“It isn't the same thing,” Otis would sigh. “Coin gold and bar gold can never fill the heart. Only the gold that a man pans with his own hands can do that.”
But the people took to Dana Coscuin particularly, though they could not believe this was really his name.
“Are you a singing minstrel?” one of the men asked him.
“I'm a singing minstrel of one song only,” Dana confessed.
“There was a singing minstrel who came here in the time of my grandfather,” the man said. “He was blind, so he sang. He used the name of Dana Coq-à-l’âne which is a burlesque of the name of the folk hero. We will sing some of his comic songs to you tonight. But you use the name almost directly. You also must be a minstrel man or a comic poet.”
“Yes, I do think of myself a little as a comic poet,” Dana jibed. “Do you know The High Comedy of Blood and Death? I've done pieces of that.”
“We know it in some versions. We will sing parts of it tonight, and then you will sing other parts. It is said that nobody knows all the verses of that bloody comedy.”
“Nay, they can't all be sung or known. They haven't all been acted out yet.”
“You also must be something else,” the man continued. “You must be a sun child. The sun burns most men dark, but a sun child is burned lighter by the sun.”
“Yes, I think of myself as a sun child. Mayhap I think of myself as a solar myth as well,” Dana said with near seriousness.
“Why Dana, you could have been the prophesied white god come to these shores,” Charley Oceaan laughed. “If you had not been so foolish as to shave while we still sailed on the bateau-mouche you could have come as that golden-bearded white god of legend.”
They all laughed about that. They looked at the cheerful Dana who was a shorter man than most of them (this wouldn't have been the case on most islands or in most lands). That Dana might be the predicted prodigy who was blood nephew of the volcano Soufriere, who held green thunder in his right hand and three suns in his left, was itself a bit of comic minstrelsy. Many of the comic songs had to do with false claimants to the title.
But wait a moment! Though the right hand of Dana seemed empty, yet he had a powerful way of moving it and flicking it out that made larger men blink and gape. His wrists were as thick as their arms, and they were muscular men all. Dana just might have green thunder in his right hand.
And in his left hand, at that very moment, Dana jingled three gold coins and slid them upon each other. The gold coin always has its value and magic because it is an icon of the sun. Perhaps Dana did hold three suns in his left hand.
“Let the Dana greet his Uncle,” Guerchin the sous-sous-governor jested. “Then we will know for sure.”
“All greetings to you, Uncle Hot Cauldron!” Dana called a loud and friendly salute across the jumbled hills to the hot-top mountain. And the volcano Soufriere answered by belching a glob of fire and ashes.
They all laughed loudly at that. They laughed as though it were the punch line of some comic minstrelsy. Of course, the volcano Soufriere belched these little globs of fire and ashes fifty times a day at least, but his Reverence seldom did it so deftly on cue.
They laughed. Then two of them, Damisa the Leopard and the man who had talked of minstrelsy, were singing a comic song together; not quite in the same jumble of languages, not quite in the same jumble of tunes, but a very funny song of many levels and terraces of humor.
Laughing, Dana walked away from them all. Even his feet laughed as they played slippery tricks on him on the mossy green rocks. Dana had a great hunger for this place and he filled it with laughing. He was a laughing glutton for these scenes and sceneries. He walked a crooked two or three hundred yards, taking all the bursting, exploding, many-tiered greenery in with his intricate eyes. Then he could see less and less of it, though the smells and sounds of it came pungently and overwhelmingly. And finally he could see nothing at all except a watery green blur.
He was not laughing now. He was crying, though somewhat joyously. He was blinded by his own puzzling and almost ecstatic tears. The pungency of a four thousand foot jungle permeated him. Then he knew that there was another pungency standing on green-stained feet and looking at him.
“Welcome home to Domdaniel, Dana Coq-à-l’âne,” the girl or woman said. She spoke in a very throaty and dusky way; it was as if the rocks of Basse-Terre, splintered by the exploding greenery, were speaking. But Dana couldn't see her for his drowned eyes.
“Is this place Domdaniel?” Dana asked. “I thought it was only my own eyes that were drowned with their own flux. Am I under water then? Domdaniel is the city or the cavern that has been a long time covered by the ocean, and nobody knows where it is.”
