“Once.”
“You could not have. There is no possible way you could have heard of him. Ah, this man intends to have me killed. I am a little nervous about that, but not very nervous. I am careful, though. Yours is one of the names I hold in my mind, of a young man who might or might not get through to them, who might or might not be of some worth if he did get through. I am not one of them myself but I know them. I am of myself. I have not decided whether it is better to burn down the world with green fire or with red. I am not even certain that it is necessary to burn down the world. I am Malandrino Brume. Stay with us for several days. There are things that we will have to teach you.”
Dana Coscuin stayed with Malandrino and Magdelena Brume for three days. He learned things that they meant to teach him, and things that they did not believe were teachable. He learned the amazing things about the two of them together.
There was a passion between those two that was unaccountable, that was unique in its clearness and power, that was absolutely direct and faithful, that was so strong that it almost threatened to consume them. She was as beautiful a woman as was to be found anywhere; he was, no doubt at all about it, the ugliest man in the world. Her love for him was all but incandescent, and was matched only by his cosmic passion and love for her. Their relationship was compounded of much good humor, good health and good wit. It went beyond all its parts. It was like nothing else in its time.
Neither of these persons would ever be able to do an unkind thing. There is reason to believe that they sometimes had to kill in Brume's dimly understood multinational business. There is a certainty that they sometimes had to rob selected persons and destroy selected property. They were fearless and widely feared. But they were incapable of any unkindness.
The two Brumes were physically perfect. They were like primordial creatures. Brume was of consummate strength and physical craft and speed and balance. His ugliness was simply something archaic and primeval. Magdelena, who was trim and pretty but not small, was beautifully cat-like in her motions, was stronger than a Hendaye girl and more graceful than any girl anywhere.
A perfect couple, the Brumes, but were they not as confused in their understanding as are some of the imperfect people?
“We return to the shaggy age,” Malandrino Brume lectured Dana as they lay in rock-shade one noontime. “The bearded men reappear in the world in this nineteenth century, and I am one of them. The bearded thoughts also appear. This isn't to say that the thoughts are old. Most of them are youthful, but deformed (I admit it) and shaggy almost beyond the hope of order. The rational age has cracked wide open with the realization that man is not a rational apparatus. He is a stolid animal, or he is an hysterical ghost, or he is an effete avatar; but he is not a reasoning machine. But should we not respect and strive for reason? For reason in grace, yes. For reason out of grace, no.
“Soldier Coscuin, it is not the question whether there will be Revolution in Europe. What is this Revolution, a hundred-year-old foetus that we should doubt whether it has ever been born yet? No, the Revolution is the oldest and most creaking thing in the world, a gray man-image that renews himself always with difficulty. The only question is whether this phase of the Revolution will be red or black, or white or gold or green.”
“Pick a color, dear Dana, and hang it on your heart,” Magdelena smiled an interruption in that exquisite voice that always set the blood stirring.
“For all the nameless saints of Ireland, my color will have to be green,” Dana said. “Were it not so, it would have to be blue. Is there a Blue Revolution?”
“Blue is in the Tricolore,” Brume said. “There is the red for the blood of Christ, the blue for the eyes of my wife, the white for the innocence that must come back to us. The Tricolore has generally failed, in the same sense that everything has generally failed.”
“Ah well, what is the Green Revolution that I may become attached to it?” Dana asked him.
“In the Carlist Hills you will be indoctrinated with the Black Revolution, and just the veriest touch of the Green,” Brume said. “I myself would join the Green Revolution — were it in existence to be joined. But the Green is no more than a hope only, a thin hope, and it breaks away into sea-green, eel-green, monster-green. The thing about it, Dana, is that it hasn't been formulated yet, and it may never be.”
“Not formulated at all, Brume?” Dana asked.
“Only in scraps, by outlandish and contradictory people, Cobbett and Cobden in England, Ozanam and Buchez and Blaye and Cheve in France, August Olt in Alsace, the young Archbishop of Damiata who is named Vincent Pecci, and — ”
“Who is this Blaye?” Dana asked.
