“The black-birds have declared for Hell long ago,” Dana said, “but the ravens are for us.” He told the bird to ascend and spy whether the strange ship was still visible. The bird didn't understand him. It walked about the decks, and it flew up to explore the upper rigging. It did not report back, not in that particular bird person ever.
The men, under the direction of the Englishman Osborne, brought and loaded twelve boatloads of stones with the two ship's boats. It would settle the high-riding Catherine somewhat.
“We must at every moment be in expectation of the moment of the parousia.” This was the Testament of Kemper being read imperfectly by the eyes of Dana Coscuin. “Now, the parousia meant originally no more than the presence. Then it meant the special presence that must be in us. It is the in-dwelling (einwohnung), it is the resolution, it is the coming, or it is the second coming; it is the day of judgement, it is the end of the world; it is tomorrow, it is today yet if we hurry. And we must hurry if we are to be ready for it, and we must be ready for it.
“We must institute, detail, and support, today, all the economic, social, political, bionomical, psychic, musikotic (things of the muses, the arts and the sciences, the musics), teleologic, agapetic” — there were some other classifications here that Dana could not understand, that perhaps Kemper had not understood — “principles, the principles of all these things in accordance with the parousia. We must believe that the parousia, if it does not arrive today, will arrive tomorrow at the very latest, and we must be in a fevered hurry for it. If each day we discover that in fact the parousia has not arrived, we must still say ‘It will arrive tomorrow them. Hurry, hurry, make ready for it.’ We are not permitted delay in things pertaining to the parousia, and everything pertains to the parousia.”
Carolina had brought a guanaco onto ship and she announced that she intended to keep it. It was a fine noble male beast. Men helped her bring and load several ship's boats full of meadow-hay, the cold-killed high grass that made a natural hay which the animals lived on through all the southern winter on that coast.
They waited till it was total dark, and then cast off from that shore. Dana had night eyes, and so had Damisa the Leopard. They navigated out from the dead-end pocket; they came to clear and unobstructed sea again and followed south. Men with true night eyes could see the shapes and patterns of everything. They could see the shallows and the depths, the land and the further land. They could see the sharks, and the larger shark.
The larger shark had a huge scanning light. It was a great parabolic silvered mirror with burning buckets of oil and iron baskets of flaming wood knots at the focus of it. It threw a fine search-light out over the water; it scanned and scanned. This larger shark had sails that were gloss-black and royal purple, and it was trimmed everywhere in blood red. It was named BRAMI PIEKIELNE (Dana called it the Bramble Pickle now and he laughed at it) which is The Gates of Hell.
The Catherine Dembinska slid by that large and cannoned shark-ship in the dark, and the flaming scanning light never came onto her once. (It wasn't really a very good searchlight; it blinded more than it showed.)
South to ice-winter then, for a few more days. There was exhilarating tempest and gale. The Catherine became almost a crystal ship incrusted with ice. Inside of Wellington Island she went, inside of Madre de Dios (Mother of God) Island, inside of Hanover Island, and then loafing in still more interior channels while the big shark-ship, the Bramble Pickle, passed them on the outside, still searching. And everyone knew that Ifreann Chortovitch was ship-master of the cryptic and scarlet-piped Pickle.
“I was fortunate in everything,” the Testament of Kemper said (this sheet was possibly the first of all the Testament, though it was found in the disordered middle of one bundle), “I was born into the Faith itself, as well as into the Folk in whom the tide was rising. I was born into kind and intelligent and wealthy family. I came with a good mind, a great body, and towering expectations in myself. Why then will I die upside down in a small water with my life unaccomplished and even my youth unrealized?
“It is because I was also born a quester. The quest was given me to follow out, even if it should take me to the edge of the world. Oh, but by a queer mishap I slip off that world's edge. I fall and I am gone.
“I was born for the adventure, for the green gamble; I gambled it to the absolute extent of my powers. I was one of the special people, of the mythological people, and Dana believed me a giant returned at our first encounter. But I lose my gamble and my life. I foresee this all now in the last month of that life. Why do I lose it?
