Elaine also wrote details and reminiscences of Catherine; she seemed in some way to be wishing to take, or supplement, Catherine's place with Dana. And she enclosed the Testament of Kemper Gruenland.
How had she come by this testament? It is supposed that Kemper had given it to her in Amsterdam. With premonitions of his own death having grown to a certainty, Kemper had written out his Testament and Credo, trying to leave something of himself. He hadn't been able to communicate well in life.
It was fact, however, that Dana had already come onto stray sheets of this Testament of Kemper. He had found several of them in the child's coffin that was now on the Catherine, and later he had found several others in that same chest. Dana was forever coming on things in that chest that hadn't seemed to be there before.
There was a possible natural explanation of how the strong sheets of that screed had come into the little coffin. Kemper had been in Amsterdam when Dana had received the coffin. He had run his hands through the gold of it and tried to calculate its weight and volume. He could well have left written sheets there, and Dana could have well missed seeing them until later.
But Dana preferred an unnatural or preternatural explanation of it. He believed that some of the sheets were written by Kemper after he was dead and were wafted to the chest from Purgatory. And he believed that the number of the sheets in Elaine's packet had increased while the packet was en route.
“Ah well, I'll read them in my leisure at sea,” Dana said. “It will not be easy. They are written, as were the other sheets, in the High Dutch of the Germanies. I talk it only a little, and read it less. There'll be difficulty and slowness about it unless the Holy Ghost kindle new tongues in my mind. His Ghostliness has done that for me before, however.”
There were signs that Ifreann Chortovitch was recovering his powers. There was one day (when Dana had strode out a dozen miles from Santiago on the road to Valparaiso), a day that was absolutely perfection.
It was blue and green and gold, with hills and fields, and a torrent (all the rivers of Chile are short-running torrents from the mountains down to the sea). On the roads there were carriages and wagons full of people and produce. There was a real liveliness in it all. This was the healthiest climate in the world, the Chileans all told Dana, this rolling Santiago plain at the foot of the Andes.
“It is the scenery that strikes me,” Dana had said once, “and I have seen scenery.”
“What is scenery?” they had asked him. “This is Chile.”
One moment of perfection there was, from the highest sky ever, from the most varied mountains, from the most burgeoning plain, off towards the bluest sea which could be seen fifty miles away; moving perfection of people and horses and wheels, the singing of people and the singing of the torrent.
Then it was all crumpled up and thrown away.
How?
Why, by a giant hand that crumpled it up as though it were no more than a sheet of paper, that proved it was no more than that. The hand was that of Ifreann. Dana would know that hand anywhere, by the rank sulphur-colored hair on the back of it, by the great purple veins standing out on it. But the hand was incredibly giantized so that it covered all earth and sky, so that it could crumple up earth and sky and throw them away.
Dana stood blind and deaf. He was not in black blindness, but in gray or colorless blindness. His eyes themselves were not faulted; there was simply nothing left to see anywhere.
The world was gone. The people were gone. The singing of the people and of the torrent was all quieted; there were neither people not torrents left. And sound, when it came again, was inner sound. It was the mocking voice of Ifreann talking, so it seemed, from Dana's own stomach.
“Had you illusion of a world, Dana? Really, there isn't one, never was. And now you may not even have illusion of it. I've crumpled it up and discarded it. Had you illusion of Dana, Dana? Did you believe that there was really such a person, that there was any person? Watch (but you cannot watch), listen (but you cannot listen either), experience for a moment that I destroy this last illusion of yours. I crumple you up and throw you away, Dana.”
“You are resilient, Ifreann,” Dana said. “You have a little of your strength and cunning back. I was embarrassed for a while to have too weak an opponent. And now you feel yourself strong enough to play tricks on this trickster? Be careful, Ifreann, I'll open your belly again and let the blood and sulphur gush out, and your brains and your trickery are in your belly. I can crumple up illusions too.”
