The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I will tell you about the Cristo also. Sometimes, when you sit in judgment of me, when you wish to reform my clay, you seem to believe yourself to be the Cristo. You are not. You are too pure, and you are, as yet, too shallow. I will tell you about Him.

  “And I will tell you about me. And then, if I feel very unkind, I will tell you about yourself.”

  Elena split open kid bones with her teeth and took the marrow with a tongue that seemed too long and too roughened. She also flayed flesh off the bones with that long rough tongue.

  She cut open the long bones laterally with her canine teeth which seemed sharper and stronger than the blade of a clasp knife. She took bones from Dana's plate and sundered them similarly. Elena was elegant, but she was not fastidious.

  “The Magdelena had an occasional fast day among the feasts,” she said. “It was no deprivation when the seven devils were cast out of her. They had become old and grubby, and she had newer and fresher devils waiting to enter. And the seldom fasts never confused her. She knew which were the feasts. She especially loved the great pork — to dine on it, and to be entered into by it. We will have a pork feast tomorrow.”

  Dana was physically weary. He was no boudoir athlete. He was shaken by the horror of his days-and-nights-long wrongdoing. He was sitting at night table with the fundamental mystery, manifested in a red gown. And the mystery had a carnivorous tongue that shredded meat and bones, and that took the flesh off his soul.

  “You do not know the Magdelena, Dana, if you believe she is reformable into your narrow mold. And you surely do not know the Cristo. Was he so pure? I tell you that he held fornication with the woman at the well, with two other women that I forget, and with Mary Magdalena. The Luther wrote this belief, and several of the Luthers with whom I have talked believe it yet as a matter of course. And, to cow your own Irish sort of bull, all unbelievers believe it. They say that the Gospel writing of these things indicate that such took place, that the expressions are literary commonplaces.

  “And, besides all this, I have private information and experience. This Cristo himself has come to me in this way; this little brown-skinned girl has had personal fornication with him. Such things are unliterary commonplaces in all of rural Europe. And I will tell you this: the Cristo knows the one-thousandth position.”

  “Were I home again in Ireland, were I home again in my wits, I would strike dead anyone who said such things,” Dana grumbled darkly. “You lie and you blaspheme, Elena.”

  “Oh, I suppose so, Dana. And yet a person did come to me in such a way at night once, and he told me that he was the Cristo. Should I have told him that he lied? Well, he was the Cristo, or he was the Devil, or he was mad. But, Dana, he did know the one thousandth position.”

  “Christ will come into you, Elena, but not in that way.”

  “You are wrong, you are unnaturally wrong, Dana. I suggest you have a try at analyzing some of the dreams and visions of the great Teresa and the great Catherine. Study the context, study the symbols, study what symbols were not symbols at all but sheer reality. Read what they really wrote about their encounters. Christ did come in to them as I say.”

  “No.”

  Dana rose in moral revulsion. He left the contorted presence of Elena Prado; he left the cave-mansion-room; he left the house; he left the town. And he cried out his frustration like a shattered and sun-burned old desert-prophet who has been tested too long and who has failed the tests.

  There are several versions of what happened next. One is that Elena had men seize him on the night road, put him into a big barley sack, and carry him so bound to her castillo where she kept him prisoner.

  There is a variation of this, that the men did seize a dazed young man in a green shirt and stuff him into a barley bag and carry him away. But when the bag was opened in the castillo, the young man in it was not Dana. Dana had in him a trifle of the draoi, the wizard. But more likely he had luckily come on a young man, stunned him with a quick blow, changed shirts with him, and made his own way out of there.

  Dana was not made a physical prisoner in the castillo, whatever you may have heard. But he was still another sort of prisoner of Elena when they were next together: it was the next evening, and they were in the town of Estella.

  They were together now in quite a different way. Things had changed completely and suddenly, so that they looked at each other and hardly recognized themselves as the same persons. Dana had changed. His despair was all gone; he was shining with new hope. And Elena had changed even more deeply. Nobody but a converted Magdalena indeed, or the most adept actress in the world, could have shown such such total change.

