Ifreann and O'Boyle, of course, hit ground as if shot on finding that their dropped and likely dead prey was alive and behind them, working havoc in their own camp. They had been had, but they were still dangerous and devious. They came at once to the attack. They came like snakes on their bellies, real snakes of the blood and the line. O'Boyle could track, even on his belly in the dark, and Ifreann could sense a prey. Two great snakes writhed down the steeps towards Dana in the dark, and the dark was their element.
But it was Dana's hour yet. He could crawl as dark a crawl as either of them. Why, he could crouch and climb lower than they could crawl. He went upward again in the dark, carefully, not shadowing the fire of the explosions. He slid between the two giant snakes, making a point of touching both of them. More, with his thumb bleeding again from Ifreann's shot of several days before, he marked a bloody D on Ifreann's forehead, and that giant creature believed it was only a low bush that had brushed him. What he signed on O'Boyle was a mark we cannot convey, but one Irishman will not use it in friendly heart on another. Dana had counted coup on the both of them, and they not even knowing it.
Two hundred yards above them again, this was quite quickly after the passage, Dana broke a loud ringing laughter that had his signature all over it. He heard the quick curse of O'Boyle below him, and the angry intake of Ifreann's breath. Indeed, Ifreann for the rest of the episode had located himself by his heavy breathing, he being such a big man, and crawling always such very hard work, and the great altitude taking toll. Dana pinned them down with rifle fire in their location and he left them pinned there. He even essayed a loud and ringing song:
“My name is Dana Coscuin, I am Proctor of these Hills.”
He went back to his party, but not directly. It seemed as if he set his song to sauntering off in one direction and himself in another. By and by he came to his place in the Condor's nest. He lay down and slept the sleep of the justified in the sulphurous warmth a hundred feet from the snow fields.
Young men sometimes like to make these evening incursions.
“Ecuador is truly the back-brain of South America,” the Condor was saying on the second day. “Greater Columbia is the face of it turned eastward. There isn't any neck. We are one of the monstrous figures dug out of our own ground, grotesque and deformed, neckless and squat.
“Peru is the lungs. Brazil is the great paunch. Banda Oriental is the privates. The Argentine is the loins and the entrails. Chile is the spine. There aren't any legs to us; we aren't going anywhere. We face east, into the past, where things have happened that we missed. All other continents face west, into the future, where things will happen.”
The odd fact was that this man, Gabriel Moreno, who talked so distantly and bookish, who played the role of the Condor with not yet enough feathers to cover himself, this man really would become the savior of his country and the Christian Hercules. Not right away, not for several years, but after a while he would bring stability and inspiration and gain; he would bring a series of blessed decades, in fact. And he wouldn't have survived for it if Dana and his friends had not passed that way. Many things would never have come about if Dana had not passed over this way or that.
But in the meanwhile the blood must flow for several years. yet.
The second night it was Damisa the Leopard who went out to intervene and misdirect, and kill. We haven't the chronicle of his incursion, but he didn't return till near dawn. He said that he had killed O'Boyle. This may have been so. O'Boyle had been expecting a death since Dana had death-marked him on the forehead in blood the night before. And O'Boyle wasn't seen again.
Damisa said that he believed that Ifreann had now withdrawn down the slopes once more. He'd not linger when things had taken a wrong turn for him. He'd pull back and wait. He might return, but only when again backed by one or two or three men.
Men began to gather to the Condor on the third day, men who would be his partisans. He hardly knew what to do with them.
“Really, Dana,” he asked, “how is it done? It is necessary that Gabriel become the Condor indeed, become a real hero, this for my country and not for myself. But how is it done?”
“Oh, it's all in the hands of God and of a mad God's-girl in Amsterdam,” Dana offered him. “As to God, I have requests of my own to present there and to me they hold precedence over your own. But I'll ask the mad girl to do something for you. She really does make things up, and when she makes them they are made. I'll have her make you a hero. She can do this.”
“I'll not be made a hero by humor, Dana.”
