The pit itself was very small, not eight feet across if Dana could judge by the tone and echo of Revanche's breathing. Two men or two dogs could not long escape each other in it. There was larger spreading space above; there was also a grill-work or bar-work of iron above.
Two men trying to hold their breaths, to give no indication of their presence in the total dark. Evenly matched as to weapons, though Dana had refused to be searched, and both blind in the dark.
“His is no great advantage over me,” Dana reasoned. “He has been a blind man for only short months, and I have been a night man (hunting and fishing, and then manhunting) for a long time. I'm almost as good a blind man as he is. And they gave me, without meaning to do it, one weapon they forgot to give him, a blindfold.”
The blindfold was a long and strong kerchief. It would make a good loop, a garrote. Dana knew how to kill a man in the dark with a garrote like that, quicker and easier than with a knife. With the end knotted the scarf made a good swinging probe to locate the silent Jude. There had been a queer sigh from Jude Revanche just about the time the door closed, and then no more.
Dana, warily crouched and knife ready, probed the dark with the swinging scarf. He reached every wall with it, but he did not reach Jude Revanche. He probed along the earthen floor with his feet, having slid free from his sandals. He found new mud, and then he found the body. He had the candle stub out of his hat (he had not permitted himself to be searched), and he lighted it.
Jude Revanche was dead with a knife in his throat. That twisted man had either killed himself, or there had been consummate trickery. Jude was shrunken from his former self. He was wasted, and not at all fearsome. He had a quite different look in his face than Dana had expected. There was great fear there, something that was almost compassion, something that was almost (was this possible?) peace. An added look to Jude that puzzlingly reminded Dana of someone he knew.
Had Jude been led there blind for bait? Had he been killed by one of the rough men, just before the door was closed, and while Dana still wore the blindfold? The curious sigh had been just about at that time. Had Jude killed himself, for twisted revenge or for twisted repentance? Had Jude ever sent any challenge at all? He must have, for Magdelena Brume had carried that first challenge and there was no possibility of trickery in Magdelena. But had he sent that night's challenge? Or had others reported it to bring Dana to the struggle that he could not win?
Dana affixed his candle-stub to the belt-clasp of Jude Revanche who lay on his back dead. Then Dana sounded three times, but not the sound of the raven. He gave the mournful moan of the Irish loon, three times, loud and long. The men opened the door. It was a striking presentation that they opened it on.
“You struck a light!” they cried furiously. There were more men there than they had been. Called witnesses.
“I struck a light,” Dana said.
“You struck a light and murdered the blind man by it!”
“I struck a light, and the blind man is dead.”
“There's the sign of Cain on you!”
They drew back from Dana, perhaps in horror, perhaps in pretended horror, more likely because Dana had a knife in his hand yet and it flashed in the candlelight. He looked as though he'd use it, and they let him through.
“There will be a thousand blades after you by morning,” they called after him.
“Let them be after me then,” said Dana.
“It will be said everywhere that you struck a light and murdered a blind man by it,” they called.
“Let it be said then,” Dana called back. “There is no way to win a battle with a blind man.”
But to himself he said, “That last look on Jude's face, I know now who it reminded me of. It was partly the look of the face of the Third Man. I must go on till I see all of that face again.”
Dana wandered, intense and distraught. He hadn't been defeated too badly in the battle with blind Jude Revanche. He had other things to consider than what might be said of him, and it was only those said things that could hurt him. He looked at faces, faces. The sun came up on June 23, the first of the three days of the bloodiest street fighting ever seen in Europe.
There were the barricades, and there were the prodigies reported on the barricades. One of the prodigies of the barricades was Dana Coscuin who had the mark of Cain on him now and who could not be killed. He went conspicuous in green shirt and he took no cover at all. It is said that a dozen shots were fired at him and none harmed him. That is possible. There was some remarkably bad shooting on the barricades. It is also said that a hundred blades were thrust through him and none harmed him, but this is to be doubted.
It was a three-day delirium of bloodshed there. “What ultimate horror would this have been if it had not been de-fanged?” the Third Man had asked. But Dana Coscuin was spared part of that horror (hardly anyone else in Paris was spared it) in that he walked in an intent daze still looking for the face of the third man. He had done all he could do here in any case. He had pulled some of the teeth. He had chopped some of the weeds. And he would continue to plant and to cultivate. But nobody short of God would have been able to halt that three-day red rain.
Dana wandered out of Paris before the third day was finished. And he continued to wander, over France, over Europe, looking for the face, or what the face stood for. As Brume had suggested, he asked himself one question often, and he listened intently for his own answer. It was not, in those months, given to him what he should do.
Dana wandered from June to November, in and out of Spain, in and out of Italy, through the Germanies, into Vienna and Prague. And in November he came to Poland.
XII
ONE MORE DAY UNTIL THE SKY FALLS DOWN
Since 1772 there had been little independence in Poland. The country had been occupied by Prussian, Austrian, and Russian forces.