  Why, Dana had won the victory after all! He had won it completely and in an absolutely unexpected manner. There had been divine intervention. Of course, there is divine intervention in every moment and place, but this had been in a special and spectacular form. Elena had taken counsel with certain spiritual advisors (she said), and they had opened her eyes and her heart.

  (Elena had indeed taken long counsel with certain advisors, but they were not of the spiritual sort.)

  There were not many words between them. There could not be; there were too many things that had to be passed over in silence. They ate fish and ashes that night in an abandoned hovel. The ashes were from the fact that Elena had failed in properly cooking the fish, but also (she said) as fortuitous sign of her penitence.

  “I was a hardened sinner, and now I am again a child of God,” Elena said. This was a rather awkward thing to say with conviction, and Elena did say it with total conviction. “Repentance came to me swiftly, Dana, and like a ghost. Now I will marry you in Christ, give all my wealth to the poor, and be as good a woman and as a good a wife as I may be for the remainder of my life. May Our Lady and Saint Teresa preserve me in this resolution!”

  “Ah, let us go to the hills and wake the old priest and have him marry us at once,” Dana said in his pleased daze.

  “Oh, I'd be killed in the hills,” Elena protested.

  “You never have been.”

  “Rather we will part for now, my Dana, and spend the night, each in his own place, in chastity and contrition. We will be married at first flick of dawn, in my castillo, by my priest.”

  “It is I who would be killed at the castillo.”

  “You never have been. Come on the very end of the dark, Dana. Come through the roof. The hatchway will be left unbolted. A very small group will be arriving at almost exactly that time, and we will be married almost immediately.”

  “And will I be killed before or after the thing?” Dana asked with the last of his irony. He wasn't really distrustful; those were only some words that he had left over in his mouth.

  “Why have you become afraid of danger, Dana? You were never afraid of it before. Trust in God, and in your own wits, and in my goodness.”

  Elena put ashes on her head and on her tongue with gestures that seemed too deep to be false. She put her hands on Dana's shoulders in all strength and chastity. And she turned and went out and away in the night. The nine-day verbal and carnal conversation was over with.

  Elena Prado went again and took long counsel with certain unspiritual advisors. Never mind: who can say whether the spirit is present or absent in a group?

  And Dana spent the night on the pallet in his own cave, chastely, and yet restlessly. He had been in and out of many traps before. He did trust in God. He did trust in his own wits. And he almost trusted in the goodness of Elena Prado.

  When it was nearly time for him to do so, Dana rose and moved out of his cave. But instead of taking the way to the castillo of Elena Prado, he took the path to the den of the old priest. He awakened the old man and was confessed by him. And that seemed to be all of it.

  “I had thought that you might want to question me about other things,” Dana hazarded.

  “What is to question? She will not come to me, so you will go to her and her own priest who is the New Bishop.”

  “Well, will I be killed
there?”

  “That is not for me to tell you. In any case, it will not matter. You are in grace again, so it will not matter if you are killed.”

  Dana left the old man then, on that rather chilly note. But he still wanted advice as he went back along the path. He asked this of Christ, of the old priest who had not given it to him directly, of the skull of Christian Blaye (that third noteworthy thing in the angry shrine back in Hendaye), of rough Brume wherever he might be now, of the Count Cyril. And the answer came in the voice that had to be that of the Count Cyril. Dana knew all the other voices, including that of Christ.

  “Whatever you do, do quickly.”

  And Dana moved quickly, down the path, down the mule-road, down the cliff-side in the lessening dark, onto the roof of the castillo (not a half hour had gone by in all this rapid action), through the hatch.

  “Fasten the bolts after you, Dana,” Elena Prado said. She was standing below him holding a candle. But Dana did not fasten the bolts. He fumbled with them and he pretended to fasten them, but he did not. Well, even Elena had told him to trust in his own wits. There had been something wrong with the castle yard as he had come onto the roof. More than a very small group had arrived. Every shadow and shelter was filled with silent horsed guards.