“Yes, by my own humor in sending this, and by the creative humor of the mad girl you'll be made a hero. She can do this. Much of the world now functions by her humor.”
Dana wrote a letter to Scheherazade Jokkebrok in Amsterdam. He sealed it with candle-wax from his own candle and marked the seal with the bloody impress of his foreshortened thumb. After all, that mad comic had made it up that his thumb should be foreshortened. Dana gave the letter to one of the new men who were coming and going, one who was going down to Guayaquil with the news that the Condor had indeed arrived.
It would happen, after several years, after the letter had come to her and she had got around to doing it, that she would make a hero out of Gabriel Moreno. It would remain one of her fictions, of course; how could that bewildered man become the Christian Hercules in fact? But it would be a good enough fiction to go as fact into all the history books from then to now, it would be a good enough fiction to save Ecuador and purge her madness, it would be a good enough fiction to fool the man himself into believing that he was Condor and Hercules.
Late on the third day, Dana's party broke up. The United States man Otis Ranker remained with Gabriel the Condor in the Condor's nest. More than a dozen men had now accrued to the Condor; they would be his nucleus.
Damisa the Leopard, that mottled black man, took a temporary parting from Dana, to make contact with other groups in the mountains. Dana and the lady Valiente took a trail to Quito again, then downwards to the lowlands and eventually to Guayaquil.
A year turned over. Then a second.
Dana had been down to Guayaquil from the highlands six times. Each time that he came, he was fortunate to have rendezvous with a person who now spellbound him completely — his Ship and his Bride.
This was the ship named La Catalina, The Catherine. She had been at the dock in Guayaquil when Dana had first landed there from the Isthmus near two years ago. Dana had claimed to Milagroso Moreno that he would someday own that ship. He wouldn't. She would own him. She was a beauty, though, three masts and a funnel. Catherine had always been somewhat modern and adaptable. A funnel was in no way unfitting to her.
She always recognized Dana, that ship that was something beyond. She was always in port when he came down to the port city, though in between times she would sail to California and to the Isthmus and to Chile and clear around the Horn.
It was at the time of their first reunion; at Dana's second coming to Guayaquil, that Dana filed formal claim to her. This was not yet by deposited gold or by paper; it was by relic and bone. It was that small bone splinter that Dana always carried in his bosom, that bone from the shattered skull of his murdered wife Catherine Dembinska. Now he left it in a secret place in the wardroom of La Catalina. Now the ship and the bride were officially aspects of the same person; the ghostly marriage of Dana to the presence was a legal one.
Dana took part in either fifteen or seventeen battles in the time he was in Ecuador, late in 1849, during all of 1850, early in the year 1851. The number of the battles, to the mind of Dana, depended on the count of the combatants; by Dana's own rule there must be at least twenty men involved to make a battle. Fewer men than this, and it was a skirmish. Dana had been in more than a hundred skirmishes. There were several combats where the count was uncertain; it was not sure whether they were battles or not. Usually the battles had from a hundred to two hundred and fifty men on a side, and of course Dana couldn't be in nearly all of
them. They weren't big things, but this wasn't a big country.
Several times Dana was in the company of a boy-man Serafino Tirana, the son of the lady Valiente. This was a flaming young man of pure life and incandescent involvement in all good things. He couldn't shoot well, though; he couldn't use cover effectively; he had no real sense of direction or landscape; he was lost at night; he hadn't a real gift for silence or for stalking; he was still alive only because God sometimes preserves young fools and young saints for mysterious purpose. Serafino needed instruction in military matters; almost all of the young men needed such instruction. He'd have been wonderful at a proclamation with his pure voice, at some flag-raising on a barricade, at some flashy and heroic turning of events. Nobody's blood would have run redder or more sudden and striking at some great turning of events. What a martyr he would have made! But he wasn't, as yet, a very effective soldier.
At one battle Dana found himself on the same side with Ifreann Chortovitch the Son of the Devil. How could it be right that they be on the same side?
