“Steady, I have him I have him … ”
“Aîuba, we cannot yield any more headway,” Juripari said. “Steady, steady … ”
The capitan was clear in his sight. Cut the command off at the head. Falcon squeezed the trigger. The lock closed; the flint flared. Falcon saw the hat fly from the officer’s head into the stream; then glowing slow-matches met touch-holes.
“Down! All down!”
The river flew up around Falcon as if shattered like glass; splinters flew up from the raked gunwales, but the hull held, by Jesus and Mary; the shot bounced from that adamant forest trunk. A sigh; Juripari, endlessly surprised to find the side of his head shot away, slid gently into the river.
“Lighten, lighten!” Caixa commanded in lingua geral. Supplies, water, the second musket, all cartridge and shot but for a sniper’s handful, followed Juriipari. Falcon watched with leaden heart the black water close over his beamiful, precise, civilized instruments. He rolled his journal into a tight cylinder and pushed it into the bamboo tube he had designed for just such a pass: so closely capped as to be watertight, in extremis it might be thrown into the river in the vain hope that it might someday, some year be found and returned to the French Academy of Sciences. The canoe surged forward. Pirogues broke through the drifting bank of powder-smoke and gave chase. Falcon lay prone in the stern, sighting over the gunwale, dissuading the musketeers from incautious fire. Alone in the canoe Caixa’s head was up as she read the varzea for a landmark.
“Cover me!” Caixa shouted. Falcon wiped the spray from his green glasses and let crack at the lead musketeer. The weapon flew from the soldier’s hands, shattered in the lock. Caixa touched a fuse from Falcon’s smolldering pan; with a shriek and rush the signal rocket went up beside his head and burst in brief bright raining stars. Its detonation rolled across the roof of the forest; startled hoatzins plunged clumsily from their roost. The soldiers exchanged hand signals; the two hindmost canoes backed water and turned.
Then two gleaming bolts stabbed out like lightning from either bank and pierced the disengaging canoes through and again. A wavering shriek rose from the canoe on the left bank; a ballista bolt had run an indio paddler through the thigh, a terrible, mortal wound. The water rippled and parted, lines appeared from beneath the surface. Invisible defenders hauled the happless canoes in to shore. The soldiers tried to hack the lines with bayonets, but they were already within the short range of the repeating crossbows. A storm of bolts annihilated the crews; those who leaped into the river to save their souls were run down by bowmen loping along the shore. The soldiers’ thighboots filled with water and dragged them under the black water.
The chase had become a rout, the entrapped canoes circling, firing into the varzea as they tried to withdraw. Twice again Zemba’s ballistas struck, once capsizing an entire canoe. Soldiers and indios alike cried pitifully as the Iguapá hunters waded thigh-deep into the water, shooting them like fish with their poisoned darts. Falcon found his body trembling from the exciteement and the pure, dispassionate efficiency with which Cidade Maravilhosa’s defenders set about destroying their enemies to the last man. Yet Falcon’s exultation was partial, and brief. Even as Zemba’s defenders had repulsed tbe attack by water, raiding parties of indios and caboclo mercenaries had attacked and set torch to the manioc plantations.
The boy poled the pirogue through the trees. An oil lamp, a wick in a clay pot set on the prow, struck reflections from the night-black water. Cayman eyes shone red then sank beneath the surface. Father Luis Quinn stood in the center of the frail skiff; black on darkness, an occlusion. To the boy he seemed to float over the drowned forest. Fragments of voice carried across the water, heated and impatient; the lights of the observatory passed in and our of view as the boy steered among the root buttresses and strangler figs. A fish leaped, splashed, its belly pale.
“Here,” Luis Quinn said softly. The pirogue halted without a ripple.
Quinn stepped into the knee-deep water and waded toward the light and the voices. The observatory had been built on a high point to give an uninterrupted window onto the sky; now it was the only building of any conseequence above water in Cidade Maravilhosa and therefore the natutal conclave for the aîuri. Worlds flickered across Quinn’s vision as he slogged from the water, leaves clinging to his black robe; worlds so close he could touch them, worlds of water. The voices were clear now.
“The revetments will be overtopped by morning,” he heard Zemba’s musical voice say as he entered the observatory.
“God and Mary be with all here.” The aîuri of Cidade Maravilhosa were seated in a democratic circle on the floor of the gteat room, Falcon’s calculations and theorems crawling around them like regiments of ants. Quinn kicked off his saturated leather slippers and took his place among them. The hem of his black robe dripped on to the foot-polished wood. The aldermen crossed themselves.
“This is clearly an artificial phenomenon,” Falcon said in his halting lingua geral Even in the half-light of palm-oil lamps he wore his glasses. Quinn noticed Caixa squatting on her hams in the deeper shadow at the edge of the hut. The waiting woman. “If my expedition had been permitted to continue its planned course, I am in no doubt that we would have encountered a … a … ” He gave the word in French.
“A dam,” Quinn said in the lingua.
“Yes, a dam. It is cleat that the Rio do Ouro has been dammed with the intention of flooding the quilombo and rendering us helpless,” Falcon said. “To construct such an artifact — I have made some calculations as to the size and strength required — requires an army of labor. There is only one person in this vicinity who can set whole populations to work.”
“And set whole populations to war,” Zemba said. He turned to Luis Quinn “Did you see, Mair? Were you there when the Portuguese maggots burned our crops? I had thought we might see you, leading us to battle with the high cross. But I did not see you. Did anyone see the Mair? Anyone here?” Zemba’s young cocks crowed behind him. Quinn hung his head. He had expected the admonition; it was meet and right, but his pride, his damnable, Satanic pride wanted to crow back. He saw a pewter mug in his hand as he had seen it in so many worlds, in those worlds stopped himself from murder and yet in this world nothing could be changed.
“I was… away.” He caught Falcon’s look of surprise. Murmurs sped from mouth to mouth; the aîuri rolled and swayed on their thin kapok-stuffed cushions. Oil flames bent on their wicks as a sudden warm gust possessed the observatory. “You must trust me when I tell you that our troubles here are only part of a greater conflict, a war waged across all worlds and times, so vast that I cannot encompass it.”
“Troubles. Ah, that explains it, then.”
Flames flickered across worlds.
“I cannot explain it to you; I barely apprehend it myself. Nothing is as it seems. Our existence is a veil of illusion, and yet in a thousand worlds, I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood.”
Consternation among the old men, muttered aggressions among the young.
“And among these thousand worlds, did you find an answer?” For all his feathers and finery Zemba seemed diminished, dismissed, desperate to regain some degree of stature before his men. This is when we are our most dangerous , thought Luis Quinn the swordsman, when our pride is broken before our friends. “For if I understand this rightly, the Portuguese capitan’s great guns and Father Diego Gonçalves’s men can sail right over our defenses and annihilate us to the last infant.”