  The false Abadesa was there, she who showed too much bare neck and shoulder and bosom to be an Abadesa of the old sort. She took Dana in her arms as he came down from the hatchway, and it was wrongly pleasant to him. Dana toppled her onto the stone floor, and Elena and the Abadesa went into ringing laughter. Oh well, weddings are supposed to be gay, and that false Abadesa had always had an Irish look about her.

  Then there was a crowd of people in the little stone-floored room. Surely the wedding should have been in the castillo chapel. But, no, it would be right here. The count who was not Count Prado was there. “Why have you not killed Brume?” he hissed to Dana. The three young philosophers were there. “When will you tell us where the Count Cyril may be found?” one of them whispered angrily to Dana. “Tell us now, or there will not be any other time. For your life, tell us now.” “Go to Hell,” Dana told the young philosophers gently.

  And the New Bishop came into the room, already vested. He began the wedding mass almost at once, and it seemed a curiously abridged version. He was in a great and fearful hurry. With these people also, what they did they would do quickly.

  Elena Prado the bride, but she was not dressed as a bride, pressed closely to Dana on one side; the false Abadesa pressed closely on the other. Both were rather more fondling than they should have been at mass, and both were much stronger than would have seemed possible. In fact, they had Dana pinioned.

  The denouement came quickly. It was the Offertory of the Mass. How could it be so soon? It was quite clear that this was not Christ's proper mass.

  “In quorum manibus iniquitates sunt: dextera eorum repleta est muneribus — In whose hands are iniquities: their right hand is filled with gifts,” the Bishop hurried on. “Te interficio, Dana, pistola ista,” he added with a change of tone, and those words do not properly belong in any mass whatsoever. But the false Bishop had a pistola in his right hand and he was going to kill Dana with it right now.

  A number of things happened at exactly the same time. There was the holler of bolts not quite cramped, and the spilling down of daylight from above to confuse the candlelight below. Elena Prado had cast herself flat on the stones like the clever snake she was. But Dana was able to fling the false Abadesa into the bishop's pistola. As she intercepted the shot, Dana was up on her shoulders before she could crumble. “Above you, Dana,” came a hearty voice from Heaven, or at least from the roof. It was that of Mariella Cima who can never be praised enough. She grasped Dana by the hair of his head and jerked him up through the hatchway, up from the shoulders of the Abadesa who was shot dead but had not yet had time to fall.

  Saved by the hand of the giantess, and below was Elena Prado's moan, “Oh my Dana!” Elena was snake, but she was other things as well.

  And then the giant's hand came down. Tancredi Cima flung a great kettle-bomb, the grandfather of the grenade, into the hatchway. And he slammed down the hatch. It blew off again, though, and it nearly took his hand with it.

  And how was it with them below? All dead and exploded in their flesh? It had to be so. And yet Dana had seen, in an almost valid dream, a future meeting with Elena after he himself had come to his greyness. She would be one-eyed and bent and her face entirely of scar-tissue. But stubborn and lustful and snaky-triumphant as ever: not dead, not dead.

  “Not the cliff!” Dana cried. There were men on the roof to take them, and they were between the three and the cliff. The men were half-blinded by the sour black smoke that had exploded up out of the hatchway, but the three were also half-blinded.

  “Dana, Tancredi, Mariella,” came a voice from the castle yard, on the opposite side from the cliff, “three black horses from the Count Cyril.”

  And there were three black horses there, ready and empty-saddled, but there was nobody to whom that voice could have belonged. The intrepid three were off the roof and into the saddles. Fifty guards on their white horses were about them, but how could these catch an inspired three on the blacks? Mariella unslung a long rifle (her own!) from a saddle sling and began to shoot guards out of their saddles so rapidly that it had to be a contrived burlesque. Mariella had had something to do with the appearance of these three black horses in spite of the fact that she had come to that place down the cliff by hand and foot.

  “Where, where?” Dana cried, as they were through the shell of the white-horsed guards but closely followed.

  “To France,” said Tancredi in his booming carrying whisper. “There will be no safety for us in all Spain for some time.”

