Cavalcanti gave orders to lower São Gabriel’s longboat stowed in the waist, a task the crew hated — the craft was cumbersome and the space to work her free was limited. Men cursed as they struggled with block and tackle, hands were grazed and torn and muscles strained, tempers flared in the noon heat before the weighty boat was swung out over the bulwarks.
“I want the ten best men, armed and ready. Those men on shore may be Norman thieves,” Cavalcanti said. “We’ll take Fernandes across to Consolação’s boat; then we’ll go ashore.”
Gomes de Pina frowned. “Norman thieves? Here? In Porto Seguro?”
“It’s possible.”
“But they’ve been on the beach since we arrived,” the fidalgo said. “That means nothing.”
“In Lisbon,” he said testily, “they reported a factory at the Bay of All Saints, at Cabo Frio, Pernambuco, and here.”
Factory, Cavalcanti thought derisively. Goa, Malacca — those were factories, formidable trading posts established by Portugal’s merchants. What manner of factory was this, a pile of logs and a group of castaways? “With respect, my Captain General,” he said, “something about that group is not in order.”
“Could it be” — Gomes de Pina paused, looking out across the water — “that they are alone? No savages out there, Master — only the men with the logs. Is this what appears strange to you?”
Cavalcanti glanced at the fidalgo with something close to admiration. It was a good observation, and coming from one who’d sunk so low in his eyes during the voyage, it surprised him. Where were the Tupiniquin? Ever since Cabral’s day, they’d been known to dance on the beaches when the great ships came in, greedy for the little bells and beads they expected.
“Carry on, Master Cavalcanti,” he heard the fidalgo say. “If those are the thieves of Dieppe, you’ll know what to do.”
Cavalcanti sat in the stern when they rowed across to Consolação’s boat, sweating beneath his leather cuirass.
“Those palms,” Cavalcanti said, indicating a place to the lee of the brazilwood logs. “Make for the beach there.”
He almost hoped they were Dieppe pirates. With the aid of their sponsor, Jean d’Ango, wealthiest merchant of that port, the pirates had been attacking Portugal’s ships for years, intercepting fleets from the Indies, raiding to the very mouth of the Tagus. On a trading voyage before this squadron, he’d seen the great house this d’Ango was building on the quay at Dieppe with exotic woods stolen from Brazil — a palace paid for with the blood of Lisbon marinheiros.
The closer they approached, the more suspicious Cavalcanti became: by now those men should be running to meet the boat, wading into the water to greet their brothers from home.
“Oars! Oars!” Cavalcanti cried, scanning the beach, from the mouth of a river that lay to the south, up to the logs, and along the sweep of the bay to where Cabral’s great cross stood.
Any doubt about the identity of the men ashore vanished when he saw a puff of smoke.
Two guns concealed near the logs opened fire, hurling their iron balls at the longboat, now within their range. One fell short with a harmless burst of spray; the second reached the boat. By a hairsbreadth, it missed an arquebusier crouched forward, struck the rower behind him, and tore off a strip of the port gunwale, almost upsetting the craft with its blow. A man screamed pitifully — not the front oarsman, who was dead with half his face gone, but another, who had sat to port and was pierced by jagged splinters.
The water sloshing about his feet red with the blood of his men, Cavalcanti commanded: “Row! For the love of God, keep rowing!” The men, frozen in the moment of attack, moved their oars.
Cavalcanti saw that it was better to make for the shore than to pull back toward the ships: The Normans had time to reload and fire only once more before the boat beached.
He glanced at the ships, and observed men swarming over São Gabriel’s deck: They were getting out the sweeps to maneuver her where her guns could blast those on the shore. But the Normans would be able to get off a second shot at the longboat before the São Gabriel could open fire.
Some corsairs had started to run toward that part of the beach picked out by Cavalcanti. Behind them, their gunners had worked swiftly and again the cannon roared, but this time the shots whistled over the boat.
The longboat’s arquebusiers now fired at the men on the beach. Before they could reload, the keel skidded on the bottom and the boat jerked to a halt.
Cavalcanti caught his balance. Then he leapt into the chest-high water with his sword drawn. “Portugal!” he cried. “For the love of God and São Tiago!”
