The next day, or perhaps the day after that, they were in the town of Aire on the Adour. They had been coming through hayfield and wheat stubble and pine tree and walnut country, which was also the land of the big pale-yellow bulls. It was at Aire that Tancredi received his own Count Cyril pay. The man who gave it to him had the appearance of a village notary, and he seemed to find the task distasteful. “From the Count Cyril,” the man said.
And later that same week, Mariella received Count Cyril pay at Casteljaloux. This was unexpected. Mariella had never received direct pay before. It was a full and handsome townswoman who paid it to her. “From the Count Cyril, my poulette,” she said. “Stay with me under my roof tonight. It is enough that your men should sleep under the good sky.”
“I will do it,” Mariella grinned. “Really, I have always considered myself somewhat better than these two men.”
“It will be all right now with France, I believe,” the full handsome woman called back over her shoulder as she made off with their Mariella. “The Blessed Virgin appeared this week to two children not fifty miles from here.”
“It is sure that she was the Virgin?” Dana asked.
“Yes. She was wearing her blue mantle.”
On the edge of Marmande two or three days later, they met Kemper Gruenland, the giant that Dana had once fought at Castletown Landing on Bantry Bay in Ireland. Big Kemper (Who arranges these things anyhow? Who arranges them?) had been waiting for them.
“You Dana, you Tancredi, you the woman, you are all under my orders now!” Kemper called out roughly. “Move quickly. We will travel all night. Do not pretend weariness because you have walked all day. I will have the woman into the inn here for a short quarter hour. Be ready to travel after that.” Big Kemper had shoved in his ante but he didn't really understand this game.
“No man will ever have me except Tancredi,” Mariella said. “And we are not under your orders. Actually all are to be under my own orders, but we are to pretend that we are under Dana's. I know who you are, big man, and you will enter into my love as Dana has. But you will be under our orders.”
Tancredi had his hooked knife in his hand.
“I will show you, big man,” he said, “how we treat with your sort in Sardinia.”
“You the Sardinian!” Kemper roared with contempt. “But it is I who have been doing bloody work in Sardinia for these several years. It wasn't you who was selected for it. Even Dana was there in the Sardinia, and he did not know that I knew it. But you were selected for nothing. We fight now, stumbling Tancredi.”
“Give me the hooked knife, Tancredi,” Mariella said with authority. “We will have no murder in our gathering company.”
Tancredi gave her the hooked knife. Then Kemper and Tancredi joined battle there on the edge of Marmande.
Kemper Gruenland was tall and bulky. Tancredi Cima was even taller, but lean. To ordinary men, both were giants. They began both with giant earth-quaking blows, and loungers from town and country were gathering to watch them.
They had the strength and the epic awkwardness of true giants. They entwined, and they broke away again. They were like big bears on their hind legs, slavering, snorting, roaring, crashing blows, breaking quickly to blood. They were too strong for their forms; they began to break each other up; one could almost imagine that pieces were falling off them as they battled. They fought with hand and foot and butting head. Both were slippery with blood and cloudy-eyed from the blows. They heaved and struck and wrestled. And both buckled a little at the knees after a while of it.
And Mariella was laughing like chimes.
The battlers grunted great grunts and went at it still more strongly. They punished each other. They made a large noise. They groaned, and they breathed like hippopotami in labor.
And Dana was laughing like Billbury Bells.
“You and I, Dana,” Mariella guffawed then. “We take it from them now. And later, when they are well again, we will give them instruction in the art. We will show them forever who gives the orders. You and I, Dana my love.”
Dana moved onto Kemper Gruenland and spun him out of it. And Mariella had Tancredi.
