Graciliano gestured to the guide, indicating with a circular motion of his hand that they should work their way around the enclosure. This took three-quarters of an hour, for on the north side the tree cover thinned — the blacks kept their horses in a corral here — and they had to fall back to remain unseen.
“I saw no guards posted,” Graciliano told Jacinto upon returning. “They probably think that because their lord of the devil, Ganga Zumba, squatted here for decades, they’ll do the same.” Graciliano said that by following the old thoroughfare, cutting across the open clay area and the manioc field, and striking from the north where the trees were few, they could get through on horseback. “This very night, Jacinto, we attack!”
Graciliano was wrong about the lookouts: The scouting party had been seen by two men, who reported to Black Peter.
“We must leave!” Tobias said. “Immediately!”
Black Peter disagreed: “Run like dogs, Tobias? Are we not men of men? We will defend the house of our lord, Ganga Zumba!”
At 1:00 A.M. on November 2, under a weak moon in an overcast sky, Graciliano led thirty-nine men from the camp in the forest. Two men were left behind, one half blinded by a thorn that had raked his eye, the other incapacitated by dysentery.
The riders reached the old thoroughfare of Shoko. Graciliano was in front with Ribeiro Adorno and Jacinto. The three lounged in their saddles, keeping the ponies at a steady pace. Beyond the thoroughfare, they moved in single file with Jacinto in the lead, until the ponies’ hooves clattered onto the clay at the former kraal of the royal regiment. Firearms were loaded, swords drawn. Graciliano and other vaqueiros left their swords at easy reach beneath their saddle girths and chose for the first charge their iron-tipped goads.
“May God see us this night,” Graciliano said, in a muted but hoarse voice. “For His sake, and for Paulo Cavalcanti.” He shook his lance furiously. “Ride, vaqueiros! Death to the devil!”
They spurred the ponies through the darkness, faster and faster, crashing through the undergrowth toward the north end of the enclosure. The men were silent; the only sounds the breathing of their ponies, the clatter of hooves, the creak of leather, the jangle of equipment. The trees began to thin out, and the embankment loomed large in the distance. Three or four men gave a suppressed whoop, and others took up the cry. At 150 yards, storming toward their objective, all were screaming for the blood of Black Peter.
Jacinto and two other men had been ordered to stampede the renegades’ horses. As the charge began, they broke off to the right. Now Jacinto swung back, racing his mount toward Graciliano. “The horses — ”
Suddenly, along the embankment, a semicircle of fire broke out as the muskets of Black Peter’s men crackled. A rider and pony up front crashed to the ground. Two men behind were thrown as their mounts slammed into the fallen animal. Elsewhere five men were shot, three struck dead by the hail of bullets. A second volley lacked the ferocity of the first, and the remaining twenty-five cattlemen and seven engenho workers fell like a thunderbolt upon the runaways’ camp.
Some riders surged toward two breaches; some charged furiously up the embankment, brandishing their weapons and taking up Graciliano’s cry: “Death to the devil!”
The inner embankment was steep and a few ponies stumbled and fell, but most riders were carried safely into the enclosure. Runaways were hammered to death by the thundering hooves; others fell back toward piles of rocks and the hut platforms.
Graciliano stormed beyond a breach in the embankment. A musket ball from runaways at a pile of rocks grazed the side of his neck, raising an angry weal, but he did not slow his charge to the rocks, where he impaled a black with his goad. The other runaways abandoned this position, one trampled by a vaqueiro’s pony as he ran, another gunned down by a man beside Graciliano. Riders tore across the 120 yards to the far side of the enclosure, then wheeled their mounts and attacked the blacks at the hut platform. Vaqueiros leapt from their ponies wielding machetes and swords in hand-to-hand combat.
The fight lasted less than ten minutes. When the first slaves threw down their arms and begged for mercy, others quickly followed suit and the resistance collapsed. From every direction, there were cries and groans of agony from men on the blood-soaked ground, seven of Graciliano’s horsemen among them.
“Black Peter!” Graciliano had dismounted and strode furiously around the enclosure, shouting at the top of his voice. “Where’s the devil himself?” he demanded, striking the blacks nearest him with the shaft of his goad.
