Brasyl (18 page)

"I have no hand for the drawing," Luis Quinn said. "Your
writing is unfamiliar to me. Might I ask what language?"

"A code of my own devising," Falcon said. "It's not
unknown for scientists to need to keep their notes and observations
secure. Ours is a jealous profession."

"Some might see it as the work of a spy."

"Would a spy show you that he writes in code? Look! Oh look!"
Quinn's attention darted to where the doctor pointed, leaning
intently over the rail.
Yes
, he had been about to say,
if
that spy thought that those notebooks would be found later, by
stealth or theft.

A mound in the water, a wheezing spray of mist broke the surface and
vanished into spreading ripples. A moment later a second apparition
surfaced and submerged in a soft rain of exhalation. The two circles
of ripples met and clashed, reinforcing, canceling each other out.
Falcon dashed, flapping coattails and loosely bound sheaves of paper,
along the narrow gunwale to the bowsprit, where he clung, keenly
scanning the misty water through his peculiar spectacles. "There!
There!" The two humps arced through the water as one a short
distance ahead of the ship, blowing out their lungs in a gasp of
stale air. "How marvelous, did you see, Quinn, did you see? The
beak, a proonounced narrow protrusion, almost a narwhal spear."
He dashed excitedly with his coals on the paper, never taking his
eyes off the close, hazed horizon. "The boto—the Amazonian
river dolphin. I have read . . . Did you see the color? Pink, quite
pink. The boto: extraordinary and I think unclassified. To catch one,
that would be an achievement indeed: to have the classification
Cetacea Odontoceti falconensis
. I wonder if the captain, the
crew, even my own staff might obtain one for taxonomic purposes? My
own cetacean . . . "

But Luis Quinn stared still into the pearl opacity that hung across
the river. A plane of shadow, a geometry, moving out in the mist
upstream of
Fé em Deus
, glimpsed and then lost again.
There. There! His flesh shivered in superstitious dread as the dark
mass resolved in the mist, like a door opening onto night, and behind
it, another rectangle of lesser grayness. What uncanny river-phantasm
was this? Silent, uterly silent, without a ripple, floating over
water not on it. Luis Quinn opened his mouth to cry out in the same
instant the lookout yelled a warning. Captain Acunha on the stern
deck whipped glass to eye. Quinn saw his unmagnified eye widen.

"Sweeps! Sweeps!" Acunha roared as the house appeared out
of the ripppling mist. The coxswain and his mates lashed
still-drowsing oarsmen awake with knouts as the floating house spun
ponderously on its pontoon and drifted past within a biscuit-toss of
the
Fé em Deus
. Behind it was the second object Quinn
had glimpsed: another pontoon house, and behind it, appearing out of
the fog, a whole village upon the waters, turning slowly on the deep,
powerful currents of the stream.

"Larboard sweeps!" Captain Acunha shouted, running along
the central decking with a landing hook to the station where the two
benches of chained rowers craned over their shoulders to find a
roofless wooden house bearing down on them at ramming speed,
corner-forward. "On my word fend off. Anyone of those putas
could sink us. Cleverly now, cleverly ... Now!" The sweep slaves
had pushed their oars as far forward as they could, and on their
captain's command hauled back, making gentle, oblique contact with
the side of the house pontoon, forcing it slowly, massively,
ponderously away from the side of the ship. The captain thrust away
with the landing pike, fighting for leverage, his whole weight behind
the spike, face trembling with effort. Forward oars passed the
runaway house to aft oars; clenched muscles shone wet in the mist.
The house grazed past
Fé em Deus
's stern by a lick of
paint and vanished through the downstream horizon.

From the forward deck Luis Quinn watched the houses sail past. A
village afloat—a village cast adrift. The latter houses, many
of them caught together in duets and trinities by tricks of the
current, showed signs of burning: few had roofs; some were charred to
the very waterline, stumps and sticks of blackened wood, like
shattered teeth. Twenty, thirty, fifty. Six times the sweepers fended
off a castaway house, once at the price of a third the larboard
side's oars. Not a village. A town. A deserted town, abandoned,
slaughtered, taken.

"Hello the village!" Luis Quinn thundered, his deep
sea-formed voice carrying across the smooth, unruffled water. And in
the lingua geral. "The village, ho there!" No answering
hail, no word, not even the bark of a dog or the grunt of a pig. Then
a house, burned down almost to waterline, turned in the stream and
through the gaping door Quinn saw a dark object, and a pale hand
lift. "There's someone there!" he thundered. "There is
one yet alive!"

