Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

“He won’t have a hope.”

  “How did he fall that far behind?”

  “How would I know!” Amador said testily. “Load.”

  They fired two shots and waited.

  The natives set about preparing a place for the night and cut back bushes to clear a spot for a fire. Most of the birds and animals had fled the drought-stricken caatinga, but on previous nights the party had heard weird caterwauling close by their halting ground. And Amador had identified the bloodcurdling sounds as the screams of a puma.

  After fifteen minutes they fired their muskets again, and later another round, but Ibira did not come. His disappearance cast a depression over them. Even Amador — not given to sympathy for Carijó, as he thought of most savages — was concerned. “Better that he’d never escaped the slavers than to be alone and lost and left to die in this desert!”

  “Perhaps we’ll find him when we turn back.”

  “Perhaps,” Amador said unconvincingly.

  That night the hours passed slowly. Neither Amador nor Segge wanted to dwell on the fact that this brief, bitter journey had cut short their dream of finding El Dorado and the Amazons. They must pray this night for nothing more than the good fortune to survive the return.

  In the middle of the night, the four men were visited by a horror such as only the caatinga could deliver.

  The long drought had affected every plant and creature, and had thrown all into a titanic struggle for survival. Not far from where the men rested was a knobby hill of granite boulders, its deep crevices infested by a colony of vampire bats. There were hundreds of them, with rufous brown fur and pointed ears. They had razor-edged incisors and V-notched lower lips on which to rest their grooved tongues.

  When there was water in the caatinga, the vampires had no difficulty locating prey; the brush was home to deer, rhea and numerous other birds, and rodents — the giant capybara, the agouti, cavy, and coypu. But few animals or birds remained now in the caatinga, and the vampires’ nocturnal forays had become desperate, ranging over a wider and wider area.

  On this particular night, dense flights of vampires set out as usual. Several packs broke away from the main body, and one of these, a group of three, found the four men.

  All three bats settled on the natives, who were naked. The first vampire to attack selected a Tobajara’s big toe; it drank greedily, its back and ears shivering. When it could take no more, it pulled away and plopped onto the ground a few feet from the native.

  Amador awoke slowly. As both he and Segge slept in their clothes, they had not been immediately inviting targets. When Amador opened his eyes, he saw a bat on the ground eighteen inches from his face. “Vampiro!” he screamed.

  At that moment, the main swarm found them. “Vampiro! Vampiro!” Amador shouted.

  Segge leapt to his feet, waving his arms, kicking, cursing. The two Tobajara, who had slept through the vampires’ painless assault, scrambled up, slapping at bats that brushed against their bodies; especially vulnerable, the naked men fled into the caatinga.

  Vampires became entangled in Segge’s long locks. He gave a hoarse shout of pain as he tore out handfuls of his hair to rid himself of the hideous creatures.

  Amador pulled the stopper out of his powder flask with his teeth while continuing to dance around and swipe at the bats with his other hand. He shook out a handful of powder and, with a warning to Segge, tossed it into the glowing embers. They jumped back as it flared up violently.

  Vampires caught in the powder flash dropped into the fire. The rest broke off into the black night beyond the glare. Amador threw more powder into the fire, and here and there, small, dark bodies rose and swooped away. The two men stood motionless for a few minutes, until they saw that the pestilent visitation was over.

  “Were you bitten?” Amador asked anxiously.

  Segge rubbed his neck. He plunged his fingers into his hair and scratched violently in a fitful reaction to the touch of the vampires. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Amador did not think it necessary to say anything about the consequences of a vampire bite. Furia — “The Fury” — some Portuguese called it.

  The Tobajara returned, both with unmistakable evidence of the vampires’ attack. They began to moan that the night raiders had been evil spirits sent by their enemies.

  Amador silenced them, but not for long. Soon they were screaming with pain as Amador, with a lancet given him by Segge, cut deeply around the flesh at the Tobajaras’ toe and neck wounds.

  Ibira had not been forgotten. Before they started to break camp, they again fired their muskets to attract his attention, but to no avail.

