Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Angelene, the eels are not dressed the way my cousin Eileen dresses them in Ireland,” Dana said.

  “No. These are better,” she told him.

  “One of us must remain here, to drive a nail through the Devil's shadow if it is possible,” Charley Oceaan said, “or to strike the wheels from his chariot as the old song has it. I believe that this person had better be myself. This is my own place. I will keep my eye on the estate named Gate of Hell. And I will begin the work in small, after several years of seeing its mixed victories and defeats in large.

  “Besides, Dana, there are two slain men in the hills, and they will be discovered today or tomorrow. This is a French island, and the French are incurably legalistic. Ye'd better go with the Goose, Dana, and come back another time. Damisa the Leopard will go with you, and Otis will be with you to the other side of the Isthmus. I do not know about this O'Boyle. He may go with the Goose, if he stays in a crowd and is very careful of the way he walks. If he turns back for anything, if he walks alone at all, he will be the third dead man in the hills.”

  “I've no fear at all of you, black man,” O'Boyle said.

  “I'll not have Dana trailed by any Ifreann hand or hind,” Charley Oceaan maintained.

  “Will you not now?” O'Boyle asked with churlish scorn. “Dana will have to be quite a man to keep up the pace, to go where I go. I go my own way in the world. Dana Coscuin would have to be a tall stepper to follow in my tracks.”

  “It is all right, Charley. Damisa the Leopard will be there,” Damisa the Leopard said.

  “Where did the man tell you to go, Dana?” Angelene asked him a little later.

  “To Guayaquil. How did you know that a man told me to go somewhere?”

  “Yes, I suppose Guayaquil would be best. There are so many troublesome places and so few good men to dispatch. Running a world must be a troublesome business.”

  “Is there something you'd like to tell me, Angelene? Have you an instruction for me?”

  “No. Only that the House of Dana Coscuin and the Bride of Dana Coscuin and the Grave of Dana Coscuin are all here on Basse-Terre.”

  “The belle of Dana Coscuin is here aussi,” Celeste said.

  There were other events in that day. It is quite likely that Angelene did give Dana an instruction, that she explained a bit more about his mission. After all, she was one of the sources, just as the Black Pope and Brume and Christian Blaye and Catherine Dembinska had been. She had these things, of herself, out of the Earth.

  Dana hadn't them yet of himself. He was a slow learner, though a passionate doer. The day hadn't come yet when he would tell a man, ‘Go to Torino’ or ‘Go to Rome’ and that man go without question. Dana was the double-hero of this island and of other places, but he was still a boy with strings on him.

  “There was mail packet on the Goose,” Angelene said, “mail from England and from the continent. Some for myself, some for yourself, I take care of it all.”

  “How take care of it? Can you read, Angelene?”

  “Certainly. I can pass a letter across my face and read what is in it, that without opening it. I can also read in proper manner.”

  “You will not give me my own mail?”

  “No, merely tell you what was in it, and what came otherwise. One Kemper (he was of your party) is dead.”

  “Yes. I felt that blow even before I left Amsterdam. I was fair sure of that.”

  “One Elaine, who was almost of your party, is not in so much trouble as I believed she was. She killed a man, but there were circumstances. It was not discovered till she was in English port, and she is English.”

  “Oh, she'd battle, as well as Catherine, as well as yourself.”

  “Of the others the news is more hazy. It didn't come by mail packet.”

  “Is Ifreann dead, Angelene?”

  “I believe not. You failed to kill him. You must be more careful in these things.”

  “I swear that I did kill him. I'll not believe that he is alive on this island.”

  “Oh no, he isn't alive here. These are only shadows and deliriums of himself that he projects here. Those who think they have seen him here have seen only his emanations. I believe that he is still alive somewhere, unrecovered and irrational. That is why O'Boyle left him. He'd deal with a devil, but not when that devil loses his sureness of movement. We'll know more of these things later.”

