The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Whether that Son of the Devil is half Irish or not, Catherine, I do not know,” Dana said, “but I believe that you must be. That account you have given has winter peat-fire smoke in it. Come with me now and make appointment, and we can be married tomorrow.”

  “No, Dana. Why do men want to interfere in these things anyway? Let the woman tell what man she will marry, and when: and let the man accept it. I have already told you that I intend to marry you. When I am ready to tell you, I will tell you when it will be.”

  “Will it be this year?”

  “Yes, late this year, Dana.”

  “Here in Paris?”

  “No, it will be near my own Krakow, and a little towards Skawine, in whatever country they happen to be at that time.”

  “My company has broken up, Catherine. I'd thought it would go on forever.”

  “No, it has not and it will not break up. Not even death will break it. I myself will still be a member of your company after I am dead. It is true that Kemper Gruenland has gone off to the Germanies. So has Ifreann, the enemy of your company. There're some rough things coming to that region. The Germanies are always much more violent than France, but that violence is less bruited around. It is true that Tancredi and Mariella have gone off to Sardinia. This Sardinia must be nine times blasted in its own fire and nine times purified in its own blood before it will be able to effect its own leadership in the movements. There must be a myriad of slashing teeth pulled there before that island can be trusted with even a bloody leadership. And there must be many a hot man murdered before it can come to a rational violence. Big Kemper has done some of this selective murder and fang-pulling. Yourself and rough Brume have done some. And now Tancredi goes home to this task; and Mariella brings Spain to Sardinia. Spain has gone there often.

  “But the world cannot do without the strength of little Sardinia. Its charcoal-burners really did start the fires that will burn much of the world. That fire is needed, but it cannot burn in every direction at once. There are even some elements of that murderous madness that are needed by the world. Consider poor Jude Revanche whom you blinded. Dana, the world couldn't do without his power. It would have been a little lacking if he had not lived.”

  “Even Charley Oceaan is going to leave town, I believe,” Dana said. “And if you leave then, Catherine, I will be alone and aimless. My own company will be scattered, and my own task, whatever it is, will be still largely unbegun.”

  “Ah, your task on these lull days is to sit and talk with me, Dana, and watch the world for every betraying sign. It's a walleyed unbroken colt, this world, but it has the look in its walleyes before it acts.”

  Dana and Catherine were eating at an open-air table in the Madeleine, on a day less chilly than those before. And Dana was back in Catherine's heart.

  “Was it not, Catherine, that yourself and Charley Oceaan planned the whole Ifreann orgy so that you could rob Ifreann of documents?”

  “No, of course not, Dana. Ifreann himself planned the Ifreann orgy. He really is a man-magnet when he's in his strength. That thing had to happen. It was written in your own black stars, in those of all of you. We planned only to take a slight advantage of what had to happen.”

  “Was it only a slight advantage, Catherine?”

  “Yes. The documents, the registers are so ambiguous as to be maddening. Part of them are clearly frauds and were meant to deceive if found. Others of them are genuine, but still they are in their own false framework and they can only be followed by cork-screw minds.”

  “Has it ever been serious, Catherine, or is it only the game? The events in Paris, so far, are more comic.”

  “Dana, it has been deadly serious from the earliest beginnings, and it is a chain of miracles that the world has not already died of its own hot business. There is really a furnace burning under our feet. We live on a frail framework above this everlasting furnace, and parts of the framework are always catching flame and falling off into the deep flame-ocean. There is purifying fire and there is foul fire; and that under our feet is foul. Just before the framework breaks up and falls into this furnace, someone shoves in a reinforcing plank or two to strengthen the shaky over-structure; and this will help for a day, for an hour, for a second. And then, twice as much of our support will fall off into the flame.

  “Dana, the enemy of honest revolution is this murderous under-thing which also steals the holy name of revolution. How can we ever keep it clear from the other? How can you do it, Dana, when Ifreann has planted so many things in your bemused skull?”