“Dana, I have you blind and deaf. You cannot see anything at all.”
“Ah but I can. I can bring it back. I can see mountains again, out of the corner of my eye; high in the east I can see them.”
Ifreann angrily reached out his giantized hand and crumpled the new mountains.
“You cannot see, Dana, and you cannot hear.”
“But I can. I can hear my own blood. Destroy my hearing of that if you can. Crumple me up. Rather I crumple you. I destroy the illusion of Ifreann.”
And he did destroy it. There was perfection again, and it endured all that afternoon and evening as Dana strolled back to Santiago.
But Ifreann did this thing another dozen times in the next several days, crumpled the world away before Dana's eyes and ears. Sometimes it would be an indoors world, and the great hand would come and destroy it and leave Dana in a sightless void. But he'd come back from it, he'd come back from it quickly, and he'd bring the people and the rooms back just as they were.
“Maestro Coscuin,” a man spoke to him anxiously after one of these assaults. “You staggered and you clouded. Then you threw back your head and laughed. Is it well with you?”
“Aye, it's well with me. I fight with principalities. Whip them too.”
And yet this Ifreann was deadly and dangerous. Dana had the good sense to be concerned and careful, as well as confident.
One other momentous thing happened in the Santiago days. Serafino Tirana, fearful that Dana would steal his sudden new-old love (Dana wouldn't have; it was all a joke between Dana and the lively Carolina for the stirring up of jealousy in Serafino), married his cousin (not of the forbidden degree) Carolina Olimpo in legal and churchly rite.
So it was that this Carolina did come onto the Catherine as bride, as the bride of young Serafino Tirana. This Carolina was a bit like Catherine Dembinska herself. And she was also a bit like a monkey. She was like the two things in one common trait: her love of climbing. And in another: her solemn gaiety.
How like a monkey? In face or in figure? Surely Serafino would have chosen a pretty girl, even a beautiful one. And she was; she was beautifully monkey-like, both in figure and face. She couldn't have been pretty, of course; that would be asking too much. Yes, she was a monkey-face, and she was beautiful, impudently beautiful, eerily beautiful, lively and lividly beautiful. Och, she had the muzzle on her, and the brown-black eyes too big for a human face! Och is iontach, she had the full teeth of which humans have only the remembrance! She had the crowded face of the monkey, so many things to put into it, so little room for them, but so beautifully done in her case. And she had the voice, of greater range than the human and of greater rapidity, such voice as has not been heard in the world since speech was taken away from the monkeys for their sins. As to her own sins, she seemed to have none; none are known of her at all, none are reported of her by anyone; this is a thing in persons that you'll hardly encounter once in a lifetime.
And she was as inconsequential as a monkey. No, no, it is not meant that she was unimportant; that is only a derivative meaning. She didn't follow a sequence, a chain; she sure didn't put sequences together to any linear consequence. There was no one thread that could be followed through her anywhere. She was here and there always, in depths and in flight, painting her own picture in dots and splotches; but it all came to beautiful effect.
She was also a bit monkey-like in body, with the great agility and scamperishness of all monkeys. She had, however, an unaccountable physical stren
gth that monkeys do not have. They fake it, they do not really have it. Carolina had it. And Catherine.
Catherine Dembinska had also had these monkey elements. Oh, she was a great and gracious and beautiful lady, but she had her own quota of monkey blood.
And the solemn gaiety. This is a monkey trick. Solemn, ceremonied, almost liturgical in every move, which does not preclude rapidity and darting of movement; a life-way of moving, an importance of the moving body; and gaiety of every minute of it: understand this please.
Such a love of climbing! Those who remember Catherine Dembinska in life will know that that flaming and dedicated and very intelligent lady was also a rooftop romper, a dancer on gablepeaks, a night-climber of edifices, a flesh-crawling daredevil. We must all be daredevils, though, or the devil will have his way with us.
