Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  And the peering Ifreann, having his own night-eyes only and not using dead-man eyes (though he had contact with many dead men) had miscalculated. He hadn't realized that the Catherine was quite so close, quite so small, quite so low in comparison to his own ship, even though she rode too high in the water. His cannonade was too high on her, taking one top-gallant only and doing no other immediate damage. Luck, luck of the Irish, luck of the English, luck of the Haussa, luck of the Sardinian-Spanish (that was Serafino), and luck of the Spanish-Greeks (that was our beloved monkey-face Carolina). And the Catherine was running under full steam and full sail now; the too light, too high, too-tipsy ship was on a real scamper.

  She rolled fearfully again, and once more cannoned the Brami on the down-roll. Luck again, and more luck. Confusion and consternation on the Brami and a floundering there, while the Catherine skipped.

  Luck had rolled for the Catherine, as a ship rolls. Then she was away from it all, fast — before luck should roll back in the other direction. She had hamstrung the larger ship for a while. She left it.

  The Brami would have to land and repair; at Rio Gallegos, perhaps, or in the double estuary of the Chico and Santa Cruz, though there were no real facilities in either place. And the Catherine was on the northern swing, furthest and fastest, not likely to be overtaken within a thousand miles, not before Bahia Blanca, perhaps not before Montevideo itself.

  The Catherine did, in fact, put into Bahia Blanca for two days, and left there reprovisioned, repaired, and reinvigorated. And there was still no sign of the pursuing Brami. She might be taking a wider sea-way, but it was believed that she was still behind.

  It was on the voyage from Bahia Blanca to Montevideo that Serafino Tirana killed the guanaco. It had become an intolerable animal, and for all its love-sickness it had become quite a fat animal. Serafino killed it and roasted it and served it as a big feast for all of them. They had all loved the wooly fellow and all been exasperated with him. They hated to see that antic animal go, but they were glad that it was down themselves that it was going so delightfully.

  “It's as though I were eating my own suitor,” said that monkey-faced beauty, our own Carolina. “He always liked me so much, and I certainly do like him now. I wonder if you will be so flavorsome, Serafino, if we ever come to such dire straits that it is I or you. You'd not doubt which would be the eater and which the eaten in that case, would you, Serafino?”

  Nobody doubted that Carolina would be the eater and not the eaten if it ever came to such dire straits. She'd have had any of them, hungrily and gaily and directly, just as a smaller shrew will kill and eat a larger snake, tearing and eating the very jaw muscles of it first. Pray God that it never comes to such dire straits with any of them.

  Another nine days and they came to Montevideo on the East Bank (the name of its country, indeed, was The East Bank, La Banda Oriental) of the great La Plata estuary which was here more than fifty miles wide.

  They came and sea-anchored offshore. And three hours later, Ifreann came with his own Gates of Hell. But there could be no conflict between those two ships here. This was war, and this was the standing water of a war fleet. There was fleet-master and harbor-marshal. There were two hundred ships of fifteen nations standing there, and they were under unified command. Both the Catherine Dembinska and the Brami Piekielne, of necessity, came under that same unified command.

  So they came to worldly, cosmopolitan, polyglot Montevideo. That cow-town, that back-water (the Plata water really did back along Montevideo in its huge disgorgement), hide and salt-beef port; that ramshackle wharfage was all those urbane and worldly things? Yes, this busy and unfinished town was all those things now, and had been so for near a decade. To explain quickly the situation at the bordering of the four nations: Brazil, La Banda Oriental (Uruguay), Paraguay, and Argentina or the Republic of La Plata. These borderings had generated storm centers which are called ciclones, and Montevideo had been such storm center for the longest.

  The four countries then, quickly:

  Good Paraguay is poor and proud;

  'tis woods and grass and boulders.

  Of exports only three allowed:

  Tall timber, beef, and soldiers.

  Brazil is in a doldrum sea

  With Pedro on the throne.

  She'd murder in a troop of three

  Who'd murder not alone.

  La Plata is a platitude;

  The Rosas thing is flat:

  Then why the monster mob intrude

  With reek and rogue and rat?

