The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You are wrong, Magdelena. I see it now. Kemper told it to me without understanding it himself. I am my full self. The light is provided to me, yes: but the women (except Catherine) are all the same woman. When I say you are the thing perfect I mean that you are the thing plain. There is only the one woman and you are the clear image of her. Even the Greeks knew that there was only one. Even big Kemper knew it. They both had the same mistiness about the poem of the Maid Helen. But she is simply the world-woman who is every woman (except Catherine).”

  “I have never heard of this Maid Helen,” Magdelena said.

  “Maid Helen. Magd Elena.”

  “I have never heard of Magd Elena either,” said Magdelena, but she grinned.

  “Oh, it is all the one woman, the Helen, Ellen, Ella. Aileen, Elena, Elaine, Mariella (who is Marry Ella or Mary Helen), Magdelena. Really, there has been only one woman in the world, except Catherine.”

  “How about the first woman in the world, Eve? Turn her into Helen, Dana, or shrivel your Irish tongue in your mouth.”

  “Oh, her real name has always been Eveline, which is Eve-Helen. Yes, there is only one woman in the world, and she is a prototype and not a person. Except Catherine.”

  “This Catherine, Dana, she told you that Ifreann the Son of the Devil was half Irish. Consider that Catherine herself may be half Irish and her real name may be Kathelene. That can be Cat-Helen, or Battle-Helen, or Down-Helen. There are any number of Helens who can be made from your Catherine. But you only shine by borrowed light, Dana.”

  “Oh well, and what man is it who wants to meet me in the dark?”

  “Jude Revanche whom you blinded. The challenge is to fight him to the death with short knives in the total dark.”

  “I lose either way, do I, Magdelena? Only a coward would kill a blind man, and only a coward would run from one. And only a fool would fight one in the dark. What day will it be?”

  “He says that you will be advised of the day. May you tremble in the meanwhile, he says.”

  Then, in an early day of June, Dana met, and hardly knew, Malandrino Brume. This was not rough Brume now. He was a dandy, but a powerful one. He was a top-hatted, frock-tailed, trouser-spatted dude out of a Daumier drawing. The Daumier dudes, however, sometimes have a self-burlesque element in them.

  “Ah, you are a puff-ball, a mannish lady, a less than Engishman even, a mollason,” Dana jeered him. “Where is the rough Brume I knew?”

  “Try me, boy Dana. Ah, you are almost a man now. You drank the Devil under the table, and you felled big Kemper — in your second go at him. Do not forget, though, who taught you the tricks for both victories. Yes, I am in masquerade as a gentlemen. Who would recognize me in this? To work now, Dana. We make portentous visits to two or more men tonight.”

  “No we do not, Brume. I am cloyed of the smell of blood. I am convinced that your way is all wrong. I've had enough of this killing to prevent killing.”

  “Kill? Why should we have to kill, Dana? Having to kill is always an admission of weakness, of partial failure. This evening, you and I will go out and terrify several men. We will terrify one man into doing nothing, and another man into doing something. I hope we will not be so inept or unsuccessful as to have to kill any of them.”

  “All right. We will try it. Brume, do you know where Charley Oceaan is. But I forget — you do not know him.”

  “But I do know him, Dana. He is here in Paris and he is occupied. He works alone for a while. You will often have to do the same.”

  “Brume, I was recruited blind into some form of half-military service. But my pay has been irregular — ”

  “Good, though, Dana.”

  “ — and I have never received any orders of any kind — or none that I could understand. I do not know who my commander is; I do not know where I am supposed to go or what I am supposed to do. Everything I touch is a failure, and I am left to wander loose. Secrecy may sometimes be necessary in a military operation, but when it is so extreme it makes a low comedy of it all. Brume, what am I really supposed to do?”

  “You are supposed to ask yourself that question often; and you are supposed to listen closely to your own answers. It will be given to you what to do.”

  “Brume, have you ever seen the Count Cyril?”

  “How should I know? But the Count Cyril has seen me. And I am one of the very few who has received writing in his own hand.”

  “You have no idea what he looks like?”

  “The third man we visit tonight, Dana, look at him. I am told that there is some resemblance there. This man is rumored to be either a kinsman or an ancestor of the Count Cyril.”

  “An ancestor?”

  Dana Coscuin and Malandrino Brume terrified two men that night, and amused a third. But they did not kill any of them; they were not so unsuccessful as that.

  Brume was in admiration of Dana's agility on the roofs. Brume, who had been a mountain man, could climb anything; yet he hadn't Dana's lightness and speed on the roofs. Brume also admired Dana's mastery of locks and bolts. Brume himself had always forced windows with a burglar's jimmy and broken doors with a sort of crampon. He hadn't the art of sliding tumblers and bolts with a thin piece of parchment or with a piece of watch spring. But Dana had been to school both to Malandrino Brume and to Catherine Dembinska.

  One man, at whose place they made strange entry, took quite a bit of terrifying before he promised not to do a certain thing. He had his own stubborn streak in him. He was a colleague of Brume's in the parliament. He swore that he would denounce Brume in that parliament and everywhere in Paris and France. Brume said that he would not feel natural if he were not widely denounced. There was a low and peculiar sound, a muffled breaking.

