Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2, Page 3

  The coffin scene was the most logical and the latter. Nehemias, Dana knew, had put away his lap-harp and gone to bed in his own coffin. It was simply that Dana had drunk very deeply after eating hugely, after having walked to weariness all the day, all the month. And he had gone to sleep in the rich coffin there as his hosts had invited him to.

  That was the most logical, the most likely, the most simple of the happenings; Dana had gone to sleep simply there, and wakened simply in the morning. The only thing left without explanation is that Dana did not waken so simply as that. He wakened with informed loins and informed head; his coming years and his instruction had been reoriented and deepened. A new universe had been spun for him, and it might very well have been spun out of the cosmic belly of Scheherazade Jokkebrok.

  He also wakened to voices, to living voices in the living morning. “This is the house,” came the voice of Mariella Cima. “Would I lead you four hundred miles and lead you to the wrong house? This is the house, I tell you.”

  “In here, in here you the people! The one you are looking for is inside. Dana is here,” sounded a second voice, that of Scheherazade.

  Dana wakened in a coffin, that is true. And the insane young woman named Scheherazade was bending over him. She had, however, a great cleaver in her hand, one that would take off his head in a single chop. Her cheerfully mad eyes showed that she intended to use it, and with rapid flicks of her powerful wrists she did use it. She didn't cut off Dana's head with it, though it was sharp enough for that. She was cutting off his whiskers, and it is a very sharp cleaver that one can shave a man with. She had always used it to shave dead men, and to shave her live father, Nehemias.

  The room was brimful of sound now. All the friends had come in, whooping at Dana's situation. They were roiling and boiling and in the happy confusion of being together again. Mariella Cima the largest and most handsome woman that you will ever encounter; Tancredi her somber husband who was a mountainous Sardinian, lean and fiery as the Sardinian cliffs; Charley Oceaan the dapper black man with the spooky eyes who came from Basse-Terre which is called French Guadeloupe; Kemper Gruenland from the Germanies, a giant man in body, who might also become a giant in brain if all its empty places were ever filled up; Elaine Kingsberry the English lady (what was she doing here? — she had a right to be here, to be one of the pact, she had been the best friend of Dana's dead wife Catherine Dembinska). They did make a lot of noise when they were all together whooping in that room.

  “I am confused,” Scheherazade confessed. “The five of you here so suddenly and so solidly, and the other four here so strangely. I do know you. You are mine.”

  “We are yours forever,” Mariella said. “I knew you, I knew you better every mile that we came closer to you. We are yours, Scheherazade.”

  “Out and bare yourself and lie on that slab, Dana,” the insane Scheherazade ordered (never laugh at her; perhaps she did make them all up, and yourself also), “I know of only one way to wash a man and that is to wash him on the slab as a dead man. And you are filthy from your travel.”

  “So are we all,” Kemper boomed. “Will you wash us all on the dead-man slabs?”

  “Yes, yes, all, all.”

  “We'll go to another cleansing first,” Dana said, “and we will all go there together now. The mere washing can come any time.”

  They all went out the front door like a tide going out. Five streets came together there before the dead-man shop on the street named Doodkiststraat, and the appointed company had arrived simultaneously by several different streets. Catherine Dembinska, the dead wife, had come over the roofs and not by any street at all. Even in life she had liked to travel over the roofs.

  Catherine was one of the four who were there so strangely and yet were known by Scheherazade. There would always be a penumbra of ghosts in this company of the pact: Catherine herself; the contortedly beautiful Elena Prado (nobody knew whether she was still in the flesh or out of it); Judas Revanche who had been blinded by Dana's hand and knife before he had been murdered by others; Ifreann Chortovitch the Son of the Devil (Dana knew that he had slain this man, for all that the winter raven had croaked ‘he is not dead, he is not dead’). It's a dull group that doesn't have its corona of ghosts.

