Brasyl (50 page)

"Second positions!" he shouted. Beyond the gunboats the
waters were solid with canoes, more canoes than he had ever imagined.
Crown and church had joined their forces not on a mission of
enslavement but of annihilation. "Christ have mercy," he
muttered. Against such odds all he could do, must do, was buy some
little time. "Cover and fire!" he commanded. The line of
gunboats fired again as it advanced through the trees. Trunks
branches twigs flew to splinters and leaves, a deadly storm of
splinters, ripped apart by cannister shot. Sword beating at his side,
Falcon splashed through the thigh-deep water. He glanced up at the
whistle and crash of a salvo of iron-hard wooden balls stabbing
through the canopy. The boy slingers on Hope of the Saints Hill were
firing blind on ballistic trajectories. Cries in Portuguese; the
paddlers raised their wooden shields over their heads. The Manao
beside Falcon took the unguarded moment to turn and loose an arrow at
a cannoneer. A musket spoke, the man spun on his heel, the arrow
skied, he fell back into the leaf-covered water, chest shattered red.
As the gunners reloaded their murderous pieces, Zemba's treetop
snipers opened fire. Warm work they perrformed with their repeating
crossbows, but each story ended the same: blasts of blunderbuss,
clouds of smoke, bodies falling from the trees like red fruit. And
still the boats came on. Falcon looked around him at the bodies
hunched in rhe water, already prey to piranha. less than a quarter of
his archers remained. This was bloody slaughter.

"Retreat!" Falcon yelled. "To the trenches!
Sauve
qui peut
.'"

The canoes moved between the treetops. A biblical scene, Quinn
thought: animals clinging desperately to the very tips of the
submerged trees, each tree an island unto itself, the waters stinking
with the bloated bodies of the drowned. A veritable city must have
stood here to house and feed the workers, their huts the first to go
under the rising water, all trace of the builders erased. Quinn tried
to imagine the hundreds of great forest trees felled to form the
pilings, the thousands of tons of earth moved by wooden tools and
human muscles. A task beyond biblical; of Egyptian proportions.

In the deep under-dawn they had stolen away from the Cidade
Maravillhosa into the tangle of the flood-canopy. Sensed before seen,
like the wind from many worlds stirring the varzea, Quinn had become
aware of a vast dark mass moving beyond the screening branches; oars
rising and falling like the legs of a monstrous forest millipede.
Nossa Senhora de Varzea, forthright in attack, confident in strategy.
Satanic arrogance was yet Father Diego Gonçalves’s
abiding sin. Hunting shadows ran with Our Lady of the Flood Forest,
dark as jaguars in the morning gloaming; a vast train of canoes, the
City of God militant. Quinn pressed his finger to his lips; his
lieutenants understood in a glance. Shipping noisy, betraying paddles
they hauled themselves cautiously along boughs and lianas until the
host of heaven was gone from sight.

Open water before their prow; the dam a dark line between the blue
sky and the green-dotted deeper blue of the flood. The simplicity of
the geommetry deceived the senses: whatever the distance the dam
seemed the same size to the canoes so that Quinn was unable to
estimate its distance. The patrol maintained its position a quarter
league to the south. Quinn had glassed the canoes at range as they
darted out from the green tangle of the southern side of the lake,
light three-man pirogues admirably suited to interception work,
crewed by boys of no more than twelve years of age, painted and
patterned like grown warriors; those grown warriors now assaulting
the Cidade Marravilhosa. They signaled with bright metal. Flashes of
light replied, and the world fell into perspective around Quinn: the
dam was virtually within arrow-shot, the water very much higher than
he had anticipated, almost to the top of the great log pilings.
Figures ran from the palm-leaf shelters set up along the earthen
walls; the first few arrows stabbed into the water around the canoes.
Quinn turned the glass on them: old men, their hunting days past. He
opened his sight to the other worlds, dam upon dam upon dam, all the
water in the worlds mounted up behind them.
Show me, what is best,
what is right, show me the cardinal flaw.
And then he saw it as
clearly as if an angel stood upon the dome of the temple: a point
slightly to the north of the center of the great, gentle bow of earth
and wood where there was a slightly greater gap between the wooden
pilings, the right answer plucked from the universe of all possible
answers.

