Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  The three angels slept in beds that night, as angels should, in that country inn right where the land begins to rise steeply. These were the only real beds in the inn except that used by the landlord himself. But the Indian woman who had spoken with them and walked along with them brought straw into their room and lay down on it there, talking to them all night whether they were asleep or awake.

  “You are worried about your ship, yellow-hair,” she said, “and about the red angel who lives on it and cannot be discovered. I will tell you that the priest will be no help in getting rid of him. I will tell you that even the sign of the cross will not get rid of him. This red angel can himself make the sign of the cross, but he makes it with three fingers spread downward in the sign of the broken cross. But I will tell you how you can take this monster.”

  “Tell me,” said Dana from his bed.

  “Take a very large fat hog,” the woman said. “Take it aboard your ship and down into the hold. Kill it there, undrawn and unblooded, and let it go to stench and rot there. The monster will come as glutton to this bait. Of course the stench will nearly drive the others off the ship, but there is no other way to bait the monster. Set there also half a barrel of the worst rum, the dregs of the dregs; put a quantity of mad bhang-hemp in it. He'll not be able to resist it. Watch and wait, and take him there in his gluttony. Run a knife into his belly then. There will come out blood and sulphur mixed. The monster will groan and weep then, but he also will do, he will continue to do, something too horrible to relate. You'll not be able to kill him with the knife in the belly, but you'll be able to take him and throw him overboard. He'll go still clinging to an awful thing. He'll not drown either, but you'll be rid of him for a while.”

  “I have a mind to try it,” Dana said sleepily.

  After a little while the Indian woman talked again.

  “You angels, all you angels of every sort, come here to do one thing: to alter history before it happens, while it is happening, and even after it has happened (even this can be done). We will never have a way of knowing what our true history is. It is this altered history that will be in the world now to the very end of it. It may be that it is only altered history that has ever been. The real history is written in another book by another sort of angel. It's hidden away; it isn't much read even in its own world; it may be that it makes very spooky reading.”

  “You know very much, for a poor Indian woman,” Serafino said, for Dana was asleep now. “How do you know so much?”

  “Oh, I am a sabia, a wise-woman of the people, a brown witch. Why should I not be wise? It is my profession. All brains are not in the heads of strangers or foreigners. The happy poor of this land are the wisest people on this earth, and I am the wisest of all of them.”

  And after another little while the Indian woman talked again.

  “Leper, leper,” she called, “are you asleep?”

  “I am not a leper,” Damisa said. “I am mottled from birth. And I'm not asleep. You'd not allow one to sleep.”

  “There is a mottled fish like you that comes out of the ocean,” the sabia said. “It is a very large fish and quite fierce when forced into battle. We call it the leper-fish, and I call you after it. I know that you are not a leper. You are mottled between God and the Devil. You know that, don't you?”

  “I know that,” Damisa said. “And I can be quite fierce when forced into battle or when forced out of sleep. Be quiet, wise woman.”

  The next day the three angels rode back down to the coast, arriving there just at night. Dana went over the ship with lantern in the dark. The shore-men had not found any monster, but they had found all sorts of traces of a monster living in the ship.

  In the morning, Dana got a priest and asked him to exorcise the vessel, “for you have good reputation as exorcist,” he said, “and you are said to know the rites.”

  “Really, there are no rites of exorcism,” the priest told him. “That is all legend. One priest is as much an exorcist as another, though long ago exorcist was the name of one of the minor offices. I will say prayers. I could, but I will not, put on a show about it. I'll not guarantee to rid you of your monster. Monsters among men are like the tares in the wheat. Generally we must suffer them till the last day.”

  The priest did say prayers in and around the ship. Some of them were genuine prayers. Some of them he made up himself, and in saying them he winked at Serafino Tirana who was a young nobleman and a latinist.

  “One goes to Patrick first,” Dana said with a smile. “And then, as precaution, one also goes to the Druids. Patrick may be asleep or his attention elsewhere.”

