Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  So Dana stayed with the ship. The ship went to Paramaribo of Dutch Surinam on the South American Main. It was a great three-master of a thousand tons that had been lately retired from the Dutch East India Company and had been bought and put into service by others on this shorter and less exacting run. Under high sail it appeared as sleek and able as a man-of-war, and it had painted imaginary gun-ports which would once have fooled all except the elect. But it was slower and more ponderous than a war-ship, and the painted ports were now all but obliterated. In that decade and ocean there was no need for such deception anyhow.

  The name of this ship was Vervormwolf, which is change-wolf or were-wolf. This may also be the meaning of the name Guadeloupe where the ship was not going. At Paramaribo, the ship discharged Dana Coscuin and Charley Oceaan and a child-sized coffin which they had with them, and also a heavy Holland cargo. It loaded rich: cane, coconut, bauxite, balata (this is the juice of the bully tree from which the Dutch had begun to make a primitive rubber), and rum.

  Dana and Charley were in this puzzling port of Paramaribo for but three days. It was a confounding and a mystery, a piece of Africa and of India on the American Main. The sky was a peculiar jade-green (it was even rather jaded green); the trees were blue, particularly the Blue Tree; the water was all the color of chocolate. The air was sour, the heat intense, and the grace of God seemed to be not fully over this place.

  There were Negroes there new from Africa. They did not know whether they were slaves or not, and their transporters professed not to know. Some of these Blacks were on their way to Brazil. Brazil had been abolishing slavery (with at least one proclamation a year) for thirty years now, but there still existed contrato, a form of indenture. This was in the form of loosely contracted labor to pay for the passage from Africa.

  But it was not essential that these Blacks go to Brazil, or to any particular place at all. One of them told Dana that he would willingly go with him and Charley Oceaan wherever they were going. There was only the fact that he owed a certain man either money or assign work. Dana paid the money to the certain man; he paid a much smaller sum that the man originally asked. Dana was always one to insist on fairness in such dealings; he was capable of a grinning sort of menace and a casual handling of weapons that often went to insure this fairness. The price settled on was truly fair.

  This African Black went with Dana and Charley to Cayenne in French Guiana in a little lug-sail coaster vessel. The African Black was named Damisa. This name, he said, meant leopard.

  “What?” Dana asked (speaking through Charley Oceaan who knew all the quasi-tongues). “Is it because you are fierce and swift?”

  “No,” Damisa said. “It's because I'm spotted.” Either by birth or disease this man had whitish-yellow botches on this black skin.

  Cayenne, now that was something more like it! It had a more human tone to it, a saner madness. The people there were rogues, every one of them, bitterly cheerful rogues. The ribs stuck out of their skins and the tongues waggled in their heads. They refused to work; they refused to starve; they worked out a compromise between the two things. They had a happy and knife-bladed wit, and they talked a French that even Dana could understand. They were all undeniably French in Cayenne: White French, Black French, Magenta-colored French. The fathers and the uncles of the White French had come there originally to the penal settlements; even some of themselves present had personally experienced this transportation.

  There was deep revolution in every man, woman, child, and dog there; but they were faced with an almost non-existent government at which to direct their revolt. There were no rich men there to be plundered; there were no fine buildings to be pulled down or burned. It was revolution chattering and crackling in the air forever, but it hadn't the substance either of the Green Revolution or the Red.

  Cassava and corn and fruit were eaten by the people, and a little of all of these were exported. There was building wood and ship wood, but who wanted to cut wood? There were diamonds to be had in the near interior, but who wanted diamonds? There was nearer and easier gimcrackery to be had for the picking up, and most of the people were gaudily adorned. There was rum for the making of it; there was meat for the easy hunting. There was shade from the scorching and enervating heat. There was gold to be had, but only foreign adventurers had come to placer-mine it.

  One of these gold placer-miners was a United States man named Otis Ranker. Otis had just heard exciting news of other gold in a more northern country. As a matter of fact he had just heard this exciting news from Dana Coscuin who didn't know that it was exciting.

