Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  There was something very wrong here. Both Serafino and Osborne acted as if they believed that Dana was literally crazy, and Damisa the Leopard avoided his eyes; he groaned and cast his eyes down at the deck and would not look at Dana. Dana wasn't crazy. Serafino and Osborne couldn't both have become crazy at the same time, nor Damisa so distraught.

  “Is this a conspiracy to make the captain believe he is insane?” Dana asked softly. “But I've never captained it over you. You are all with me willingly. If there was any hard thought you should have told it to me in words. I'll put any man who wishes it ashore at nearest port and at double pay. Or is it for the reputed gold on the Catherine that you'd undo me? Most of the time it is merely reputed, and I don't understand the reason for it. Tell me why you plot against my brains.”

  “Oh my poor friend!” Osborne moaned in real sympathy.

  “Singly, Dana, singly,” Carolina purred, “with my man as well as with the others. Have it out of them. My own wits and intuitions are on the line with this also.”

  “Thank you, Carolina,” Dana smiled. “I'll have the separate truth out of the elders, and this younger also.” And he took hold of Serafino Tirana by the nape and pushed him powerfully up the ladder. “Come along, beloved pup,” he told him, “we will get to the bottom of this deep thing right now.”

  He brought Serafino to his cabin. “Now then,” he told him, “let us have it. Are you all daft, or am I? If this is a joke, then a joke I don't mind. I know the crookie tongues of Ireland; I don't recognize them so well in the scattered nations. Do you not remember the monster Ifreann?”

  “I have heard of the man Ifreann who dabbles in the politics, as both of us do also. I've not met him. He was pointed out to me once at a party in Santiago. I know nothing of a monster Ifreann.”

  “On this ship, you do not remember him?”

  “On this ship I do not.”

  “Not of his being taken on the rotten bait and of your being horrified of his gluttony? Not of my piercing his great belly to let out the gush? Not of us throwing him overboard?”

  “Dana, there were no such things. Not in my seeing or hearing.”

  Serafino was serious. He didn't remember them at all.

  “You do not remember our first search for the monster, the malign influence, the stenches, the lightning that he brought down to the yardarms? You do not remember the fear of the men and of yourself, and how we searched every cranny of the ship for the devil?”

  “I do not.”

  “You do not remember the murder of the man, one of the three who had come to us with assurance at Guayaquil?”

  “The man died of a fall.”

  “You do not remember our careening the ship near Tocopillo and our having her gone over for three days by land-men on the monster search?”

  “The ship was careened for hull worms, to scrape her.”

  “You do not remember having the priest exorcise the ship.”

  “I remember your having a priest bless the ship. I liked that.”

  “You do not remember my procuring a great fat hog and putting him into the hold under our feet, and killing him and leaving him undrawn and unblooded for bait? You do not remember the barrel of rotten and be-bhanged rum that we set for added bait? You'll not remember the monster taking the bait at all, and our own handling of the situation?”

  “Dana, these things simply did not happen. The Catherine is too small a ship for such things to have happened and me not know them.”

  There was never so honest a young man as Serafino. There was never so deep a puzzle.

  Dana took the boy back to the hold and grasped Osborne the Englishman.

  “You'll not take me by the nape, Dana,” this Englishman told him. “I'm a full man and I won't be so handled by anyone, not even by you.”

  “But you will come with me and we will talk.”

  “I go with you, my friend, and we will talk out this madness of yours to the very bottom of it.”

  And when they were in the cabin Dana asked Osborne:

  “All right, you tell me just what you do remember about the monster.”

  “Dana, all I know of the ‘monster’ is the wild talk of yourself and Carolina in the present hour.”

  “Why did we careen the ship near Tocopillo? You were in charge of the operation.”

  “We did it at your insistence, Dana. You wanted to be sure the ship was sound in every plank for the voyage around the Horn. The operation was entirely unnecessary.”

  “We did not do it for monster search?”

  “No, Dana, there was no mention of monsters.”

  “Or for hull worms?”