"Raise anchors!" Acunha shouted. Windlass catchpawls
rattled over capstans. The anchors rose from the water, gray and
slimy with river silt. "Sweeps! Starboard side. On my command."
The drum beat; the oars rose and dipped;
Fé em Deus
turned on the steel waters. "All pull."

The slaves strained to their oars.
Fé em Deus
dashed
forward, gaining on the house that Quinn had seen. Acunha deftly
commanded his sweeps to negotiate the boat through the drifting,
rurning pontoons.

"Again lads, let's have you."

A final effort and
Fé em Deus
drew alongside. Quinn
strained to see; a figure was visible lying on the floor of what, by
the fallen statues and charred altar, must have been a church.
Acunha's scouts, lithe, agile Pauxis all, leaped aboard with lines
and secured house to ship.

Quinn followed Acunha on to the raft. His feet slipped on wet,
charred paper as he walked through the collapsed, smoking, still-warm
ruin. Acunha and the Pauxis knelt around a delirious woman who
clutched the rags of a Carmelite postulant's habit to her like
children. A caboclo from the angle of her cheekbones, the fold of her
eyes: her face was too direly burned for any other features to
identify her. She stared up dumb into the ring of faces that
surrounded her, but when Luis Quinn's shadow fell on her she gave a
keening shriek that made even Captain Acunha step back.

"What is it, what happened my daughter?" Quinn asked in the
lingua geral, kneeling beside her; but she would not answer, could
not answer, slapped away his ministering hands, gasping with fear.

"Leave her, Father," Acunha ordered. "Bid Dr. Falcon
come over from the ship."

Falcon was helped over the narrow water between the two vessels.

''I'm a geographer, not a physician," he muttered, but yet knelt
down beside the sister. "Get back get back, give the woman some
air, let her see the light." After a brief examination he drew
Quinn and Captain Acunha into his confidence. "She is terribly
burned over the major part of her body; I do not know if she inhaled
flame, but her breathing is shallow, labored, and heavy with phlegm:
at the very least I would say that her lungs have been damaged by
smoke. I have seen many a loom fire in Lyon; they can spontaneously
combust in cotton duff. I certainly know that it is more often the
smoke that kills. But I fear the greatest damage lies here." He
held up a pair of botanical tweezers; caught in their tips a tiny
white ovoid the size of a grain of rice."

"A botfly egg," Acunha said.

"Indeed sir. Her burns are infested with them; infested, some
have already hatched. From that we may deduce that the town was set
to the torch not less than three days ago."

"God and Jesus, they will eat her alive." Acunha crossed
himself, kissed his two fingers.

"I fear there is very little we can do save make her comfortable
and easy. Captain, there is an herbal simple I have seen used in
Belém do Pará; acculico it is called, a stimulant herb
but with a potency for analgesia. I believe it would ease this
woman's suffering."

Captain Acunha dipped his head in acknowledgment.

"The galley master keeps a supply in his sabretache. It puts a
wondrous spark in the slaves' stamina."

"Good good. A few balls should suffice. Now, we must move her.
Gently, gently."A hammock slung from a bamboo pole negotiated
the postulant as tenderly as they could over to
Fé em Deus
, but she still screamed and wept at every jolt and rub of her
exposed tissue against the weave of the fabric. The slaves carried
her to an awning on the aft deck. Falcon administered the leaf and in
time soothed the woman's ravings to a dull, relentless mad burble.

Quinn remained on the boat-church. He knelt to the altar, blessed
himmself, and lifted one of the charred papers. Music notation: a
Mass by Tassara of Salvador. To the greater glory of God. A simple,
riverside church; Quinn had passed many such in the floating villages
along the varzea, the seasonal flood plain of the river, rising and
falling on their pontoons with the waters. They were without
exception trading posts, supply depots for river traffic and lines
into the vast hinterland; their church a simple wood-and-thatch
pontoon, a raised wooden platform for sanctuary, horns and clappers
for summoning bells. An altar cloth worked with glowing, fantastical
representations of the four Evangelists in braid and plaited feathers
lay half burned at the foot of the altar. It would have brought a
fine price at any floating market, but the defilers had preferred to
burn it, to burn everything.

