Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  Ifreann Chortovitch was indeed in Montevideo, but he was (for the moment) the most subdued Ifreann that Dana had known. He sought Dana out at a social gathering and questioned him.

  “My uncle, the Lord of the Flies, has paid you to kill Rosas,” he said. “Whyever did he not give me the job, Dana?”

  “Possibly because you are incompetent, Ifreann. The Lord of the Flies is your uncle?”

  “He is my uncle, the brother of my father who is the Devil. Although my father is by far the greater, yet in the hierarchy (with us it should properly be called the anierocracy) the Lord of Flies is my superior until I have attained my majority. I cannot understand his selecting you for this. I cannot question him, so I will question you.”

  “When will you attain your majority, Ifreann? You're surely of age as a man.”

  “Am I a man, Dana? You yourself know that I am more than man.”

  “I know you to be less than a man. But what is the age of majority among monsters?”

  “That I can't say, Dana. Time runs a little different with us. In a hundred years, I would guess, I will be of age. He has hired you, and you will kill Rosas?”

  “No. I think I'll kill you instead, Ifreann. That's more to my liking.”

  “It isn't quite the time that one of us should kill the other, Dana. It's been deferred, I don't know by whom. If it had been time for it, I'd have killed you off the Horn. Since you'll not answer my questions, then let us at least enjoy each other's company here. You'll not deny that we've had high old times together, and we are the only two interesting persons in the city.”

  “I find many interesting persons here, Ifreann, and you not among them. Be gone, you bumbling boy.”

  “You are afraid to be alone in my company. You are afraid of my mind and my power.”

  “No longer, Ifreann, no longer. You are out of power and out of mind.”

  “I am genuinely puzzled about another thing,” Ifreann said. “You are not like ourselves. With you persons there must be observation of the times and the intervals. This has been ordained from the beginning. With us, a man may come of age at one hundred years, or one thousand. He may be born within one week of his conception, or the time may be five years. He may grow to man's size in two years, or in two hundred. We aren't bound by the flow of time.”

  “Or by the flow of sanity, Ifreann. Mad devils we are used to, though. A sane devil would be almost unpleasant. You'll never be unpleasant in that way, I know that, Ifreann. But what are you saying?”

  “How have you and the Catherine had this daughter? There was no time for you to have had her. It's not much more than three years since you met the Catherine. You were married to her not much more than ten days till her death. Your times are not random like ours. There was no time either before or after. There was not time for the daughter to be gestated or born. There was no time for her to grow up, for she is near grown up and already married herself. Even myself was hardly so large at three years old, nor nearly so mature as she.”

  “Ifreann, you are completely insane. How could Carolina be the daughter of myself and Catherine?”

  “That is what I ask you. And now I will have to kill her. I can't allow any of that seed to survive. There is another thing, Dana. Who is the child in the child's casket that you carry along on your travels since Amsterdam? This is, I divine it, a son and not a daughter. There was certainly no room for two births by the Catherine. Did she twin? This son also I will have to kill, if he does live. Just what is the state of the child and the child's casket, Dana?”

  “There's no child, Ifreann. It's true, though, that there are child's bones in the box; more sometimes than others. I don't understand this. There is other junk in the box: papers that appear and disappear, remnants that I cannot place, letters that were mailed to me from Europe only the day before. I don't know the why of the box. I don't know why I am burdened with it. It's very untidy what is inside it. Like your mind.”

  Ifreann moved off from him then. They were both puzzled about a lot of things.

  But Ifreann had no lack of company. The flies gathered around him. He was a great center of attention wherever he went. He did have a power and a mind. He was subdued only with Dana. He was a most exciting and compelling creature, a huge, coarse, handsome, and incredible person. There hadn't been anyone else like him.

  Damisa the Leopard came to Dana very sullenly.

  “We have never quarreled, Dana,” he said. “We have never lied. Tell me the truth now. Have you taken money from the Ghoul to kill Rosas?”

  “Once I took money to kill a man and did not kill him. Several times I have killed men free. I have never yet killed a man for money.”

  “But you haven't answered me.”

  “I haven't, Damisa, and I will not.”

  “I am going to Rosas, Dana. To kill him you will have to kill me first.”

  “No such thing. I could circumvent you a dozen different ways. Go then. We will meet again.”

  “I don't leave you in friendship, Dana.”

  “I see you go in friendship. Yes, I know you will be able to find Rosas, and I will be able to. I don't know anyone else out of this city who would be able to find him.”

  So Damisa left, not entirely in friendship with Dana. But why should Damisa the Leopard be going to Rosas, a man of whom he could not possibly have heard a good word anywhere?

  Dana Coscuin had been faking a lot. He didn't know much about the situation, and he knew almost nothing about the Argentine dictator Rosas. He would find out what he could, but in Montevideo there were only the Rosas enemies to gain information from; they, and very few and very covert friends of that open and mysterious man.

  Dana went onto his ship and attempted to talk to her.

