Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  “And why will you change, Milagroso?” Dana asked him. “I like you as you are even though you are as worthless as you are pleasant. What sort of man will you change into?”

  “I will become once again a citizen of Quito which is the most opposite thing in the world to a citizen of Guayaquil. I will change because my cousin Gabriel Morena, the Christian Hercules, returns from Europe next year. I will change because his coming always brings me to my senses. What is in the child's coffin that you carry with you, Dana? The bones of a child?”

  “Yes. It's a hair-raising fact, but I have come on a dozen or more child's bones while rummaging through its trash. There didn't use to be so many of them. I believe that there were none at all of them at first. In time, I suppose, there will be a complete set of them.”

  “Yes, it would be a little hair-raising to have the child become more complete and more articulated. Is there something wrong about the child that you can't bury him in consecrated ground and must carry him with you?”

  “Something wrong with him, yes, Milagroso; but I suppose I could bury him in consecrated ground, whether or not he is a person requiring burial. But he is as ambivalent as are you yourself. I do not believe that you yourself have a complete set of bones either. I am sure that there is more of you yet to appear. As to the child, it may be that he doesn't know which city he is citizen of either; it may be that I must carry him around till he decides. Frankly, Milagroso, I don't know why I carry the little coffin around. And the way that I acquired it, when I remember back on the thing, seems improbable. Ah, she is a beauty though! Three masts and a funnel!”

  “Oh, the ship? I could lust for her, Dana, but I couldn't love her as you seem to.”

  Milagroso Moreno led them all (Dana, Otis Ranker, Damisa the Leopard, and O'Boyle) to a seamen's lodging house where he seemed to be known. They went there with their sea-bags and locker-trunks and coffers, hiring strong and great-breasted young boys to help them carry all the load.

  “The boys are from the high hills,” Milagroso said. “Because of the altitude there they have developed very deep chests. Almost everyone here has lived in the mountains also. Almost everyone in the mountain country has lived on the coasts. We of Ecuador are like the ocean currents. We make a great circuit. There is a long season in us, a four or five year long season, and we go and return in that time. We are none of us of the one region only. We would be only half people if we didn't take part of both these lives. In many of the other countries there are only such half people.”

  They all stowed their baggage in rooms at the lodging house. They paid a little money to the lady who ran the rooms. Then they went out again.

  “I will go and visit the flesh-pots,” O'Boyle said. “Have a care, Dana. Have a care, Moran.” He always called Moreno Moran. He twisted many names to an Irish form.

  “The flesh-pots are hardly simmering so early in the morning, O'Boyle,” Milagroso called after him. Then to Dana, “I believe he is really seeking employment. He is a soldier for hire and he will be hired. He'll be competent. He says that he has served one of the greatest plotters of them all.”

  “He has that,” Dana smiled. “How old is this cousin Gabriel Moreno?”

  “He is twenty-eight, four years older than myself. He is a marvel.”

  “I knew a man of that name and that age last year,” Dana said. “If he was a marvel then he kept it a secret, from myself at least. If he is the Christian Hercules he has kept it even a deeper secret. He doesn't look like a Hercules. Where has he his title from?”

  “He has it from the future, Dana. As yet I am the only one who calls him by that title. He learns late. He grows. I myself will proclaim him, as will others. I will be John the Baptist to his Christ. You smile, Dana, why?”

  “You are a light minded playboy, Milagroso. You'd not be John of the desert, living on grasshoppers and clothed in camel hair.”

  “Why, Dana, my shawl is llama wool, and the llama is cousin of the camel. And I do eat grasshoppers, preserved and coated in chocolate, of course. They are a delicacy here. But John was not always an ascetic. He was a wanton playboy till he felt the near coming of his own cousin Christ. Then he changed.”

  A man, a well-garbed and wealthy older man, was calling after one or the other of them.

  “Count Cyril,” the man called.

  Dana felt an old ghost or shadow stirring inside himself. It was almost as if the Count himself was in his gullet and trying to answer. More odd, Dana sensed that Milagroso was startled. It was as if a ghost had stirred in that companion too.