In the time of Napoleon, however, between the years 1807 and 1815, an independent Grand-Duchy of Warsaw was created. This could last only as long as Napoleon lasted. The Polish Legions, composed of Polish emigrants from their occupied homeland, had fought for Napoleon against all three of the occupying nations. In the creation of the independent Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, they were paid for their bloody labor. And, at the Congress of Vienna, they were paid for it again, in the reverse direction, by their three old enemies.
After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Russia had occupied more than two-thirds of Poland. This was called Russian Poland, or Congress Poland, or Crown Poland. But there were pieces of old Poland outside this. The Posen district belonged to Prussia; the Galicia district belonged to Austria. But the City of Krakow, with a little bit of surrounding territory, was made independent, a very small state at the conjunction of the three Imperiums.
It was in the Free State of Krakow that Ifreann Chortovitch the Son of the Devil was born. It was here also that Catherine Dembinska was born.
Krakow was a pretty small freedom candle burning in the Eastern Marches, and it was a center of intrigue. The intriguers were mostly the Polish refugees from Prussian and Austrian and Russian Poland but also refugees of many other races from the Prussian and Austrian and Russian Empires. The crowding of the refugees always kept Krakow very poor, so the place was not entirely free. And the intrigues were a little grandiose and top-heavy; so they sometimes toppled the town and its territory.
There had been scheduled for February of 1846 an uprising against the three occupying powers of all territories that had been Polish. The plans of this uprising were betrayed, totally and in complete detail, in all the regions involved. They had been betrayed by Information Men working out of Krakow. And the insurgents had their heads knocked off everywhere they raised them.
The manifesto of the insurrections had been published for all Poland in Krakow, so the Austrians came and extinguished free Krakow, blew the candle out. This was only two years before the time we are speaking of.
The Austrian method had been to incite the peasants against the insurgent leaders of Poland,
to offer a bounty for every corpse produced and for every residence burned. This produced the massacre of two thousand ‘lords’, the Polish-blood landlords of Austrian Poland. The Austrian-blood and German-blood landlords were not massacred, and many of the massacring peasants were not peasants at all but mercenary forces imported for the task. There were many cases of the genuine peasants defending their lords from the masquerade peasants.
But it had its bright side. An emancipation that had long been proposed was finally effected. It was stated that this was in repayment to the peasants who had revolted against the revolt: Austria abolished serfdom in Galicia and all of Polish Austria. Even the serfs of the Austrian-blood and the German-blood lords were freed, and there was some loud grumbling that this had not been the intent at all. This was in April of 1848, the year we are traversing.
The only serfdom left in Europe now was in Russia herself and in the somewhat more than two-thirds of Poland that was Russian-occupied.
But no-longer-free Krakow was still a center of intrigue, was still plotting for another uprising of all the Polands for that 1848, just two years after the last dismal defeats. And the same, or nearly the same Information Men were eager to betray all the details of this new insurrection also.
Dana Coscuin had been wandering in an odd manner for five months when he came to Poland in November of 1848. Let it be emphasized here that Dana was a young man in the prime of his sanity. There are certain heavy elements of delirium in these wanderings, but the delirium was not in Dana; it was in the scene and the times.
They were demented months in a demented world. The coherence was all gone out of it. It was not consequential. There were things to be seen in those times which are not usually seen or usually admitted as being seen, although everybody was very good natured about it all. Even in the bloody businesses there was this element of good nature. People foresaw in pieces, they understood in shaggy selections, and they accepted with good grace.
There was much breaching of the walls between the material and the immaterial. It was as if the graves were opened and many who had been asleep had arisen. They were more fools than saints who arose, however. Yet they were happy fools, and that is nearly the same thing as saints. It was the summer of the Resurrection of the Fools, and all the roads of Europe were clogged with them.
There was a difficulty about some of the persons who were met, the discerning whether they were quick or dead. There was Jude Revanche that Dana met for an hour one afternoon. This was on the road from Carcassonne to Narbonne in South France. Jude was not then blind, but he was purblind. He complained that the weakness of his eyes handicapped him in falconing and fowling. They talked about falconing and fowling of which Dana had done much in Ireland and Jude in Sardinia. They did not talk about the conflict that had been between the two of them.
Jude was of the opinion (it was more than just opinion, since Dana had heard the same thing from other persons; it was fact) that all the roads to Purgatory were overcrowded and stopped from the unprecedented numbers of persons dying and going there that summer. Some souls of his acquaintance had been waiting a way to go for as long as three months, he said. And others were told that if they could find a way of their own they were permitted to use it. This particular road, from Carcassone to Narbonne, was not one of the proper roads to Purgatory, Jude said; but beyond Narbonne, and just short of Coursan, he believed that a Purgatory road might be found.
He wasn't a bad fellow. Dana was glad that he was going to Purgatory and not to Hell. Jude was glad of it also. Some souls of his acquaintance were having to wait as long as three years for an open road to Hell.
There was the morning that Dana saw the whole fair landscape from horizon to horizon and realized that it was all on the inside of one very large soap-bubble. He saw then, beyond and dwarfing it all, the pipe that was blowing the whole bubble, and the face that was blowing the pipe. The wide world was quite small in comparison to that face. It was the face of a rather lack-eyed monster, somehow like an old Irish bummer, a little like that of one of the Other People who live under the hills. “Be careful, you'll break it if you puff any more into it.” “I always break them,” said the monstrous face. “I wish I could keep one of them sometime.”