  The swarm of bats had intensified their loathing for the caatinga, and they felt less reluctant to turn back.

  Then, Ibira returned. He made a noisy approach and they heard him call out their names before they saw him. The Tobajara joined them in shouting wildly in response.

  Soon Ibira pushed his way through a thick patch of scrub. As he came toward them, he appeared none the worse for his night in the caatinga.

  Ibira had no sooner begun to work his way through the brush toward them when, from the direction he’d come, warriors stepped through the caatinga — twenty men with clubs and bows, their bodies streaked with war paint.

  “We’re done for!” Segge cried.

  Amador whipped out his machete. He stood with his stumpy figure bent slightly forward, his dark eyes narrowed and defiant. The Tobajara faced the warriors with quiet resignation.

  But Ibira quickly cried out, “They are not enemies; they are friends! Tupinambá! From beyond the caatinga.” He excitedly pointed west. “There! Three hours march, the caatinga ends.”

  Amador did not relax his belligerent stance. “You saw this?”

  “Yes. I found these men there.” He shook his head. “They found me,” he corrected.

  “Where?”

  The storyteller called out the names of two Tupinambá, who stepped forward. “These are the sons of Ipojuca, who leads the clan.” And again he said, “You will see the caatinga end before the sun is in the middle of the sky.”

  Segge turned to Amador. “Do you believe him?”

  “He must be telling the truth, else he wouldn’t be alive.” He lowered his machete and began to sheathe it. “But ready your musket all the same.”

  Segge looked at him quizzically.

  “Your first lesson, Segge Proot: You must never trust wild savages. Look at them watching us.” He jerked his head toward the sons of the chief. “Never think you know what’s in their minds, because you’ll be grievously wrong.”

  Thus it came about that they joined forces with the Tupinambá Ipojuca.

  The caatinga did not end as abruptly as Ibira said it would, though the dense scrub did thin out on a gray, dusty, rocky plain dotted with the same withered trees, palms, and cacti. The plain was incomparably easier to traverse, and within a day they found a muddy depression where they were able to fill their leather water pouches. Two weeks later they came to the living cerrado, high savanna with gallery forests, where game was plentiful. The slow-moving column rested to recover from the caatinga.

  Ipojuca’s Tupinambá were a typical remnant of the coastal tribes. Settled at the Bahia in the days of Ipojuca’s great-grandfather, after a clash with the colonists the clan had moved 120 miles inland.

  Eighteen months ago, Portuguese had come with the announcement that the river valley and lands to the south and north of it had been granted to them by the governor. For a year, Tupinambá and Portuguese had coexisted. Then some warriors stole a cow and feasted on it; in reprisal, the Portuguese burned their fields. “The next time you go near our cows, we will burn your malocas,” the colonists warned them. Ipojuca led his people away from those lands.

  Six months’ migration from the lands behind the Bahia, through the caatinga had brought Ipojuca and his clan to the place where the warriors had led Ibira.

  When the Tupinambá and the five newcomers reached the cerrado, the native
s built sturdy shelters and threw a barrier of thorn and branches around their encampment. The men occupied themselves with daily hunts; the women planted manioc cuttings.

  Ipojuca held different attitudes toward the men who had joined his column. He ignored the Tobajara: As prisoners who had left the Tapuya clearing, they were dishonored men. Ibira, a Tupinambá, he welcomed as a brother.

  The mameluco Amador he despised. Such men were recognized as the scourge of the Tupinambá.

  Ipojuca knew not what to make of the big Long Hair with the pearl in the lobe of his right ear and thick, drooping, straw-colored whiskers. “Yellow Beard,” he’d called him. Ipojuca had heard of the Dutch. It was good to know that they were enemies of the Portuguese.

  More intriguing to Ipojuca was Yellow Beard’s work. He watched, as Ibira sat quietly while Yellow Beard fiddled with his sticks of color. A pagé of the clan, Ipojuca felt it his duty to observe Ibira closely for two weeks after Yellow Beard had made his image. Although he’d noted no ill effect on Ibira, the elder stoutly refused to sit for Yellow Beard.

