The people of the village admired and respected him, but they could never get close enough to know him properly. Several girls thought they had, but they were wrong. Two old women, aunts of the chief, tended the fire at his place, and he appeared perfectly satisfied with this arrangement. If any felt his behavior strange, they kept their opinions to themselves, for this young man was the favorite of their chief, who called him Little Brother.
The chief, whose hands still bore ugly scars, was Ubiratan. “Little Brother” was Aruanã of the Tupiniquin, and five Great Rains had passed since the night the jaguars slew Pojucan.
That nightmare had continued long through the journey. Fever had gripped Ubiratan. The boy knew the plants used at his maloca for such sickness, but he had been unable to find them now.
When Ubiratan had recovered sufficiently, they set out on foot, keeping to the riverbank. Two full moons passed before they finally staggered back into the clearing where they had been greeted with friendship.
They built a new canoe and equipped it, and this time they succeeded in reaching the end of the river. They had passed an entire season upon its waters, for when they got to the mouth, the Great Rains had already come.
The river that they were leaving was itself enormous and flowed like a dark and dangerous serpent, but Aruanã had seen its waters swallowed by the yellowish flood of Mother of Rivers.
It took three sunrises to travel between the first Tapajós malocas they encountered and the place where Ubiratan’s family lived: The waterfront settlements were so numerous that several were passed in a single morning’s voyaging, and more people dwelt opposite, on the islands in Mother of Rivers.
On the last morning of their passage, six war canoes rode out to greet them, the warriors in body paint and finest feathers. They chanted a song of welcome, for word of the arrivals had been passed from the first malocas where they’d rested. When the travelers and their grand escort beached below the Tapajós village, Great Chief had stood on the sands with his elders and headmen, making no effort to conceal his joy at the return of a favorite son he’d mourned for so long.
“Why did you never tell us your father is Great Chief of these people?” Aruanã asked Ubiratan one day.
“It has no meaning for Tupiniquin,” the Tapajós said.
After two Great Rains, Ubiratan’s father had died in battle, and “He-Who-Returns,” as Ubiratan’s people called him, became Great Chief.
With Pojucan dead, Ubiratan had accepted responsibility for the boy and saw him through all the rites of manhood, which were not demanding for one who had passed from childhood to maturity in the dramatic circumstances of their journey. Ubiratan had placed him under the finest warriors and hunters, and bade them teach the young man all they knew.
Aruanã should have felt a contentment greater than that of most men, for now he was indeed a man in every sense. But, with the passing of each Great Rain, an emptiness he’d experienced the night his father was killed — a sense of the great distance between this place and the village he remembered as his own — always returned. I am Tupiniquin, he often reminded himself, of the maloca of Tabajara, whose voice is most often heard in the clearing.
He could fight and hunt with Ubiratan’s men, and make love with their daughters, but something was missing. When he looked at the stars, as his father had done, he dreamt of his own people and felt a longing such as Ubiratan had known at the Tupiniquin village. He did not forget the dishonor of Pojucan or his own torment over the stolen feathers of Macaw, but there was something else, stronger, too vague to define, calling him to the side of the ancestors. I am Tupiniquin.
Such a notion might not have taken hold so profoundly had he not fallen under the spell of the mysterious old man of whom Ubiratan had spoken on their journey. Aruanã did not meet Tocoyricoc until more than two Great Rains had passed and he stood with the mature young men. Only then did Ubiratan take him to the ancient one, whom many Tapajós saw as a messenger of the spirits.
Tocoyricoc was bent with age, and after each meeting, Aruanã had gone away believing that it would be their last, but the old man still lived. No one knew exactly how old he was or where he had come from, except that it was a place where the sun set and the mountains stood in the clouds. Some said that he had reached the Tapajós at a time when Ubiratan’s great-grandfather was Great Chief, but no one could be sure of this.
Tocoyricoc’s body was short and emaciated, his face deeply lined and his head bald, but his eyes were alert, as was his mind. He and Aruanã spent so much time together that there were Tapajós elders who voiced a concern about one who was not of their people standing so close to He-Who-Sees-Well.
The old man rarely left the cave in which he dwelt, high on the side of a hill, three days’ journey from the main Tapajós village.
When Aruanã first saw the entrance to the cave, he had been disappointed. He had not known what to expect, but surely it should have been more than a dark hole in the earth. While Ubiratan sought an audience for him, Aruanã stood watching those who served the old man: four maidens. Their families accepted it as a great honor that they should be taken for two Great Rains to attend to the wants of He-Who-Sees-Well. They slept in a hut below the hill — little girls, Aruanã noted, who could not have known men. They kept glancing in his direction, exchanging words and giggling, while they sat preparing the manioc.
Once he was admitted to Tocoyricoc’s place alone, and his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Aruanã found the cavern large, with a high ceiling, thickly clustered with sleeping bats, and a broad gallery, at the end of which was a natural raised platform only a step up but wide enough to provide the main living space for the sole occupant of these shadows.
It was chilly and damp. The only light came from a fire to one side of the platform, its smoke curling against the blackened rock behind it.