There was another morning that Dana had breakfast with the Pope. This was not in Rome but in the smaller town of Gaeta in the hotel named Giardinetto. The other tables were filled, but this man had a table to himself and men stood and waited on him. Dana sat down with him and told him that he was the Count of Kerry. The man said that he was the Pope of Rome.
“Do you believe that Rossi will be murdered?” the Pope asked Dana.
“Assuredly,” said Dana who did not know who Rossi was. “Why should he remain unmurdered when better men than he is are murdered every day?”
“As vicar of Christ I have great difficulty in receiving communication from Christ,” the Pope complained. “In all the hard things I am left to my own wits.”
“I have the same difficulty in receiving communication from the Count Cyril Prasinos,” Dana said.
“Oh, him! A witty man, surely, and a pleasant one, but some of his solutions are a little exterus, how would you say it? — outside the lines.”
Actually Dana was experiencing a crisis, but experiencing it quite sanely, such as often comes to young men who go into the blood-spilling business and then hear nothing but a great silence when they expect either explicit orders or commendation.
“It's as though God and the Count Cyril had both washed their hands of me,” Dana said.
Dana met Elena Prado selling fish in Magdeburg. (“What is that little brown-skin doing up here in the Germanies?” Dana asked himself.) She was one-eyed and bent, and her face was entirely of scar tissue. But she was lively, she was stubborn, she was lustful, she was snaky-triumphant. After a queer congress with her, Dana asked her if she were really alive.
“I will tell you this, Dana,” she said in her newer and rougher voice (she may have had scar tissue on her inner throat also), “if I am dead, I have not been dead as long as some of my fish here. Are there any fish of Ireland that speak with such authority? I will sell them yet, though. I will sell them to people without noses.”
Dana met Kemper Gruenland somewhere in the minor Germanies. There was no question but that this was Kemper, alive, and in the health of his flesh; though he had a long and stark face-scar which now made him look older.
“You are more than a brother to me, you Irish scoundrel,” Kemper said with a real friendliness and no reserve at all, “but you will never be elder brother to me now. I have aged several years in these short months, and you have been allowed to stand outside it. It has eaten me too, Dana, and I've had to muck my way through all the heavy earth of Germany. You have been permitted a wuestewanderung, a wilderness-wandering, a desert-wandering. It's a thing that refreshes also while it tires and burns. But it takes you to the top of the hill and permits you to see all sides; you will remember those other landscapes even if you do not know what to do about them as yet. But I have had to trudge this low-lying road all the time. I'm not holy enough to have been given a wilderness-wandering and a recess for my wits.”
“Should we not have at least as much time in each other's company as — ”
“As we had in the company of the Son of the Devil, Dana? We should have and we will. A night and a day and another night of it, and maybe a bit more. It may not be as noisy or as vile as the Devil's go with us, but it will be as hearty, and more pleasant.”
They spent the most of two nights and two days in each other's company. It was hearty and very friendly, and ultimately it might prove a very memorable time. Kemper Gruenland had a number of friends of the irregular soldierly sort who had been working the German countryside. They drank and ate and rode horses. They talked profoundly, even if in barracks accents. They were all working that Germany of the heavy soil should be as green a land as any ever. There was a solidness of tactics with them, such as had been fou
nd only in the Carlist Hills of Spain, and such as had not been found in France or as yet in Italy.
“Germany is the giant who has been hacked into one thousand pieces by the malicious trickster,” one of Kemper's huge friends said. “Our hope is to put the poor giant together again and make him again a living person. Our fear is that he may have become so bad-natured and savage of mind from his having been chopped to pieces that he will be a danger to the world. It's a real fear, and we are real men in asking what is the right and the wrong of the things we are doing and the way we are doing them.”
Kemper repeated to Dana, just before Dana took his leave from him, that all members of the Company were to meet with Charley Oceaan in Amsterdam on the first day of the next year. Kemper said that we was certain that all members of the Company were still alive.
“And, Kemper, I have just received my own call,” Dana said, “after four times forty days wandering in the desert. Now there is one clear face and one clear voice for me, for a little while at least.”
Dana had been in Prague either before or after this. Now he came out of Ostrava to Sucha by a mountain way, and then turned northeast on the fringe of the mountains. These were the first and the last mountains of Poland, here on her southern border; from here the whole country is flat fields forever, Poland without boundaries.
Dana, who was tired and traveled and dirty, found a pond just before the mountains let loose. He stripped himself and washed his body and his green shirt with a block of soap that he always carried in his hat, along with candle stubs and other useful things. Then he stretched himself in the sun in what seemed almost a worshipping attitude. It wasn't; but he knew that both the body and the sun are sacramentals and may be treated as such.
There was tittering on the mountain behind him. “It's the young of the female kind,” Dana said, “and I must dress and be away without shaming either party too much. There's a tone to that tittering that is like something to come home to, but it's a home I was never in before.” The tone reminded him of Catherine Dembinska, of her lilt, and it was to her that he was coming home.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 25
