Quinn scrambled up the buttress of earth that joined the dam to the high terra firme. He felt Falcon’s bamboo cylinder pressed next to his bosom. Quinn withdrew it, weighed it in his hand. He imagined it in the shatter of the great flood, that flood in time subsiding, the cylinder bobbing unregarded among the greater bulks of the forest trees, Rio do Ouro to Iguapáni, Iguapáni to Catrimani, to Rio Branco, to Rio Negro, to Amazonas. To the sea, on the currents to the shores of Ireland or the coast of Portugal, wavelets rolling it up a white strand. More to tell in this story. He slid the rube inside his black robe.
Canoes had been beached on this earthen ramp, run up above the floodline, light pirogues.
“Waitacá, would it be possible to make headway against the flood?”
Waitacá studied the river, the flow changing with every second as Father Gonçalves’s dam was scoured away.
“It could be done through the varzea, with caution.”
“I have need of speed.”
“It could be done with both of those.”
“Very good, then. Waitacá, I have need of your help at the paddle. I still have an admonishment to visit upon Father Diego Gonçalves.”
Soldiers’ boots, the bare feet of indios splashed into the water as the canoes ran through the flooded stake-lines onto the shore. Archers threw away their bows, took their knives in their hands to grapple hand to hand with the attackers. The hillside was a landslide of yelling, whooping indio bodies part running, part slipping, part falling in their charge; Zemba at their head, flinging light javelins as he charged, more airborne than earthbound as he leaped over bodies and half-filled trenches. And among them, Dr. Robert Falcon, sword held out ahead of him like a cuirassier’s blade, screaming hate and obscenities never to be thought of a Fellow of the French Academy.
The two lines met with a shock that quailed Hope of the Saints Hill to its roots. Falcon found himself sword to bayonet with a charging Portuguese infantryman. He sidestepped and cut the man’s legs from under him. Caixa finished the work with her spear. Falcon threw her the bladed musket, took the man’s sword for himself. As he tested its weight and mettle, a Guabirú spearman lunged out of nowhere: Caixa caught him full on her bayonet, twisted the musket. The man gave a terrible wailing shriek and slid from her blade. She nodded in approval.
Two-bladed, Falcon did a demon’s work along the front line, cutting halfway to the enemy’s battle standard of a naked woman entwined in green, but for every man who fell three sprang up and more canoes packed in behind those run onto the shore, indio conscripts in half-uniform — a jacket, breeches, sometimes only a tricorn hat — running lightly from hull to hull to leap into the fight. And still the water rose.
Zemba led the nation like some relentless forest legend; the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds surged across the battlefront, a daring drive here, a feint and full-blooded attack there. But Out Lady of the Flood Forest commanded the waters, and the attackers were a red tide. The City of God drove the City of Marvels back across the first and second trenches. Beyond all thought, all reason, all language, Dr. Robert Falcon worked wrath and slaughter with his twin blades, and it was good. It was very good. He knew Luis Quinn’s abiding sin in all its ecstasy and horror. To be so present within the moment and one’s skin, the immediate and imperious liveliness of all the senses, the precipice of every second wherein one might kill or die, the luxury of such complete control over another. The Art of Defense, even the foot-boxing tricks he had learned from the waterfront men, were pale eunuchs of the ecstasy of battle.
Feathers waving upon the bloody hillside. Blood and buff and a shining sword.
“Araujo!” Falcon called through the clatter of war. “Now you shall have your contest.”
The colonial officer ran to meet him as Falcon threw down his second, looted sword. Abruptly Araujo pulled up, whipped a pistol out of his sash of office. And Caixa was there between Falcon and the ball. A discharge, a gust of smoke, and Caixa went tumbling headlong. French, Portuguese, lingua geral, Iguapá — Falcon’s shouts were incoherent. Caixa rose unsteadily to her feet, then grinned and opened her left hand to show her bloody stigmata where the ball had passed through.
“Kill him, husband!”
Araujo flung the useless pistol at Falcon, who deftly sidestepped. Falcon spread his hand in invitation, then dropped into the stance. Araujo saluted and returned the attitude. A new round of mortar fire howled down onto the hilltop, but nothing remained there but shattered flesh and wood. Falcon feinted, then attacked. Araujo, for all his European airs, was no practitioner of the Art of Defense. In five moves Falcon had sent his blade whirling away across the red earth and the Portuguese captain found a sword-point at his chest.
“Senhor, as a fidalgo to a fidalgo, I cast myself on your mercy.”
“Senhor, alas, I am no fidalgo,” Falcon said, and ran him cleanly through in one lunge.
A tumult from downslope; Falcon glanced up from cleaning his sword on Araujo’s coat to see the great cross of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos teetering madly in the center of a ring of Portuguese indio-conscripts. Zemba leaped and whirled, his spear and hide shield dashing and darting. Men fell, men reeled away bloody and ripped, but every moment more piled in. Falcon ran, sword ready. He could feel Caixa at his back, her wounded hand bound in Araujo’s neckcloth, her spear held underhand to stab up into an enemy’s bowels. Terrible, wondrous woman. The cross wavered, the cross went down, then Zemba snatched it up again, clutched against the back of his tattered shield.
Falcon threw himself into the circle of soldiers, cut and cut again. Zemba gave a cry, arched backward, and went down on his knees in the water, blood gouting from his severed hamstrings. His face wore a look of immeasurable sadness and wonder.
“Get them out of here, lead them, we are done for here,” he gasped, and flung the cross on its pole like a javelin. Ribbon and streamers fluttered in the train of the Lady of All Worlds; then Caixa’s bloody hand reached up and caught it.
Zemba smiled, eyes wet with tears. An auxiliary in a tanga and infantryman’s jacket stabbed with his spear. The blade point burst from Zemba’s throat and he fell forward into the flood, still smiling.
A pillar of smoke and fire stood over Cidade Maravilhosa, a sign for leagues up and down the Rio do Ouro. Again the great guns of the Nossa Senhora da Varzea fired. Quinn and Waitacá paddled steadily, stealthily, by root and branch. Quinn had glassed the basilica from the cover of a felled tree half a league downstream; Gonçalvesthought the mortar crews-Portuguese gunners with Guabirú loaders-sufficient garrison. The east end of the basilica was undefended, and the flying buttresses and baroqueries afforded ample concealment. Waitacá and Quinn handed along the basilica’s waterline to the cable eye they had agreed wordlessly from telescope-distance as the best entrance. Waitacá seized the mooring cable, slung his legs up, and climbed it like a golden sloth. Quinn’s sword jammed momentarily on the narrow eyelet; a rattle and he was inside, in the reeking, oozy gloom of the stern bowser.
“Free the slaves before anything,” Quinn said. “You will be able to easily overpower the mortar batteries.”
Waitacá dipped his head and drew his steel knife. He knew the rest by heart. Cut the anchor lines, then take the galley slaves to attack the rear of Gonçalves’s army.
I have given you the task most difficult , Quinn thought. Mine is the task most necessary. Boys’ voices from the lavabo; chalice and paten were being cleansed for the celebratory Mass. Black on black, Quinn spirited past.