Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Dante, still in his own Purgatorio by latest information, must be in envy of this hellish scene,” Dana stated in wonder. “He conceived nothing more outrageous.”

  “I knew the Alighieri but slightly,” Ifreann spoke in near human voice. “He hadn't much direct information. He was naif. He believed nearly all that we told him. We conned him a bit.” And Ifreann still gobbled rotten meat, taking in even more of it than equaled the stream of blood and sulphur that poured out of him.

  Osborne the English ship-fitter came down into the hold bearing a small hand-lantern. He was ashen of countenance by the jumping light but he did not seem surprised by the scene.

  “Can the four of us take the mountain of him and heave him overboard?” Osborne asked.

  “We can, we will,” Dana said.

  “Let me take a small joint, Dana,” Ifreann begged, “to eat on my journey.”

  “Take it,” Dana said, and Ifreann took a great rotten ham with fifty pounds of meat still on it. The four men carried the mountainous form with its burden up the ladder, then up the companionway to open deck.

  “Can one feel compassion for a devil?” Osborne asked. “I'm confused on it.”

  “Not till he asks for it,” Dana said. “He won't.”

  They flung the huge form and its burden overboard. It smashed and shattered the water with a whale-like splash. It left a glowing wake of phosphorus and sulphur.

  “Is it murder we've done?” Serafino asked dully.

  “No. He'll not drown,” Dana pronounced. Then they saw Ifreann by his own yellow light, drawn up into himself like a big devilfish and still eating ravenously underwater on the rotten ham-joint of swine.

  Sharks streaked towards the creature, drawn by the turgid blood. And they ran into an invisible water-wall. They reversed themselves with a turmoil and spume. They sped away from that ocean-whorl in great panic. They'd come on one more ferocious than themselves.

  Change after change in the Ifreann then. Oh, he was octopus, he was giant ray, and then more giant fish. He was devil, he was monster, he was man. It was as man, or as near-man, that he surfaced, apparently unhurt, turned and waved at the four men on deck (and did it with a certain resurgent pride), and swam for shore with a powerful stroke. But his way in the water was still a little fishy for true man.

  “He'll not drown,” Dana said in echo to the words of the wise woman, “but we'll be rid of him for a while.”

  It was no great distance. They were no more than a mile and a half from the docks of Valparaiso. They were in the middle of Valparaiso harbor now, and in the middle of ships. It was harvest time in the harbor also. Other things had been done, by Dana's previous orders, while the monster was being baited, taken, and disposed of.

  It was light night in the harbor, and the sail-ships and the steam-ships stood up brightly and in array, gunboats all. And they had given ultimatum to the port city.

  Then a ghost ship slid through the middle of them invisible with blue and green sails and shrouds and lines. She had come in swiftly on the night wind. Now she went on coal and steam almost silently as she coasted down an alley of ships.

  History was being altered in the making, was being altered forever in fifteen minutes of impossible action. It wouldn't be remembered; not the incredible things that were really happening, not the bloody rapacious thing that perhaps had already happened and now was altered out of being (“to alter history before it happens, while it is happening, and even after it has happened — even this can be done,” the wise woman had said).

  All that would be remembered, all that is written now in the histories (where you can find any scanty thing at all of it there) is that there were rumors of a sea-siege of Valparaiso, and that nothing came of it; that the ships and the rumored ships vanished like fog or like bursted rumor itself.

  All that would be remembered was that there had been talk of long and violent revolution in Chile, and that it had proved to be little more than talk. The gathering of hostile groups had dissipated of themselves with only three very small engagements (or one by a variant account) within three months (within a single month by another story). It was a revolution in name only, 'tis written in one place; and even the name-only of it isn't given.

  And yet there were memorable happenings one night in Valparaiso harbor, and there were memorable encounters with a whole city and whole nation on shore the next dawn or early morning. Memorable things these that happened, but are not remembered.

