Oh, it was a rough go of it as Manolo and his horse picked up surge and speed. It was rough country there. An educated man on an educated horse could stay in the clear open and drag his victim through every thorn bush and thistle trap on that plain.
An ordinary man would be dead in three quarters of a mile of it; the toughest man would be dead in a mile and a half. “To the death, Manolo, to the death!” Rosas bellowed behind them. Yes, Rosas was a very cruel man. Sometimes, in remorse, he cast himself into thorn bushes after a deed was done, but he was always certain that the murder was absolutely consummated before he allowed himself remorse.
But Dana was now jerked and battered into full consciousness. Might as well meet death in his wits. But on the heels of full consciousness, and himself dragged by the heels, Dana had a startling realization of the thing they had forgotten, or had never known.
“Even the doltish Danes of Ireland, when they came, (and I have some of their doltish blood in myself) knew enough to break a man's thigh bones before they dragged him to his death,” Dana was laughing his realization that he had it whenever he wanted it. “Are they children, these people under half a sky? Have they never know savagery itself? A man with his legs and recoil unbroke can turn anything around, anything.”
Dana went with it a short way. There was something horribly luxurious in taking this exquisite death-battering. But he couldn't afford the luxury of enduring it for long.
“That's enough,” he said. “It's not for myself, it's for the Indian that I have compassion. It's his turn on the way back.”
It was no great trick. Once, when he was air borne in his jouncing, Dana doubled himself in a great surge. Sometimes a rope may be snapped in this manner. It wasn't. He tried it a second time and missed. But on the third attempt Dana fastened on the line with his teeth just above where it knotted to his ankle binding. Dana savaged the rope with his teeth. He was wolfish, he was tigerish with his teeth. His bounding and jouncing was the more violent on him in his doubled-up position, but it was more violent on the line also. Dana was bear-toothed, he was beaver-toothed, he was savage-human toothed. Strong men in the three-bays region of Ireland used to show their strength of jaw by biting pieces out of pine boards. A strong man toothed and rampant can sheer through a pretty good hemp line. Dana did it. The line parted.
Dana crashed and rolled violently, but he came onto his feet, standing, and only moderately broken. The Indian Manolo was circling back on his horse, having felt the breaking of the line. And Dana still stood with his hands bound behind him.
A very agile man, though, can jump backwards through the loop of his own hands. Dana did it. He fell in the close effort. He rose again with his hands in front of him and gnawing like a giant frantic rat at this wrist bonds. His forearms stood out absolutely black with the effort, and he broke the gnawed ropes. Manolo and the horse were upon him with whip and hoof.
“Ah, the horses of this land are as childish as the men,” Dana blood-mumbled out of his mouth. “Knows he not better than to over-rear with a dangerous animal under his belly?”
For the horse had over-reared when he went up with slashing hoofs, and Dana was the most dangerous animal on the pampas (the runt jaguars of that part of the continent simply weren't in it with Dana for fierceness). Dana surged powerfully into the back legs of the over-reared horse, grabbed the very fetlocks out from under him, and threw that heaving hulk of a horse onto its back.
And smashed the rider under him? Never. Manolo was better Indian than that. Manolo was onto his feet before his horse crashed to the ground, and came at Dana fast.
Something else, very fast. Dana had felled Manolo with echoing violence.
“I spoke an unwitting falsehood a bit ago,” Dana told himself as he bound the stunned Indian's wrists behind him. “I said that he was the fastest man a-hand I'd ever seen. I'd forgotten about a faster man. I'm a faster man. I'd almost forgotten for a moment that I was a thunder-man.”
Dana bound Manolo's ankles as his own had been bound. He knotted the line, a slightly shorter line now, to the ankle bindings, and he tied the other end of the line to the saddle horn of the skittish horse.
Then Dana raised a two-hundredweight stone above his head with intent to bring it down with all his thunderous strength. But, instead, he laughed, and tipped the giant weight off behind him.
