As they returned along the foot-hardened walkways, the field workers bowing in deference to their Father, Quinn let himself slip down the march to fall in with Zemba. The swift night was running down the sky; the shifting layers of air around the river pressed the smoke of the cook-fires to the ground, dense as fog.
“So friend, is this the City of God you have been looking for?” Quinn spoke in Imbangala. In the weeks chasing legends up to the confluence of the Rio Branco, Luis had been fascinated by, and learned a conversational facility with, Zemba’s language. Learn the tongue, learn the man. Zemba was not so much a name as a title, a quasi-military rank, a minor princeling betrayed to Portuguese slavers by a rival royal faction of the N’gola. His letters of mannumission, sealed by the royal judge of São Luis, were forgeries; Zemba, he was an escapee from a small lavrador de cana in Pernambuco who had lived five years in a quilombo before it was destroyed, as all the colonies of escaped slaves were destroyed, and ever since had searched for the true City of God, the city of liberty, the quilombo that would never be overthrown.
“The City of God is paved with gold and needs neither sun nor moon, for Christ is her light,” Zemba said. “Nor soldiers, for the Lord himself is her spear and shield.”
The two-man patrols were ubiquitous; skins patterned in what Quinn now recognized as the tribal identity of the Guabirú and armed with skillfully fashioned wooden crossbows, cunningly hinged in the middle with a magazine atop the action. Quinn recognized the Chinese repeating crossbow he had encountered in his researches into that greatest of empires, when he had thought his wished-for task most difficult might lead him there, rather than to this private empire on the Rio Branco. Quinn did not doubt that the light wooden bolts derived much of their lethality from poisons. He murrmured phrases in Irish.
“Your pardon, Father?”
“A poem in my own language, the Irish.
“There is truth in that.” Zemba moved close to Luis Quinn. “I took my own diversion while the Spanish father showed you the fields. I looked into one of the huts. You should do that, Father. And the church, look in the church; down below.”
“Father!” Gonçalves called brightly. “Confidence in Our Lord is surely the mark of a Christian; having seen what I have shown you, are you with me? Will you help me in my great work?”
Zemba dropped his head and stepped back, but Luis Quinn had caught the final flash of his eyes.
“What is your work, Father?”
Gonçalves halted, smiling at the ignorance of a lumbering adult, his hands held our in unconscious mimicry of the great Christ-idol that dominated his city.
“I take beasts of the field and I give souls to those that will receive them; what other work is there?”
You seek me to provoke me , Luis Quinn thought. You desire me to react to what I see as arrogance and self-aggrandizement. Luis Quinn folded his hands into the still-damp sleeves of his habit.
“I am nearing a judgment, Father Gonçalves. Soon, very soon, I promise you.”
That night he came to the maloca that Diego Gonçalves kept as his private quarters. Pacas fled from Luis Quinn’s feet; Father Diego knelt at a writing desk, penning by the yellow, odorous glow of a palm-oil lamp in a book of rag-paper. Luis Quinn watched the concentration cross Gonçalves’s face as his pen creaked over the writing surface. Ruled lines, ticks, and copperplate, an account of some kind. Quinn’s approach was unseen, unheard; he had always been quiet, furtive even, for a man of his size.
“Father Diego.”
The man did not even start. Had he been aware all the timel Gonçalves set down the nubbin of quill.
“A judgment by night?”
The prie-dieu was the only solid furniture in this long, palm-fragrant building. Quinn settled his large frame to kneel on elaborately appliqued cushions.
“Father Diego, who are those men and women beneath the deck of the ship?”
“They are the damned, Father. The ones who have rejected Christ and His City and so condemn themselves to animal slavery. In time they will all be sold.”
“Men and women; children, Father Diego.”
“They have brought it on themselves; do not pity them, they neither deserve nor understand it.”
“And the sick, Father Diego?”
Gonçalves’s boyish face was bland innocence.
“I am not quite certain what you mean.”
“I looked into one of the malocas. I could not believe what I saw, so I looked into another, and then another and another. This is not the City of God; this is the City of Death.”
“Overtheatrical, Father.”
“I see no play, no amusement in whole households dead from disease. The smallpox and the measles rend entire malocas and leave not one alive. Your ledger there, so neatly ruled and inscribed — have you records there for the numbers who have died since being liberated into your City of God?”
Gonçalvessighed.
“The indio is a race under discipline. They have been given over to us by God to be tried, tested, and, yes, admonished, Father. Through discipline, through exercise, comes spiritual perfection. God requires no less than the best of us as men and as a nation sacred to Him. These diseases are the refiner’s fire. God has a great plan for this land; with His grace, I will build a people worthy of it.”
“Silence.” Luis Quinn’s accent cut like a spade. “I have seen all you have wrought here, but I take none of that into account into my judgment, which is, that you are guilty of preaching false doctrine: namely, that the people to whom you have been sent to minister are born without souls and that it has been granted you the power to bestow them. That is a deadly error, and with it, I find you also guilty of the sin of hubris, which is the fatal sin of our Enemy himself. In the name of Christ and for the love you bear Him, I require you to place yourself under my authority and return with me to São José Tarumás, and then to Salvador.”
Gonçalves’s lips moved as if telling beads or chewing sins.
“Buffoon.”
Rage burned up in Quinn’s heart, hot and sickening and adorable. That is what he wants. Quinn continued in the same flat, emotionless voice, “We will leave at dawn in my canoe. Instruct your headmen and morbichas in whatever they require to maintain the aldeia until your replacement has been sent from Salvador.”
“I truly had expected more.” Gonçalves’s hands were folded piously in his lap. Palm-oil lamps cast unreadable shadows on his face. “A man of languages, from Coimbra indeed; not one of those local peons who can barely even read their own names, let alone the missal, and hear devils in every thunderstorm and várzea frog, a man of learning and perception. Refinement. Have you any idea how I long for a brother with whom I could discuss ideas and speculations as far beyond the comprehension of these dear, simple people as the firmament? I am disappointed, Quinn. I am sadly disappointed.”
“You refuse my authority?”
“Authority without power is empty, Father. Brazil has no place for empty authority.”