“Do you believe he could be responsible for the destruction of the boatttown?”

“Not even the Carmelites are so compromised. But I am not safe here; you, my friend, enjoy some measure of protection through your crown misssion. I am merely a priest, and in this latitude priests have always been disspensable. We leave in the morning, but I will not return to the Colegio, not this night.”

“Then I shall watch and wait with you,” Falcon declared.

“I would caution against spending too much time in my company. But at the least leave me your sword.”

“Gladly,” Falcon said as he removed his weapon belt and handed it, buckles ringing, to Quinn. “I could wish that you had not thrown that uncommon knife into the river.”

“I had to,” Quinn said, lifting the sheath into the sanctuary light to work out its character and feel. “It was a wrong thing. It scared me. Go now; you have been here too long. I shall watch and pray. I so desire prayer: my spirit feels sullied, stained by compromise.”

Light on the black water; a million dapple-shards brilliant in the eastering sun that sent a blade of gold along the river. The far bank was limned in light, the shore sand bright yellow; though over a league distant, every detail was pin sharp, every tree in the forest canopy so distinct Falcon could distinguish the very leaves and branches. The pandemoniac bellowing of red howler monkeys came clear and full to his ears. Falcon stood a time at the top of the river steps blinking in the light, shading his eyes with his hand against the vast glare; not even his green eyeglasses could defeat so triumphant a sun. The heat was rising with the morning, the insects few and torpid; he hoped to be out in the deep stream by the time both became intolerable. But this moment was fresh and clean and new-minted, so present that all the terrors and whisperings of the night seemed phantoms, and Falcon wanted to stretch it to its last note.

Quinn was already in his canoe. The Jesuit, a smallpox-scarred Indio in mission whites, and an immense, broad black were its entire crew. The remainder of the pirogue was filled with Quinn’s manioc and beans. Falcon’s much larger fleet rocked on the dazzling ripples: a canoe with awning for the geographer, three for his staff, five for his baggage, a further three for their supplies, all well manned with Silo José Manao slaves.

“A great grand morning, thanks be to God!” Quinn called out in French. “I cannot wait for the off.”

“You travel light,” Falcon remarked as he descended the steps. The river had fallen farther in the night; planks had been hastily laid across the already-cracking mud, but there were still a few oozing, sinking footsteps through the mud to the canoe. “Is this the best the fabled Jesuit gold can purchase?”

“Light and fast, please God,” Quinn said in Portuguese now. “And sure the paddles of three willing men are worth a whole fleet of pressed slaves.”

The black man grinned broadly. Determination set in his face, Falcon picked his way up the rocking canoe to his seat in the center under the cotton awning. He could feel the silent derision of his crew, the more audible laughter of Quinn’s small outfit, in the flush of his face. He settled delicately into his wicker seat, the sunshade hiding him from insects and scorn. Falcon raised his handkerchief.

“Away then.”

The golden river broke into coins of light as the paddles struck and pulled. Falcon gripped the sides as the bow-water climbed the flanks of the canoe. A moment’s fear, then his fleet fell in around him, paddlers slipping into unconscious unison, an arrow formation curving out into the Rio Negro. Quinn’s smaller, lighter craft, frail as a leaf on water, surged ahead. Falcon noticed how easily Quinn’s massive frame, despite the terrible blow it had sustained so recently, learned the paddle’s rhythms. Falcon could not resist the infantile urge to wave his kerchief to him. Quinn returned the acknowledgment with a wide, careless grin.

Time vanished with the rolling stream; when Falcon glanced back around the side of his shade, São José Tarumás had dropped from view behind a turn of the stream so subtle that it had been beneath even his trained regard, so vast that the walls of green seemed to close behind him. Against will and reason, Falcon found the spirit of the river entering him. It maniifested itself as stillness, a reluctance to move, to lift any of the instruments he had set in his place to measure the sun and space and time, to engage in any action that might send thought and will rippling out across the black water. The calls of birds and canopy beasts, the splash of river life, the push and drip of the paddles and the hum of the water against the hull, all seemed to him parts of a greater chorale the sum of which was an enormous, cosmoological silence. The still spires of smoke from across the green canopy, the riverside settlements, the squat thatched cones of churches, their wooden crosses erect before them, the frequent river traffic that hailed and waved and smiled-all were as far from him as if painted in aquarelle on paper and Falcon were a drip of rain running down the glass. His hands should be meassuring, his hands should be sketching, mapping, annotating; his hands gripped the sides of the canoe, river-tranced, hour after hour.

Quinn’s hail broke the spell. His pirogue had drawn ahead, hour on hour, until it seemed a mosquito on the surface of the water. Now, where the channel divided into a braid of marshy islets and eyots, he bade his steersman turn across the current and waited in midstream. As he drifted toward Falcon’s phalanx, Quinn raised his paddle over his head in his two hands and thrust it into the air three times. On the instant every paddler in Falcon’s fleet put up his oar. Impetus lost, the inexorable hand of the Rio Negro took the boats, checked them, turned them, scattered their line of order into chaos.

“Paddle, you oxen!” Falcon roared, and, to Juripari his Manao translator, “Command them to paddle, this instant.” The translator remained silent, the paddles unmoving. Falcon struck at the back of a slave kneeling immediately before him. The man received the blow with the stolidity of a buttressed forest tree. Quinn and his crew were stroking swiftly toward the drifting canoes. He hauled in along side the swearing, berating Falcon.

“Apologies, my friend, but this is as far as you travel with me.”

“What have you done? What nonsense is this? Some wretched Jesuit plot.”

“More that fabled Jesuit gold to which you alluded, Doctor. The Society has never feared the power of lucre, like some others. But you will come no further with me, Dr. Falcon. Ahead lies the Arquipelago das Anavilhanas, which Manoel tells me is a mapless maze of ever-shifting sand bars and lagoons. I have instructed your crew to make camp on an island for five days. In that time I will have so far outstripped your expedition that you will never find me. My friend, it is not safe for you to go with me, and to be truthful, my own misssion may lead me to actions that I would not wish witnessed by one outside my Order. Neither was it safe, even for you, to remain in São José Tarumás. But in the Anavilhanas, no one will ever find you.” Quinn lifted the Frenchman’s sword from the bottom of the pirogue and offered it to him. “This is your weapon, not mine; and if I do not have it, Grace of Our Lady I shall not be tempted to use it.” He tossed the sword; Falcon caught it lightly in his two hands. The canoes rocked on the still water, all bound together in the dark currrent. “Argument is futile, my dear friend, against Jesuit authority, and Jesuit gold.” Quinn nodded to his indio pilot; paddles dipped, the pirogue drew away from the helpless Falcon. “I must confess a further crime against you, Doctor, though, as I have returned your sword, it is more in the nature of a trade. Your device, your Governing Engine; in this land it would become a tool of the grossest human subjugation conceivable. Forgive me; I have removed it from your baggage, together with the plans. It is an evil thing.”