Most of his men were behind him, their lances and swords at the ready. But the arquebusiers dallied, and paid with their lives.
One pirate who ran to meet the Portuguese hurled a sputtering grenade into the longboat. It exploded at the feet of the arquebusiers, killing both and blasting a hole in the bottom of the craft.
Cavalcanti was slashing and stabbing his way through the Normans. Man for man, they were now evenly matched, eight to eight, but Cavalcanti had been careful to choose only men with experience. Those who stood with him had bloodied their swords on some African or Indian shore and proved too much for their foes from Dieppe.
The struggle was short and brutal. Within minutes, four of the Normans lay dead in the water. Three backed off, begging for quarter, but were slain.
“To the guns!” Cavalcanti ordered, and started off down the beach, but he hadn’t gone far when he stopped in his tracks: the cannon in São Gabriel and Consolação opened up, bombarding the area around the log piles.
At the height of the barrage, a fire started between the logs; when it reached the Normans’ magazine, a series of dull explosions followed. When the ships’ guns ceased firing, a deathly silence fell on the shore.
Cavalcanti and his men advanced slowly, until they reached the battered and deserted camp. A great pile of logs blazed, and several shelters were also on fire. The master sent three men to search for the fugitive gunners.
Leaving the marinheiros near the burning camp, Cavalcanti waded a short way into the water, where he washed his sword blade clean.
He was puzzled by the absence of inhabitants. He gazed toward the nearest stand of palm and deeper into the trees, but he saw no sign of other men. He walked along the beach, his breathing gradually became calmer, and the only noise was the sound of his boots crunching the small white shells at the water’s edge.
He moved in the direction of the river mouth at the end of the bay; nearing it, he realized just how far he had come from his party, and made to turn back.
At that moment the Tupiniquin began to emerge from the trees near the river. For the second time this afternoon, Cavalcanti’s sword rasped out of its scabbard, but the Tupiniquin showed no belligerence as they approached.
It was the man who led them out of the trees who commanded his attention.
He was a brown-bearded giant, brutish-faced, and carried a long staff. He wore a doublet made from animal skin, ragged breeches, a long patchwork cloak. On his head was a faded blue-velvet cap; his feet were covered with rough leather, bound with thin vines.
He moved deliberately, and then, a few paces from Cavalcanti, he said in perfectly good Portuguese, “Be thankful, my friend, for Affonso Ribeiro. Thank your Holy Mother this night for this poor old degredado. Without him, the Normans would have taken you!”
Gomes de Pina was enjoying every moment of the feast. The plentiful food and fresh fruits pleased him, but most especially he relished the Tupiniquin women, who served him and danced before him.
One plump, comely maiden gave the fidalgo all her attention. She was the daughter of the elder of a maloca — a princess of these people, according to Affonso Ribeiro.
“They’re so young and pretty, so very, very innocent. I see paradise, Master, in the days before sin,” the fidalgo said. He determined that as soon as he could depart this celebration, he would lead the girl to his cabin in São Gabriel
.
Gomes de Pina and his captains and officers sat on palm-leaf mats in the clearing between the Tupiniquin malocas. To the left of them, the elders of the clan were sitting together on the ground, engaged in a lively conversation about these “Long Hairs.”
Affonso Ribeiro, self-proclaimed degredado, “outcast,” moved between the two groups like a great sultan. He had shed his tattered garments and wore a billowing skirtlike creation wrapped around his midriff; when he was alone with the Tupiniquin, alone with his three wives and sixteen children, he went naked.
What he’d told Nicolau Cavalcanti on the beach a week before this feast day was true: The master of São Gabriel and his men did have Affonso Ribeiro to thank for their lives; without his presence, the Tupiniquin would most likely have fought at the side of the Normans.
The corsairs of Dieppe differed from the Portuguese in their method of gathering brazilwood: Instead of setting up factories, they sent men to befriend and live with the natives. As friends, they warned the natives against the Portuguese, who they said would enslave and murder them.
The Normans the squadron found on the beach had come ashore a month before, and Ribeiro had been there to greet them.