“I make the calembour, the pun,” the girl said. “My own surname is Domdaniel, but the meaning of Domdaniel is La Demeure de Daniel, ou de Dana, the House of Dana. For Dom is the word for house in holy Latin. We have our own name because we have always lived near this place called the House of Dana Cosquin, this great rock. Welcome home, Dana.”
“Am I home then?”
“You are home. You will go away many a time, but you will always come back here as to home. You can never go back to any other place as to home again.”
Dana's eyes had cleared a little. He saw the girl as rainbowed now, as irised, as every color. Indeed she was just that. How could she be at the same time both fairer and darker than the other girls of Basse-Terre? How could she have always that nimbus of color about her? She had it even after Dana's eyes had cleared.
Part of it was the incredible raiment she wore. “I am a weaver and a dyer,” she said to his eyes. “Shouldn't I make the brightest things for myselves? When I make for a rival I make a little bit lacking, though better than anyone else could make. Notice the pretty Celeste. You have noticed her, and you will notice her again and again. Notice how prettily she is dressed, by my own weaving and dyeing. Notice also that I have played certain small tricks on her. I can also make the calembour, the pun, in my weaving. When you catch on to it you will smile.”
The brightest things for herself, actually she had said for herselves as if she were plural. The most gaudy things they were, at least. Dana recognized her now. She was the strong girl who had carried the three-hundredweight barrel on her head and went laughing up the hills.
This girl was pretty, perhaps, in a very wide use of the word, for she was a very wide girl. In many, in most places she might have been rated as quite pretty. But she wasn't as pretty as most of the girls on Basse-Terre. They were exceptional.
But she was a seven-colored female from the seven bloods running through her, and she was also her own color-maker. She was thicker than most of the girls of that island, more sturdy; and they were all a sturdy bunch. She had a dark grin that was unsettling, and light clear eyes. Dana realized that she had been talking sometimes French and sometimes English to him. That was all right. Basse-Terre had been English nearly as long and as often as it had been French. Everybody there spoke everything.
“What is your name, jade?” Dana asked her. He couldn't help calling her that. She was as sturdy and mountable as a little horse.
“My name is Angelene Dame-de-Dan,” she grinned. “That means Bride-of-Dana. Oh, oh, oh the look on your face! Did you expect another sort of bride? Will you say to me as the United States man says, ‘Be off, you nay-ger’?” And Angelene almost dissolved in laughter.
“Aye, you are a clown-jade, a skittish and silly mare,” Dana growled. “You said your surname was Domdaniel. Now you say that it is Dame-de-Dan.”
“Oh yes. I am the House of Dana. I am the Bride of Dana. I am your house. Come live in me.”
“You're naught but a heavy-haunched jade of this green island,” Dana groused. (Ah, but Green was one of the seven colors and races of her.)
“Come ride me then,” Angelene grinned, cocking a heavy haunch at him. “Dana Coq-a-l’âne the burlesque hero was a girl-rider, and Dana Cosquin was to be the soldier and seaman
of high fortune. You are both. Come live in me, Dana! But there is my dour friend wandering below and exploring the little streams! I will go and devil him for a little while. You amuse yourself with the pretty Celeste, and see if you can catch the pun in my weaving on her.”
Angelene went whooping down the rough rock terraces in pursuit of the dour United States man Otis Ranker. A pungent creature she was, appealing to every sense.
But Dana Coscuin really had come home. It was a cloudy reality. It was fantôme fact, still it was so. On this island he was truly at home for at least some short days of his life. This was his home, more even than Bantry Bay in Ireland where he had been born something short of thirty years ago. This was the place he would come back to always. This was the place he would die. The Grave of Dana Cosquin had been called by that name for more than a hundred years. Should he not someday inhabit it then? It was a natural stone cave, they said, and he hadn't seen it yet.
