“Oh well, it is no more than a letter from a girl,” the old Father said. “The character of the hand shows the girl to be as ferocious in the wild-woman way as yourself, Mariella. It also shows the girl to be of startling intelligence, of a tomorrowish program, of a green-growing intuition, and of a corona-like flaming personality. It shows further, in the mixture of styles, that the girl has been schooled in Vienna, in Paris, and in England.”
“Her writing shows all that?” Tancredi asked unbelieving.
“Yes, it does show all that,” the old man said, “but I would not recognize all that in it except that I already know the hand and the girl.”
“Does everybody in the world already know everybody else in the world?” Dana asked in exasperation.
“Everybody in the intense world of the two revolutions does know everybody else in that world, or will yet know them,” the old priest said. “To the text then. It is written in Polish so that you would have to bring it to me to read, I being the only familiar with that tongue in these hills. It will therefore contain a message for me also. I will uncode it to myself as I go along, or I will keep the letter and uncode it later if it is difficult. It speaks:
“ ‘Dana my love — that is really the single name of you. My adversary the Devil wants your soul and body. So do I also. He has written to you, so I will write to you. Three things I will do to you. I will teach you the lore of the Green Revolution (I am the only complete adept at that); I will use you; I will marry you.’ ”
“Much better you marry that girl than the death-witch, Dana,” Mariella interrupted. “I love this girl already, and Tancredi loves her also. It is all right, Dana. Go ahead and marry her.”
“Oh hush up, Mariella, hush up,” Dana growled.
“ ‘No, you will not marry the Prado puta,’ ” the old priest read on in the voice of the letter. “ ‘This has been disallowed, in Heaven by God, on Earth by myself. Nor will you find final death in that encounter. If it seems that you do, then I will come and dig out your body and reanimate it. I have never discovered the limit to my powers; do not make me drive them to the limit in you case.
“ ‘And yet I will have you to follow the instructions of the Son of the Devil — almost. Be in Paris just before the beginning of the new year. It is necessary that you meet me before you meet him; and you will meet me in Paris. And it will be a particularly interesting springtime there. There are three things involved in all this: the Good Serpent, the Bad Serpent, and the World. We two sorts of serpents are involved in an apocalyptical conflict for the Good World. And it is a good world. It was made good. We will cleanse it and set it to the good growing again. This must be done constantly.
“ ‘And you are a poor lad from Ireland who does not understand about the two snakes, since there are no snakes in Ireland? No snakes in Ireland! I have been in Ireland. I have seen snakes driven in flocks like sheep as far as the eye could see. Do you not know that the ram-headed snake is a familiar figure in old Irish art? You eat snake-meat there, and you believe that it is mutton. So do we in Poland. So do we almost everywhere. But I will instruct you later.
“ ‘And you will also be, as my adversary commands you to be, in the Eastern Marches for the excellent shooting in the autumn and winter. You will be there; I will be there; the Catherine-cursed Son of the Devil will be there. And one or more of us will die there.
“ ‘You escape from the Brown-skinned mantis, Dana. I order you to do this. How else could you come to me?
“ ‘Signed in love, in this world and in the other — Catherine Dembinska.’ ”
It was the sound of the Polish name that broke up Tancredi and Mariella and Dana and sent them into spattering laughter. And this puzzled the old priest, the Black Pope. Like most Poles of the world, he was unable to understand that the sound of every Polish word and name is funny.
“Oh but I love her! Tancredi loves her. You also must love her, Dana,” Mariella was still chuckling. “Wherever did you meet her, Dana?”
“I have never met her. Never before in my life have I heard the name of Catherine Dembinska.”
And the sound of the name set the three of them off again.
“You will marry her, though, Dana. Tancredi and I will compel you to do it,” Mariella guffawed.
“Nobody will ever compel me to do a thing like that.”
“Oh, you'll marry her, and we will all be there. And we will all be in Paris in the Springtime, and in the Eastern Marches in the Fall and Winter.”
