Big Buttocks roared at his executioner, inviting him to hurry, for his pleasure would be brief.
“You will die, Tupiniquin, when my people march. You will fall with all in your maloca. Slay me, now! Bring the hatred of my brothers — many brothers, Tupiniquin, with many arrows!”
It was as he mockingly demanded. Rushing at him from behind, Aruanã swung the great club. Big Buttocks made a move to avoid the blow, but he was too slow. He shuddered and went down. His fellow Cariri watched bleakly as Yware-pemme smashed against his head — horrible, crunching blows — until he lay still.
“Your brothers, Cariri,” Aruanã said, with surprising calmness, “this is what will come to your brothers.”
Old Mother and her cohorts rushed forward to take possession of the body. They lifted Big Buttocks and, singing as they went, carried the body to the boucan.
She was holding a short piece of wood, sharpened at one end. She handed it to the women, who knelt by the body, and watched as it was driven deep between those great rounds of flesh. Always the first step, the bung would stop the rich juices from flowing.
Yware-pemme struck again and again, and quickly there were three groups of women at work in the clearing.
The men avoided these preparations, turning instead to the gourds of beer set out for them. The first to drink was the executioner. As head of his maloca, it was Tabajara’s privilege to serve the beer to Aruanã.
The young man drank and returned the gourd to the elder. “I give thanks, my father.”
“For what?”
“There is no memory of no-warrior.”
“A young warrior with three names,” he said, “has no need for what is past.” He paused for a moment, then continued: “Aruanã’s hammock hangs next to Tabajara’s, and Tabajara will soon be an old man.”
Aruanã looked down humbly. First there were the three names of his victims to add to his own. And now Tabajara was suggesting that a time would come when Aruanã would lead the maloca.
“If it is shown by our ancestors,” he said quietly, “it may happen.”
Naurú approached them, with his awkward gait. “He must be taken away now,” he said, “before the fire dances.”
Aruanã looked past the pagé to the women. Those not busy with the bodies danced about the others, singing of revenge. Mothers rushed their children to where the Cariri lay, beckoning them to wet their little hands in the blood.
He saw Juriti standing on a small mound: her bloodstained arms were raised, her head tilted back, as she sang to the sky — a song that Aruanã could not hear but that those near her were following with obvious pleasure. He stood up reluctantly, indicating that he was ready to leave a celebration that had scarcely begun,
Tabajara and Naurú hastily led him to the maloca, where he stripped off the feathers on his legs and climbed into his hammock. Naurú gave him a small bow and arrows, similar to those placed with newborns, chanted some words over him, and then hurried away with Tabajara.
A man found glory in wielding Yware-pemme — but at a price. For three sunrises he must leave his hammock only when absolutely necessary, for in this period he was in terrible danger from those he’d slain. Sickness, madness, sudden death — any could find him if he was caught by the ghosts of the Cariri. After the third sunrise, the names of the Cariri could be called and he would be free.
In the clearing, the bodies of the Cariri were scalded and skinned.
Big Buttocks’s arms were cut off close to the shoulder, and his legs above the knee. Four women seized these limbs and danced them around the clearing, calling out:
“Awake! Awake, fallen Tupiniquin! Here is your death avenged. See the legs that marched against you. See the hands that held the bow.”
The enemy were being dismembered with bamboo knife and stone ax. The trunks were split, the intestines removed and set aside; these would go with other parts of the viscera into a great broth, which all would sip, taking the strength of the enemy. Naurú made a silent appearance before each body to claim the thumbs and genitals. These would be prepared in the hut of the sacred rattles, the former in a concoction that would make arrows fly true, the latter for fertility in man and plant. When the limbs of the Cariri lay on the grill, Old Mother took her clay pot to the boucan and sat there, intent on catching the fat that dripped down the supports.
The butchers caroused and sometimes squabbled over the joints; the men danced in the clearing and sang with joy at having seen the suffering of the Cariri. So it would go, they warned, with any who dared gnaw the bones of Tupiniquin.
