Brasyl (24 page)

"Luis. Luis Quinn."

A voice, through the brilliant, lordly rage. For an instant Luis
Quinn considered turning and using this blade, this divine, hellish
edge on the tiny, whining voice that dared to deny him, imagined it
curting and cutting until there was nothing left but a stain. Then he
saw the houses and the doors and windows close around him, felt the
thatch stroking his shoulders, the man beneath his blade, the
helpless, ridiculous man and the glorious fear in his eyes above the
masking kerchief.
In the last instant before you face eternity you
still maintain your disguise
, he thought.

"Fly!" Luis Quinn thundered. "Fly!"

The assailant crabbed away, found his
feet, fled. Quinn pushed past the pale, shaken Falcon and descended
to the jetty where moments—it seemed an age in the gelid time
of fighting he knew so well from the dueling days—before they
had been dickering with the canoe feitores. A marveling look at the
blade—no shop in Brazil had ever made such a thing—and he
flung it with all might out over the heads of the canoemen into the
river. His ribs ached from the effort: had the angelic knife left an
arc of blue in its wake, a wound in the air? Now Falcon was at his
side.

"My friend, I seem to have outstayed my welcome."

The church was death-dark, lit only by the votives at the feet of the
patrons and the red heart of the sanctuary lamp, but Falcon was
easily able to find Quinn by following the trail of cigar smoke.

"In France it would be considered a sin most heinous to smoke in
a church."

"I see no vice in it." Quinn stood leaning against the
pulpit; a vertiginous affair clinging high to the chancel wall like
the nest of some forest bird, dizzy with painted putti and
allegorical figures. "We honor the cross with our hearts and
minds, not our inhalations and exhalations. And do we not drink wine
in the most holy of places?"

The stew of the Rio Negro day seemed to roost in the church. Falcon
was hot, oppressed, afraid. Twice now he had seen the rage of Luis
Quinn.

"Your absence was noted at supper."

"I have a set of exercises to complete before I continue my
task."

"I told them as much."

"And did they note the attack at the landing today?"

"They did not."

"Strange that in so contained a town as São José
the friar has nothing to say about a deadly assault on a visiting
admonitory." Quinn examined the dying coal of his cigar and
neatly ground it to extinction on the tiled floor. "There is
wrong here so deep, so strongly rooted, that I fear it is beyond my
power to destroy it."

'''Destroy,' that is a peculiarly martial word for a man of faith."

"Mine is a martial order. Do you know why I was chosen as
admonitory in Coimbra?"

"Because of your facility with languages. And because, forgive
me, you have killed a man."

Quinn snapped our a bark of a laugh, flattened and ugly in his
uncommon accent.

"I suppose that is not so difficult a surmise. Can you also
surmise how I killed that man?"

"The obvious deduction would be in the heat and passion of a
satisfaction."

"That would be the obvious deduction. No, I killed him with a
pewter drinking tankard. I struck him on the side of the head, and in
his helplessness I set upon him and with the same vessel beat the
life from his body, and beyond that, until not even his master could
recognize him. Do you know who this man was?"

Falcon felt his scalp itch beneath his wig in the stifling heat of
the church. "From your words, a servant. One of your own
household?"

"No, a slave in a tavern in Porto. A Brazilian slave, in truth,
an indio; recalling now his speech, I would guess a Tupiniquin. The
owner had made his fortune in the colony and retired with his
household and slaves to the Kingdom. He did not say much to me, only
that he had been instructed to refuse me any further drink. So before
all my friends, my good drinking and fighting friends, I took up the
empty tankard and struck him down. Now, can you guess why I gave
myself to the Society of Jesus?"

"Remorse and penance of course, not merely for the murder—let
us not bandy words, it was nothing less—but because you were of
that exalted class that can murder with impunity."

"All that, yes, but you have missed the heart of it. I said that
mine was a martial order: the discipline, friend, the discipline.
Because when I murdered that slave—I do not choose to bandy
words either—do you know what I felt? Joy. Joy such as I have
never known before or since. Those moments when I have taken or
administered the Sacrament, when I pray alone and I know I am caught
up by the Spirit of Christ, even when the music stirs me to tears:
these are not even the faintest echoes of what I felt when I took
that life in my hands and tore it out. Nothing, Falcon, nothing
compares to it. When I went out, in my fighting days, I merely
touched the hem of it. It was a terrible, beautiful joy, Falcon, and
so so hard to give up."