  “What is wrong with that old hidalgo?” Milagroso wondered aloud. “It isn't a name that one speaks in the street. Though I am distantly of the Count's kindred, yet he is a man at least three times my age. Also I believe that I do not resemble the Count at all. This man knows me. How could he make such mistake? He must be morning-mad.”

  “Maybe there is another Count Cyril than the one who comes to your mind,” Dana suggested doubtfully.

  “No. There is only one Count Cyril,” Milagroso said with finality, and Dana knew it was true.

  “Count Cyril!” the older man was still calling as he came to them at a near run. But it was to Dana and not to Milagroso that he came. He put his hands on Dana's shoulders and all but embraced him.

  “Ah, my Count!” the man cried. “I had no idea that you were here.” But then he halted and was confused and apologetic. “But no, you cannot be he. You are far too young a man. And you haven't his appearance, only his air. I'm sorry. You are not the Count at all.”

  “Don't say that I am not the Count at all,” Dana spoke with a cheerful liveliness. He was a little surprised at his own words, though; he listened in some wonder for what himself would say next, for the way he would finish it. “It may be, man, that I am a little bit of the Count after all.”

  “Ah yes,” the old man agreed. “His stamp is on you. I would like to speak with you about him further but, as you know, that is not allowed. A large good morning to you, my fine young man, and to you also Milagroso. I suppose that my eyes will never again behold the Count in life, but I did have a sudden hope there for a moment.”

  The old man left them then. Dana also would have liked to talk to him further on the subject; but he also knew that it was not allowed. But why was it not?

  And Milagroso Moreno was looking at Dana with real awe.

  “Dana, Dana, I wouldn't have believed it of you,” he said. “You also belong to the special ones. I was born so, but you are so by the Count's own choice. Ah, you are a predilecto! Each time any one of us is discovered to another one we enlarge the world, even if we must not speak of such things.”

  They went to breakfast at a rather superior place. The establishment had style, and the people who came to breakfast there had style even though some of them were barefoot. There was an uncommonness about the common people here. Dana could feel the quick wit and the bright intelligence of the folk. There are lands that lack this easy enchantment, this arty way of doing everything, even of eating breakfast, the bantering recognition that is based on true cognition. Ecuador wasn't at all lacking in the things, in particular it was not lacking here in Guayaquil.

  They began the breakfast with coffee (why was it better coffee than that of Basse-Terre? Because it was grown on higher mountains and under a steeper sun) and semita or Jew-bread. They had fish called Bagre, and apples. No, the apples didn't grow on the level of Guayaquil. They grew three thousand feet higher up, but one hadn't to go very far to come to such altitude. In Ecuador, every crop and every humor may be found merely by ascending or descending.

  Dockmen who had worked all night were drinking the brandy named chimpin. There were shop girls, smarter than those of Paris, eating quick breakfasts and laughing. Prettier than those of Paris they were, and with a more cosmopolitan air about them. After all, Guayaquil was a more cosmopolitan city than Paris. You do not see so many Chinese or Negroes in Paris; you do not see thirty different kinds of Indians
there; you do not see so many United States people, hardly as many Italians, not nearly so many Spanish or Catalan folks — in the very early morning you do not even see so many Frenchmen in Paris as in Guayaquil.

  Brown rice out of brown pottery bowls, but the spoons and the forks were silver (Ecuador was still a big silver country); the people were not fastidious about their spoons and forks (that which defiles one does not go in by spoon or fork).

  “You have not eaten till you have eaten llama,” a girl said, and she gave Dana a big piece of meat on her own fork. “Is it not good?” she asked. “Does it not taste like camel? You are from Europe from the suco (blond) look of you, so you will know. Does it not taste like your own camel?”

  “It is good. It is like goat and unlike sheep,” Dana said. “I have never eaten camel.”

  “Oh, but I thought surely you were from Europe where there are camels,” the girl said.