  The Gloucester Goose pulled away from Basse-Terre an hour before sundown. All who came on her left on her except two United States men who believed they had discovered a paradise where they could live well on corporation coin. Others who sailed on the Goose when she left Basse-Terre were Otis Ranker, Damisa the Leopard, the man named O'Boyle, and Dana Coscuin. There was another man there named Jack Galopade, the man who would like to have tried the new king stallion. “I'd go if I were asked,” this Jack said softly. Dana didn't hear him, and Jack didn't go. It was a curious hinging of fate.

  The Goose went well, for not being seaworthy. She'd been an old whale ship when she was younger, and she could still sail. She went so fast that the worms had not yet made complete havoc of her hull when she arrived at the Isthmus.

  Direct from Basse-Terre to Chagres on the Isthmus, thirteen hundred nautical miles and a bit, in twenty days! Otis and Damisa and O'Boyle and Dana had formed a rowdy company by this time. Otis was not sure whether he would go to California or not. He also might go to Guayaquil, foregoing gold for adventure; indeed, both might be found in Guayaquil. Dana still had the child's coffin that he had brought from Amsterdam. His fate was tied to that coffin, and he still found gold coins when he rummaged through the trash of it.

  Chagres was a small boom town, and they spent no more than one day there. Up the Chagres River then, by poled canoe, the four of them. There was a long wait, and Dana had to pay more for the trip than the United States men were willing to pay. There were no more than a dozen of the canoes that went each day, and there were probably five hundred United States men from various ships in Chagres waiting to go. This first part of the trip could hardly be made without canoe or other boat, for the land of that part of the Isthmus was unsubstantial and swampy.

  Then, onto firm land at Cruces. It was only a twenty mile walk to Panama City over a good trail that had been paved in the Spanish days.

  And Panama City was full of United States men waiting for any kind of transportation to anywhere in California. It was a crowded town full of rough men. The United States men drank and sang ‘Oh, Susanna’ and ‘Pretty Nellie Kelly, with the Buck-Skin Belly.’ The Panama City hotel men rubbed their hands and mined gold in their own way.

  There was a wait of many months sometimes for any transportation north to California. But returning ships, going back round the Horn for another load of gold-seekers, would sometimes put into Panama City and carry regular traffic on down the South American coast to pay their return costs. And many of these ships would put in again at Guayaquil.

  IV

  ECUADOR OF THE CONDORS

  Hablaban en voz alta, y el anciano

  Con acento vibrante:

  “Vendra,” exclamaba, “el heroe predilecto,

  De esta cumbre gigante.”

  All cried in risen voice like dizzy song;

  In trembling tones the Oldest croaks and speaks:

  “Oh he will come, the hero chosen long,

  Out of these cloudy cliffs and giant peaks.”

   — Andrade, The Condor's Nest

  There were many elements gone into the revelatory kinetic vision of the world and its life that Dana Coscuin acquired of a sudden in mid-year 1849 while still some miles off the coast of Ecuador.

  Part of it, a very strong element of it, came from the mind of the now dead Kemper Gruenland who had been a sometime companion-at-arms of Dana; though Dana would not receive the full testament of Kemper for another two years.

  But big dead Kemper had the urge to tumble his whole teeming mind into Dana's, and now it came with a great surge. The quiet, dr
eamy, bloody-handed Kemper had never been able to communicate well; he was of slightly stuttering speech, and he spoke little except for his sudden, confused, tide-like spates and floods of words that left incomprehensible driftwood and debris in their wakes and left all his hearers bewildered. It was part of Kemper's difficulty that he never learned to phrase his thoughts well till after he was dead. (It is an anomaly of the present chronicles that Kemper does not make significant appearance in them till after he is dead.) But Kemper's Testament began to come to Dana now, heaving and twisting with a strange intellectual passion, about six months after Kemper had died upside down and under water.