“Because not everyone can win the gamble or there would be no gamble to it. The stakes could not go so high without high risk. And they were very high, and they go even higher. I am destroyed for this world, but should someone not be able to take something from me? Let my own talents and members be scattered and given to the others in some way. I should still be of some use to the transcendent green and growing thing. Let me be green manure for it at least.
“I am now like a great bag of words full to bursting, in prediction and prescience of my own death and total failure I am exploding with these unspoken words. I am into the white fires of purgatory before my actual death; I am swollen and inarticulate with my own frustration. I'm a lopped off limb of this green growing thing, and I'll still believe in it as the true image of the Thing itself till I reach (after a thousand years in these white flames) Green Heaven of the Blessed, of which I have already seen a fragment.
“I pour out floods of words and I spoil quires of paper, but there are obstacles, obstacles, obstacles.”
One of the obstacles was that Dana was able to translate no more than one sentence in five; that's one reason that the extracts here appear in such scrimped form. But perhaps Kemper was improved by being quintimated; he had always been a wordy young fellow.
Dana read the Testament fragments with some interest but without emotion. He had loved Kemper, he supposed, in a cold sort of way; but Kemper simply hadn't been a man to ignite emotion. It was for that, it may be, that he would have to spend such a term in the white fires; he'd learn the igniting there.
And yet Kemper had been a young man of very great passion and promise, and of outsized body and egotism, and he'd been terminated before his late-blooming youth had really opened. Some of Kemper's talents and members did enter into Dana in those days and weeks. He was there, almost as immediately, but not nearly as warmly, as Catherine herself. There was much of Kemper's tall and awkward spirit in the coronal lightning that danced so solemnly about the icy yardarms of the Catherine; there was something of his shattered and bulky resoluteness in the ice-pinnacled passages and cruising icebergs.
“Through the dark cheerfully,” was on another page of the Testament; it was almost the only phrase that Dana could read on that page. It was really a motto for Kemper. He'd been painfully cheerful, but he hadn't ignited.
“Green manure, are you, Kemper?” Dana asked jovially as he set the Testament aside once more for a while. “Sack up yourself properly then, and set you over in the corner by the guanaco. We'll plow you in under the growing roots when we are next ashore.”
Kemper was dead. Catherine was dead. Perhaps others were. There had been no word for the several years from Tancredi and Mariella Cima. There had been no word lately from Charley Oceaan. It might be that Dana was the only one of the Company left alive. Oh well, one forms green companies again and again. The green companies own no sovereign against death and destruction.
“Somewhere near here, down under the water and the bergs, there is a little factory, a smithy, an usine, where the great Humbolt Current is manufactured and hammered together,” the Englishman Osborne said.
“I imagined that the thing was devised still further south, in a shop under Antarctica itself,” Dana smiled.
“No. It isn't that way. It's made in a little inundated shop not too far offshore from last land. On further south, before coming to the permanent ice, there is cross wate
r and even calm water. The great current wells up from under very close to here.”
They were off the Archipelago Reina Adelaida, almost off of icy last land. The shark-ship still hunted them and lay in trap for them, and they must soon decide whether it would be the Magallanes Strait, the Beagle Passage, the Wollaston Pass, or the outer Horn-around itself. It didn't matter much, except that their correct guessing was a matter of life or death.
Meanwhile, the guanaco had become mean and savage, though all it had was its awkward teeth to be savage with. A guanaco cannot kick damagingly. It dances and scutters about, but it cannot really kick. And its jaws and muzzle may be clamped shut by a man's hand and its neck twisted whenever it becomes too mean. Nevertheless, the guanaco had become annoyed and annoying.
The animal was jealous of Serafino Tirana and his affection for his wife Carolina. It was jealous of Dana because he was ship-master. It was jealous of Damisa because Damisa was smarter than itself. The only one bothered by the animal's behavior was Serafino who had not yet completed his honeymoon, his honey-month, with his wife.
