“His name, his name?” Dana still asked.
“The Count Kirol, for Kirol is an Eastern King,” Samuel Lively ventured.
“It is close, but not close enough,” said Collin O'Connor, the blackest fabricator of them all.
“Dana of my bosom, it is the Count Cyril that you serve,” Aileen said seriously. “There is ordered mystery in all this business, and you will spend your life in unraveling it and serving it. It is the Count Cyril. But never use that name carelessly. Nor at all, save at the hour of death.”
“Oh Ireland of the legends,” Dana grinned. “Oh the long and crookie tongues of Ireland. The five of you say it, so I suppose it is true. The Count Cyril, you say. I wonder, will I remember the name of your creation if I hear it again? Do I deserve so grand a master?”
“You do not, Dana,” James O'Nolan protested, “and you do not deserve so grand a mistress, you being of the forbidden degree, a cousin only and no suitor, and you reign from ‘Queen's Lap.’ ”
Yes, Dana had been sitting, for the long hour, on the lap of Aileen: and, yes, the suitors were genuinely jealous.
“Now I must be gone,” Dana said suddenly. “I know the times exactly and it is time for me to start. The shipmaster will be striding the landing when I come.”
“Be you all gone to your homes,” Aileen said to the suitors. “I will go with Dana halfway, and a little more, to the landing.”
Aileen suddenly blew out the lamp. They all found their ways out of the door with considerable antic play, Aileen in the middle of it all, as she intended. Then the four suitors went to their homes: Samuel Lively who had killed an English enforcer and buried his body in Aileen's north manure pile, Danny McGivern who instructed the young (and there is no money in that), Collin O'Connor and James O'Nolan who had done stranger things. These were the friends of Dana's boyhood, and now he would go away and be a boy no more.
Aileen and Dana were on their way —
“We are all that we have of each other of the blood; a brief moon-madness now, and then we separate. God with you,” she said.
“God and Mary with you,” Dana told her. The flinty stars showed just midnight there on the crest above Black Thief Cove. And, after a brief moon-madness, they parted.
The one ship was at Castletown Landing, and the one shipmaster was walking on the land. He was a large fair man in the moonlight, and he lifted his head as if waiting Dana's coming.
“I will have passage on your ship to Hendaye,” Dana Coscuin told the man.
“My ship goes to Santander of the Timbers and to Gijón of the Whales, both in Spain,” the man said, “but she does not go to Hendaye this voyage.” The man was clearly a Scandinavian, and he talked as though he were certain of his destination.
“Show me to my cabin,” Dana said. “However it happens, we will go to Hendaye.”
“You are able-bodied? You want to ship as a seaman?” the man asked.
“I am a gentleman with gold in my pocket. I will sail as a gentleman,” Dana said.
“We carry no gentlemen passengers, only seamen,” the Master told Dana. “And I will have none but fair-haired men on my ship. A black-haired man is a devil, a red-haired man is a misbegotten son of a devil. You are not Norse but you are fair. So is he. I need only one additional seaman. Fight for it if you wish.”
Yes, there was another man there, standing so still that Dana had thought him a stone. And yet, would Dana not know any stone of that size around Castletown Landing? For the size was considerable. This other man was as fair-haired as Dana, he was as young as Dana, and he stood head and shoulders taller. He was a gigantic Germanish sort of lout, slack-faced and blank-eyed. He had the biggest hands and feet that Dana had ever seen on a human man. Well, Dana Coscuin was the fastest man with fist or knife or knob-knocker in all the Three Bays region. He had never been whipped, and he had felled some real mountains of men: never men with hands and feet like this man, but very tall and very heavy men for all that.
Bright Fate said that Dana should go to Hendaye. Bright Fate said that he should go on from there to the higher country to find a fundamental rock that had so many things wrong with it. And Bright Fate had said that it was at this rock that all Dana's adventures would begin. Bright Fate had erred: Dana's adventures began right now. But Dana was not allowed to let this big hulk of a Germanish boy steal his place from him. He started forward to the encounter, and he stopped.
