Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  Dana parted from Valiente's bosom and from her frightening liveliness. He gave her such a kiss as is only given to the great and vital saints. He erupted out of that house and into the dazzling day to be about the ship and the soul business.

  Dana drew bank draft; it was ready for him. He hired boat, and was out to meet the Catherine when she had scarcely entered the harbor. Her refitting began before she was docked.

  And when she was easy at the dock, Dana put further workmen and equipment aboard her. A master ship-fitter, an Englishman named Osborne, came to him. There would be many such fortunate encounters. Osborne knew where nine brass cannon might be found, there in Guayaquil, already cast, and all but ready for mounting. He knew exactly what Dana wanted done, and he knew how to do it. They stowed and equipped.

  At midnight they went out for trial voyage. How the Catherine spoke and moved! At dawn they docked once more.

  Men came and went, and Dana was careful who they were. Nobody used the gang or the ropes without his knowing, and there were no lines to dock except coned rat-lines. The painters were at work on the Catherine, for she rode high in the water now, uncargoed and unladen. No need to careen or lock-dock her. She had never been particular of such details, and they'd paint her as she rode.

  Her hull was painted ghost-green, the color of invisibility. It would blend with the light or with the dark. But her new name (really the same as the old) was not meant to be invisible. It was painted large in her own ruddy colors, not red, not yellow, not quite orange, but all of them together in a blend that Dana chose. It was as near as he could remember the color of Catherine's own hair. But Catherine had had chameleon hair, not always of the same color. So would this painted name be; always a flame, but not always quite the same flame.

  La Catalina had been painted over, but she was still there: for Catherine had also been La Catalina, the Kathleen, the cat-Helen, the Cath-Helen (the battle Helen), the kathar-Elen (the pure-Helen), the kathol-Elen (the entire, the catholic, the universal Helen); so she would always be. But now she was painted with her own flame-name by which she was known in both worlds: CATHERINE DEMBINSKA.

  The loungers of Guayaquil cheered and hooted and laughed as the big bright letters of it came to their finish. They knew, as all good people everywhere know, that all Polish names are funny; and that some of them are holy.

  Damisa the Leopard came to Dana that second day. He would go with Dana, he would sail with him to Valparaiso. Three other men came with assurance. They had received the call, they knew the destination (though Dana had not spoken that city's name since it was spoken to him in the street). And Dana received them, not knowing how they were called but knowing that they were good men.

  In the evening, several of these men went off to the easy and gracious tarts of Guayaquil, but Dana still kept watch, knowing every workman and visitor who came aboard the Catherine. There was one who must not come, but he'd be too big to be missed in any scanning.

  On the third day, the boy-man Serafino Tirana came to Dana with two companions. Serafino was the eldest son of the lady Valiente (not really, Dana was now her eldest son, and Serafino her next eldest) and it was by Serafino that part of Valiente would go with Dana, as she had said.

  On that third day the Catherine was coaled and further provisioned, and on that day the brass cannons were mounted. There was much to be done yet. She would be sheeted at sea. Three of the old seamen of La Catalina remained with her. There was Damisa, and the three men who had come with assurance. There was Serafino Tirana with his two companions. There was the English ship-fitter Osborne. There was Dana Coscuin himself; twelve men when the Catherine sailed at dark.

  Ah, but there was a thirteenth man on her also, one of whom she had been afraid to her death. In spite of all careful watch of the gang and the ropes and the rat-lines, the biggest rat in the world had come aboard.

  VI

  CHILE AND SPINE AND THE GHOST

  Down coastal desert spine, through spumy white

  To green, below the mountains fired and iced,

  There came the quick encounter, where stood bright

  Bernardo's ghost, and sharp the thorn of Christ.

   — Auctore

  Now to elucidate these lines (as John of the Cross always wrote of his own short stanzas when he expanded their elucidations into whole books), the spine and the thorn are counterpoint and pun, and they stand in apposition to the ghost. But the spine and the thorn are not quite the same thing. The spine and the thorn are both stiff, sharp-pointed processes, but the thorn has vascular tissue and the spine lacks it. The thorn of Christ (which does have vascular tissue) is both the difficulty and the hope of the world, and is of especial importance to the world with only half a sky over it.