“Christian Blaye of Hendaye, murdered in Toulouse,” Brume said.
“Is it possible that Dana has come by way of Hendaye?” Magdelena laughed. “It is more than possible (I see it in his eyes now) that Dana has entered in collision with the widow Jane Blaye, that he has enjoyed the racy hospitality of her house and tavern, that he has encountered an enormous earthiness there. But must not the Green Revolution be earthy in its sustaining?”
Dana never did understand the Brumes fully. The heavy French of Malandrino and the light French of Magdelena were of different regions. What English phrases Magdelena knew were comic or stereotyped ones. But Brume would place a big vital hand on Dana's shoulder when the comprehension was slow, and some degree of understanding did seem to flow from the big hand. Magdelena would shake Dana roughly by the shoulders and kiss him full on the mouth when he didn't seem to understand her completely.
Brume taught Dana the complete geography of the mountains in the days he was with them, and much of the geography of the adjacent countries. He told him the names of several hundred men and what they stood for. He taught him weaponry beyond what Dana had known. But which of them taught the other the most about hand combat is doubtful. Brume was extraordinarily strong, but Dana was sly and fast; Brume was not beyond the years of learning.
“Magdelena would not ordinarily have abused you and played tricks on you at your first coming,” Brume said on the last full day that Dana was with them. “It was a peculiar case, and we had to know who you were. A man has been sent to kill us, you see. He is sent by a man that I call Ifreann the Devil. I know the form and moves of this Ifreann, but I have no description at all of his sent killer. Oh well, he will strike in a night or two. I am world expert on these things, with senses that never sleep. Is there any man expert enough to slip up on me? I don't know. I will see very soon.”
Rough Brume was a wood carver. He had carved a yard-tall statue of the Blessed Virgin and had set in blue pebbles for the eyes. The eyes of the statue were really those of Magdelena. In fact, the entire statue was the same time the Blessed Virgin and Magdelena.
Brume had also carved a crucifix of great power, passion and brutality. It is possible that Brume had not always been a mountain man even though the mountains were now an extension of his body.
“You have had it too easy, Soldier Coscuin,” Brume said to him once. “You have slipped and side-stepped your great testings again and again. It is good to be able to do this, but you have to be blooded if you are to be a soldier.”
“I have been blooded before, I have been a soldier before,” Dana told Brume.
“I believe that if Dana has collisions only with the ladies he will always win,” Magdelena teased with her golden voice. “I suspect that he has conquered the widow Jane Blaye in a dozen ways. I know that he has conquered me in a hundred. Now this is good training for one who takes the back road into the Carlist Hills. There is another lady that he will meet before he fully comes into those hills. She is ambivalent, and a man could die from her. Nobody ever passes into those hills without encountering her; nobody has ever conquered her.”
“She is no lady. She is a cheap honey jade,” Brume growled.
“She is death-danger to you, Dana my love, and we will not even tell you her name or her sign,” Magdelena chided. “But if you die beca
use of her, remember that you were warned.”
It was the third night that Dana had been with the Brumes. He slept under a high rocky ledge, and they were under another fifty feet away from him. Dana intended to leave the Brumes but he did not know quite how to mention the matter. He was in love with their power and depth, but he had his own times and roads to follow.
“I will leave then in the night and they will understand,” he said to himself. “There is no clear way to leave good friends without spoiling it.”
His blanket was rolled. He lay on the naked stones, and there are certain vibrations that only naked stones can give. He had his hand-knife in his hand, everything else was rolled into his roll.
He dozed, and he hadn't intended to. There were vibrations and emanations in his shallow sleep that didn't belong there. “It is a weasel after the poultry,” he said in half-sleep. He could feel the threat of it. “It is no small weasel,” he said then, and stirred a little.
