“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 Quinn, eyes dark like a monkey’s in his thick facial hair.

“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 Quinn heard a discord of anxiety in his voice. The Dutch are traders, not slavers. Three days ago the raiders had struck. The people stolen from this town must have already passed them, anonymous, unremarked, wired together through the ear, or the nose, like animals tamed to the plow.

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 Quinn to him.

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

“Dead,” Quinn said.

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

“I do not need to hear,” Quinn said with heat and power. “They desecrated… I went into the church… the altar, the filth, human filth…” Falcon joined them.

“She is speaking now.”

“Has she any information?” Quinn asked.

“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?” Quinn asked.

“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 connventional priestly dress; sober, simple, practical.”

A dry, cracking cry came from the awning. Quinn hastened to the Carmelite’s side, lifted her head to offer her water from the pewter mug. Falcon watched him gently sponge the ruined face and clean the botfly eggs from the suppurating burns. Pity, rage, sorrow, helplessness — the violence of his emotions, the complexity of their interactions like patterns in a weave, shocked him. Brazil, you madman? Orsay at the Academy had exclaimed when Falcon had approached him to fund his expedition. Greed, vanity, rapacity, brutality, and contempt for life are vices to all the great nations of the world. In Brazil they are right virtues and they practice them with zeal.

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 Quinn sit with the destroyed woman, at times talking to her, at times reading his Spiritual Exercises with fierce concentration. Falcon tried to sketch in his expedition log his memory of the boat-town. Planes, angles of mist and shadow; meaningless, hieratic. This is a river of fear , he wrote. The refined soul naturally veers from melodrama, but Brazil turns hyperbole into reality. There is a spirit here, lowering, oppressive, dreadful. It saps the heart and the energy as surely as the monstrous heat and humidity, the ceaseless insects, the daily torrential downpours; rain warm as blood that yet chills the bone. I find I can almost believe anything I am told of the Amazon; that the boto is some mermaid-creature that rises from the river at night to take human lovers and father pink-skinned children; of the curupira with his feet turned the wrong way, deceiver of hunters, protector of the forest. On these hot, sleepless nights it is too easy to hear the uakti, vast as a ship, hasting through the night forest, the wind drawing strange music from the many fluted holes throughout its body. And what of the woman-warriors after whom this river was (mis)-named, the Amazons themselves?

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 Quinn’s face as he ministered to the dying woman. Falcon knew well the hand gestures, the motions of the lips.

Quinn came forward for a fresh breaker of water and Falcon said softly, “Did you administer extreme unction to that woman?”

Quinn ducked his head. “I did, yes, I did.”

The fear that he too was no more than a notch on a belt running through this airless, blood-fueled mill kept Falcon from easy sleep, but as the immense, soft southern stars arced over him, the gentle sway of Fé em Deus on the current sent him down into dreams of angels, huge as thunderheads, moving slowly yet irresistibly along the channels and tributaries of the Amazon, their toenails, the size of sails, drawing wakes in the white water.

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 Quinn said simply, mildly. Falcon’s temper flared.

“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,” Quinn said as if reading Falcon’s doubts. “I shall pray for her soul and repose when we reach São José Tarumás and for myself do penance. For now, by your leave, my Spiritual Exercises have been neglected and I must attend to them.”