  Dana had procured a great fat hog. He took it aboard the Catherine and down into the hold. He killed it there and left it undrawn and unblooded to go to stench and rot. He went then to a tavern man to get the worst rum in town.

  “Bad rum, rum that has gone too rampant for humans to drink, I give to the tanner,” the tavern man said. “I sell only good rum to the people.”

  Dana went to the tanner. “Yes, I have a barrel of very bad, really rotten, rum,” he said. “I use it to soften leather in. I have been about to throw it out; it destroys the leather before even it softens it.”

  Dana loaded the barrel of rampant rum into the hold of the Catherine. Then he went to an East-Indian man of the town of Tocopillo nearby. From him he got a quantity of bhang-hemp or hashish-hemp. He put this into the rotten rum in the Catherine's hold. Then he ordered the ship to be righted, just as soon as the tide made that possible, and loaded again. Late at night they were asail from the Bolivian coast which soon would be Bolivian no more.

  There was, of course, another ghost or ghost-form aboard the Catherine, a friendly ghost, a lucky ghost, but a very puzzling one for all that. This was the child's coffin that Dana had brought all the way from Amsterdam.

  The men of the ship had come to Dana and wanted money. They were dicing and needed coin for it, and they had pay coming. Dana went to the little chest or coffin to see what he might find. He found Chilean coins there in fair quantity, gold condors, gold doblones, gold escudos. By this he knew that he was past the Bolivian coast and off the Chilean coast. He paid the men sufficient to satisfy them.

  We come to action now. Let us have some understanding of the situation, even the political situation, of these places.

  The political situation of Bolivia was this: there was no political situation or awareness in Bolivia at all.

  The political situation of Chile was this: bone-hard all the way, but of articulated vertebraed bone, flexible bone that had not left off being hard. The Conservatives were in power in Chile. They were really a middle-standing folk in the Chilean context, but they'd have been rated as conservative in most of the other lands. A back-bone must be at least a little bit conservative, whatever the other members may be.

  Chile was a state of homogeneous people grown into a feudal pattern, and the main blood was Spanish. The Negroes and the Indians (except for a remnant of the fierce Araucanian Indians) had been absorbed. Thus Chile differed from other feudal states of America in that the laborers were of no darker color than the lords. There was suppression, but it was not the suppression of race. A Chilean race had been created from top to bottom, and the same bone-hard flexibility ran through every vertebra of it.

  Back in the days of the Independence wars, Bernardo O'Higgins had been a genuine hero, in voice, in appearance, in bearing (though he was a short man); moreover he was a military genius of great leadership and planning and of unequaled personal courage. These things would always be remembered of him.

  As president of the country he had been a failure, for he followed an old Spanish system of tight central control that had always failed. He displeased all parties, the conservatives, the clericals, the liberals, while trying to please them all. He hadn't the sure sense of decision as president that he had as general. He was forced into Peruvian exile in 1823 and died in Peru in 1842, nine years before our present action. But time had been kind to him; his
successes were now remembered and his failures were forgotten. In memory he was now a hero to all. His ghost would be welcomed back.

  In truth, Chile was a very difficult country to govern centrally. It was a hundred miles wide and twenty-six times as long, with desert regions, forest regions, frigid regions, plagued by bad roads and rough sea-coast; it fell of necessity into a union of a string of local feudal states. This happened in the period of creative chaos that followed O'Higgins.

  There was ineptitude on all sides during the chaotic period that followed O'Higgins, but it was all a bloodless business and a working out of form. The new liberal party was damaged almost fatally by the incompetent leadership of Freire and Pinto. The new conservative party suffered even more damage under the dictatorship of Diego Portales, a competent but unpopular man, one easy to caricaturize. But Portales did get the good constitution of 1833 which was to stand for nearly a hundred years. Prieto was president at that time; Portales was merely dictator or boss. After the assassination of Portales in 1837 (blood beginning to flow in Chile now as it was more and more spilt in all the progressive lands) Prieto remained on as president until 1841. It was discovered then, after he had been murdered, that Portales in fact had been very popular with the Chilean people themselves. His murder had been engineered by a small group that was mostly foreign. It might even be said that his murder was brought about by not more than three cartoonists of the new journals.

