by Ian McDonald
On Quinn’s command the Iguapá archers laid down suppressing fire while a final croak of encouragement eked the last effort from the paddlers. The canoes collided with the massive wooden piers. With a roar Quinn swung up onto the dam and charged the sentries, sword grasped two-handed. Some of the braver old men hefted their war-clubs; then age and caution decided and they fled to the southern end of the dam.
‘Let them go,’ Quinn ordered. ‘We do not make war on old men and boys.’
While the Iguapá lashed the canoes into a tight raft between the piers, shifting barrels as close to the structure as possible, Quinn studied the construction of the dam. The upper surface was eight paces wide, of clay tamped on wicker hurdles. The earth rampart, already greening with fecund forest growth, sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. The drop to the clay, trickling bed of the dead Rio do Ouro was ten times the height of man. Again he marveled at the energy and vision of his adversary. Could any amount of explosive blast away such massive soil and wood, such concentration of will and strength? A tiny crack was all that was needed. The water would accomplish the rest, the incalculable mass of flood penned league after league up the valley of the Rio do Ouro.
An arrow drove into the clay a span from Quinn’s foot. Eight war canoes had emerged from the southern shore and were stroking fast for the dam, finding range for their archers.
‘I would have been surprised had Father Gonçalves entrusted the protection of his dam to old men and boys alone.’ Quinn said. ‘Lay the fuse; there is not a moment to be lost.’
The loading was complete. The Iguapá scrambled up onto the dam; Waitacá plugged the end of a fuse line into the barrel and reeled it out behind him as Quinn’s archers laid down covering fire. The old men remembered their honor and picked up their war-clubs for a charge. Quinn and Waitacá ran for the northern shore: the reinforcements had given up their firing and were now stroking flat-out for the bomb.
‘We must blow it now,’ Waitacá said.
‘We’re too close.’
‘Mair, now or never.’
‘Lord have mercy,’ Quinn whispered as he took the carefully guarded slow-match from the wooden pail and touched it to the end of the line. The fuse burned in a blink. A stupendous, stupefying blast knocked Quinn and the Iguapá to the ground. Winded, deafened, Quinn saw a great wave blow back from the dam and crash against it in the same instant as a pillar of water leapt up the same height that the dam stood above the dry riverbed. Dark objects turned and tumbled in its breaking white crown: war canoes, tossed up as light as leaves in a forest squall. ‘Christ have mercy.’
Spray drenched Quinn; splinters of wood rained around him. His head rang from the explosion; his body ached. Slowly he rose to his feet. On the far side of the dam the old men halted their charge. The Guabirú boys stood up in their canoes, dumb with astonishment. Those reinforcements who had survived the blast stroked for their capsized canoes. The cloud of smoke and steam cleared away. The dam stood. The world hung; then the old men took up their charge again, the boys swung round to the aid of the stricken men in the water. The dam stood.
Dripping from every hem and seam, Falcon threw himself through the safe gap in the bamboo palisades into the foremost trench. Dry earth beneath his cheek. Leeches clung to the exposed flesh where his stockings had rolled down. An Iguapá pagé applied paste ground from forest bark. Stones, wooden shot, arrows flew overhead in a constant gale. Then Falcon heard a deeper report from the hilltop and, leeches to the devil, stood up to see five loads of hot stones arc over his head and burst in an impressive roar of steam where they struck among the gunboats. As trebuchets were recranked and fresh stones heated in the hilltop fires, the ballistas spoke, spears of fire stabbing out at the canoes. Falcon had devised the adhesive coating of resins and gums: a dreadful threat to gunboats heavy with shot and powder. Those so struck battled beneath a withering fire of slingshots and poison barbs to extinguish the clinging fire; when a gunboat blew up a cheer rang around the hill, and a second when the swivel guns retreated into the cover of the varzea, there to lay down a steady bombardment of Zemba’s artillery.
Falcon worked his way uphill through the linked trench-lines, past battalions of grim-faced boys; gold-faced, strange-skulled Iguapá; Caibaxé with lip-plates, though they were too young to have undergone the formal rites of manhood, war makes any boy a man; the Manaos, their foreheads and crowns shaved into a singular tonsure. Each clutched a spear and wooden knife, waiting, waiting for the word from Zemba’s Imbangala lieutenants. Falcon threw himself to the earth, hands clutched around his shaven head, as fresh bombard came screaming in. He felt the hilltop quake through his belly; blind, primal panic, what to clap hold of when the earth itself shakes?
