Brasyl (30 page)

"I cannot receive Mass from you, Father Gonçalves."

Again, the coy dip of the head that Quinn understood now concealed
fury.

"Does not your soul crave the solace of the Sacrament?"

"It surely does, and yet I cannot."

"Is it because of the Lady, or because of the hand that gives
it?"

"Father Gonçalves, did you attack and raze a Carmelite
mission and take its people into slavery'"

"Yes." Quinn had expected no worming denial from Father
Diego, yet the flatness of the acknowledgment shocked Quinn as if a
pistol had suddenly been discharged.

"You did this contrary to the act of 1570 prohibiting
enslavement of the indigenous peoples and the rule and example of our
Order?"

"Come, Father, each to his role; you the admonitory, I the
examiner. You are aware what that means?"

"You are empowered to judge and declare Just War against those
who scorn the salvation of Christ's Church. I saw the house of God
burned to the waterline, our brothers and sisters in Christ put to
the sword. I spoke with a postulant, a survivor, dreadfully burned.
Before she died she told me she had seen angels walking on the
treetops, the angels that adorn the masts of this self-consecrated
basilica."

Gonçalves shook his head sorrowfully, as at a woodenly obtuse
schoolboy. "You speak of enslavement; I see liberation. When you
have seen what I have worked for Christ in this place, then presume
to judge me."

Quinn strode from the choir. Day was a plane of blinding white beyond
the door.

"I shall call upon you this evening to begin the examination of
your soul."

Bur Father Gonçalves’s words, thrown after him, hung in
Luis Quinn's memory.

"They were animals, Father. They had no souls, and I gave them
mine." A flicker of lightning momentarily lit the receiving
room. By its brief illumination Quinn saw Father Gonçalves’s
face as he took apart the Governing Engine; the delight and energy,
the pride and intelligence. It had not been the soul of Diego
Gonçalves that had been examined in this hot, high airless
room; it was his own, and it had been found light.
I am of so
little connsequence that you prefer to study a machine
. Now came
the thunder. The cloud line was almost upon them; Luis Quinn felt
warm wind buffet his face. Hands ran to the rigging, reefing sails. A
tap at the door; a lay brother in a white shift.

"Fathers, we have raised the City of God."

Gonçalves looked up from his study, face bright and beaming.

"Now this you must see, Father Quinn. I said you could not
presume to judge me until you had seen my work; there is no better
introduction."

As admonitory and pai climbed by ladders to the balcony above the
portico, the basilica was simultaneously lit by lightning and beaten
by thunder, a rolling constant roar that defeated very word or
thought. Luis Quinn emerged into deluge; the threatened storm had
broken. Such was the weight of the rain Quinn could hardly see the
shore through wet gray, but it was evident that Nossa Senhora cia
Várzea was preparing for landfall. The greater body of the
canoe fleet had fallen back, and now only two remained, big dugouts,
thirty men apiece, each hauling a thigh-thick rope from its bowser
beneath the narthex. Combing otter-wet hair out of his eyes, Quinn
could now discern piers running far into the river; mooring posts,
each the entire trunk of some forest titan sunk hip-deep in mud
rapidly reverting to its proper elemental state. A cross, three times
the height of a man, stood at the highest point of the bank.

The double doors opened, men and women in feather and genipapo
bearing drums, rattles, maracas, reed instruments, and clay ocarinas.
They stood impassive on the steps, the teeming rain running from
their bodies. Father Gonçalves raised a hand. Bells pealed
from the tower, an insane thunder audible even over the punishing
rain. In the same instant, the assembly burst into song. Lightning
backlit the monstrous cross; when his eyes had recovered their
acuity, Quinn saw two streams of people pouring over the top of the
bank, slipping and sliding on the mud and rain-wash, summoned by the
beating bells. Again Gonçalves lifted his hand. Nossa Sennhora
da Várzea shook from narthex to sanctuary as she shipped oars.
Now the shore folk stood waist deep in the water, fighting to seize
hold of the mooring lines. More joined every moment, men and women,
children alike, jamming together on the jetties. The ropes were
handed up to them; the men pulled themselves out of the blood-warm
water to join the effort. Hand over hand, arm by arm, Nossa Senhora
da Várzea was hauled in to dock.