  “There were no hull worms. The ship scarcely needed scraping. One always looks for them, but there had been no particular mention of them.”

  “Osborne, there had been a death on board, had there not? How did the man die?”

  “He was mangled in the donkey engine, Dana.”

  “Do you believe me out of my mind, Osborne?”

  “You are, temporarily I hope, distraught.”

  Dana dismissed Osborne and had other men sent into his cabin. First he had the three old seaman of La Catalina in separately. Two of them knew nothing at all about any monster, but they gave still other answers as the reason for the careening and the circumstances of the death on board. One man refused to answer anything at all. Finally he said that he believed he was infected by spirits, that the spirits had ordered him to forget certain things and that he had forgotten them. That his head was near to burst when Dana tried to make him remember again. He begged to be excused from it all.

  Dana had in the two men who had first come to the ship with Serafino Tirana. These two were absolutely innocent of any knowledge of the monster at all. There was no remembering in them, and no sign of any forgetting.

  Dana had in the two of the men who had come to the ship with assurance. They didn't remember anything of all this. They didn't even remember the dead man very well, though he had first come as their companion. They were no help at all, but they hadn't as much assurance as they'd first had when they came to the ship.

  When they had all gone, Damisa the Leopard came in without being called.

  “And you, Damisa, you cast down your eyes and would not remember either,” Dana chided.

  “Me cast down my eyes, Dana? Never, without a reason. I had that devil nailed to the deck-floor of the hold with my eyes, and I kept him there till you finished the questioning. Otherwise he'd have been able to correlate the men on their texts and their excuses. Now he's gone for a while. I'm not likely to forget these things, but I wonder that you were able to withstand it. I'm experienced with the unnatural animals and you aren't.”

  “Am I not? What has happened, Damisa?”

  “What you saw happen did happen, all the way. But the devils can always expunge the memory of themselves from simple minds.”

  “The Englishman Osborne isn't simple-minded.”

  “Yes he is, Dana. Tough-minded, but simple-minded; it's often the case with Englishmen. I was a wise man in Africa, Dana; too wise in one case. That is why I was cast out, after being a leader, and sold as a slave. I had encounter with the sleazy” (furtivos, Damisa said in Spanish) “spirits before I was born. I was mottled in the womb by them, but you'll never find a more stubborn man against them. I'm pleased that you remember the happenings. You aren't a simple-minded man, and I had thought you were.”

  “How did Carolina know about it all, Damisa? It all happened before she came aboard.”

  “Oh, the ship told her, Dana. They are very close. The ship is alive, as I believe you know. She is a person and a spirit surviving.”

  “The ship is my wife, Damisa.”

  “So every good sea-master says of his ship.”

  “This ship is my wife literally.”

  It grew colder as they blew and tacked south. They were off the Valdivia coast. Then they were off Chiloe and Guafo Islands. They came amidst the Archipelago of the Chonos, some
times threading a way between the islands of it, sometimes standing westward of them all. They were below forty-five degrees latitude and in the brunt of the Roaring Forties, winds as rugged and sustaining as any on earth.

  This was the hilled and forested Chile where the population had run sparse. They were not so far south even as Dana's own Bantry Bay was north, but the winds and the currents had more chill on them here. The Antarctic has far longer fingers than the Arctic.

  They ran dead-ended into a bay pocketed with land and in sight of the great mountain named Valentine or Valentin. They had believed they were running between islands when they were dead-ended. When they were satisfied that there was no passage through, they landed for a day on a steep shore of the inlet.

  The Catherine had been misbehaving besides. She ran far too high in the water, for she ran empty except for their own coal and provisions. Dana had disdained to carry a cargo, and had not taken on sufficient ballast to compensate. He may not have been the most foresightly ships-master in the world in this respect. But Catherine had always had her own humors anyhow. She liked to ride too high and too wild. She scared Dana sometimes, as she used to scare him with her daredeviltry on rooftops.

