“The Ifreann, is he alive or dead?” Dana asked dully.
“In whatever state he is in,” said the fourth man, who held the Spanish pistola, “we will send you to him in that same state, thus — ”
That was the moment, the moment when the fox goes to ground from the midst of the hounds after seeming to be paralyzed by fear. It's the moment when the snake doubles, feints, and re-doubles. The fourth man had spoken with words, but when he spoke also with the pistola he was too late for Dana. Dana was out of the middle of them, off of the meander, and down into one of the open ravines even as the pistola flashed and shot sounded.
Ah, Dana was a real night man now, gone thirty yards before the ears of the four manifestations had cleared from the barking blast of the gun. He stood still then, supernally dark and without breath or sound or aura, able to take any of several instant ways from his new darkest spot.
“You know not fox ways; you know not natural snake ways, even though you're an unnatural snake yourself,” Dana taunted his enemy, hidden mind to hidden mind. “You do not understand how cannily natural things may move on the earth. And you have admitted that you are dead, Ifreann. That one said that he'd send me to you in the state yourself were in, and he intended to send me to you dead.”
(Dana's reasoning may have been at fault here. It's possible that the men meant to torture him only, with pistol wound, as well as with knife and boot and cudgel, before bringing him before Ifreann in whatever state he was in.)
The four tall and shaggy forms moved now, rapidly and even efficiently, in a loose group, off of the hog-back meander and down into the ravines after Dana. They had one dark lantern; it threw a single narrow spot, out and down.
It was difficult for Dana to resolve the men behind and above the narrow spot of light, but it would not have been difficult to escape them. The man with the dark lantern was the man with the knife. He hacked silently at restraining lianas and vines as he cut a quiet way, and the other three followed. There was one liana more restraining than the others, and another of the flexible danglers caught him about the knife wrist as he hacked soundlessly through one of them. The man hardly realized that the hand of Dana had him by the knife wrist till the knife was twisted out of the hand, or that he had lost his voice till a crackling blow from Dana took it away from him, or that he had lost consciousness till a second blow from Dana robbed him of that. And Dana had the dark lantern a-hand with hardly a bobble in its movement.
“Is it all right down and ahead?” called one of the men behind, the man with the big cudgel.
“All right down and ahead,” Dana sent back in a hoarse whisper. Dana had heard the man with the knife speak, had heard him threaten to cut his eyes out; he had also heard the shadow of Ifreann himself in the voice, as a man's voice will be like the shadow of that of a more powerful man he has been associated with. And Dana was a good mimic. He led them, with the dark spot, around the body of the man he had felled, dictating their very footfalls as he went.
At the same time he spoke voicelessly to his first victim that he now left behind (it is quite possible to speak so to a man who has just been bowled over the low threshold of conscious and so is receptive): “I send you back to Ifreann with the message. I will not see him or recognize his being. I send you to him living, on the very slender chance that he is living, and because I am disinclined to kill again. If he is not in that state, and the message does not reach him there's naught lost but your own well-feeling.”
Dana tied the lantern to a slim hanger, then set it to bobbling slightly and wavering as though a man were still holding it. But he himself stepped back and around, letting the low-hanging vine carry the burden and the bait.
“What is it man, what have you spotted?” called the man behind, the man with the heavy cudgel. “Have you spotted the Irish breallan? Have you him down?” (Ifreann had had an Irish girl for mother and the Devil himself for father, but how was it that one of his manifestations or flunkies used an Irish turn?) The heavy-cudgel man was almost up to the bobbling dark lantern when Dana struck, not him the second man, but the last of them, the flat-cudgel man. He forced a cry out of that fellow that would have curdled the spleen of an ape. It was such a heart-cry as is sometimes given when a knife slips between the ribs; yet doesn't slip there mortally, or the cry wouldn't have such power. “You also go to him alive, and tell him I won't come,” Dana spoke voicelessly.
Two men down and damaged now, the first and the last of the trail of them, and the other two thrown into somewhat of a night confusion.