  “Which is the road?” Dana howled. There were a dozen possibilities, but some one way must be set first in mind.

  “Straight for Laruns,” Mariella decided in a wild voice. “It is further to the border, but there is nobody between us and it.”

  They rode madly, and, after pursuit had slackened a little, a little less madly, out of the bleak hills of Spain to the merry meadows of France.

  VIII

  SELECT COMPANY

  They went ninety cruel miles in three days, going much of that time at night.

  “It occurs to me, Mariella,” Dana said, “that you have never been out of Spain, that you have never been more than twenty miles from your own spire in the hills. How is it that you are so sure where we should go? You are an illiterate. You don't know what a map is for. How can you know just where we should go, in light or in dark? If we fall down one more ravine, I will doubt that you do know.”

  “Trust me, Dana, trust me,” Mariella said. “It is not my fault. If the horses were surer-footed we would not fall down half so many ditches. I have known birds nearly as illiterate as myself, as like to hold a map upside-down as straightways, but tell them the name of a town and they could fly there straight. So can I. When you are with me, there is no doubt of us going by the best road.”

  It was misty morning. They were over the border and nearly to Laruns. And there, now in the middle of a not too rough way, they were surrounded by bandits.

  “Shall we?” Dana asked his companions. He was ready enough for a caper or a death battle, if they were with him in it.

  “No, we shall not,” Mariella Cima said softly. Mariella had to be right. She would have battled readily if there had been reason for a battle. “I see that there are good kind men here,” she said, “and we will give them anything they want.”

  “Only the Count Cyril's horses,” the leader of the bandits said. “There is other need for them now and you must give them up. I know you will not mind walking the four hundred miles.”

  “When did you see the Count Cyril?” Dana asked, very interested. But Dana was misunderstood, a thing that happened before at the mention of that man's name. Or it was that the bandit leader pretended to misunderstand him.

&n
bsp; “When you have pay from the Count Cyril?” he asked. “Perhaps you will receive it from someone else along the way, but not from me. I will relieve you of the horses. That is my present duty.”

  “I have taken a liking for my black horse,” Dana declared. “I will fight you all for him.”

  “It isn't possible for you to fight us,” the bandit leader said easily. “There are too many of us for you to fight. And we are also in the employ of the Count Cyril; there cannot be conflict in our company.”

  Mariella and Tancredi had already dismounted and given their horses up to the bandits, and they would never have been overawed by mere numbers of opponents. Dana also gave up his horse with puzzled regret. And the bandits gave cheese and bread and wine and potatoes to the three of them for a meal.

  “Magdelena Brume sends her love to Dana,” one of the lesser bandits said.

  “Let her not send him too much love,” Mariella warned. “He is in my love now.”

  “Christian Blaye, the stark head of him, sends his good wishes to all three of you,” another lesser bandit said, “and he wishes you could have come his way, but he knows that you have chosen the better route.”

  “I will crack walnuts on his skull on my return,” said Tancredi Cima. “I love what little is left of him more than I love any fleshed man, except Dana.”

  “Jude Revanche sends his hate, Dana, and says that he will yet cut your throat,” still another of the bandits told them.

  “Somewhere I had heard that he was dead,” Dana protested.

  “Somewhere we had all heard it,” the man said, “but he isn't.”

  (Jude Revanche was the squarish bearded man who had once cursed Dana Coscuin in a roadway at Hendaye and said that he would put a pig-knife between his ribs and that he would burn down the Carlist Hills.)

  It was indeed true that all persons of the two Revolutions knew or would know each other.

  The three pilgrims walked that day and slept in a haystack that night. They had exchanged the rocky roads of Spain for the dusty roads of France. They resumed their journey the next morning, Mariella always directing them on the correct way. At Pau (on Gave de Pau, or Pau Torrent) Dana received new Count Cyril gold for his purse. He received this from a silent farm woman who looked out of an unfamiliar face with familiar eyes. Dana had developed the fancy that all his paymasters had the same eyes, however else they differed. “From the Count Cyril,” the woman finally said, but nothing else.