Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2 Read online

  Contents

  Contents

  CONTINUUM

  I AMSTERDAM AND OCEAN WEST

  II BASSE-TERRE THE BOTTLE IN THE SEA

  III STALLION TO SPANISH MAIN

  IV ECUADOR OF THE CONDORS

  V MY SHIP AND MY BRIDE

  VI CHILE AND SPINE AND THE GHOST

  VII THE TESTAMENT AND THE HORN

  VIII IN GLORIOUS DEFEAT

  IX WHERE YET VOLCANIC IS MY HOME

  … CONTINUUM

  A constellation of persons or events will have precedent. It will not appear out of nothing; it's a converging of previous trails and persons. Before one set of adventures, there was always another set; and before those, still another set, back to the beginning of the world.

  We pass from one set to another now, from the Green-Flame adventure to the Half-Sky adventure. We are still in the middle of the nineteenth century, that most unreal of centuries, looking for reality under stodgy and ridiculous surface.

  The bridge between the two sets is crossed on the first day of the year 1849. The bridge is actually a shallow flat-boat canal in Amsterdam, and Dana Coscuin crossed it by — but no, not now: at a later time it will be told how he crossed it.

  Some of the continuing persons out of the Green-Flame adventure are these:

  Dana Coscuin, the green-shirted curadh or Irish hero.

  Kemper Gruenland, the Germanish giant.

  Charley Oceaan, the black man from Basse-Terre.

  Tancredi Cima, the tall Sardinian.

  Mariella Cima, the mountain wife of Tancredi.

  Count Cyril Prasinos, the timeless and invisible instigator and employer.

  Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil.

  Aileen Dinneen, Dana's Irish cousin.

  Elena Prado y Bosca, Countess and Doxie, who was also Muerte de Bosacaje, and who may or may not be dead.

  Elaine Kingsberry, the English Lady.

  Jane Blaye of Hendaye, and her daughter, Sainte Erma.

  The Black Pope of the high Carlist Hills.

  Malandrino Brume, a rough man.

  Magdelena Brume, the holy panther who is Malandrino's wife.

  Judas Revanche, the Carbonarist who'd burn the whole world down.

  Catherine Dembinska, Dana's wife; dead, but still of influence.

  Some of these persons will not be seen again in the Adventures; they have done their work before God and are gone, but they remain in the Constellation. Most of them we will have with us again on the Half-Sky Adventure, or on further adventures. And the list of the involved ones will be added to till there is a whole bright multitude of them.

  Watch them and wonder.

  I

  AMSTERDAM AND OCEAN WEST

  Con el Sol, el Mar, el Viento y la Luna

  Voy a amasar una loca Fortune.

  With the Sun and the Wind and the Moon and the Sea

  A lunatic fortune I fashion for me.

   — Martinez, Ballad of the Crazy Fortune

  Who ever met a stolid Dutchman? I never did, and I'm older than you are. It was the Spanish, back when there was war and rebellion between the peoples, who hung that lie on the Dutch. The Dutch, and their English underlings, had first hung the Black Legend on the Spanish, making them out to be dark-hearted and treacherous people. The Spanish, in revenge, hung the Stolid Lie on the Dutch. The latter was the more damaging and the less fair.

  The Dutch, in fact, are a remarkably light-hearted and skittish people. And Dutch Amsterdam was (is, and will forever be) a city of gay, chuckling, and bright (but hidden) treasure. Amsterdam is, moreover, the Baghdad of the Nights, and all its episodes are stories out of the Nights. The treasures of this Amsterdam-Baghdad are in rich caskets or coffins: some of them are named Goud, Diamant, and Geest, which are Gold, Diamond, and Ghost — by Ghost the Dutchmen mean the mind or intellect.

  Dana Coscuin opened and reveled in two of the latter sort of treasure caskets in his first night and morning in Amsterdam. The first night was the eve of the new year, though the Dutch call it Oudejaarsavond or Old Year's Evening. More precisely, one of the caskets was named Geest, Mind, and the other one was named Geest en Lichaam, Mind and Body; though it was loaded full of the Count's own gold.

