by Ian McDonald
‘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.’ Gonçalves cocked his head - that 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, Léon against Toledo.’
He ran into the open nave. With a cry like a hunting bird, Gonçalves cast 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 Gonçalves back 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’ side, Gonçalves recovering 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’ balletic style. They battled up and down the choir stalls scattering psalters 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. Gonçalves knew 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 Gonçalves would 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’ eye. ‘Kneel and submit to the authority of the Society of Jesus.’
Gonçalves went 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. Gonçalves held 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. Gonçalves leaned 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.
‘A cunning idea,’ Gonçalves said, 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’ 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’ head, 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 farther 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 Senhora 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 running 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, but 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 strong-hold 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 Our 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 bayonets 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 Fourvière 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 Déus.
‘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.