  The man also demanded, in a very tight and rasping voice, why Brume and his pup had made strange entry instead of coming to the front door like proper visitors.

  “I did not know that the man who machinated and gave dark counsel was the same man who sat with me in the parliament,” Brume said. “You have too many faces and persons in you. I will have to cause one of them some pain, but I do hope it will not be the person of my friend in the chamber.” And Brume broke another of the man's fingers as casually as he might break a bit of bread.

  The man moaned (he had a low pain threshold), but he was still stubborn. Then the man suffered further digital fracture and became faint. He also became quite afraid of Dana Coscuin who had made no move at all. Dana had learned certain spooky tricks from Ifreann, from Tancredi, from Charley Oceaan; moreover he had a fair-eyed weirdness of his own. The man began to shake from his pain and faintness and fear. He pledged not to do the certain thing that Brume was concerned with. Would he keep his promise? Brume said that he would send a doctor around to care for the fingers that had been unfortunately and accidentally broken. And they left the man there.

  The man of the second visitation was already fainthearted. That had been the trouble with him all the while. Brume was intent on forcing the man to take a certain action, and the man had already shown himself almost incapable of any action. But he was a strategically placed man and it was important that he should take the action. Brume and Dana terrified him. They obtained his faint promise that he would act. And he would act, if he was capable of it. They left him.

  And the third man was not at home. Dana felt some relief at this. An aura had been building up about the very idea of this man about whom Dana knew nothing at all. The anticipation had been both pleasant and fearful. Dana and Brume made an extraordinary entry, and they went through the establishment pretty thoroughly. It was a lived-in but undocumented house. The third man kept his things elsewhere, or he kept them in his head. They left the place.

  They went to a stall among the night markets and had oysters and pink wine. Neither of them had the money to pay. Dana snapped his fingers softly and grinned. Which one would it be? It was a fish wife who came to them wiping her hands on her apron. “From the Count Cyril,” she said and gave D
ana a little packet. “Thank you both,” Dana said. From the packet he paid for the oysters and wine, receiving quite a bit of silver in return for his coin.

  Then Brume brought Dana to the Brume household.

  “Magdelena is out of the city on her own bright business tonight,” Brume said. “Here is my house, Dana, and here is a challenge for you. Try to enter the house in any way whatsoever. See if you can solve even one lock here; see if you can find any weak place anywhere. You cannot. Nobody can break into my house.”

  Dana tried it, out of sheer sport, for nearly an hour. He could not effect any entry whatsoever. Brume then opened the combinations of locks and heavy bolts, and they went in. They went down into the cellar of the house to a specially locked and bolted room. Brume opened it up, and they went in and lit a lamp.

  But there was a man already in the room, laughing at them with his eyes. Dana felt Brume tremble, but he talked calmly.

  “This is the third man, Dana,” Brume said. “He was absent from his house when we visited him. And now he has come to my own house very oddly.”

  Who did this third man remind one of? To Dana he looked a little bit like Brume himself, a little bit like the Black Pope back in the Carlist Hills, a little bit like Christian Blaye, as he might have looked with flesh on his skull.

  To Brume the man looked the little bit like young Dana here; a bit like other men that Brume had known; a puzzling bit like the idea of a man that Brume had been carrying around with him.

  The man had an amused and intricate face, moving hands that were like kindly serpents, a complex and remembered voice. The man had been talking from the time that Brume and Dana had entered, talking intently but with a timeless cheerfulness, putting words together like pieces of aromatic wood to form a coffer or ark.

  “He looks very much like Catherine's late father,” Dana said to himself.

  “So much so that, had she not told me for sure that he was dead, I would swear that he was the same man.” Then Dana shivered a bit as he recalled that he had never seen Catherine's father alive or dead, that he had never seen any picture of him, that Catherine had never described his appearance at all.

  “Whyever should you have sought me out at my house, Malandrino?” (These were not the actual words of the man; they were an impression left behind by the words. The words themselves are unrecorded and unremembered; there seems an obstacle to recalling the words themselves.) “It is only a very temporary house of mine in any case. You wondered just who I was who meddled at second and third hand, and you decided to have a talk with me. Malandrino, it is I who decide when it is time to have a talk.

  “What we are trying to do, Malandrino and Dana, cannot well be put into words other than the original words of it in the Gospel. And does it not sometimes seem that we do not adhere closely to the Gospels? The same parts are not given to everyone. Each does what he is able to do. There are many strange parables in Scripture, and we live out one of the most puzzling of them.”

  The man looked a little bit, Malandrino Brume mused, like Pius VII (Pio Settimo, Barnabas Chiaramonti) who had been Pope during Brume's Roman childhood. He looked smarter than that dead Barnabas — like one who would not so often have been outsmarted by the fox Napoleon.