  “There are, of course, all sorts of things wrong with him,” he said, “as there are with me, as there were with thee even. But there is something wrong with what they all say is wrong, there is something wrong about every enemy this man has who has so many of them. Tell it to me then, Catherine, is there any way that we can fit this bloody and foul man in? Is there anything green and growing about this tyrant? Is there contradiction about this that would shatter your heart and timbers? Could he have any part in the Green Revolution, or could I if I aid him?”

  The idle rigging of the Catherine Dembinska sighed and laughed. Catherine had her own way of answering. There were spook voices all through her. She'd always been multi-voiced. A confusion of voices, but they were all her own. Then there came words, or at least meaning, in Catherine's own special inner tone.

  “Green? Of course he is green, Dana. He is overgrown with green; he's green field and forest and pampas. Why, he has more green things growing out of his navel than all the foreign flies of Montevideo have ever seen in all their lands and days.”

  Why, this was astounding! Catherine had always hated every tyranny so much, every oppression. But she had always been unexpected in her thinking, had always known the things behind their appearances. Dana laughed. Why, he'd have a battle against the tides yet, and he'd not be wrong to have it. It was delicious to talk to his wife-ship sometimes. He only wished that he could talk with her more completely.

  “I'm mad, Catherine, as mad as Ifreann, but not with the same madness. I'll ask you a mad question then, his own question, but maybe in a cleaner madness than he asked it. Is the beautiful monkey-face girl Carolina somehow of our issue? Are the sometimes bones in the little coffin at all of our issue? What say you, swan and sloop; what say you, girl and green galleon?”

  Skittish laughter of rigging and timbers again. The answer like a bird flying down and almost landing on the scrubbed deck.

  “A little bit of our issue, both, Dana. We were meant to issue whole worlds, Dana, and we will do it vicariously or directly, but we will do it. The gawky devil doesn't understand how it is, and it worries him.”

  “It worries me too, wench,” Dana growled. “Had any man ever so maddening a wife as mine?”

  But, of
all the people that Dana talked to, it was mostly the remarkable and intelligent poor people of Montevideo, the people so poor that they did not have to adhere either to the Colorados party or to the Blancos, who told Dana about the man Rosas and about the mind-flow of all the Plata countries. Dana was impressed by the profundity and sophistication of these poor in contrast to the simplistic and superficial thought of the Montevideo rich and worldly people. Damisa had once told Dana much the same thing about the poor people of Africa.

  “Europeans and Americans haven't this sophistication in political matters,” Damisa had said. “They are like children before the people of Africa, especially the poor people of Africa. I don't understand the necessity for a man or a group to forget to think when he has learned to read, but in practice it works like that. It's as though one had signed covenant, as soon as one had learned to sign, that only one man in a hundred of you should thereafter be able to think and that the others should agree in all things with this thinking man (even though his own thinking should be shallow). It seems to me that this is too high a price to pay for literacy. No such price is exacted for the other little tricks of hand and eye and mind.

  “For this reason, in much of Africa, it is only slaves of Arabian derivation who are allowed to be literate, to carry out certain necessary functions of communication and record; and there is protection set up against these literates ever having position that requires intelligence or thought.”

  Damisa's views were too extreme and he didn't live by them himself. He had begun to be literate; it is, after all, no great trick for a grown man to learn to read. But now Damisa had gone to Rosas.

  This Rosas, Dana was learning as much about him as he could, was born in Buenos Aires in 1793, so he wasn't really old: either fifty-eight or fifty-nine now. He had soldiered first when he was thirteen years old, against the British invaders of his homeland; he had already been man-sized and man-minded. When he was sixteen he was put in charge of his father's barony, very extensive cattle and land holdings. He was competent at the managing, but he didn't want it. “A good man is able to build his own barony, as large and as rich as he wants it,” he said. He gave it all up; he refused his inheritance and patrimony, and it was one of the richest in all the Americas. He went native.

  Rosas always claimed to have some Indian blood. But others say that he had none at all. He was a blue-eyed fair man of Spanish ancestry. But he became a white Indian, a Gaucho of the Gauchos, the King of the Gauchos. He was the finest rider, the finest shot, the finest knife-man, the finest lasso man, the finest boleadoras man among the Gauchos; this meant, according to the Gauchos themselves, that he was the finest man in the world in all these things. He imbibed the boisterous cruelty and high-spirited blood-thirstiness of the Gauchos.

  The Gauchos, in spite of their affection and affectation of Indian ways and costuming, and in spite of their free mixture and intermarriage for a long time, were about three parts White for one part Indian. They have been painted redder than they were.

  The King of the Gauchos went into business. With two other men (Rosas was then about twenty-two) he started a meat-salting plant. They cured their own meat and shipped it on their own ships. A special law had to be passed against them (they were avoiding the Buenos Aires customhouse). They did well, though, and paid not too much attention to the law against them.

  The King of the Gauchos went into marriage to one María de la Encarnación Escurra (the Scarlet Woman); Rosas dressed her always in scarlet and she was a dazzling figure.

  The King of the Gauchos went into politics. He already had many men and many thousands of acres, more than his father had ever had. He aided Rodriguez into power as governor of Buenos Aires providence; then broke with him. He backed Rivadavia, and then broke with him also. He was sent to deal with the Indians on the demarcation line in the south. He dealt competently, built new forts, earned the trust of the wilder Indians (and never lost it). Effectively settled Argentina was then only about half its present area: south of the Rio Negro it was still mostly wild Indian country. Rosas backed Dorrego, a good man.

