“What really draws you back to Spain, Dana?”
“Elena Prado.”
“Lady Death-in-the-Woods herself? The double-named wench? She's a hell filly.”
“Maybe she need not remain a hell filly. Your wife Magdelena told you that I was your friend upon the Earth and that you were responsible to God for me. Never mind how I know that she told you that. No, of course I have not heard from her. How could I have?”
“So then?”
“So Elena Prado is my friend upon the Earth and I am responsible to God for her.”
“That is a very dangerous responsibility, Dana. It will be either your body's death or your soul's if you play with that fire again. Don't do it.”
“Yes. I will do it.”
“Come with me to Turin first. I want to have a few words with the King Charles Albert while he is still king. There is a proverb that kings sometimes talk truth in their twilight days. I forget just how it goes. You can return to North Spain by the land route then. You have been over most of the roads.”
“All right. On that way I may stop by and see how Ashley and his spiders have recovered.”
“Oh, Ashley is dead now. He didn't play the part of the trap at all well. We go to Turin.”
It was in Turin that a gentleman, perhaps even a nobleman from his aspect, called after Dana Coscuin.
“Wait, sir! Wait, Oh my Count! God and St. John be praised! Where have you been?”
Dana had been pleasantly larking around the town. Their approach to the city had been vivacious, coming to it across hemp fields on foot with unaccountable anticipation. The buildings here were newer and racier than those of Rome. Dana had just been wondering whether the Palazzo Madama before which he stood could be translated as the Madam Palace. It did look like a sporting house.
But the gentleman was calling out to someone, and there was nobody before him except Dana.
“Cyril, Count Cyril,” the man was crying, and he rushed towards Dana. “To see you again is to — ”
Dana shivered at the unreality of the moment. It was always mysterious when he heard that name. And the gentleman pulled up short and his face darkened.
“You are not Count Cyril,” the man said accusingly. “You are not the Count Cyril Prasinos.”
“Have I said that I was?” Dana asked puzzled.
“You are not he. You are a much younger man. But how is it that you look so much like him and you a ragged ruffian?”
“Where is the Count Cyril?” Dana asked in a hurry as though the opportunity would slide away from him. “I am an associate of his and I have been looking forward to meeting him.”
“No, no,” the man disclaimed. “If you were really an associate of his you would not ask where he was to be found. You would know that he would find you when he wanted you. But how can you look so like him and yet lack all of his qualities? Where is the nobility? Where is the wisdom?”
“Pig's arse, how do I know where the wisdom is?” Dana growled ungently to the gentleman. Truly, Dana was as disappointed as the gentleman was. Why couldn't Count Cyril Prasinos have been there in the square?
It was also in Turin that Dana heard a King talk truth in his twilight days. King Charles Albert, Duke of Savoy, nominal ruler of the Piedmont, King of Sardinia, healthy appearing and not quite fifty years old, did not seem to be in the twilight of his life. The fact that he talked straight King's truth, however, indicated to one wise man, Brume, that he would die in a year or two.
“There was never a man so regarded as a Liberal and a Nationalist as I have been,” the King was saying to Malandrino Brume and to three other men; and Dana Coscuin, mingling with footmen and menials, listened closely. He was a poor boy from the outer bay country, and he had never heard a king unburden himself before.
“For a fact, in my personal views, I am a Liberal and a Nationalist to the point of silliness,” the King said. “In my sayings and actions I am not, but nobody really notices that I'm not. There is a compulsion that will not let me follow my bent.”
“Well, what is that compulsion?” Brume asked. “You have everything going for you in your own realms. What can be the compulsion against?”
“The Kingship itself. A King receives his orders, and he does not know where they come from. It is very mysterious, gentlemen. I have talked with many other kings, and all say it is the same thing with them. The only man on Earth, I believe, who is under more compulsive orders than Kings is the Pope. He believes, and we also are constrained to believe, that it is known where his orders come from. Oh, the new Pope is flopping like a hooked fish! There are so many things he wants to do, that he had intended to do, that all his staff and most of his people want him to do, that he has gone into total frustration already. God is unaccountable, is unreasonable, and is I believe, mistaken in what he directs the Pope to do. But that is the way it has always been with God, and He is the only God we have. I believe also that it is God who compels me to do foolish things and to refuse opportunities.”
“You are called the King of Italy. You can begin to act like it,” one of the men said.
“Yes, I have been called the King of Italy for many years and it is like a big joke. I could take the joke out of it if I were allowed. I am the Duke of Savoy which is historically a part of France. I am acting ruler of unsettled title in the Piedmont, which is a very small piece of Italy. I am the King of the backward island of Sardinia off in the sea. But I am not the king of any of the Italian mainland at all, and I am in control of no more than a tenth of the Italian land.”
“You have been King of Italy these sixteen years past,” said one of the listening men, “by the grace of the Revolution, of the Resurgence — ”
“Which will happen some sixteen years in the future, by my count,” said another of the listeners. “Truly, you are a child of fate, Charles Albert.”