  Part of the kinetic vision was the twisting tug of the winds and the ocean currents in that powerful part of the Pacific Ocean where the ship Dana rode now came around for land. It was a heaving and turning of the watery and airy skins of the earth that are very much alive, that are even intelligent, and that generate and propound their own turbulent messages.

  Elements of it coming to Dana were of the older stuff of the past year and years, ripening and being realized in him now. These were the words and the works of certain strong partisans of the Green Revolution: Malandrino Brume with whom Dana had travelled many months; Christian Blaye known to Dana only at the angry shrine in the cluttered room in Hendaye where Christian's skull was one of the three prodigious speaking pieces of peasant art; Catherine Dembinska who had been entirely intellect and passion, and who had been Dana's incredible wife for the last eleven days of her short life.

  A recent element of it all had been the earthiness and oceanness of Angelene Domdaniel who received the Green Revelation directly out of the Earth and Sea and communicated it directly with body and body's aura.

  A part of it even had been from a very short sermon of the puny priest of Basse-Terre and Capes-Terre. That priest, as it happened, had had the thing incomplete, and part of it he had had wrong. Still, he had a grip on it. He told that the Center, which is Christ, is Everything. He also told that the Eccentric (the off-center) was almost Nothing.

  “It is not a nothing. It is ourselves,” Dana maintained.

  The puny priest had stated that all the eccentrics resembled each other in their weightless noise and in their error. But this did not take into account the intense polarization between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution, and it was in this polarity that Dana lived. The two did not resemble each other; they contradicted each other at every turn. Other eccentrics might be nothing, might be identically nothing; but one of these was the towering positive and the other was the abysmal negative.

  “Ride any analogy or any horse one hundred miles in a day, and it will go lame on you,” Malandrino Brume had once told Dana.

  But the little priest had mentioned (though he hadn't sufficiently appreciated it) the kinetic element of the eccentrics, the Angular Momentum. He had even known that the proper name of it was the Life Affair. Ah, the angular momentum of it all!

  This angular momentum is appreciated (still a long ways off the Ecuador coast) where the Humbolt Current, which come arrow-straight and strong out of the Antarctic and up the straight South American coast, begins to shatter and twist with its mighty momentum, to twist away from a coast that is no longer straight, that is bulged out in a whirlpool of high mountains. Indeed, this Humbolt (the longest and strongest current in the world) so twists out to ocean here that it lets a warm rain-current from the north twist inside it to the crooked coast (for which reason the Ecuador coast has rain, as the Peru coast and the upper Chile coast have not).

  This angular momentum is appreciated where the wind swirls at the very hub of the world. This is at the equator where the low, north-traveling winds should rise straight up and fold back on themselves and return towards the south polar regions at high elevation. (The ocean currents wish to do the same thing, but they are thwarted.) At the equator also all winds wish to blow from east to west. This is complicated a little when those winds, only a little bit in-shore, have had to tumble down four-mile-high mountains to fulfill their directions. So there is turbulence.

  The equatorial westward-traveling winds will return (an eighth of the world further south) as eastward-traveling winds, the Roaring Forties, from their latitude.

  There was strong angular momentum of all the elements while Dana Coscuin and his companions were still some miles from the Ecuador coast. There was also strong angular momentum of the intellectual and psychic sort so that the brains of the travelers leaped with ideas as the ocean there leaped with fish. (Those are the fishiest waters in the world where the Humbolt breaks up and turns west.) There was a real swooping down of the mind to take those ideas and inklings on the leap, like the swooping down of the sea birds. (Nowhere are there so many sea birds as over the white Humbolt, that hundred-mile-wide white streak of water in the blue, and as over the turning and break-up of that Humbolt.) It was all waters and winds and fish and birds and minds leaping and tumbling.