  “We plant and we cultivate as well as we may,” (it was the impression that the man was saying this) “and we weed. It is more than a myth that every weed is a dragon's tooth in disguise. We pull such fangs as we can. Yet one who might consider from the short future the three days of horrible blood that are almost upon us could well ask ‘What ultimate horror might this have been if it were not de-fanged?’ Most horrible of all is that there will be little reason for it, only that the peoples’ own governments were not able to deliver quickly enough such things as the people wanted but could not yet formulate.

  “ ‘Hell was not built in one day,’ is an old saying, and those who work for its erection and sustaining work without ceasing. So must those of us who countervail it. It is such slow, though often rewarding work, that we can hardly see any progress in one lifetime; and only a few are given more than one lifetime to devote to it.”

  That man talked to them a very long time, or so it seemed. Much of it went directly to the substrata of their minds and memories; only hazy bits of it remained on the surface. Brume and Dana both became very sleepy, not from lack of interest, from some humorous trick that the man was playing on them. It was as if there was something here too rich to be understood at one sitting. After a long while of it, there was something about the man rising to go (he had some signs of great age about him, the backs of his hands, the sunkenness of his cheeks; and some signs of quick youth, his full throat, his eyes, his easy movements); there was something about him saying that he would let himself out, that Brume and Dana could rest easy (they were not hosts, he was host); there was something about the man being gone then.

  When it seemed time for morning, Dana woke in his chair and left that house. Brume was sleeping too deeply to be bothered. Dana went to the house where they had first looked for that man the night before. Dana again made extraordinary entry, a more tricky thing by daylight, but the house was not the same as it had been the previous night. It was the same house; some furnishings were still there, but it simply was not a lived-in house now, and did not seem to have been for some time.

  Dana went back to Brume's, and Brume was gone. All day he searched for that Third Man, or for Brume. It was right at dark that evening that he found Brume.

  “Have you any idea where that man can be found?” Dana demanded hastily.

  “None,” Brume said. “He is never found. He finds. Don't push it, Dana.”

  “Brume, do you know who that man was?”

  “I do not. I guess who you guess it might have been. I believe you guess wrong. You can't find him, Dana. Give it up.”

  “Brume, I will find him. That's all that matters now. You talk straight. You said, before we visited him, that the man was either a kinsman or an ancestor. I believe that he was the man himself. Now, what do you know?”

  “I know that my house was reputed to be haunted when I rented it, Dana. And I believe that we have seen the haunt, no more than that. I also believe that we were deceived by the house we visited a little earlier. That house had not recently been occupied, but somehow it seemed to us that it had been. We encountered a known haunt, one who leaves on all the impression of great profundity and wisdom without actually conveying either. These things do happen. We live in a paranormal world, and there is no normal counterpart to it; often, people have difficulty in understanding this.”

  “I have difficulty in understanding you, Brume. Was your haunt an ancestor of Count Cyril?”

  “Yes, a reputed ancestor of the reputed count. Nobody knows very much about either. Get some sleep tonight, Dana. The blood-gates burst open tomorrow.”

  “Brume, I will find that man if I have to go to the ends of the earth to do it.”

  “As good an excuse as any, Dana. A young man who has not gone to the ends of the earth has been young in vain.”

  “Brume, I will find him.” Dana left Brume and went out looking for a face and a form. He would scrutinize every face and form in the world till he found the one he looked for. He seemed to be bumping into many people in his hurry. He had no system in his search. There was no longer any division into hours. There was only frantic hurrying to examine every face in the world.

  “There is no face in the world, except Catherine's, that I would rather see,” Dana Coscuin was saying out loud. “I have the promise from her, but I let this man get away with no promise at all.”

  Dana bumped into a group of rough men, and they grappled with him.

  “Come along to your death,” one of them said.

  “He is waiting,” said another. “He says that now is the time.”

  “It is damned if you do and damned if you don't,” said another man.

  Dana felled three of the men in sudden anger. The rest drew back a littl
e, but were ready to overwhelm him.

  “There's a lack of understanding here,” Dana told them all loudly. “Speak to me civilly. What do you want?”

  “You go to fight blind Revanche now,” said one of the men.

  “In a blind dark room,” said another.

  “To the death,” said still another.

  “All right, let us get it over with then,” Dana told them. “Jude Revanche is wrong and there is no way that I can set him right. And there is no way that I can die till I find that face. We go.”

  It was a peculiar inner building they came to then. It was dark enough, and the men were finding means of making it darker. One of them said that it was a pit where men had used to put dogs to fight each other to death for bets and spectacle. Someone was putting a blindfold on Dana.

  “For what?” he asked them, “if it will be blind dark anyhow?”

  “Lest you cheat a little on the coming or going,” they said. “And now we search you.”

  “Nobody searches me,” Dana maintained. “Lay off, or there will be more dead men than one here.” He was not searched. But he was given a short sharp knife (“Revanche has one exactly like it”) and he was brought down into a pit that had an earthen floor. There were three men who brought him in there, but Dana picked out the breathing of the fourth man, Revanche. Dana was tall-eared now, needing every advantage he could find. He had more important things to do than to die there.

  “The victor will cry three times like a raven,” one of the men said. “Then we will open up again.” Dana heard the door close. He heard certain other business about the door, apparently muffling being put into place.