“Who is the bleeding joke on, Dana?” Ifreann called. “Is it possible that the Son of the Devil be compromised in his tenets? But your own interest, Dana, is in ending the wars with a certain kind of peace. My interest is in prolonging the wars with no peace ever. 'twas sure to happen that we'd sometime be on the same side, but it will not happen often. But, Dana, in one thing you have tricked me.”
“I'll trick you for life and victory,” Dana growled, “but in what one thing are you talking about?”
“Ah, you're in grace now, Dana. What will it profit me to kill you and then have your soul escape me? I am counting on your final companionship in hell. I'll make no secret of it; the folks there are mostly dull, and you're not. I'll line me up a score of ruddy companions for those latter days, and you are counted in their number. For you are Dana, and you will fall again and again. Ah, I'll catch and kill you at one of your falls.”
“I've no need to worry about your own state, Ifreann. It does not change. I will kill you when it is time to kill you, and I'll not botch it again. Someone or something will tell me when it is time to kill you. The time isn't yet. How I wish it were!”
There was the continuing mystery about the child's coffin that Dana had left in charge of a landlady in Guayaquil. Dana had carried this box around a good part of the globe and he still had no idea what it was. He knew only that the contents of it were subject to independent change.
“I have made gold deposit in your name, Don Coscuin,” the landlady said at one of Dana's earliest returnings to Guayaquil. “The gold in it had made it quite heavy; I was afraid it would break the floor. Now it becomes too heavy again; I must make another deposit for you.”
“Or shall I stud up the floor for you?” Dana asked.
“No. I will go and make deposit. Or you do so.”
So Dana had a good sum of gold deposit in Maritime Bank in Guayaquil.
Dana priced the ship La Catalina on perhaps his third return to Guayaquil. She wasn't cheap. He hadn't that much gold on deposit.
“You can have her today, Dana,” the lady Valiente said. They met now and then. Several times they had traveled together. “It is no matter that you are short of gold. Have you not yet understood the parable of the slow money and the fast money? With gold and with paper, fast paper, you can have the Catherine today.”
“Who would sign the paper? Who'd have the Catherine in chattel?”
“Why, you and I can sign the fast paper, Dana, and a few others. We'd form corporation, we'd print stock, we'd make money even on the turning over of the money. She'd be chattel to no one, she'd be the same commercial venture she already is. Everybody profits when the paper turns fast enough. You can have her this very night. You can try her sail this very night.”
“Get thee behind me, Lady Diabhal,” Dana laughed to her. “You are temptress in more ways than one.”
No, Dana did not want the Catherine to be the commercial venture that she already was. What a way to speak of a ship and a bride. He wanted something entirely other.
“Ah, I'll unsail you of white and sail you of blue and green,” Dana told the ship who now lolled almost lasciviously at kedge-anchor and had not yet been brought to dock. “One sail of sea-blue and sea-green, one sail of sky-blue, one of midnight green. Thou'lt be a ghost; and greens and blues, not blacks and whites, are the ghost colors. None will see thee for thy swiftness. In other life you loved to go over the high roofs; now you'll go over the high danger seas like a wraith. I'll give you shroud lines as black as Kerry cattle, and roving as green as gherkins. You'll be all but invisible as you go in sun or in storm, a ghost, a girl, a gull, a galleon. I'll feed you none but the blackest coal for your engine and your donkey-engine, and only the clearest wind for your sails and sheets. Three sheets in the wind, my girl, and the green-black smoke from your funnel when you'd strike the swifter.
“I'll mount nine brass cannon to roll out on thy wales: we'll volley, we'll shell, we'll raid. I love thy roll and thy rake and thy shape and thy tumblehome. You had always a form and a movement beyond the perfect.”
Dana was in love with the ship. She wasn't a great large ship, but she was fast and handy. She was a ruddy beauty.
Months after this (it was Dana's sixth and last trip down to Guayaquil), a man passed him in the street. This man had the same eyes, but no other characteristic at all, of two other men who had conveyed instructions to him.
