Acuti carves Ainda aqui

The dawn after the singing. The rainforest is wet. Pirá-tatá’s body has been laid in the way the Tupinambá lay an elder of the line; Almeida does not watch the laying. He turns away — not from grief but from something that will, in his hourly count, be the thing he could not name in his commonplace book.

Acuti works alone. He has been preparing for this since long before the river party left Bahia. The hardwood plank — itaúba, dense as a brick, slow-grain — Pirá-tatá had set against the central stone the previous afternoon. Acuti now lays the plank across his knee. He has chosen his words. He cuts two.

The cuts take less than an hour. The wood is so dense that the chisel-strokes leave letters so deep no rain in any century will erase them, no termite will eat them. The wood will outlast the priest, the Inquisitor, the entire colonial frame within which the priest sailed. The wood is being signed.

Ainda aqui. Still here.

The chip is the heavier work. Acuti cuts it from the central stone with a tool the Portuguese soldiers, when they reach the plateau two days late, will not be able to identify. He wraps it in cured hide. The chip is the size of a man’s head and the weight of three. He will carry it across his shoulders for two weeks.

In the third hour after Pirá-tatá’s death, Mendes and Ferreira make their move. Almeida is at the central stone, his head bent. Acuti hears them on the path before they have closed thirty paces. He drops the chip; the hide bundle thuds.

He runs them down at the river. Ferreira is killed in the reeds — Acuti’s blade clean, the soldier’s chest red, the river red downstream for thirty seconds. Mendes is younger and faster; he escapes west, will live, will tell Mascarenhas the story in Bahia, will be a problem for the next four years.

Almeida finds Acuti at the river. The water has cleared. Ferreira’s body is gone.

Acuti hands him the chip and the plank.

The plank goes into the cassock pocket. The chip goes into Almeida’s pack between the iron-bound books — where, over the next six weeks, the chip’s iron-corrosion property will manifest on the rifles and on the binding hardware of the priest’s working bible, and where, in the captain’s locker of the Nossa Senhora dos Remédios in November, the chip will rust the hold’s iron visibly enough that Captain Henriques will move it without asking.

The plank will stay in the priest’s pocket for seventy-eight years.

The chip will leave him in 1571.

The line is being carried both ways at once: east in the priest’s pocket; west in Acuti’s keeping, back to the plateau, into the cave, to wait.