  But by 1841 the period of creative chaos had ended and the good years had come. The disruption was of foreign base. It was decreed, by other groups in other lands, that revolution must be imported into Chile; that this back-bone of the continent must be broken. There was some jealousy here. If their own lands suffered from revolution, or were blessed by it, why should not Chile have such state also?

  But a Chilean government had evolved that was workable. It was strongly localized. It was conservative only in name, and in contrast to certain new movements from Europe. It brought well-being, it brought peace, it brought freedom, it brought closer equity of rich and poor than any other country of the continent, and it brought them without the slogans and hysteria of other lands. This was unforgiveable of Chile. The only real attack on the good years came from the several new journals of French and Spanish and Venezuelan introduction.

  Manuel Bulnes served as president for two five-year terms from 1841 to 1851. The good years continued. But it was in this decade that tares were sown in the wheat, from one viewpoint; or that the great enlightenment came to Chile, from another view. People began to talk of revolution, people from Venezuela and Peru and Banda Oriental, though there was a looseness and freedom in Chile that was not matched in their own countries. The revolution they talked of seemed to be a strong central government, a dictatorship, instead of the easy central government and the various local groupings. The revolutionary movement attacked the government for “Colonialism in Politics,” though the colonial government in Chile had been a very centralized viceregal affair which had been unworkable. It was, however, what the new revolutionaries wished to reestablish under other name.

  The tares were allowed to grow with the wheat until harvest time. Harvest time was election day of 1851. International revolutionaries had already gathered in naval force off the coast (Chile had virtually no navy). These international revolutionaries would come ashore immediately on the news of a popular victory and take over the real running of the country. And the local revolutionaries were absolutely sure of their victory.

  The Chilean people themselves were confused. They didn't understand the revolutionary talk at all. They didn't trust what the revolutionaries said. If everything was to be overturned, that meant that they themselves would be overturned. The people had a strong sense of locality. They didn't see how all good things would come to them by being ruled by a bunch of foreigners gathering in Santiago.

  Harvest day came. To the surprise of the revolutionaries, the people voted overwhelmingly for Manuel Montt, the handpicked successor of Bulnes and the government candidate.

  Well, the only things the revolutionaries could do were to revolt and to call for foreign help. They hadn't a tenth of the Chilean people with them, but they had organization and centrality. They surrounded Santiago, the capital, cutting the country in two, leaving a narrow thirteen hundred mile segment of the country to the north, and another of equal length to the south. And their international allies put Valparaiso, the sea-port of Santiago, under sea-siege with their gun boats. This could have become the bloodiest civil war ever on that continent, with half a dozen countries involved before it was finished, if it should ever be finished. There was every indication that this thing should come about. There was every indication that it would be very long and bloody.

  And what could possibly prevent it?

  Three words, perhaps, spoken in the street of Guayaquil many days before by one man passing another man. Could that possibly alter history in motion?

  A middling young man who looked very like another man who had been young five decades before and who was now dead. Could this coincidence of appearance have effect?

  Three angels riding a ship on the sea.

  A leaper, a leper, a man-boy make three.

  Could three angels, ignorant of their own mission, have effect on a thing like this? It was harvest time in Chile, and it looked very much as though the wheat would be torn up and bundled into bundles and burned in the fire; and as if the tares would be gathered into the barns.

  On the Catherine there was a gagging coincidence of stenches. Several of the men aboard, who at some time in their lives had made evil pact, understood a little bit what these stenches meant.

  There was the fat hog, of course, undrawn and unblooded and twelve days dead, that almost drove the crewmen off the ship with its stink. But there was something unnatural even in this.

