The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  But France had her Republic, her second.

  And that three-day frolic, that was the (almost bloodless) Revolution of 1848? No, that was only the final scenes of the comedy, The Eve of the Revolution, and the farcical introduction to the Revolution itself. There was more to come in the months ahead.

  A thing happened to Dana Coscuin in Paris that had previously happened to him in Turin. A gentleman, an educated man from his aspect, called after him in the street.

  “Wait, sir! Wait, my Count! Wonder of wonders that you are in Paris!”

  Dana almost guessed the mistake from the man's approach, and he was doubly puzzled.

  “Count, Count Cyril,” the man called, “ — but you are not Count Cyril.”

  “I try to be as like him as I can,” Dana said, “but I am disadvantaged, never having met him in the flesh.”

  “You are not the Count Cyril Prasinos,” the man said, “You are a much younger man. But I am glad to see you, sir. You are a fine young man.”

  “Do I look like Count Cyril?” Dana asked.

  “Not really. But it is something in the shape of you, something in your walk. Good day. I am glad that I spoke to you.”

  “Where did you see the Count?” Dana asked.

  “One may not speak of that. It is secret. Good day, young sir.”

  Dana had his own small following in Paris. He had become something of a symbol to a small group of Irishmen, freedom advocates, who were in Paris. Dana didn't understand why he was a symbol, neither did this mixed bunch of Irishman. Dana knew less of affairs than any of the bunch.

  Catherine Dembinska had become very much a symbol to a larger number of Polish freedom-seekers; and Catherine did know as much of affairs as any of them.

  “It has almost gone well here in Paris, for the first little part of it,” she said, “and there is some hope that it will go well in Poland. It has been almost bloodless here. That is one thing, although it is not the main thing. Nothing has really been done, of course, but space has been cleared so that something may possibly be done. And the witherers, the poisoners have stumbled and done badly. They never cease, though, and we may not.

  “This has gone on forever, Dana, though it is hard to trace through garbled history. And it must still go on forever. For every year, for every decade, for every life it will go on. We are the People Militant on Earth until we finally join the People Triumphant in the Kingdom, which is not quite a ministerial kingdom, though we will all have our designations in it. For all your own life and for the life of all your children, you will carry on the green battle, Dana, and I will not be with you.”

  “You will always be with me, Catherine. Even the loss of a little flesh, should that premonition of yours prove true, will not inhibit that. You are always with me, my bird, my lark.”

  “You called the little brown-skin your lark too.”

  “How could you know that? Yes, I did and I do. We will never have enough larks. I will not give up on anyone I have ever loved, and you do not give up on me, not even if one of us must leave the world. You keep something of me, or I will keep something of you.”

  “Oh, don't keep my head as Jane Blaye keeps that of her husband Christian, Dana. Some lesser bone or bone splinter will do.”

  “I will see to that, if that time ever comes.”

  “I and thou, Dana, and the pleasure of each other's company,” came the overpowering voice on the first day following that three-day farce. “The gutters are not as red as I had hoped, but let that not spoil our friendship.”

  It was big Ifreann Chortovitch, the man who never slept, though his eyes were red-rimmed as if he needed sleep.

  “Get back in your rocks, ogre,” Dana called with a merry recklessness. “You are a sick stumble-clown. Be gone.”

  “Oh, I'm not out of the rocks at all, Dana. You misunderstand me. I'm out of the Ocean, a saltier and more sulphurous one than you ever sailed. I really am the Son of the Devil, you know, and I make looser deals than my father does. I know that you are not above deals with the Devil. Take a chance. Come on an orgy with me. We haven't really known each other, and I have so little time.”

  “I'm selective even in my mates for orgies, Ifreann. You're a clod, an excrement.”

  “I will play on your weakness again. You are afraid to be afraid. I say that you are afraid to drink with me, to sing with me, to outrage the populace with me; you are afraid to match stories with me, to be man against me. You are as afraid as is big Kemper who comes here.”

  “Big Kemper is not afraid of you, clumsy Ifreann,” Kemper said, for he had just arrived, to the two of them in the street there.

