“A glorious morning indeed, Father.”
The violent loudness of the voice as Quinn prepared to descend into quiet was like a blow. He lurched against the creaking, unsound rail.
“Forgive me, Father, I did not mean to alarm you.”
Falcon stood at the aft of the ship half-shadowed by the awning. He too balanced an open book on the rail, a soft suede-bound sketchbook in which he drew with charcoal.
“Our superior general prescribes dawn as the best time for meditation.”
“Your superior general is right. What is today’s subject?”
“The Two Standards, of Christ and of Lucifer.” At many junctions and embarkations in his life Luis Quinn had returned to the disciplines of the Spiritual Exercises. The packet from Coimbra to Lisbon had been brusque business, he no more than freight. The calm-bound crossing to Salvador was for prepararion, for the lingua geral and the writings of the great explorers and missionaries. The slow crawl up the coast to Belém do Pará had been the opporrunity to study his follow traveler and subject — this small, fierce man of strangely juxtaposed convictions and doubts and swift, ill-concealed humors. But the river, that province of time as much as distance, unchanging and never the same from breath to breath, was the true embarkation to the celebration of discipline. “We are commanded to envision a vast plain about Jerusalem, and mustered upon it around his banner the armies of our Lord; and in the same work of the mind’s eye that other vast plain around Babylon, where around the banner of the deceiver are gathered the forces of Lucifer.”
“How do you imagine it, the standard of Lucifer?” Fé em Deus was waking; the movements of the crew sending luxurious ripples across the glassy water.
“Golden of course, like a bird, a proud bird of prey with feathers of flame and diamonds for eyes. He was a Lord of Light, Lucifer. Quite quite beautiful and so skillfully made that the diamond eye enchants and seduces everyone who sees it so they think, Yes, yes, I see myself reflected there and I am good. Excellently good. Who would be drawn to it if it did not mirror their vanities and answer their hopes?”
Falcon gave his whole weight to the rail and looked out into the morning, where bands of blue were appearing as the higher mists evaporated. “You have a great gift for visualization, Father. I find that I must augment my memory with material aids.” Quinn glanced at the doctor’s book. The double-page was covered in a drawing of the visible shore, the line of the trees, the taller tops rising above the general canopy, the jumble of high birds’ nests, the zones of the strand: the scrub vegetation — a writhe of black denoted the jacaré in the lee of the bleached fallen branch — the edge-grasses and the cracking reach of the exposed muds and silts. Captain Acunha never tired of saying he had never seen the river so low. The whole was annotated with comments and footnotes in a strange cursive.
“I have no hand for the drawing,” Luis Quinn said. “Your writing is unfamiliar to me. Might I ask what language?”
“A code of my own devising,” Falcon said. “It’s not unknown for scientists to need to keep their notes and observations secure. Ours is a jealous profession.”
“Some might see it as the work of a spy.”
“Would a spy show you that he writes in code? Look! Oh look!” Quinn’s attention darted to where the doctor pointed, leaning intently over the rail. Yes , he had been about to say, if that spy thought that those notebooks would be found later, by stealth or theft.
A mound in the water, a wheezing spray of mist broke the surface and vanished into spreading ripples. A moment later a second apparition surfaced and submerged in a soft rain of exhalation. The two circles of ripples met and clashed, reinforcing, canceling each other out. Falcon dashed, flapping coattails and loosely bound sheaves of paper, along the narrow gunwale to the bowsprit, where he clung, keenly scanning the misty water through his peculiar spectacles. “There! There!” The two humps arced through the water as one a short distance ahead of the ship, blowing out their lungs in a gasp of stale air. “How marvelous, did you see, Quinn, did you see? The beak, a proonounced narrow protrusion, almost a narwhal spear.” He dashed excitedly with his coals on the paper, never taking his eyes off the close, hazed horizon. “The boto — the Amazonian river dolphin. I have read… Did you see the color? Pink, quite pink. The boto: extraordinary and I think unclassified. To catch one, that would be an achievement indeed: to have the classification Cetacea Odontoceti falconensis. I wonder if the captain, the crew, even my own staff might obtain one for taxonomic purposes? My own cetacean…”
But Luis Quinn stared still into the pearl opacity that hung across the river. A plane of shadow, a geometry, moving out in the mist upstream of Fé em Deus , glimpsed and then lost again. There. There! His flesh shivered in superstitious dread as the dark mass resolved in the mist, like a door opening onto night, and behind it, another rectangle of lesser grayness. What uncanny river-phantasm was this? Silent, uterly silent, without a ripple, floating over water not on it. Luis Quinn opened his mouth to cry out in the same instant the lookout yelled a warning. Captain Acunha on the stern deck whipped glass to eye. Quinn saw his unmagnified eye widen.
“Sweeps! Sweeps!” Acunha roared as the house appeared out of the ripppling mist. The coxswain and his mates lashed still-drowsing oarsmen awake with knouts as the floating house spun ponderously on its pontoon and drifted past within a biscuit-toss of the Fé em Deus. Behind it was the second object Quinn had glimpsed: another pontoon house, and behind it, appearing out of the fog, a whole village upon the waters, turning slowly on the deep, powerful currents of the stream.
“Larboard sweeps!” Captain Acunha shouted, running along the central decking with a landing hook to the station where the two benches of chained rowers craned over their shoulders to find a roofless wooden house bearing down on them at ramming speed, corner-forward. “On my word fend off. Anyone of those putas could sink us. Cleverly now, cleverly … Now!” The sweep slaves had pushed their oars as far forward as they could, and on their captain’s command hauled back, making gentle, oblique contact with the side of the house pontoon, forcing it slowly, massively, ponderously away from the side of the ship. The captain thrust away with the landing pike, fighting for leverage, his whole weight behind the spike, face trembling with effort. Forward oars passed the runaway house to aft oars; clenched muscles shone wet in the mist. The house grazed past Fé em Deus’s stern by a lick of paint and vanished through the downstream horizon.