There were other battles, and more prisoners slaughtered. By rallying a group of warriors and preventing the enemy from crossing the river near the village, Aruanã had demonstrated his unquestioned qualities of leadership. So there was great joy in the village when Juriti delivered his son and he took to his hammock for the lying-in period.
To bring a new child to the village made the greatest demands upon a father: a woman held the seed and matured it, but it could grow only with the spirit of man, and if any evil affected him, it would also touch the child.
During the five sunrises of his confinement, he must neither hunt nor take any meat, for the strength that would come to him could weaken the baby. His voice could not be heard above a whisper, and the names of enemy he’d slain must not be called in his presence. He must remain in his hammock as much as possible till the threats to his newborn had passed.
Four sunrises before, he had heard Juriti cry out in the maloca.
“I must go,” she whispered afterward, and he had jumped out of his hammock to help her rise.
“You are worried?”
“So many would take this happiness.”
“My little dove,” he said, “I have strength for this first child.”
“When I am alone, I will see the courage in your face.” She clenched her teeth as a pain came. “It will be a boy child,” she said, and smiled. “As his father, with the ways of a great Tupiniquin.” But the smile faded and again she showed concern. “O Aruanã, go well. May the ancestors watch over you.”
“I am prepared,” he said. “Go — and bring the child.”
She reached for some fresh wood for the fire and waited till it burned. She looked again at the manioc and fruits she had been gathering these past days, and hoped that they would be enough to satisfy her husband’s hunger. She watched him climb back into his hammock before she left, heading for the edge of the forest.
There was a small glade just beyond the river, and she could hear the stream from the place where she waited to give birth. It was tranquil and comforting, reminding her that her people were not far off. The child moved in the early afternoon, and she tried to stifle her cries as the pain increased, but it was not possible. When the baby breathed on the soft mat of leaves where she had squatted, she looked around furtively lest an evil be attracted to this place.
She cut the cord with a shell, as Old Mother had instructed, and cleaned the baby. She was very weak when finally she got to her feet and walked slowly, clutching the tiny body to her own. She paused at the river’s edge to bathe Aruanã’s son, and knew great joy at the sight of the sturdy infant.
The news reached Aruanã long before she returned to the maloca, and he lay back, pleased but exhausted.
Juriti brought his son; he heard the strong cry and saw the robust little body and was enormously relieved that his efforts thus far had succeeded. Encouraged, he faced his confinement.
The sunrises passed quickly, for his friends came to the maloca to visit the new father and congratulate him on the son he had made. When her work in the fields was done, Juriti hurried back to his side, and did all she could to help him through this difficult period. Naurú, too, came to chant over the child, and on the last occasion, he asked for the umbilical cord, which Aruanã had received from Juriti. At the first new moon, Naurú would conceal pieces of this in the village, a guarantee of many children for the son of Aruanã.
The fift
h sunrise came and the vigil was over but for one ritual: Aruanã must go alone to the sands at Bluewater that flowed to the end of the earth and find the tiny white shells for his son’s first necklace. When the baby wore these, his lip could be pierced and his chosen name heard for the first time.
On this beach where he walked for the shells, Aruanã felt contentment at being alone.
One man, alone, at the edge of his world, his bare feet making an impression along great curves of sand. Beyond the palm groves rose the tattered fringe of the forest, which pressed so deeply upon his soul, perhaps because he had reached so far into its depths. Above was the sky, which he had come to share with the distant Tapajós, with the Nambikwara, and with those whom Tocoyricoc remembered.
He walked with his head bowed, and felt a twinge of excitement every time he found a shell. He didn’t hesitate to toss away any that showed the slightest blemish, for the shells were for his son.
“My son!” he cried. “My son!” He leapt then, great bounds of joy. “Son of Aruanã!” he shouted. “Son of Tupiniquin!”
And then, at the height of his happiness, came a premonition.
Aruanã stopped in his tracks. He glanced first toward the palm grove, then looked out over Bluewater that flowed to the end of the earth. Every instinct, so finely tuned, alerted him that something was wrong.
His hand tightened around his club. He took a few steps, only to pause once more and search the land, his eyes scanning the waters at the very edge of the sands, where spirit creatures were said to rush out of the surf to assault man.