Dana moved in with the head toss of a young bull, as he had once moved in at Castletown Landing. Again he landed a series of shocking blows. But there was a difference now. The other time was before Dana had been with rough Brume. The other time Dana had been the strongest fast man from the Bays area: now he was more. He had learned hand combat from the rough master himself, and he was both a stronger and a faster man than he had been before. He timed, he stalked, he exploded, he demolished. As once before at Castletown Landing, he gave three murderous, ox-felling, fist-axe chops at the open face. And he stepped back to let the giant fall. It was not as it had been before. This time the giant did fall unconscious. Dana had brought Kemper down with just nine blows, and had taken none.
And Mariella, lovingly, violently, had stretched Tancredi in an identical bloody unconsciousness on the ground. This wonderful hefty beauty (she can never be praised enough) was unconquerable in this world, even by members of the foul sex.
“You and I, Dana,” she said. “May they never doubt us.”
The two of them shouldered the two large unconscious men and carried them to a nearby hayfield. The loungers and admirers from town and country brought them wine and onions and a long loaf for supper. They lay up there for three days till their two casualties should be ambulant again.
Dana and Mariella spent the time talking of the wonderful world of politics and affairs with townsmen and farmers: drinking brandy and playing a species of darts at the inn, drinking buttermilk and pot beer and playing a species of cards in the farmhouses.
“Who is the King, the King of it all?” Mariella asked once. “Nobody mentions his name, and I am curious.”
“In our own France we have the Citizen-King Louis Philippe, he of the pear-shaped head,” said a farmer.
“I do not mean just the King of France; I mean the King of all places,” Mariella said.
“In your own Spain, the King is a Queen, Isabella II,” a farmer's wife contributed.
“Also in England, the King is a Queen,” said a farm laborer there, “Victoria.”
“In Austria it is Ferdinand I, who is also said to rule in Hungary,” said a knowledgeable farmer. “Hungary, however, is a three-winged chicken, and Szechenyi of the right wing, Deak of the middle wing, Kossuth of the left wing do not acknowledge Ferdinand loudly.”
“No, I mean the King who is King of them all,” Mariella insisted.
“Pius IX is Pope. To me he is above them all,” said a laborer.
“No. I mean his correspondence as King,” Mariella still tried to express it.
“Nicholas is King of Russia, and also of Congress Poland, much against the wishes of the Poles,” the first farmer said. “James Knox Polk is King-President (he who presides) in America. King Frederick William is King of Prussia. Leopold I is King of Belgium. William II is King of the Netherlands.”
“Charles Albert is King of Savoy and Piedmont and Sardinia,” Dana said. “I have met him. Grand Duke Leopold is King of Tuscany. There is a different Ferdinand I who is King of Naples and Sicily. I am not sure, though. He may be dead. Another may be King there now.”
“Frederick Augustus is King of Saxony,” the farm-laborer said.
“There is a feathered bird called King of Saxony,” Mariella said.
“Ernest Augustus is King of Hanover,” the laborer continued. “Louis Augustus is King of Bavaria. Sultan Abdul Mejid is King of Turkey.”
“None of you knows what I am trying to say,” Mariella protested. “The Count Cyril would know who is the legitimate King of the Realms. The Count Cyril is one of his ministers.”
“How could you so much as know that there is a Count Cyril?” the knowledgeable farmer asked. He sounded both surprised and frightened.
There were several sorts of hardships about, the people said. The potatoes everywhere in Europe had partially fa
iled for several years, though not totally except in Ireland. There were various mixups about moneys and wages and debts. People either worked long cruel hours or they were not able to get work at all. The people were not driven down so deeply as they had been in 1789 when they revolted: not even so deeply as they had in 1830 when they revolted. But now they expected more and were entitled to more. Being not so weak as they had been at the other times, the people would be able to revolt more strongly. “I see no end at all to the blood we will spill this time,” the knowledgeable farmer said. “I was a younger man in 1830 and I say that we did not spill nearly enough blood then. Something always seemed to go wrong and thwart us. There are many things about the revolutions that I don't like. I never liked the killing of priests in revolutions; I love the priests as I love my own family. Still, if everyone else is killing them, I suppose that I will do it too. One does what is expected of him if he is a good citizen.”