  Dana and his men opened fire with eight of their nine brass cannon, four on a side, as they went on steam through the dark alley of ships. They shot point-blank, from less than fifty yards, at the ships on either side of them: two cannons on each side firing into the superstructures (what had Osborne the English ship-fitter and ammunition man done with these shells?) with weird scattershot of plasmic flame; two cannons on each side shooting solid heavy ball into the sitting ships right at waterline. Firing rapidly and moving rapidly, they demolished the double array of vessels; they left them sheeted in flame and floundering.

  The Catherine was the ghost ship, invisible first in the dark night, invisible now in the trough of flames. She moved fast under engine and donkey engine and wind. She volleyed again and yet again, shattering superstructure and mast and yard, bursting the very bellies of the ships, and setting up sheets of flame and flame and still more flame.

  Ships afire looked across the narrow harbor alley at other ships afire. All these polyethnic and polyglot gunships of the revolution had just been altered out of being. If they saw the ghost Catherine at all, they saw her at too close range, and in direct line of fire with their allied craft.

  So the maritime revolution broke up, all hands on the craft turning to fire-fighting and pumping. Those that could move moved out of the harbor and down coast towards the rebel-held satellite port of Cartagena; many of the men would be saved by small boats out of there, but their ships would not be saved. Other men (the majority of the men on the ships) jumped into the harbor-sea and swam for the docks of Valparaiso, becoming confused and contrite foreigners and not revolutionaries at all during their exhausting swim. The sea-siege of Valparaiso was lifted. More, it was expunged. In history and in memory it became the case that it had not happened at all.

  Ultimatum was never executed on Valparaiso. It was forgotten. It hadn't been. Valparaiso wasn't shelled from the sea, except for a light warning lobbing of shot just after previous sundown and some hours before the arrival of the ghost.

  And at following dawn only one ship came to dock, the small beautiful trim ghost ship named Catherine Dembinska. She had singed and flamed and burst thirty larger ships — and where were they now?

  And one man only came first onto dock, before the lines were made fast, before the gang was laid. He came with a thirty-foot leap, downward and dockward; a heroic leap such as one does not see every day, or every decade. He stood as though made of golden sapphire fire that burns but does not consume. He was a tow-headed and green-blue-fire-eyed man of less than giant size, but he became a man-magnet in his own right. For the empty streets and dock-road slips were suddenly filled with people.

  “It is the O'Higgins appeared again!” they cried. “He is returned to life and to youth. Chile is reborn with O'Higgins.”

  “My name is Dana Coscuin,” Dana sang out to them.

  “O'Higgins returned to life and to youth can call himself anything he wishes!” they howled, and they feted him and his crew now coming onto dock and they feted the ghost-ship Catherine.

  Ah, they weren't really superstitious there. They knew it wasn't really the O'Higgins. But the legend cycle had made full turn, and this was another manifestation of that particular fire-and-ice hero.

  Dana was a lucky one. He made his own legend, and he loved every minute of it, every day of it, the whole month of it; for it was a bright and celebrated month that they spent in Valparaiso the seaport and in Santiago the capital.

  This was the beginning of optimism in Dana f
or the Green Revolution in the land under half a sky. There was much more than half a hope for it now. The devil had been bound for a thousand years (or for a fortnight at least) and he could not return as quite so rampant a devil as he had been; the bloom was off his youth in his local pervasive form.

  It was, in fact, exactly a fortnight before Dana saw his peculiar devil again, and this devil was forced to the sidelines by Dana and his group, pushed out of notice (and he loved notice), denied his climax and shock-appearance (and those things were a main strength to him).

  This was a large party-affair, a sumptuous feast and palaver in Santiago the capital. We will not say who was the host of this affair or whether he was wealthy: he was wealthy in wisdom and esteem at least. We will not say that this was a high-society affair, as such things might be called in other places. It was an homogeneous-society Chilean affair of intelligent and benevolent souls of all stations.