The House of Dana Cosquin, this large flat rock on which he stood and dreamed, had been known by its name for twice as long as had the Grave. And Dana would build a home here someday, in five years, or in ten. Ah well, he'd begin to build it now. He gathered high jungle rocks, prying them out of their grass and moss, and outlined his house with them on the big flat rock. Some of these rocks were very heavy. Well, he was very strong. He could have carried a three-hundredweight barrel on his own head, if he'd had as much heaped hair on his head for cushion as Angelene had. Some of the rocks that he rolled and dragged and lifted into position were four or five-hundredweight. He set the plans for the walls or ramparts. He set a more vague plan with smaller stones for the individual rooms and porches. He worked hard for two hours.
Then he lay down with the big rock itself for bed and a sizeable stone for pillow. He lay with the high crests behind him and the slopes and the ocean before him. He listened to a curious dialog of two voices, the voice of the seven-colored Angelene Domdaniel and that of the dour Otis Ranker. They were in a stream bed three hundred feet south of him, three hundred feet lower down. It was very steep land here.
Oh that girl was a kidder, an harasser, a gay instigator, a mocker.
And Otis Ranker answering her in a worried voice, he had been to all the corners of the world for gold, to Australia and Africa and South America. He was a rough looking and rough talking man. He was afraid of no man or beast on Earth.
One thing about him though (Dana had guessed it before, and Angelene had guessed it in delight now), although Otis was not afraid of God or Devil or Man or Beast, he was afraid of Woman. Angelene was having her own sort of hilarity over the discovery, and Otis Ranker was suffering.
And yet it isn't a rare thing. Remember all those bold-shy men who were the first exploring men in so many parts of the world. Abel Tasman, Vitus Bering, Marco Polo, Meriwether Lewis, Bingley Raffles, Robert Clive, James Cook the Captain himself — they went to the ends of the land and to the ends of the ocean. All were driven by the wild spirit of adventure, it is said. But what if they didn't go willingly at all? What if they were chased? They were all bold-shy; they were all withdrawn characters. Few of them were wived, and none of them was wanton. Really, did they climb the highest mountains and cross the widest oceans because they were afraid of the women at home? Dana chuckled at his own insight in this.
Dana could hear the worried voice of Otis Ranker far below him: “Be gone from me, you nay-gress. It's indaycent the way you talk.” And the whooping laughter of Angelene Domdaniel was like a whole orchestrated jungle.
Ah, but she'd put the prod to Dana also! Which Dana was he really? Was he the girl-rider of the comic minstrelsy, or was he the breaker of stallions and the soldier and seaman of high fortune? Och, he was both; hadn't all the high heroes been both? The Irish giants had often made women carry them on their backs for great distances. When a woman was unusually weary of an evening it was said that she had been giant-ridden. And the hero Finn McCool himself had ridden on the back of a maiden so that he could not be tracked by his great footprints through the snow. Einhardt had ridden Erma, the daughter of Charlemagne, for the same reason.
Remember the evening at the Aran Islands off Galway Bay in Ireland when the gay women had waded to the boats and taken their men onto their shoulders to carry them dry-shod to shore just for the lark of it? Damisa said that this was sometimes done at African landings, and a seaman told of Polynesian maidens giving the same welcome to men from ships’ boats.
Dana had ridden on the merry shoulders of Elaine Kingsberry when they played the dance named Ride the Wild Mares in Hendaye. And he'd often so romped on his now dead wife Catherine Dembinska, as she had once rimed: “In me and out me, aride and above, Ten full days that my lover love!”
Others too. A Gypsy lass in Savoy had invited Dana to ride on her back for luck and for a florin, and he had; and he'd had luck from it. And he'd ridden on the round Dutch belly of Scheherazade Jokkebrok in the whirl-around dance named Toton. Angelene Domdaniel also had such a round full belly, but was it Dutch? Dutch was not one of the canonical colors and races of Basse-Terre; yet there was Dutch blood there.
Others also. Another Dutch girl who had carried him across the shallow flat-boat canal in Amsterdam. And he'd ridden a small fanged beauty in south France, she who had given him a letter from Ifreann. No, that may not have happened, though there had been a sudden lust for it. There is dreaming mixed with the facts here. And an episode with Magdelena Brume — what? When did that happen? There is no real memory of it in the accounts, only in the present silliness and dreaming.