  Fittingly this was in the street named Doodkiststraat which ran back from the waterfront north of the Ij River (the Nordseck Canal which later obliterated this street was as yet undigged). Coffin Street it was named, and Dana came there in joyful weariness just a little after dark on the last night of the year 1848. He had walked from Utrecht that day.

  A gay madwoman was singing, and Dana had been following the sound. Dana could hear such things at a great distance, picking them out from other sounds, finding the direction of the source. There were flickering oil lamps in front of the rakish buildings of these streets back from the waterfront; only a small portion of Amsterdam had gas lights as yet.

  One could not tell the houses from the business buildings there. Most of them were a combination of both. But the door was ajar on the house of the source (it was a cold night, but the singer would not have noticed such a thing as cold), and Dana walked right in. The singing girl-woman winked at him and went on with her singing. She sang in Dutch, and Dana understood the message but not the words. The singing woman was engaged in the pleasant occupation of drawing a corpse.

  “My name is Dana Coscuin and I'm Ireland's gift to Ij,” Dana joined in the song with rousing voice, for its tune was very like his own tune, or he imagined it to be. His unmusical ears and voice set everything to that one tune.

  “Mijn namm is Scheherazade Jokkebrok,” the singing girl tried to match her words to the tune also, but it broke the tune to pieces, and she fell to laughing.

  “Lie you down on that slab there,” she laughed in French then, knowing that Dana (tow-haired and fair though he was) hadn't much of a Dutch tongue in him, “and I'll blood and draw you just as soon as I'm through with this other fellow here.”

  “I am not dead,” Dana said cheerfully, but he lay down to rest on the slab next to the corpse that the girl had under consideration.

  “Nor was this one when I began on him,” she whooped out of powerful throat and breast. “But, no, that is a lie, or a joke. He was quite dead. So will you be if you remain. I make no exceptions when I am busy at work.”

  “Nobody is named Scheherazade Jokkebrok,” Dana accused. “What do you do with the entrails?”

  “It is not by coincidence that I have the best gardens in Amsterdam,” the girl said with pride. “They are the life of my gardens.” She was taking the viscera out of the corpse in great loops and lumps. It was pleasantly strenuous work and she made it seem enjoyable.

  “There is coffee going in the inner room,” Dana suggested with some hope. “The smell of it comes through stronger smells than I can interpret.”

  “Yes, go get it and bring it here with the cups,” she said. “If you haven't eaten, bring bread and cheese and sausage too. Take that basin there and bring it to me full of hot water. And bring my blue towel.”

  This was a young, strong girl. She had robust fleshy arms and shoulders and breast, and small feet. She was dark Dutch; though Dana recognized Spanish veins in the throat of the girl (he'd always recognize such Spanish veins), perhaps a Jewish curl to the ears, French-gray eyes. She had a round Dutch belly.

  In the kitchen there were four coffins with a prepared corpse in each of them, and four more coffins that were empty.

  “Business is good?” Dana called half-mocking.

  “Business has been good,” the girl said seriously. “It slacks off a little now, and I am glad that it does. I believe that people shoul
d postpone dying till after the holy season, and many of them are doing that.”

  The girl came into the kitchen carrying the corpse above her head on her two hands, and it was that of a heavy man. She had finished up with it quickly and clothed it in its best Sunday suit. She lay it in one of the empty coffins, disposed it neatly, and fluffed out the velvet lining a bit. She was deft. She had the right touch for these things. She washed her hands in the basin and dried them on her blue towel. She and Dana began to set food on a table for supper then.

  “If you wonder why we are so easily and quickly in accord, it is because I made you up,” she said. Dana didn't quite understand her. “You are Dana Coscuin and you believe you have a commitment to change the world,” she continued. “You do have that commitment now; I just gave it to you; you hadn't it before, but you believe that you had.”

  “Have you this establishment by yourself?” Dana asked her.

  “Oh no. There is my father. He'll come very soon to supper. I made him up too.”

  “Have you a mother?”

  “No. I was never very good at making up mothers. I will do it soon though.”

