Luis Quinn prodded again at his smudge fire. “Have you thought what you will do at the City of God?”
“Destroy it.” He saw surprise flicker on Quinn’s face.
Then the Jesuit said, “Yes, of course. It is too big, too vulnerable. Break them up, send them off into the forest. How long do you think you can hold off the bandeirantes?”
“A generation with luck. It is the diseases that will destroy the red man before any slave-takers.”
“All men are helpless before their legends, but do this for me if you can: disabuse that story that I will come again and take them to the New Jerusalem. ”
The main body of the fleet was passing now, families and groups of friends, nations and tribes, all riding the turbulent water through the rags of mist; children in tiny frail skins of bark, peccaries and pacas in bamboo cages loaded onto rafts, the sacred curupairá frogs in their terracotta pots, sacks filled with what manioc could be scavenged from the twice-ruined fields. The crazy yellow bill of a toucan tied to a perch in the prow of a family canoe was a splendid mote of color. It had taken many days to portage past the falls, the canoes slid on vines down slick clay slides, the terrified livestock lowered in cages or slings, the people winding down the paths, treacherous with spray, hacked from the stub of the dam, still an impressive barrage across the Rio do Ouro.
A raft of watercraft had now built up behind the flume, the gray river black with them as one by one they entered the white water and made the run between the two boulders. Some recognized the Mair on his rock and raised their paddles in salutation as they passed. Behind them the prison-rafts negotiated the run, the Guabirú guarded by the swivel-guns of the captured Portuguese war canoes. They might ransom their lives by negotiating a union of cities: Cidade Maravilhosa with war-weakened Cidade de Deus.
“As you rightly say, we are helpless before our legends,” Falcon said, for he was no longer Aîuba, the yellow-head, the Frenchman, but protector of the City of Marvels, the zemba; and Caixa, war hero, the Senhora da Cruz, standard-bearer of the new nation.
“I will return as often as is safe,” Quinn said. “I am still a novice in this; there are disciplines and arts of defense of which I know nothing. It is a war, but mine has always been a martial order.”
Warm gray drizzle gusted in Falcon’s face. He blinked and opened his eyes on a kaleidoscope. Each rock, each tree, each bird and wisp of mist, Luis Quinn and his stick and fire, were shattered into a thousand reflections that seemed to lie behind the objects they mirrored and at the same time beside, each adjacent to every other image, yet differing in greater or lesser detail. Even as he struggled to comprehend what he was seeing, the vision was lifted from him.
“It can be manipulated,” Quinn said. “I am less than a novice in this compared to some walkers of the worlds; I possess enough skill to share my vision.”
“This chaos, this uncertainty and clamor of the eyes, how can you ever know what is real and what is false? How can you ever find your way back to the true world?”
“They are all true worlds, that is the thing. We live in the last whispered syllable of time, dreams within dreams. Our lives, our worlds, have been lived a thousand, ten thousand times before. The Order believes that we must dream on, that all else is cold and death. But some believe that we must wake, for only then will we see a morning. For though our lives have been lived ten thousand times, our world reborn time after time after time, in every rebirth there is a flaw, an error, something copied imperfectly. A trick of the enemy, if you would have it. In our world, our times, that flaw is the curupairá, a window on the plethora of worlds and the reality that lies behind it, and thus our hope.”
The greater party of the Cidade Maravilhosa had passed down the white-water gut; now the children, grinning and wet in their little skimming pirogues, took to the run. They waved to Caixa; she stood fast, the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds gripped in her wounded fist. Falcon shook his head.
“I cannot believe in such a world.”
“The world persists whether you believe it or not.” Quinn rose. “I must be getting on now. They are waiting for me.” He dipped his head toward the forest edge, dark and dripping. Falcon imagined he saw two women standing there in the dim, one a white woman with a head of curling golden hair, the other of an Asiatic cast and complexion, her hair a dark red. A black man waited under the eaves of the forest. All wavered like mist on the edges of Falcon’s perception; then he picked his way over the stones to the shore. When he looked back only the smoldering fire remained.
The Iguapá nation had passed, the children’s boats melted into the mist. Caixa had rerurned the cross to its figurehead place in the canoe; the paddlers pushed out. Waitacá gave a cry; an object running the gut. For an instant Falcon thought it was a capsized canoe, a great war boat. It cleared the run into slack water. The paddlers hauled it in. An angel face, blank yet smiling, gazed up at the fast-running gray mist. Its hands held a three-bladed sword; an angel fallen from the pinnacles of Nossa Senhora da Varzea. Falcon pushed it out into the stream, and the rippling water running fast and chattering over the stones took it and carried it away.
GLOSSARY
Abia: Uninitiated novice.
Agogo: Twin-horned metal percussion instrument used in candomble and capoeira.
Aîuri: Tribal council.
Alabe: First drummer and song leader; male office in candomblé.
Aldeia: Missionary Indian village, usually Jesuit.
Alva: Skin-color descriptor: pure white, considered rare in Brazil.
Amaci: Herbal infusion used for purification.
Assentamento: Assemblage of objects, herbs, and water fed and venerated as the conjunction of a person and orixá.
Axé: Transformative power: magic, the force that makes things happen.
Baiana: From the state of Bahia, latterly come to mean the quasi-traditional costume of women from Salvador.
Baile: “Dance,” used in Rio in the sense of an impromptu street sounddsystem party, giving rise to the popular carioca genre of “baile-funk.” Constantly evolving.
Bairro: Official city district.
Barracão: Main ceremonial room of the terreiro. Bateria: The percussion section of a samba school.
Bauru: Paulistano hot ham-and-cheese sandwich, often in sweet bread.
Berimbau: Stringed instrument of African origins, a bow attacked to a resonator gourd, used in capoeira.
Bicha: Literally “bitch,” but used as “queen.”
Bolar: To “roll” in the saint-a spontaneous possession trance and common precursor to initiation as an iao.
Branca-melada: Skin-color subtype. Honey-colored.
Caboclo: Mixed Indian/white, very much an Amazonian underclass. The term is mildly derogatory in contemporary Brazil. See also manzeluco.
Cafezinho: “Small coffee,” served strong, small, sweet, and on the go.
Caiçara: Riverside slave stockade.
Camarinha: Inmost, holiest chamber in a terreiro, reserved for the mae do santo and her consort. Also, in colonial Brazil, a town council.
Candomblé: Afro-Brazilian religion based around the veneration of orixás.
Captaincy: Division of Colonial Brazil; a segment of land bordered by two lines that ran parallel to the equator inland until they struck the Line ofTordesilhas, the demarcation between Portuguese and Spanish terrritories. Ruled by a donatory.