He could feel prowling murder emanating from the ground and the naked stones. He studied the stars, and it was the time he had intended to rise. He studied the wind, and he rose very cannily.
“It is no weasel after the geese,” he then said. “It is a night murderer after my own hosts.”
Dana snaked his way around a rock shoulder. He set his own emanations and vibrations into the bones of those hills. He felt the signal of his own disturbance go out from him, and he felt the other disturbance altered. The strange prey or preyer was highly sensed and alert. This would be quiet and dangerous.
They were so near to each other that they could hear each other's blood. Dana felt fear and anger come from the stranger, and his own aura must have conveyed the same.
Ah, a jangle of muted metal on rock, a bone-handled knife, and Dana answered it with the scrape of his own knife. Then the dim ring of pistol on stone, but Dana did not have his own at hand to answer it. This was all subtle empty boasting. The man was not likely to shoot. He found himself between two jaws and he knew that Dana was not his assigned target (they were so close that they were reading each other's minds). He could also hear the breaths and the blood of the Brumes.
And Dana had an advantage equal to the gun in the invader's hand. He could cry out and awaken the Brumes and box the raider in. Dana could also withdraw no more than his own length, be better (indeed perfectly) shielded, and have his own pistol in hand in a moment. Or Dana could —
On him! Dana was borne down and knifed through by sudden savage attack. Dana had too many advantages to be permitted the advantage of first strike. The invader had stabbed Dana deep with a cut that scraped his left clavicle and buried itself between shoulder and neck. And the invader had cuffed Dana's own knife wrist for the moment, as had Dana his.
Time was against Dana here. He was hurt and he was underneath, and the hand with which he cuffed the invader's knife wrist was the hand of the now mangled shoulder. He could hardly prevent the man's withdrawing of the knife and further stabbing.
There was a death temptation to cry for rough Brume. It was resisted. Brume, for all his friendliness, still regarded Dana as a boy. Dana would be a man in this, even if a dead man.
One death-trick that is born in the blood — to hold the knife within one's wound and refuse to release it. A spasmodic clenching of the body muscles on the deep driven dagger — the attacker fumbling in his effort to withdraw it, even after Dana had released the knife-wielding wrist.
Dana now had two hands on his own knife. He shifted it to his own weaker hand and drove it upward. There was a spasm in the body of the overlying man. Dana, with both hands on his own knife, drove it deep through the belly and up into the rib cage. But the dying man finally freed his own knife and slashed Dana from scalp to chin with his last act.
Dana flung the man off. With a second stroke he removed all doubt that the man's life was gone. He rolled the man around and took a packet from him which certainly contained papers and probably money. He doused his own wounds with wine.
The dead man appeared to be a sleek dangerous hunter, and Dana shivered for his own saved life. What sort of man was Ifreann who used such strikers as Jude Revanche and this dead man?
Dana went and stood over the sleeping Brumes and gloated a little. Even the wariest must fall into deep sleep sometime, and who can mock them for it?
“You were sleeping so sweetly,” he said as if giving Magdelena's words back to her, “as if it were your first night in the mountains.” And she was sleeping sweetly.
“And you are the world expert on these things, with senses than never sleep,” Dana mocked the sleeping Malandrino Brume. Brume was sleeping deeply and powerfully. Dana loved these two persons whom he had just saved, and this made a rather sharp night-going of it.
Dana lay down on top of the sleeping Magdelena and kissed her strongly upon the face and mouth. She partially returned his kisses, but she did not waken. He lay upon her and soaked her hair and head and face and neck and breasts and entire upper body with his blood. Ah, what a sticky red joke he was playing on the sleeping beauty! He laughed then, and his own pain became a sort of rending pleasure upon her. He loved this as an elaborate jest; and Magdelena would love it in the morning, after she had seen what had happened in the night and that it was not Dana who was dead, and after she had realized with blue-eyed delight what outrageous calling card he had left upon her. He kissed her bloodied mouth with great passion; then he rose from her.