The runaways swore that their leader was not there.
As Graciliano searched for Black Peter, others of his group fell upon the huts on the raised platforms and set them ablaze.
“That one!” Graciliano suddenly commanded, pointing at a runaway who began to moan with fear. “Bring him!”
The slave was forced to inspect the dead and wounded blacks, first in the enclosure and then, with firebrands to light the way, outside the embankment. Repeatedly the slave shook his head, for neither Black Peter nor Tobias was among the twenty-nine blacks who lay dead.
Graciliano’s rage mounted. “Where? Where have they run to, peça?”
Without hesitation, the man blurted out: “The hill.”
“What hill?”
“The Place of Stones.”
Graciliano grabbed the slave’s arm and twisted it violently. “Where?”
“Mercy, Master! I will show you!”
With Jacinto Adorno and one other vaqueiro, Graciliano set out immediately. The moon was obscured by drifting clouds, and in the dark it took two hours to reach the hill.
“This is the Place of Stones,” the runaway said, and begged to be left behind. “Black Peter warned against violating — ”
“Climb, peça!” Graciliano prodded the man with his lance, making a shallow cut in his side. “Climb! ”
It took three-quarters of an hour to find the path and, fifteen minutes later, the narrow passage that led to the enclosure. The vaqueiro was behind the slave; then came Jacinto and, at the rear, Graciliano.
They were twenty feet along the passage when two muskets roared. The bullets missed the runaway, but the vaqueiro was hit in the face, and a bullet thudded into Jacinto’s shoulder, hurling him against the side of the hill. Graciliano was unhurt.
A cocked pistol in one hand, the goad in the other, Graciliano crept forward, hearing a clatter of stones ahead. Through a break in the cloud cover, he saw a man scrambling over a pile of rocks. He raised his pistol and fired. The man was hit but did not fall. Graciliano flung down his pistol and sprang forward, gripping the goad in both hands. He drove the long blade into the man’s back.
Tobias gave a rapid succession of short, sharp, hard sounds and then lay quiet.
Graciliano was fifteen feet from the entrance to the enclosure. Keeping to the right of the passage, close to the stone wall, he continued on.
Black Peter was at the very edge of the enclosure at a spot where a part of the wall had fallen and the stones were but three feet high. He was bare-chested and his right shoulder was bleeding from a bullet wound. He stood unsteadily, swaying back and forth.
“Devil!” Graciliano screamed.
Black Peter turned his head slowly. He had no weapon.
Graciliano took a step forward but then stopped, watching Black Peter with the same wariness he showed in stalking a jaguar in the caatinga. “Devil!” he cried again. “I’m a Cavalcanti! Brother of one you butchered!”
Black Peter was staring at the wall next to him. “Ganga Zumba?” he said softly. “Father?”
Graciliano’s mocking laughter filled the enclosure.
Black Peter shuddered and cried out: “I am alone!”
“Yes, Pedro Prêto! Alone with Graciliano Cavalcanti!”
Black Peter took a step back from the wall and gave a cry of utter despair. He was here to take the long leap to where the bones of the warriors lay. But he could not bring himself to jump.
“What’s wrong,
Black Peter? Do you see the devil?” Graciliano stealthily moved forward.
Black Peter’s tall, thin body began to shake violently. “Jesus?” he cried out.
The appeal infuriated Graciliano. He lunged forward with the goad and gashed Black Peter’s side. “Our Lord will not hear you!” A second thrust penetrated Black Peter’s abdomen.
Black Peter sank to the ground, and for the third time, dying, he called out: “Jesus?”
Graciliano leaned against the rock face at the back of the enclosure. Suddenly, there was a noise; he cursed and swung around. But it was only a toucan, disturbed by the cries, rising from its nest in the trees below.
“Senhor Pai!” Graciliano shouted. “Someone! Bring my father to me!” He sat on his horse outside the Casa Grande. Eleven of his men who had died had been buried at a settlement near Palmares; the remainder of the force was assembled on the open ground in front of the house.