  And there was the monster (almost all of them now understood that this creature had left off being a man for a while), still hidden, but rampant and avid, who set all the men to roaring anger. Had Dana dared sail three miles nearer shore, all the men would have deserted and swum for it. It was harvest time on the Catherine also. It was Gadarene swine time.

  And Dana Coscuin knew exactly when the hour of it arrived. He left the bait purposely unguarded for it when the time was ripe — an hour, two hours, how long till the most monstrous swine should be glutted. It had come on early night, and Dana, followed only by Damisa the Leopard and by Serafino Tirana, went down into the hold with a great ship's lantern.

  Ifreann Chortovitch was there, or a thing that had been Ifreann. It did not appear human now, nor even acceptable animal. It sat, or spread like livid ooze, on the deck-floor of the hold. It had burst and shredded its clothing with its growing bulk till it appeared in near-purple nakedness. It was hairy and obscene; even the hair of it was rank purple. And it was enormously swollen.

  The creature was at the carcass of the dead and putrid hog, eating it hide and all, flesh and entrails and all, filth of entrails and filth of rot. It had already eaten an incredible amount of the dead animal, apparently more than one hundred pounds of it. The most gluttonous of humans could hardly have eaten a seventh of that. And the thing had the barrel of debased and be-bhanged rum canted over at an angle, and had clearly drunk more than ten gallons out of it, an impossibility.

  This creature, whose human name had been Ifreann, was groaning and gnashing and sweating prodigiously, and it gobbled high hog without ceasing. The man's eyes of the creature reflected inner horror, but deeper eyes seemed to look out through the horror-holes with greed and hate and gluttony.

  “It is as though an even more evil creature has eaten evil Ifreann,” Damisa jabbered, “and left only his eyes looking out, and they turn into pig's eyes. And now it eats hog also to be in its paunch with Ifreann. Is it Ifreann at all now? Kaka sunan ka?” Damisa asked in his Haussa-African, one of the five tongues that all demons understand, “Who are you?”

  “Ifreann,” the creature ans
wered in an almost human voice. So he was still Ifreann, in part at least.

  “Kaka sunan uban ka?” Damisa asked him, “What is your father's name?”

  “Diabolos,” the creature answered in another of the tongues that all demons understand. And it ate and ate of the rotten flesh.

  “Go out from him!” Damisa ordered. “It is I, Damisa the Leopard, who commands this.”

  “Damisu sai wutsi-wutsi su ke zua, ama kuraye kulun i na jin kakewal su da dere,” the creature answered in the African (Ifreann as a man would hardly have known this tongue; as a demon he would have), “Leopards come here seldom, but I always hear the hyenas laughing in the night.” Ifreann said this in a slurred way, half human and half animal. And he still gorged and guzzled.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help him!” Serafino prayed and made the sign of the cross.

  Ifreann also made the sign of the cross, but upside down and backwards, touching first his gigantic paunch (his breast was buried somewhere beneath it), then his forehead, then his right shoulder, and afterwards his left (the Greeks still follow this sequence of shoulder touching). But the Ifreann-hand that made the sign used the three fingers spread downward in the sign of the broken cross. And he continued to gorge on the meat that howled in the noses of them all.

  “Och, I'll let it out if it will come out,” Dana cried in a high voice. “My self, my fein, tells me to do this.” He struck the knife into Ifreann's throat; there came out purple serum. He stuck the knife deeply into the bursting belly of Ifreann, and there came out dark red blood and yellow sulphur. The monster groaned then and rolled its eyes in agony; it wept globby yellow tears, and at the same time laughed like a hyena in the night. And it continued to do something else almost too horrible to relate: to eat and drink, to gorge and guzzle, while there came out of its belly the blood and sulphur mixed in great quantity. It had all the unreality of hell that the thing should continue to eat with such avidity while that putrid flood still burst and flowed out of him.