  But the spine has other meanings; one is that of determination, of back-bone or spirit. This meaning impinges on another definition of spine, that of the notochord of primitive creatures and of the embryos of higher creatures which then becomes the true boney spinal column.

  In another sense the spine is the same as the spirit (the ghost). The bones of the spine (the cervical and thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, the sacrum, and the coccyx or tail) form the hollow sheath for the spinal cord of nerves and tissue; this cord, as well as the bones that sheathe it, is the spine. ‘The spinal marrow, which is but the braine prolonged,’ old Sir Thomas Browne wrote, but he was wrong. The spinal cord is not a prolongation of the brain. The cord was first; it was the main thing in primitive creatures. Then the brain appeared, as a prolongation or appendage of the cord, as a button or nodule on top of it. The cord is the older, its memory is the longer. It was the original location of the spirit, the ghost. It survives as a ghost, and as the seat of the deep unconscious which is of the whole long body and not only of the button which is the head.

  But the long country of Chile is the spine and ghost of the South American continent. She is the relic of a more giant continent, much of which has been devoured by the sea. She remembers when it was greater; she is still the ghost of the superundated limbs. And the spine as thorn is ghost of an antediluvian passion akin to that of Christ.

  There are other ghosts arriving to the congress of events. One is the ghost ship and ghost woman who is named the Catherine. One other is Dana Coscuin himself who had the appearance, to old men who remembered, of Bernardo O'Higgins; hence they called him the Ghost of Bernardo.

  “Bernardo O'Higgins, the principal creator of the Chilean Nation, was short and pudgy, but energetic, with blue eyes and fair skin which betrayed his Irish ancestry,” so wrote the great Hubert Herring.

  That description sounds a little bit like Dana Coscuin. But the actual similarity was more than a little bit. Rheumy-eyed old men swore that it was actual identity. Those who knew O'Higgins only by visual tradition (and visual tradition is strong and very accurate with the illiterate and semi-literate), or knew him only from portraits, were equally convinced, on seeing Dana, that he was an absolute reincarnation of O'Higgins who had died as old man nine years before this time in his Peruvian exile.

  Back now, from elucidation to narrative:

  The gay ghost ship named the Catherine (her gaiety marred somewhat by a fearful presence aboard, however) was still a sail counter of the great Humbolt current, in valiant tacking battle with that current. Sometimes she near toppled under her sails, when the wind favored her for a while and the current opposed her, as always; sometimes she even went to coal and chugged her engine and spumed the water. But mostly she went on sail. She had been canvased now to her own sort of invisibility, sailed in green and blue. And she hadn't yet arrived to the Chile coast. She was still off the coast of Bolivia, off the Tocopillo sector.

  There is a snicker. There is an ironic question from someone we cannot see: “Would that not be a little like the sea-coast of Bohemia where the Bard set a fanciful comedy, meaning by it ‘Land of nowhere’? For these two countries have no seacoasts.”

  No, the seacoast of Bolivia was rougher and more ari
d than that of Bohemia, and not fanciful in quite the same sense. For Bolivia did have a seacoast in those decades; it was later robbed of her by Chile. It was a rough barren coast. And something violent and barren had infested the ship herself.

  Dana had known for some while that Ifreann Chortovitch was on board. He thought at first that Ifreann was dead now (and was angry that he was not dead by the Dana-hand), and that he was present out of the flesh. But the evidence mounted every day that the Son of the Devil was there alive and fleshed and violent and scheming. The animality of the creature was overpowering; he had to be there. He pervaded everything. He made the turtle-soup taste like snake-soup, he made the Jew-bread taste like devil-bread. He turned all thoughts around the wrong way. He drew down lightning to the yard-arms, and caused sulphur to cover the sea. He was a malign influence. His booming laughter could be heard at all hours, but mostly in the middle of the night; and it simply could not be located.