  This girl was mad — pleasantly, logically mad. She had the beautifully cracked look in her eyes. One other girl had had the same cracked look, but she'd had it more emptily: a girl in Hendaye, who people called Sainte Erma.

  The girl poured fresh milk and black beer together for a drink that was better than it deserved to be. She had hot barley bread there, and butter. There were beef ribs and pork sausage and apple-butter and honey. Eggs, and more eggs. Coffee with brandy and whipped cream. Sea-salt, white pepper, black pepper, and nutmeg in four shakers there. Blue cheese, hard cheese, cream cheese, curry powder, little peppers, little onions, praling-eels, shellfish named mossel. Sea-bird, woodcock, Moscovy duck, lobster.

  “I knew you would be hungry when you arrived after your long walk,” the girl said. Haddock out of the salt ocean. White wine laced with gin. Red wine laced with whisky. “I made your eyes too pale,” the girl said. “I will darken them.” Tapioca and shredded coconut from the south seas. Applesauce from Flanders apples, with cloves from the Moluccas. Brown sugar from Guayaquil. Pies with almond and cinnamon crusted on them. Walnuts from Persia. Mutton chops baked with brown rice. So also did they eat in Baghdad between the rivers.

  “We will not begin to eat the big roast till my father comes,” the girl said. “When I first made him up I made him preposterous and over-bearing and flamboyant. Then I developed an affection for him, so I made him deeper and more mellow. I aged him somewhat also. When I first made him up he was not really old enough to be my father. At that time I had not yet decided upon what role he should fill. But now he is modified and filled with real affection, and we get on well together.”

  Dana Coscuin was the pride of Ireland and the scourge of all unnatural things. He was weary and resplendent in bright green shirt, he was tow-headed and stocky, green-eyed and grinning. He was young and vigorous.

  “I first made you a little bit too young and inexperienced,” the mad girl said. “I will mellow you also, and put new brains in your head. I will fill you out in detail. And if you really wish to change the world, why then I will have you change it. I had about decided to have somebody change it anyhow.”

  And what was Dana Coscuin doing here, sitting in the kitchen of a death's-house in Amsterdam anyhow? Well, Dana had been appointed (he didn't know by whom) to be adventurer and proctor-at-large to the world. The wide world was his province, and that part of the world which has only half a sky over it was to be his next adventure. Amsterdam was one of the swinging dutch-doors to the whole wide world, and especially to the world of the narrow sky. Besides, Dana had appointment in this Amsterdam for the first day of the New Year. He had this appointment with a peculiar and discrete set of folks. All had pledged that they would keep this appointment, dead or alive. One at least was, to Dana's knowledge, dead; and Dana waited this one's coming with special interest and desire.

  “It is only accidental that you are Irish,” the girl Scheherazade Jokkebrok said. “At one time I had decided to make you up as Polish. I don't know whether I should change you back or not.”

  “It has been done; I'm already riven,” Dana told her, “I was cleft wide open, and a bit of flat Polish field and of high Polish lady was set into my breast. Then I was closed up again, badly.”

  “I remember it now,” Scheherazade said. “I will examine you again after a bit. If I closed you badly, then I will fix the botch. I seldom do bad work. Here comes my father now. Admire him! I'm proud of him; he is one of the best things that I have ever done. And you too are one of the best, Dana Coscuin.”

  Nehemias Jokkebrok came through the doors and into the kitchen room; he came preposterously, incredibly, flamboyantly. How must he have been before Scheherazade had mellowed and aged him? Oh, he was mellow, but there was new growth out of the old growth of him like an untrimmed grape vine. He was aged, but he hadn't left off being young also. He was a timeless creature out of some sea; he was even encrusted with salt, and perhaps with barnacles. Or it may have been the glittering snow on him that gave that impression.

  “Good Old Year's Evening, my holy daughter,” he boomed like melodious church bells. “Good Old Year's Evening to you, Dana of the legend, you who would change the world and do not know that it is changed a hundred times every day. We will sit down to dinner now, the three of us, the three most important persons now in Amsterdam as it happens, perhaps the three most important persons in Europe.”