Graciliano dismounted but did not greet his father. He took a leather bag that hung from the pommel of his saddle and undid a rope securing it. He stepped onto the veranda and shook out its contents at the feet of Bartolomeu Rodrigues.
“Senhor Pai! Our Paulo is avenged!”
The senhor looked down at the head of Black Peter. “Christ’s justice be praised,” he said several times. Then he raised his eyes to Graciliano. “Come into the house, my son.”
Graciliano took his father’s arm and entered the Casa Grande, but in the reception hall he stopped. “Senhor Pai . . .”
“Yes, Graciliano?”
“I’ll stay a week. Then I’ll return to the fazenda,” he said. “If I’m needed, I’ll come.”
Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s voice was unexpectedly strong: “I expected to hear you say this.” He paused, his grip on his son’s arm tightening. “Go back. Go, Graciliano Cavalcanti, and take my blessing with you.”
XVI
April 1788 - April 1792
Benedito Bueno da Silva had a reputation for courage equal to that of his ancestor Amador Flôres da Silva, the great bandeirante. And he had a tenacious spirit, too, as firm as that of his own grandfather, Olímpio Ramalho, who had been among the first to find gold at Minas Gerais.
In 1708, Olímpio Ramalho da Silva became embroiled in the conflict between Paulistas and fortune hunters who flocked to Minas Gerais from Portugal and the coastal settlements of Brazil. His defense of his property against a violent band of Emboabas failed, and at the end of 1708, he left the main diggings at Vila Rica de Ouro Prêto, and returned with his immediate family to the da Silva lands beyond São Paulo.
Olímpio Ramalho’s years in Minas Gerais had not made him a wealthy man. Not only had he repaid Amador’s debts to Ishmael Pinheiro — Ishmael’s descendants were merchants at São Paulo and on the coast at Santos — and made good the obligations to others who had financed Amador’s last bandeira; he had also been the support of the vast Ramalho-da Silva clan, regularly visiting their lands thirty miles west of São Paulo until Maria Ramalho died in 1700 at the grand age of eighty-seven.
In 1710, savages in Mato Grosso slaughtered two of Olímpio’s three sons, who had gone north to prospect for gold. With the memory of Amador and Trajano, both of whom had suffered so greatly on their quest for riches, and the death of his own sons, Olímpio vowed to avoid the accursed pursuit of sudden wealth, and with his surviving son, Antônio — Benedito Bueno’s father — he returned to a long-neglected occupation: muleteer. When Olímpio Ramalho died peacefully in 1718, he had left Antônio a good transport business, with pack animals operating between São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Antônio had died in 1753, leaving Benedito Bueno to carry on the tradition.
In the year 1788, Benedito Bueno was sixty-two years old and unusually robust. A noble Tartar, some called him, a description befitting a man who had been the terror of Jesuit, Spaniard, and savage in the contested lands south of São Paulo. But his military exploits had been eclipsed by another activity: his daring convoys to the goldfields of Cuiabá in Mato Grosso.
In both spirit and boldness, these convoys were a continuation of the mighty pathfinding adventures of men like Amador Flôres and Captain-Major Antônio Raposo Tavares. Cuiabá lay eight hundred miles directly to the northwest, but the impenetrable jungle of Mato Grosso, and the danger of attack from savage tribes occupying the region, necessitated a circuitous voyage of 3,500 miles to the mining camps, and whereas the bandeiras of the seventeenth century had mostly advanced on foot or by horse, the Cuiabá convoys were river-borne. This and their seasonal departures gave them the name “monsoons.”
From Porto Feliz, a canoe landing about eighty miles north-northwest of São Paulo, the monsoons traveled six hundred miles down the Tieté — the Anhembi, in Amador Flôres’s day — a journey of twenty-six days, with waterfalls, rapids, and reefs to navigate constantly, and on to the Tieté’s junction with the Paraná. The canoes were then paddled south, for 120 miles, until they came to the mouth of the Rio Pardo on the right bank of the Paraná. The ascent of the Pardo, northwest and for three hundred miles almost to its source, took two months and brought the convoy to the watershed of the Rio Paraguay in the swampy marshes of the Pantanal. Another two months’ travel along two thousand miles of the Paraguay and its tributaries and finally the monsoons reached Cuiabá.
