Tancredi rode his horse up to the only other single-mounted man — quite a young boy, really. He set the mouth of his long pistol between the boy's eyes, and the eyes rolled up in terror. He fired, and the eyes seemed to come unhinged and to roll down in opposite directions before they closed. And the boy fell dead on the horse's neck.
Muerte de Boscaje had closed her eyes in transport during the headlong gallop. Dana was dismounted now and looking up at her, studying her. She opened her eyes again with a shudder. Muerte, the death-witch, was gone now, or rather she had withdrawn down inside. The opened eyes were those of Elena Prado, wounded, scared, tired, and disconsolate.
“Who else?” Tancredi was asking, and he was waving his long-handled pistol as he studied the remainder of the white-faced Carlists. All of them had always been afraid of Tancredi. “We were allowed to escape. Why? The witch had tagged those she wished to escape. Who else is really of her party?”
“There are no others, Tancredi,” Elena said softly (she did at least comprehend the doings of each of her states when in another state), “the boy you killed was the only one that I had clear understanding with.”
“You then,” Tancredi said, and he turned his long pistol on her.
“All right,” she said. “Kill me then. I had rather Dana killed me. But I also have secret passion for you, Tancredi, so it is all right that you kill me.”
“No, Tancredi,” Dana interposed. “You kill her, then I kill you.”
“All right, Dana,” Tancredi said in dazed fashion. “I kill her. You kill me. All right, Dana.” Again he brought his pistol about to kill Elena.
Dana savaged Tancredi off his horse, caused him to miss his fire, rolled him in the grass and rocks, pinned him flat. Dana might not have been able to do this to Tancredi had not the big man now fallen into a state of smiling listlessness.
“You have been seduced by her before, Tancredi,” Dana accused. “You have no excuse.”
“True, I have no excuse if I leave her alive. But I just remember that she is dying in any case. Cut the rifle shot out of the witch, Dana, and see whose name is on it. It's of an unseduced woman, and it will kill the witch.”
“How will there be name on a rifle shot, Tancredi?”
“There will be, Dana. Cut it out and see. It is the name of one who remains forever unseduced by her or hers.”
The four other young Carlists shuffled off, two to a horse, dazed, defeated, deflated of their recent dream of love and death, or of their recent nightmare of sex and murder.
“You should not come back to the hills in less than a year, Dana,” Tancredi said, “not if you go away with Muerte now. They will all believe that you are Muerte's creature and they will kill you for it. I will believe it also. As soon as she is dead, Dana, ride out of the country.”
“Before a year has passed, she will have seduced all of you into such massacres again and again,” Dana said, “unless I am able to mold her again, to form her again now.”
“It is the pitch that defiles,” Tancredi swore. “There is no reforming of an other-sexed devil. It's no matter, though. She'll be dead before the day is gone. Then ride, Dana.”
Dana tumbled the young dead boy off his horse, mounted it, and rode off leading the black stallion with Elena sullenly upon it.
Tancredi picked a precarious way along the slopes, half-way back the way he had come, launched a hill skirmish as it should be launched, killed three Government men, and sent fifty of them into aimless panic. He partly made amends for being seduced that day.
Dana Coscuin brought Elena Prado to her castillo, and stayed with her there for a week.
Elena did not die. She did not even sicken. Dana, when he had cut the rifle ball from the back of her neck, from the back of her shoulder, found that it did have a name cut on it. It was the name Mariella, she who would surely remain forever unseduced by Elena Prado or by Muerte de Boscaje. This was the Mariella who was the girl friend or mountain wife of Tancredi and who had winged the death-witch from the high cliff. But even the name Mariella, etched by hand on the rifle shots, did not have enough magic to kill Elena. And Mariella had thought that it would have.
Elena did not die, and she did not sicken. She certainly did not play the wounded role, except perhaps in reverse. She had enormous vitality. She even tempted Dana to rough her, to rough her wound, to revel in her blood. And she tempted him to much more scarlet things.
Elena was all her persons at once now. Her real merriment came to the fore strongly; it was her own nature, but it was a twisted and sinful sort of gaiety — almost bottomless, for all that, and more exciting than a human thing has the right to be.
The shy and sheltered girl was in her too; she used that, she used it strongly. Sometime there would come an hour, only a little while after her death, when the Devil himself would say in a straited and bemused voice, “She is a shy and sheltered girl. Remember one thing, all, remember it in your blood: I am one of those who shelter her.” It may be that this scene would happen, it may be that Dana only staged it in his own mind. And yet Elena was on quite close terms with the Devil and kept him dangling unmercifully.
And Muerte de Boscaje was always simultaneous and strong in Elena: the high hilarity of blood and death and sex and flesh! She soused the brains and lights of Dana with her all-compassing fleshy philosophy. Really, it wasn't decadent, nor was it scattered and unjointed. It was totally integrated, filled-in and complete; it was fully logical and rational, if its premise was accepted. The fleshy statement of Elena Prado was one of the two possible statements that can be made about the worlds.