  An indication of the elevated spirit of the fiesta was the fact that the early lion of the feast was a leopard: Damisa the Leopard. This large glad grouping accepted Damisa, that mottled and leprous-appearing Negro who had been semi-slave, in a way that less high societies (those of New York or London or Berlin) would not have accepted him, not with such an easy grace. Damisa was barefoot, and who would notice that? He had bought new shoes that very day (his ship-shoes had gone to pieces), but the new shoes had not yet learned the ways of his feet so he had discarded them for the evening.

  And this society did not make a mistake in accepting Damisa as lion. He was gracious, he was balanced, he was witty, he was worldly (of worlds many of the Chileans did not know about at all). He was a master entertainer (not a servile entertainer); he was a really rare talker. He was a much better conversationalist than Dana when they wound into the evening, before the wine that loosens and the brandy that warms. Dana would begin to excel later in the evening, as he always did, but now he had the good sense to look like the reborn O'Higgins, and to preserve the illusion with as few words as possible. It was all Damisa and his travelers’ tales for that while, and Dana looked at his friend again and again. He had traveled with this man, perhaps he had come to love him, but he hadn't really seen him before, not with the wide-open eyes that all the people turned on him now.

  And Osborne the Englishman was not, as it became clear, an ordinary Englishman. He was known to all the great ones there; he was known and recognized by all the little ones as well; his reputation in South American affairs went back ten years further than Dana's, and it had always been one of pacification and aid. He was another sent angel with a very broad mission.

  Serafino Tirana was a nobleman born. This was not so important in Chile as it had been forty years before, but it was important to some. What was important to all was that Serafino was naturally noble. And the man-boy had become a man now; Dana hadn't been sure of it till this night; he had become a man in the short weeks that he had traveled with Dana. Serafino had kinsmen and kinswomen present; he'd have had them present at his coming in half the capital cities of the world.

  Dana talked with a cobbler, with a weaver, with a fisher, with a cattle-man, with a grain-grower. He found them all to be integral and important. This was a little like Ireland where all the common people are important, not like England where only the important people are important. It was a little bit like parts of Spain in this, like very great parts of France, like parts of Savoy, even like parts of bloody Sardinia.

  Serafino had discovered a young and larkish female cousin. They had not met since childhood, and they were much taken with each other. She was not, Serafino explained it to Dana, a cousin within the forbidden degree.

  “Nor is she in the forbidden degree to me,” Dana said with a mystifying look.

  “The Catherine would not like it if you took another wife,” Serafino stammered out of sudden white-face.

  “She'd love it,” Dana grinned. “What if this Carolina should come onto the Catherine as bride two weeks hence?”

  “As whose bride, Dana? Come away with me, Carolina.”

  “No, no, I must talk to this light-hair.”

  A rich man gave Dana a fine cigar, and he smoked it up with curling pleasure. Later in the evening, a poor woman gave Dana a cigar of her own rolling and licking (she shaped it deftly and rapidly) and he smoked it up with even greater pleasure. They all drank out of strange cups and ate from strange fingers, though none of them was really strange to any other one. They were a spontaneous group in close communion; it doesn't happen often with such a large group; it is a thing to be remembered.

  Yet, there was one man there who remained a little strange, who didn't mingle easily with the others, though he looked as though he'd like to. This was a very large man and he had a familiar look about him. He had a booming voice when he used it, and a hearty manner. Why couldn't he come to the heart of the group?

  Dana didn't really recognize him for some time, had not in fact really looked at him, had felt him only as a shadow on the fringes. The big man was in evening clothes of the European style. He'd have been at home in high society anywhere in the world. He wasn't properly at home in this mixed top-to-bottom society.

  He was Ifreann Chortovitch, back in human form, urbane and distinguished, large; himself of nobility of old title. One almost expected him to take monocle from breast pocket and pop it into his eye. Then he did just that. The move was almost too much for Dana.

  “Should one feel compassion for a devil?” the Englishman Osborne had once asked.