“We are the first knowledgeable common people,” said the farmer's wife. “Many of us have been to school; in almost every family there is someone who has been to school. This has never happened to the common people in all the world before. It is by this, however, that we have lost confidence in the higher classes. Being ourselves educated now, we see how much is lacking in all education. Before we had it, we thought that education was magic; now we know that it is muck. If the higher classes are on the same level as ourselves in this, then we are not really effecting anything with all of our doings. Our whole country, probably the whole world, is a boat adrift, with a broken tiller, with feeble oars, with rended sails. The navigator has forgotten where we are supposed to be going, and the man who writes the log has forgotten where we have been. I wonder we get along as well as we do. Really, we do not get along badly. Somebody is having fun with us in all this, but we can also have fun (some of it very rough fun) as we go along. God, I believe, is a great humorist. I don't know whether He has it all figured out, or whether He makes it up as He goes along.”
“The fightings and killings have already started in a dozen parts of France,” the knowledgeable farmer said. “This is all to the good. Nobody is quite sure what the fighting is about yet, but it is good to get it started. In many years, it is almost impossible to get conflict started.”
Several days had gone by there in the neighborhood of Marmande. Tancredi and Kemper agreed that it was time to be on the road again. They were not well, but they would die if they lay in that snow-covered hay any longer. Mariella, who was too vital ever to have been cold in her life, did not understand their objections to sleeping under the beautiful sky. She believed that sleeping under the beautiful sky would cure anything. And Dana, who was too stubborn to admit ever having been cold, though he had been, would still go about in his green silk shirts with nothing over them; though he did procure great coats for the two frosty giants.
It was a crisp mild day when they took the road again.
“We may have to hurry,” said Mariella. “Or else we may make it easily and in perfect time with our present good pace. There is one detail I have to settle. Which come sooner, Krakow or Paris?”
“Paris comes very much the sooner,” Dana said. “I believe that perhaps I should serve as guide, Mariella.”
“I believe that you should do no such thing, Dana. If Paris comes sooner then we will make it easily enough. It is Paris that we will be in barely this year then, and Krakow about the same time next year. I was never lost, of course, and now I am even less lost.”
“I also believe that some other one of us should serve as guide,” Kemper said.
“Oh no, absolutely no. I am completely inerrant. No one of you even knows the color of the house on the other side of this hill. How could you be guides to Paris? With the migrating birds you also hear them talk this way. ‘Which comes first, America or Africa?’ you may hear the guide bird ask the others. But he knows the way all the time. He speaks in humor. Do you know that we will meet another member of our forming company at Blois?”
“I myself would not go by way of Blois,” Dana said.
“I know of no one we are to meet this side of Paris,” Kemper told her.
“I did not so much as know that we were a forming company,” Tancredi said.
“Yes, we will meet another companion at Blois, and he will go along with us on our way,” Mariella said. “Our company will be complete then, except for Dana's wife. We will meet her one week later. Then our ring will be closed and invincible. There will be Dana, and his three grenadiers; and my adopted sister, his wife; and myself, Mariella of the Mountains, the old mother goose herself.”
Mariella was by several years the youngest of these young people, but she often spoke of herself as the old goose.
At Blois on the Loire they did meet another member of their forming company.
But it was Kemper who had all sorts of information when they did come into Blois, no mean town.
“Saint Deodatus was a Saint of this town,” Kemper said, “as was Peter of Blois, much later. Louis XII was born in yonder fine château: and several States-General of France were held there.”
“Ah, let us hold another States-General of France there then,” said Dana, “now, of ourselves, and by ourselves. Who is to say that it would be illegal?”
“The older building we come to on the other side is Notre Dame des Aydes,” Kemper said a little later. “It is a place of pilgrimages. It is noted for its statuary. The striking statue before the door there, of the gray limestone and with the inset face of black marble, dates back to the thirteenth century. It was carved by Augustin Blosius, which is to say August of Blois. It is called Le Moine Moricaud.”