“Go to Valparaiso,” the man said, and they passed with no pause and with no other recognition.
Dana went to Maritime bank and inquired of the state of his funds. He was startled at the new size of his account.
“This large addition, this very large and recent addition, who made this deposit to my name?” Dana asked an official there.
“The lady Valiente Tirana,” the bank official told him. “She made the deposit this very morning.”
“The lady Valiente is in the city?”
“She was; she may not be now; she was leaving at once, so I heard.”
One other thing first: the Catherine, where was she? She was not in the harbor, she was not at dock. No, but she was on the horizon coming in. They'd have a timely meeting that day or that evening.
Dana found the lady Valiente in the house of one of her kinsmen. He embraced her with a sudden passion. He knew now that she was a great beauty. He'd heard it said of her; he'd have known it anyway by now. They could but pass each other again and again in their comings and goings, and touch very seldom. Now they touched.
It wasn't quite what you'd imagine, not even considering the fallible nature of Dana and the quietly smouldering but genuinely volcanic nature of Valiente. For Dana was in love with his ship and his wife, and they had become the same person, or would become so immediately by the imminent ransoming. And Dana had now walked in grace for many weeks and was as chaste as Saint Aloysius himself. The lady Valiente was old enough to be Dana's mother, had she gone into the child-bearing business at fourteen. Besides, Valiente was a veritable saint herself, this on the word of everyone who knew her. Saints preserve them from all wrong in this! And who will preserve the saints? Did Theresa and John come together wrongly when they met in the flesh, and they likely the most passionate creatures on the earth? It is known that they did not.
Nevertheless, the lady Valiente, though a true beauty and a true saint, was a veritable she-bear of a saint and beauty. Dana had grappled with giants and prodigies; he had never met a rib-cracker like this lady. She drew him onto her bosom as if he were a child, and near crushed him there.
“The two sons of my body are always a little embarrassed by the demonstrative love of their mother,” Valiente murmured with a voice like a ship talking in cross-currents. “I am glad that you, my new eldest son, are not.”
“Where is your husband?” Dana asked after a while. He had not breath at all but the breath he drew from her bosom.
“In Asti,” she said. It was the soft washing under-voice of a shi
p turning and tacking.
“In Asti of Piedmont half a world away?”
“Half a world away, Dana, where we come from, where my other son is now with his father, where I will go in one year and you in several.” The roll and the rake and the shape of Valiente were very like those qualities of a fine and spacious ship. She'd taken Dana up in her arms as if he were no grown son but only a boy.
“And how will it be with Ecuador when I go, when we go?” Dana asked. Valiente's hair was loose and Dana was entirely within the cascade of it.
“Oh, the tide has turned here, Dana. You have felt it. No more than five hundred foreigners had infiltrated, organized as only the weird ones can organize, and had attempted to splinter her and bring her to red madness. And half that many others with scarce any organization at all (are we organized, Dana, are we?) have started her on the way back to green sanity. The Condor isn't ready for several years yet, but things do go well. We come and go as we are appointed to it. A man in the street this very day told you where you were appointed to go. This cracked and green land is other than it would have been, it is better than it would have been if you had not come to its shores and hills.”
“The Catherine,” Dana said, “you have made deposit against her for me. Is it enough?”
“Oh yes, she's been priced anew.” Valiente was really a small woman. How did she hold big Dana so easily and yet so crushingly in her arms? “There'll be a bill of sale already made out when she comes to port,” Valiente said. “It's been arranged. And there's enough left over to equip and cannon her. Go at once to the chandlers and armorers. They'll be at the fitting of her even before she's properly docked. A crew will come to you, ready and able. Some of them you already know. Some you do not. One of them is very special to me. Three men of the old crew will remain on the Catherine. And a furtive but ungainly supercargo will sail with you also. You'll not want him, you'll not even see him for a good while of the voyage, but his sailing with you cannot be prevented. And part of myself goes with you when you go. You'll understand this later.”
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 14