  “Did you know, Dana, that big Kemper is going away to the Germanies with me in just three days?” Ifreann asked.

  “No. Kemper is going away to the Germanies against you, Ifreann,” Kemper said. “I am not sure in how many days I will go.”

  “I am a man magnet!” Ifreann shouted. “You laugh, Dana. You laugh, Kemper. Wait. Wait a short time only. I draw the others to me here. They cannot refuse the dark enticement. Did I not write to you, Dana, before you even knew what company you would be joined in, that there would be four of you and that I would manipulate you in a great unmelody, that the incomplete music in each of you would be blended with my power into a devilish bit of art? This is the ‘Paris in the Springtime’ that I promised you, though it is not quite spring. You see. They come.”

  Ifreann was already quite drunk. It might be that they had never seen him sober, but neither had they ever seen him so dark and glowing.

  “You lie, dog devil,” came the strange carrying whisper of Tancredi Cima, and Tancredi appeared still some distance down the street but striding resolutely towards them. “You lie that I am afraid to drink with you, to sing with you, to commit outrage with you. You lie that I am afraid to match stories and prophecies with you. You lie that I am afraid to be a man against you. Shrivel, big man. I will show you how we kick devils along like footballs in Sardinia.”

  “Have I said these things?” Ifreann said innocently and with multiple winking.

  “You have a whisper as carrying as my own,” Tancredi charged. “Yes, you have said these things, you have whispered these things. Have at you, dog devil! I will see you with your tail between your legs.”

  “One. Two. Three,” Ifreann counted. “Here comes number four. He will seem surprised to see us gathered here, but he will not be. You are afraid, Oceaan, you are afraid to set your spook against my spook.”

  It was Charley Oceaan, dapper and dark, who came. “I'll kill you in your cups, Ifreann,” he said. “That is the Devil's own way to die.”

  “I have another house here in Paris that you don't know about,” Ifreann said. “Here it is, right at hand.”

  Ifreann unlocked the door of a house there and entered, and the four young men followed him in.

  There was a region in the head or person of Dana Coscuin, there is a region in every man (one does not know whether there is a corresponding region in women) that is a veritable underworld, a wrong place that should not be, and is. This region was called Sheol by the Jews, and Hades or Kolasis by the Gentiles. The Holy Vulgate names it Infernum, and the Irish call it Ifreann which is the same word badly adapted. Many primitive persons call it the Ocean; they do not mean the known ocean of the world, but another one. Charley Oceaan called this place Océan Affreux. Tancredi Cima called it simply Sotterraneo. Kemper Gruenland called it Luecke, the void. Doctors, not understanding it, once called it the Subconscious; later, understanding it even less, they called it the Unconscious.

  It is not a state or a disposition. It is a place and a substance. It is fragmented, but it is not all in the mind or in minds. Sometimes it overlays a whole worldly region. Sometimes it is even behind a door. Now it was behind a particular door in the rue de la Ferme-des-Mathurins, a short street off the Madeleine.

  Four men of a company followed a devil in by that door, and inside they found that they were on the inside of the
ir own heads.

  This house of Ifreann Chortovitch had aspects which each of the four young men had believed were to be found only in his own private underworld. It was as though one's dirtiest thoughts were all set out in a line and a garish light played on them. What sort of a house was this which struck such dismal accord with the several private worlds? Oh, it was a comfortable and well-appointed piece of Hell. This Ifreann who had brought them in there was a haunt, a spook, a real monster unchained; but each of the four had known the real and private face of this monster before seeing it now, each had known it in the intimacy of his own head, of his own under-brain.

  Shock at this, but by no mean silent shock. That would not be permitted here. Be it said that the monster was a hearty host. Often there is a heartiness in a hell-company that simply should not be. Quickly, immediately, as though happening before, as though intruded backwards in time, there was the shouting, the towering unmelody, the scarlet bloodship. There was crooked revel. And time itself was crooked. This had long been going on when it started.

