Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  “‘Do not let me die, Nehemias,’ he croaked again. ‘The God who you worship falsely and I truly will be revenged if you do this thing.’ ‘I am preparing something which I may or may not give you in a moment,’ I said. ‘We will see.’ ‘You are preparing nothing,’ he growled. ‘You are only rattling glasses and bottles. You are letting me die.’ ‘Not so,’ I said, ‘or not certainly so yet. I work rapidly, but it will be sixty seconds before I save you or do not save you. Ponder the drama of this in the meanwhile, enemy. Did you ever imagine such an encounter?’ But he groaned blackly. ‘Who gave you the power to decide whether I should live or die?’ he rattled then. ‘Are you God?’

  “‘He isn't. I am,’ the street girl said.

  “I dropped the beaker. I dropped the bottle. And both of them shattered. I was shaken, and I am usually a man of steady nerves. To have two of my corpses return to life on one night was shocking.

  “I believe that I would have saved the life of my enemy except for this intervention, but I'm not sure that I would have done it. I had shattered the potion that I must give my enemy; I must fix another one for him. And the girl — I must see to the girl. Most of the blood had been spilled out of her before she was brought to my slab. She needed blood instantly if she were to live, and my enemy needed the potion. Could I save both?

  “Besides, the blood of one person will sometimes save another person, but at least as often it will kill that other person. Could I in conscience hesitate? I could not. Hesitation would condemn both of them to death. I was into my own arm with a needle and with the tube that went to the small pump. I drew three full quarts out of my arm. This alone would have killed any other man, and it left me dizzy and sick. I injected the blood into the girl. She sighed deeply and went off to sleep. Whether she died again or not I did not know. This had taken me several minutes. I mixed another potion for my enemy then, but real death had closed his teeth tightly against it when I came to give it to him. He had died.

  “I turned back to the girl then, but my own loss of blood was almost my loss of life. I collapsed across her. I did not die, but I had an experience such as comes seldom to any except the dead. For my sins, I spent a long hour in the steep flames of Purgatory. When I returned to the world, the girl was rocking me in her arms. The girl had lived. There had never been anyone as alive as she. She is my daughter here, and we say that in a peculiar way she is now my daughter by blood.

  “Did any other dead-dauber man ever have such an experience? Before God, that is the true story of it.”

  Oh that was a big and rich roast that they were devouring there! Nehemias ate with passion, almost with such passion as he had ascribed to his enemy. Whether that was the true story or not, Nehemias still was not easy with it after four years.

  “There are those who say that my daughter here is unnatural. That she is not truly live or truly dead. And I say that, odd as she is in her beautiful and talented head, there is nobody else in the world as alive as she is. Yet some insist that she is the female of what the Negroes call Zombie and Jews Golem.”

  “Are you Jews?” Dana asked them.

  “No. Catholics,” Nehemias said. “Though in former years I must admit that I sometimes let it be believed that I was a Jew; thus to make it easier for myself. But in this very year of 1848 the New Constitution has now given us freedom of our religion and (supposedly) freedom from harassment. In all Europe this freedom is now lacking only in parts of the Russias and the Turkeys, and of course in enslaved Ireland; and even in those dark places the disabilities for our religion are seldom death ones. We are Dutch of the Dutch, we are Catholics of the Kerk.

  “My daughter does have a curious look about her, though. I do not know, and she does not remember, what was her blood and creed before I brought her back from death and created her as my daughter. She has a brilliant mind, whether she had that before her pseudo-death I do not know. You will notice one detail though, Dana, if you have talked to her at any length, and you have — she is insane. It doesn't matter to me, and it doesn't seem to matter to her.”

  “My holy father, your story of the two prematurely dead persons did not happen quite as you told it,” Scheherazade commented with that wonderful purring out of her round belly. The French-gray eyes of the girl had gold flecks in them, or at least lion-tawny flecks. Her heavy hair had a brindled roughness to it; there are black-maned lions in Africa, and perhaps lionesses also, that bear resemblance to Scheherazade in this. The Spanish veins in her throat could as well have been Arabian (but would not Dana know such Spanish veins anywhere?); the Jewish curl to the ears might almost have been Polynesian; the dark Dutch look could have come from Goa or Java. The round Dutch belly, however, was of Holland and no place else. Dana put his hand on its fullness to see if he could feel a quickening inside, but there was no quickening except her own.