  La Banda's under Eastern Sun

  And polyglottal stews,

  More babble-ish than Babylon

  And jew-er than the Jews.

  There, we hope that explains the political and practical situation of the four countries. These things being so, naturally there was conflict and the hope of conflict. And the promise of blood attracts unusual dignitaries: the Lord of the Ghouls and all his hangers-on; and the Lord of the Flies.

  But Dana and his company found good society in Montevideo. The atmosphere of the town reminded Dana a little of Krakow, but there was an artificiality here that hadn't been in Krakow. Krakow had always been under siege, internal and external siege, and had been marked to great depth by those sieges.

  And Montevideo had been under siege; those had been her years of soul and storm. There was something effete about it all, though, as though it hadn't been genuine blood and storm. The Argentine dictator Rosas loomed as true devil to all these conglomerate people of Montevideo, except that the conglomerates believed in no devil or spirit, believed in nothing but matter, and said so always. Nevertheless, Rosas was the worst bugger one would ever find. No, it is true that Rosas himself had not besieged Montevideo, but he had been friendly to him who had.

  The siege of Montevideo had actually been lifted six years before; Dana was surprised to learn this. It had been lifted bloodlessly. It had, as a matter of fact, been carried on bloodlessly, and incompletely all through it. Some trade had been allowed to the city, but the city had been restricted.

  The fact was, however, that Montevideo still acted as though she were under siege, under bloody and devastating siege. The role of City Under Siege had proved a hard role for her to forego.

  Dana talked about this with an overblown man who seemed to be high in the conglomerate society of Montevideo. This man was no other than the Lord of the Flies. And in attendance of the Lord of the Flies there were always numbers of rakish literary men.

  There was Esteban Echeverría the guitar-playing fingido-gaucho and translator of Byron; José Marmol the author of the un-great Amalia; Bartolome Mitre who wrote the un-famous Memoirs of a Rosebud, and also verse-dramas such as El Poeta; Vincent Lopez in his wan role as the External Exile (though nobody ever prevented him from recrossing the Plata River to his Argentine home); Alberdi and Gutierrez; del Rio and Rivadeneira; Mora, and Bello (another translator of Byron — almost all of these men translated Byron and Victor Hugo); Sarmiento and Viola; Jotabeche and Sanfuentes; Cesar Díaz and Adriano Díaz. There was quite a midge-cloud of the scribblers. Some of them came and went, to Venezuela, to Chile, to Spain, to London, to Paris, to Sardinia, and to Italy. But just at this time there was peculiar gathering of them in Montevideo.

  “I am the Lord, they are the Flies,” said the over-blown man who was known as the Lord of the Flies. “If there were not writers around one to despise, one would have to despise oneself. You are sure, young man, that you are not a nipote of the Count Cyril?”

  “I'm no blood nephew that I know of,” Dana said, “nor have I ever seen him (that I know of). But I'll be no Peter to deny him. I've wanted to see him and know him. And I've taken his coin.”

  “Have you been bought by his coin?”

  “I've been hired by it, I think. I'm mostly left without direction. I come and encounter and wonder.”

  “I have more coin than the Count Cyril,” said the Lord of the Flies. “But I buy with it. I do not hire. And I giv
e clear direction. You would go, and do, and be spared the wonder.”

  “I'd not like to be spared it entirely,” Dana said. “But why do you, from all over the world, crowd into this rough landing on the Plata estuary? You crowd here and gibber. The siege (such as it was, and it wasn't much from what I can find) was lifted six years ago. By what are you still besieged?”

  “The horrible dictator Rosas still lives and rules, in Argentina, in the Buenos Aires district across the river. It is for this reason that Montevideo is full of exiles, from Buenos Aires itself, from the northern wilds of La Banda where the government still rules, from London, from Paris, from Italy.”

  “How should Rosas over the river force exiles out of Italy into unbesieged Montevideo?”

  “With Rosas unfallen, there can be ease nowhere in the world,” the Lord of the Flies said.

  “What is this man? Is he Rome that you wait for him to fall?”