  They were on ocean, of course, but it seemed as though they were on one of those long lakes of the Andes that are high in the mountains. They watched whales, surprised that the creatures should be sporting in such high water.

  While they were there (Dana was alone on ship, and the others all taking a chilly holiday on shore) Dana read a curious passage in the Testament of Kemper and wondered how that big young man with his massive crammed brain could withal be so childish:

  “Hieronymos Oceanus wrote a curious history, that God had had an earlier incarnation, as a whale; by this he redeemed the Ocean and altered the whale from a malevolent to a benevolent creature. So may we pray to the redeemed whales for their intercession, he writes, as justly as we pray to the saints and angels for theirs. Hieronymos points out that the whales have become truly benevolent, and men have not: so that earlier incarnation may have been the most effective.

  “Note also that Hieronymos does not write that Christ had an earlier incarnation, but that God had an earlier incarnation: he does not specify which person of God it was. It seems to me that it could not have been the Holy Ghost: He is more likely to have had incarnation on the high planets or in the high air. I believe that it is God the Father who had this incarnation.

  “The iconography of Christ the person as fish may be a reflection of the older representation of God the Father as right whale. We feel profoundly that the peace of ocean is maintained by all the good whales; it would be a constant turmoil otherwise.

  “But Hieronymos Oceanus strayed outside the Faith and only returned at the moment of his death. Are we to assume that it was such extravagant speculation as this that caused him to lose his faith? Or may we think that it was the intercession of holy whales that brought him back to it? That I may never lose mine I pray for the intercession of all good creatures, saints and angels and stone patriarchs and whales.”

  “Thou bumblehead,” Dana laughed, “I'd hand thee a penny catechism over the void if I could reach so far. But I'll pray for thee myself, green-stone patriarch that I am; aye, and I'll see about the prayers of the dolphins and the whales also. Who are we to refuse any help whatsoever?”

  Dana had begun to consider himself as a patriarch, though he had as yet no offspring. He thought of Serafino as his offspring, and much more so he thought of Carolina.

  “Had Catherine lived to have a daughter, she would now be very like Carolina,” he said stoutly. “Very like, except that she would not yet be two years old. But there'd be a resemblance in the girls, I can tell that.” But Dana wasn't really much of a patriarch.

  There were troops of ostriches on the more open parklands of the shore, and troops of guanacos. The two creatures were very much alike in the high way they held their heads on their long necks, in the wooly feathers of the one and the feathery wool of the other. Both seemed anxious to whisper something into any passing ear, and both would take a piece of any ear that came too close to them. Perhaps the ostriches and guanacos of South American are but runts to their African cousins, the true ostriches and the camels; yet both stood near man-tall and showed signs of being formidable.

  Then there came the feeling of threat, but not from the broken and rolling lands about. There was a hunter coasting the coasts, and he'd prey on Dana and his. This instinct of Dana was always correct; he was being hunted now and he knew it. ‘Twould be no good to bawl out for quietness: this was a long-eyed hunter who cruised for them, and he'd not hear the little shore sounds of the party.

  But the Catherine Dembinska remained the invisible ship in her cove and cranny, and an hour went by. Then Dana saw the hunting ship. She had taken the outside of the peninsula (that which Dana had believed to be an island when he came) and she would not enter the blind pocket. She cruised half a mile off shore, about three miles from where Dana watched her through a low saddle in the seaward hills.

  She was larger then the Catherine, she was grander in every way; there was no doubt that she was better cannoned. She had three masts and a large funnel, not a small funnel such as the Catherine had. She had been built composite; she hadn't been altered for occasional steam. And the Catherine was afraid of her; Dana could feel it in every plank of his spouse ship. Well, Catherine had been afraid of him to her very death, and she was right to have been. This was the old murderer acruise.

  “He imitates me,” Dana said, for the strange ship was not sailed in white. She also attempted to sail invisible, but for her it didn't come off. There was something just too striking in the darkling colors of the hunting ship, the glossy black, the royal purple, the trim of blood red which that ship-master would never be able to forego. Such pride cannot be hidden anywhere, however much it wishes to sail invisible.