  The Catherine wasn't that big a ship. Nothing so large as Ifreann could logically hide on her. Dana was all over the beloved craft, by light and by dark, and he could not find this enemy. All the men of the crew were trustworthy, and none of them could find the foul giant.

  Dana checked rations for three days to find if Ifreann was raiding them. He was. That creature had always been a glutton beyond all believing, and now he was using as much food and drink as all twelve of the proper men on the ship. Dana put guards on the rations at all times, and the guards were faithless and went to sleep. But the guards were not faithless; they were cast into sleep by malign power. Dana himself stood guard over the rations, and was ambushed into the same sleep or paralysis. Ifreann mocked him during these spells, and Dana could not wake to him.

  Fires broke out all over the Catherine. Objects were levitated. There were sudden stenches. Ifreann was having fun at his brimstone antics.

  A man was killed. This was an antic that couldn't be tolerated. The murdered man was one of the three men who had come to Dana with assurance at Guayaquil. Dana put the Catherine to land at Tocopillo on the Bolivian coast.

  The English ship-fitter named Osborne was put in charge. Twenty shore-men were hired; the ship was careened in a steep estuary there. It was unloaded completely. The twenty shore-men went over that not large ship for three days. They were looking for a great beast or man or creature, and they were to examine every timber and fitting of the ship till they found it. This creature was described to them. He had been described in an earlier chronicle:

  “Ifreann was as tall as Tancredi, as bulky as Kemper (and oh, they were a huge pair!), and he had much more meaning and weight to him. Perhaps this Ifreann was a young man, as was said of him, but there was nothing to correlate his appearance to. Perhaps he was handsome, if a man with a great purple pumpkin of a head can be called handsome. Well, yes, Ifreann was handsome; he was probably the most imposing man that any of them had ever encountered — but he did have a high complexion.” And again: “What does a tracked Devil smell like? It is undeniable that he has a strong animal smell when he is pursued or at bay — a little like a bear, a musk-mad bear. A little like a wolverine, which continental Europeans call the Glutton, which is also called the Son of the Devil. A little like an ape. Very strong and rampant.”

  “We understand,” said one of the land-men. “It is the espantajo, the coco, the trasgo, the espiritu errante.”

  “Aye, he is arrant spirit and arrant flesh,” Dana said angrily. “Find him. Find it.”

  Dana thought that the fresh eyes of the shore-men might discover Ifreann. He was camouflaged from the ship-men, perhaps by their being too familiar with the ship and its background.

  So we have three days on the Bolivian coast while they search. Bolivia was the poorest country of the continent, and this coastal region was the poorest part of Bolivia. But poor Bolivia was an essential part of this queerest of worlds. It couldn't have lived without her.

  Back on one of the bull mountains of Ecuador, the Condor had told a mystical but true geography of the South American continent. He had named the countries and their parts with great accuracy and perception. Ecuador was the brain. Greater Columbia was the face. Peru was the lungs. Banda Oriental (Uruguay in modern name) was the privates. Argentine was the loins and entrails. Chile was the spine. And so it went.

  The Condor forgot only one organ and member. He had a tendency to forget about this thing. He was still on the bull mountain trying to realize what was lacking in his scheme for things. He could not become the Hero, he could not become the Christian Hercules, till he realized what he had left out of all his theories. And he would be several years yet in realizing it.

  What the Condor had so far left out of all his calculations was the heart. And poor Bolivia was the poor heart of the continent.

  “For the balance and sanity of the world, it is necessary that there be ten happy paupers for every unhappy and arrogant rich man. However, for the balance and sanity of the arrogant rich, it would be well if all those happy paupers could be gathered together in some distant place out of our sight. They bother us.” So wrote an arrogant and unhappy rich man once.

  Bolivia was a land of happy paupers, so Dana Coscuin decided when he had hired horses and ridden some way inland with Damisa the Leopard and Serafino Tirana. A long day's ride up country, and a long day's ride back, and talking with very many people on the night between — it did give some idea of the country. They did not see all the happy paupers of Bolivia, they did not see any of the arrogant rich; but they saw the paupers in all their sorts, for all sorts of poor people like to come down to the sea and idle there, and wander the roads, and lounge about the countryside. These are the estates of the poor.