“Nay, I'll not shatter his shanks,” Dana said. “I'll give him the same chance he gave me.” Dana mounted the bewildered and squealing horse. He lunged, and the horse lunged, and they dragged Manolo over a very rough seven furlongs back to Rosas.
An ordinary man would be dead in a furlong less than that. But a very tough man might have some life left in him after even a four or five furlong longer torture.
Dana completed the screaming drag (Manolo was a well-voiced Indian) with a flourish, reared up before Rosas, and leapt easy-footed to the turf.
“He'll not die of it,” Dana said. “He's near as tough a man as myself. But he's broken bodied and he needs care. Rosas, are you still a child, and you having ruled so many years?”
“A child? How am I a child?” the dictator Rosas asked, but he was taken aback.
“You know not that one first breaks the femores, the thighbones of a man before heel-dragging him to death?”
“No. This I hadn't known, Irishman. I've been doing the thing defectively for thirty years and nobody has instructed me better.” Rosas had understood his neglect instantly, of course, and he was appalled by his own ignorance. But he'd been doing it carelessly and wrong for those thirty years, and no other man had lived through a death-drag he'd ordered.
“You are a child in other ways, Rosas,” Dana said. Dana had the upper hand now, for all that he was shredded in clothing and body. “You come to defeat, Rosas,” he said. “There is no way out of that. Will it be a glorious or an inglorious defeat you win for yourself?”
“It will be glorious, if it comes,” Rosas said, “but I'm not convinced that I'll be defeated. I've won at ten to one against me before. But I'll go in glory if I go. I'll die hard in the battle.”
“No, that's the un-glory way for you to go now, Rosas. Yes, you are still a child. I'll instruct you, and I beg that others instruct you. We must get to it now. We haven't a lot of time.”
They had plenty of time, really. The day was February first. The battle of Monte Caceros wouldn't be fought for two days yet, on February third of the year 1852.
Urquiza hadn't the terrible vigor that Rosas had once had; yet that vigor of Rosas’ had been a deceptive thing. It had been broken up by patches of lassitude and plain laziness, and by large areas of neglect. The areas of lassitude in Rosas had grown larger in later years, and those of preeminent vigor had grown smaller. And Urquiza had, perhaps, more vigor than any other man in the United Provinces of the Plata.
Urquiza hadn't the sometimes mad cruelty of Rosas; he detested it. But he did have a towering firmness with its own slight edge of cruelty. He was a man of the Provinces and of the mid-century.
He hadn't that which might be called the visceral intelligence of Rosas, that body feel for everything in the Provinces, the absolute rapport with its basic looseness and freedom. But Rosas himself hadn't that feel as strongly as he'd had it once. Urquiza was the more brainy man, by any conventional standard; and he also had the body feel, which Rosas lacked, for the world beyond the Provinces. He stood to Rosas something like nephew to uncle, a more sophisticated nephew to the uncle he still remembered as a mighty man of yore.
“If you knew you were to die within three days, Rosas, and if you had free choice in the matter, who would you choose for your successor?” Dana Coscuin asked him.
“Urquiza, of course, foul traitor that he is. But I don't intend to die within three days.”
“I and Urquiza and others intend that you will die, as far as your connection with the United Provinces goes, within three days, Rosas. Well then, if you knew you must go into permanent exile within three days (and that is a thing which
you must do), who would you choose for your successor?”
“Urquiza, of course.”
“Choose him then.”
“He's chosen himself. Yours, as first stated, was the better device, Irishman. It'd spoil it for me to put my seal on it. If I am taken away, then I must be (for the grand effect of it) taken away roaring and bellowing. How many good men do you think that it'd take to put me on a boat, Irishman, and me playing the bull to the very hump?”
“A dozen strong men, I suppose, Rosas; unless we ring your nose like a bull indeed, then it'd be easier. You'd never be able really to unite the United Provinces again. Something has gone out of you.”
“I know it. But has that something come into anyone else?”
“Maybe into Urquiza, Rosas. He can unite the Provinces again, and defend them.”