“There are only two possible statements that can be made about the worlds,” the Black Pope of the Carlist Hills had lectured one day. “Alpha: there is a God. Omega: there is not a God. To adhere to either of these two statements strongly is to be logical at least. Not to do so is to be in the snivelling wasteland between and to have no point of contact with logic or reason. Upon either of these two statements a total system can be built, and it can be true to itself in each of its million details. But the two systems cannot have points of contact in even the least detail.”
The old lecturer had also once said, of the death-witch herself, “She is in love in an unchristian way.” O hermano mio, was she ever! She was in love with everything in one of the two possible ways. And again, in the wasteland between them, there is no possibility of love at all, only of stickiness. Better even her inverted love, the torrid satanism of the Omega way, than the empty thing.
Pardon. We are misunderstood. No, there is not a middle rationality without passion. There is no rationality at all without passion, and no logic. What would one hang them upon? Sometimes one must insist, for a very short moment at least, on certain truths.
And Dana was misunderstood. Elena Prado was misunderstood. She made a good thing out of the misunderstandings, though. Dana Coscuin tried to have it both ways. He couldn't. He should have stood firm in the first statement; that has enough flesh in it, but not flesh alone. Elena was not of ordinary flesh. She was of flesh gone absolutely fetishistic, and with no place for any other central thing.
Dana put his hand into the fire. Then he walked into it bodily. Two days, three. Dana fell philosophically. That is bad. He fell carnally. That is also bad. (All in the context of the first statement.) A million details began to grow out of his changes or falls, and not one of them would be in consonance with the previous details of his person.
The minutiae of the affair are not to be given here. They are locked up in documents in an intangible place. But the basic fact of it all was known widely and instantly. Dana had several scattered persons who were in accord with him. It was these who knew the change at once.
It was known to Aileen Dinneen in the hills above Castletown in Ireland.
“Dana Coscuin, you of the same blood that flows in the left side of my body,” she called out, “why have you done this wrong thing with another woman? Better you should have stayed in Ireland and sinned
with me.”
It was known to a priest named Croinin, also in the hills above Bantry Bay.
“Dana Coscuin, I told you to think twice before you died dishonorably in Spain,” he sputtered angrily, “and you have gone ahead and done it thoughtlessly.”
It was known, in some nonverbal fashion perhaps, to a demented girl in Hendaye who was called Sainte Erma. Sainte Erma suffered grotesquely and silently because of Dana.
It was known to Jane Blaye, the mother of Sainte Erma. Jane Blaye went into a large and cluttered room, her own quarters.
“You must kill the snake, not play at killing it,” she said to the carved wooden statue of the gleeful virgin that was there.
“Ah, I knew it would be a long weird way coming,” she said to the peasant painting of Christ Coming Through The Walls. “We will still look for it. We will come through walls ourselves. There aren't any doors to where we have to go.”
And to the third noteworthy thing, the remnant head of her husband in the angry shrine corner she said:
“Dana has left our company for a while. How shall we ever unlock the things if our most promising ones are lost to us. I'm flushed from it. Cool me.”
She sat there, and the cool sanity of her husband, Christian Blaye, swept over her.
The thing was known to Magdelena Brume in certain low hills that broke into moors.
“Dana Coscuin!” she cried in blue-eyed sorrow and outrage. “How can you be my dear friend if you misbehave with a female beast? Surely you still want to be friendly with me. How then have you traded in your soul for the tired little lies? Once you left your blood on me for a calling card, and now you have nothing but wormsblood in you. The Saints in Heaven weep when you defile yourself so cheaply, Dana. I always did say that if the Saints in Heaven wept less and got off their fat groppe and went to work on these things, something might be done. I myself will see if something cannot be done about this.”
(What? All this ringing of bells all around the world just because Dana Coscuin went to bed a few times with a little brown-skinned girl? For that, yes. And also because he traded off his soul philosophically, and adhered, by silent assent to the last statement rather than the first. There is often a syndrome of items here. And these things do make a difference to the people of the first statement.)
Magdelena found her husband, big rough Brume, sleeping in the brush. Indeed, he was storing up sleep, for he was starting on a long travel that very night.
“I have just suffered a wide-eyed noontime dream about Dana Coscuin, the boy we blessed on his way to Spain,” she told her husband as she wakened him with a loving swat on the loins.
“Women have no business with these monitory dreams,” rough Brume growled. “Who are you, Caesar's wife or Pilate's, that you should suffer a dream?”
“I am the wife of a nobler Roman than either. Go at once. Get Dana, wherever he is. It will take you no more than a week out of your way. Shake him out of his lethargy and his sin and his brainlessness, with words if you can, by the nape of the neck if nothing else will do for him. Take him with you on your journey. Yes, I know that you will be gone for more than one year and less than two. I know that you must move from here on the moment and arrive somewhere else on the moment. But Dana is my dear friend, and this concerns his soul. Only you are powerful enough to compel him away from the brown-skinned enchantress. Let the ninety-nine wait. Go save the one who is in peril. He will be luck to you, Malandrino. And the breaking of the schedule for your own journey may save your own life. These things have happened. Go get Dana. He is our friend upon the earth, and we are responsible to God for him.”
“All right,” rough Brume said. He gathered himself up wearily and started on the side journey that would take him one week's travel out of his way.