The seamen on the Catherine were horrified (the most seaworthy of them were the most horrified) by the insane dancing of Carolina on yardarms (they were a-sea again on the roughest and most dangerous of voyages); they could not bear to look. They begged Dana to forbid the thing.
But Dana's heart ached with pleasure to see her at the antics; she was Catherine come to life again, smaller-bodied but just as willful. This Carolina could climb anything aloft. She'd go up the masts as a squirrel might, without rope at all. She'd dance on the highest yards and even on the billow of the sails. She'd drop from one yardarm to the lower in her own form of solemn insanity.
“The Catherine would not let me fall,” Carolina would say. “She understands me.”
“She understands you,” Dana said, “but nobody understood her.”
“I would have,” Carolina maintained. “I do.”
Carolina would tumble off shipboard, swim quickly under the vessel (and these were very rough waters they were in) and climb up the other side. Oh, she'd use rope if there was a rope dangling. If not, she'd actually climb up the slimy out-leaning sides. She'd actually do this. It was witnessed.
They were at sea again on the roughest and most dangerous sea-voyage of them all, right at mid-year, the winter of the southern hemisphere. The most dangerous sea voyage, the most dangerous voyage of any sort according to a seaman of an earlier time:
“The most dangerous adventure of any sort, short of death itself, remains the voyage around the Horn,” he had written, “and it has the same two issues and options as the death adventure: salvation for the salty elect, or destruction forever.”
But this was the nineteenth century; a journey around the Horn could not be as dangerous as it had once been. Not quite so dangerous for the larger ships, for these were larger than they had been in other centuries. But it was quite as dangerous as it had ever been for small-medium ships like the Catherine Dembinska. The winds still blew, the currents still swirled, the ice still iced. It was no longer true that one ship in three was lost forever in rounding the Horn. Now only one ship in nine was lost on the adventure.
Dana, by fits and starts, had been reading the Testament of Kemper Gruenland. He would read it all, he swore, but he would not read it all in the order in which it presented itself. In any case, it was clear that the sheets were not all in the order of their writing. Elaine Kingsberry had arranged them as well as she could, in the way she believed they should have been. But there were other sheets here of which Elaine knew nothing and had not seen.
Here was one passage of the Testament as Dana puzzled it out:
“Something momentous came into the world in the middle of the eighteenth century, certainly before 1790, probably before 1770, and apparently after 1740. I believe that it happened almost exactly one hundred years ago.” (It isn't sure when Kemper wrote this but probably in 1848; it contains some insights he could hardly have had before that year, and he died on either the first or the second day of 1849.) “What happened in whatever year was that a new evil came into the world; or an old evil, better organized, came into power. This evil has now ruled the world for one hundred years. It is the power behind all governments and the power behind all anti-governments. It is behind all movements of mankind, for no movement (not even our own green movement) has been able to stand totally clear of it. It has even infiltrated the Church.
“This is not something imaginary, it isn't something blown out of proportion, it isn't something that has always been. It is a difference in kind and not in degree from what has gone before. We are in a new era of evil areign.
“I believe that, just one hundred years ago, the millennium ended (the Thousand Years was the name of a mystic, and not an exact, period), and that the force that had been bound and limited for a while was unbound. I believe that the name of this new evil, or the old evil resurgent, is The Devil Unchained.
“We try, however, to find a more human and identifiable face for it. We track it through a jungle of organizations. We come up against walls and veils. We try to trace the pattern of these concealing obstructions. We say ‘Here it is’ and ‘There.’ And it is there, in every one of the places suspected, but we are not able to find the key place.
“There is a Hidden Hand indeed, but it slips inside one puppet and then another; and when it moves on they are puppets as lifeless as before. We try to externalize it, to give it a human or graspable form: but it is inhuman.