  “There is nothing inside my belly except the universe,” Scheherazade smiled. “I keep it there for use, but I don't keep it in the form of particulars.”

  “It is in this that my daughter is gek,” Nehemias explained.

  “My holy father, on that old night you had already let your enemy die,” said this cheerfully mad girl. “You had let him die there on the slab. This was imperfect of you, and it was then that I knew that I must renew and perfect you. I hadn't done you well the first time. I didn't, in fact, remember doing you at all. And then you said ‘Nobody will ever know. Even God has dozed for the moment.’ And you were quite satisfied with your omission. ‘I had not dozed,’ I said then. ‘I had not looked away. I never doze or fail to see. I have eyes that you do not know of.’ So it was that I had to renew you. You are now a much better man than you were when I spoke to you from the slab.”

  “That is true,” Nehemias said, “and I owe it to you. You were the second making of me.”

  “And the first,” the girl insisted. “Do you understand it, Dana? I make up fables, then I animate them. My father is one such fable of mine. You are another.”

  “My daughter has these fancies, Dana,” Nehemias explained. “She believes that the World and its Persons are nothing but her own fictions, and that the people move and act as she fables them to do it. I will say this, however, her doings have always been beneficent; and they work. There was a woman here a month ago whose whole world had collapsed. I tell you that my daughter made up a new and better world for her to live in, and that new world stood and delivered for the woman. She lives in it yet. My daughter has made up new fates and worlds for countless persons, and they all stand the test. This, my daughter here, has building and healing hands and voice and belly. She will change your own fate, always for the better.”

  Dana pressed his hand deeply in the girl's belly again. There was much more quickening there than he had first suspected. It was quite true that the whole universe was inside, Pisa and Turin and Rome and Hendaye, Paris and Rome and London and Krakow, all the towns and countries of Europe, all the lands beyond the ocean that have only half a sky above them, all the islands, all the images (including the images that walk like people), all the intricacies of the Two Revolutions, all.

  “I might wish, Scheherazade, that you had made one of the things a little less strong, and my own thing a little stronger,” Dana said.

  “Well of course I will then,” she answered. “I have no real way of knowing what you wish except by the pressure of your hand. Whatever you want, I will make it.”

  “You used a phrase, Nehemias, ‘The World and its Persons,’” Dana said. “I believe it has another meaning than you intended to give it. I'm a little-lettered man myself, but I once traveled with a man named Brume and he taught me the meaning and power of words. Now a person is really a mask, an antique mask such as an old actor might have held before his face and spoken through. The word personare would mean ‘to sound through’ in Brume's own Roman. It is by half a accident that person is sometimes used to mean a human individual. But what your daughter really made up for you to say was not ‘The World and its
Persons,’ but ‘The World and its Masks.’ We have always known that we lived in a masked world. We haven't seen the true face of it ever. We aren't sure that it has a face of its own. I have always wondered who makes the masks that the world wears. My employer, whom I have never seen, makes some of these masks of the world, I believe. Your daughter, I know it now, makes others of them. These two may account for a large portion of the masks that the world wears.”

  “I worry a little about my daughter here,” Nehemias said. “She is a very good girl. She helps people beyond all measure. She goes to communion daily, and goes with a shattering humility. But she thinks she is God.”

  “I am not so sure of that as I once was,” Scheherazade whispered softly with that shattering humility, and now she looked much younger than she had before, a girl and not a woman. “Now and then, and more and more lately, I have the most curious feeling that there is another mind than mine in the universe. But it must be that I am, in Dana's sense, one of the persons of God, which is to say one of the masks of God. I do create people and incidents. I made my father here. And I made you, Dana.”