The animal would give them no peace together. It harassed them in the open, and it camel-howled, goat-gaggled, sheep-bleated, stomped and chewed at every door they were behind, at every bulkhead that separated it off. Serafino bound the animal's jaws together when he was tired of its biting. He hobbled the legs of it, and twisted its neck till it cried like a kid. But the guanaco remained angry and excited and jealous. There had never been so love-sick an animal anywhere. It was totally taken by the beautiful monkey-face, the Carolina.
And there was a lot of sympathy for the animal on board. The men knew just how he felt. The guanaco wasn't the only one who felt a double love for Carolina (licit and illicit at once), and suffered a two-level jealousy of Serafino (good-humored and joking, and at the same time gnawing and a little tainted). All the men felt it, even Dana. The sad and awkward guanaco was the symbol of them all.
They took the outside way on the sea, outside and south of Desolation Island, but inside some of its satellite islands. They had lost the shark-ship, but whether ahead of them or behind them they did not now know. The monster-master of that Gates of Hell didn't know where the Catherine was now. The danger was that the men on the Catherine didn't know where he was either. The days were long white twilights with snow on the lands and even over the fringing seas. Visibility was very poor; one could hardly tell the islands from the bergs.
Inside of Londonderry Island they went then, but outside of Hoste, then south of the land mass and going east. The Wollastons loomed ahead of them one sleety noon, and no order was given which way to take. Dana had his nose in strange papers and seemed to have absolved himself of command in this. It was Catherine herself who decided.
Damisa the Leopard had the wheel in hand, and there was never a man with such power in his hands as Damisa. But the Catherine turned the wheel on him, to starboard, southeast and south. It isn't true that she wrenched the wheel from his hands and turned it. She gave but gentle and firm indication of the direction, and Damisa understood and did. Further south again, and around the very last rock of the island group. The Catherine wished to go absolutely around the Horn, and she did. Cape Horn is a minor and unimpressive sight, but the southernmost of them all.
The wind was behind them, a gale that was really more voice than blow. That gale had scared more ships to death than she had actually shattered. It was sleeting and lightning at the same time in a queer and noisy storm. Dana sat on a three-legged stool on the bucking rolling deck and was once more (with the howl and the scurry about him) devouring the Testament of Kemper Gruenland.
Dana read or imbibed it by the glittering lightning that made dazzle of the driving sleet. The hours had roared by; it had come on night now, if there was any way to tell day from night.
“On steam!” Dana ordered suddenly, though there had been no change of situation. The boilers were fired, as Dana returned to his perusing. He would drink, as it were, a sheet of the Testament; he would drink it dry of all content, and then give that sheet to the wind. He was in complete communication with big Kemper now, the first time ever. The words and thoughts and spirit of that huge and often inarticulate dead man came tumbling into Dana without barrier or language or obstacle of tortured expression. Dana imbibed the sheets as well in the dark as in the lightning flashes. He began to know what Kemper was all about; he digested that man as if he were eating his flesh given freely. Kemper had been the more intelligent of mind, Dana the more intelligent of body; but there had been so many gaps in all of them (in Kemper more than in any) that it seemed those gaps would never be filled. Now that big poetry-stuffed rowdy from the Germanies was filling in many gaps in Dana, and forever. Dana was taking on much of the power and personality of Kemper and making it his own. This was the Testament.
“Man the cannons!” Dana cried loudly in a voice that rang through the whole ship and dwarfed the voice of the gale. “Array them all on starboard and lash them fast. Pack them and ball them and fire-ball them. This is on the advice of Kemper.”
“Who is Kemper?” Osborne the Englishman lifted a high question. But he wasn't questioning the order; he was going to the cannon.
“It matters no bit who is Kemper!” Damisa gusted in his own gale voice. “Dana is ship-master, and it's all to the cannons!” But Dana himself lent no hand. He still sat on the three legged stool and read (drank in, rather) the strange Testament in total dark and in crooked dancing light. His own eyes were the best when he used them, but now he preferred to look through the privileged eyes of a dead man.