  “You are sure of this?” he demanded over and over. “You are sure of this, Green-Shirt?”

  “Of course I'm not sure of it, man,” Dana told him. “It is sea rumor only. I heard it in Paramaribo from a man from a Mexican ship.”

  “You are sure of this? Then I'll go there at once. I'll go where you go to your toy islands; from there I can get some sort of transport to the Isthmus. Crossing the Isthmus is better than going around the Horn, or crossing overland Mexico. I've done both, and I know this couldn't be worse.”

  The news Dana carried was of the California gold discovered in 1848, and the news had begun to travel by land and sea rumor by early 1849.

  After five days in Cayenne, Dana Coscuin and Charley Oceaan and Damisa and Otis Ranker boarded a small French vessel of the kind that was then called bateau-mouche. This vessel was going, by great good fortune, to Basse-Terre itself — the home of Charley Oceaan and the predestined home of Dana Coscuin.

  And, three weeks later and after only three stops, these four men went ashore on blessed Basse-Terre carrying a child's coffin and other baggage besides.

  Four of them carrying that heavy coffin and other baggage besides? Yes. The coffin wasn't really very heavy now.

  So Dana had spent a great weight of gold out of it? No he hadn't; he hadn't spent a single gold piece out of it. He had spent a very little bit of other gold coins from a leather bag that he carried, but nobody had taken anything at all out of that little coffin. What facts then about the damnable decline of the coffer?

  The fact was that Scheherazade Jokkebrok of Amsterdam-Baghdad, though she was the most splendid fabulator in the world, was still a fabulator. And hoard gold, wherever it is fabulated, will always diminish or disappear, particularly if it is buried or if it is taken on sea voyage. In Ireland it will turn into ashes or sheep dung or walnut shells or shore pebbles; in Flanders it turns into small pieces of broken pottery; in France it turns into spoiled onions or rotten potatoes or (again) ashes and clinkers; in Haussa land, so Damisa told them, it will turn into peanut shells; in Basse-Terre it turns into rags and inferior shore shells and the refuse of sugar refining.

  Oh, there were still gold coins in that child's coffin. There would always be. One had only to sift through the rubble and find a few of them on the bottom any time. There were still as many gold coins there as the Count Cyril had left in a fat purse for Dana, but there weren't the thousands of pounds of them that Scheherazade had made up. The coins may even have been self-renewing. Several years later, when he had dire need of money, Dana found four such coins during a quarter hour's rummaging through the trash of that coffer. He believed those were the last of them, but a month later he found two more, and a year later another. He never was sure that he came to the last of them.

  But why mention small minted gold when we come to golden Basse-Terre itself?

  Basse-Terre (the town and the landing) has a longitude of sixty-one degrees, forty-four minutes, and forty-two seconds west; and a latitude of exactly sixteen degrees north. These identical bearings have been given (in a chronicle of another sort) as those of the Earthly Paradise, and there is some truth in that. The island of Basse-Terre is roughly rectangular and about eight miles east to west, and sixteen miles north to south; or as large as any land may be and retain quality. Its twin island Grande-Terre is of about the same area but has the shape of a distorted triangle.

&nb
sp; Basse-Terre (Low-Land) must have been named in irony, for it is all tumbled hills and mountains, green cliffs, and purple chasms. There is no level land on it at all, and the only low land is the sea-sort which everywhere rises quickly to tangled heights. The twin island, Grande-Terre, however, is low-lying and almost awash of the sea.

  Besides Basse-Terre itself, the other towns on Basse-Terre Island are Pointe-Noire, Ste. Rose, Le Lamentin, and Capes-Terre. None of these towns is large. All of them together, and including Basse-Terre Town, would not have the population of a medium village where you come from.

  Foci of interest on Basse-Terre Island are the volcano La Soufriere of four thousand nine hundred feet height, the House of Dana Cosquin (that spelling has always been used on Basse-Terre; do not change it) which is on the southwestern flank of the volcano, the Great Thermal Springs which are hard south of the volcano, and the Grave of Dana Cosquin on the southeastern flank of the volcano.