  “Why not, Ipojuca?” Yellow Beard asked. “It can’t harm you.”

  Ipojuca did not change his mind, and cautioned the other elders of the clan:

  “Yellow Beard shows friendship, but what if the image he makes is seen by Jurupari r another demon? What will happen to you under that evil gaze?”

  Not one elder posed for Yellow Beard.

  They sat outside a shelter built by the Tabojara, Amador on the ground with his stiff leg stretched in front of him, Segge hunched over a sketch of two girls who were rasping manioc tubers nearby.

  It was July 1641, four months since the Tupinambá column had halted. For weeks Segge had been complaining about this protracted delay, but Amador was not impatient. “El Dorado’s lake and the Amazons have lain hidden for centuries,” Amador said. “What difference will a few months make?”

  Accustomed to the long campaigns of the bandeiras, Amador accepted the leisurely migration. “We are better off crossing this sertão with a strong body of warriors,” he said. “These lands are infested with Tapuya.”

  Amador had two additional reasons for staying with the column: Yari and Yara, the girls scraping the manioc. Their long black hair brushed their shoulders, and their firm, bronze-skinned breasts shook as they worked. They were sisters, Yari seventeen and Yara eighteen, so similar in appearance they could be twins. They were both fleshy, with round stomachs and broad hips, wide mouths, and the darkest eyes.

  Their father, Jupi, the elder of least influence, had offered them to Segge as a gesture of friendship. He also hoped that their association with Yellow Beard might enhance his own status at the men’s meeting place.

  Segge had been delighted when the girls were brought to him. He immediately sat them down side by side and sketched them. That night they were waiting beside his hammock. Segge had shooed them away.

  “What is wrong with Yellow Beard?” Jupi had asked Amador the next morning.

  “He has an angry God.”

  “Ah! He is the same as black robes who will not take a woman?”

  It was as good as any explanation. “Yes,” Amador said.

  Suddenly, as he and Jupi were talking, there was a commotion at the entrance between the thorn-and-branch barrier around the shelters. A group of warriors had returned from the morning’s hunt.

  “Capybara!” the lead man shouted. “Capybara!”

  The hunters had killed three rodents, each weighing more than one hundred pounds. When the trophies were carried into the clearing, the hunters were greeted with cheers from the women, who hastened toward the place where the capybara were to be butchered. Word was passed around that there’d be a feast to mark the splendid hunt. They had every intention of marching to the west, but saw no need to hurry when so many nights could be spent in celebration.

  Two hours after the return of the hunters, Amador and Segge sauntered over to where the capybara were being butchered. Some men were skinning the third beast; women attended the other carcasses. Their hands and forearms were bloodstained, and they all appeared to be talking at the same time.

  Segge laughed. “The grandmothers are in charge,” he observed.

  “They are the most experienced,” Amador said.

  “Surely, for they’re old and there have been many hunts.”

  “The grandmothers do the honors when they roast men.” Amador watched them with disgust. “With every step they take beyond our lands, they fall back to barbarity.”

  The truth of Amador’s words became shockingly evident two weeks later.

  The Tupinambá had watched Segge draw the Tobajara at the shelters, on the cerrado, beside a river near the encampment. The suspicious Tupinambá said nothing to the Tobajara. But many times Ipojuca commented: “Who can say what will happen?”

  Then the first Tobajara fell ill. He took to his hammock and was irritable and restless; he complained continuously of a dry throat.

  Amador and Segge thought it no more than a bad humor with the savage, until Segge entered the shelter late one morning and found that the Tobajara was having difficulty breathing. He fetched Amador. They stood next to the man as he sighed and sobbed, struggling for air.

  “He has a fever,” Segge said.

  “His toe,” Amador said, pointing. Segge noticed that the scar left after Amador had cut away the flesh around the vampire’s bite was now red and inflamed. “He has The Fury,” Amador said.

  The Tobajara did not live. The rabies had been dormant for months. Now within two days the Tobajara was seized with violent choking paroxysms. The sounds from his heaving chest were not unlike a dog’s bark; foam flecked his lips; his jaws snapped at the air. On the third night, maniacal and raving and entangled in his hammock, he choked to death.

