The Sun and the Cross #1005403

A sun that warms everyone. A cross that protects no one.
1756: in the reductions of Paraguay the Jesuits have taught the Guaraní to read, to sing and to work the land in common. Then a treaty signed far away, in Madrid, hands those lands to Portugal, and the Society orders its fathers to obey. Father Lorenzo Malaspina stays with his people as far as Caiboaté, where in little more than an hour the armies of two crowns put out the only experiment that took the Gospel seriously. When the Jesuits are driven out of Brazil as well, all that is left of that world is a bell and a little girl sold at the market in Rio.
1760: the Brama enters the bay of Guanabara with Charles II Martini, his sister Inés, Kofi Osei and the children, still young. They are looking for a safe harbour for the India route, and they find a colony that lives on gold and on men in chains: the mines of Vila Rica running dry, the king’s fifth that nobody wants to pay, the slavers blessed on the quay at Salvador. For thirty years the family puts down roots between Rio, the Minas Gerais and the Andes, where Kojo goes down into the silver mines of Potosí and watches the revolt of Túpac Amaru end in the square at Cusco, while in Quebec the Martini house empties and in Ouidah there remain those who never left.
The Sun and the Cross is the fifth volume of the saga A Mari Usque Ad Mare. From the missions of Paraguay to the mines of the Minas Gerais, from a merchant’s ledgers to the silver of Potosí: thirty-two years in which faith walks beside power and becomes an instrument of conquest, conversion is an obligation and the ideal breaks under the weight of reality, until 21 April 1792, when Tiradentes is hanged in Rio de Janeiro and Inés closes the ledgers of a family that has learned to survive everything.
The cross is a sign that has not protected.