  Dana Coscuin had been startled to find a name so near to his own attached to natural features on this little island in the Antilles. He suspected Charley Oceaan of an elaborate practical joke in this. This was not so. One week later, the local priest showed Dana, in a book printed before Dana's birth, these names for these landmarks.

  As for Charley Oceaan, when he had received his own first instructions several years before (these instructions at second-hand from the Count Cyril Prasinos), he had believed that Dana Coscuin was a code name for his mission, taken from the landmarks of his native island, and slightly misspelled as if perhaps to make an acrostic. He had been more than startled to meet, in Hendaye, in Paris, in other places, a man actually named Dana Coscuin: a man, moreover, who did not so much as know that there were places named Basse-Terre or French Guadeloupe.

  The House of Dana Cosquin was a high flat rock about two miles northeast of the little town of Basse-Terre, about two miles southwest of the topmost for of the volcano. This high flat rock rose clear above the high jungles and was but little lower than the emerald height of the volcano. It gave a supreme view over a very great reach of ocean, and over many islands and rocks and shoals. From the House of Dana Cosquin one could see the small islands named Iles des Saintes (from their size they were two major saints and three minor saints, but they do not seem ever to have been individually named). Off towards the South Islands was a shoal named Vieux Port, and from the high House of Dana one could see its underwater buildings and old stone docks better than from any nearer point or lower height. These were not at all recent things, not of the last several thousand years; they were very old and submerged megalithic remnants.

  From the rock named House of Dana Cosquin, one could also see Marie-Galante, an island half as large as Basse-Terre itself; one could see all of Grande-Terre that was not occluded by the volcano Soufriere. Once could see other lands and seas; one could see various currents, each one with its own texture and coloration; one could see various under-sea fountains and wellings-up, especially that known as the Great Green Fountain. And, on the island itself, one could see the cap-rocks of the Great Thermal Springs.

  There had never been a house on the flat rock called the House of Dana Cosquin, at least not in historical times. There may have been a giant's house there in the old megalithic days. The rock itself, of some four acres extent, appeared to be hand hewn and not of natural finish at all (though of very old patina). But there would be a house there; Dana Coscuin (he would always spell his name that way, though his son and grandson might spell it with a q, though the Guadeloupéens had always spelled it with a q) resolved now that he would build his house and home on this high rock. He had a full vision all at once of what the house would be like.

  The site was about three hundred yards from the stone and sod house of Charley Oceaan; and there were five men now at Oceaan's, sorting out their things and making ready to dwell there for a short or a long time. As to the other foci of interest on Basse-Terre Island — the volcano named Soufriere, the Great Thermal Springs, the Grave of Dana Cosquin; we will leave them till tomorrow. No, tomorrow is Sunday when we will worship and rest. We will leave those sights for next week.

  The five men gathered today at Oceaan's stone and sod house were Dana Coscuin and Charley Oceaan themselves; Damisa, the leopard who was the mottled black man; Otis Ranker, the United States placer-mining man; Guerchin, who was governor (more accurately under-governor, still more accurately under-under-governor: Le Gouverneur Sous-Sous, Damisa the leopard would come to call him in fun) of some small portion of the Island of Basse-Terre of French Guadeloupe.

  “I will be with you if I may,” this man Guerchin said as the rest of them worked, making their several trips down to the landing and up the hills again to bring their goods, “since I see that you four are men of culture and travel, and I have a great hunger for these things and the news of them. The over-Governor of Guadeloupe and Basse-Terre has forbidden me from visiting his house or partaking of his company. He has also taken away all my rights and my salary. The only other cultured man on this island, besides myself, is the priest; and we disagree because I am an atheist. We have reached this agreement: for five days each week we are close friends; on Saturday we quarrel, so that we may not have to see each other on Sunday; on Monday we become friends again and continue so till Saturday. Today is Saturday, and we have quarreled.”

