“Come come,” Father Diego commanded, darting lightly down the perrilous rain-slick companionway. Quinn could refuse neither his childlike delight nor his galvanic authority. Gonçalvesraised a hand in blessing. The jetties, the piers and canoes, the haulers in the water and all across the hilllside, went down on their knees in the hammering rain and crossed themmselves. Then Gonçalvesthrew up his arms, and choir, tolling bells, thunder, and rain were drowned out by the roar of the assembled people. The choir fell in behind him, a crucifix on a pole at their head, a dripping, feather-work banner of Our Lady of the Várzea at the rear. Quinn hung on Gonçalves’s shoulder as they slogged across the slopping red mud, canoes running up onto the bank on every side. Bodies were still pouring over the hill; the steep bank was solid with people.

“Citizens of heaven, subjects of Christ the King,” Gonçalvesshouted to Quinn. “They come to me as animals, deceptions in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers all: Accept his standard and have life in all its fullness, become men, become souls. Or choose the second standard and accept the inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel.”

Quinn wiped away the streaming water from his face. He stood with Gonçalves on a rise at the lip of the bank; before him palm-thatched longhouses ranged in concentric circles across a bare plain to the distant, rain-smudged tree-line. Remnant palms, cajus, and casuarinas gave shade, otherwise the city — no mere aldeia this — was as stark as a sleeping army. At the vacant center rose a statue of Christ risen, arms outstretched to show the stigmata of his passion, ten, ten times the height of a man. The smoke of ten thousand fires rose from the plain. And still people came, mothers with infants slung from brow straps, children, the old women with drooping flat breasts, pouting from the malocas into the muddy lanes between, their feet and shins spattered red. Striped peccaries rooted in the foot-puddled morass; dogs skipped and quarreled. Parrots bobbed on bamboo perches.

“There must be forty thousand souls here,” Quinn said.

The leaping rain was easing, following the storm front into the north, set to flight by bells. To the south, beyond the masts and crowning angels of the floating basilica, shafts of yellow light broke through curdling clouds and moved across the white water.

“Souls, yes. Guabirú, Capueni, Surara nations — all one in the Cidade de Deus.”

Luis Quinn grimaced at the bitter liquor. The Guabirú boy who had offered him the gourd cringed away. The storm had passed entirely, and sun rays piercing as psalms swept the plantation. Leaves dripped and steamed; a bug kicked on its back in the puddle, spasming, dying. What Luis Quinn had thought from the purview of the bank was the edge of the great and intractable forest was the gateway to a series of orchards and plantations so extensive that Quinn could see no end to them. Manioc, cane, palm and caju, cotton and tobacco, and these shady trees that Gonçalves had been so insisstent he see: Jesuit’s Bark, he called them.

“The key that unlocks the Amazon.”

“I assume from its bitterness it is a most effective simple against some affliction. ”

“Against the ague, yes, yes; very good, Father. What is it holds us back from taking full stewardship of this land, as Our Lord grants us? Not the vile snakes or the heat, not even the animosity of the indios, though many of them display a childlike enthusiasm for violence. Sickness, disease, and espeecially the ague of the bad air, the shivering ague. A simple preparation from the bark of this tree affords complete cure and immunity, if taken as a reggular draft. Can you imagine such a boon to the development and exploitation of this God-granted land? A thousand cities like my City of God; the Amazon shall be the cornucopia of the Americas. The Spanish have souls only for gold and so dismissed it as desert, wilderness; they could not see the riches that grew on every branch and leaf, under their very steel boots! As well as my Jesuit’s Bark there are simples against many of the sicknesses that afflict us; I have potent analgesics against all aches and pains, herbal preparations that can treat the sepsis and even the gangrene if caught early enough; I can even cure disorders of the mind and spirit. We need not cast out with superstitious exorcism when a tincture, carefully administered, can take away the melancholy or the rage and quiet the demons.”

Luis Quinn could still taste the bitter desiccation of the almost-luminous juice on his tongue and lips. A chew of cane would cleanse it; a good cigar better. He had smelled the curing leaf from the drying barns, and his heart had beat sharp in want. Now he felt a fresh cool on his still-wet back; glancing round he saw the sun halo the giant Christ, its shadow long over him. The mass bell of Nossa Senhora da Várzea intoned the Angelus; in maloca, field, and orchard the people went to their knees.

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.