“Not completely, Irishman. They'll never be serene under strong peace again.” (Rosas was correct in this. The Provinces would not be under such strong peace in the foreseeable future. But they'd be able to stave off utter disaster for decade after decade of that foreseeable future. They would join many other lands on the precarious razor's edge, and they would not be destroyed.)
“I'll not surrender to that noisome cloud of flies on the other bank,” Rosas said stubbornly.
“No, you will not,” Dana explained. “Our whole idea is to forestall that. The flies, the devils, the good men turned weird, have pitched their hysteria too singly on one thorn, you. We remove that thorn from the flesh. And Urquiza stands steady and in control, having conquered you and sent you into exile.
“They'll know, on the other shore, quickly that they've been robbed of their chaos and their devil's opportunity, but they'll not know it soon enough. They'll be as afraid to attack Urquiza as they were to attack you before Urquiza declared against you. And their thing will be broken for a while, and all the babble exploded out of it. They'll not be able to bring a new hysteria to such a pitch for near a decade.”
“Why didn't Urquiza take it over from me five years ago when I begged him to?”
“He wasn't competent for it then, Rosas. Now he is.”
“I'll think about these things, Irishman.”
Dana went to the Lady Valiente and to her son's wife, Carolina, and asked them if they were able to take the Catherine Dembinska down river a hundred miles, out of the way.
“We can take her, eldest son,” Valiente said, “but she'll not want to go. She'd like to blaze her cannons a bit in the battle here.”
“She'll do none such. I'll not have that arsonist wife-ship of mine in any battle here at all. She's capable of igniting the whole thing, and me pouring cold water on it day and night.”
The two ladies took the ship down river — no — it was the three ladies (one of them in timbered-flesh but still graceful form) who went down the river together.
The next morning (it was February second) Rosas stood and gazed across the river at the polyethnic armies on the other side. (There was dust in the air; Urquiza was coming, and the foreign armies would not dare cross till Urquiza had attacked Rosas.)
“Carrion birds, maggots, swarms of flies, devils’ devices,” Rosas was muttering. “Ah, but there are good men from Paraguay and Brazil and Uruguay there, good men (though traitors) from the United Provinces, good men even from England and France and Italy. Why do these good men make a bad army, Irishman? Why are they an intolerable evil?”
“It is an intricate business, Rosas.”
“Which means that you don't know the answer, Irishman. I will tell you what is wrong: their statement is false.”
“What statement is that, Rosas?”
“The statement that they make as they draw up into an army, or a mob. It is the same as the Garibaldi statement. He is another torch-head, Irishman, as you and I are, one of the passionate fair men. I believe that he is right in his person but wrong in his statement.”
“I don't understand about the statement, Rosas.”
“You had better understand about it, Irishman. It's a statement that is not to be believed, and you yourself will hear it again and again, at other times, in other places. Be wary of it.”
That night, February second, Urquiza came (only half secretly) to talk to Rosas himself. The armies of the two men (the armies which were to fight each other on the morrow) were already mingling with each other in friendship and reminiscence of old acquaintance. They had odd customs in the United Provinces.
Urquiza stated that perhaps there need not be a battle at all. But the moment that he said it he knew that he'd spoken wrong, for the Indians and Gauchos on each side began to wail.
“It is our last chance to die in battle, and you'd rob us of it,” they complained.
“There will always be wars and battles,” Dana joshed them.
“Not like this. They come with new things now, with field guns and entrenchments; we have heard of them. This is the last of the old battles, our last opportunity to die in the kind of war that we understand. This will be the last fighting of men on horses with rifles and pistols and knives and boleadoras and lariats, the last such battle as God himself loved to fight in his youth.”
“I suppose that there should be some sort of battle,” Rosas said.
“All right,” Urquiza agreed. “We'll let them go, about three hundred men on a side, and they can find death in it who want it. It's hard on them that the old days should be gone.”
“It's hard on me also,” Rosas said.
“And we'll let about four hundred men (they need not be any of the same men) select themselves to ride on the retreat,” Urquiza continued.