"I have seen it," Falcon said weakly. The heat—he
could not breathe, the sweat was trickling down the nape of his neck.
He removed his wig, clutched it nervously, like a suitor a nosegay.

"You have seen nothing," Quinn said. "You understand
nothing. You never can. I asked for a task most difficult; God has
granted me my desire, but it is greater and harder than Father James,
than anyone in Coimbra, ever imagined. Father Diego Gonçalves
of my Society came to this river twelve years ago. His works the
apostles themselves might envy; whole nations won for Christ and
pacified, the cross for two hundred leagues up the Rio Branco,
aldeias and reduciones that were shining beacons of what could be
achieved in this bestial land. Peace, plenty, learning, the right
knowledge of God and of his Church—every soul could sing, every
soul could read and write. Episcopal visitors wrote of the beauty and
splendor of these settlements: glorious churches, skilled people who
gave their labor freely, not through coercion or slavery. I have read
his letters on the ship from Salvador to Belém. Father Diego
applied to the provincial for permission to set up a printing press:
he was a visionary man, a true prophet. In his petition he included
sketches of a place of learning, high on the Rio Branco, a new city—a
new Jerusalem, he called it, a university in the forest. I have seen
the sketches in the College library at Salvador; it is sinfully
ambitious, maniacal in its scale: an entire city in the Amazon. He
was refused of course."

"Portugal's colonial policy is very clear; Brazil is a
commercial adjunct, nothing more. Continue, pray."

"After that, nothing. Father Diego Gonçalves sailed from
this fort seven years ago into the high lands beyond the Rio Branco.
Entradas and survivors of lost bandeiras told of monstrous
constructions, entire populations enslaved and put to work. An empire
within an empire, hacked out of deep forest. Death and blood. When
three successive visitors sent from Salvador to ascertain the truth
of these rumors failed to return, the Society applied for an
admonitory. "

"Your mission is to find Father Diego Gonçalves."

"And return him to the discipline of the Order, by any means."

"I fear that I understand your meaning too well, Father."

"I may murder him if necessary. That is your word, isn't it? By
rumor alone he has become a liability to the Society. Our presence in
Brazil is ever precarious. "

"Kill a brother priest."

"My own Society has made me a hypocrite, yet I obey, as any
soldier obeys, as any soldier must."

Falcon wiped sweat from his neck with his blouse sleeve. The smell of
stale incense was intolerably cloying. His eyes itched.

"Those men who attacked us: do you believe they were Father
Diego's men?"

"No; I believe they were in the hire of that same father with
whom you dined so well so recently. He is too greasy and well fed to
be much of a plotter, our Friar Braga. I questioned him after the
Mass; he lies well and habitually. The wealth of the Carmelites has
always been founded on the red gold; I suspect their presence is only
tolerated here because they descend a steady supply of slaves to the
engenhos."

"Do you believe he could be responsible for the destruction of
the boatttown?"

"Not even the Carmelites are so compromised. But I am not safe
here; you, my friend, enjoy some measure of protection through your
crown misssion. I am merely a priest, and in this latitude priests
have always been disspensable. We leave in the morning, but I will
not return to the Colegio, not this night."

"Then I shall watch and wait with you," Falcon declared.

"I would caution against spending too much time in my company.
But at the least leave me your sword."

"Gladly," Falcon said as he removed his weapon belt and
handed it, buckles ringing, to Quinn. "I could wish that you had
not thrown that uncommon knife into the river."

"I had to," Quinn said, lifting the sheath into the
sanctuary light to work out its character and feel. "It was a
wrong thing. It scared me. Go now; you have been here too long. I
shall watch and pray. I so desire prayer: my spirit feels sullied,
stained by compromise."