  There was uprising led by Lavalle, and Dorrego was murdered. Rosas raised a Gaucho army and moved on Buenos Aires. The junta convened and made Rosas governor of Buenos Aires. And he imposed peace. This was in 1829 when Rosas was about thirty-six years old.

  Rosas was a Federalist. He believed that government should be kept loose and local. He believed that the various provinces, Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Santa Fe, Córdoba, San Juan, Pampa, Rio Negro and others should be self-governed and even greatly decentralized within themselves (under various local Caudillos or leaders in association under the provincial governor); and that the league of provinces into a nation should be an even looser one. Rosas believed that the United Provinces of the Plata or Argentina should be only a shadow concept within the larger United Provinces of South America. He wasn't a nationalist. He was a total localist.

  He never held higher office than that of governor of the province of Buenos Aires, and yet for many years he was effective dictator of all Argentina by means of his overpowering friendships with the other governors and caudillos. It was sometimes said that he claimed Uruguay (La Banda Oriental) as a part of Argentina. He didn't. He considered it a neighboring province, like the other neighboring provinces, and likewise entitled to his overpowering friendship. Rosas was always sad when his strong friendship was refused.

  Serafino Tirana came to Dana Coscuin in some agitation one day. “This town of Montevideo is Babylon,” he said. “You know that, do you not? It's a babble almost to high heaven, and nothing can be done here. Besides, the battle will be elsewhere. It will be fought in higher Mesopotamia, not here in Babylon itself.”

  Mesopotamia, Between-the-Rivers land, Entre Rios, was indeed the province where the final stand of Rosas would be made.

  “Is it true that you have taken money to betray and kill Rosas, Dana?” Serafino asked now.

  “To betray him, yes, not to kill him.”

  “You betray us all then, Dana. You are not really taken in by the babble talk of this queer city. You know the right and wrong of it. I am going to Rosas now, and Carolina with me. If you betray him, then you are our enemy when you come into the Rosas country.”

  “I will betray him, and I will come into the Rosas country. I'll see him felled. And I'll see you again, Serafino, and it may be that yourself and Damisa and others may understand the reason for it then.”

  Serafino and Carolina left Dana and went up-country. Several of them had already left Dana.

  The enemies of Rosas had always been the Unitarios, the United Ones, the advocates of strong central government. They wanted a single government, and the international revolutionaries also wanted a single government in every nation everywhere. Central governments can be grabbed off by sudden assault; governments diffused into scattered local parts and sub-parts cannot be. The enemies of Rosas insisted that even Rosas must head a central government, and he refused. They insisted that he should become legally stronger, and he would not; practically he was already too strong for them. The strong man stood in the way of strong government; he didn't believe in it.

  The situation had gone on for twenty-two years with Rosas governor of Buenos Aires most of that time. The Unitarios were everywhere the allies of the Revolutionaries. But the blue-and-white banners of the Revolutionaries had almost everywhere been supplanted by the red flags of reactionary localism (to modern ears it sounds as if they had the colors backwards).

  Rosas was cruel. An American resident of Buenos Aires, J. Anthony King, stated that Rosas hung his victims in the market place of Buenos Aires with the label ‘beef with the hide’ on them. King's report is wrong only in using the plural. Rosas never repeated himself. He used other labels on other bodies, of course; but he killed fewer men in all his years than any other dictator had, and his years had been longer.

  Rosas had stepped down once (1832 to 1835), stating (honestly, perhaps) that he had no wish
to govern any longer. Three weak governors (Balcarce, Viamonte, Maza) filled the interval. None could control the city or the province; and the United Provinces of the Plata was secure only when its most populous province of Buenos Aires was secure. Rosas was called back. He swore “We will hound to death the infidel, the blasphemer, the thief … and all who dare scoff at our Holy Faith … until not one such monstrous person survives among us. The All-Powerful will direct our steps.” Rosas was sincere much of the time; sometimes he was carried away by his own eloquence. But infidels, blasphemers, thieves, and scoffers at the Holy Faith had entered the district in the two and a half years of Rosas’ absence. And in the sixteen years following his return they gathered like storms on the borders of the provinces, and particularly in the province named The East Bank (Uruguay), about which province there was dispute whether it was one of the United Provinces.

  “One of the flies in the midge-cloud around your Lord of the Flies, will grow larger,” a short Italian man told Dana one day. This was the same Italian man who had once told a lot of things to Serafino Tirana.

  “Which one will grow larger, friend, and how large?” Dana asked.

  “Mitre,” the Italian man said.

  “Mitre? The un-celebrated author of the Memoirs of a Rosebud? But isn't he the sorriest scribbler of them all?”

  “Not quite, man Coscuin. Marmol is an even sorrier scribbler.”

  “Oh yes, I'd forgotten about him. There are so many of the flies. How large will he grow?”

  “Big enough to rule the entire country.”

  “He'll not take over from Rosas!”