  “Not till he asks for it, at least,” Dana had answered. Ifreann asked for it now, in his own way, by his lonesomeness. Dana went to him.

  “How are you really, Ifreann, old enemy?” Dana asked.

  “Not well, Dana, not well. I do not seem to enter into the festivities easily tonight. And I'm troubled with my stomach. I was wounded there, you know, and in my throat. I'm not healthy with it at all.” Ifreann had lost his grand voice. He had no more than a strained wheeze now.

  “Goats’ milk is sometimes good for an ailing stomach,” Dana offered helpfully, “and honey for the throat.”

  “Yes, so I have heard. I will try them. Dana, we are, of course, enemies forever. I will kill you in the final account of it, however often you kill me first. I'll drink your blood, I'll split your bones; but all that is in another context. We have reveled together and talked before. There was never so good a companion as yourself. Let us talk now.”

  “No. We've talked in Paris; we've talked in Skawina outside of Krakow; we've talked in my head, and in yours; in the flesh and out of the flesh. I've talked to you, and you man and devil and animal. I'll talk to you in none of these cases again.”

  “Ah, but you will, Dana,” big Ifreann muttered. “In the weeks and months ahead you will talk to me, in the flesh and out of it, in my head and in yours. I can never get enough of talking with you.”

  “I have enough of it now,” Dana said. “And you'll not over-awe me again. From now on, I enlarge and you diminish. No more, Ifreann.”

  “Shall I flee from your face and seek asylum in swine, Dana?” Ifreann asked. Ah, that was more like it. There'd been a flash of Ifreann's old purple humor there.

  There was another strange man near, and Dana walked over to him. This man looked a little familiar in only one respect. He had the same eyes, but no other characteristics at all, of several other men who had conveyed instructions to Dana.

  “Go to Montevideo,” the man with the messenger-eyes said in the messenger-voice. Then he winked at Dana (he hadn't quite the same eyes as the other messengers had), “ — by the long way round,” he added.

  “All right,” Dana answered. “I go, in due time.”

  Due time was two more weeks by the little clock that worked in Dana's head. Then he'd set sail again on the breath-taking Catherine Dembinska.

  VII

  THE TESTAMENT AND THE HORN

  Madio cielo y dos mares y agua buena.

  Tierra altisima y baja; sol de soles.
>
  El hombre condor y sus arreboles

  El hombre azul y la noche serena.

  Made half of sky, and the double ocean surrounding,

  Highest and lowest of land, and sun of suns of light:

  The condor man and the great red clouds abounding;

  The blue man calm in serenity of night.

   — Carlos Pellicer; Toda, America Nuestra

  But this latter-day poet does not here say that the America is a land under only half a sky. He says that it is half sky, that it is permeated with sky. This is a more illuminated view of it in all ways. Physically and optically the America is suffused with light. It is much more hopeful than it was.

  We ourselves do not quite understand the symbolism of el hombre azul (the blue man), and that is our loss. We think of him somehow as cool blue and night blue, as well as ghost blue. But we do understand something of the optimism, or optimizing, the turning the corner and coming back to the sun.

  There now come bloody hopes to replace bloody despairs.

  While in Santiago, Dana received a large packet of papers from Elaine Kingsberry the English lady who had been best friend of his late (but always in some way, present) wife Catherine Dembinska. It was a varied packet. There were pamphlets and booklets in several languages; people were trying to put the growing green revolution into words on paper. Elaine begged Dana to read these, to put himself current, to acquire an intellectual background to the movement, even though she knew he was no reader. There were notes from Elaine to Dana of various datings and subjects. She told him of a plot against her life and then a plot against her freedom that had taken place on a little steamship between Amsterdam and England; and of how it became necessary that she shoot a man dead and be harassed in courts for the act. Dana already knew this account in essential from Angelene Domdaniel of Basse-Terre; Angelene had learned it both by letter and by her own intuitions.