“Tonight you can trust me completely, my passion. There will be another night in another year when you should not trust me. By then, though you will be half gobbled up, and you will trust me. But tonight I am worth your clear trust. I hear the horses now too, Dana. That makes them a half mile off. Come then, since I will not let myself use my long pistols, and I will not let you use your short American one, we go down this dark corridor then.”
“Your lamp lights it well for some distance,” Dana said. Elena snuffed out the candle-lamp suddenly and sprang aside, but Dana had her by a hand buried in her heavy hair. She giggled with real merriment then, but she'd have been gone away if he had missed her. Dana could not really trust her completely.
Elena went down the absolutely dark corridor, Dana gripping her heavy braids as he went along.
“Who is Muerte de Boscaje?” he asked her. His voice was low-pitched. All voices are lower-pitched in the dark.
“She's a snow-bird,” Elena said. “She does not strike till the first snow in the meadows, six weeks, Dana, seven. Then you will know her and raid with her.”
“And find out that I have already known her?”
“And find out that you have seen her but have not known her at all. Oh Dana, know me, know me a little!”
“Why are you death-threat to me, Elena?”
“For the perversity of the world and for my own perversity, I suppose, Dana. But I am not death-threat to you for many months. I will never be a threat to you, not if I am able to mold you as you should be molded.”
“I have my own mold, and I suspect that it will not be changed.”
“Then I will be death-threat to you, Dana, but in another year, not now. This is the end of the corridor. Is it not mortal dark here? Embrace me here in the dark in the roughest and most powerful way possible. I exact that from you for saving you this way.”
“I'd have done better to save myself in my own way. Ah, and I still might do so.”
“No, wait, Dana. It's more fun when you wait till it's almost too late.”
“The horsemen are in the yard,” Dana said some moments later. “Is it too late? One of them goes to the back door and dismounts and waits. The other two go to the front door. One hangs back a bit there in the dark, and the other knocks for entry. Is this a trap? Are you a trap, Elena? I will shoot my way out of this trap and add you to the false bishop and nun and count and the three true constables. I'll break your neck, girl.”
“I am not a trap for you, not tonight, Dana. There are but two doors to my castle, but the castle nestles under the flank of the cliff. Just above us in the roof is a hatch-way. Climb onto my shoulders and unclamp the gramp-irons, Dana. Ah, are you not agile, and am I not strong! The hinges will not groan. They are always oiled; I use them often.
“Roll quietly onto the roof then. From behind its little parapet you can spy down on the men at either door. And from the back parapet, just above us, with one leap you can be into the tangle of vines that cloaks the face of the cliff. I know that you can make your way silently and swiftly up that face of the cliff in the dark, I do it often myself. This is a favorite way I have of coming and going at night. And you are much more agile than I am.”
Elena was quite strong for so slight a girl. And very much alive in her emanations. Dana would almost swear that her shoulders scorched his feet through his sandals.
“Dana, you will cross the mule-road at the very place where we first loved,” Elena's whisper came up from the absolute darkness. “And then you can lose yourself in the high hills and be clear of all guards and all Queen's Constables for the while.
“Be in expectation of an early snow, and a snow-bird. You will see my other face then. And, Oh Dana, you will finally know the high hilarity of blood and death.”
Dana said good-bye to her with the sharp thrust of his toes on her shoulders.
Dana was through the hatch-way and onto the roof. No need to spy on the guard at the back door or at the front. He couldn't trust Elena completely even now, but he could trust his own swiftness. He was over the gap and onto the vine-clad face of the cliff with no time gone at all. He was quickly up the cliff, across the mule-road (but not at the place of first meeting, at a crooked corner away from it rather — tactics must be varied), and free into the high hills.
Not till then did Dana realize how neatly the little brown girl had sprung his careful-careless trap and robbed him of his three constable prey.
V
MUERTE DE BOSCAJE
“From the narrowest footholds in the high hills, we rolled the Moslems back,” the Black Pope was saying, “and it took us seven hundred years. We rolled them back out of Spain but we did not roll them back out of the world. So it will be with this nameless thing that is so much more evil than the Moslems. It is of the Devil and it will be in the world till the end of time. But it is not meant to hold the whole world or even the greater part of the world.”
A snowflake touched the Black Pope's nose.
“Ah, the snow,” he said, “and the witch will fly soon. Do not follow her. She is in love in an unchristian way.”
But some of the young and the older men who listened to the Black Pope would follow the death-witch in spite of his warnings.
“The world is a garden,” the old man said. “It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also; they too are a great part of the planting. Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate. Do not be fooled as to what it is and who sowed it. Do not be fooled in the factory or the arsenal, in the ship-yard or the shop; do not be fooled on the bleak farms or in the crowded city, in the club or in the workers’ hall or in the drawing room. The wrong thing that is sowed is the red weed, the red blight. And the Enemy has done this.
“Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever; and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned. It is a disease, it is a scarlet fever, a typhoid, a diphtheria; it is the Africa disease, it is the red leprosy, it is the crab-cancer. It is the death of the individual and of the corporate soul. And incidentally, but very often, it is also the death of the individual and of the corporate body. We are asked to swear fealty to this parasitic disease which the enemy sowed from the beginning. I will not do it, and I hope that you will not.”
There had been a woman screaming several hundred feet below them and at no very great distance. Now there was the hint of several other women joining the screaming.
“Ah, why did she have to kill him?” Tancredi muttered. “He was the least bad of them all. He was with us more than he was against us. And she, if she is really with us, why does every stroke of hers go so wrong for us?”
“Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names,” the Black Pope was saying, and now his head was quite powdered with snow. “It used to be only the English who excelled in the deception of words. Then the French went even beyond them, and now the whole world is adept at it.
“Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial; the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. But do not pity them overly; it is your own death and your soul's death that they work by their deception.”
A young boy had come up to the fringe of them in the high rock amphitheater. Dana and Tanc
redi and several of the others edged over towards the boy.
“Our loyalty on earth is to a Kingdom that is not on earth,” the old lecturer was saying. “The Empire is in abeyance, we live all our lives in exile. But let us at least be faithful in our exile. Man on earth must attempt two tasks: to reconstruct himself as nearly as he can to the image of God, and to reconstruct the world as nearly as he can to the image of the Kingdom.”
“It is the Pedro Cuadro who has been killed, is it now?” Tancredi asked the boy.
“Yes,” said the boy.
And a rider has already ridden to inform, is it not so?” Tancredi asked. “He has ridden to the Constabulary. And our group will be blamed for the killing because Peter was a Queen's man.”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“It was actually the Bruja, the death-witch who murdered the not-very-bad Pedro Cuadro, was it not?” Tancredi went on.
“Yes,” the boy said.
“But the constables have a traitor of ours who can inform where we den, or rather the witch will say that it is the case that the constables have a traitor of ours.”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“She herself will lead them part way to us,” Tancredi rasped angrily. “Then she will come and lead certain foolish ones of us part way to them.”
“Yes, I think that,” the boy said.
“And she will bring us, outnumbered, into the rigged middle of them in an unadvantaged place.”
“I don't know what that is,” the boy said.
“As always, she will perform heroics and prodigies,” Tancredi almost hissed, “and she will shrill out the glory of the high Carlist thing. When the mad charge is finished, she will have more than twenty bullet holes in her cloak and it will be a miracle that she is alive. But, when the bodies are tallied, it will be ourselves who contribute so disproportionately to the dead.”
“Yes, I think so,” the boy said.
“I feel that I already know this witch,” Dana said.
“Yes, you do,” the boy told him. The boy went down and away from them then, having told Tancredi and Dana and a few others all that he knew of the affairs. And some of the young Carlists began to see about their arms and to drift off to another meeting place out of hearing of the Black Pope. Some others of them said that they would not follow that female fire again; but of these, most knew that they would follow her when they heard her.
It was a light morning snow, more a sign that one could swear by than a weather event. Ah well, ten miles that the rider would go with the news, ten miles that the constabulary would ride back. Or had the constabulary already started? Had they started an hour before the murder itself happened? Tancredi was of that opinion.
There was a frugal noon meal with the Black Pope. And then more and more of the young men drifted off to the other meeting place. How did they know that someone was coming to that place to harangue them? Never mind, they knew.
“The Rezadora, the Mantis is coming now,” one of them said. And after a while she came.
Dana Coscuin had the smell of a great black horse before he saw or heard it. He had smelled but not seen it at the stables of the castillo of the Condesa Elena Prado. He had known then that it was a black horse, a stallion and not a gelding, and that it was priceless — all this without seeing it.
Ah, there were some thirty of the young irregulars there waiting! They heard the muffled sound of approaching hoofs. Then the sound was lost but the Presence came nearer. Dana, who thought he had guessed all that was involved here, was shaken.
“Behind you!” she called in a clear voice. She was behind the thirty of them, in a dead-end pocket in the rocks, and it was no way apparent how she had got there.
“Muerte de Boscaje!” mountainous Tancredi breathed. He was completely dazed, in total admiration; yet he, more than any of them, had been inoculated against her.
This was the infamous Muerte de Boscaje, the insane battle-witch who had led a dozen mad Carlist raids. And something had failed badly in every one of those raids.
Dana Coscuin was as dazed as the rest of them. And he was weirdly puzzled.
Muerte de Boscaje was not exactly, as Dana had suspected that she would be, the same person as the young Countess Elena Prado. Oh, they used the same body, apparently. Perhaps they took turns with it. But they were not essentially the same person.