“I have taken rooms for all of us at the Red Fox,” the gray limestone statue with the inset face of black marble said. “We will spend several days here and clean up. We will have to present better appearances from now on. We will still be the strong sly fighters, hard as rocks and evasive as fog, but we will also be personages.”
Kemper was startled to hear this, but the others were not. That the statue was a man should have been plain: but he could have passed as a statue among statues there if he wished.
“You talked Dutch at Jane Blaye's place in Hendaye,” Dana said, “and you talked English at the other place there. Now you talk French; you talk it worse than you talk the others, and yet it is plainly your own tongue. Who are you?”
“I am a thirteenth century piece by August of Blois,” the man said. “Kemper has just told you so. But he is wrong to say that my face is of black marble. It is of obsidian stone from the volcano named Soufriere on the island of Basse-Terre.”
“His name is Charley Oceaan, Mariella,” Dana said. “He is a black man.”
“Oh, that is what he is? I thought there was something the matter with him. Whenever I foresaw him, there was this something different about him. Is Oceaan the same as Océano? You are Carlos de la Mar?”
“Likely I am the same person, Mariella,” said Charley. “Let's go along to the inn and roistering house.”
“I remembered the description wrongly,” Kemper was saying. He still wasn't satisfied that what he had pointed out as a statue had turned into a man. “This statue was supposed to be by the North door of Notre Dame des Aydes. And I do remember this man from Hendaye. He was drinking Holland gin and eating cherries.”
“Well then, if my wife foretold him, and if Dana and Kemper know him, he has to be all right,” Tancredi said in accepting Charley. This man named Oceaan was not of vivid resolution; if he had been, he would not have been mistaken for a statue, not even for a moment. He was black, but not of shining spectacular black. In fact, Tancredi Cima the Sardinian was at the same time of a deeper black and a very deep red. No man ever had such depths of color as Tancredi, and no one would ever mistake him for a statue. Charley Oceaan was of a tame color beside Tancredi, but there were some indications that Charley was not a completely tame man.
“Where is the island of Basse-Terre whence you have your face?”
Dana asked Charley Oceaan a little later. Now they were at the Red Fox, the inn and roistering house.
“You astonish me, Dana,” Charley said with puzzled amusement. “On Basse-Terre, where I was born, there is a site which the people call The House of Dana Coscuin. The house is not built yet, but all the people know where it will be. There is also a less inhabited site which the people call The Grave of Dana Coscuin, though the grave is neither digged nor filled, and will not be for many years, I hope.”
“It is on a hill, the grave is, and one can see the ocean on three sides from there,” Mariella Cima said.
“Yes, Mariella,” Charley agreed. There was something about this Charley Oceaan that puzzled Dana and would puzzle him for all the years to the end. Was Charley a very simple man, or was he highly complex? He had the ease and sureness that can belong either to complete simplicity or complete sophistication. He was a black man who had learned several languages and sets of manners. He had traveled; he moved well in any company; he, indeed, was hard as rocks and evasive as fog; he was intelligent, and he showed indications of being witty. But had he lost anything of his simplicity?
“And how am I to come to this island of Basse-Terre, Charley?” Dana asked. “How am I to build a house there, and how am I to die there? And me not even acquainted with the place.”
“I believe you will first go there with me when I go back to visit my first home,” Charley said. “I believe you will become attached to it then.”
“How did you leave it?” Dana asked.
“I left it on a Dutch ship, that being the first to sail from there after I had made up my mind. As to why I left, I must tell you some of the things that my father used to say. He was a very poor and unschooled black man of Basse-Terre which is also called French Guadeloupe. However, he had a very large head stuffed full of brains. My own head is also stuffed full of them, but it is physically much smaller than the head of my father.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 16