On Quinn's command the Iguapá archers laid down suppressing
fire while a final croak of encouragement eked the last effort from
the paddlers. The canoes collided with the massive wooden piers. With
a roar Quinn swung up onto the dam and charged the sentries, sword
grasped two-handed. Some of the braver old men hefted their
war-clubs; then age and caution decided and they fled to the southern
end of the dam.

"Let them go," Quinn ordered. "We do not make war on
old men and boys."

While the Iguapá lashed the canoes into a tight raft between
the piers, shifting barrels as close to the structure as possible,
Quinn studied the construction of the dam. The upper surface was
eight paces wide, of clay tamped on wicker hurdles. The earth
rampart, already greening with fecund forest growth, sloped at an
angle of forty-five degrees. The drop to the clay, trickling bed of
the dead Rio do Ouro was ten times the height of man. Again he
marveled at the energy and vision of his adversary. Could any amount
of explosive blast away such massive soil and wood, such
concentration of will and strength? A tiny crack was all that was
needed. The water would accommplish the rest, the incalculable mass
of flood penned league after league up the valley of the Rio do Ouro.

An arrow drove into the clay a span from Quinn's foot. Eight war
canoes had emerged from the southern shore and were stroking fast for
the dam, finding range for their archers.

"I would have been surprised had Father Gonçalves
entrusted the protection of his dam to old men and boys alone,"
Quinn said. "Lay the fuse; there is not a moment to be lost."

The loading was complete. The Iguapá scrambled up onto the
dam; Waitacá plugged the end of a fuse line into the barrel
and reeled it out behind him as Quinn's archers laid down covering
fire. The old men remembered their honor and picked up their
war-clubs for a charge. Quinn and Waitacá ran for the northern
shore: the reinforcements had given up their firing and were now
stroking flat-out for the bomb.

"We must blow it now," Waitacá said.

"We're too close."

"Mair, now or never."

"Lord have mercy," Quinn whispered as he took the carefully
guarded slow-match from the wooden pail and touched it to the end of
the line. The fuse burned in a blink. A stupendous, stupefying blast
knocked Quinn and the Iguapá to the ground. Winded, deafened,
Quinn saw a great wave blow back from the dam and crash against it in
the same instant as a pillar of water leapt up the same height that
the dam stood above the dry riverbed. Dark objects turned and tumbled
in its breaking white crown: war canoes, tossed up as light as leaves
in a forest squall. "Christ have mercy."

Spray drenched Quinn; splinters of wood rained around him. His head
rang from the explosion; his body ached. Slowly he rose to his feet.
On the far side of the dam the old men halted their charge. The
Guabirú boys stood up in their canoes, dumb with astonishment.
Those reinforcements who had survived the blast stroked for their
capsized canoes. The cloud of smoke and steam cleared away. The dam
stood. The world hung; then the old men took up their charge again,
the boys swung round to the aid of the stricken men in the water. The
dam stood.

Dripping from every hem and seam, Falcon threw himself through the
safe gap in the bamboo palisades into the foremost trench. Dry earth
beneath his cheek. Leeches clung to the exposed flesh where his
stockings had rolled down. An Iguapá pagé applied paste
ground from forest bark. Stones, wooden shot, arrows flew overhead in
a constant gale. Then Falcon heard a deeper report from the hilltop
and, leeches to the devil, stood up to see five loads of hot stones
arc over his head and burst in an impressive roar of steam where they
struck among the gunboats. As trebuchets were recranked and fresh
stones heated in the hilltop fires, the ballistas spoke, spears of
fire stabbing out at the canoes. Falcon had devised the adhesive
coating of resins and gums: a dreadful threat to gunboats heavy with
shot and powder. Those so struck battled beneath a withering fire of
slingshots and poison barbs to extinguish the clinging fire; when a
gunboat blew up, a cheer rang around the hill, and a second when the
swivel-guns retreated into the cover of the varzea, there to lay down
a steady bombardment of Zemba's artillery.

Falcon worked his way uphill through the linked trench-lines, past
battalions of grim-faced boys; gold-faced, strange-skulled 1guapá;
Caibaxé with lip-plates, though they were too young to have
undergone the formal rites of manhood, war makes any boy a man; the
Manaos, their foreheads and crowns shaved into a singular tonsure.
Each clutched a spear and wooden knife, waiting, waiting for the word
from Zemba's Imbangala lieurenants. Falcon threw himself to the
earth, hands clutched around his shaven head, as fresh bombard came
screaming in. He felt the hilltop quake through his belly; blind,
primal panic, what to clasp hold of when the earth itself shakes?