“I would have been a wonderful Pretender,” King Charles Albert said. “If they had me not, I would be an astonishing Prospect. Or, were I in exile, I would be one that men would die to bring back. If I went tomorrow, the Carlist thing would grow in our own hills. The sad case of myself and my people is that they have me, and so they cannot enjoy me in absentia.
“Why, gentlemen, I have been a very good king, an exceptionally good king, and that is the difficulty. A nation with a bad king may believe that the situation would be remedied if they had a good king. But a nation with a good king will finally know that there is no remedy under kingship. ‘My Kingdom is not of this world,’ Christ said. ‘Nor is yours, or yours, or yours, or yours,’ the Holy Spirit said to us just the other day. Ah well, I believe I'd have been a good commoner if I hadn't been a king. What will come next is kings to be led around on a string, and led around by second-rate men too. That will not happen to me. I will abdicate and then I will die. But it will happen to my son. It saddens me a little that I begot a son who will be led around on a string. All Italians will howl and clap in those years and it will be a glorious thing — only not really.”
“I believe the only kingdom that will survive this coming wave will be the Kingdom of Heaven,” one of the men said.
“The institution remains stable in Hell also,” Brume reminded them.
That had mostly been a king talking truth in his twilight, and his truth was that the king game was pretty well finished.
Dana Coscuin left Brume (who still had whole days of brimful discussions to hold with the leading men) — left him that evening and started towards High Spain by the land route.
It was in Port-de-Bouc on the way to Spain that Dana was handed a letter by a black-eyed imp of a girl, nine years old, and fanged like a wolf within her pleasant smile.
“Ten piastres for the service,” she said when she handed Dana the letter.
“I am sure that the sender has paid you already, girl.”
“Ten piastres, man, or I will put an incantation on you. Your teeth will turn inwards and gobble you. Your eyes will fall out and roll around in
the road like marbles. Your urine will be full of worms.”
“One Italian soldo,” Dana said. “That is worth half as much as ten of the seamen's piastres.”
“All right,” the witch-girl said with her beautiful fanged smile. She gave the letter to Dana and took the soldo. She wasn't finished, though.
“You cheated me,” she howled when at a little distance. “Your teeth will eat up your tongue and the whole inside of your head. Your eyes will roll in the road and be eaten by goats. Your urine will be full of worms with teeth like saw-teeth.”
“Do you know the charm to send auger-worms in by one's navel?” Dana asked her. “Once they begin to bore — Ah, what's this? Who writes this?”
“No. Tell me, tell me, the auger-worms,” the girl implored. But Dana was reading the letter. It was written mostly in English, larded through with an oily sort of French, and it contained a few Irish phrases to make Dana wonder about the writer:
“Dana, the Boy who struts like a Man:
“I will use you, Dana, and then I will devour you. But we can have the pleasure of each other's company for months and even years while I work my way upon you. I want you badly. I have to do largely with colorless and tasteless creatures, and I anticipate a certain flavor in you. We can make wonderful disharmony together.”
It was written large and muskily. It was in the hand of a powerful man.
“You sing badly, and you have only one song, Dana. Oh, but there are four of you in the unmelody that I will manipulate. You know a tall man who mumbles, but his mumble has a long and strong carriage. You know a German man whom you once believed to be a giant come back to Ireland. You know a black man named Oceaan, though you may have forgotten him for the moment. There is curious and incomplete music in each of your four voices and persons, but the blend of you all will be a devilish bit of art when my own power is added to it. And how is it that I know that you four will come together again? Dana, I am the Son of the Devil; sometimes I get a look at the script.
“I will even tell you the bait that I will use to take you with. I call you a coward, a liverless Irish coward. I say that you tremble in your bones and are afraid to meet me. I say that you are a boy too scared ever to become a man. And I know how you will respond. You will still be a liverless Irish coward, but you will meet me, to prove to your own self that you are not so cowardly as that. Ah, I will have you, Dana, by this bait to your death and damnation. The one without the other would leave me unsatisfied.
“You go now to a little brown girl who is my sister in the kingdom. I tell you that I have had her before you; I tell you this to anger you. You are a coward even with her. She can break you. She can devour you at will. I only hope (I cannot see the script at this passage) that she does not devour you completely. I want to do that. Myself, or that little brown-skinned Mantis, one of us will eat you up.
“You are on the wrong side, of course. Stupid Brume won you back after you had been taken once. But you can become a man of reputation and use, and you will be called into use. You killed a man of mine in the hills behind St. Jean de Luz and not far from Baztan. He was a qualified man, just insane enough to be competent in these things, or I would not have sent him after such a man as Brume. Since you were able to kill this man, it is likely that I have underestimated you. Indeed you are a boy and a coward only in comparison to such a man as myself. There is somewhat more to you than to the common breed.
“Follow instructions now, so that we may become close friends in the short years before I devour you. Be in Paris right after the beginning of the next new year. We will have orgies of delight. Be in Paris in the Springtime; it will be a particularly enjoyable Spring. The Summer will be a little muggy, but I can promise you excellent shooting in the Eastern Marches in the Autumn.
