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“Have Big João come round to see me. I can help him choose his men—I know all of them. If you think I ought to, that is.”

Antônia Sardelinha had approached. “Catarina came around this morning asking for you,” she said to Abbot João. “Do you have the time right now to go see her?”

João shook his head: no, he didn’t. Tonight, perhaps. He felt abashed, though the Vilanovas understood that with him God came first and his family second: wasn’t it the same with them? But in his heart of hearts it distressed him deeply that through force of circumstance, or the will of the Blessed Jesus, he saw less and less of his wife these days.

“I’ll go tell Catarina,” Antônia said to him with a smile.

Abbot João left the store thinking how strange things had turned out in his life, as they did in everyone’s perhaps. “Like in the minstrels’ stories,” he thought. On meeting up with the Counselor, he had believed that blood would vanish from his path, and here he was involved in a battle that was worse than any he had ever fought. Was that why the Father had made him repent of his sins? So as to go on killing and seeing people die? Yes, that was no doubt why. He sent two kids he ran into on the street to tell Pedrão and old Joaquim Macambira to meet him at the exit from town leading to Jeremoabo, and before going to where Big João was he went to look for Pajeú, who was out digging trenches on the road to Rosário. He found him a few hundred yards past the last huts, covering a trench across the trails with boughs of buckthorn to hide it. A group of men, some of them with shotguns, were bringing tree branches and putting them in place, as women distributed plates of food to other men sitting on the ground who appeared to have just finished their work shift. On seeing him coming, everyone flocked round him, and he found himself in the center of a circle of inquisitive faces. Without a word, one of the women placed in his hands a bowlful of goat meat sprinkled with maize meal; another handed him a jug of water. He was so tired—he had come all the way on the run—that he had to take a deep breath and drink a long swallow of water before he was able to speak. He did so as he ate, without the thought ever occurring to him that a few years before—at the time when his gang and Pajeú’s were trying to wipe each other out—the people listening to him would have given anything to have him at their mercy like this so as to subject him to the worst tortures imaginable before killing him. Luckily, those chaotic days were a thing of the past.

Pajeú didn’t turn a hair on hearing of Father Joaquim’s news about a second army coming. He did not ask a single question. Did Pajeú know how many men there were in a regiment? No, he didn’t know, and neither did any of the others. Abbot João then asked him what he had come to ask him to do: go south to spy on these troops that were coming and harass them. His band of outlaws had marauded in that region for years; he knew it better than anybody else: so wasn’t he the best man to patrol the route the soldiers took, to hunt up guides and bearers to infiltrate their ranks, to set up ambushes to delay them and give Belo Monte time to ready its defenses?

Pajeú nodded, still without having opened his mouth. Seeing his yellowish-gray pallor, the enormous scar across his face, and his strong, solid body, Abbot João wondered yet again how old he was, whether he wasn’t a man far along in years whose age didn’t show.

“All right,” he heard him say. “I’ll send you reports every day. How many of these men am I to take with me?”

“However many you want,” Abbot João answered. “They’re your men.”

“They were my men,” Pajeú growled, glancing quickly around at the men surrounding him, a sudden warm gleam in his expressionless, deep-set little eyes. “They’re the Blessed Jesus’ men now.”

“We’re all His men,” Abbot João replied. And with sudden urgency in his voice: “Before you leave, have Antônio Vilanova give you ammunition and explosives. We have fuses now. Can Taramela