"Come come," Father Diego commanded, darting lightly down
the perrilous rain-slick companionway. Quinn could refuse neither his
childlike delight nor his galvanic authority. Gonçalvesraised
a hand in blessing. The jetties, the piers and canoes, the haulers in
the water and all across the hilllside, went down on their knees in
the hammering rain and crossed themmselves. Then Gonçalvesthrew
up his arms, and choir, tolling bells, thunder, and rain were drowned
out by the roar of the assembled people. The choir fell in behind
him, a crucifix on a pole at their head, a dripping, feather-work
banner of Our Lady of the Várzea at the rear. Quinn hung on
Gonçalves's shoulder as they slogged across the slopping red
mud, canoes running up onto the bank on every side. Bodies were still
pouring over the hill; the steep bank was solid with people.

"Citizens of heaven, subjects of Christ the King,"
Gonçalvesshouted to Quinn. "They come to me as animals,
deceptions in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers
all: Accept his standard and have life in all its fullness, become
men, become souls. Or choose the second standard and accept the
inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel."

Quinn wiped away the streaming water from his face. He stood with
Gonçalves on a rise at the lip of the bank; before him
palm-thatched longhouses ranged in concentric circles across a bare
plain to the distant, rain-smudged tree-line. Remnant palms, cajus,
and casuarinas gave shade, otherwise the city—no mere aldeia
this—was as stark as a sleeping army. At the vacant center rose
a statue of Christ risen, arms outstretched to show the stigmata of
his passion, ten, ten times the height of a man. The smoke of ten
thousand fires rose from the plain. And still people came, mothers
with infants slung from brow straps, children, the old women with
drooping flat breasts, pouting from the malocas into the muddy lanes
between, their feet and shins spattered red. Striped peccaries rooted
in the foot-puddled morass; dogs skipped and quarreled. Parrots
bobbed on bamboo perches.

"There must be forty thousand souls here," Quinn said.

The leaping rain was easing, following the storm front into the
north, set to flight by bells. To the south, beyond the masts and
crowning angels of the floating basilica, shafts of yellow light
broke through curdling clouds and moved across the white water.

"Souls, yes. Guabirú, Capueni, Surara nations—all
one in the Cidade de Deus."

Luis Quinn grimaced at the bitter liquor. The Guabirú boy who
had offered him the gourd cringed away. The storm had passed
entirely, and sun rays piercing as psalms swept the plantation.
Leaves dripped and steamed; a bug kicked on its back in the puddle,
spasming, dying. What Luis Quinn had thought from the purview of the
bank was the edge of the great and intractable forest was the gateway
to a series of orchards and plantations so extensive that Quinn could
see no end to them. Manioc, cane, palm and caju, cotton and tobacco,
and these shady trees that Gonçalves had been so insisstent he
see: Jesuit's Bark, he called them.

"The key that unlocks the Amazon."

"I assume from its bitterness it is a most effective simple
against some affliction. "

"Against the ague, yes, yes; very good, Father. What is it holds
us back from taking full stewardship of this land, as Our Lord grants
us? Not the vile snakes or the heat, not even the animosity of the
indios, though many of them display a childlike enthusiasm for
violence. Sickness, disease, and espeecially the ague of the bad air,
the shivering ague. A simple preparation from the bark of this tree
affords complete cure and immunity, if taken as a reggular draft. Can
you imagine such a boon to the development and exploitation of this
God-granted land? A thousand cities like my City of God; the Amazon
shall be the cornucopia of the Americas. The Spanish have souls only
for gold and so dismissed it as desert, wilderness; they could not
see the riches that grew on every branch and leaf, under their very
steel boots! As well as my Jesuit's Bark there are simples against
many of the sicknesses that afflict us; I have potent analgesics
against all aches and pains, herbal preparations that can treat the
sepsis and even the gangrene if caught early enough; I can even cure
disorders of the mind and spirit. We need not cast out with
superstitious exorcism when a tincture, carefully administered, can
take away the melancholy or the rage and quiet the demons."