Light on the black water; a million dapple-shards brilliant in the
eastering sun that sent a blade of gold along the river. The far bank
was limned in light, the shore sand bright yellow; though over a
league distant, every detail was pin sharp, every tree in the forest
canopy so distinct Falcon could distinguish the very leaves and
branches. The pandemoniac bellowing of red howler monkeys came clear
and full to his ears. Falcon stood a time at the top of the river
steps blinking in the light, shading his eyes with his hand against
the vast glare; not even his green eyeglasses could defeat so
triumphant a sun. The heat was rising with the morning, the insects
few and torpid; he hoped to be out in the deep stream by the time
both became intolerable. But this moment was fresh and clean and
new-minted, so present that all the terrors and whisperings of the
night seemed phantoms, and Falcon wanted to stretch it to its last
note.

Quinn was already in his canoe. The Jesuit, a smallpox-scarred Indio
in mission whites, and an immense, broad black were its entire crew.
The remainder of the pirogue was filled with Quinn's manioc and
beans. Falcon's much larger fleet rocked on the dazzling ripples: a
canoe with awning for the geographer, three for his staff, five for
his baggage, a further three for their supplies, all well manned with
Silo José Manao slaves.

"A great grand morning, thanks be to God!" Quinn called out
in French. "I cannot wait for the off."

"You travel light," Falcon remarked as he descended the
steps. The river had fallen farther in the night; planks had been
hastily laid across the already-cracking mud, but there were still a
few oozing, sinking footsteps through the mud to the canoe. "Is
this the best the fabled Jesuit gold can purchase?"

"Light and fast, please God," Quinn said in Portuguese now.
"And sure the paddles of three willing men are worth a whole
fleet of pressed slaves."

The black man grinned broadly. Determination set in his face, Falcon
picked his way up the rocking canoe to his seat in the center under
the cotton awning. He could feel the silent derision of his crew, the
more audible laughter of Quinn's small outfit, in the flush of his
face. He settled delicately into his wicker seat, the sunshade hiding
him from insects and scorn. Falcon raised his handkerchief.

"Away then."

The golden river broke into coins of light as the paddles struck and
pulled. Falcon gripped the sides as the bow-water climbed the flanks
of the canoe. A moment's fear, then his fleet fell in around him,
paddlers slipping into unconscious unison, an arrow formation curving
out into the Rio Negro. Quinn's smaller, lighter craft, frail as a
leaf on water, surged ahead. Falcon noticed how easily Quinn's
massive frame, despite the terrible blow it had sustained so
recently, learned the paddle's rhythms. Falcon could not resist the
infantile urge to wave his kerchief to him. Quinn returned the
acknowledgment with a wide, careless grin.

Time vanished with the rolling stream; when Falcon glanced back
around the side of his shade, São José Tarumás
had dropped from view behind a turn of the stream so subtle that it
had been beneath even his trained regard, so vast that the walls of
green seemed to close behind him. Against will and reason, Falcon
found the spirit of the river entering him. It maniifested itself as
stillness, a reluctance to move, to lift any of the instruments he
had set in his place to measure the sun and space and time, to engage
in any action that might send thought and will rippling out across
the black water. The calls of birds and canopy beasts, the splash of
river life, the push and drip of the paddles and the hum of the water
against the hull, all seemed to him parts of a greater chorale the
sum of which was an enormous, cosmoological silence. The still spires
of smoke from across the green canopy, the riverside settlements, the
squat thatched cones of churches, their wooden crosses erect before
them, the frequent river traffic that hailed and waved and smiled-all
were as far from him as if painted in aquarelle on paper and Falcon
were a drip of rain running down the glass. His hands should be
meassuring, his hands should be sketching, mapping, annotating; his
hands gripped the sides of the canoe, river-tranced, hour after hour.

Quinn's hail broke the spell. His pirogue had drawn ahead, hour on
hour, until it seemed a mosquito on the surface of the water. Now,
where the channel divided into a braid of marshy islets and eyots, he
bade his steersman turn across the current and waited in midstream.
As he drifted toward Falcon's phalanx, Quinn raised his paddle over
his head in his two hands and thrust it into the air three times. On
the instant every paddler in Falcon's fleet put up his oar. Impetus
lost, the inexorable hand of the Rio Negro took the boats, checked
them, turned them, scattered their line of order into chaos.