Ian McDonald - Brasyl

“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.

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.”