Ian McDonald - Brasyl

“Retreat!” Falcon yelled. “To the trenches! Sauve qui peut .’”

The canoes moved between the treetops. A biblical scene, Quinn thought: animals clinging desperately to the very tips of the submerged trees, each tree an island unto itself, the waters stinking with the bloated bodies of the drowned. A veritable city must have stood here to house and feed the workers, their huts the first to go under the rising water, all trace of the builders erased. Quinn tried to imagine the hundreds of great forest trees felled to form the pilings, the thousands of tons of earth moved by wooden tools and human muscles. A task beyond biblical; of Egyptian proportions.

In the deep under-dawn they had stolen away from the Cidade Maravillhosa into the tangle of the flood-canopy. Sensed before seen, like the wind from many worlds stirring the varzea, Quinn had become aware of a vast dark mass moving beyond the screening branches; oars rising and falling like the legs of a monstrous forest millipede. Nossa Senhora de Varzea, forthright in attack, confident in strategy. Satanic arrogance was yet Father Diego Gonçalves’s abiding sin. Hunting shadows ran with Our Lady of the Flood Forest, dark as jaguars in the morning gloaming; a vast train of canoes, the City of God militant. Quinn pressed his finger to his lips; his lieutenants understood in a glance. Shipping noisy, betraying paddles they hauled themselves cautiously along boughs and lianas until the host of heaven was gone from sight.

Open water before their prow; the dam a dark line between the blue sky and the green-dotted deeper blue of the flood. The simplicity of the geommetry deceived the senses: whatever the distance the dam seemed the same size to the canoes so that Quinn was unable to estimate its distance. The patrol maintained its position a quarter league to the south. Quinn had glassed the canoes at range as they darted out from the green tangle of the southern side of the lake, light three-man pirogues admirably suited to interception work, crewed by boys of no more than twelve years of age, painted and patterned like grown warriors; those grown warriors now assaulting the Cidade Marravilhosa. They signaled with bright metal. Flashes of light replied, and the world fell into perspective around Quinn: the dam was virtually within arrow-shot, the water very much higher than he had anticipated, almost to the top of the great log pilings. Figures ran from the palm-leaf shelters set up along the earthen walls; the first few arrows stabbed into the water around the canoes. Quinn turned the glass on them: old men, their hunting days past. He opened his sight to the other worlds, dam upon dam upon dam, all the water in the worlds mounted up behind them. Show me, what is best, what is right, show me the cardinal flaw. And then he saw it as clearly as if an angel stood upon the dome of the temple: a point slightly to the north of the center of the great, gentle bow of earth and wood where there was a slightly greater gap between the wooden pilings, the right answer plucked from the universe of all possible answers.

On Quinn’s command the Iguapá archers laid down suppressing fire while a final croak of encouragement eked the last effort from the paddlers. The canoes collided with the massive wooden piers. With a roar Quinn swung up onto the dam and charged the sentries, sword grasped two-handed. Some of the braver old men hefted their war-clubs; then age and caution decided and they fled to the southern end of the dam.

“Let them go,” Quinn ordered. “We do not make war on old men and boys.”

While the Iguapá lashed the canoes into a tight raft between the piers, shifting barrels as close to the structure as possible, Quinn studied the construction of the dam. The upper surface was eight paces wide, of clay tamped on wicker hurdles. The earth rampart, already greening with fecund forest growth, sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. The drop to the clay, trickling bed of the dead Rio do Ouro was ten times the height of man. Again he marveled at the energy and vision of his adversary. Could any amount of explosive blast away such massive soil and wood, such concentration of will and strength? A tiny crack was all that was needed. The water would accommplish the rest, the incalculable mass of flood penned league after league up the valley of the Rio do Ouro.

An arrow drove into the clay a span from Quinn’s foot. Eight war canoes had emerged from the southern shore and were stroking fast for the dam, finding range for their archers.

“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?