  One of the leaping ideas on which Dana's mind swooped and fastened was that Ecuador (still over the horizon from them) was the spinning and tumbling hub of the world itself, a whirling and toppling top. And Dana would find that his idea of the land was the correct one. The high mountains there would be dizzy mountains in all meanings. The quakes and the volcanic activity would all be part of the tourbillon, the whirlpool, the whirlwind, the whirl-massifs. So would be those bands of intellectual activity in the country, a tumbling and tumultuous activity.

  Though never a bookish land, with never any opportunity to be such, Ecuador had for a long while exported intellectuals. This was one the very odd-sounding exports of the country, like vegetable ivory (tagua nut), balsa wood, toquilla straw, and Panama hats. No other country thought to export such things.

  But Ecuador had forever been exporting a whole floating and whirling nation of intellectuals, exporting them to all the provinces of Grand Columbia (Venezuela, Columbia, Panama), and to Peru and Chile, and even to Brazil and Mexico and Argentina. Even in the old Indian days the floating world of intellectuals had come from the Ecuadors (the invigorating coasts and the invigorating high-lands). South America would not have been the same thing without them, would hardly have been anything at all. It had been the strange flights of brain-blown and notions-mad men from Ecuador which had given impetus and yeasting to the whole mass.

  Dana and his ship-mates had met ebullient Ecuador men long before they came to Ecuador itself; met those strangely-humored men of the easy and sparkling intelligence: those Jews of America, those Romans and Greeks of America, those Irish and French of America, those Parsi and Magi of America.

  It was in the company and conversation of one such sparkling man that Dana Coscuin came to the land itself, their ship sliding in on a curious calm by afternoon and night, sliding up the great Guayas estuary and docking without a jolt at the city of Guayaquil at dawn.

  “In the small city of Escarpe alone there are nine hundred famous poets,” the young man was saying (his name was Milagroso Moreno), “and this out of only one thousand men in the town. In the valleys of Seso there are twenty-nine professors of jurisprudence and thirty doctors of philosophy, and there never a school of any sort within many leagues of the valleys. These men are professors and doctors innately and intuitively and they are unequaled in the world.”

  “So are we all in Ireland,” Dana said. “The meanest hog-slopper there will have nine degrees after his name, and all of them put there by himself. I must see the name of that ship there. I will buy that ship some day.”

  “You would never buy that ship with talk, Dana,” the man named Milagroso told him. “It'll have a high price on it. The name is La Catalina.”

  “The Catherine is her name then? I will buy her, and with more than talk.”

  “She is no good, Dana. She's a whore of a ship.”

  “Swallow those words again, or fight me,” Dana turned on the surprised Milagroso with a rising growl. “She's a high lady and you will not call her any other thing.”


  “Fight you, Dana? Anywhere, any time. You can be had. But why should you fight me over the reputation of a ship you have never seen before? You are out of your reason sometimes.”

  That was all true. Dana knew he could be had. Milagroso had a way of moving, the lithe lazy power. So had Damisa the Leopard. And O'Boyle and Otis Ranker were large and mighty men. Dana was really the least of the five of them, and yet this was no way for a hero to be thinking. He would have whipped them all at once or one at a time if the need of it ever rose. He'd use trickery, he'd even use his wits. He was not hero for nothing. But he wasn't in a hero mood this morning, and really these were a bunch of rough and ready men with whom he had been travelling.

  “I will have that ship, Milagroso.” Dana still insisted. “When I sail from Ecuador I will sail as master and owner of her. She'll be my barque and my bride.”

  “Nice, very nice,” Milagroso said. “I also have been in love with ships. It is a more passionate thing, it is even a more fleshy thing, than to be in love with the ladies. As to myself, Dana, I am presently a citizen of Guayaquil. I am a free-trading, free-spending, and free-thinking man of this open and light-minded port. I live the drifting and brilliant life, and I see my country destroyed by the prodigal brilliance and easy connivance of my own sort. We'd deal with the devil for our pleasure; we eat all the substance of the poor; we mock our Maker; and we join the Lodges. Next year, however, I will change completely and be a different sort of man. I am ambivalent and I can make these changes.”