“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.