  “Will you make it up that I meet my four friends here in this town tomorrow?” Dana asked with a smile.

  “I had already made it up that you would meet six at least, friends (and several enemies) in this town tomorrow. But how did you know that? How can the unsuspecting pot know what the potter has designed for it?”

  “This pot that is me is not completely unsuspecting, girl. Will you make up a good westering voyage for me to the world under half a sky?”

  “I will, Dana, but there will be things going wrong with it as fast as I can right them. I see that another has already made this up for you, but he's made it badly and dangerously, for all that he meant it well. You wouldn't have survived his voyage; you will barely survive mine. But I will make it better and richer for you. Why, he left for you no more than a heavy purse such as one might hold in two hands. But I have remade it into the child's coffin. I cannot make your voyage any less dangerous, but I will make you keener and bolder for all the encounters. I will draw all your years and the instructions for them out of my belly tonight. I will set them into your loins as you ride the whirling world tonight, and I will set them into your head when you lie in your coffin.”

  “Coffin?” Dana protested. “I do not intend to lie in a coffin for many years yet.”

  “We sleep in coffins in this house,” Nehemias explained, “myself and my daughter and such guests as we have here. My coffins are luxurious and comfortable. You will sleep on lavender and scarlet and cream-colored satin to the smell of sandalwood and cedar. You'll not willingly go back to sleeping in a bed after the luxury of a coffin.”

  Old powerful Nehemias (himself a black-gray-grizzled lion of immensely talented paws) had taken out a sort of lap-harp which he held flat on his knees and began to play. Scheherazade again poured (or made up) white wine laced with gin and red wine laced with whiskey. And they celebrated the Old Year Evening.

  Dana was one of the select men who had drunk the devil himself under the table (it happened in Paris in that same old year of 1848), but Scheherazade seemed to be taking an unfair advantage of him. She was making up, she was fabulizing an inebriation for him. He went out of his wits; the whole scene became fragmented. Nehemias orchestrated on the lap-harp, bringing impossibly varied winds and beats out of its strings, and there was also an orchestration of events. Three or four things were happening at the same time; three or four different Dana Coscuins were doing different things at the same time, but doing them all in the one symphony.

  “Do not be alarmed, Dana,” Scheherazade was saying. “I am considering these different roles for you. Do they not go in good harmony together? But some of them will not do singly, some of them will not do at all.”

  “I must meet my friends somewhere in this city tomorrow,” Dana was saying out of several of his mouths, out of several of the sets he was involved in.

  “You will meet your friends tomorrow in any case,” Scheherazade orchestrated. “I have decided to keep that part in. The only question is with what momentum and with what setting I will put your instructions and direction into your loins and head tonight.”

  In one scene, Nehemias played the lap-harp very softly, using it only as adjunct to his own voice. Great voices in their conversation should always be supported unobtrusively by lute music, and the lap-harp was essentially a lute. Nehemias talked as few men had ever talked to Dana before: as the Black Pope had sometimes talked to him in the high Carlist Hills of Spain; as rough Malandrino Brume had talked as they prowled the nightscapes of Europe; as the Third Man had talked to both Dana and Brume in the house in Paris. There was a great feeling of profundity here (with actual words, as in all the previous cases, unremembered); there was an absolute aura of wisdom — but there was something else.

  There was a phoniness to Nehemias, though Dana declined to give it that name. There was no deceit in that phoniness, no malice, only an incompleteness beneath the illusion. It was as though Scheherazade had really made her father up and had not bothered to fill him in completely. Dana had noticed this incompleteness in other men who had the aura and front of greatness.

  There had been King Charles Albert when Dana had heard him talk in Turin. There had been the Citizen King Louis Philippe when Dana had heard him talk in Paris. There had been Ifreann Chortovitch when Dana had listened and savored him during the days and nights of their orgy, and Ifreann was the certified Son of the Devil. Dana had doubted that even these were real people; and Dana had also felt this same incompleteness and unreality in himself. More real was the Count Cyril whom Dana had never seen. More real was Christian Blaye whom Dana had known in his bare skull only.