Aruanã saw familiar items — sacred rattles, flutes, gourds, piles of herbs and roots- — and unknown things, too. But none of these intrigued him as much as a large square of material, stretched out against the rock wall next to the old man, depicting a strange-looking figure.
Aruanã had never seen such a man — or was it the spirit of a man? — captured in such a fashion: a fat little warrior, a yellow stick in his hand, with big ears and square eyes and the oddest headdress he’d ever seen, guarded by smaller warriors in rows about him.
“What is it, Old Father?” Aruanã asked — later, when it was proper to do so. He had already answered questions about the journey and his past. “It is the past,” Tocoyricoc replied.
The past? Aruanã was truly puzzled. How could something that clung to a rock be the past? “I have never seen such a person,” he said, and added, “captured in a hammock!”
Tocoyricoc’s terribly thin body trembled with laughter. “This is no man,” he said, when he quieted. “It is no more than the scratching in the sand.”
“There is no color in the sand,” Aruanã said.
Tocoyricoc patiently tried to explain how he had woven the panel with soft palm fibers that had been dyed in different colors. His young listener continued to be baffled, until Tocoyricoc likened the weaving process to the making of a hammock, and then it became a little clearer.
“I have never seen such a warrior,” Aruanã said.
“Nor has any man in this forest.”
“But there are such men?”
“Of power and wisdom.”
“More power than Great Chief?”
“They cannot be compared to each other.”
“Are you one of those on the wall?”
Tocoyricoc either didn’t want to answer him or lost track of the exchange, for he asked, “Great Chief has said that you come from where the sun rises. How is this?”
“At the very edge of the earth, Old Father.”
“Your people?”
“I am Tupiniquin.”
“And where are you from, Old Father?” Aruanã asked, directly.
“From the past,” Tocoyricoc
muttered, but, noting the question in the boy’s eyes, he added: “I was on a journey across the seasons, from the great mountains into the forest, along rivers that took us from our villages.”
“Where were you going?”
“We were looking,” came the vague response.
“What were you seeking?” Aruanã asked.
“To learn of things beyond our world.”
In their meetings to come, the old man would return to the same theme. He would sit there on the first stool Aruanã had ever seen, his body bent toward the young man as he spoke. Occasionally he’d lose track of what he was saying, and Aruanã would have to wait while he searched his memory.
Among the objects in Tocoyricoc’s cave was something even more magical to Aruanã than the little warrior — “the lines that remembered.” They appeared to be a bunch of bowstrings of different colors and lengths knotted together untidily. Tocoyricoc used a word from his own language to describe them: quipu.
When Aruanã first saw the old man consult it, he’d picked out a red cord. “First knot,” he said, “is battle of Black Valley, where a young Tocoyricoc fought. Two and one knots is the age he had, this is his place among the warriors, these, the number of enemy killed.”
“What magic is this?”
“It is a way of remembering,” he said. “To show what is past.”
With the quipu, the old man could count the Great Rains of his past and see the events that lay between the years. Every color stood for a specific thing or event; every knot he made was a mark on his memory. Black he used for time, red for war, white for peace, green for the journeys in the forest, and so on. Thinner strings and threads radiated from the main cords; lesser colors were for lesser events. It was a perfect record of all he had seen and endured.
He had lived in a land where the mountains stood in the clouds and the air was thin to any who had not taken it with their first breath.
“This was the land where Master — one you would call Great Chief — arose. Son of the Sun. He came to change our world when I was your age. Before He-Who-Transforms, we were a miserable people — living as those who see nothing but the forest.” His voice shook with emotion as he told Aruanã about this great sky-being. He showed the young man his own golden earplugs —“tears of the sun”— and said that they were pitiful things compared with what adorned the Master. He was chief of all chiefs, supreme ruler of the quarters of earth. “When the Master led us, the ground trembled before our enemies. I marched with our warriors till not a voice was heard against the Master. When the enemies’ malocas were burned and those who resisted slain, the Master forgave the rest for standing against him. He welcomed them as our own people.”
When peace came, Tocoyricoc said, they had begun to transform the land according to the thoughts of the Master. They built great malocas of stone, and temples. The idea of a temple meant nothing to Aruanã until Tocoyricoc compared it with the huts where sacred rattles and flutes were kept.
“You seek feathers of Macaw and other birds for their beauty, is it not so?” he said. “You cry with pleasure when Ubiratan wears the adornments of Great Chief? All this will not compare with the beauty of this sacred maloca, guarded by women who serve those with words for the Master. They are called Virgins of the Sun.”
Here was something unimaginable to the Tupiniquin: the notion that women were capable of anything beyond carrying the seed of man and raising manioc.
“The Virgins of the Sun — they have known men?”
“It is forbidden, but it happens. Yet, if a boy child comes from this mating, it is killed. It is forbidden for a boy to breathe in the maloca of the Master. Girls can be kept but not seen until they are grown and show themselves as Virgins of the Sun.”
Aruanã heard many strange and wondrous stories in the cave: of canoes that sailed far upon Bluewater like that near his old village; of holes in the earth where men worked in darkness seeking the silvery light of the moon, and of rivers and lakes that flowed with tears of the sun; of great bowstrings tied between mountains so that men could cross from one height to another.