“Who was I, forgotten subject of Dom Manuel, to deny them?” he’d said to Gomes de Pina. That Manuel was dead and King João III sat on the throne mattered little to a man who only remembered a Portugal from which he’d been exiled twenty-six years before.
“They could take as many trees as the Tupiniquin would cut,” he said, “but I wasn’t having them near this village, and my family agreed.” There were many in the malocas, not only his wives and children, whom he regarded as “family.”
“When you landed, the Normans stood alone.”
Gomes de Pina showed little gratitude, for he could not overlook the fact that Affonso Ribeiro was a degredado: Such men banished for their crimes at home were considered eminently suitable emissaries to unknown lands. They were dumped ashore to dwell among the natives and learn their customs and language. If they lived to be successful in this enterprise, the king would consider a pardon - after twenty years. When Cabral’s fleet sailed for India after its New World landfall at Terra do Brasil, Affonso Ribeiro had been left behind. To his great good fortune, the Tupiniquin had been kind to him, especially one young, much respected warrior, who, when Ribeiro learned their language, told him that no man deserved to live without a name or people of his own.
Ribeiro’s third wife, Salpina, was a daughter of that same warrior, Aruanã, today elder of his maloca.
Toward midafternoon, Gomes de Pina could no longer contain his excitement at the prospect of playing with his little princess, and he signaled to his officers that he wished to return to the flagship. Except for Nicolau Cavalcanti, who stayed with Ribeiro, the Portuguese started back through the forest, intoxicated with the heady manioc brew, laughing as the giggling girls led them on.
The reason Cavalcanti hadn’t gone off with the fidalgo was that the girl he desired was a daughter of Affonso Ribeiro. In most ways, she behaved as did the others offered to the village’s guests, without guile, joyful in her eagerness to please. But there was something else that entranced Cavalcanti, something that reminded him of the loveliest, highborn roses of Portugal: the ever-so-slightly aloof manner she would assume playfully on occasion, pouting her lips. And rather than follow Gomes de Pina and the others, he was content to savor this alluring combination, with its subtle hint of the familiar and open eroticism of the strange and savage.
Such delight aside, Cavalcanti could not ignore the other realities: He saw the whitened skulls at the entrance to the stockade, heard soft tunes from flutes made of the bones of men. He caught the glances of their two pagés, filled with disapproval and suspicion. He’d remarked on this to Ribeiro, but the degredado, had only laughed. “Once there was a devil,” he said, “who would have made you tremble.” He slapped his side with amusement. “These two wizards — they’re always together in the sacred hut, two men who know no women and love each other as much as the spirits they dance with.”
It was obvious to Cavalcanti that the warrior Aruanã was the most powerful of the elders. He sat opposite him now, with Ribeiro.
“He has a question,” Ribeiro said, then paused to hear it before translating. “How is it, he wants to know, that you come so far to fetch wood? Have you none in your own country?”
“We have forests,” Cavalcanti said, “but not with the wood we seek in these lands. We need this wood for dyeing.”
Aruanã nodded; this he already knew from Ribeiro. “But why do you want so much?” he asked.
Cavalcanti thought of the king, João III, and endeavored to explain: “In our country, there is a man, a chief among us, who has great riches.” He had seen possessions the Tupiniquin had acquired in their contact with visiting ships. “He has axes, knives, looking glasses, and beads, more than enough for every man in this tribe and all the clans of these shores. The wood we collect is for him.”
“But, tell me, does this man not die?”
“Certainly,” Cavalcanti said. “Like all.”
Aruanã again consulted with the elders, before continuing: “If this man dies, who has these things he leaves behind?”
“His children, his brothers and sisters.”
Now Aruanã laughed. “This man must be a fool, and so, too, all who endure so much for him.”
Translating, Ribeiro did not conceal his amusement at the insult, but Cavalcanti was angered: Such words from a Moor and the Infidel would speak no more.
“We also have the family of our malocas,” Aruanã said, “and we love our children, but we know that as this earth supports us, it will in like manner support them.”
Cavalcanti looked away to where Ribeiro’s daughter sat with other girls, a distance from the men.
Ribeiro read the desire in his expression and shook Cavalcanti’s shoulder with one of his great paws. “You like this forest child of Affonso Ribeiro?”