“The young men are all bothered tonight,” the old priest said inconsequently. “I can feel them all wakeful and wondering on their pallets. The devil's own lust has them this hour.”
“This Catherine Dembinska whom I love, I will take her as my younger sister,” said Mariella.
“She is older than you are, Mariella,” the old priest said.
“Is it not wonderful that the Catherine who is a lady and who has been schooled in Vienna, Paris and England should become the sister of Mariella of the Mountains?” Mariella asked.
They broke it up after a while. Dana was going (he said) to his own cave, to clear it of the blown-in trash of two years, to stow his gear there, and to take up his abode there again. They all promised to go to Paris just before the beginning of the new year, and to the Eastern Marches in the next autumn and winter.
“I also may be in the Eastern Marches the winter after this one,” the old priest said. “If there is to be excellent shooting there, well, I am an excellent shot.”
Coming into the night-dark again, there was an uncanny spirit on the hills. Mariella knew it and looked at Dana with warning and tragic eyes before she turned away. Probably Tancredi knew it also. He knew everything that Mariella knew.
And Dana knew it strongly. “No wonder the young men are all bothered tonight, that they are wakeful and wondering on their pallets. The devil's own lust has them this hour,” Dana echoed the old priest's words in his mind.
“If she is out this night, then I will go in by her small door and wait for her in her own place,” Dana told himself. “The Polish girl's letter was strange, but there is something nearer with a lot more blood in it.” He veered off from the way that would have taken him to his old cave. “My other and last encounter, I will have it also tonight,” he said, “since the first encounters have gone well and with the loss of hardly a cupful of blood.”
Dana Coscuin came to a certain mule path. And after a while he came to a remembered place where he had once, with correct instinct, stood upon a brown-skinned snake and punished her severely with his heels.
“But she is my friend upon the Earth and I am responsible to God for her,” Dana said.
Dana came down the cliff above the Castillo of Elena Prado who was also Muerte de Boscaje, and was sometimes called the Death-Witch, and also the Snow-Bird.
“She chooses to go out of her own house at night by a hatchway in the roof; to go up the cliffs and into the high hills; and to set up a twanging in the night-sleep of all the men. And she leaves loose the gramp-irons of the hatch cover when she is out, so that she can come back in the same way. Well, I will avail myself of her unconscious hospitality; I will enter and wait for her. I believe that she comes back almost right now. I feel her strongly and quite near at this minute.”
Dana came noiselessly off the vine-hung cliff and onto the roof of the castillo. It was quite dark: clouded over, but without the Gothic lightning tonight. The darkness did not matter. Where Dana had been once, he could go again no matter how dark it was.
Dana lifted the lid of the hatchway on its always oiled hinges. He slid through. He let himself down. He hung, ready to drop. But something came to him, came under him, lifted him again, taking his weight so suddenly that it startled him.
“It is my Dana come back to me,” said Elena Prado.
Dana was a straddle of her shoulders, a-ride of her neck.
“Oh be easy, Dana, I will carry you,” Elena said, and she started through the swayin
g darkness with Dana a-mount. Dana took her heavy braids in hand, though; he toppled the both of them onto the stone floor, clamped her down, took a knife from her, took another, took a small pistol from her. Then he took from his own hat the candle stub such as many night men carry, lighted it, puddled it, waxed it to the stone floor. It showed Elena so contortedly beautiful and so disheveled that Dana was as wakeful and wondering and filled with the devil's own lust as were any of the young hill-men on their pallets. Dana, in fact, had Elena's stomach for pallet, and he held her heavy braids in such way that he could have broken her neck in a second. She was his friend on the earth, but he didn't fully trust her.
“And now we will talk, my little lark,” Dana said.
“Sí, seguramente, talk to me, my Dana,” Elena said.
And then it was a conversation that went on, verbally and carnally, for nine days.