  Dana read the name on the ship. Dana could read a ship's name at three miles? Yes, Dana could read this ship's name at three miles, for it stood out in blood red on gloss black in letters twice the height of a man; and Dana had fine eyes. He read it but he did not recognize it. He took a scrap of paper from his hat and wrote the name down, and returned the paper to his hat. He would find it out later.

  The name of the ship in tall red letters was BRAMI PIEKIELNE, and she was a murder ship. But Dana laughed aloud. Does not even the Devil realize that all Polish names and words are funny? How can one intimidate with them?

  A gaunt, raling, and dust covered herald rushed to Dana as he sat there in curule chair on his balcony. The mad herald dashed his lantern to pieces on the rocks (rocks? what rocks?) and the broken fire and flaming oil of it ran along the ground like snakes. “They are upon us,” the herald croaked, “all is lost.” And then he died. Such an encounter was enough to waken one, for Dana had been sleeping.

  It was no herald, it was Carolina Tirana y Olimpo. She hadn't died; she had cast herself down in happy exhaustion after running down hills and through water and climbing at a run the slick sides of the Catherine Dembinska. She hadn't dashed any lantern to pieces or spilled serpentine fire on any rocks. She had shattered, over the head of the sleeping Dana, a bundle of reeds and meadow stems and cat-tail rods and shrub fronds, covering him with a snowstorm of blooms and flaming leaves and late flowers, some of them of pleasant perfume, some of ignoble acridity.

  Ah, the prone panting laughter and the flushed form of Carolina was pleasant to see. They weren't on rock balcony, they were on ship planks. Dana hadn't been sitting in a curule chair (what was he, an emperor, that he should sit in curule chair?); he had been sitting on a little three-legged stool and sorting the leaves of the Testament of Kemper and watching a ship at sea. (Now the Testament had other leaves, and flowers, mixed in with it forever.) And he'd gone to sleep, for only a blink, and he'd received a message from a dying herald. No matter that the gaunt herald had turned a moment later into the panting and laughing Carolina. First, on the very a
dvent of the moment, he had given his message, and Dana had received it.

  “They are upon us. All is lost,” Dana said aloud.

  “Is all really lost, great-uncle Dana?” Carolina asked. “I don't think it is all lost at all.”

  “Go tell them to load stone ballast,” Dana said.

  “The Englishman Osborne has already told them. They're loading the ship's boats with stones now.”

  Dana took the scrap of paper out of his hat and passed it to Carolina.

  “Can you read and interpret the name written there?” he asked her.

  “I can't, Catherine can,” Carolina said, still panting, and she held the paper with the writing down to the deck.

  “Catherine says that the name of the ship” — Dana hadn't told Carolina that it was the name of a ship, and she couldn't have seen the ship — “is the same as the name of that estate that you know, Porte d’Enfer, which is to say The Gates of Hell.”

  “You understand Catherine very well. I had a fancy a while ago that she might have been your mother, in a strange sense.”

  “Oh, she was distant cousin of my own mother, and they looked alike, beautiful, not ugly and monkey-faced like me.”

  “You knew her, Catherine, in the flesh I mean?”

  “I met her once in London, when I was a little girl and she a big girl. She recalled that meeting to me only yesterday.”

  Well, that was all right. Most of the noble folk of the world are at least distantly cousined, and both Catherine and Carolina belonged to the noble folk. Carolina was gone off the ship then and to the ship's boats where the men were loading stones.

  A black bird, a big black raven-like bird came and held conversation with Dana. They couldn't understand each others tongues. The bird talked in bird tongue and didn't intend to be understood, only to be friendly.

  It wasn't the same raven that had talked with Dana and warned him near Skawina; it wasn't even the same species of raven. It wasn't the same one that had cawed at him in recognition on Basse-Terre. The situation was a little like that of the several men who had given Dana instruction and destination: they had been different men with the same eyes. These had all been different birds, but there was some similarity in all of them, and they were all partisans of Dana.