“Quick, bring the lantern,” the heavy-cudgel man called to the man who wasn't there. “The luath man is behind us. We'll have him quickly, to the saving of our companion and ourselves.”
Then a man was at the lantern again, Dana, and he brought it along in seeming obedience. (How was it that Dana had taken a liking to the heavy-cudgel man, and him a servitor of the Ifreann?) “Here with the light, here with the light!” the cudgel man called. “He's blooded but not dead. You, Jaime, be cocked and ready for a shot. The lurker is still near. And you, Sebastian, set down the lantern to light this one, and then guard aft.”
But it was Dana, not Sebastian, who set the lantern down obediently, and then cudgeled the stooping cudgel-man unconscious with his own cudgel.
“And you I send to him alive,” Dana minded at the new-fallen fellow, “and tell him, if he is alive, and he isn't, that I will not come and I will not see him.” Then Dana doused the dark lantern.
Jaime, the pistola-man, gibbered fearfully in the dark. He called and got no answer. He stumbled and fell. He arose and ran. He stumbled again, and Dana came upon him and killed him.
“The Ifreann deserves his answer, though he deserves nothing else beyond. You, Jaime, go to him dead, as I believe he is dead, and tell him that I'll have no more dealings with him in this life nor in another.”
Dana retrieved the lantern, lighted it again, unhooded it to a wider flood light. He also took the Spanish pistola, and with these he went up to the higher ridge. The unaccountable element was still there: the distress flare from the sea. There was a touch of sea-light now, and Dana saw that it was an uncertain sail-ship afraid of the surf thunder. It was near to Capes-Terre where it would wreck without pilot. Dana signalled as well as he could with pistola and lantern. He signalled for it to go around south and west. This would bring it in sight of the Basse-Terre landing by daylight. The ship sent flare again, and a different sort of flare. Dana did not know whether he was understood.
Angelene Domdaniel came to Dana then. How had she come unheard onto a night-man like Dana? She had a pistol that sent up flares of four different colors. She muzzle-loaded them one after another and sent them up.
“They will understand now,” she said. “They will go around. It does not matter whether it is a friendly ship or an enemy ship. It is a niais ship, a goofy ship, and it is lost.”
Dana and Angelene walked to Basse-Terre. It was Sunday morning and almost dawn. The priest, in soutane, was already riding a donkey into town from the other way.
“You needn't have killed the man,” Angelene said. “I could have gotten your message to Ifreann somehow, if he needed the message.”
“I know it. I killed him out of willfulness,” Dana answered.
“Then go to the priest.”
Dana went to the priest and told him he wished to be confessed. The man took a stole from the donkey-saddle and put it around his neck without dismounting. Dana told the priest that he had killed a man.
Had he contrition for it now, the priest asked him.
Not yet, Dana told the priest, for the night's excitement was still on him. It might be, as a matter of likelihood, that it would be many months before he would have contrition for this act. The willfulness worked in him this way sometimes.
“Then, as a matter of likelihood, it may be many months before you can be absolved,” the priest told Dana. The simple-minded priest told him also that the willfulness had been set into hi
m by an antagonist, that Dana had been defeated in a combat, and had not won as he had believed.
“There is a lot you don't know about this sort of combat,” Dana said stubbornly.
“And a lot that I do know about it,” the priest told him.
The priest told him again that he could not be absolved and could not receive the sacrament in his present state of mind. And there the case remained.
Soon it was full early morning and people began to come to the church to the Mass. The priest heard many and quick confessions for half an hour. Then all the faithful filled the front of the grass-roofed church, and those others who either did not belong to the Faith or who (as in Dana's case) were impenitent within it, lingered in the back. One man, the sous-sous governor Guerchin, stood just outside and would not enter, but he was not keeping his accustomed distance.
It was two minutes later that Dana was jolted by a great elbow into his side. He looked about (and up) into a grotesque grinning and winking face that filled most of the broken head of a big loose man. It was the heavy-cudgel man whom Dana had left as almost dead short hours before. The big fellow nudged Dana again and grinned. They stood side by side.
The priest was a puny man of all the seven bloods of Basse-Terre. He looked like a simpleton, but he sermonized with quick intelligence when the time for it came.