This was a judgment
, Luis Quinn thought.

The altar was strewn with lumps of rain-softened excrement. Quinn
swept them away, cleaned the Communion table with the rags of its
former covering, choking at the reek of human filth, smoke, and wet
ash. He fetched the cross from the midden of half-burned rubbish
where it had been flung. It was as intricate and fabulous as the
altar cloth; minutely carved and painted panels depicted the Stations
of the Cross. Quinn kissed the panel of Christ Crucified at its
center, held his lips a lingering moment before setting the cross in
its place. He stepped back, dipped his head in a bow, then
genuflected and again crossed his breast.

The Fallen Cross. The permit for Just War.

The postulant would not tolerate Quinn's presence until he changed
his dress for a white shirt and breeches. "She fears my robe not
my face," Quinn commented, setting lights to drive off the
mosquitoes. "A Carmelite mission, a poor enough place though
they modeled themselves on the Jesuits. Music in church; daub, all
that stuff. Who would attack a river mission?"

"Not bandeirantes, never bandeirantes," Captain Acunha
said, shaking his head. He was a thickset, squat man, of bad
complexion and coarse, greasy hair; thickly bearded; more slavemaster
than shipmaster. "They would never descend a raft town."

"These are hungry times for flesh," he said.

Acunha stared at Luis Quinn, eyes dark like a monkey's in his thick
facial hair.

"It was the Dutch, Dutch bastards; they've always had their eyes
on the northern bank. Weigh there! Weigh anchor, get us moving, we've
been too long here." The bluff assertion of command, but Quinn
heard a discord of anxiety in his voice. The Dutch are traders, not
slavers. Three days ago the raiders had struck. The people stolen
from this town must have already passed them, anonymous, unremarked,
wired together through the ear, or the nose, like animals tamed to
the plow.

Calls from the water; the Pauxi scouts had swum over to other burned
houses and returned with news that they exchanged with Acunha in
short, accented stabs of language like arrows.

Acunha beckoned Quinn to him.

"They have found the bodies of the friars in other houses,"
he said in a low voice,

"Dead," Quinn said.

"Of course. And ... bad. Badly used. Used abominably."

"I do not need to hear," Quinn said with heat and power.
"They desecrated . . . I went into the church . . . the altar,
the filth, human filth . . . " Falcon joined them.

"She is speaking now."

"Has she any information?" Quinn asked.

"Ravings. Visions. Again and again she returns to a
hallucination of angels of judgment, angels of retribution, a host of
them, their feet touching the treetops. Gold and silver angels. The
friars and irregular sisters went out to meet them. The angels told
them they had been judged and found wanting. Then they seared the
village with swords of fire. She herself hid beneath the altar when
the angels burned the church around her. The rest were gathered up
and told they had failed and would be descended into slavery."

"Angels?" Quinn asked.

"Her mind is utterly destroyed."

"And yet I am reminded of a legend from Salvador, of the angels
battling in Pelourinho with blades of light. The angels that brought
the horse plague."

"And there is your habit . . . . "

"The Society of Jesus has no habit; our attire is nothing other
than connventional priestly dress; sober, simple, practical."

A dry, cracking cry came from the awning. Quinn hastened to the
Carmelite's side, lifted her head to offer her water from the pewter
mug. Falcon watched him gently sponge the ruined face and clean the
botfly eggs from the suppurating burns. Pity, rage, sorrow,
helplessness—the violence of his emotions, the complexity of
their interactions like patterns in a weave, shocked him.
Brazil,
you madman?
Orsay at the Academy had exclaimed when Falcon had
approached him to fund his expedition.
Greed, vanity, rapacity,
brutality, and contempt for life are vices to all the great nations
of the world. In Brazil they are right virtues and they practice them
with zeal.

Weary and world-sick, Falcon stepped through the chained bodies
pulling at their oars to his hammock reslung in the bow of the ship.
The slaves, the ship, the river and its fugitive peoples, its sacked
aldeias and vain mission churches, were but gears and windlasses in a
vast dark engenho never ceasing, ever grinding, crushing out
commerce. Nation building, the enlightened uplift of native peoples,
the creation of culture, learning, art, were trash: wealth was the
sole arbiter, personal wealth and aggrandizement. No university, not
even a printing press in all of Brazil. Knowledge was the preserve of
noble, queenly Portugal. Brazil was to keep its back bent to the
capstan.