  But Nehemias Jokkebrok was well contrived, whoever had contrived him.

  In another simultaneous scene, in another part of the orchestration of events, Nehemias played the lap-harp very loudly and goatishly, and Dana danced and whirled with Scheherazade and seemingly with a crowd of others. The malesonitus of the instrument now reminded Dana of the strong piping of the evil hornpiper of Hendaye, and the dancing reenacted some of those rowdy dances. This surely was not Mountain Bridges played over again, not the Dance of the Unbreakable Dolls, not Ride the Wild Mares. Perhaps, though, it was the whirl-around dance named Toton in which the strong Hendaye girls had whirled their men. Dana, in this scene or setting at least, was riding astraddle the round belly of Scheherazade, and she spun around and around with him. And around and around yet. Had she not said that he would ride the whirling world that night? Had she not also said that the whirling world, the whole universe, was in her belly? But this was not a thing of itself; it was all part of a skillful orchestration. The girl was making it all up as she went along.

  There was another scene in that melange. A multitude of men were stretched out on a multitude of slabs, and Scheherazade went down their ranks and opened the throat of each of them with a knife. From the gullets of some she took green stones. From others red stones. By this could be known the true from the false. But Mariella Cima had opened Dana's throat with a knife and taken out a green stone back in Spain. Was the fabulating Scheherazade guilty of plagiarism?

  Then there was Ocean. Ocean is one of the authentic masks of the world, and Dana was in Ocean with all persons whatsoever, with all masked beings whatsoever. They ascended and descended, and this did not matter. Ocean contains time and space and countless other categories; it is not, however, contained in any of them. Amsterdam was a city of peculiar assonance with the ocean mask of the world; now, though, the entire world was in that rapport. This was not necessarily a watery sea, as the name imperfectly suggests; it was equally Transfiguration on the Mountains. It was an intermingling of people so closely that they all inhabited each other. Dana's dead wife Catherine Dembinska was there and winked at him roguishly. The skull of Christian Blaye was there and in a talkative mood. The Count Cyril Prasinos was there, though Dana could not see his face; h
e was behind Dana, touching him on the shoulder, laughing at him with green young laughter that was several centuries old.

  All of the inner company were there: Tancredi and Mariella Cima, and Kemper Gruenland, Charley Oceaan (who had the name of the phenomenon), Magdelena and Malandrino Brume, Jane Blaye, Eileen Dinneen the Irish cousin, Elaine Kingsberry (how could she have known of the appointment at all, unless she had been informed by the dead Catherine's spirit?) Blind Judas Revanche was there (how had he come?); as was the deformed, demonic, indomitable Elena Prado (how had she?) This was rhapsody dream. No, no, it was communion of souls. The soul is the substance that is behind the person as mask. So all the friends and enemies were already in town, whether in the flesh or out of it.

  All but one. Only one of the strong people was not in Ocean. This was Ifreann the Son of the Devil. He was near, but he was not with the others. He howled in a voice to terrify mountains and crack and craze them; he boomed and rattled at the heavy doors, but he could not break in. At what doors? At the doors of Ocean itself. The damned howl outside it and they cannot come in.

  “Begone, Ifreann,” Dana said softly, for they had been almost-friends. “You are not in rapport here. Break your great voice and hands on the door in vain. You'll not get in.”

  Dana knew now that he was lying in a rich coffin that had been given him for guest bed, that he had been lying in it for some time. Just as well he knew that he was not dreaming, though he was slightly drunk. He knew that he had caught the world in one of its more authentic masks, and in a special form of it that is known to esoterics as Ocean West. This was the mask where eels flew overhead like birds and all good people sat down to dine with God and his saints forever, to commune with them in their diverse forms, and some of those forms were pleasantly fevered. Tancredi Cima, for instance, was a scarlet and black devilfish, and yet he was a friend forever. Dead Catherine was an undead dolphin. Elena was a Portuguese man-of-war. But the ocean was holy and Ifreann could not come in, for all that he rattled its doors and cursed and fulminated.