“Now just a minute, Dana,” something said to him. It was not Fate; it was his own canny brains. “This man is not the big Germanish fellow that he seemed at first. He is not even of the human sort. He is a genuine giant.”
“Well then,” Dana said back to his canny brains, “I am an Irish hero, and I remember that Irish heroes fought giants before. Fought them, yes, and even seemed to defeat them.”
Now here was the difficulty. No Irish hero, no hero of any sort had actually ever defeated a giant. There had been certain trickeries, certain events that spelled the downfall of giants. But the thing itself had never happened: they had not defeated a giant in combat. Well, maybe there would be certain trickeries, certain events again; and maybe Dana Coscuin would seem to defeat the giant. And, a very long maybe, that might be enough.
Dana moved in with the head-toss of a young bull. He swung like a woodchopper with a double-bitted axe: he caught the big fellow in the middle with a heavy series of shocking blows that did sound like a sharp axe biting solid oak. And Dana looped long high smashes at the big slack jaws and the glistening face of the giant, smashes now with the solid sharp sound of the axe into pinewood. For a human-sized man, Dana himself had tremendous fists. He struck again resoundingly, and he stepped back to let the giant fall.
And he did not fall. He bent a little at the knees; he bent a little at the middle. His slack face was ruddy in the moonlight from Dana's blows. But he was not as blank-eyed as he had been (rather crafty-eyed now) and he did not bleed and he did not fall. He watched with near canniness whether Dana would go for something else but Dana was never the first one to kite a fight. Besides, the giant had a longer knife than Dana's, and a longer pistol.
Dana moved in again, faster than before. He found his vision darkened and crimsoned by a giant bear-blow, but then he was inside the defences of the giant. He chopped with the sharp-edged fury that would have disemboweled a bear. He felt the giant's hands and arms come down like two trees upon his shoulders, but the big tree itself was an open target between them.
Dana swung as though he were swinging a pole-axe or battle-axe. This was sturdy Dana Coscuin who could burst oat-sacks with his fists, who could lift a riding pony on his shoulders. He was the strongest fast man in the Bays area and he had three open, shattering, murderous, ox-felling fist-axe chops at the big open face. He made to step back to let the giant fall.
The giant did not fall this time either, and Dana did not exactly step back, not as he had intended. He stumbled and twisted with the weight and force of a tree-like arm on either shoulder. Then an exuberance seized the giant. He had Dana with his two huge hands, one at the nape of the neck, one at the crotch. And Dana was swung and thrown, thrown in the giant's swing.
Dana flew through the tumbling air. He hit spread out like a crucified crow against a heavy mooring pile on the shore, and he heard the piling crack or groan from the shock. He hung there for a short instant from the force of the impact, and perhaps from the adhesion of his own gore. Then he fell on his face, half in the water, half on the stony ground.
“Aye, the giants have returned to Ireland,” Dana moaned with his mouth in the gravelly mud. All his bones were broken except the one small bone that Outlander giants do not know about.
“Mother of God, and I die here in my youth and my virtue,” Dana breathed.
“I hate it a little,” the Ship Master was saying some time later. “You are a fine boy, it seems, but he is a fine man, and I need only one of you. I leave you here. You'll not drown here. The tide'll not rise another inch. It's high now, and
we'll shove almost at once. If you die of it, it's but to be expected. But I do regret it.”
“Oh the Green Hills of Skibbereen!” Dana moaned where he lay. And, as they tell of many an Irish hero, he died and he stank upon the stones.
His death, however, was not a long one. The Ship Master came again, after a very little while. He came in a somewhat vexed mood and hauled Dana out of the steep flames of Purgatory and set him on his feet.
“The big bonde says that he'll not go without you,” the Ship Master complained. “What am I do do? I need only one of you. Will you go without him?”
“No, I will not,” Dana said out of his bloodied mouth. “I'll not leave Ireland unguarded to him here on the shore. Bright Fate now says that the two of us, the giant and I, will be together for a while. And Bright Fate says that we will rejoin several other times in blood-spilling places.”