  The second Tobajara had watched his friend with apprehension. Five days after the first Tobajara’s death, he, too, was stricken. He was bled repeatedly, but developed the same symptoms. On the second evening of his seizures, the Tobajara staggered outside. A dozen paces into the clearing he fell dead, but not from rabies. An arrow, shot by a Tupinambá at the order of Ipojuca, had pierced his heart.

  Amador and Segge buried the Tobajara alongside the other victim, beyond the brush barrier. They returned to their shelter and stayed there. It grew late as they lay talking. Even Amador now agreed that they should continue their journey. Neither Yari nor Yara had been near the shelter since the Tobajara took ill.

  “Where is Ibira?” Segge asked, before he slept.

  “With his savage friends.”

  “They are quiet.”

  “The death of the Tobajara unsettles them.”

  It had done more than that. At the men’s meeting place, Ipojuca sat with the clan’s sacred rattles and moaned an appeal to Voice of the Spirits, a melancholic incantation that begged forgiveness for the elder and pagé Ipojuca. He had promised the ancestors to lead his people to safety, but instead had invited a hideous evil into their midst.

  His warriors listened as Ipojuca sought guidance against the devil that had taken the Tobajara. When at last Ipojuca raised his head, the warriors saw that his expression was no longer remorseful; this was the face Ipojuca assumed when he was ready to command.

  “What has been learned, Ipojuca?” the elders asked.

  “I see the white cords,” he said, and every man there understood his meaning.

  It was becoming light when forty warriors crept toward the hut of Amador and Segge. The women and children were posted in the gloom of their huts; they had been warned of severe punishment if they strayed into the clearing before the men’s work was done. Six warriors led by Ipojuca slipped into the hut; others stood beyond the entrance; a group moved behind the shelter, where the branches and fronds were weak.

  Amador woke the instant the Tupinambá entered the hut. “Segge!” he screamed. “Segge! They’ve come to murder us!”

  Amador leapt from the hammock, and struck out with his fists as he tried to f
ight toward a machete on the opposite wall.

  The warriors behind the shelter burst through the fronds. A dozen hands reached for Segge as he lay in his hammock. He was hoisted aloft and rushed into the clearing.

  It took seven men to hold Amador down. They bound his arms and legs with thick white cords. Ipojuca tied a fiber rope around Amador’s neck. “See, Portuguese,” he said, “now you are my cow!” With a vicious jerk of the cord, he pulled Amador out of the hut.

  Ibira had been present when Ipojuca called for the capture of Amador and Segge. He could have warned them, but he hadn’t. “I am Tupinambá,” he said to those around him. “I stand with Ipojuca.”

  In the clearing, the Tupinambá women and children streamed from the shelters and danced around the prisoners.

  An old woman wobbled up to Segge and made as if she would take a great bite out of his arm. “See! See, Yellow Beard, how we take our enemy!”

  Segge began to sing, a shaky rendering of the Twenty-third Psalm, in Dutch.

  The harridan shrieked with delight: “See how he weeps! Yellow Beard, who casts spells — he weeps!”

  Ipojuca stood in front of the warriors, who watched with approval as the old woman led the tormenting of the men. The grandmother was well qualified, having witnessed slayings as a young girl when the Tupinambá had taken many prisoners.

  Amador screamed and cursed and tried to get to his feet. The cord around his neck was yanked, throwing him to one side, where he lay mouthing oaths against the Tupinambá, who jeered at him.

  The grandmother leapt back to Segge’s side. She grabbed his shirt and began to tug at it. This was a signal for the mob of women. They fell upon the prisoners and stripped them of every stitch of clothing.

  The women prodded and pinched Segge’s pink body, and passed endless remarks on the differences they observed between the two men. Amador had a worse time of it: They punched and kicked him, and beat him about the shoulders with sticks.

  Ipojuca finally ordered them to stop, and Segge and Amador were left alone for hours. They lay on the ground with a group of warriors close by.