“The camp!” Zemba cried in a huge voice. “Is this the camp of the Frenchman Falcon?”
“I am he,” Falcon shouted.
“I require assistance; I have a sick man aboard.”
Look for me by the mouth of the Rio Branco.
Falcon plunged into the river as Zemba steered the canoe in to shore.
Luis Quinn lay supine in the bottom. His exposed skin was cracked and blisstered by the sun; the seeps and sores already flyblown and crawling. But he was alive, alive barely; his eyelids flickered; rags of loose skin trembled on his lips to inhalations so shallow it did not seem possible they could sustain life.
“Help me, help me with him, get him up to the shelter,” Falcon commanded as the canoe was run up on to the shore. “Careful with him now, careful you donkeys. Water; get me clean water to drink. Lint and soft cotton. Careful now. Yes, Luis Quinn, you have found me.”
“What world is this?”
Dr. Robert Falcon set down his pen on his folding desk. The tent glowed with the light of clay oil lamps; fragrant bark smoldering in a burner repelled those insects that had infiltrated through flaps and vents. Those outside, drawn helpless to the light, beat mechanically, senselessly, against the stretched fabric, each impact a soft tick. On the long nights he had sat vigil by the hammock Falcon had imagined himself trapped inside a monstrous, moth-powered clock: a great Governing Engine.
“Might I say, Father Quinn, that is a most singular question. What day is it, where am I — that would not be unexpected. Even, who are you? Bur ‘What world is this?’ That I have never heard.”
Luis Quinn laughed weakly, the laugh breaking into dry, heaving coughing. Falcon was at his side with the water sack. When he had half the bag down him, swigging immoderately, Quinn said, voice croaking, “You certainly sound like the learned Dr. Falcon I recall. How long?”
“You have been fever-racked for three days.”
Quinn tried to sit up. Falcon’s hand on his chest lightly but irresistibly ordered him down.
“They will be here, he is coming, he’s very near.”
“You are safe. Zemba has told me all. We are beyond the reach of your Nossa Senhora da Várzea, though I admit I should be intrigued to see such a prodigy.”
A flash, like lightning in the skull. A moment of lucidity, Zemba running the canoe out into the dark water and lying in the bottom as the current carried it away from Nossa Senhora da Várzea. “I have you, Pai, you will be safe.” Staring up into the starry dome, past exhaustion, past sanity, the black filling with stars, and then constellations appearing behind those constellations and ones beyond that, and beyond that, black night filling up with alien constellations until it blazed, more and still more stars until the night was white and he was not staring up into forever but falling facedown toward the ever-brightening light, infinite light. Quinn cried out. Falcon took his hand. It was yet fever-dry, thin as parchment.
Three days, working with Zemba to dress the burns with paste the Manaos prepared from forest leaves, removing blowflies one by one with botanical forceps, bathing sweating brows and shivering lips, forcing spastic jaws open to pour in thin, poor soup or herbal mate to see it moments later spewed up in a stream, hoping that some fragment of good had gone out from it. Water, always water, more water, he could not have enough water. Nights of fevered ravings, shrieking demons and hallucinations, prophecies and stammerings until Falcon thought he must stop his ears with wax like Odysseus or go mad.
“It has always been so,” Zemba said as they bound Quinn’s hands to the hammock ropes with strips of cotton to stop the priest putting out his own eyes. And then the roaring ceased, that silence the most terrifying, when Falcon crept to the hammock not knowing if sanity or death had claimed Quinn.
“Zemba … ”
“Outside, waiting.”
“He saved me. There are not thanks enough for him … Listen Falcon, listen to me. I must tell you what I have seen.”
“When you are rested and stronger.” But Quinn’s grip as he seized Falcon’s arm was strong, insanely strong.
“No. Now. No one ever survived; this may not be the end of it. I may yet succumb, God between us and evil. This may be only a moment of lucidity. Oh Christ, help me!”
“Water, friend, have more water.” Zemba entered with a fresh skin; together the two men helped Quinn drink deep and long. He lay back in the hammock, drained.
“For a hundred leagues along the Rio Branco the emblem of the Green Lady is an object of dread, the Green Lady, and the Jesuit dress. My own black robe, Falcon. He has made a desert land, the villages empty, rotting; the plantations overgrown, the forest reclaiming all. All gone; dead, fled, or taken to the City of God, or the block in São José Tarumás. The friars at São José said nothing; that is their price. Plague is his herald, fire his vanguard: whole nations have retreated into the igapó and the terra firme only to be annihilated to the last child by the diseases of the white men. But he sees the hand of God; the red man must be tried by the white, must grow strong or perish utterly from the world.
“From the City of God to the Rio Catrimani is five days, and eight farther to the Iguapára. I had not thought there could be so much water in all the world. Endless, empty forest, with only the voices of the beasts for commpany. Manoel had passed into a silent, trancelike state of introspection; even the Guabirú guards were mute. I have heard that the indios may will themmselves to stop living and very soon pass into a melancholic decline and die. Many have chosen to escape that way from slavery. I believe Manoel was on the edges of that state; such were the rumors of what the Iguapá would work upon us.
“The Iguapá are a nation of seers and prophets; pagés and caraibas. They are consulted only on matters of the gravest import and they are never wrong. Thus they have lived a thousand years unmolested by war, famine, or disease. Their legend is that by Amazonian forest drugs they are able to see every posssible answer to the supplicant’s question and so select the true. But the price is terrible indeed. Very soon after the climax of the ritual trance the caraiba descends into confusion, then to full hallucination and a final collapse into insanity and death. They see too much. They try to understand, they overballance, they fail, they fall … I outrun myself. At such a price, the Iguapá do not sacrifice their own. No, their prophets are prisoners of war, hostages, rivals, criminals, outcasts. And of course the black priests of an alien, ineffectual faith. What is our weak prayer, our unseen hope, our whimsical miracles, compared with their iron certainty of the truth, that there is an answer and they will always know it? We could ask them about the mysteries of our God and faith, and they would answer truly. Dare we ask that? Dare we let it darken our imaginations?
“For five days we camped at the designated shore, leaving the signs and markers, invisible to me but as obvious to a native of these forests as a church cross to a European. When you have need of them, they will come to you. On the sixth day they came. They were wary; they have always been jealous with their secrets, but in this time of dying and vast migrations through the várzea they have grown more cautious. Like spirits out of the forest, so silent they were among us, their arrow-points at our hearts, before we knew it. I did not think they were of this world, so uncanny was their appearance: their faces shone gold; they habitually apply the oil of a forest nut they call urocum, and their foreheads, which they shave almost to the crown, slope sharply backward to resemble the shape of a boat. They bind the skulls of their infants with boards and leather while they are still soft and malleable. Manoel and I were bound and led by the hand; the Guabirú guides blindfolded. Their interpreter, a man named Waitacá, told me this was a recent courtesy: the eyes of all but the questioner would have formerly been put out with splinters of bamboo. We of course were never expected to return capable of speech.