“My ship is named Skaebne. She is not named Skinnende Skaebne,” the Ship Master said with some inconsequence. He was saying that his ship was named Fate, but not Bright Fate.
“Well, it would be the Shining Fate to have the both of you with me in a trouble, either on the ship or on the shore,” the Ship Master continued.
Dana Coscuin came on board the Skaebne with only one of his bones still unbroken, but that was the bone that can work the rapid regeneration of the whole person.
II
THOU CLOIG, THOU SCHED, THOU CRANE, THOU TALKING SKULL
There were nine men on the ship that heaved out of Bantry Bay on the tide-turn before dawn. The ship had been bringing whale oil and timber spars out of Norway to Spain, and had touched down in Ireland for water, for medlar fruit, for perry, and for pigs, and to bury a man who had died that past day. Really, the ship had touched down in Ireland to pick up Dana Coscuin.
Many northern ships took the Irish outer way to Spain, to avoid the scrutiny that English ships sometimes turned on goods bound for Spain. There was bad water between England and Spain even when there was no war. And the Back Doors of the World had never gone clear out of use.
“There are no snakes in Ireland,” the giant was saying to Dana as they cleared Three Castle Head, “but they ring the ocean all around the land. A Snake Master will give the signal, some day, and they will invade and devour the whole land. The entire ocean is full of snakes.”
“They are not snakes. They are conger eels,” Dana told the giant. “Good whisky and long eels and to sit in the lap of fair Aileen, that is what Friday night in Heaven is like.”
“Is that a poem?” the giant asked.
“Aye. It's the Westernmost Poem of the World.”
“It is part of the poem of Maid Helen,” the giant said inconsequentially.
The dawn was to port of them, and Three Castle Head behind — the last sight of Ireland that Dana would have for several years. It was the prime island of the world but the rot was in the land: literally so this year, as it had been figuratively all through the slave centuries.
“Alas for the sharp smells of Ireland,” Dana moaned.
“You will find Spain pungent enough,” the Ship Master told him.
And nine days to Hendaye where they weren't supposed to be going.
“Was there a one, a stranger person, who told you to go to Hendaye?” Dana asked the big Germanish boy (he hadn't been a giant, that was all delusion; he was a hulking German as he had first seemed) as they were reefing together on a spar.
“No. But there was one, a stranger person, who told me to go to Dana Coscuin,” the big fellow said. “I didn't know whether the Dana thing was a place or a man, and I was too abashed to ask questions of the man who ordered me so directly. I came out of my own Mark to a Frisian coast town. In every Frisian coast town, it is the case that one man or other will know the name of every town in the world. And in every Frisian coast town, it is the case that one man or other will know the name of every man on every sea. It was the last man I asked in the Frisian town who knew the name of Dana Coscuin and that he sailed in and out of the bays of Southwest Ireland.”
There was something about this big Kemper that was either very childish or very droll. Often he seemed a simpleton. But he had the sudden brains when he needed them, just as he had the sudden strength.
“If you were sent to me for direction, Kemper, I have none,” Dana said. “I am the most lost man in the world. I know only that I am first to go to Hendaye, and I have no idea who orders me there.”
“I only know that I am to go where you go for a while,” Kemper said, “and then I will be told where else to go.”
The big fair giant was named Kemper Gruenland and he was from deep in the Germanies. He was not uneducated. He was better booked than Dana who had learned a little Religion and Arithmetic and Latin under the hedges, and a little of other things on the oceans and the lands. Kemper's head was filled with a variety of things, but they were none of the same things that were in Dana's own head. Kemper was not silly; he was only dreamy. He questioned everything in the world, but never in the way of disbelief. Now, indeed, he did question who had ordered him out into the world, and who had ordered that orderer. But he did not question the order itself. He didn't understand Dana speaking of Bright Fate. He had believed fate to be dark.