  They drink Holland gin in Hell. That had always been known. This is not to demean the drink by associations. They acquired a taste for it early, and they do not easily change. Ifreann had lugs and cases of Holland gin for his guests. They drank a lot of it. It had been near evening when they went through the door, before time turned crooked.

  They sing a lot of very loud unmelody in Hell. There really was a devilish bit of art in the incomplete melody of Dana and Tancredi and Kemper and Charley Oceaan blended in with the overpowering blast of Ifreann Chortovitch. This song, if it was song, had the distorted element of other things: it had been going on for a long time when it started.

  It was song to raise the roof by, it was song to drive stout men into the ground like stakes by, it was music to geld behemoths by, to sink ships by, or to hang burghers by.

  All four of these young men had known hearty male bashes, the machada, the he-goat mobbing. They had giant-sized orgies in the Germanies; the Teutonic sagas carry only pale echoes of them. In Ireland they sometimes combine drinkings with horse-breakings and rip-tide boatings and cudgel fighting, and these parties are often rampant. In Sardinia, drinking men will go after wild bulls to take them by the horns and try to break their necks; or they will attempt to climb precipices at night or blindfolded. On Basse-Terre, which is French Guadeloupe, young buckos full of sugar rum will swim out into sharkful waters and slash their own forearms bloody to call the long sharks to the challenge of the short sharp knives. “And the way we hunt lions in Senegal …” But had Charley Oceaan been in Senegal? Charley had been everywhere. All of them had been everywhere. They were hombrones all.

  But they had not before been in this particular company. What matter? The pure of heart cannot be harmed even by the presence of the Devil. But what of those who only comparatively speaking are pure of heart? What of those who have been bescrubbed again and again and can come only dirty gray in heart and soul? What of those who have achieved purity of heart no more than three times in their lifetimes and then had fallen abysmally? What of those who are going to achieve it next season, after certain other things have finally been put behind? What of Dana and Tancredi and Kemper and Charley Oceaan?

  There was loud degradation that cannot be put into words, and shortened or distorted time. There had been one morning come since this had started, but no one had paid attention to it.

  Possibly there were elements of hallucination here; possibly there were elements of literal hellishness. But there was certainly adventure, beyond wild horse breaking in Ireland or shark baiting off Basse-Terre; there was incredibly daring conflict with monsters that are clear off-world. There were hearty and heroic encounters, and deep Ifreann was the core of the achieving fellowship. These were not to be remembered things; they were far too strong for that. They were things that no man with proper man's soul in him would be able to do. Here were hyena hunts through the iron meadows of Hell.

  Then more vulgar and less heroic things, but still towering in their hold. Monsters yet, violent and smelly monsters. There was illusion, and there was reality betrayed. There were visions of children spitted on spits and roasted. But the young men could not reach out and touch these sights. If it was Ifreann illusion, then Ifreann was a master illusionist. There was one who began to gather himself against Ifreann, but this was hardly noticed by the other three.

  Knocking off the tops of Holland gin bottles, and knocking off the heads of pitiful old women. Drinking the staggering stuff, and it was drinking the blood of infants. Knifing tiger sharks, and it was knifing your own grandfathers. Cutting up roast meat on the plate, and eating the very eyes and cheeks of your present comrades.

  Sadism and perversion presented on a new track then. Maidens deflowered by giant hounds, and rotted bodies coupling with slavering devils. More rapid, more shaking perversions on Ifreann's bioscope, or thanatoscope. It was here, however, that Charley Oceaan challenged Ifreann, spook against spook, illusion against illusion; and he cracked all that devil's projections down the middle.

  But time was still out of joint, or rushing by. It was second night, it had been second night for a long time. Oceaan cracked Ifreann's face down the middle too, it seemed, for that man was now crazy-cracked, cracked even for a devil, blind and slavering and falling.

  “Wait, Oceaan,” Tancredi had whispered out of twisted lips, “don't hunt them all off the scene. There was one creature there, one witch-lioness, I want her now.”