Turning to her husband, Dana cuffed Malandrino Brume and thumped him upon his mighty chest. “Good-bye, old man,” he said. “I leave you now.” And Malandrino Brume was still sleeping deeply and powerfully. Dana gave Brume a resounding slap on the haunch.
“Sleep, you two saints, sleep till the sun gets in your eyes,” he said.
Dana had been almost quiescent for some days, allowing substance to be poured into him by various strong people. Now he would begin to pour out his own strength.
He swung his gear and started with painful laughter to find his way down the southern slope of the mountain to Spain.
Three days later, having been in and out of Pamplona where he had gleaned information without mortal encounter, Dana was singing his way down a mule-road in Northern Spain, which might or might not take him to the town of Estella.
My Name is Dana Coscuin was the name of his own loud song, and he sang it boldly for all the world to hear. He had proclaimed himself to the world.
Certainly the six-inch-deep knife wound had not been healed in three days, nor had the great ragged slash on his face. But Dana had sloshed wine immediately into his wounds, and he had been blessed with curative magic when he lay atop Magdelena Brume and imbibed grace from her and covered her with his blood for a sign. Moreover, Dana had had his wounds cleaned and bound by a doctor in Isaba before he had come to Pamplona.
He now had garbled passwords and places stored in his head. He had begun to unravel the configuration of men and movements. He knew the several different places he could go for fundamental forming, and the several other places he could go for Spanish fun.
Dana now wore the brightest green shirt in the world. He had bought it from a Gypsy: he had bought three of them, but the one he wore was even brighter than the two brothers. If anyone could not see Dana coming along the mule-road, then he was blind to the color green. If anyone could not hear him coming along that road, then he was deaf in his ears. Dana maintained in his sudden sunlit jollity that he was Ireland's gift to Spain and to the whole Continent.
He did not yet know who he worked for or what his job was, nor where he should go, nor what side he was on: but those little gaps in his information would be filled in quite soon.
He had met and defeated all but one of the early predicted perils. There was one more thing that his advising saint, the blue-eyed Magdelena, had warned him of. Well then, he would save the warning till he should come to the thing.
It was clear to him, though, just as such things are always clear in the old tales, that thi
s peril was upon him now in most unsuspected form.
A lady, who was indeed dressed as a lady, was standing in an anxious manner on the edge of the mule-road ahead. Her gown was of the dark brown color that the Carmelites wear, but it was stuff too fine for poor Carmelites. Her shoulder-piece was ivory-colored and rich, and it was gathered in by a finely gloved hand. Her coif was gray, and barely missed being lilac or purple. There were other fine things about this lady, bright extra things such as are not worn by the ladies of Bantry Bay at least. Oh, the cream-colored gloves on her hands!
Dana knew who she was: not by description, for she had not been described to him; not by name, for he did not yet know her name. But he knew who she was.
“Good day, my lady,” Dana said when he had come up to her, “my name is Dana Coscuin and I am the pride of Ireland in these parts.” Dana had always a breezy chivalry with even the finest ladies.
“Young man,” the lady said (but she was no older than Dana), “go at once to that castillo in the valley below and have them send a carriage up for me. I am wearied.”
“I do not know whether my road winds past that valley house or not,” Dana said. “If it does, then I will have them send the carriage up for you.”
“Young man — ” the lady said with some annoyance now — and then she scalded him in a high and pretty voice. The meaning of her torrid outburst was not clear. How many successive sentences of Spanish should Dana be expected to understand? The lady was displeased, and she flushed beautifully in her anger.
‘Speak to me, Magdelena, my saucy saint,’ Dana said in his under-voice to his beloved patron in the mountains. ‘Did you not warn me of this very one, and tell me that I was forewarned?’
“Young man,” the displeased lady said to Dana again, and then she said other things. There was something overly sly about this lady. She was not particularly displeased really. It was an easy act with her. She was appraising Dana, she was measuring and dealing for him, she was counting coup on him.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 6