“You have been contacted. You are afraid to be afraid, and so you will come. Then it will be I and Thou, and our unholy pleasure together. And, after the years of our pleasure, there will be only one of us. Which one of us will be the I when it is resolved? That is not certain. Were it not a gamble, I would not anticipate it so strongly.
“Escape La Sorciere, I beg you, for a timelier and more gory death at my own hand.
“Signed, in this world and in the other —
“Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil.”
Dana had heard of this man Ifreann before: from Brume, from men in the Carlist Hills, even from the ravens of the woods. It may have been that Ifreann was a handy man to hang legends on, or it may be that he generated legends. Whether or not he was the Son of the Devil, he was known to have had human birth in the Krakow region of Polish Austria.
“Ah, Son of the Devil, how do you do it?” Dana asked out loud when he had read the letter. “I will not admit that you are brainier than I am. How would I myself startle a man with my seeming omnipresence? The easiest way would be to be really present. You are not brainier than myself. You observe me by following me lately and by being at hand now. You gave the letter to the little fanged beauty when I was in the sight of you both.
“Your eyes are on me from somewhere right now. Well, are your ears on me? Hear me then. I take it up. I put my power against your power. I put my sanity against your just-enough-insanity to be competent in these things. Devil's Little Boy, I am afraid of you only a little. And you are afraid of me at least as much. I can feel it from you. That is the way it should be. The fear musk and the excitement musk are part of the delight when two males set to battle with their minds and with their spirits and with their animals. I will meet you in every place you name. I will confound you.”
Dana turned around completely, scanning his surroundings. He felt the eyes upon him, he even felt a strong friendship for their murderous presence. But the eyes could be anywhere in the circuit. Then Dana bawled out loudly:
“I'll meet you on your own field. Shake a little, Ifreann!”
And a little less loudly he said:
“But first I will go to Spain, to my friend upon the Earth.”
He went down the road singing My Name is Dana Coscuin and he walked a long two-weeks walk. He came to one of the turns of his life and he made ready for it.
He was confessed of his sins at Prades; he entered Spain near Puigcerda.
VII
DANA, YOU HAVE THE WRONG GIRL
Dana Coscuin was in double danger of his life when he returned to the Spanish arena. The irregular Carlists would kill him, for the word had gone out those many months past that he had become a puppet of Elena Prado and of the other Queen's creatures. Even Tancredi Cima would kill him. Even Mariella, who was now the wife of Tancredi, would kill Dana if she believed that he was the creature of the creatures. And both of these persons had a huge love for the Dana they had known.
And the queer creatures would kill him even faster. There was a false Count, a false Bishop, a false Abadesa, and probably the false Elena Prado who would kill Dana in a blinking because he had not killed Brume nor led them to the Count Cyril, and because he had not remained subverted and hypnotized.
Dana had nothing to defend himself with except his tongue, and he was now believed, on both sides, to be double-tongued. And yet he did have other things. He had wits (they had grown in him almost unnoticed), he had talent for navigating on the narrow edge, he had the gift of communicating at a distance and without words. There was a strong rumor, picked up by several of either party, that Dana was returning to the Hills; yet the only active element in that rumor was Dana's own aura, sweeping out thinly to those of special sensing, in an arc a hundred miles beyond himself.
Dana had been absent from the Carlist Hills for nearly two years. He had been in high company many times; his reputation had grown; he was believed to know more about the machinations than he did in fact know.
“But much has happened in these two years, Dana. It is two more times around the whirlpool, two watery grooves nearer to the vortex.”
“I am able to keep track of the seasons, Padre gris,” Dana said.
“Who will father the Queen's children? Nobody. She says that she will do it all by herself. Many insects do this, and Isabella is very like an insect in her waspishness, in her spiderishness, in her ever immaturity coming always mask-faced, cotton-faced, old-young out of the cocoon. And with such divergent and parthenogenetic insects the offspring is always female, so I see a long line of female children for the Queen.
“She has never lacked partners, though, not from her twelfth year. Now the sad fact is that, while all her intimacies are elaborated in a thousand stories every day, while her Dictators (first Espartero and now Narvaez) have killed twelve times as many persons as the Inquisition killed in its several centuries (but they have not been twelve times as often censured for it), while the poor are looted down to the very marrow of their bones and insulted in their every belief, while Holy Mother the Church in particular is vilified, while Spain herself is the object of derision of the new official Spanish humor (and Spain once had pride), the Queen and her government are tremendously popular with almost exactly one half the people of Spain. I believe that this thing, and things similar to it, will be tremendously popular with exactly one half the people in the world for the next several sad centuries.”
“You are sure of your statistics, are you, Padre cano?” Dana smiled in the dark. “It will be exactly one half.”
“It will be exactly one half, Dana. I have the proportions in my bones and have no need for statistics. And if there is an odd head left over in the world numbering, you and I will crack the head open, knowing there is something unright about it.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 12