  “Exactly. He is Rome. Not Rome Resurgent, but Rome Eternal. We'll not allow any eternal thing. That is the reason for the gathering and excitement here. Till Rosas falls, nothing can be done.”

  “There is active voice to every predication,” Dana said. “If you want him to fall, fell him.”

  “Young man, I've been waiting for you these months unwittingly. Let us talk business,” said the Lord of the Flies. Dana went with that overblown man and talked business in a quiet and secluded place. And nobody except Dana himself and the man known as the Lord of the Flies would ever know just what words passed between them. Was the Lord of the Flies the mysterious man who was also named Count Ouzel Rotwappen? He may have been; it isn't at all certain.

  Montevideo was full of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spanishmen, Italians, Chileños, countryless men, and natives who had grown a foreign look on them in that latest puzzling decade. There were Indians, also, and mixed blood, and Gauchos who have horse and cattle blood in their veins and not human blood at all. But, head for head, there were probably more Italians than anything else in Montevideo.

  “Oh but there are a lot of us here,” an Italian man said to Serafino Tirana who was himself partly of the blood. “We greatly outnumber the Spanish here now. I believe that we were first accepted as a harmless substitution for the Spanish (though we are not harmless) a third of a century ago when the feeling against the Spanish was very strong. We've been coming here for a long time, and they've forgot to count us. Some of us have come from fragmented Italy herself, some from Sicily and Sardinia, some from France and from London, from the whole floating world of exiles and flotsam. And some of us have been hatched here on the spot, out of gaucho horse-nests and mule-eggs.”

  This seemed to be a good natured man under an unusual sadness. He clearly took Serafino as a newly arrived Italian, and he spoke to him in Italian.

  “And there was a great hatcher, a great cackler and crower who has but recently risen from one of these horse-nests,” the man continued with his sad-smiling voice, “and he's left a large hatching here that is neither fowl nor flesh nor horse-meat. I greatly fear that I am of that hatching myself.”

  “What man was that?” Serafino asked him.

  “It was the great Garibaldi (why is there something a little unsalted about the taste of his name in my mouth?), it was the great Garibaldi who has gone back to Europe these last several years to see about the resurrection of Italy. But for near a decade he had hatched strange chicks around this estuary.”

  “Great things are whispered about him,” Serafino commented.

  “Who has whispered them longer than myself? He is a man who looks and acts like a leader. And your own leader, signorino, is a puzzle to me. He has grown larger. You do not know that? On some of my trips, I saw him about Europe several years ago (I'm not sure that he remembers me). He is a larger man now than he was then. He is taller. He is bigger. He is still on the green side of the hill, but he is too far past boyhood and youth to grow in height so in not much more than three years.”

  “He's done it in not much more than three weeks,” Serafino said, “or else my own eyes have deceived me, and I've been with him every day of the time. I agree that he's a puzzle. He himself says, and I'm not sure that he's joking, that he has taken on aspects, both of spirit and body, of a certain man, now dead, who was of his company. And this man was a near giant in body, so Dana says. Now I do not believe that this thing is possible, but I believe that Dana believes it. I do not myself believe that Dana has grown so in three weeks, but my eyes believe that he has. Something else has come over him yesterday and today, though.”

  (Well, Dana had grown a little taller and larger in these last several weeks, or else he had fooled more eyes than those of Serafino or of the Italian man. We will not here aver that he had grown larger, only that he seemed to have.)

  “Are you totally committed to this leader Dana?” the man asked.

  “No, I am not totally committed to anyone, not even to Christ,” Serafino said, “though I should be. So far I've found no reason not to follow Dana.”

  “He has taken money from the Lord of the Flies to kill Rosas,” the man said.

  “You don't know that he has, man.”

  “No, I don't know that he has, but I almost know it. It's as near plain as a thing can be.”

  “Well, don't you want Rosas dead?” Serafino asked. “Isn't he the bloodiest and most oppressive leader in all South American history?”

  “So we all say,” the man mumbled. “Hasn't he oppressed? Hasn't he robbed? Hasn't he tortured? Hasn't he murdered?”

  “So we all say, young man,” the man mumbled again. “But no, the second of the four counts isn't true. He hasn't robbed. Even ourselves haven't been able to phrase that against him.”

