Quinn shielded his face and edged toward the inferno of blazing wood. Nothing could survive that pyre. Flames were leaping up the piers from angel to angel, licking across the clerestory screens, caressing the ceiling bosses. The choir stalls and screens were already ablaze; at the end of his strength, numb with awe, Luis Quinn watched the flames coil up and engulf Our Lady of the Varzea. The basilica was disintegrating, blazing timbers and embers raining from the ceiling, the smoke descending. Choking, Quinn rushed from the wooden hell. In a rending crash the roof fell and flames leaped up among the guardian angels, igniting the sails. Quinn marveled at the destruction. With every moment the current was taking the church farrther from safety, closer to the falls at the destroyed dam. Quinn dived lightly into the water. Canoes pushed out from beneath the flood-canopy; a golden face glinted among the Guabirú. Quinn stroked toward Waitacá; then the fire reached the powder magazine. An apocalyptic explosion sent every bird flapping and screaming from the flood forest. Quinn saw the angels of Nossa Sennhora da Varzea ascend, flung high into the air by the blast, and fall, tumbling end for end. Fragments of burning wood plunged hissing into the water around Quinn; as hands helped him into the canoe, he saw the blazing hulk of Nossa Senhora da Varzea spin slowly away on the current.
It was a rout now. The cross of Our Lady of All Worlds stood in the trench beneath the shattered hilltop, a sign and hope for the people. Portuguese snipers let fly with musket-fire; the Guabirú dispatched the wounded. Falcon leaned on his sword, the weight of the worlds suddenly upon him, a desire to lie down among the dead and be numbered with them. The floodwaters were thick with already-swelling bodies. He bowed his head and saw that the water was tunning away from around his sodden, cracked shoes. The water drained away from around his feet. The bodies were stirring, moving, drawn together into the recesses of the varzea. And the angels, the terrible visitants of wrath upon the mast tops of Nossa Senhora da Varzea, were moving. Very slowly, but with gathering impetus, moving downstream.
Falcon stood on firm land now.
I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood , the Mair had said.
“But not here!” Falcon shouted. “Not this world!”
Now the army of Nossa Senhora da Varzea became aware of the water ebbing around their canoes and turned to stare as their patron angels vanished behind the treetops. Smoke rose, blacker, denser by the second. A great flash of light lit up the southern sky, momentarily outshining the sun. A plume of smoke in the shape of a mushroom climbed skyward; a few seconds later the explosion shook Hope of the Saints Hill. A grin formed on Falcon’s face, broke into wonderful, insane laughter.
“At them?” he roared, circling his sword over his head. “One last charge for the honor of the Mair! At them!”
The canoe lightly rode the white water. A gray morning of low cloud after rain, scarves of mist clung to the trees. On such a dripping day they shouldered close to the river, dark and rich with rot and spurt. The canoe skipped among great boulders and the trunks of forest trees, smashed and splintered, wedged across rocks, half buried in the grit. The paddlers steered it down a channel that poured gray and white between two tumbled rocks each the size of a church. The golden cross set up in the prow wavered but did not fall. It shone like a beacon, as if by its own light.
The man on the shore raised his arm again, but the smoke from his fire was unmistakable now. Heaven knows how he found anything combustible on such a day , Robert Falcon thought. But his intent, he suspected, was always smoke, not heat.
The steersman ran the little pirogue in. Falcon splashed over the cobbles to shore. The strand was littered with leaves, twigs, whole branches and boles, drowned and bloating animals, reeking fish. He heard the grind of hull over stone. Caixa waded ashore and firmly planted the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds in the gritty sand.
“Dr. Falcon.”
Luis Quinn sat on a boulder, a smoldering cigar clenched in his fist. A flaw of mist waved between the trees.
“Father Quinn.”
The two men kissed briefly, formally. “Well, we live,” Falcon said.
On a plaited strap around his shoulder Quinn wore the bamboo tube that held the history of the Marvelous City.
“I am most glad, friend, that you ignored me and did not consign this to the waters,” Falcon said. “The history of the Marvelous City may be finished, bur that of the City of God has yet to be started.”
“With your permission, that will be a new history from this,” Quinn said. “This story has far to travel.”
“Of course. You know they are already making legends of you. The Mair can foretell the future. The Mair has a knife that can cut through anything, even men’s hearts and secrets to read their deepest desires. The Mair can walk between worlds and from one end of the arch of time to the other. The Mair will come again in the hour of his people’s sorest need and lead them away from this world to a better one where the manioc grows in all seasons and the hunting is always rich and bountiful, a world the bandeirantes and the pais can never reach.”
“I had expected tales, but not that last one.”
The vanguard of the Cidade Maravilhosa’s fleet appeared around the widely incised river bend, bobbing on the white water.
“What do you expect when you destroy the enemy’s stronghold and then, the tide of battle turned and on the verge of victory, you disappear from the field of battle?”
Falcon had shouted his voice red raw, standing on that hill, sword in hand. Caixa waved the ragged cross of Out Lady of All Worlds, taking up Falcon’s rallying cry in her own tongue. The destruction of Nossa Senhora da Varzea held the army of the City of God in thrall. Many Guabirú were on their knees in the bloody mud, rosaries folded in their hands. Some had already fled the field of battle. The Portuguese regulars faltered, conscious of how grossly they were outnumbered. And the water was running, away from the feet of the soldiers, eddying around the bodies of the dead, draining from the trenches in fast-running streams and little torrents, flowing out from under the beached canoes.
“At them!” A lone cry, then the last of the quilombo’s men, red and black, came over the crest, arms beating, war-clubs, swords, captured bayoonets waving, all roaring, all cheering. Caixa was swept up, Our Lady of All Worlds flying over their heads; then Falcon was caught up and carried away. The Portuguese formed defensive lines, but as the counterattack crashed into them a second wave of warriors broke from the varzea, brushed past the dazed Guabirú, and piled into their rear. Tribe won out; the vacillating Guabirú, seeing the charge of their liberated brothers, took up their weapons and joined the attack. Falcon glimpsed a figure in Jesuit black at the forest’s edge. The Portuguese lines broke; the men fled for the gunboats. The Iguapá gave chase, slashing and clubbing at the soldiers as they tried to run their big canoes into deeper water. Now the women and children were coming down the hill, the women executing the wounded, the children picking the bodies clean. The flame of battle was snuffed out. Falcon rested on his sword, weary to the marrow, sickened by the slaughter under the dark eaves of the flood forest. None of those men would ever see São José Tarumás again. In that cold understanding was a colder one: Falcon would never see Paris again, never tease Marie-Jeanne in the Tuileries, never again climb the Fourviere with his brother Jean-Baptiste. His world would now be green and mold, water and heat and broken light, mists and vapors, and the flat, gray meanders of endless rivers. Canoes and bows and creatures heard but seen only in glimpses, a world without vistas, its horizon as distant as the next tree, the next vine, the next bend in the river. A vegetable world, vast and slow.