Eileen the Irish cousin had liked to give her suitors rides, one after another, and Dana also. No, that may not have happened, may only have been thought of; there was something the matter with that recollection. But hadn't he ridden Mariella Cima and small Jane Blaye and the contortedly beautiful Elena Prado? Some he had, some he hadn't. There's mix-up here. And there was another Dutch girl, no more than ten years old, who had bowed her back for Dana to mount her, and had then carried him endlessly up and down stairways, again and again, and yet again. Was she the same Dutch girl who'd actually carried Dana across the shallow canal? She was almost the same; she was the miniaturized dream image of the other.
And fair Celeste of Basse-Terre, who had taken Dana from the boat and carried him through the surf on his first coming to the island. But it couldn't have been like that. The boat had docked at the stone dock there, and Dana and his friends had walked off it laden with their baggage and the small child's coffin.
Dana, as a matter of fact, had been sleeping on the flat rock named the House of Dana Cosquin, with a smaller stone under his head for pillow. He had dozed off and had been dreaming slightly peculiar and erotic dreams. By the dreams’ testimony he was Dana the Girl-Rider. Then the easy dream was broken, but at which end it was broken is not sure.
”Get off my estate, you unseemly oaf!” sounded the loudest voice that Dana had ever heard in his life, the fearful thunder that has no equal in the world. “This rock is part of my estate, Porte d’Enfer. On your feet at once and be off, or die on you back where you are!”
Oh, that was an ear-shattering voice! It would have waked the dead, as they say, but it didn't particularly disturb the living and sleeping Dana Coscuin. He was the other Dana also, the breaker of stallions and the soldier and seaman of high fortune, the authentic hero.
Besides, he recognized the thunderous voice and knew that it belonged to a dead man. Dana had killed the man. Why should he open an eye to look at a thundering dead man who couldn't be there? Instead, he shifted to another and more conversational dream.
“Hello, Ifreann,” he said. “How are things with all the people in Hell? I do not believe that this great rock named the House of Dana Cosquin belongs to your estate Porte d’Enfer at all. Titles here are loose, and ancient name and repute prevail. This rock bears an ancient name that coincides with mine. In any case, absentee titles are voided, and I arrived before yourself. Do you know that the Governor of Guadelou
pe and Basse-Terre refuses to believe that the Citizen King has fallen, that he refuses to believe or accept that there is now a Republic in France? Or that there is a new Dictatorship following on the Republic? Titles here are by possession only. Your four sinister flunkies stare at me but I will not be scared.”
“Look at me, Dana,” said Ifreann Chortovitch. “Wake up and look at me.”
“I was dreaming peacefully. I will not wake up to see a dead man who is not there.”
“I am alive,” said Ifreann the Son of the Devil. “Come and put your hand into the wound in my side where your own rapier point went through. Dana, is it possible that there is something a little unoriginal in my words? I would not be unoriginal in anything.”
“Go away, dead man.”
“Wake and see,” Ifreann said. “Or sleep and doubt. Dana, I love you with my own black love, but there is war between us forever. Do not fear my four sinister flunkies. They will not kill you. Torture you, yes, but not kill you. I have reserved that for myself. Will you not wake and see my face?”
“I will not,” Dana said resolutely. Why should he believe a man might be alive when he had killed him with his own hand? Even such dreams are unhealthy. Dana moved to another level of dreaming, shifting slightly on the big rock. He was Dana the lap-rider now in a new light dream, but he remained Dana the Hero. He had faced down the fearsome Ifreann without even opening his eyes.
Big Ifreann sighed and walked away, a huge heavy man with a remarkably quiet tread. Or else he did no such thing; he was not there — he was a dead man and could not be there. But either Ifreann or his ghost was seen by more than a hundred people who knew him by sight, was seen by them that afternoon in the clear light, and it was said fearfully that the Master had returned to his Estate.
Dana was in another lazy dreaming. It is the perfume of a plant, said to be a species of the mandragora, that sets off such peculiar day-dreaming and sleep-dreaming in the high aromatic hills of Basse-Terre. These are involuted bold-shy imaginings and remembrances of grotesque romping with the high ladies: not social high ladies, personality high ladies.
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 5