  “He went off more bemused than ourselves. Let him shout to all the little Germanies! Someone will shove in the green-juice timbers to shore up the structure in the Germanies also. Will you be in Paris, Catherine, when it heats up here again?”

  “I will be here through March and April and most of May. I'll be gone in June.”

  “But June is when the fun will happen.”

  “No. It isn't fun. Your two devils, the Elena and the Ifreann, have given you the false bit about Merry Murder and Merry Hell. It isn't merry, and they aren't. They're hysterical.”

  “Elena Prado, I think it, I have dreamed it, is one-eyed now and her face all scar tissue. But she is still snaky-triumphant, and she is still merry.”

  “No, she isn't. I am, though. It keeps breaking out in me no matter what. I want to shout and dance on roofs. Oh, life and death can be merry enough; they are to me. They aren't to them.”

  Charley Oceaan stopped by their table and sat with them. He talked thoughtfully:

  “It isn't certain that I will see you again in Paris, Dana,” he said, “though I will be here for quite a while. And it isn't certain that I will ever see you again in this world, Catherine. Dana, I make appointment with you now: meet me in Amsterdam on the very first day of next year. You will need me then, Dana. You will be in a bleak time of it. We'll go off to another part of the world, to another world that has only half a sky over it. Catherine, I also make appointment with you, but I cannot tell the time or place of it, nor which world it will be in.”

  “Ah, we'll both keep our appointments with you, Charley,” Catherine told him.

  They were drinking sour sauterne and eating little fishcakes. It must have been for penance; there were better things to eat and drink there. They were all keeping a penitential lenten-time that spring.

  “Where are you going in June, Catherine?” Dana asked.

  “I am going to Praha, which the French and the English call Prague. I have Slavic business there. And also, as is fitting, I will carry to Bohemia and Moravia the Green Scapular of Saint Cyril. That is where he worked, you know, and where he planted his green branch.”

  Persons who have heard of all the known seventeen small scapulars may still be ignorant of the Green Scapular of Saint Cyril. It was a private sign, and it was worn by only six persons in the world: Dana Coscuin, Kemper Gruenland, Tancredi Cima, Mariella Cima, Catherine Dembinska, Charley Oceaan. It had been devised by Dana and sewn by Catherine.

  The nineteenth century was the scapular century. The original scapular was the sleeveless monks’ robe falling down from the shoulders, the scapulae. This was the large scapular, differing in the various orders. Then certain lay persons, about the time of the Crusades, adopted the small scapular worn under the shirt: two small squares of wool cloth with images figured on them and joined by two wool bands going over the shoulders. Thus the lay people could also be robed in Christ.

  But it was in the nineteenth century that this insigne appeared in a rich variety of forms. All the members of the Company had already worn a scapular, Charley Oceaan the White Scapular of Our Lady of Ransom, Dana and Kemper the Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel (the best known of all of them), Catherine the Blue Scapular of the Immaculate Conception, Tancredi and Mariella the Red Scapular of the Passion (the Lazarist Scapular). Bad people as well as good wore the scapulars. The murderous and now blinded Jude Revanche also wore the Red Scapular of the Passion, this on the word of Kemper Gru
enland who had traveled with him. It was even said that the devilish Ifreann Chortovitch wore the Red Passion Scapular, or some sort of burlesque of it.

  “Is it in Prague that I will meet you again?” Dana asked Catherine.

  “I don't think so. It will probably be in my own Krakow. Even that Devil's son promised you excellent shooting in the Eastern Marches the coming autumn. It will be in the Eastern Marches: but I hope without hope that we may be spared the shooting. I myself will never shoot again in my life, though I will teach you to fence, Dana.”

  “Certainly it is better to shoot sometimes, than to wait and be killed like a sheep,” Dana argued.

  “For me, no, not any longer, Dana,” Catherine said. “Me, I will wait, and I will be killed like a sheep. That isn't the way I used to be, but that is the way I will be now.”

  “How would you teach me to fence?”