“The retreat?” Dana asked. He didn't quite understand that.
“Irishman, you arrange so much of it, and you do not understand about the retreat?” Urquiza asked in amused disgust. “When that army of obscenities breaks across from the other bank, then we must point out to them the Rosas army in full retreat, and we must set them in pursuit of it. Never mind that the men on the retreat will be three of my own men for one of Rosas’. We will say it is the Rosas army, and who of the strangers will know better. My men, and the Rosas men, can ride to Hell and back in a single day, a long journey. The mixed crowd from the other bank can't ride like that. In three days our men will have ridden the pants off the strangers. Then some of our men will turn, and there will be bloody fun here and there. You know how these things are, Irishman.”
They took Rosas then to put him on the ship to go to his exile. Twelve strong men couldn't do it. It took twenty. He didn't bull-bellow as he'd said he would, though. He fought silently and powerfully. They tied him down and strapped him down in a bunk, and the exile ship slipped down the river with him. Rosas sobbed in his throat like the broken-hearted animal he was. (This was still the early night of February second, the night before the battle when Rosas should be overthrown.)
But he'd have a second youth in England, would Rosas, in Southampton. He'd live twenty-five years more. He'd be a gentleman-farmer and a tract-writer. For the latter thing he would discover a real talent in himself. He'd write mostly against the false statement of the Garibaldi people and others of their kind.
In the morning (of February 3, 1852) was fought the battle of Monte Caceros. It was essentially a mock battle, but it was also the last battle of the sort that the Gauchos and the Indians understood, the last one that belonged to the old days. And quite a few of these basic men accepted the last opportunity to die in old time battle.
Then the mixed armies from the other bank broke across the river and were set in pursuit of the retreating “Rosas” army. The pursuers did have the pants ridden off them in three days or less, and many of them met death when the rag-tags (deep in the wild country now) decided to turn and have some fun out of it.
The international devils, the interworld devils, had felled a strong and compromised man who had stood in their way. They had done it after years of effort and planning.
And in his place they now saw another strong man, less
compromised, better supported, unassailable for some time, and standing equally in their way.
It was enough to make devils weep.
IX
WHERE YET VOLCANIC IS MY HOME
“In the nervousness of the belching Volcano, and the great water-spout in the Passage, when the Fountains of the Deep are broken up and all the ancient Islands appear in the Sky, then will the World end for a while.”
— Marie Galante, Prophecy
“The End of the World in the Cannoning Gates,
And fountaining Sea where the Damsel will die:
Volcano afire, and the Islands and Straits;
Green Fire in the Ocean, Red Fire in the Sky.”
— Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre) Prophecy
What's this, what's this? There are some sheets of the life missing, and they cover at least two years of the life of Dana Coscuin. Well, surely they're in the chest there, in the child's coffin. It's junky in that chest; it should be cleaned up. But the sheets of all the years of the life ought to be there. They aren't.
No, the sheets of at least two of the years (from early 1852 to early 1854) are missing; or at least they cannot be found in that rummage now. It may be that they'll be found at a later date and be inserted then. A life need not necessarily be lived consecutively. It's mere habit.
Besides, a few scraps of those two years are known, from Damisa, from Serafino, from Otis Ranker and others. They're given here then as a scrappy abridgement:
Dana was several times in and out of Mexico in this period. There're whole memories of the Mexican adventures, but they're not at all clear. Dana was there at the time of the return of the dictator-liberator Santa Ana, the man who was so divided in himself between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution as to be almost driven to insanity. In Mexico Dana met a deeper Religion coupled with a deeper Atheism than he had met anywhere in the further south. He had not before encountered these two strong forces in the same persons. He met also a quality that can only be called Nobility of Indians. In Peru and in Ecuador there had been some remembrance of this quality. In Chile and in the Argentine there had been some prevision of it. Only in Mexico did Dana find it living. Dana was in Mexico with Otis Ranker and with Damisa the Leopard; and Damisa remained there to become a Black Mexican.
Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Page 24