“We'll cannon on a down-roll,” Dana cried, “just an instant before the Gates, before the Pickled Shark, cannons. The Shark is sheer south of us, close on starboard, closer than she believes. Ifreann peers. He has night-eyes as I have. Kemper never had them in life but he has them now. How he has them now!”
“I have night eyes,” Carolina of the monkey-face chattered clear and high. “We are the lower ship and we love it closer. We are near too close for the Gates of Hell to bring to bear on us.”
“Ready is it?” Dana called after a while, but he had given no glance at all at the scene. He was still busy with the sheets of the Testament and had not once turned his night-eyes towards the hovering enemy.
“Ready,” called Osborne.
“Fast alert,” called Damisa.
“Al alcance,” called Serafino Tirana.
The Catherine gave a great roll to port, and then started back from that steep roll. The command was given on the down roll.
“Fuego, fire!” Dana cried, and a deeper voice within Dana's voice also roared “Schiessen lassen.”
There was simultaneous cannonade from the Catherine Dembinska and from the Brami Piekielne the shark-ship named the Gates of Hell; aye, and cannonade from the low sleet-shining sky.
The two ships flamed and coughed and thundered at one another.
VIII
IN GLORIOUS DEFEAT
We sinned in supercility
And ruled in horny-handed right.
He fell to newer ways, yet we
Have left a germ to germ the night.
A man more man than other men
Was wary of a statement wrong.
He built a holding way, and then
Withdrew from it. And he'd been strong.
We, honest late (when we are dead),
On upward path (with curt'led feet),
Defy that devils rob our red,
Or steal our glorious defeat.
— Auctore
We examine now the situation at the bordering of the four nations. The four nations were: Brazil, Banda Oriental (Uruguay), Paraguay, and Argentina or La Plata. These borderings had generated storm centers which are called ciclones.
“Wait, wait, wait!” cry voices. “You'll not leave us in the icy lurch there. The journal may not adjourn so. What of the action off the Horn?”
But the action off the Horn was, of necessity, an adjourned ac
tion. It was only the first booming clash of a running battle that would last for three years. To end it now would only end it in the destruction of the Catherine Dembinska.
For the shark-ship, the Gates of Hell, was an iron clad. This was revealed on the first salvo. Dana must have known it in the bottom of his mind from his first sight of that ship, from a certain clumsiness in her off-shore stance. He had now been half expecting the heavy sound of an iron-clad under cannoning. He'd heard it at Valparaiso, though it was quite a new thing; one of the ship-targets on Dana's harbor raid at Valparaiso had been an iron-clad. And something or someone, probably Kemper in his Testament, had been informing Dana that Ifreann's Gates of Hell would be an iron-clad.
An iron-clad can be taken, of course. It can be had. It can be breached and smashed and sunk. But a wooden ship can be smashed much more easily, much more quickly. The Catherine could not stand and trade heavy shot with the Brami with any degree of success. Besides, Dana knew that this was not meant to be the main action, the final action.
But the Catherine could strike devastatingly, and then run like a wraith. To take advantage of this, Dana had first ordered that the Catherine's cannons should be fire-balled as well as heavy balled.
Andanada y trueno! The Catherine fire-balled the whole superstructure of the Brami, fouling and creasing the funnel, cracking yards, igniting sails and lines, snapping and separating sheets and shrouds. Luck, luck, you cannot beat luck like that.
Then the heavy-balling on the far down-roll took the Brami solidly at the waterline. The cannons didn't break or breach her, not at one volley, but they sprained and loosened her; they shattered some timbers beneath her iron-plates, they opened for enough sea to be of some concern, they discommoded her. The Brami hadn't been born as an iron-clad any more than she'd been born a steam ship. She was an improvised thing, more outlandishly so than even the Catherine.
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 20