  The people of the appointment all trooped into another building nearby. It appeared to be another private house or shop, but Mariella Cima led the way and Mariella was unfailing in her sense of direction. The building was really named Dood-Christus-Kerk, Dead-Christ-Church, and was located there in Doodkist Street. All the Churches of Holland still looked like private homes, for the reason that they had been hidden and secret churches for several centuries until this very year. Except the Churches of the Reformed Sects which all looked like public barns — big, generous and with no particular style to them.

  Dead Christ Church had been one of the secret churches for a long while, but it blossomed out now; it had even added clanging bells. This was a holy day, the first day of the year, the Feast of the Circumcision.

  Then, a simple and profound miracle, one that all the people of the appointment had seen a thousand times, one that never became old or stale for any of them.

  ‘Kai ho Logis Sarx egeneto kai eskenosen en hemin,’ so the writer John had described it near eighteen centuries before, and John is the patron of all writers whether they know it or not. He was a stylist! And he had known the Person personally. ‘And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us’ — who else could write a sentence like that?

  An hour later they were all at breakfast in another establishment in the same street. There was talk which might have seemed presumptuous talk, for the persons of the appointment were dividing the world up among themselves.

  “It is back to the Germanies with me,” big Kemper was saying. “There is so much that will go wrong there; there are so many twisted and contrary seeds. There should be ten thousand men to have any effect at all, and I am only one. But I am called to fight it out there until I am killed there. I haven't received any instructions; I haven't received counsel or coin from the Count, but I will do what I can.”

  “I will give you your instructions, my big man,” Scheherazade told Kemper, “but I become more and more confused. It is surely the case that there are other minds than mine in the world, strong minds, and how can that be?”

  “We will always be of one mind with you, Scheherazade,” Mariella was saying, “and we will always receive instruction from you, for I understand this thing about you, and I will make my man understand it. Tancredi and I will go back to Sardinia. Our miserable little island has been chosen to set the world on fire, and my man and I are among those who will have something to do with the quality of the flame. Spain in this century was only prelude to Sardinia, and France is only a bad-tasting burlesque of it. We will not be modest about our part. Someone may well say of us after we are gone — ’But for these two, the world would have been different and worse.’”

  “If nobody else wants me, if nobody wants me to go with them, then I will return to England,” Elaine Kingsberry was saying with some difficulty. “If nobody else has a mission for me, well my father will stand successfully for Parliament this season. He has no brains of his own. He will have to depend on mine. I will do what I can do there, if nobody wants me elsewhere.”

  “Shall I make up some brains for your father?” Scheherazade asked. “I made up some for my own father and they work wonderfully.”

  “Even you would not be capable of helping my father in this,” Elaine said sadly.

  “Dana and myself will go to Basse-Terre,” the black man Charley Oceaan was saying. “We will go there directly or indirectly, but we will find our crooked way into the world it represents. Till this sick man is healed nobody can be hale. We will splinter our brains on those lazy reefs. The colors of the thing are more rampant there than anywhere, even than in Sardinia of the charcoal-burners. God will have to outdo all His past performances if any of you are to see us alive again.” />
  “You puzzle me more than any of the others, Charley Oceaan,” Scheherazade moaned out of her burning throat and her generating belly. “I remember all the others after I think about them a bit. I don't remember you nearly so clearly. Did I make you up?”

  “Why of course you did, Scheherazade,” the black man said cheerfully (Charley wasn't a completely black man: he was Irish and English and Spanish and French and Dutch and Carib Indian and East-Indiaman as well as Negro. He was an all-color man, but he was commonly called black). “I'm a fiction, anyone could tell that I'm a fiction, and what lady was it who made all the fictions that matter?”

  “Oh yes. Myself. I remember it all now.”

  “Can you make it up, though, that we get a berth as deck hands this day on some Dutch or other ship that is going Ocean West?” Charley Oceaan asked. “I particularly want this for myself and Dana. The sick world gets sicker, and fate refuses to hurry for us.”

