“Now you offend me,” Falcon flared. “Now this is indeed madness. If I had a piece I would pistol you so that your insanity should not infect others. Airily you claim to breeze between worlds and histories, by whim, by thought, by will-o’-the-wisp or fiery chariot, and with a wave of your hand my world is abolished; rationality, scientific inquiry, the knowability and preedictability of the physical world merely a tissue of illusion over a void of… magic. Divine fiat, the power of word and thought over mundane reality.”
“But, Falcon, Falcon, what if that is what the world is made from? Word and thought?”
Falcon slapped the center pole of the hut. “This is real, Quinn. This is reality.” Quinn smiled weakly. “If the simulacrum were detailed enough, how would we ever know?”
“Oh, for the love of God!” Falcon leaped to his feet. Golden faces looked in at the door, withdrew at Falcon’s hostile glare. “The water is up again. That is what I came to tell you. I want to take a canoe and a party of my Manaos away from the cidade.”
“Talk to Zemba. He is protector of the cidade.”
“I desire to talk to you. I desire you to ask me why I want a canoe and a party, why I want to investigate the rising water. You have become remote, distant, aloof, Quinn. You have set colonels and counselors between yourself and me, Luis; between yourself and your people.”
The bark curtain over the door twitched. Zemba entered, his skin glossy wet from the rain.
“Is all well here?”
“Nothing has occurred here,” Falcon said. “I was merely telling Father Quinn that I am taking a reconnaissance party onto the river to investigate the rising water.”
“All such applications must be made to me as chief of security.”
Falcon bristled.
“I am not your slave. Good evening, sir.”
Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon: Expedition Log 8th August 1733
Often I feel that the only important feature of my journal is the date in the heading. Too easily the days slip into an eternal present; without past, facing a future indistinguishable from now, disconnected from human history. But surely the first duty of a chronicler is to establish his own history within the greater flow of time. So I write 8th August 1733 and rejoin common humanity.
How good it is to be abroad on the river, in a ten-man canoe with Juripari before me, Caixa at my back, and all the vegetable riches of the Rio do Ouro arrayed before me. Cidade Maravilhosa had become oppressive and hostile; not in the physical sense — that would not be tolerated, not even from Zemba and his military claque — but to my qualities, my profession, my beliefs. The City of Marvels is a City of Blind Faith. I had believed in the aîuri, that wise body of indio morbichas and ebomis from the escaped black community, to steer the community sanely and sagely, but it has been filled with pages and young warriors under Zemba’s sway. A council where older and more careful heads — I count myself among them — are shouted down by the zeal of young males is not beneficial to the community.
This is the fifth day of the expedition, and we are now running downstream. At good speed and in good heart we set off from the cidade and made twenty leagues a day upriver, taking us into the high Rio do Ouro beyond the exploration of any Paulista bandeira. Here are indio nations that have never seen a white face before, yet the canoe parties we encountered — Juripari found a simplified Waika could effect basic communiication — knew of the Marvelous City and the great caraiba who walked between worlds.
I was initially nonplussed to find the levels on the Alta Rio do Ouro to be lower that at Cidade Maravilhosa, the precise reverse of what one would expect for a flood descending from the headwaters. But the scientist, in the face of conflicting facts and theory, always modifies theory to reality. A set of measurements taken below the cidade will confirm if the river is filling from the lower courses. I have one set of measurements now, from a point some three leagues beneath the quilombo as drawn on my rudimentary chart of the Rio do Ouro fluvial system — some fifteen as the river wends — and they seem to support my general hypothesis. A second set taken at tonight’s camp will put the seal on it…
“Aîuba!”
Over floods and centuries the Rio do Ouro, rounding a prominent ridge, had eroded a wide bow, almost a bay. Falcon’s canoe cut close to the bluff, doubled the point, and found itself bow to bow with a fleet. Falcon saw paddles, bright brass, the glint of sun from steel, plumed hats.
“Scarlet and buff!” he cried. “Portuguese soldiers!”
The Manaos swiftly, sweetly reversed their seating in the canoe, dug at the water with their paddles. Falcon’s smaller, lighter craft could outpace the heavily laden war canoes, but there was headway to be lost; and as he came about and seized his own paddle to lend his speed to the craft, the pursuers bent to their blades. The chase was on. A dull pop, little louder than a musket, and a plume of water flew up some paddle-lengths to the left of the canoe. Another, and Falcon saw the ball pass with fluttering howl and bounce three times from the water before vanishing.
“Paddle for your lives!” Falcon shouted. He slipped the glass out of his pocket. Six swivel guns bow-mounted in heavy, thirty-man war canoes. As he glassed the soldiery — a dozen colonial infantry in each of the lead boats, dress coats patched and mold-stained after weeks on the river-the swivel gun spoke again. The ball bounced from the river in a splash of spray that soaked Falcon and cleared the canoe between ]uripari and a Manao deserter called Ucalayf. A narrow target and the flat trajectory over which the Portuguese were firing had served thus far, but soon the gunners would load shot rather than ball and make murder of them.
“Caixa! The muskets.”
She was already rodding the first of the two pieces that Falcon had kept sacrosanct from Zemba’s requisitioners. A woman of skills is a pearl beyond price. Falcon drew on the red-and-gold division flag in the stern of the center war canoe. Before it sat an officer in dress uniform, his tricorn hat edged with feathers, grimly gripping the sides of the canoe. Falcon recognized Capitan de Araujo of the Barro do São José do Rio Negro. A simple shot, but Falcon lets his sight slide forward to the buff-coated gunner bent over his piece in the bow.
“Steady, hold her steady!” It was a delicate calculus; the cease-paddling made the shot surer but necessarily brought them into the range to the musskets of the colonial infantry. At his earliest clear shot Falcon discharged in a crack and cloud of smoke. Zemba’s cartridges answered truly. The gunner jerked and went down into the floor of the war canoe, shot clean through the crown of the head. A roaring jeer went up from the pursuers; the body was rolled without let or ceremony into the river. Full five swivel guns replied, their shots falling all around the canoe, some so close water slopped into the dugout. The paddlers bent to their task; dark river water peeled away from the bow. Caixa handed Falcon the second musket and reloaded the discharged piece. The musketeers in the indio canoes were risking longer shots now, at extreme range and wildly inaccurate but sufficient to keep Falcon off his aim. And it was as he had feared: rounds of canister shot were being handed down the length of the gunboats.