  “I've often taken a high view of my own importance,” Dana said, “but the times I have done so have been the times when I was most wrong about everything. What if it is the same thing with mad Scheherazade, and with you old Prophet?”

  Nehemias Jokkebrok was bearded like one of the prophets, or black-bearded like one of the still-young prophets, and he had a surety about him which even the greatest of them lacked for all their anger.

  “Yes, we are often wrong, but we are always important, Dana,” Nehemias said with a haunting bit of old authority that Dana had heard in but one voice before — in the voice of the Third Man whom Dana and Brume had visited with on one puzzling night. “The reason that we are important is that there are no duplicates of any of us. It was intended by God that there should never be a duplicate of any person, but the great majority of people make themselves into weak duplicates of others. This is to go against God, and to go against God is to lose importance.”

  One of the dead men groaned in his coffin. Dana arched a brow at this and grinned with an almost-nervousness.

  “It is nothing at all,” Nehemias said. “Many of our pieces here are imperfectly dead. There is a certain windiness in them for several hours, and sometimes they so sound. Resurrecting them is alway disappointing, though, except in one case who is very close to me.”

  “Was it from the child's coffin?” Dana asked, for there was a smaller coffin among the others. “There is something a little wrong about the child's coffin.”

  “No. What you see wrong about the child's coffin is that it has had to be under-braced, for it is quite the heaviest in the room. You will see, in fact you will receive, that smallest coffin in the morning. Be not curious about it till then. It was conveyed here by orders of a friend of yours.”

  Now that her father had come, Scheherazade brought the big roast to the table and they began to devour it with a gusto that was not entirely holy. It was as if Dana and Scheherazade had not already been feasting on other things. Important persons often show this seasonable gluttony and they are to be blamed for it.

  “I will tell you about us, Dana,” Nehemias said, “since what my daughter may have told you is probably from her own fancy. She is not my daughter by birth or by original blood, though she is my daughter by saving blood. Know you that a man who draws and dresses dead people will sometimes have experiences such as will not come to a tobacconist or a draper or even a cobbler.

  “On one e
vening, just four years ago, I had two such unusual experiences. It was in the quiet part of the night, one hour before midnight, and I had finished with all except two corpses on my slabs. One of these was that of an enemy of mine who had died naturally but passionately, of a stroke of the over-dramatic sort, as everything he did was over-dramatic. The other was of a poor girl of the streets, known to my but slightly and only by sight. She had died by a bloody attack, whether by her own or by another hand had not been determined.

  “I worked on the man, my enemy, first. I began my incisions, and I made a discovery which I had made only seven times before in my life at this trade. The weirdness of that night would bring it to nine times, and it still remains so four years later. There was something beyond the windiness and sounding which you heard a moment ago from one of the boxes. I discovered that the man I was working on was not really dead. ‘Tis sometimes said that this happens often. Is nine times out of the more than thirty thousand cases in my life what you would call often?

  “I am, was, a doctor and surgeon before I was unlicensed long ago in one of those movements when papers and prerogatives were taken away from people of my belief. With my doctor's knowledge, I gave my old enemy an injection directly into the heart. He revived a little, with a purplish trembling and passionate effort on him.

  “He rattled his chest. I poured a little brandy down his throat. He shuddered, he gasped, he spoke. ‘I am alive, Nehemias,’ he said, ‘I have been conscious but incapable of movement or sound for all this time that I have been here and you have been whistling over your work.’ ‘We are enemies,’ I reminded him. ‘We are enemies,’ he croaked in his awful voice. ‘Do not let me die.’

  “I tell you, Dana, I was fascinated by this thing. Might this not be the perfect murder case? This would be the murder that could never be proved or tracked. Think of another case so death-tight. All I had to do was let him die, and I would have murdered my enemy free and with no suspicion ever to attach to me. No one would ever know. Even God dozes for a brief moment just before midnight, and it was that time exactly. After all, my enemy had been certified as dead when he was dumped on my slab. Relish it, Dana. Is it not a rich dilemma? It is quite likely that I could have saved him then, that I could have had his passionate enmity continued for years.