose. "I must be getting on now. They are waiting for me."
He dipped his head toward the forest edge, dark and dripping. Falcon
imagined he saw two women standing there in the dim, one a white
woman with a head of curling golden hair, the other of an Asiatic
cast and complexion, her hair a dark red. A black man waited under
the eaves of the forest. All wavered like mist on the edges of
Falcon's perception; then he picked his way over the stones to the
shore. When he looked back only the smoldering fire remained.