  Everybody in Ecuador was very friendly. Everybody liked every other body. (Why then had there been nine civil wars in less than nine years? Why were there two different civil wars going on at that very time?)

  “Dana, do you know how Ecuador has its name?” Milagroso asked him.

  “Why, I suppose the Spanish named it Ecuador because the Ecuador (the Equator) runs exactly through the middle of it,” Dana said lamely, feeling a trick question.

  “Then why was it called Ecuador before the first Spanish came here?” a shop girl asked. “Why was it called with that name a thousand years before the Spanish came?” She was table-mate to the girl who had given llama meat to Dana to eat.

  “Was it so?” Dana asked.

  “Indeed it was,” Milagroso assured him. “It was, in the Quechua language, three words and not one: yek, and gua, and durra.”

  “What do the words mean?” Dana asked.

  “Oh, there's dispute about that. Some say one thing, some say another. But the words of the name are very old.”

  “I myself talk Quechua,” said the girl who had given Dana llama, “as this charlon, this Spanish-blood dude you are with does not. I can say that there are no such words in Quechua. We do not make words that sound like that in Quechua. The words are in one of the other languages, I think in Quito. What they mean is ‘Fair-haired man in green shirt bite on old joke,’” and she giggled the special giggle that is named chachara in Ecuador.

  “The country really was named something like Ecuador long before the Spanish came,” Milagroso said seriously, “but nobody knows what the name meant. The name was already attached to the country before either the Quechua or the Quito Indians arrived here.”

  The shop girls had finished their breakfast. They slipped their feet into their sloughed-off sandals, rose suddenly with a clatter, and ran for it. Milagroso was not playboy for nothing, and Dana could catch any idea as soon as it flicked through any mind near his.

  They caught and kissed the girls before ever they'd reached the doorway. Dana gave the little Quechua-llama girl the kiss that is called zafado in Ecuador. She stroked and patted his green silk shirt, and the other girl did also. Chinamen had begun a silkworm culture in Ecuador, but they hadn't yet such silk as this.

  The girls went off to work in the shops or wherever. And Dana had already begun to like the friendly ways of Guayaquil and Ecuador.

  “It's a greener land than Ireland — and a closer place than home,” he sang to the tune of ‘My Name is Dana Coscuin.’

  A mixed-blood man, a mixed-type man (he looked half simpleton and half sage) was talking that evening or the next to Dana Coscuin and Otis Ranker and Damisa the Leopard and the man named O'Boyle.

  “You have asked the question that I cannot answer, Dana,” he said. “Why have the most friendly of all people been killing each other for a number of years? They cannot give any reason for it; I, who am one of them, cannot. We kill each other in all friendliness and cheerfulness, but we kill — we have left off being the salt of the world and have become the saltpeter against each other. How has it happened to us?”

  Otis Ranker looked over his shoulder to be sure there was no stranger there. “Have you considered that this may be hand and hoof of the Devil himself?” he asked. Otis was a backwoods boy in his origins. A more urbane United States man might never have thought of that plausible explanation.

  “Of course I have thought of it,” the native man said. (All men are native of somewhere and thus all are equally native, you say? No, no, some are more native than others, more new-born, more natural-born. This man was true native.) “From our hills and mountains and high plains and shores there have been dug out, for very many years now, more than half a million statues and statuettes and replicas and heads. There is a similarity in these. The faces are all of one sort, the figures are all of one sort, but they are not the sort of any Indian or other men known. They are a different creature than man, yet they were originally made (is my theology sound here?) in the same image. Every one of them bears the face of a devil, or of the Devil. There is some speculation (scribblers’ speculation, what we call ‘ink-well speculation’) as to who carved all these.

  “Nobody carved them. Why should they be carved? They are the heads and faces of the devils forever in the rocks of the land. When the rocks are shattered into pieces, the face of the devil is still on every piece. It is the same as when a looking glass is broken into pieces: every small piece of it will still reflect the entirety of what is there to be reflected.