“Well, let us agree that it is Green Fate that calls us out then,” Dana said. “It's bright by sun and dark by moon, and it grows by both. It hasn't finished growing in us, it hasn't found its own direction yet. It is a riddle, Kemper, a fiddle-riddle. If I had my fiddle here, I would play you music that is green on the outside, and blood-red on the inside when you break open a note. My music is the delight of the pigs and the salmon and the envy of the larks. I am, and this is known the length and depth of Bantry Bay, the greatest fiddle-player in the world.”
Dana was joking. He wasn't really very good on the fiddle. But Kemper answered with great seriousness and near-anger.
“No, my fiddle would break your fiddle with the very tone of it,” he insisted. “I was told to go to you, Dana, and I go for a while. And I will follow you for a very little while. But my fiddle could break your fiddle and I could break you. My boat could sink your boat. There is a tree by my house that could splinter the tree by your house. I have mountains that could grind your mountains down to gravel. And my sweetheart will be twice as big as your sweetheart.”
They hadn't any full common tongue between them. They used a little bit of fisherman Dutch Frisian, a little English, a little French. They did not get along badly.
“Do you know the name of our ultimate employer?” Dana had to ask. Something was bothering him here: the chance that Kemper knew more than he did about this.
“The Count Cyril,” big Kemper said. “I am honored to be in his employ, even if he sends me for a while to follow a small man. I take high pride in being associated with this great man in any way. But his name is all that I know.”
Dana Coscuin had exploded into ringing whooping laughter.
“Oh the depraved five of them, the black fabricators!” he chortled in amazement. “Oh the deceptive devils! They'd make the devil himself ashamed with their tricks. How could they have done it to you, poor Kemper? They'd have to have legended your mind at three miles’ distance on yesterday night. Is it possible that their naming and trickery is so powerful? Ah, the long and crookie tongues of them all, and the conniving lap and shoulders of the lady Aileen! Was it not about two hours before midnight last night, Kemper, that the name of Count Cyril bounced into your head for the first time?”
“It was not, Dana. What is the matter with you? It was more than a month ago that the great name was first spoken to my ears. I asked a dozen persons about it then, and I discovered that it was a known name. Nobody was able to give me any information on the great Count, but all leading persons had heard of him. I have the dates and circumstances all down in my day-book.”
“What is this, Kemper. The world has a wrong wobble on its axle then. It is you who have foxed the gab fabricators. Kemper man, you are not capabl
e of it. How could you have intruded that name into their conniving heads? You don't know who he is or of what he is Count?”
“No, I don't know these things at all, Dana. He is a person who has always been there, just one step beyond. It's as though he were my own grandfather, I suppose, if I had a third grandfather. He's in early country stories also, is the Count Cyril. I don't remember any of them except one. This is that he is really the Count of every County and Grafschaft on Earth; that whoever else seems to hold them, they hold them from the Count Cyril, or they hold them in error or usurpation. And there are many other things that I only guess at or put together with my own fine wits.”
There was something about big Kemper that was either completely childish or bewilderingly joking.
“I was to find you, Dana, and to go with you a ways,” Kemper said. “And I am to part from you, and later join you again. We are to be loosely of a small group, choice ones recruited by one of the parties of recruiters. It seems wrong that one like me should follow one like you, but I will do this for the group and for the Count Cyril. I believe that I am to be in second place to you for only a short time: until your death. Let that not be too long, Dana. I will grow very restless in second place.”
It was nine days to Hendaye, where they hadn't been going. The sea swept gray and purple out of the west all that time, aromatic and arrogant, but never really loud or foamy except when it smelled land. The Ship Master himself seemed a little puzzled when they finally rode off Hendaye landing. He came very near to making excuses for being there.
Dana and Kemper, with the Ship Master and one other man, took the boat from the ship and landed certain bales on the Spanish shore. They made three such trips. But the ship itself stood off the French town. And then the Ship Master with Dana and Kemper and the one other man came ashore to French Hendaye.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 3