  “I'll not do that,” Scheherazade swore. “I'll not do that at all. You will sail like gentlemen, even like the royal gentlemen you are. I may even make it up that you sail like kings. Come along, in any case, and we will give Dana what has been made for him.”

  Amsterdam, which has more canals than Venice and more bridges than Paris, twinkled in the bright sun and bright snow of the first day of the year!

  “Has Count Cyril left something for Dana?” Tancredi asked Nehemias (for that mountainous man was spooked by Scheherazade). “Do you know of the Count Cyril?”

  “I do know of him. I have met him. They are very few who can say the latter. Yes, he did leave something for Dana Coscuin at our establishment. My daughter was not satisfied with it though. It didn't matter to her that it was quite rich; she insisted that Dana deserved even a richer dowery (she used that word), and she made it up for him.”

  They were back in the dead-dauber house now. Scheherazade went to the under-studded child's coffin that was there and opened the lid.

  “It's quite heavy,” Nehemias said. “Really, she is greedy in the behalf of others to make it so heavy. The Count Cyril left a substantial purse. There was no reason for multiplying it a hundred times, other than her natural extravagance when she is in the creative mood.”

  They all admired. They admired for a long time. Kings have lived and died without ever seeing that much gold in one heap. In many entire nations there has never been such a quantity as this. They dipped their hands in the hard sun-stuff (solar worship is inexplicable without it, and who can say whether the tangible or the distant image happened first); they whistled; they sighed; Kemper Gruenland cried — he was inside Magic Mountain — he was a fabulist himself. Then he measured it by hands-depth and width and length. The child's coffin wasn't clear full, of course. It would have burst of its own weight and broken through the floor if it had been.

  “It has a specific gravity of more than nineteen,” Kemper said (how could he say something as prosaic as that when he was crying with ecstasy?) “If solid it would weigh twelve hundred pounds to a cubic foot (English and Dutch measure and weight differ very little). Allowing for the coefficient of lay, for round coins of various sizes will leave their calculable spaces between, allowing for its being a very small child's coffin, and not full, it will still weigh two thousand pounds. Can six people carry this?”

  (You who do not habitually deal in large quantities of gold coins may not realize just how heavy they are.)

  “Six people like ourselves can carry it,” Tancredi Cima said with all confidence.

  “There are eight handles to it,” Scheherazade pointed out. “I made it up that way. My father and I will take the fore and aft handles, and eight of us can carry it, yes. Do give me credit for being practical in these things. The ship is at the first dock, right off five-street corner. All arrangements have been made. We will load the coffin at once, and Dana and Charley Oceaan will remain on the ship. The others of you will come back here afterwards. I have made up packets for all of you, though none of them the weight of this. I have made up instructions for you also. The Count Cyril, though he is my friend and fabrication, needs help in his scheming.”

  Eight very strong persons — Nehemias and Scheherazade Jokkebrok, Mariella and Tancredi Cima, Kemper Gruenland, Charley Oceaan, Dana Coscuin, Elaine Kingsberry — picked up the child's coffin and carried it down to the dock at five-street corner and onto the ship, down a gangway, down a ship-ladder, into a cabin that may have been reinforced for it. By the Good Thief Saint Dismas, that coffin was heavy! Kemper had underestimated the weight of it. You do not see that much gold coin every day.

  Dana Coscuin and Charley Oceaan sailed that very hour on that ship for Basse-Terre. They did not go directly there, of course; no ship ever goes directly to Basse-Terre. 'twould go to Paramaribo first, but that also is Ocean West; and it is one way to Basse-Terre.

  Elaine Kingsberry took a little steam packet to England that very night. Kemper Gruenland hired a coach and took the Enschede road towards the Germanies. Mariella and Tancredi set out afoot on the Tilburg road which should bring them in less than a month through the Lowlands and France and to Marseilles, from whence Sardinia is only a sea-voyage away. The several unbodied and doubtfully-bodied spooks associated with the group took their own ways to their own places; spooks are not greatly restricted in their travel.