Parts of the conversation took place in that same dark, stone-floored room below the hatchway in the castillo. Some of the conversations took place in the master chamber of that house; some of them in Elena's own large and richly cluttered room which she called her heart outside her body; some of them were in the big dining hall there. But many of the pieces of it were held out on the night hills when Dana tracked and took Elena at their darkness game. Some were in Dana's own cave. Others were on horseback or in coach. And still others were in the city of Pamplona, in an inn there, in a rich house there, and in another house, an overly crowded and overly bohemian house there.
There was puzzled bitterness in such Carlists as happened to see the two together, and they were mostly the Carlists who were equipped with night eyes. Mariella would have killed this Elena Prado if she had caught her alone. She had tried to kill her before, of course, and had failed; never mind, she would have been able to kill her now. But both Tancredi and Mariella now believed that Dana had the green rock inside him and was himself faithful. It did not matter that Mariella herself had once palmed and foisted that rock; Mariella herself believed in it now. Neither of these true friends would harm Dana alone, or Dana and Elena together.
But there was harm enough and danger enough in the conjunction of the two conversationalists. Elena Prado was the shy and sheltered girl who was also a brown-skin snake and a death-witch and some other thing besides. Dana was a very fine young man, but he had a cave in the middle of him: a devil-door, a hell-entrance such as are often found in the Irish hills and in the Irish persons. Dana had been using this dangerous entrance for several days now.
“You are wrong when you say that I am your friend upon the Earth,” Elena was murmuring as they lay bare and warm on cold high rock and watched a faint nacre-colored arc that would turn into dawn in an hour. “I am your friend from under the earth. I am such thing as comes out from under the rocks. How would people know of positions and passions if we snakes had not taught them? People, and particularly Christian people, are without real imagination in this. The Moslems when they were in Spain (they were not completely people as Christians and effetes understand the thing; they were a little more or a little less) knew the nine hundred and ninety-nine positions. They left as their legacy to the poor people of Spain only the ninety-nine. But I know all. Had you not suspected that I was of their brown-skinned line? I am of every old line. What do you think? Am I a brown-skin for nothing? How else do you want me, Dana?”
Rime-frost had been forming, and now a very light snow had begun. One would hardly say that the frail snow sizzled when it came onto the bare Elena, but it melted just before it touched and it gave a warm damp sheen to the hot-flesh girl. Sheep were bleating petulantly from the cold, but Dana was warm in an illicit summertime.
“I want you the right way,” Dana said, “but I have to go down all the wrong ways to find you.”
“Oh, you have the wrong girl, my Dana. I can be several different creatures, but not that right one.”
“Yes. I have so much to pour out to you, Elena. And only the right way is spacious enough for it.”
“Oh, my way is spacious, Dana; it goes down and down. But are you such wine as can compel the jug? I tell you that I am a jug made of the obscene clay. I have been fired in a few furnaces, and none so delightful as yours, my Dana, and I am a ready enough jug; but I'm still of the obscene clay. What you want is a chalice and not a jug. I tell you though, my Dana, that the chalice isn't in it at all. It's too far removed from the Earth.”
“I will tell you something else, Elena: Christian men are not effete.”
“Always they are, Dana, always. Yourself, the times you are not effete are the times you also are not Christian.”
Elena slept then. She always slept and woke suddenly. And Dana also slept, but only on the fringes as he had learned in these last several years. There was real danger in them being discovered there by the dawn or daylight.
Some of the older Carlist men had smiled at the idea of Dana Coscuin trying to make an honest and Christian wife out of that puta. This can sometimes be done with a poor girl, but hardly in the whole world has it ever been done with a rich one. These Carlists understood (they were good at reading dispositions and dilemmas) the state of things with Dana. It was the sort of news that traveled on the wind, even the interior parts of it. These older Carlists did not smile, however, at the idea of Dana Coscuin becoming again a queen's creatures’ creature. If, as seemed unlikely, Dana should escape with his life from the queen's men, these older Carlists swore that he would not escape with his life from themselves. And some of them were not even willing to wait for the developments of the Dana tale.