The pirogues of these fleets were forty feet long and four feet wide. Up front rode pilot, bowman, and six oarsmen. Nine feet behind them, toward the center of the craft, was the cargo area; each long, slim canoe was capable of carrying from four to six tons of supplies. At the rear was accommodation for up to sixteen passengers. At times, as many as three hundred canoes with three thousand people departed from Porto Feliz or two other embarkation points, but even these great river armadas were no guarantee of preservation from the perils of drowning, pestilence, and starvation or from attack by war parties of Paiaguá and Guaicuru. Some monsoons had been wiped out to a man.
Since 1739, when, as a thirteen-year-old boy, he made his first voyage to Cuiabá, Benedito Bueno had completed thirty journeys with the monsoons. He owned sixteen pirogues manned by natives who, despite the law decreeing their freedom, were in all but name Benedito’s slaves. On occasion, his canoes had been commissioned for the official escort of a monsoon, but mostly the pirogues transported men and goods to Cuiabá for the profit of Benedito Bueno. There had been accidents in the tempestuous Tieté and Pardo rivers, and men and cargoes had been lost, but those incidents were rare: The expertise of Benedito Bueno’s pilots and bowmen was such that several were able to recite from memory every serious hazard along the nine great rivers en route to Cuiabá.
The river was in Benedito Bueno’s blood, and each voyage a renewing of the wanderlust inherited from his bandeirante and Tupi ancestors. Thus, there had been no surprise when on a July morning thirty years ago, returning from a monsoon and a trip to São Paulo, Benedito Bueno announced to his family that they were departing the lands left to him by his father. Two brothers, Agostinho and Vicente, who were muleteers like their grandfather Olímpio, would stay at the old house thirty miles west of São Paulo; his wife and sons, Benedito Bueno said, were going to Itatinga, the Place of White Stones.
Itatinga lay 125 miles north-northwest of São Paulo. Here the Rio Tieté swung sharply east and then looped back toward the northwest; on the inner bank of the great loop were the white stones, a low outcrop of eroded rocks. Within the horseshoe bend of the river the gently sloping hill country was mostly forested, but there were grassy openings, too, ideal for cattle.
Benedito Bueno’s original grant from the captain-general of São Paulo had extended three miles along the left bank of the Tieté and inland for three miles, but similar grants subsequently obtained by his sons had enlarged the property to an area four times that size and including most of the land within the loop.
Behind the white rocks and a canoe landing there was a bluff. On this elevation, Benedito Bueno had built a house similar to the one he had left: square and single-storied, with rammed-e
arth walls, a tiled roof, and twelve rooms. But the construction was poor and the house neglected, and free-roaming pigs, chickens, and dogs contributed to the squalid appearance of the place.
That the settlement at Itatinga represented a regression almost to the days when the first of these da Silvas lived on the lands near São Paulo was indicative of the Paulista frontiersman’s priorities. Like his forebears, Benedito Bueno had wanted to be in the sertão, far beyond effective reach of authority, where he could wield absolute power over the fifty-six souls at Itatinga — besides the family members, there were five black slaves and eighteen free Carijó and mixed breeds — and over the men of his pirogues. He had enjoyed this independence for some twenty years; but, with an increasing drift of colonists west and northwest from São Paulo, a settlement had grown up at a cattle halt twelve miles southwest of Itatinga. Tiberica, named after a Carijó chief whose malocas had stood there, was granted town status in 1766, and a dozen years later the district had been elevated to a parish, with the da Silva lands falling within its jurisdiction.
Benedito Bueno’s firstborn son, Silvestre Pires da Silva, welcomed these developments. Silvestre realized that with Benedito Bueno, grand admiral of the monsoons, the age of the bandeirantes would come to a close, and he had settled down to develop Itatinga, where he’d planted seventy acres of sugarcane, a crop now cultivated extensively on smallholdings throughout São Paulo captaincy, though not yet on a scale comparable with that of the plantations of Pernambuco. Silvestre had had some education at São Paulo and had served as alderman at Tiberica; he was hoping to become colonel of the local militia and district representative of the captain-general of São Paulo.
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