  The people of the appointment had gone their several ways to play their hands in the double revolution that is the program of the world, that is the most persistent of the life-death double masks of the world. They went well and wealthy, and each with a seemly prospectus.

  God was in his Heaven, the Devil and his son Ifreann were surely home in Hell, Count Cyril and other plenipotentiaries were active in Middle World, there was still blood running in all the arenas, but the Green Revolution was on the rise and its enemy on the decline.

  And it looked like a fat future and all good voyage with cherry brandy at the end of it for our particular friends.

  It didn't fall quite so.

  There was the business of a hired coach overturning in a canal, of screaming and drowning horses, and of a man named Kemper Gruenland trapped underwater. This was no accident. It was hired murderers about their business of murder, and Kemper was their designated victim.

  There was the business of Mariella and Tancredi ambushed by rifle fire about an hour before sundown, about a league from Utrecht, both hit and hurt and down. They had been priced, and determined sharp-shooters moved in to have the price for them.

  There was the business of Elaine Kingsberry in her small cabin on the small steam-packet on the way to England, rather startled when an axe blade came through her door, rather more than startled when three more axe-blows demolished the door, seized with terrorizing anger when a large man stepped through the remnants of the door and advanced purposively with axe rampant.

  Redder stuff than cherry brandy at the end of some of these voyages.

  Was it quite certain that Ifreann was home with his father in Hell?

  II

  BASSE-TERRE THE BOTTLE IN THE SEA

  Il peut lever au ciel l’un de ses deux bras nus.

  Son navire est coulé, sa vie est révoule:

  Il lance la Bouteille à la mer, et salue

  Les jours de l’avenir qui pour lui sont venus.

  He lifts a stark bare arm to heavens dumb;

  His ship is sunk, his life at end of turn:

  He hurls the bottle in the sea, and stern

  Compels a future and commands it come.

   — De Vigny, The Bottle in the Sea

  And that is what Basse-Terre is, a bottle in the sea. It is even said that it is a bottle with a message inside it. It's also said that it's a bottle full of good storm-tossed liquor (cet elixir noir et mysterieux) and that the message is to be found in the liquor.

  It is truly a bottle in the sea in the sense that it has drifted and traveled with the seas and currents. It has not always been where it is now. It was once in the High Bah
amas, in the region that is now known as Crooked Island Passage. It was larger then. Many pieces have been lost off it in its travels. Later it was in the upper Leewards. The British island of St. Kitts has a town named Basseterre, the name having clung to that locale. The island drifted southeastward then. It grounded on the volcano Soufriere and broke in two, forming the twin islands of Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe proper) and Grand-Terre. Another piece of it drifted twenty-five miles further east and became the island of Marie-Galante. This is all to be found in honest legend. It was a floating island; it would float yet if it did not have the sea-anchor of the volcano Soufriere.

  It was still early in the year 1849 when Dana Coscuin first came home to Basse-Terre. Can one come home to a place where one has never been before? Yes, of a certainty. It was for this that God put Homing in man. The only purpose of man is to reach the Home where he has never been before, and this homing is often prefigured on earth.

  They hadn't gone to Basse-Terre directly, of course; that is always impossible. But they had come quite near those Windward Islands on their rather rough winter ocean passage. At one time, Dana felt the nearness overpoweringly.

  “I just believe I could get out and walk on the water to it,” he said. “I would know the way. I feel it in my loins that I could do the thing.”

  “It may be that you are feeling and thinking too much with your loins since you had encounter with the confabulating belly of that female tale-maker,” Charley Oceaan joshed him. “Oh, I suppose you could do it. Being pure of heart, I could probably do it myself, walk on the water. But it's more than two hundred miles we miss it by in this passage, and look at those seas! You'd be walking up and down fifty foot waves for day after day, and walking on water is as wearying as walking over sand or plowed ground. Best to stay with the ship.”