The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “ ‘Basse-Terre is the fairest land in the world,’ he used to say, ‘but there is something very much wrong with it. It is a little land on a leash of a bigger land. There is something wrong with the leash, there is something wrong with the bigger land, there is something wrong with the whole world. What is wrong, we must make right, Charley. I will work here to make it right with our island. You go out, Charley, and make it right with the rest of the world. It has to be done from both ends. We will not see each other again in this life. When you know that I am dead, though, come back here and pay me honors. At that time, you will have come to a pause in your own task, and a change in the scene of it will be indicated.’ I did as my father told me. I am about the business of straightening up the world now. You four will work with me in this for a while, and for a shorter while a fifth person will work with us. As to our straightening up the world, we won't be able to do a perfect job of it. But, should one somehow in some other context see the world as it would have been without our intervention, that one could immediately see the very great difference.”

  “How will you know when your father is dead, Charley?” Dana asked.

  “Oh, he'll send me an Ocean dream to inform me of it.”

  “Why do you ask foolish questions when you could readily guess the answers, Dana?” Mariella asked. “Charley will think you are stupid.”

  Yes, they were in Blois and at the Red Fox for several days. They spent Christmas in Blois. Then went to mass at the Capuchin house in the morning. Then each of the five of them found a beggar, and they brought them all together to the Red Fox for a royal and roaring feast.

  “What we need is a king who is a king,” one of the beggars said. “There is no sense at all in having a Citizen King. We are either a kingdom or we are not. We must be a true Kingdom if we are to mirror the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Who ever heard of the Democracy of Heaven? Who ever heard of a Citizen God? We are an imperfect mirror, and that is the source of all our troubles.”

  (All beggars, as you may or may not know, are staunch conservatives. They are monarchists in their very bones. If they are at the very bottom, they want to know that there is a very top.)

  “What we need is more charity,” said another of the beggars. “We know that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and we have taken the less blessed role. But it worries me, and it should worry everybody, when the givers do not give as they should, when they do not avail themselves of this Heaven-sent grace. We worry for their souls. We ourselves in our lesser role, are not deficient. Do we ever refuse to accept? We will do, in our own small and imperfect way, everything that we possibly can to assist our betters to this grace. We pray day and night that the more fortunate ones may attain this grace and finally be saved.”

  “What we need is more meat and less potatoes,” said a third of the beggars. “There is less potatoes, it is true, from the state of that harvest, but there is not more meat. I sometimes believe that the richer folks are keeping it all to themselves. Onions and cabbages and potatoes are all very well, but there should be more meat. We are only trying to assist you to grace when we suggest this.”

  “Oh, there is more meat,” Charley Oceaan told them. “It is roasting in big joints. It will be done soon. The meat that is in the soup is not all the meat. There is pig and beef coming, and goose. And bread with live honey, and other beer and other wine.”

  “What we need also is warmer clothes,” said the fourth of the beggars. “There are folks so warmly clad that they do not even notice that winter has rolled around now. But it is here, I tell you. It snowed yesterday and it will snow again tomorrow. There was ice on the ponds this morning and it is hardly gone yet.”

  “But Mariella has given a new cloak to each one of you,” Tancredi pointed out.

  “Those things?” the fifth beggar was contemptuous. “The woman must have bought them at the thieves’ market. Oh, they are warm enough, I suppose, but they are low things with no style at all. They are things such as are given only to very poor people. I believe that very poor grace attaches to the giving of poor gifts. I will go even further. I will say that these cloaks are in the Spanish style, and as such they are only fit to be worn by Spanish people or by mules.”

  There is no way of telling whether Mariella was hurt by these remarks. She had bought the cloaks at the thieves’ market, and they were somewhat in the poor Spanish style.

  “Do you people ascribe to the Rights of Man?” asked one of the beggars (he was either the second or the third beggar).

  “We ascribe to the Rights,” Kemper told him. “We do not ascribe to the society of that name. In any case, the society has disappeared.”

  “In any case, the society has formed into a dozen new societies,” that beggar said, “and their ideas will never be put down.”

  “Some of their ideas will be put down,” Charley Oceaan said, “and some of their ideas will be elevated. For that we are here.”

  “It was said of old that you could know the Devil by his cloven hoof,” the fifth beggar said. “I say that you can know the Devil by his cloven tongue. You all of you speak two ways and you all of you are foreigners. What do you do in France?”

  “France is the theater in which the world-play is playing this year,” Charley Oceaan explained. “We are characters in it. If we were not here the play would be less or different. We have some ideas about how this play should develop. All persons at all times have the right to be in France and this has always been understood. There must, in any world, be one country in which things are first attempted and tested.”

  The beggars became less surly after a little while. They were loosened up by the other beer and other wine, by the bread with live honey, by the big roast joints. But there was still some complaint.

  “You yourselves are drinking one sort of wine and you are giving us a different sort,” the second beggar complained.