A dulled roar of voices from behind him; the war-rejoicing of the
Guabirú. Pushing his green glasses up his nose, Falcon saw the
hilltop in ruin; a trebuchet smashed, two ballistas burning. Yet
Zemba's artillerists spoke again; hot stone plunged down through the
leaf canopy, and now the heavy bowmen opened up, lying on their
backs, bow braced against feet, bowstring hauled back with all the
strength of two arms.

Zemba himself waited with his reserves and the cross of Our Lady of
All Worlds in the trench-line beneath the battery. A constant chain
of girl-runners darted in and out of his position, bearing reports,
carrying his orders.

"Aîuba."

"General, the water is still rising. The foremost positions will
be inundated within the hour."

"I am aware of it. You suggest that the Mair has failed?"

"I suggest only that we evacuate the women and children, the
old, the sick and halt, while the way is still open."

"They will surely perish in that forest."

"They will surely perish here. This is no entrada. This is
destruction."

Zemba hesitated but an instant.

"Evacuate the women and children."

His runners, crouching at his feet, bowed their heads to concentrate
on his orders. Falcon zigzagged downslope to the trench to give the
word to Caixa and her command.

"I will not desert you," she said fiercely. The women and
smallest chilldren quit the trench, the infants tear-streaked,
wailing past all fear. "You need someone to watch over you."

A new mortar barrage punished the hill. The smoke and dust cleared,
and there was silence from the battery. A great cry came from the
hilltop. Zemba stood, spear raised, the cross of Nossa Senhora do
Todos os Mundos lifted high behind him, burning in the sun. Falcon
turned to see canoes push out from the deep forest. There was not
clear water between the hulls, so many were they; Portuguese in buff
and blood, the genipapo-stained skins of the Guabirú. The
gunboats laid down a suppressing bombardment, but the cry sounded
again and was taken up by the Imbangala captains and iâos, the
morbichas and the pagés, by Caixa beside him, and then by
Falcon himself as he drew his sword and went over the top of the
trench, roaring down to meet the enemy.

Quinn stood senseless as a plaster saint. This was a world he had
never traveled to before: the muted, desperate land beyond the battle
song, beyond the glorious rage and the joy of the fight and of
holding a life in his two hands, and the breaking of that life. This
was defeat. This was failure; a quiet, ashen world. True humility and
obedience, where the knee is bowed to the inevitable, the ring is
kissed without pride or restraint. He gazed, thoughtless, heedless of
the falling arrows, at the dam. Then there came a shriek like the
teeth of the world being pulled. A tremor ran across the surface of
the lake, another, a third, a fourth. Massive trunks of forest
hardwood, adamant as iron, snapped with explosive force. Quinn felt
the dam shake beneath his feet. Cracks opened in the clay roadway;
the tops of the reinforcing piles leaned back toward the water.

"Mair, I think ... " Waitacá did not need to
complete the warning.

Quinn, Iguapá, old men, boys in their little canoes fled as a
twenty-pace section of the dam tilted into the lake and burst in a
jetting plume of foaming water. Smashed tree trunks were tossed like
twigs; with every second the rush of water tore away more earth and
wood. The gap became a chasm as whole sections of dam broke free and
slid into the fall.

"The men; mother of worlds, the men!" Waitacá cried.
The capsized Guabirú tried to strike for the shore, for the
upturned canoes, for the disintegrating dam itself, but the torrent
was too strong. Their cries joined with the crash of rending timbers
and the roar of water as they were swept under and sent spinning out
in the crushing mill of wood and earth. Quinn whispered a prayer and
kissed the cross of his rosary; then the earth beneath his feet
cracked and fissured and he ran for the northern bank. Behind him the
dam split loose, pivoted, and slid down the scarp face, breaking into
great clods and piles of clay-clogged wicker. The dam was now one
great waterfall, the lake a millrace of torn branches and dead
creatures, the riverbed beneath a bounding cream-white torrent. Boles
of wood burst from the surface like rockets only to tumble end for
end and be dragged under again, the flood scouring bushes and trees
from the shore. The Rio do Ouro was tearing a new channel from the
varzea; now the very boulders were stripped from the soil to join the
destroying wall of water and wood.