“She’s lovely,” Cavalcanti murmured.
“Then, Jandaia is yours, my friend, for as long as you want.”
The meaning of this exchange, though conducted in Portuguese, was clear enough to Aruanã: Ever since the Long Hairs first landed in this bay, like the little Nambikwara ever hungry for love, they were never so happy as when enjoying the gifts of woman. This he had no difficulty comprehending; but there were many other things about the Long Hairs that continued to puzzle him even now, so many years after looking into their hairy faces, there at the white sands where he’d gone to find shells for First Child’s necklace.
He would never forget their reception — his and Tabajara’s — aboard Cabral’s ship. He could recall walking slowly past men who stood with shiny coverings on their chests and long pointed arrows. He heard a strange babble of words, and saw that some pointed to his headdress, while others showed interest in his penis. He’d shrunk back when they put their hands out to touch his skin, not in fear but because of the smell they exuded, a stench offensive to a man accustomed to bathing three or more times a day.
The man Ribeiro later identified as Cabral sat in a chair far more impressive than the stool Aruanã had seen Tocoyricoc of the Tapajós sit upon.
Aruanã remembered his surprise:
“I have seen this!” he’d cried
“What?” Tabajara had asked.
Aruanã had taken a step forward and was pointing to Cabral’s necklace. “These are tears of the sun,” he said. “The same as I saw with Tocoyricoc.”
Aruanã’s pointing brought Cabral instantly to his feet; clearly he was excited. The interpreter addressed them in several tongues, but Aruanã only continued to point again and again to the neck chain and then to the land, trying to show that tears of the sun were a “long, long journey away.”
They’d been fed after that. Aruanã took some food offered to him, but the taste was awful and he spat it all out; the same with a sour red drink. Then a jar had been set before them, bu
t never had he sipped such foul water.
The next day they’d gone back to their people, and in the clearing they’d declared that the Long Hairs were no enemy of the Tupiniquin.
The Portuguese had been taken to the sweetest drinking water. The fields were dug for manioc, and the women sent to gather fruits and nuts. Bows and arrows and feathers, and birds themselves — macaw was Long Hairs’ favorite — were exchanged for little bells and bracelets, and beads of many colors.
When the Long Hairs eventually sailed away, they’d left behind this man Ribeiro, whom the Tupiniquin came to call Ticuanga, because though he’d been soft as manioc dough when they first knew him, like ticuanga cakes, he’d hardened in the sun.
They had first puzzled over this “gift” of Cabral’s. Why should the men in their great canoes hand over their prisoner? That Ticuanga had been a captive, they had no doubt, and the Tupiniquin had not known what to do with him. For his part, Ribeiro lived like a man without a past, becoming a great jovial warrior who loved and fought like the best of the clan.
Aruanã was still thinking of Ribeiro when he saw him rise at the approach of a group of young men dancing across the clearing. Ribeiro joined them, stamping his feet with theirs. Faster and faster he danced to the rhythm of the rattles they shook, until he could no longer keep up with them and collapsed on the ground next to Cavalcanti.
The master turned to him now. “Senhor,” he said pointedly, “you’ve been away from Lisbon for twenty-six years. Surely the new king would pardon you for a mistake you made as a child. Don’t you wish to return to the land of your birth?”
“Me? Affonso Ribeiro? Herder of goats? Go back to Portugal? Never! Here is my land! Here is my family!”
Quick as Ribeiro’s avowal was, Cavalcanti sensed a false note in it, which only further piqued his curiosity as to why Ribeiro so emphatically chose these simple savages above his own people and why the Tupiniquin had accepted him.
Several began to contribute to a story then, translated by Ribeiro, about a long journey made by Aruanã. Cavalcanti paid little attention to the narrative, for he knew that the minds of these people were filled with fantasies and lies: Where, for example, was the empire of Africa’s legendary Prester John, with his golden chariots and bejeweled palaces? How many years had Portuguese marinheiros believed the Africans who spoke of a wondrous kingdom in the interior — until the Portuguese reached Ethiopia! Black Christians they found, yes, but no more wealth than in a single Indies ship of Dom João III.
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