  “That is true,” said Charley Oceaan, “and that is the way it will remain. I had received certain bottles, sent to me by unusual courier from Count Cyril himself. They are for myself and for the other members, and they are to celebrate the forming of the company. I suppose they are excellent: they are, at any rate, better than any I have ever had before. But they are a gift that cannot be translated. We are the receivers, not the givers, of this excellent wine. What we give you is good, but we are not counts.”

  “I have heard of this Count Cyril,” the third beggar said. “I knew a man, a man of the people and of blood, who would turn aside and spit green at the mention of his name. A curse on all who drink his wine!”

  The wine from the Count Cyril was not all that extraordinary. It was good only in the way that all unspoiled wine is good. It was an ordinary yellow wine, though Dana called it golden. It was a commercial wine, and the purveyor had marked on the bottles that it was sacramental wine. The only one of them who knew (with his jumbled wealth of useless information) that the purveyor of the wine had been out of business for three hundred years was Kemper Gruenland. Kemper (and this was unusual for him) did not immediately blurt out this information. (An ordinary wine will not usually keep well for more than three hundred years.)

  But it did really become a roaring and a royal feast, especially after the beggars went and brought their women in for it. There was also found for the feast a piper who made music almost as raunchy as that of the horn-piper at Jane Blaye's at Hendaye.

  And in the morning, the Select Company started for Paris. This was Dana and his three grenadiers, Tancredi and Kemper and Charley Oceaan, and Mariella.

  “We will go by railway,” Charley Oceaan said. “It is a disgrace that Mariella has never ridden on the railway. As a common thing it is half as old as she is, and in a very few years it will reach to every corner of France. I am not sure of you others either, whether you have truly enjoyed this thing or whether you lie.”

  “I have ridden on a railway car in my native Sardinia,” Tancredi stated.

  “That cannot be,” Charley pr
otested. “There are not, as yet, any railways in Sardinia.”

  “But there is one. It is in an open-faced mine there, and I rode once on one of its cars, atop the diggings.”

  “A real railway train pulled by a steam engine?” Charley asked unbelieving.

  “No. The cars were pulled by mules. But it ran on rails, hardwood timbers with iron strips on their tops, and the cars had flanged wheels for them. That is what it is to be a railway.”

  “And I rode a railway in my own state, one of the lesser Germanies, and I will not tell you which,” Kemper maintained.

  “That is barely possible,” Charley admitted. “There are several short lines in the Germanies.”

  “I myself ride them constantly,” Dana said. “But I believe that you, Charley, never have.”

  “That is true; you have caught me out. But I will ride this time, now, today, if (I have not checked it yet) a train runs today to Paris. The Count would want us to ride this way at least once.”

  They checked. The train did run that very morning to Paris. They loaded on it and they rode. This was luxury, though a dusty and grimy sort of luxury. Each coach was of the size and shape of a ten-team coach such as runs along the roads, and there were half a dozen of these following each other in a row which was called a train. Now they were personages, people of importance. Poor people did not yet ride on the railways.

  “There has been a great mistake made,” Mariella said when they had ridden in their new luxury for four hours. “I believe that this railway train does not go by way of Montrouge. Let us tell the driver that he must put it onto other rails that will go to Montrouge.”

  “Why would anybody want to go to Montrouge?” Kemper asked.

  “That is where is Dana's wife,” Mariella said. “She is not exactly in Paris on this day. She is in Montrouge.”

  “Dana doesn't have any wife,” Charley reminded them. “But I suppose we could go into Paris on the railway and then walk out or somehow ride out to Montrouge. It can't be more than twelve miles.”

  “Well, I suppose that we can tell the driver of this machine to put it on other rails immediately. I will do that.”

  “There aren't any rails that go to Montrouge, Mariella,” Charley told her.

  “Then we will make the driver stop this machine right now, and we will walk to Montrouge.”

  “That seems foolish, Mariella,” Kemper said.

  “It is not at all foolish,” Tancredi opposed him. “My wife is never foolish. It is good that we make them stop this right now and get off it. I have a premonition that this train will be exploded and very many people killed. All Sardinians have premonitions like that from time to time.”

  “I have discovered that Sardinian premonitions are almost always wrong,” Kemper said.

  “Almost always. Not quite always,” Tancredi admitted.

  “We will make the driver stop this machine right now, and we will get off and walk to Montrouge,” Dana stated. “We must trust Mariella in her intuitions. We must even trust Tancredi a little bit in his premonitions.”

  They made the driver stop the railroad train. He objected strongly. There was not a scheduled stop here, he said. He had to be threatened with sharp knives and with pistols before he stopped it, and all the trainmen were surly at being made to stop.

  The Select Company got off the train and walked to Montrouge. It was only twenty miles, off to the west.

  The railway train itself exploded in Alfortville and very many people, more than twenty, were killed. Men of a certain revolutionary sort had put explosives on the train and fused them to explode in the middle of Paris, but they had exploded sooner.

  It was late in the afternoon when they came into Montrouge. Charley Oceaan believed that they should either take rooms at a public place at once, or find out if there was an evening coach going on in to Paris, or —

  “ — or pick out a wife quickly, Dana, one that will satisfy Mariella, and then we will find out a priest, and have it done and then consummated. What do you think of that little prairie chicken there, Dana? What do you think of her, Mariella? Will she not do nicely?”