But there was no threat at the waterline, and he lifted his gaze. For a long moment he stared at it unknowingly — the very thing that was occasioning his disquiet — and then he recognized what had crept into his vision and had caused him to pause:
Tiny puffs of cloud had fallen to the end of the earth. Four . . . five . . . six were bunched together just above the horizon. Otherwise the sky was perfectly clear.
He made a hesitant progress toward the water, squinting into the distance at the strange clouds. But even as he did so and perplexed as he was, he began to see that his first impression had been wrong. Very quickly now the swiftest clouds lifted above the water. There was a flash of understanding: Here were great canoes coming from the end of the earth.
Aruanã watched as they came closer. The sun was gone behind the trees, and he found it difficult to discern the craft, but he stood rooted a while longer before he realized that he must hasten to the village and tell what he had seen. This made him gaze at the horizon again, to be absolutely certain, for it was a fantastic discovery for a man who had gone to seek no more than shells. They were there, darkening images now, these canoes that had come from the end of the earth.
THE-ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BRAZIL - THE TUPINIQUIN
BOOK ONE: The Portuguese
IV
March - April 1526
Standing with the ship’s master on the poop deck above São Gabriel’s sterncastle, His Excellency Gomes de Pina was about to be violently ill.
Gomes de Pina held his frilly sleeve near his face as he observed a group of sailors below. They were keeping a protective half-circle at the ship’s firebox, where a grisly meal was being prepared. Any who lurked close to these marinheiros were warned off with threatening glances and oaths.
Sixty-four days beyond the bar of Lisbon’s Tagus, the marinheiros had seen one in three who had shipped out on the São Gabriel’s in late March of this year 1526 die from scurvy or the bloody flux. What remained of the provisions was rotten or fermented and, besides, would last no longer than a week. These men, old hands at long voyages, had hunted in the hold, in the dank forecastle, wherever they might corner or spike rodents. Skinned and spread on the firebox grill, the rats were to be their sustenance.
“Ratazana?” His Excellency said querulously.
“Ratazana,” the master of São Gabriel confirmed, with thinly disguised amusement.
The master was of medium height, sturdily built, with a discernible strength in his movements and intelligence in his face, burnt mahogany by the sun. He had green eyes that were brooding and melancholy, and a prematurely gray beard in this, his thirty-sixth year. His full name was Nicolau Gonçalves Cavalcanti. He was descended on his father’s side from a long line of Florentine merchants who had settled in Lisbon. His mother’s family, the Gonçalves, brought the blood of old Portugal — of Iberian and Celt, of seafaring Phoenician and the Roman of Lusitania province, of Swabian and Visigoth, and of the sensuous and inquiring Moor, who ruled in the peninsula for six centuries.
Cavalcanti noticed that the sight of rats cooking over a firebox was not the only cause of Gomes de Pina’s discomfort. As a fidalgo, a noble at the court of Lisbon, Gomes de Pina would simply never consider any alteration of his appearance. Thus, even in the intense heat of the tropics, every day he emerged from his cramped quarters draped with slashed doublet, thick breeches, and silken mantle and labored up the steps to the poop, where he posted himself in sweltering authority. Today, as always, beads of sweat stood out on His Excellency’s forehead, and his breathing was labored.
“Sixty-four days out of Lisbon,” the fidalgo said, “forty days west of Cabo Verde, and still no Terra de Santa Cruz. Could it be the fault of this Guinea pilot?”
“I find nothing wrong with João Fernandes’s reckoning,” said Cavalcanti. “There are signs of land.” Just two days before, they had sighted bottle weed and asses’ tails, and a flight of birds had crossed their bow.
“Master, signs there are, but where is Santa Cruz?”
Cavalcanti did not reply immediately. He was thinking of Gomes de Pina’s use of the old name — Land of the Holy Cross — given to the territory by Pedro Álvares Cabral when he discovered it for Portugal in 1500. On the Lisbon waterfront, to men who knew better, it was Terra do Papagaio (Land of Parrots) or Terra do Brasil, named for the brazilwood taken from its wild shores.