  “Oh, but we bury the devil-rocks with greenery, with green grass and green rice and new green wheat. This has always been the remedy — to flood it all over with waves of growing green. In the more blessed times it works well. But there come perverse years (we have had five very perverse ones in a row) when all the fruit of the greenery still shows the devil-face. It is on every grain of rice, and every mealed grain of wheat or corn. He's in every banana and guava and grape. We were meant to be the lively light of the world, or at least of this long Pacific coast. Well, we are still that lively light, but lately we liven up in wrong shapes and wrong faces.”

  “How much do you pay?” the mercenary O'Boyle asked.

  “Nothing at all,” the native man told him. “You must even provide youself with shoes and gun, and food for five days. Later you will not be given anything, but you will be shared with. If you have anything left in your pockets you are expected to empty them into ours. We pay all that we can afford; it is a little bit less than nothing.”

  “That's plenty,” the mercenary O'Boyle said surprisingly. “I've already provided myself with those things. Open your pockets, man.” And O'Boyle poured a small stream of gold and silver, and paper notes, into the pockets of the mixed-blood man. Then he clapped a derby hat on his head (it was one of the derby hats that the Ecuador Indians have always worn, not one of those that European and United States dandies wore; though the two were almost identical).

  “Straight east and upward is it?” O'Boyle asked, “until I come to men who look right to me? And if I don't look right to them, they'll kill me on the spot for my thanks?”

  “That is the case of it,” the mixed man said.

  “I couldn't ask for a better deal,” the heretofore so mercenary O'Boyle cried cheerfully. “Be you all on the right side when we meet again, my friends!” O'Boyle gave a bright wink out of his rather coarse fat face and went out into the night.

  “I'll give you a little gold,” Otis Ranker told the mixed man. “Almost, but not quite, all that I have.” He gave gold in little leather sacks to the man. “Later in the night I will start up that way myself,” Otis said, “I will look at it, and I will make up my mind. I want to do a right thing here. I've never done a wrong thing, but I've gone about some things wrong.”

  Otis Ranker walked out into the night as O'Boyle had done. Otis was a stiff and dour man, but he had liked the green cheerfulness of this country.

  “Dana and I will visit the Eagle,” Damisa the Leopard said.

  “In this country he is called the Condor,�
�� the mixed man told them.

  “What strange bird do we go after?” Dana asked. “I've not been told I would visit any steep bird.”

  “You are told it now, Dana,” said Damisa the Leopard.

  “You are told it, man,” said the mixed man.

  Dana had learned a little about the situation and recent history of Ecuador. There had been two very opposite men as rulers in the years following independence from Spain. They were the strange friend-enemies: the conservative and clerical Jose Flores, and the liberal and radical Vincent Rocafuerte; they were the Black and the Red. (“They are like myself and Ifreann,” Dana said, “save that I could not call either of them ‘Son of the Devil,’ and save that they made a better accommodation.”)

  They had made an accommodation. They had alternated in office for some years. They had kept the peace. And the whole country in its whole effort and thought changed every several years when they changed office. It was like a tide that flows one way for a while, and then reverses itself. It was always a cliff-brink thing, but it didn't tumble the country. The land throve in green wealth and intellectual storm. It was one of those exceptional, non-static, excellent eras.

  Flores and Rocafuerte grew old, lost the shrewd grips of their hands and minds, and were pushed aside by their own followers. But the followers of the two men could not find that old accommodation. The parties that the two men had founded had (now that their strong founding influence was gone) launched a fifteen year civil war, or perhaps a series of fifteen one year civil wars. About a third of this period had now gone by. Ecuador, which had been the most peaceful (though with a violent and dynamic peace) of all the Latin American countries, had now become the most bloody.

  It was all sheer insanity. And Ecuador had boasted such an oversupply of sanity and intellect that it had exported these two things (packaged in the little round casks that are called men's heads) as it would export any other novel commodities. Ecuadorians were everywhere in the Americas, they were leading men everywhere, but at home they could find no sane leadership at all.