  “But wouldn't it be better if he were murdered then? Dana could and would do it, for pay or without pay, if he were convinced that it would clean the situation.”

  “Something will not permit me to say that it were better if he were murdered, Signore Tirana,” the man spoke in some agitation. “I suppose that I could say ‘It were better that he should die,’ but then it comes to my mind that a High Priest said ‘It were better that one man should die for the people’ and I begin to doubt it.”

  “You are a rosso, a red, are you not?” Serafino asked. “And Rosas isn't. He's a bianco, a white. And the two parties, in all the Plata countries, are deadly enemies. Is that not so?”

  “Unfortunately it is so,” the man said. “The two parties, the Colorados and the Blancos as they are called locally, are deadly enemies. And therefore Rosas is my deadly enemy and I wish him dead.”

  Serafino looked at the man closely and was startled. There were tears glinting in the man's eyes.

  “This man Rosas,” Serafino said, “this man of whom I have heard no good word spoken since I arrived here, of whom I have heard no good word spoken ever (except once, possibly, in my childhood, and that not sure), this monster, this murderer, this oppressor, you do hate him, do you not?”

  “We will be overheard,” the man said.

  “In this babble, we will not be overheard,” Serafino assured him.

  The man stretched his neck (he was a short man) and whispered in Serafino's ear:

  “The man Rosas, I love him.”

  Serafino went through the crowd and got brandy in glasses for himself and the man. They set the glasses on a sideboard there. They lit cigars. They were silent together for some time.

  “I assume that you have known the man Rosas closely,” Serafino said then.

  “I have not. I have not been fortuned even to speak to him. I have seen him only once.”

  “Then I must guess that he is somehow of impressive or igniting person or personality.”

  “He isn't, signore Tirana. He looks more common than such a leader could possibly be. He couldn't, I believe, have been very impressive of looks even when he was younger. Now he's aged a bit and gone pudgy.”

  “Then why the love for him, since it seems to run against the grain?” Serafino asked.


  “There is a right and a wrong. This man Rosas has been right, and in so clumsy a manner as can hardly be believed. And we, we the mobbish meddlers from everywhere, how adroitly we have been wrong! Oh how cleverly, how brilliantly we have been wrong!”

  A little clarification here on the colors and on the color words. The colors hadn't quite the meaning then that they have now. As a matter of odd fact, Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Mainstay of the Blancos or Whites, or the conservative, the decentralized, the Federalist parties of all the Plata countries, had been the nineteenth century inventor of both the red flag and the red shirt. They had been his early trademark. They hadn't any great symbolism for him. The red was for the Gaucho energy and its surging blood; and it was a pun on his own name. It was in La Banda Oriental and not in Argentina that civil war arose between parties calling themselves Blancos and Colorados, the Whites and the Reds. At the time we come to, the red flag had not yet been preempted by the Communists, though it had been adopted as the flag of the red revolution in Europe three or four years before. In La Banda Oriental, the red shirts had been adopted by Garibaldi and his group. He had first bought them cheap from a Montevideo warehouse to equip his growing band; they were shirts of a popular color among the poorer classes, and they were available. There was no incongruity in red-shirted workmen fighting for the White party, or for the Red or for any party. With Garibaldi, the symbolism grew later, after he had returned to Europe. The red shirts were more unusual there, they made a great splash and distinguishing mark. But Rosas, the essential Blanco, the early and earnest enemy of the red revolution in all its phases, was not forgiven to that day or to this for his first use of the red shirt and the red flag.

  Other shirts had begun to blossom in Montevideo now, black shirts of the anarchists, blue shirts of the Greater Columbia countries to the north and of Central America, gold shirts of Bolivia and Ecuador, tricolor shirts after some of the new national flags. Even the green shirts of the men (and the girl-woman) from the Catherine Dembinska were imitated within days, seemingly within hours. There were dyers and textile men in Montevideo hasty to give any color wanted. Such Blancos, Whites, as were in Montevideo (and it was life's danger to be known as a Blanco there) were partial to blue shirts and gold shirts. Enough of shirts.