“It is no good to name it the Freemasons. It manipulates them sometimes, here and there. But then it moves on again and leaves them empty; and when they are empty, there is no group emptier ever.” (Kemper wasn't a cadenced or alliterative writer; actually he had written feige for the first empty, schwach for the second, but he had written ausleerer for emptier. Dana had to improve and inspirit him in the reading, which often made it slow going.)
“It is no good to name it the Jews. The Jews, like the poor, we have always with us. They didn't suddenly appear with the reappearance of the thing. Of course there is a Synagogue of Satan among them, and has always been; but there are ninety-nine other Synagogues that are not of Satan.
“It is no good to name it the International Bankers. There is an astuteness beyond that of the bankers in all this. It is no good to name it the Illuminati or the Carbonari or the Rosy-Cross men. It is no good to name it the old Gnostics or the new Communists. These are things that the Beast has passed through, or they are footprints left by the Beast, but they aren't the Beast himself. The Devil Unchained has been in all of these groups. But also he has been in ourselves. And when his hand slips inside us to handle us like puppets, what is the first gesture that he makes us make?
“He makes us point the finger. He makes us externalize. Dana and my friends in Dana, I will give you an example. I ask you this: was there ever an Ifreann?
“Is Ifreann our own projection? Does he in fact exist? There have been unreal circumstances to every one of his appearances. Have we merely externalized him as repository of our own Falsities and Violences? And why have we had such Falsities and Violences in ourselves?”
“Thou amadan, thou Narr, thou kraut-head, thou Kemper,” Dana growled, “it's thy own nose that handles thee like a puppet and leads thee along. It was no projection that murdered my wife in Krakow, though likely you didn't know of that happening when you wrote this. It was no projection that gluttoned high swine in this same wife and ship the Catherine, and that gushed out blood and sulphur when I ran knife into its belly.”
But the rapid and always gay voice of Carolina Olimpo interrupted now from the hold below Dana's cabin, and he realized that she was interrupting on the very subject he had been citing. He ran down immediately and into her torrent of words.
“But there was a great beast here, a great devil here, not one month ago,” she was arguing, “and it ate rotten swine here, more than a hundred pounds of it in rabid gluttony.”
“Carolina, Carolina,” Serafino was chiding her. “Where have you such an imagination?”
“You are my own delight, girl,” the Englishman Osborne was laughing. “Who but you could fabricate such fables? May you never lose the art. May you never grow up entirely.”
“See where? What, Carolina? What are you pointing at?”
“The stains of the blood and sulphur on the hold deck. One can still see them.”
“There are no such stains there, Carolina,” the Englishman Osborne insisted. “Only such dirt as is always on the deck of a hold.”
“You have scrubbed them out then, but I still see them. Damisa Leopard, didn't it happen?”
“It was a thing too horrible for a young girl even to think about. Put it out of your mind, Carolina. For yourself, let it be that it did not happen.”
“Well, you sure helped things there, Damisa,” Osborne objected with strong sarcasm. “Can't you see that the girl is upset with her imagining. It's no longer a joke. Tell her that nothing happened.”
“I tell her — nothing,” Damisa grumbled.
“Why do you lie, all of you?” Carolina chattered. “I feel it all. I will know it. Dana, here is Dana. Tell me, Dana, did you not run a knife into the belly of a devil here no more than a month ago, and did not blood and sulphur gush out in a great flood?”
“Yes I did, Carolina, and yes it did.”
“Dana, you fool!” Osborne howled. “A game is gone too far. Were you the one who first told her this trash? She'll be hysterical from it in a bit. Now say that nothing happened.”
“But it did happen. You three were here with me and the beast when it happened. And Carolina would no more become hysterical than would Catherine herself.”
“Dana, are you crazy?” Serafino asked in unfeigned amazement.
“You are out of your wits, my friend,” said Osborne the Englishman as he laid a hand on Dana's shoulder. “It has seemed since we began this Horn voyage, and even a little before, that you were ailing. You are believing a nightmare of your own?”
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 18