“The pilot can’t be blamed for a slow ship,” Cavalcanti finally said.
João Fernandes was in fact an excellent pilot. Like other navigators of his time, he depended mainly on compass, half-hour glass, and a simple knotted line and floating wood chip to track the ship’s course. He had quadrant and astrolobe, tables and charts; of latitude he could be reasonably sure, but determining longitude was beyond his instruments. More important was Fernandes’s special feel for the way of a ship in the ocean, and his conviction that a pilot who erred but ten leagues in a thousand was no pilot at all.
Gomes de Pina fell to bemoaning that a fidalgo so eager as he to be of service should be made to do the king’s business in this battered old vessel. A terror among Arab and Swahili dhowsmen from Malindi to the Malabar coast more than a quarter of a century before, São Gabriel was a tired ship now, riding behind the two other vessels —lateen-rigged caravels — that made up the squadron commanded by Gomes de Pina.
What distinguished São Gabriel from those rakish caravels was her size — 120 tons against fifty or so; her broad, square sails spreading above a wide beam; her towering castles fore and aft. Low amidships, her beam a third of her length, she had a round, bulging appearance. Her fore and main masts each carried two square sails and topsails, and the mizzen bore a lateen rig; her sharply angled bowsprit was fitted with a single sail. She had tremendous floating power and carried more canvas, but had neither the caravel’s speed nor its handiness in working to windward. She could compensate for this with her greater armament of lombards, culverins, and falconets, twenty guns in all. The weathered scars on her hull and bulwarks were signs of her fighting past. She was a tough old lady of the East, but the strains of her long voyages were telling: the crew had rarely let off pumping since clearing the bar of the Tagus.
As captain general with full command, Gomes de Pina had orders to guard the coast against pirates from Dieppe and Honfleur who came to steal brazilwood and burn Portuguese ships. The Portuguese king, João III, demanded an end to this wanton plunder of his N
ew World estate by these Norman corsair/merchantmen.
The Normans raided with quiet approval of the admiral at the court of Francis I, who himself had always treated the protests of Lisbon with contempt and had argued that His Holiness the Pope had erred in 1494 when he promoted the Treaty of Tordesilhas, by which the unknown non-Christian world was divided between Portugal and Spain. Terra do Brasil had fallen in that half of the world to be protected by the Portuguese monarch. “Show me the clause in Adam’s will that excluded me from the New World!” Francis had demanded.
All this had been told to Cavalcanti by Gomes de Pina, who had heard it at court. Squadrons had sailed before them, and there had been some success, but the coastline of Terra do Brasil was vast, with an infinite number of bays and hiding places, and for every Norman sunk, three others returned safely to the quays of Dieppe, where the brazilwood was rasped to a powder for dyeing the fabrics of Flanders.
One of the marinheiros at São Gabriel’s firebox could wait no longer. As the captain general and Cavalcanti watched, he drew his long knife and speared a sizzling rat, dancing off with it to the edge of the main hatch, where he began to devour it greedily.
The captain general turned his back on the scene and walked with Cavalcanti to the opposite end of the deck. “I see that you’re not disturbed by men eating vermin,” he said. “But I don’t expect you would be — not with the experience you’ve had.”
“There has been worse,” Cavalcanti acknowledged. “At Goa we ate rats — fat rats, thin rats — and when there were no rats, we boiled the leather from our buskins and off our trunks. And all the time we thanked the Virgin for such mercies!”
That was sixteen years ago, Cavalcanti remembered. He’d been a young officer on Frol da Rosa, flagship of Afonso de Albuquerque, captain general and governor of Estado da India, Portugal’s State of India.
He saw himself at the first triumph in 1510, when Frol da Rosa led twenty men-of-war against the Muslims holding the island of Goa, between the rivers Mandavi and Zuari, a key position on the Malabar coast. Sofala, Aden, Ormuz, Malacca — all were strategic points on the trade routes across the Indian Ocean, but none was so commanding as Goa. Let the Infidel hold the others, Albuquerque said, and the Indies could be conquered from Goa.
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