  “Be a clear man, Tancredi,” Oceaan laughed, “or I will spook you also. I will crack you wide open. I can conjure also. I have just done so. There is coming for you, Tancredi, a more fierce female than ever that witch-lioness.”

  “Not — not — ”

  “Yes. She will be here quite soon, Tancredi.”

  There had been considerable feasting in the night and day and into the second night. It had not actually been roast child, as Ifreann had set up or tried to set up by illusion; it had mostly been roast pork and roast kid.

  There had been tall stories told, the tallest in any of their lifetimes. These four young men had not been afraid to match the devil, story for story, prophecy for prophecy. More than that, there had been stories created. Did you ever hear a man vaunt that he had drunk the devil himself under the table?

  Four young men, Dana, Tancredi, Kemper, and Oceaan could now make that vaunt. They had done it. Ifreann Chortovitch was under one of the great tables, cracked and crazy and dispossessed and stupid.

  It hadn't been a short thing, though it melts all into one blur. It had been a night and a day and another night of it. It had a stench now; yet there would later be a wrong nostalgic flavor of it that would be with the four men all their lives. They had had the pleasure of the Devil's company, and it had been crookedly memorable.

  Charley Oceaan had been making up packages and bundles for some time, papers and registers and things from Ifreann's crooked house. Then, just at second morning, Catherine Dembinska came. She opened the door. She had a hand cart with her.

  “I will kill you, girl,” Ifreann mumbled from the floor, still apparently unconscious.

  “Yes. But not this morning,” Catherine said. Catherine and Charley Oceaan loaded the packages and bundles of Ifreann's things onto the hand cart.

  “A chilly good morning to you, Dana,” Catherine said. “You are out of my heart for the while.”

  Dana was weary and confused. He had drunk the Devil under the table, but what else had he done?

  “Wait until this flavor leaves me,” Dana said. “Then it may be that you will take me in again.”

  Mariella Cima came in. She was more ingenious and more valid than the most vivid of Ifreann's creations. She was a more fearsome female even than the witch-lioness that had been one of the final projections. She took the dazed Tancredi by the ear. She literally lifted him up and dragged him out of there by that ear. She ruptured the form of it, she tore the lobe. And that distorted lobe would dangle on T
ancredi for the rest of his life.

  But Tancredi got off easier than any of the other three of them. A distorted ear is nothing to the distortions that had taken place in Kemper, in Charley Oceaan, in Dana Coscuin. One does not hold high party with the Devil and come away from it unmarked.

  XI

  A BLIND MAN IN THE DARK

  Catherine had become listless, and charming. It was all in learning how to look at her. Dana had once looked at Elaine Kingsberry when Catherine was present: that would almost be impossible now. There was no limit to the attractiveness of Catherine Dembinska, except the limits of the eye and mind of the beholder. The more educated the eye, the more wonderful was Catherine.

  “How could it be that Ifreann has an Irish name (the Irish name for Hell) and he was born in your Krakow of Poland?” Dana asked Catherine when they were together in the lull days between the storms.

  “This Ifreann, this devil does not have any Polish blood at all, Dana; I am happy to say that,” Catherine told it. “Ifreann's father was the Devil. His mother was a governess from Ireland and her name was Katie Noonan. Thus he was without Polish blood on either his human or his unhuman side. Ifreann was born in a hay field between Skawine and Krakow in the year 1830.”

  “1830? That can't be, Catherine. That would make him no more than eighteen years old, younger than either of us.”

  “Who is to say that devils and humans age at the same rate, Dana? Besides, it is said that he appeared about twelve years old when he was born. Katie Noonan was firm in her own statements; so ‘The Devil’ was written in the line for the Father on Ifreann's certificate. And then they asked her what she wanted to name the young brat. ‘Aw hell!’ (Och Ifreann is what Katie said in Irish) ‘Does it matter?’ So they wrote down the name Ifreann.

  “This Ifreann killed children around Krakow in his precocious years. Myself and other contemporary children gave testimony to this, but we were not believed. It was said that wolves or other animals actually killed those children, but we knew better.”