Four days, five, six that Dana had spent with Elena Prado. And he was a reversed man in that short time. There is indeed a syndrome of items in these things. A man does not reverse in one aspect and not in another. If he did ever turn back from this new way, it would be at some distance down the road, and he would never be the same man he had been before.
Seven days that he had spent with her, and then there was another formal dinner at Elena's castillo. It was a joyous and celebrating one for all those clever folks of the second statement. “For we have lost our lamb that was found.” It was a sort of triumph that Elena would have with them all there.
The Queen's New Bishop was there again; he rubbed his hands and was much more urbane than he had been before, utterly smooth now and unhesitant. The Queen's New Conde was there and he was fulfilled. And the Queen's New Abadesa, showing an expanse of bare arms and bosom. The young philosophers were there with their girls. All were of one mind and pleasure now.
Elena had stolen and remolded a fine recruit. He was one of those who would would be flung to the fore in the calculated move that would soon crack all Europe open like a great egg filled with blood. It is good to have these fine young recruits who can be flung to the fore. And there was no doubt, from the talk that went around tonight, that there were very many persons working hard to split Europe wide open.
“There is Mordecai in Paris now,” one of the young philosophers was saying.
“He is an untidy man. He is surfeited with sour rhetoric. He is a boor. He is a Jew. But he can think. It is said that he will make a great pronouncement soon. He has been clearing his throat for it for these several years. And when he has made his pronouncement, then we will have our basis defined. I have that much confidence in him. He will have put the words into our mouths forever. In a hundred and fifty years we will have taken over the whole world with his words.”
“No. In five years we will have taken over all Europe. In ten years we will have taken over the world,” the Queen's New Count was saying. “This is on the word of young Ifreann Chortovitch who is more in a hurry than is Mordecai. It is not words we need but blood. There cannot be too much blood spilt. We will use whomever we find it convenient to use, and we will not all necessarily move in quite the same direction. It might even be better if we did not. Bloody chaos is what we will engineer in the years immediately ahead. From tottering obsolescence, from new bloody chaos, we will extract a still newer synthesis. There are a few men of distorted but strong intelligence who stand in our way, however. And that brings us to the question of — ”
“ — of a man named Brume,” said the New Bishop. “Dana, you have gestures of his, you have ways of his, you lift your head as he does, you have been with him on your way to Spain.”
“I have been with him, yes.”
“You can find him.”
“He moves around, I believe. But, yes, I can find him.”
“Find him and kill him then.”
A mile away there was the sound of zoccoli (Italian wooden sandals) on stone. Moreover, the sandals were muffled and they were worn by a very quiet-moving man. Once Dana had seen a man wearing such sandals as would make such non-sounds on stone, but he hadn't been paying attention to it. It had to be imagination now. Nobody could hear muffled sandals at a mile's distance.
“Find him and kill him then,” the New Bishop repeated.
“But I love him,” Dana protested.
“You do not love him. He is an error-bedrenched man. He is a God-bedrenched man. He is the essence of the old things that you loved before your eyes were opened. He is no part of the inspired human complexity that you have entered now. You can kill him.”
Ah, the complexity, the syndrome of items! It contained the electric brown-skinned flesh of Elena Prado and the whole hilarity of death and sex. It extended from the almost intricate ideas of the young philosophers to that rather urbane place that used to be called the Gates of Hell. It was all of one evolvate piece and over it shimmered a species of intellectual fascination.
“You can find him and kill him,” the New Bishop said.
“I suppose that I can find him and kill him,” Dana answered like a noddy.
Muffled mounta
in sandals on nearer rocks now, and Dana remembered whose footfalls they were. “It is providential that he should come just when I am told to find him,” Dana said to himself, “but how can it be providential when there is no providence? The old tongue still waggles a while in the new man.”
“And there is another wanted man who has his strings on you,” the New Abadesa with the bare bosom was saying. “He is a more important man than Brume, though seldom so immediate. We cannot find him, but he has strings on you. Track back on those strings and discover him for us. This man — ”
“ — is known only as the Count Cyril,” the New Bishop said, “and Dana here will deliver him into our hands.”
“I'm unable to,” Dana protested. “I have never seen him. I don't know who or where he is.”
“But, as the Abadesa says, he has strings on you. You are very intelligent, Dana. I believe that you can find him.”
“I am very intelligent,” Dana said stupidly. “I believe that I can find them.”
Dana rose up from table and went out the front door. He never came back. Outside, he saw rough Brume standing about fifty yards distant. Brume signalled Dana to follow, and then turned away. Dana followed him.
“I intend to kill you, Brume,” Dana said when they had walked together about an hour. It was a clouded night and quite dark.
“No, you are not now capable of doing that or any other thing, Dana,” rough Brume said. “I intend to get your brains back for you, or to get new brains and fit them into your head. I am completely disgusted with you, but my wife says that you are our friend upon the earth and that we are responsible to God for you. In this, I defer to my wife and to God.”
It was a bat-wing clouded night, a jagged lightning night, a Gothic night. No country had ever been so Gothic as had High Spain.
“Where are we going?” Dana asked.
“Far. Many places.”
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 10
