Brasyl

“Not bandeirantes, never bandeirantes,” Captain Acunha said, shaking his head. He was a thickset, squat man, of bad complexion and coarse, greasy hair; thickly bearded; more slavemaster than shipmaster. “They would never descend a raft town.”

“These are hungry times for flesh,” he said.

Acunha stared at Luis Qui

“It was the Dutch, Dutch bastards; they’ve always had their eyes on the northern bank. Weigh there! Weigh anchor, get us moving, we’ve been too long here.” The bluff assertion of command, but Qui

Calls from the water; the Pauxi scouts had swum over to other burned houses and returned with news that they exchanged with Acunha in short, accented stabs of language like arrows.

Acunha beckoned Qui

“They have found the bodies of the friars in other houses,” he said in a low voice,

“Dead,” Qui

“Of course. And … bad. Badly used. Used abominably.”

“I do not need to hear,” Qui

“She is speaking now.”

“Has she any information?” Qui

“Ravings. Visions. Again and again she returns to a hallucination of angels of judgment, angels of retribution, a host of them, their feet touching the treetops. Gold and silver angels. The friars and irregular sisters went out to meet them. The angels told them they had been judged and found wanting. Then they seared the village with swords of fire. She herself hid beneath the altar when the angels burned the church around her. The rest were gathered up and told they had failed and would be descended into slavery.”

“Angels?” Qui

“Her mind is utterly destroyed.”

“And yet I am reminded of a legend from Salvador, of the angels battling in Pelourinho with blades of light. The angels that brought the horse plague.”

“And there is your habit.…”

“The Society of Jesus has no habit; our attire is nothing other than co

A dry, cracking cry came from the awning. Qui

Weary and world-sick, Falcon stepped through the chained bodies pulling at their oars to his hammock reslung in the bow of the ship. The slaves, the ship, the river and its fugitive peoples, its sacked aldeias and vain mission churches, were but gears and windlasses in a vast dark engenho never ceasing, ever grinding, crushing out commerce. Nation building, the enlightened uplift of native peoples, the creation of culture, learning, art, were trash: wealth was the sole arbiter, personal wealth and aggrandizement. No university, not even a printing press in all of Brazil. Knowledge was the preserve of noble, queenly Portugal. Brazil was to keep its back bent to the capstan.

The peças hauled, and Fé em Deus crawled along the vast river. Falcon watched Qui

The shadows grew long, the swift dark came down, and Fé em Deus resounded with the cries and noises of a ship anchoring for the night. Falcon felt old, thin, and fragile as a stick in a drought, close to his own mortality. The figures in the aft deck, darkest of all, ink on indigo. The palm oil wicks in their terracotta pots drew studies of Qui

Qui

Qui

The fear that he too was no more than a notch on a belt ru

In the morning the postulant was missing from the ship.

“You were with her; how could this have happened?” Falcon’s voice was an accusation.

“I slept,” Luis Qui

“Well where is she, man? She was in your care.”

“I fear she went into the river. The acculico was used up. In the madness of her torment she may have made an end of herself.”

“But that is desperation, that is a mortal sin.”

“I trust in the grace and mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Falcon looked again at his companion. He wore again his simple, unaffected black habit and skullcap and his face a set of resigned concern, spiritual distance, sorrow, and inevitable loss. You lie , Jesuit, Falcon said to himmself. You were complicit; she confessed that final, mortal sin to you and you absolved her. You did not stop her. Did you even help her? From her hammock, to the side, over the rail into the kind water?

“I bitterly regret my inability to save the sister,” Qui