“The world is in a state of torment,” he said, “as it has always been. Now, a tourment is really a great twisting motion, and in Latin it was the name of an engine of war. It is at the same time a whirlpool, tourbillon, and a torture.
“The only way to escape from the bothersome froth of the whirlpool is to enter into the very center of it, which is Christ. There only is the real depth and moment. It is there that the big world must enter; it is there that our smaller local world must enter.
“There are only two things: the Center which is everything, and the eccentricity (the off-center) which is almost nothing. There is no other up or down, in or out, left or right. All of the eccentrics resemble each other in their weightless noise and in their error, however much they claim to be opposites. The greater the eccentricity, the less is the grace and power.
“However, in our fallen and defective state, all things will be at least slightly eccentric. In no other way will they acquire angular momentum than by being a little off center; in no other way will they know the center. This angular momentum which we acquire is known as the Life Affair. But to leave the deep center very far is to lose weight and depth and substance; it is to be no more than empty air moving at silly speed, of too little matter even to be called a wind.
“There are troubles today in the larger world. I will not detail them. We have troubles enough of our own. I have with me new tobacco plantings and new coffee plantings that I will give to those who want them. I doubt that they are better than the old ones. I have new millet and new corn. I am not sure that our island is the proper land for either of them. Nevertheless, we must plant always — that is why we are on the earth.
“Also I have, as always, a need of money. Anyone with sudden new coin in his pocket and the sudden disposition for it may give it to me either publicly or privately.
“That all things may be renewed in Christ! Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra delicta.”
There had grown up outside a tourment, a tourbillon, a torture of sound; yet it was really a weightless noise. Dana himself knew that it was a sail-ship coming in clumsy fashion to the landing, and tired and vocal persons dragging themselves off of it.
The sous-sous Guerchin left to see about it. Damisa the Leopard left, and the United States man Otis Ranker left to see about it. There was no need for anyone else to go.
After the Mass, Dana did find sudden new coin in his pocket and the sudden disposition to give it. He went and gave it to the puny priest. This man gave out the various seeds and plantings that he had brought with him, told a little news and heard a little. Then he mounted donkey and rode away in somewhat of a hurry. He must ride to Capes-Terre and say Mass there that morning also, and it was a hard ride.
Dana walked down to the landing with the heavy-cudgel man of last night's encounter. There was something puzzling about them walking together now. Even more puzzling was the aspect of a third man who now joined them. Dana looked sharply at this man; he knew him and he didn't. It was a Frenchman or a light mixed-blood who wore Sunday coat and shoes, a dandy man of the place who was still a little out of place.
The man had a look about him that Dana had seen before, the look of delegate authority. And he smiled more with his nose than with his mouth.
“What will you tell me, man?” Dana asked him.
“Go to Guayaquil,” the man said.
“All right,” Dana agreed, and continued towards the landing with the heavy-cudgel man. Once, on Bantry Bay in Ireland, a strange man had told Dana “Go to Hendaye.” This couldn't be the same man, though there was slight similarity. He could, however, be a delegate from the same man who had sent the other.
The sail ship at the landing was the same goofy ship that Dana had signalled on the night just past. It hadn't really been in trouble, just lost and unseaworthy and with crew and passengers weary and a little sick. It didn't matter much that the thing was unseaworthy. It wasn't, in that season, very rough sea in those regions, and many unseaworthy ships were putting out in that year from United States ports with cargo holds rigged up to take many passengers.
The sail ship of goofy mien was on the way to the Isthmus, whence its passengers would cross to the Pacific and other transportation to California of the gold strike. Most of the miserable passengers had come ashore now. They wanted fit water to drink, they wanted to be clean again, they wanted better food than ships’ food, they wanted to rest again. Then the ship would learn new bearings, find out or not find out how it had gotten several hundred miles off course, and sail again.
Angelene Domdaniel recommended that they walk a few short miles along the coast to that place where the Great Thermal Springs goes into the ocean. They could be clean again there. The ship's boats could take on good water there. She would even give them good food there. Angelene mounted her great stallion, now shod and noble in his mind and mien, though tired from the night past, and showed the way. Angelene was colorful in her Sunday best.