There is a moment right on the trailing edge of false dawn when a glimpse (an uncertified glimpse) of the future may be obtained. Elena Prado was asleep, bare and warm in the sifting snow. Dana was also asleep, but he was now directing his sleep to an end. Three times in his younger years in Ireland he had had these moments when he could see raggedly through the curtain. In one of those moments he had known that he would have to leave Ireland on account of his cousin Aileen Dinneen and his queer passion for her, would have to leave while it was still a comic thing and before it had become deadly. Now he had another Aileen with him. It could not even be said that this second one was more queer or more passionate than the first. In one realm of the unconscious they were the same, and were similarly forbidden. And it was the same realm of the unconscious that would answer questions.
“Will I see Elena Prado again in two weeks?” Dana asked. Whatever would happen at this crux, it would be settled within two weeks.
“You will not,” the realm said, and Dana was sorry to hear it. So then, he would lose Elena, according to this.
“Will I ever see her again?” Dana asked. The answer was not a verbal one. It was a mind garble, but it indicated that Dana would possibly see Elena again.
“In a year?” Dana asked. “In five years? In ten?” But the realm was silent.
“Damnu siorai!” Dana swore, “will I see her in twenty years?” There was some indication that he would. “And how will she look?” Dana asked. Well, how did she look now?
Dana turned and leaned over Elena. It was dark, but in the realm it was light enought to see by. It was, in fact, another place and time. It was a years-after dream of Dana, when he had come to his grayness, meeting again with Elena Prado who was one-eyed and bent and her face entirely of scar-tissue. That was not the shaking part of it. The spooky part was that Elena was as stubborn and lustful and snaky-triumphant as ever. There was more to this scene, there was much more.
It was depressing, it was haunting. Elena was a broken crone, but a lively one. And the scene was more real than their lying bare on the mountain rocks.
A sheep was bleating pitifully. Dana awoke on the rocks.
“Be quiet, thou caora,” he told the sheep. “Thy dreams are not so wooly as mine.”
“I'm between fire and ice!” Dana groaned in near agony. They were not now lying warm and bare-fleshed on the snow-sifted mountain rocks. They were dining together in a private room in
a private house in Pamplona.
The two of them made a picture that was entirely Spanish and of most surpassing excellence. None but an absolute genius could have composed that picture: have detailed it, have integrated it: have used the shadows so richly, have set up the contrast and the tensions so vitally, have given it such unity and symbolism; and yet have muted the allegory to its proper place, have made of the room a world apart, a primordial cave with the deep grace of a mansion, a thing under water or under earth, or outside the ordinary sphere.
Dana was beautiful by the candle-light, and Elena was not. But Elena was the major focus. Dana was golden, and wrapped in bright green. Elena was brown, and gowned in scarlet. She was incomparably intricate. She was both the fire and the ice. She was not disheveled now, except in her eyes and her tongue, and in her constantly moving hands: she was elegant. And perhaps she was again contortedly beautiful; yet masking this was a shocking ugliness, a mocking, triumphant, monstrous ugliness which she had assumed deliberately. Elena could be beautiful any time she wished, now she wished rather to be something more complex.
They were eating cabrito, roast kid. They ate it with their hands, but elegantly, not crudely. They wiped their fingers and faces with lumps of torn bread, and tossed these into the blue-black shadows. And the shadows raised to snap the lumps with white teeth. Part of the lurking shadows of the cave-mansion-room were amorphous animals somewhat on the order of dogs. These formed upward out of the shadows to take the living bread, and then melted back down into the shadows again.
“You have very feeble ideas about both the fire and the ice, Dana, and you have almost no idea about the persons involved,” Elena was saying. “I will tell you about that Magdelena. I will tell you about that Cristo. And about myself.
“You would cast me in the Magdelena role, Dana, and I will not accept it. I am only half of her name, but she is much less than half of me.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 14