Luis Quinn could still taste the bitter desiccation of the
almost-luminous juice on his tongue and lips. A chew of cane would
cleanse it; a good cigar better. He had smelled the curing leaf from
the drying barns, and his heart had beat sharp in want. Now he felt a
fresh cool on his still-wet back; glancing round he saw the sun halo
the giant Christ, its shadow long over him. The mass bell of Nossa
Senhora da Várzea intoned the Angelus; in maloca, field, and
orchard the people went to their knees.

As they returned along the foot-hardened walkways, the field workers
bowing in deference to their Father, Quinn let himself slip down the
march to fall in with Zemba. The swift night was running down the
sky; the shifting layers of air around the river pressed the smoke of
the cook-fires to the ground, dense as fog.

"So friend, is this the City of God you have been looking for?"
Quinn spoke in Imbangala. In the weeks chasing legends up to the
confluence of the Rio Branco, Luis had been fascinated by, and
learned a conversational facility with, Zemba's language. Learn the
tongue, learn the man. Zemba was not so much a name as a title, a
quasi-military rank, a minor princeling betrayed to Portuguese
slavers by a rival royal faction of the N'gola. His letters of
mannumission, sealed by the royal judge of São Luis, were
forgeries; Zemba, he was an escapee from a small lavrador de cana in
Pernambuco who had lived five years in a quilombo before it was
destroyed, as all the colonies of escaped slaves were destroyed, and
ever since had searched for the true City of God, the city of
liberty, the quilombo that would never be overthrown.

"The City of God is paved with gold and needs neither sun nor
moon, for Christ is her light," Zemba said. "Nor soldiers,
for the Lord himself is her spear and shield."

The two-man patrols were ubiquitous; skins patterned in what Quinn
now recognized as the tribal identity of the Guabirú and armed
with skillfully fashioned wooden crossbows, cunningly hinged in the
middle with a magazine atop the action. Quinn recognized the Chinese
repeating crossbow he had encountered in his researches into that
greatest of empires, when he had thought his wished-for task most
difficult might lead him there, rather than to this private empire on
the Rio Branco. Quinn did not doubt that the light wooden bolts
derived much of their lethality from poisons. He murrmured phrases in
Irish.

"Your pardon, Father?"

"A poem in my own language, the Irish.

To go to Rome,

Great the effort, little the gain,

You will not find there the king you seek

Unless you bring him with you.

"There is truth in that." Zemba moved close to Luis Quinn.
"I took my own diversion while the Spanish father showed you the
fields. I looked into one of the huts. You should do that, Father.
And the church, look in the church; down below."

"Father!" Gonçalves called brightly. "Confidence
in Our Lord is surely the mark of a Christian; having seen what I
have shown you, are you with me? Will you help me in my great work?"

Zemba dropped his head and stepped back, but Luis Quinn had caught
the final flash of his eyes.

"What is your work, Father?"

Gonçalves halted, smiling at the ignorance of a lumbering
adult, his hands held our in unconscious mimicry of the great
Christ-idol that dominated his city.

"I take beasts of the field and I give souls to those that will
receive them; what other work is there?"

You seek me to provoke me
, Luis Quinn thought.
You desire
me to react to what I see as arrogance and self-aggrandizement
.
Luis Quinn folded his hands into the still-damp sleeves of his habit.

"I am nearing a judgment, Father Gonçalves. Soon, very
soon, I promise you."

That night he came to the maloca that Diego Gonçalves kept as
his private quarters. Pacas fled from Luis Quinn's feet; Father Diego
knelt at a writing desk, penning by the yellow, odorous glow of a
palm-oil lamp in a book of rag-paper. Luis Quinn watched the
concentration cross Gonçalves's face as his pen creaked over
the writing surface. Ruled lines, ticks, and copperplate, an account
of some kind. Quinn's approach was unseen, unheard; he had always
been quiet, furtive even, for a man of his size.

"Father Diego."

The man did not even start. Had he been aware all the timel Gonçalves
set down the nubbin of quill.

"A judgment by night?"

The prie-dieu was the only solid furniture in this long,
palm-fragrant building. Quinn settled his large frame to kneel on
elaborately appliqued cushions.

"Father Diego, who are those men and women beneath the deck of
the ship?"