  “I will teach you because you do not know how. All you know is the little hand knife. You do not know the sword or the saber or the rapier, weapons that every gentleman should know. I myself am the best swordswoman in Europe. It was my own late father who stated that I was. I'll not be involved in killing again, though, and I wish there were some way where neither of you would be involved in it.”

  “Yes, my own conscience groans pretty heavily with it lately,” Charley Oceaan told them. “But someone may have to do it, and who am I to deserve clean hands? A very small bit of selective assassination, done by myself and a few others, has already saved an enormous amount of bloodshed.”

  “Well, it is no longer right for me, and it may soon be no longer right for you,” Catherine argued. “I have heard, though I do not entirely credit it, that slight and selective assassination has always been part of the program of Count Cyril. I know it was the program of Christian Blaye. I know it is still the program of Malandrino Brume. And it will remain the life and the love of Tancredi and Mariella. My own father indulged in it. So did I. I've been a bloodier girl than you might guess. My own call is changed now.”

  “And when the Instigators gather again and devise bloodshed and blight against the growth, what do we do then?” Dana asked. “We are so small a company, we must chop them down first.”

  “I do what I do. You do what you do,” Catherine said. “The play is moving so fast that even in these lull days I can't adjust to it. It is the last act and the next to the last scene, for me, not for you two.”

  On several following days, Catherine did teach Dana to fence. They fenced in a private room in a fencing academy. Dana learned the foils, the rapiers, the swords, the sabers. He also learned the etiquette of such things. Dana would never be a gentleman, but he would be picking up such gentlemanly tricks all his life.

  “What do you really believe in, Catherine?” Dana asked after the fencing one day.

  “Oh, I believe in God in his Heaven and in the Revolution on Earth.”

  “That is all?”

  “What else is there?”

  “And the Revolution is that important to you?”

  “Oh, the Revolution is the World. It is the bound duty of every one of us. It is the constant conversion, the ananeosis, the renewal, the aborning again. Curse all heretics who use words to mean their opposites! The Holy Revolution is all the green-growth and its sacralizing. It isn't their bloody and obstructing blight. They blaspheme!”

  That the Green Revolution might be allowed to flourish without blight, that was the hope. There was real hope in Paris that late winter. It had all been so gentle in Paris, and the echo through all France had been a gentle one.

  France had already had an extremely permissive government: hardly any other place had. France had already achieved very many of the reforms, and now the gate was open for all of them. Paris would lead the world.

  “But the three-day farce was the last performance of Paris as center and leader of the world,” Catherine said. “Now the world hasn't any center. Oh, oh, oh, but look what giant waves those last three tossed pebbles are causing.”

  The three farcical February days in Paris, with their pale, token bloodshed, had shaken the whole world unaccountably. How could that little popgun thing have passed itself off as an explosion, how could its reverberations have set off such cannonades? How was it possible that it fooled the very elementals so as to echo around the world in thunder-clap after thunder-clap as if the whole sky were breaking open? How could three gnats’ bites have sent whole multitudes of elephants trumpeting and charging in such terror?

  The news of the Paris events had traveled with instantaneous electrical speed to such places as the telegraph went, though the telegraph went only to select places. This was only four years after Morse's first public transmission, between Washington and Baltimore over in America, and it was the first case of instant effect and amplification of an event. The news had reached most European capitals at once.

  In other parts of the world, and in more local portions of Europe, the news seemed to arrive as a shock wave, not understood at all, but with a power many times amplified.

  In Uruguay there were renewed battles between the Whites and the Reds. No need to say that such events were unrelated to events in Europe: they were exact reflections of European events.

  In Argentina, the Rosas and anti-Rosas forces were at war; and small French forces, supporting the anti-Rosas forces on Martin Garcia Island and other places, suddenly weakened and began to withdraw, feeling without having heard it that France was withdrawing from all such interventions.

  In Brazil there was the Pernambuco uprising against the Emperor Pedro II. And in Chile, Mexico and Paraguay there were sudden clashes, all of these coming violently and at the same time. But there was no telegraph under the Atlantic yet.