  “No. There is only one who will do for Dana.”

  “Do you know her name or her appearance or where she is to be found?” Kemper asked.

  “No. I do not know her appearance, and I have forgotten her name. Should I remember a name forever? I almost know where she is to be found. We will go down this street here, and then we will take another street. Then I think that we will be almost there.”

  They went down that street; they took another street; they took a third. They came to a small cafe section. They came to one cafe that affected an English look, that had almost the appearance of an English tea-room.

  “We go in here,” Mariella said. And they all went in. The place was nearly filled. Some of the people did have an English look to them, and some of them were really drinking tea.

  “Oh, it is Dana my love!” came a loud and pleasant voice. “It is Dana himself, and his company of bugs. Dana my love, come here.”

  It was a largish hearty girl, and she patted her woolen knees. It was, in fact, the girl named Elaine Kingsberry, one of the English ladies who had been in Jane Blaye's place in Hendaye, and who had also been in the more modish place there. And with her was the other English lady who had been in the same places.

  Dana went and sat on Elaine's woolen knees and kissed her soundly for old acquaintance. She had been a fine girl, but almost mysterious in some of the things she had hinted at.

  “There is something else behind the surface,” Charley Oceaan said. “Dana remembers her. I remember her a little. But how could Mariella possibly know about her? How could she have brought us here so directly? She is the one, is she not, Mariella?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Mariella mumbled.

  “Come you all over, the Dana company!” Elaine Kingsberry called loudly. “We will make them move tables together and have room for all of you. Oh come come, friends of Dana are also our friends forever.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Mariella mumbled. “He has the wrong girl.” But she went over to the tables with the rest of them.

  “This great long man is Tancredi Cima, Elaine,” Dana said.

  “Incantevol,” said Tancredi, for he was the dark gallant with the ladies.

  “And this huge fair-head is Kemper Gruenland.”

  “I saw him at Hendaye,” Elaine said, “he did not see me.”

  “This black man with the green heart is Charley Oceaan,” Dana announced.

  “I also saw him at Hendaye,” Elaine bowed.

  “And he did see you,” Charley offered.

  “And this mother goose of all of us is Mariella Cima,” Dana introduced.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Mariella protested. “Dana, you have the wrong girl.”

  “I think so too,” the other English lady said.

  “Are you all going into Paris?” the slightly flamboyant Elaine asked. “We came out but the day before yesterday, and we are going in again tomorrow. We will all travel together and become the finest of friends. Then I must go back to England very soon, but Catherine will be staying here.”

  “Oh Dana, Dana, you have the wrong girl,” Mariella still protested. “Go sit on the other one's knees.”

  “Yes, do, Dana!” Elaine cried. “She loves things like that.” And Dana rather hesitantly slid onto the knees of the other English lady.

  “I haven't even introduced my best friend,” Elaine said. “Everybody, this is Catherine Dembinska.”

  IX

  OH, THE STEEP ROOFS OF PARIS

  “Oh, Elaine is my cloak, she is my shield, she is my disguise,” Catherine Dembinska was saying. “Who would ever notice me when she is around? Now she is going back to England again, before the fun starts really. Then I will have lost my shield, and perhaps then somebody will look at me and do away with me.”

  You could not say that Catherine Dembinska was pinkish. There is no word anywhere for her
coloration, unless it is an obscure word in Polish, to be applied only to certain Polish persons. Certainly you could not call Catherine ruddy. Ruddy implies something coarse-grained, and Catherine was fine. She was fair, and something more highly colored than the fair. She had a deep grin, and eyes that danced like swamp-fire on St. John's Eve.

  “A vile townsman of my own has seen us twice, at two different times and places,” Catherine was telling. “He looked at us very intently. No, he did not: he looked at Elaine very intently. He actually gaped, and he seemed to be trying to remember something. What he was trying to remember was something he had seen in the corner of his eye — me. After all, one of the things he has on his list to do is to kill me. But the very looks of Elaine overpowered him both times. Is she not striking? Is she not elegant?”

  Yes, Elaine Kingsberry was rather striking. She was showy, and she was almost elegant. She was of an infectious good humor, she was of a merry voice, and she was pretty. But whyever should she draw eyes away from Catherine Dembinska?

  Elaine was a largish hearty girl, true. But Catherine was no smaller, and was no less hearty — though, perhaps, a little slower of outburst. Catherine had a deeper grin that Elaine, and more roguish eyes; and Elaine's was deep, and they were roguish. Catherine was much prettier than the pretty Elaine. She may even have been beautiful: this is hard to say. Catherine may have been a little thicker, and she was at least as tall. She had all the poised power that only a prodigy can have.

  An old man on a mountain had once said that this Catherine was of startling intelligence, of a tomorrowish program, of a green-growing intuition, and of a corona-like flaming personality. Catherine herself had written that she was the only complete adept at the dogma of the Green Revolution. And she had also written that she would teach Dana, that she would use him, and that she would marry him. And this Catherine had also been distantly-known and foreknown by Mariella Cima: there is no higher recommendation than that.