  Bolivia was the most Indian of all the South American countries, the poorest, the least turbulent; and on its own terms (which you would find meager and unacceptable) it was probably the happiest. There wasn't much oppression there. There was nobody to oppress these paupers. There wasn't enough wealth in any form to attract the wealthy or to create a wealthy class. (A few mines in limited areas, a very few plantations in others; mostly just the broken-up small and poor areas.) It wasn't really a plantation country and had never had slavery in a practical form — who there could have afforded to own slaves?

  But there was subsistence for hard work, and not much possibility of surplus. The paupers were not of the ground-down sort. They were free and independent. They were just as lazy as they could afford to be; any lazier and they'd have starved to death, any more energetic and they would have lost their beautiful balance with the world. There are advantages in having a country too poor and fragmented to attract exploitation.

  “You are an angel, are you not?” an Indian woman, walking along the road, asked Dana Coscuin who rode.

  “No angel, me,” he said. “I'm a bad man often. I'm a good man some of the time. I'm no angel at all.”

  “I know you are a bad man often,” the woman said. “I can see sin marks on your face that shouldn't be on the face of one so young. I know you are a good man sometimes, that you are a good man right now. You have the air of one, and it cannot be faked. You even seem intelligent, though you are not even Indian. But you cannot understand a straight question or give me a straight answer. I ask you again, for I want to know this thing: are you not an angel, one who is sent?”

  Dana thought about it a little as he walked his horse beside her. Yes, in every tongue with which Dana was acquainted, an angel meant one who was sent, on mission or message. I meant a delegate, one who was dispatched to accomplish a job, one who traveled under orders. There was an implication but not a compulsion that the one who was sent should be a good person. There was the hope, so often unfulfilled, that all angels should ultimately be Angels of the Lord. But an angel was one who was sent, and Dana was sent.

  “I am an angel,” Dana said simply when he had thought it over. Damisa and Serafino hooted and laughed, and the poor Indian woman smiled happily.

  “It is right that you
laugh,” she said. “I'll never trust an angel who comes sour. But angels you are with your laughing and your horses, three angels riding. There is a song in our Indian named Three Angels Riding, though my own husband says it is a mestizo song, half of our own tune and story, half of an old Jesuit instruction. I will sing it to you as we go along.”

  The Indian woman sang Three Angels Riding. The song was cholo, mestizo, mixed-blood and mixed tongue; some of the words were Spanish, some of them were Indian of the various tongues. The riders understood the words and the meaning pretty well, and Serafino Tirana wrote down a version of it that night when they were in an inn, sixty miles from the sea, where the land begins to rise steeply:

  ‘Tis Three Angels riding to mountain and sea.

  The Leaper, the Leper, the Man-Boy make three.

  Come Three Angels riding with green words or red,

  From God or the Devil, they haven't which said.

  'tis Three Angels come with the word from great places,

  Or come out of Hell for to trample the faces.

  The sent ones, compelled by the message that's bound them,

  To leave the lands changed from the way that they found them.

  Ambassadors Three with instructions in sheaves,

  'tis Three Angels riding with their hearts on their sleeves.

  We've Englished this badly, but it's only one third our fault. As a matter of fact, Serafino Tirana Spanished it badly (his inept version is to be found in an old newsy letter to his mother), and Serafino stated that the Indian woman Cholo-ed it badly. She couldn't sing, and she thought that she could. That is often the way with happy paupers.

  There were possibly one thousand foreign agents or angels meddling in Latin American matters at that time. Three quarters of them, surely, were angels of the Devil; and the other one quarter was split, confused, ambivalent, not understanding their instructions well, not understanding at all who had given the instructions. But the confused one quarter did have effect, and often it was timely while seeming merely clumsy. Sometimes it was lucky. Sometimes it was inspired.