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By Root 2021 0

lancers they spy on their right come to finish them off. Since they can manage to see the dogs now and again, it is not possible that the dogs do not see them, too, now and again. He asks Honório about the Sardelinha sisters. Honório answers that before leaving the dugouts he sent word to all the women to leave. They still have a thousand paces to go before they reach the nearest dwellings. It will be difficult, with the slow progress that they are making, to get there safe and sound. But his trembling legs and his pounding heart tell him that neither he nor any of the other survivors is in any condition to walk faster. Seized by a momentary dizzy spell, old Zózimo is staggering. Antônio gives him a reassuring pat on the back and helps him along. Can it be true that before the angel’s wing brushed him this old man was once about to burn the Lion of Natuba alive?

“Look over by Antônio the Pyrotechnist’s hut, compadre.”

A heavy, deafening fusillade is coming from the jumble of dwellings across from the old cemetery, a section whose narrow little streets, as difficult as a labyrinth to wind one’s way through, are the only ones in Canudos not named after saints but after minstrels’ stories: Queen Maguelone, Robert the Devi, Silvaninha, Charlemagne, Peers of France. The new pilgrims are all grouped together in this district. Are they the ones who are shooting like that at the atheists? Rooftops, doorways, street entrances are spitting fire at the soldiers. All of a sudden, amid the jagunços lying flat on the ground, standing, or squatting, he spies an unmistakable figure, Pedrão, leaping from one spot to another with his musketoon, and he is certain he can distinguish, amid the deafening din of all the firearms, the loud boom of the giant mulatto’s ancient weapon. Pedrão has always refused to exchange this old piece of his, dating back to his days as a bandit, for a Mannlicher or a Mauser repeating rifle, despite the fact that these guns can fire five shots in a row and can be very quickly reloaded, whereas every time he fires his musketoon he is obliged to sponge the barrel, pour powder down it, and ram it in before shooting off one of the absurd missiles he loads it with: bits of iron, limonite, glass, wax, and even stone. But Pedrão is amazingly dexterous and performs this entire operation so fast it seems like magic, as does his incredible marksmanship.

It makes him happy to see him there. If Pedrão and his men have had time to get back, so have Abbot João and Pajeú, and hence Belo Monte is well defended. They have now less than two hundred paces to go before reaching the first dwellings, and the jagunços who are in the lead are waving their arms and shouting out their names so the defenders won’t shoot at them. Some of them are running; he and Honório start running too, then slow down again because old Zózimo is unable to keep up with them. They each grab an arm and drag him along between them, staggering along all hunched over beneath a rain of gunfire that seems to Antônio to be aimed straight at the three of them. They finally reach what was once the entrance to a street and is now a wall of stones, tin drums filled with sand, planks, roof tiles, bricks, and all manner of objects, on top of which Antônio spies a solid line of sharpshooters. Many hands reach out to help them climb up. Antônio feels himself being lifted up bodily, lowered down, deposited on the other side of the barricade. He sits down in the trench to rest. Someone hands him a leather canteen full of water, which he drinks in little sips with his eyes closed, feeling mingled pain and pleasure as the liquid wets his tongue, his palate, his throat, which seem to be made of sandpaper. The ringing in his ears stops for a moment every so often and he can then hear the gunfire and the shouts of “Death to the Republic and the atheists!” and “Long live the Counselor and the Blessed Jesus!” But at one of these moments—his tremendous fatigue is going away little by little, and soon he’ll be able to get to his feet—he realizes that it can’t be the jagunços who