The hill was still resounding to the great cheer as Falcon took his Manaos down the slope into the flooded forest. There was treachery beneath the opaque, muddied surface: the old trench lines and pit traps remained; one step could leave an unwary warrior floundering in deep water, helpless under the enemy’s blades. Falcon looked back but once, when he saw the angels come to a halt. Through the trees he glimpsed Caixa in her forward trench, passing out serrated wooden knives to the women and children of her command. Moments later the varzea shook to the crash of artillery and the whistle of mortar shells. The hilltop where Zemba had stationed his viable artillery exploded in smoke and red earth. Clods fell like rain, but from the clearing cloud of smoke Falcon heard the cheer of defiance renewed. Zemba’s hasty earthworks had endured; the ballisteiros and trebuchistas danced on the parapet, waved their urocum-dyed man hoods at the hovering angels.
A bird-whistle; Tucuru held his left hand out at his side, fluttered it. Enemy within sight. Falcon peered into the gloom, but all he could see was a waterlogged sloth, lanky and lugubrious, rowing its way across the flooddwaters like a debauched spider. Then in an epiphany of vision, the same as suddenly draws constellations upon scattered stars, he discerned the curved prows of war canoes pressing through the leaf-and-water dazzle. He held out his sword. His archers concealed themselves in the lush cove. They would fire twice, then withdraw to harry the enemy again. Close. Let them close. And closer yet.
“For the Marvelous City!” Falcon cried. Fifty archers fired, their second arrows in the air before the first had found their marks. All was silent. Then the forest exploded in a wall of cannon fire and the air turned to a shrieking, killing cloud of ball and splint. In that opening salvo half of Falcon’s commmand was blown to red wreck.
“Second positions!” he shouted. Beyond the gunboats the waters were solid with canoes, more canoes than he had ever imagined. Crown and church had joined their forces not on a mission of enslavement but of annihilation. “Christ have mercy,” he muttered. Against such odds all he could do, must do, was buy some little time. “Cover and fire!” he commanded. The line of gunboats fired again as it advanced through the trees. Trunks branches twigs flew to splinters and leaves, a deadly storm of splinters, ripped apart by cannister shot. Sword beating at his side, Falcon splashed through the thigh-deep water. He glanced up at the whistle and crash of a salvo of iron-hard wooden balls stabbing through the canopy. The boy slingers on Hope of the Saints Hill were firing blind on ballistic trajectories. Cries in Portuguese; the paddlers raised their wooden shields over their heads. The Manao beside Falcon took the unguarded moment to turn and loose an arrow at a cannoneer. A musket spoke, the man spun on his heel, the arrow skied, he fell back into the leaf-covered water, chest shattered red. As the gunners reloaded their murderous pieces, Zemba’s treetop snipers opened fire. Warm work they perrformed with their repeating crossbows, but each story ended the same: blasts of blunderbuss, clouds of smoke, bodies falling from the trees like red fruit. And still the boats came on. Falcon looked around him at the bodies hunched in rhe water, already prey to piranha. less than a quarter of his archers remained. This was bloody slaughter.
“Retreat!” Falcon yelled. “To the trenches! Sauve qui peut.’”
The canoes moved between the treetops. A biblical scene, Quinn thought: animals clinging desperately to the very tips of the submerged trees, each tree an island unto itself, the waters stinking with the bloated bodies of the drowned. A veritable city must have stood here to house and feed the workers, their huts the first to go under the rising water, all trace of the builders erased. Quinn tried to imagine the hundreds of great forest trees felled to form the pilings, the thousands of tons of earth moved by wooden tools and human muscles. A task beyond biblical; of Egyptian proportions.
In the deep under-dawn they had stolen away from the Cidade Maravillhosa into the tangle of the flood-canopy. Sensed before seen, like the wind from many worlds stirring the varzea, Quinn had become aware of a vast dark mass moving beyond the screening branches; oars rising and falling like the legs of a monstrous forest millipede. Nossa Senhora de Varzea, forthright in attack, confident in strategy. Satanic arrogance was yet Father Diego Gonçalves’s abiding sin. Hunting shadows ran with Our Lady of the Flood Forest, dark as jaguars in the morning gloaming; a vast train of canoes, the City of God militant. Quinn pressed his finger to his lips; his lieutenants understood in a glance. Shipping noisy, betraying paddles they hauled themselves cautiously along boughs and lianas until the host of heaven was gone from sight.
Open water before their prow; the dam a dark line between the blue sky and the green-dotted deeper blue of the flood. The simplicity of the geommetry deceived the senses: whatever the distance the dam seemed the same size to the canoes so that Quinn was unable to estimate its distance. The patrol maintained its position a quarter league to the south. Quinn had glassed the canoes at range as they darted out from the green tangle of the southern side of the lake, light three-man pirogues admirably suited to interception work, crewed by boys of no more than twelve years of age, painted and patterned like grown warriors; those grown warriors now assaulting the Cidade Marravilhosa. They signaled with bright metal. Flashes of light replied, and the world fell into perspective around Quinn: the dam was virtually within arrow-shot, the water very much higher than he had anticipated, almost to the top of the great log pilings. Figures ran from the palm-leaf shelters set up along the earthen walls; the first few arrows stabbed into the water around the canoes. Quinn turned the glass on them: old men, their hunting days past. He opened his sight to the other worlds, dam upon dam upon dam, all the water in the worlds mounted up behind them. Show me, what is best, what is right, show me the cardinal flaw. And then he saw it as clearly as if an angel stood upon the dome of the temple: a point slightly to the north of the center of the great, gentle bow of earth and wood where there was a slightly greater gap between the wooden pilings, the right answer plucked from the universe of all possible answers.
On Quinn’s command the Iguapá archers laid down suppressing fire while a final croak of encouragement eked the last effort from the paddlers. The canoes collided with the massive wooden piers. With a roar Quinn swung up onto the dam and charged the sentries, sword grasped two-handed. Some of the braver old men hefted their war-clubs; then age and caution decided and they fled to the southern end of the dam.
“Let them go,” Quinn ordered. “We do not make war on old men and boys.”
While the Iguapá lashed the canoes into a tight raft between the piers, shifting barrels as close to the structure as possible, Quinn studied the construction of the dam. The upper surface was eight paces wide, of clay tamped on wicker hurdles. The earth rampart, already greening with fecund forest growth, sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. The drop to the clay, trickling bed of the dead Rio do Ouro was ten times the height of man. Again he marveled at the energy and vision of his adversary. Could any amount of explosive blast away such massive soil and wood, such concentration of will and strength? A tiny crack was all that was needed. The water would accommplish the rest, the incalculable mass of flood penned league after league up the valley of the Rio do Ouro.
An arrow drove into the clay a span from Quinn’s foot. Eight war canoes had emerged from the southern shore and were stroking fast for the dam, finding range for their archers.