A dulled roar of voices from behind him; the war-rejoicing of the Guabirú. Pushing his green glasses up his nose, Falcon saw the hilltop in ruin; a trebuchet smashed, two ballistas burning. Yet Zemba’s artillerists spoke again; hot stone plunged down through the leaf canopy, and now the heavy bowmen opened up, lying on their backs, bow braced against feet, bowstring hauled back with all the strength of two arms.
Zemba himself waited with his reserves and the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds in the trench-line beneath the battery. A constant chain of girl-runners darted in and out of his position, bearing reports, carrying his orders.
‘Aîuba.’
‘General, the water is still rising. The foremost positions will be inundated within the hour.’
‘I am aware of it. You suggest that the Mair has failed?’
‘I suggest only that we evacuate the women and children, the old, the sick and halt, while the way is still open.’
‘They will surely perish in that forest.’
‘They will surely perish here. This is no entrada. This is destruction.’
Zemba hesitated but an instant.
‘Evacuate the women and children.’
His runners, crouching at his feet, bowed their heads to concentrate on his orders. Falcon zigzagged downslope to the trench to give the word to Caixa and her command.
‘I will not desert you,’ she said fiercely. The women and smallest children quit the trench, the infants tear-streaked, wailing past all fear. ‘You need someone to watch over you.’
A new mortar barrage punished the hill. The smoke and dust cleared, and there was silence from the battery. A great cry came from the hilltop. Zemba stood, spear raised, the cross of Nossa Senhora do Todos os Mundos lifted high behind him, burning in the sun. Falcon turned to see canoes push out from the deep forest. There was not clear water between the hulls, so many were they; Portuguese in buff and blood, the genipapo-stained skins of the Guabirú. The gunboats laid down a suppressing bombardment, but the cry sounded again and was taken up by the Imbangala captains and iâos, the morbichas and the pagés, by Caixa beside him, and then by Falcon himself as he drew his sword and went over the top of the trench, roaring down to meet the enemy.
Quinn stood senseless as a plaster saint. This was a world he had never traveled to before: the muted, desperate land beyond the battle song, beyond the glorious rage and the joy of the fight and of holding a life in his two hands, and the breaking of that life. This was defeat. This was failure; a quiet, ashen world. True humility and obedience, where the knee is bowed to the inevitable, the ring is kissed without pride or restraint. He gazed, thoughtless, heedless of the falling arrows, at the dam. Then there came a shriek like the teeth of the world being pulled. A tremor ran across the surface of the lake, another, a third, a fourth. Massive trunks of forest hardwood, adamant as iron, snapped with explosive force. Quinn felt the dam shake beneath his feet. Cracks opened in the clay roadway; the tops of the reinforcing piles leaned back toward the water.
‘Mair, I think . . .’ Waitacá did not need to complete the warning. Quinn, Iguapá, old men, boys in their little canoes fled as a twenty-pace section of the dam tilted into the lake and burst in a jetting plume of foaming water. Smashed tree trunks were tossed like twigs; with
every second the rush of water tore away more earth and wood. The gap became a chasm as whole sections of dam broke free and slid into the fall.
‘The men; mother of worlds, the men!’ Waitacá cried. The capsized Guabirú tried to strike for the shore, for the upturned canoes, for the disintegrating dam itself, but the torrent was too strong. Their cries joined with the crash of rending timbers and the roar of water as they were swept under and sent spinning out in the crushing mill of wood and earth. Quinn whispered a prayer and kissed the cross of his rosary; then the earth beneath his feet cracked and fissured and he ran for the northern bank. Behind him the dam split loose, pivoted and slid down the scarp face, breaking into great clods and piles of clay-clogged wicker. The dam was now one great waterfall, the lake a millrace of torn branches and dead creatures, the riverbed beneath a bounding cream-white torrent. Boles of wood burst from the surface like rockets only to tumble end for end and be dragged under again, the flood scouring bushes and trees from the shore. The Rio do Ouro was tearing a new channel from the varzea; now the very boulders were stripped from the soil to join the destroying wall of water and wood.
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 Iguapará, Iguapará 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 tube inside his black robe.
Canoes had been beached on this earthen ramp, run up above the flood-line, 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’ 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 índios 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 índio 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 spear-man 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, índio 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 Our 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 capitan 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 índio-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; Gonçalves thought 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 gold
en 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’ 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.