  “Aye, be our Saturday friend at least then, Guerchin,” Dana told the good fellow (all governors everywhere are good fellows, a thing little known), “and on tomorrow Sunday, if you insist on excluding Charley Oceaan and myself, you may still be friends with Otis Ranker and with Damisa the Leopard who are not of the faith. But we will gladly be friends of yours for all seven days, or for seven times seven.”

  There were other men not of the mescolanza native who were there. There were in particular four dark and sinister men who came and gazed at the friendly company. Sinister they were, surely, from the very aspect of them, but why should we call them dark? It is because words are colored. Actually, besides Dana Coscuin who was a fair-colored child of the sun, these four men were of a lighter complexion than any others who might be seen on the island. They were dark inside, though, and their darkness shone through. The dark-skinned folk of the landing and the town, in contrast, were sunny through and through; they had a shine on them.

  One of these four sinister men had arrived with Dana and his friends on the little French bateau-mouche. Two others had arrived in a larger ship. One, apparently, had already been there. These were European men, but they had none of the seven bloods of Basse-Terre; they hadn't them in Dana's estimation, at least. The seven bloods of Basse-Terre are Irish, English, French, Spanish, Carib Indian, East Indian, and Negro.

  “These men are flunkies of the Estate,” Celeste told Dana. Celeste herself was light and appeared to be pure French.

  “Which is the Estate?” Dana asked.

  “The name of it is Porte d’Enfer. For your life and your soul, do not tangle with the Estate or its men. Particularly do not tangle with the master of the Estate when he comes.”

  “I knew a man, now dead, who would have delighted in an estate of that name.”

  “Likely he is the same man, the Dana, but he is tardy in coming this time. And his men are sultry and worried.”

  “If he is the same man, he will not come — not in the flesh.”

  “Sometimes he comes out of the flesh. Do be careful, the Dana.”

  At the landing, girls and women were unloading baggage and bales from the small ship on which Dana had arrived and from a larger ship which was at the landing. The girls were very strong, and they carried loads on their heads that would stagger a strong man.

  But were there no men there to unload the heavy cargo? There were men there, big and muscular men, lithe, lively, powerful men of more capability than men elsewhere; and there were great numbers of them. Why did the men not unload the cargoes then? Let us confess it, the men of Basse-Terre were lazy. The women, being more diligent than the men, we
re paid higher wages; and in any case, the money of the women was also the money of their men.

  “It is for the pleasure of their company that we do their work for them,” one of the women explained to Dana. “Our men are the finest and most pleasurable in the world. There are not such good-humored and handsome men anywhere. Why should we not support them?”

  Even Celeste, who was slight and light, and a lady through and through, worked at the unloading. “I do not have to do this, the Dana,” she explained. “I have no man of my own to support. I have money from my father and land of my own. I do it so the other girls will not believe I feel superior to them.” She was a hundredweight of a girl, carrying half again that weight on her head up steep roads of a mile or more. Others of them, however, carried much greater loads. In particular there was a dusky good-natured rival of Celeste, thick and sturdy, who took a three-hundred weight barrel on her head and went laughing up the hills. These were extraordinary girls and women.

  Charley Oceaan had kinsmen there, kinswomen, kins-children; and they all laid to so as to make all his friends welcome and comfortable. All were wildly happy and proud to see their dapper kinsman returned from over the sea. All also were quickly taken by the appearance of Damisa the Leopard, and indeed this mottled man was extremely friendly and outgoing. Most of Charley's friends were instantly friends and partisans of the dour Otis Ranker the United States man, divining that the gold-struck heart of that seemingly surly man was really golden. And Otis liked the people, though he had an everlasting terror of being crowded. “Be off, you nay-gers,” he'd say. “Give me breathing room. Is there gold to be panned in the streams here?”

  “Why, why look for gold in the streams?” they'd ask. “There is all the gold you want for diving down to the wrecks and taking it. Why look for it in the streams?”