So was Celeste in hers, and she rode a pony as fair and blond as herself. Dana was amused as well as delighted at the vision of her. He understood what Angelene had meant when she had spoke of making puns in the colors of the things she wove for her friendly rival. Oh, there was striking incongruity in the glad-rags of Celeste, really clever juxtaposition of color that could only be called punning. Likely Celeste knew it and still liked it.
Not all followed the gay ladies, though. Half a dozen of the citizens of Basse-Terre rang bells and hoisted hasty tavern signs. They would hold open tavern for the men and passengers of the Gloucester Goose, which was the name of the goofy old sail ship. Basse-Terre could quickly become a town of half a dozen taverns, whenever a ship such as to make it worth while came into the port. Citizens who did other things, or nothing at all, could become tavern-keepers for an hour or a day or a week. And these United States men who were passengers on the Goose seemed to have money.
They had money, and they numbered more than a hundred. A great deal of gold was carried to California in the early part of the year 1849 by men like these. These men were not dregs or draggle. Mostly they were men of at least small prosperity, and they came as activated agents of sound corporations. Perhaps twenty energetic men of some finance would get together and found a corporation, put a thousand dollars each in it (that was a large sum then); then three out of the twenty men would be selected by lottery to go to California to discover fortune for the corporation.
They weren't poor men who flocked to the holds of unseaworthy ships to be taken on uneasy voyage around the Horn or to the Isthmus. The poor men hadn't heard much of the thing yet. Now, in early 1849, the news of the gold strike was still o
n a confidential mouth to ear basis; and men of some wealth hear that sort of news first.
But Angelene had her part of the trade. The filthy men from the ship bathed in the streams and pools that came out of the Great Thermal Springs. Otis Ranker appointed himself to see that everything was conducted with all propriety. He cautioned his fellow United States men that Angelene and Celeste were not loose women, that no word of blasphemy or obscenity might be spoken in their presence, but that the bathing and washing was all right; such was the custom in the place. So the men bathed and washed and swam, appointing guardians from their own groups over their clothing and possessions. They washed their clothes and hung them on tide-water branches to dry in the sun.
They had fresh water to drink and sugarcane rum; they had bananas and fish to eat. And Angelene had also dressed a barrelful of eels.
“Who are you, man?” Dana Coscuin asked the big-cudgel man. “I didn't spare your life to have you follow me like a spook. I killed one. I should have killed two.”
“You did kill two. One had a weak head and you may have killed him unknowingly. Oh, I'm O'Boyle.”
“You're no such O'Boyle as I've ever seen around Bantry Bay.”
“If you had travelled a little, man Dana, you would have seen me around Cobh or Cork or even Clonakilty Bay. I'm a good man who happened to sell his soul to the Devil for a period of years, and has now decided that the period is over with. I'll go on the Goose when she sails now, and I suspect that you will also. Take it as you like. We will go as companions or we will go as strangers, and we may not go to the same place after the Isthmus. Or I'll fight you again. I can take you by daylight. I can take you here and now. Where I am from, we consider the Bantry Bay men as mere boys. How will you have it?”
“The Ifreann, is he dead?” Dana asked without rising to O'Boyle's taunts.
“That I never knew, what manner of fish he is, or what state he is in. You aren't the only one who believes that he's killed him, Dana. I suppose, technically speaking, that you'd have to call him dead. I never saw him in proper flesh myself. Ah, he is a spooky one, though. I carried your message to him, that you would not see him and would not talk to him. Then I told him that we were quits. ‘And do not trouble yourself to follow me or have me followed,’ I told him. ‘I'll not serve your spookiness again, and I'll not be done in by you either.’ ‘It's no trouble, really,’ he said in that dry way he has. ‘I was going to follow the Dana anyhow. I'll follow you both together now.’ I left his service, and he owes me wages. I call it quits, and when I call a thing quits, even the Devil had better leave it at quits.”
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 8
