“That you have transgressed the bounds of your vows and faith and brought the Society into perilous disrepute.”

“You are not the first to have come here bearing that charge.”

“I know that, but I believe I am the first with the authority to intervene.” Gonçalvesbowed his head meekly.

“I regret that Salvador considers intervention necessary.”

“My predecessors, none of them returned; what befell them?”

“I would ask you to believe me when I tell you that they departed ftom me hale in will and wind and convinced of the value of my mission. We are far from Salvador here; there are many perils to body and soul. Fierce forest tigers, terrible snakes, bats that feed on man’s blood, toothed fish that can strip the flesh from his bones in instants, let alone any number of diseases and sicknesses.” Father Gonçalves gestured for Quinn to precede him to the choir. The screen gate was in the shape of the heart of Christ; Gonçalves pushed it open and bade Quinn enter.

The altar was the conventional wooden table, worked in the fever-dream fashion of Gonçalves’s craftmasters to resemble twined branches, the crucifix its only adornment, an indio Christ, exquisitely worked, sufferings incompreehensible to the Old World borne on his face and scourged, pierced body. But the crucifix had not taken Father Quinn’s breath, powerful and alien though it was; it was so monumentally overshadowed by the altarpiece behind it that it seemed an apostrophe. The east end of the church, where lights and ladychapel would have been in a basilica of stone and glass, was fashioned into one towering reredos. A woman, the green woman, the Saint of the Flood, wreathed in life and glory. Nude she was, Eve-innocent, but never naked. The saint was clothed in the forest: jewel-bright parrots and toucans, some decorated with real plumage, were her diadem; from her full breasts and milkproud nipples burst flowers, fruit, and tobacco; while from her navel, the divine omphalos, sprouted vines and lianas that clothed her torso and thighs. The beasts of the várzea dropped from her womb to crouch in adoration at the one foot that touched the ground and struck roots across the floor into the rear of the altar: capybara, paca, peccary, and tapir, the green sloth and the crouching jaguar. Her other leg was bent, sole pressed to thigh, a dancer’s pose; an anaconda circled it, its head pressed to her pubis. Her right hand held the manioc bush, her left the recurved hunting bow of the flood forest; and fish attended her, a star-swarm like the milky band of the galaxy reflected in black water, swimming through the woven tracery of tree boles and vines against which Nossa Senhora danced. But true stars also attended her, the Lady twinkled with glowing points of soft radiance: glowworms pinned to the altarpiece with thorns. Again Luis Quinn caught the noble rot of vegetation; as his eyes grew accustomed to the deeper gloom around the altar and the monstrous scale of the work revealed itself to him, he saw that where rays of light struck down through the tracery of the clerestory, precious orchids and bromeliads had been planted in niches in the screen of trees: a living forest. Our Lady of the Floods was beautiful and terrible, commanding awe and reverence. Luis Quinn could feel her forcing him to his knees and by that same token knew that to genuflect before her would be true blasphemy.

“I cannot receive Mass from you, Father Gonçalves.”

Again, the coy dip of the head that Quinn understood now concealed fury.

“Does not your soul crave the solace of the Sacrament?”

“It surely does, and yet I cannot.”

“Is it because of the Lady, or because of the hand that gives it?”

“Father Gonçalves, did you attack and raze a Carmelite mission and take its people into slavery’”

“Yes.” Quinn had expected no worming denial from Father Diego, yet the flatness of the acknowledgment shocked Quinn as if a pistol had suddenly been discharged.

“You did this contrary to the act of 1570 prohibiting enslavement of the indigenous peoples and the rule and example of our Order?”

“Come, Father, each to his role; you the admonitory, I the examiner. You are aware what that means?”

“You are empowered to judge and declare Just War against those who scorn the salvation of Christ’s Church. I saw the house of God burned to the waterline, our brothers and sisters in Christ put to the sword. I spoke with a postulant, a survivor, dreadfully burned. Before she died she told me she had seen angels walking on the treetops, the angels that adorn the masts of this self-consecrated basilica.”

Gonçalves shook his head sorrowfully, as at a woodenly obtuse schoolboy. “You speak of enslavement; I see liberation. When you have seen what I have worked for Christ in this place, then presume to judge me.”

Quinn strode from the choir. Day was a plane of blinding white beyond the door.

“I shall call upon you this evening to begin the examination of your soul.”

Bur Father Gonçalves’s words, thrown after him, hung in Luis Quinn’s memory.

“They were animals, Father. They had no souls, and I gave them mine.” A flicker of lightning momentarily lit the receiving room. By its brief illumination Quinn saw Father Gonçalves’s face as he took apart the Governing Engine; the delight and energy, the pride and intelligence. It had not been the soul of Diego Gonçalves that had been examined in this hot, high airless room; it was his own, and it had been found light. I am of so little connsequence that you prefer to study a machine. Now came the thunder. The cloud line was almost upon them; Luis Quinn felt warm wind buffet his face. Hands ran to the rigging, reefing sails. A tap at the door; a lay brother in a white shift.

“Fathers, we have raised the City of God.”

Gonçalves looked up from his study, face bright and beaming.

“Now this you must see, Father Quinn. I said you could not presume to judge me until you had seen my work; there is no better introduction.”

As admonitory and pai climbed by ladders to the balcony above the portico, the basilica was simultaneously lit by lightning and beaten by thunder, a rolling constant roar that defeated very word or thought. Luis Quinn emerged into deluge; the threatened storm had broken. Such was the weight of the rain Quinn could hardly see the shore through wet gray, but it was evident that Nossa Senhora cia Várzea was preparing for landfall. The greater body of the canoe fleet had fallen back, and now only two remained, big dugouts, thirty men apiece, each hauling a thigh-thick rope from its bowser beneath the narthex. Combing otter-wet hair out of his eyes, Quinn could now discern piers running far into the river; mooring posts, each the entire trunk of some forest titan sunk hip-deep in mud rapidly reverting to its proper elemental state. A cross, three times the height of a man, stood at the highest point of the bank.

The double doors opened, men and women in feather and genipapo bearing drums, rattles, maracas, reed instruments, and clay ocarinas. They stood impassive on the steps, the teeming rain running from their bodies. Father Gonçalves raised a hand. Bells pealed from the tower, an insane thunder audible even over the punishing rain. In the same instant, the assembly burst into song. Lightning backlit the monstrous cross; when his eyes had recovered their acuity, Quinn saw two streams of people pouring over the top of the bank, slipping and sliding on the mud and rain-wash, summoned by the beating bells. Again Gonçalves lifted his hand. Nossa Sennhora da Várzea shook from narthex to sanctuary as she shipped oars. Now the shore folk stood waist deep in the water, fighting to seize hold of the mooring lines. More joined every moment, men and women, children alike, jamming together on the jetties. The ropes were handed up to them; the men pulled themselves out of the blood-warm water to join the effort. Hand over hand, arm by arm, Nossa Senhora da Várzea was hauled in to dock.