  There were riots in Vienna on March 13, more violent but less storied than those in Paris.

  There was fighting at the barricades in Berlin on March 18.

  There was street fighting in Milan on March 18 and 19. This was the beginning of something that would hardly be solved in twenty years.

  On March 29, our old friend Charles Albert the King of Sardinia and Savoy began his attack on the Austrians who were entwined through all North Italy. So there were to be national revolutions as well as social revolutions. The blight would settle on the national revolutions as well, but essentially the national revolts were always a part of the Green Revolution.

  “Italy, Poland, Ireland,” Catherine Dembinska said once, “the three slave nations. So long as there is one Austrian soldier in Italy, so long as there is one Russian soldier in Poland, so long as there is one English soldier in Ireland, there cannot be peace anywhere in the world.”

  Three days in February, the splash of three small pebbles had sent waves around the world. And, having completed their circuit of the earth, the waves, now towering and rather horrible, returned in June and swept over Paris and France.

  Catherine Dembinska was gone by then. She left without any word at all, except her vague statements of several months before. Dana had only the cloudy promise that they would meet, and marry, in the East before the year was completed. The Slav Congress was to begin June 2 in Prague, and Catherine must have allowed herself at least a month's travel time.

  Catherine Dembinska gone from Paris. And Malandrino and Magdelena Brume arrived in Paris right at the beginning of June. It was a new scene with a new flavor to it.

  Actually the Brumes had arrived in Paris before June, but they had not declared themselves to Dana. Their arrival was tied in with an event called the ‘Resurrection of France,’ which was not a very important event. It took place on Resurrection Day which was Easter Sunday, April 23. This was the day of the great elections, with universal suffrage for the first time in France. The French people elected a mediocre group of delegates. The right wingers got five hundred seats, the left wingers less than a hundred. The Legitimists, who favored the return of the old Bourbon line, got about a hundred; the Orléanists, in favor of Louis Philippe who had been thrown out two months before,
got about two hundred.

  The newly elected delegates were to replace, legitimize, or work with the provisional government which had come in two months before and which had been falling to pieces. The new delegates might even draw up a constitution. They were really provisional delegates to expand the narrow provisional government. Later elections and later troubles were already planned.

  But one of the elected delegates was Malandrino Brume. This rough mountain man, who was actually a citizen of Rome, had been elected from a district of Gascony of south France. Well and good: Brume had filled several roles; he could as easily be a member of the government while doing other things.

  Dana learned only gradually that the Brumes were in Paris, and at first he doubted that they were the same Brumes. At his first attempt he did not get to see rough Malandrino Brume at all, but he did see Magdelena.

  “He is busy on certain work, Dana, and I am sure that you are also. Very soon you will work together for a while, and then separate for a much longer while. You have not come to realize it yet, but it is very lonely and dry work most of the time that you are called to do. There will be a year at a time, maybe two years, that you will not meet anybody who has been associated with you in the revolution. You will go by instinct in the dark, and you will very often go wrong. There is, by the way, a man who insists on meeting you in the dark, and you will go very wrong whichever way you go. It will be wrong to refuse to meet him. It will be horribly wrong to meet him. You will lose your life in that encounter, or you will lose your reputation. But there isn't any way you can avoid the sad thing. I've come to tell you that this man insists on meeting you in the dark.”

  “Who insists on meeting me in the dark, my mountain saint? Do you know, Magdelena, that there is nobody like you at all? You are almost the thing perfect. I shine whenever you are near.”

  “Of course you do. You are really no person at all, Dana; you're nought but a fair-haired reflecting emerald. You reflect whatever woman is near, and only this gives you your person, your self. You were a spirited person when you reflected Elena Prado that Tancredi finally blasted (I know that story); and when you reflected Mariella of the Mountains; when you reflected Catherine (her more than any); or her friend Elaine Kingsberry; or the Aileen in Ireland (I know that story too); and you are particularly spirited and lively when you reflect me. Really, Dana, I believe that I do more for you than any of them. But you are nothing without the light of your women.”