She talked then, she sang, she shrilled like the mountain wind. She set up the hypnotic rhythm, the corporate blood-beat. Her words would not stand analyzing. They were, in fact, only a parody of the much-used sermons of the Black Pope. The words, and the sense of the words, were only a very minor part of her orchestration. Was she subtile enough, in her present transported person, to do a conscious parody of the Carlist thing? Or did she merely steal the strong cadence of it? It had always had, when used the Black Pope or by any of them, a very noble cadence. Now the girl created a dementia, and they all joined in it.
Even Tancredi who had received special warnings against her joined in as if he were not himself. Even Dana who already knew this girl in several of her persons and who had received absolutely reliable monition against her was avid to follow her now.
Well, of course it was always an excitement and a pleasure to have blood-tangle with the government men; it was not complete pleasure, however, to throw away all advantage before tangling with them.
And in many young men, and in many older men too, there is a real appreciation of the High Hilarity of Blood and Death. This is a valid thing. But is it valid when it has fallen into the hands of traitors?
Muerte de Boscaje, who in other circumstances was the Countess Elena Prado, wore a rich black cloak with a crimson lining. The men were all assembling their horses. Horses? But that was wrong. No more than a very few of them should be horsed. In these tall cliffs horses were often a restriction on mobility. The mounted government men weren't fought from horseback.
Most of the men assembled now had the old smooth-bore guns of the style used in the Napoleonic wars. A few had American or Belgian rifles. No, no, this also was wrong. This was the Government kind of skirmishing they were getting ready for; it was not that of the Carlist irregulars. Hand knives, and pistols as a last resort, and ghostly stealth: such were the tactics of the irregulars. Do not fight the Government men in their strong points.
But someone had brought Dana his own horse, girthed and ready and making clatters with his hoofs. And Dana swung into the saddle, knowing it was foolish. One travels long distances by horse. But one fights from crawl or crouch, and never higher than afoot.
At the climax of one of her hysterias, Muerte de Boscaje slashed her own palm deeply with a shining knife and rubbed her face with the blood and gore of the cut.
“Sangre, sangre, sangre,” she set up the chant then. “Blood blood, blood.”
She rode forward with a sort of eagle screaming and a mastiff jollity. Sky-high hilarity in her impassioned whooping! Blood glee! And the men followed her on horseback, out of their wits, under her black and crimson spell. Their mounts slipped on the stones and the new snow, and the men set up a shouting. But noise was absolute madness in a skirmish such as this.
Muerte de Boscaje fired the carbine that she carried; then all the irregular young Carlists began to fire their muskets and carbines and long-handled pistols and Collier revolvers and long rifles. About thirty Carlists were being led out with no attempt at concealment. They were led down a long open slope (why did they not hold the slope, and make the Government men come up it?), across a bottom draw where gun-fire from the concealed Government men began to pick them off, and up another steeper and more torturous incline — thirty men into a hidden arc of two hundred men. They were lumbering and stumbling now with their horses slipping on the bad snowy footing.
“Sangre, sangre, sangre,” still came the happy broken chanting, the High Hilarity of Blood and Death and Sex, the compounded passion. And then a really murderous fire from the entrapping circle angled down on them. At least half
of the young irregulars were down now: brain-shot, horse-rolled, dragged and dead.
There was a high far whine, higher and farther than this immediate field of slaughter. Scales began to drop from some of the eyes. Tancredi howled something when there came the whine of a long rifle much higher and much more distant than the others.
“Dead-down, Mariella, you overshoot her! This time you hit!” Perhaps the queer carrying voice of Tancredi reached all the way to the high cliff that the anomalous shots were coming from. “Through the notch now, there is no other way,” Tancredi called to those on the immediate field.
Dana regained his own clarity, and fell into deeper danger, when a musket ball whanged into his own horse. There didn't seem a chance that any of the irregulars would come through it alive. But the only possible way was through that notch, the gap in the hills in front of them that should have been the keystone of the Government arch. Dana's horse staggered badly.
Muerte de Boscaje had been hit by a far whining rifle shot and she emitted a scream of absolute outrage. There was more than howling pain in her scream, there was more than surprise and fear: there was furious anger towards someone who had bungled horribly. Nobody was supposed to be firing down from that cliff. And nobody was supposed to be shooting at Muerte de Boscaje.
But her horse was still sound. Dana lept from his own stumbling mount onto the black stallion behind the bleeding death-witch.
Then, in the attempt to gain the notch, the way through, all the Carlists who were still mounted rode into what should have been the very eye of the fire. But there wasn't any eye of the fire.
There was a gap in the Government line. A way had been left open through the notch. Only five horses, carrying eight riders in all, got through free: Muerte de Boscaje and seven of the Carlists. And twenty-three Carlists were left dead in the ambush.
The survivors galloped their tired horses, three of them double-loaded, hard and heavy for a mile. They gained a rock-corral known only to themselves.
“There's no need for caution,” Tancredi said then. “We weren't followed; we weren't meant to be. They regard us as of the witch's own party. Well, who of us really was of the witch's own party? One I know now for sure.”
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 9