“These things you have told,” he one day remarked to Tocoyricoc, “make me wonder why you did not return.”
“I was alone.”
“Others walked from the mountains with you.”
“There was death in the high places and on the rivers. Arrows killed some in the forest; sickness took others.”
“I came with my father and Ubiratan. There was a reason for the journey. You said you were ‘looking.’ I have not understood this.”
“We came to see for the Master. We looked for tears of the sun, light of the moon—many things for the Master, but we came too far . . . .I waited for the next Great Rain, and then the next, until the past was lost.”
Aruanã said quietly, “I wish to see the wonders you have told.”
The old man’s sudden anger was surprising. He rose unsteadily from his stool, moving his head from side to side, advancing on his feeble legs to where Aruanã sat. “No!” he shrieked. “Seek your own people! Find them! Find your maloca before you lie old and dying like Tocoyricoc.”
It was an appeal that struck Aruanã’s heart. The distance between this place and the Tupiniquin malocas grew wider with each season. There were nights when he would lie in his hammock and think of Tocoyricoc and shudder: He could see an old man waiting for death, and the old man was himself. He might be Little Brother and he walked with Great Chief, but Tocoyricoc was right: Sooner or later, Aruanã was going to have to speak to Ubiratan.
One evening, after the fifth Great Rain, he found himself alone with the Tapajós chief outside Tocoyricoc’s cave. The young girls had been sent back to the village, the food pots lay shattered, the fires before the hut were extinguished.
Tocoyricoc had called for Ubiratan and Aruanã, and had warned that no others should approach.
Up on his platform, the old man already seemed no more than a pile of thin bones. “I will make the journey,” he said, in a tiny voice, “before the sun is strongest.” He had a rattle in his hand and shook it feebly. “I have been with the ancestors, Great Chief.”
Tocoyricoc was in pain, and was short-winded as he struggled with precise instructions about how his body should be handled after death. He knew that the fire he asked for was totally different from the usual Tapajós burial practice, but he warned of hideous punishments if he was disobeyed.
“I do not want to sleep with the ancestors of the Tapajós,” he said. “I must return to my own people. I have asked this, and your grandfathers grant my wish.”
“You have been heard,” Ubiratan assured him.
The old man was suddenly exhausted, his eyelids drooping, but he raised a trembling hand and beckoned Aruanã forward.
“Old Father,” the young man said, “it will be as you have shown.”
“The past must disappear,” Tocoyricoc said. “All but this.” He fumbled with something about his neck. With difficulty, he removed the stone and held it for Aruanã to take.
It was a green jade amulet in the shape of a small animal of a kind Aruanã had never seen.
“Carry it, Tupiniquin,” he said. “Carry it . . . to your people.”
“I am grateful, Old Father. It will go with me.”
“Your people, Tupiniquin . . . Do not let them out of your thoughts.”
When Ubiratan and Aruanã entered the cave at dawn, it was deserted. They searched its darkest recesses hastily, and then fled into the open.
Neither said a word, but their thoughts were the same: How could they have been so thoughtless as to consider Tocoyricoc a mere human like themselves?
They were still standing in front of the cave, shivering with fright in the chill morning, when the sun rose. The noises of the forest were all about them, but they heard a human cry that drew their eyes upward toward the hill directly above.
Tocoyricoc had somehow reached the summit, and now he raised his arms to greet his beloved Son of the Sun,
hailing the Master with all the voice he had left.
He stood once more facing the flaming sphere in the east and then started down. He was halfway along the slope when the men below heard a small cry, and he toppled forward, falling a distance before his body lodged against some boulders.
Ubiratan and Aruanã laid Tocoyricoc outside the mouth of the cave. They placed all his belongings about him, and made a fire in accord with the old man’s wishes.
Aruanã watched as the flames raced along the colorful cords that remembered. “Now there is no past,” he said.
They waited until everything that would burn had been consumed and then carried what was left to the waters of Mother of Rivers. To a people who took infinite care in preparing their dead, sealing their remains in large clay pots where they would be safe from evil, this seemed a poor and dangerous way to seek Land of the Grandfather, but it was as Tocoyricoc had requested.
“You will return?” Ubiratan asked.
Aruanã did not respond.
“It is a long and terrible journey,” he said, remembering a day when he had stood with this young warrior’s father. “But it is possible,” he added.
III
March 1499 - April 1500
On a fine morning two Great Rains later, a group of boys were at play in the shallows of the river near their village when a warrior stepped out of the forest and stood watching from the opposite bank. They fled toward their malocas, yelling a warning, and their fathers rushed for their weapons, but there was no enemy horde, only the tall stranger now walking with purpose toward the stockade.
Two elders stood at the head of a knot of men jamming the narrow opening between the wooden stakes as all fought for a glimpse of the arrival. The older of the village leaders turned his head and growled at the warriors behind, demanding silence.
The elder began to move forward, his war club ready. To his astonishment, he heard the stranger call his name: “Tabajara! O my father, Tabajara! Great man of my maloca!”
Aruanã, the Tupiniquin, had found his people.
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