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“Now you offend me,” Falcon flared. “Now this is indeed madness. If I had a piece I would pistol you so that your insanity should not infect others. Airily you claim to breeze between worlds and histories, by whim, by thought, by will-o’-the-wisp or fiery chariot, and with a wave of your hand my world is abolished; rationality, scientific inquiry, the knowability and preedictability of the physical world merely a tissue of illusion over a void of… magic. Divine fiat, the power of word and thought over mundane reality.”
“But, Falcon, Falcon, what if that is what the world is made from? Word and thought?”
Falcon slapped the center pole of the hut. “This is real, Qui
“Oh, for the love of God!” Falcon leaped to his feet. Golden faces looked in at the door, withdrew at Falcon’s hostile glare. “The water is up again. That is what I came to tell you. I want to take a canoe and a party of my Manaos away from the cidade.”
“Talk to Zemba. He is protector of the cidade.”
“I desire to talk to you. I desire you to ask me why I want a canoe and a party, why I want to investigate the rising water. You have become remote, distant, aloof, Qui
The bark curtain over the door twitched. Zemba entered, his skin glossy wet from the rain.
“Is all well here?”
“Nothing has occurred here,” Falcon said. “I was merely telling Father Qui
“All such applications must be made to me as chief of security.”
Falcon bristled.
“I am not your slave. Good evening, sir.”
Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon: Expedition Log 8th August 1733
Often I feel that the only important feature of my journal is the date in the heading. Too easily the days slip into an eternal present; without past, facing a future indistinguishable from now, disco
How good it is to be abroad on the river, in a ten-man canoe with Juripari before me, Caixa at my back, and all the vegetable riches of the Rio do Ouro arrayed before me. Cidade Maravilhosa had become oppressive and hostile; not in the physical sense — that would not be tolerated, not even from Zemba and his military claque — but to my qualities, my profession, my beliefs. The City of Marvels is a City of Blind Faith. I had believed in the aîuri, that wise body of indio morbichas and ebomis from the escaped black community, to steer the community sanely and sagely, but it has been filled with pages and young warriors under Zemba’s sway. A council where older and more careful heads — I count myself among them — are shouted down by the zeal of young males is not beneficial to the community.
This is the fifth day of the expedition, and we are now ru
I was initially nonplussed to find the levels on the Alta Rio do Ouro to be lower that at Cidade Maravilhosa, the precise reverse of what one would expect for a flood descending from the headwaters. But the scientist, in the face of conflicting facts and theory, always modifies theory to reality. A set of measurements taken below the cidade will confirm if the river is filling from the lower courses. I have one set of measurements now, from a point some three leagues beneath the quilombo as drawn on my rudimentary chart of the Rio do Ouro fluvial system — some fifteen as the river wends — and they seem to support my general hypothesis. A second set taken at tonight’s camp will put the seal on it…
“Aîuba!”
Over floods and centuries the Rio do Ouro, rounding a prominent ridge, had eroded a wide bow, almost a bay. Falcon’s canoe cut close to the bluff, doubled the point, and found itself bow to bow with a fleet. Falcon saw paddles, bright brass, the glint of sun from steel, plumed hats.
“Scarlet and buff!” he cried. “Portuguese soldiers!”
The Manaos swiftly, sweetly reversed their seating in the canoe, dug at the water with their paddles. Falcon’s smaller, lighter craft could outpace the heavily laden war canoes, but there was headway to be lost; and as he came about and seized his own paddle to lend his speed to the craft, the pursuers bent to their blades. The chase was on. A dull pop, little louder than a musket, and a plume of water flew up some paddle-lengths to the left of the canoe. Another, and Falcon saw the ball pass with fluttering howl and bounce three times from the water before vanishing.
“Paddle for your lives!” Falcon shouted. He slipped the glass out of his pocket. Six swivel guns bow-mounted in heavy, thirty-man war canoes. As he glassed the soldiery — a dozen colonial infantry in each of the lead boats, dress coats patched and mold-stained after weeks on the river-the swivel gun spoke again. The ball bounced from the river in a splash of spray that soaked Falcon and cleared the canoe between ]uripari and a Manao deserter called Ucalayf. A narrow target and the flat trajectory over which the Portuguese were firing had served thus far, but soon the gu
“Caixa! The muskets.”
She was already rodding the first of the two pieces that Falcon had kept sacrosanct from Zemba’s requisitioners. A woman of skills is a pearl beyond price. Falcon drew on the red-and-gold division flag in the stern of the center war canoe. Before it sat an officer in dress uniform, his tricorn hat edged with feathers, grimly gripping the sides of the canoe. Falcon recognized Capitan de Araujo of the Barro do São José do Rio Negro. A simple shot, but Falcon lets his sight slide forward to the buff-coated gu
“Steady, hold her steady!” It was a delicate calculus; the cease-paddling made the shot surer but necessarily brought them into the range to the musskets of the colonial infantry. At his earliest clear shot Falcon discharged in a crack and cloud of smoke. Zemba’s cartridges answered truly. The gu
“Steady, I have him I have him … ”
“Aîuba, we ca
The capitan was clear in his sight. Cut the command off at the head. Falcon squeezed the trigger. The lock closed; the flint flared. Falcon saw the hat fly from the officer’s head into the stream; then glowing slow-matches met touch-holes.
“Down! All down!”
The river flew up around Falcon as if shattered like glass; splinters flew up from the raked gunwales, but the hull held, by Jesus and Mary; the shot bounced from that adamant forest trunk. A sigh; Juripari, endlessly surprised to find the side of his head shot away, slid gently into the river.