The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  Dana walked, at a fast easy pace, and taking little more than four hours to it, the twenty miles into Krakow, which had once owned the name of Krakow Under the Mountains. The mountains had been closer to Krakow in earlier centuries. The Austrians, on their first coming to this region to occupy and to steal, had stolen a segment of these mountains and carried them away. That segment of the Polish mountains is now in the Austrian Tyrol. This is an authentic legend and more than a legend.

  All right, into the rather large town then, and it a Friday evening ready to come on late. Dana was there by agreement, by promise, by call. But, on a practical level, how was Dana, who now misspoke Spanish and Italian and French and Flat German but who knew no Polish at all, going to find Catherine Dembinska, a revolutionary in a city where (he had been told) revolutionaries were being killed daily? He gazed at the steeples, the spires, the towers. He tried to figure out which street looked most like it would favor her with its direction.

  “Oh come along, Dana,” Catherine said. “You won't find me, this time, by looking at the steeples. I am worth many steeples.”

  They came together violently. They kissed so resoundingly that people gathered to look, and then to cheer. People whistled and laughed and clapped. Dana knew the chunky red heart of Poland then (it's a peculiar red color, like that of Polish beets, notice it sometime), and the heartening loudness. ‘Ah, they're a mouthier people even than the Irish,’ Dana thought happily. He did not finish kissing Catherine, he adjourned it to a later moment. And certain persons came and shook his hand.

  “Come along, Dana,” Catherine said. “Oh, it doesn't matter where, just come along. Every place is wonderful tonight.” Several houses were burning and nobody was putting the fires out. “We have to let them burn,” Catherine said. “They are burned by official condemnation of people and property. Soon they will come and burn mine and perhaps me. Give us two weeks! Oh well, give us almost that long! Ah Dana, you were right to gaze at that one group of steeples. That is Lady Church where we will be married tomorrow. Only stylish people are married there.”

  This Catherine, the very ears on her were erotic!

  “I am not stylish, Catherine. Let us find a poor people church.”

  “I joke, my Dana. This is a poor people church, and it is the jewel-box of Europe. Everybody is married in Lady Church. There are five weddings tomorrow and ours is central of them all. Are you tired? Are you hungry?”

  “I will never be either again when I am with you. I'll embrace you openly in every street of Krakow. It is all the same to me where we go and what we do.”

  “What would you do this Friday night if you were home in Ireland?”

  “There is a private proverb in my bay country that even the Saints in Heaven can find nothing better to do on a Friday night than to drink the good whisky and eat the long eels and sit on the lap of Aileen Dinneen. And, pardon me, but I believe the Saints in Heaven understand Aileen to be a type and forerunner of yourself.”

  “I think so too. We'd go openly to the openest place in Krakow and defy them all, as we have been defying them by our carrying-on in the streets. And yet I wish to live several days longer. Besides that, I know they can find better whisky and eels for us in one of the underground places.”

  The place they came to was underground literally, a cellar under another cellar, and they did not come to it by any direct route. They were inside houses and under streets; at one place they seemed to go through a sewer; they were in a place of a family so Austrian that they could not possibly be more so; they were down one level and then another one.

  The whisky was really a brandy. Never mind, it was good brandy. The eels were not so long as the eels of Ireland, but they were good eels in their own way and somebody went to very much trouble to bring them to them. The lap was without equal, as strong and neat as the fields of Poland. Like the Polish fields too it was without boundaries.

  Oh, this was a conspirators’ den though. The very rafters of the ceiling shouted old conspiracy and insurrection. The walls did not have ears. The walls were stone deaf. Even the giggling, the tittering, the laughter of Catherine that was so luscious and lively would not get through those walls.

  There were twenty people in the place, no more than that. Everybody knew Catherine as a center person of their family, and everybody knew who Dana was. Dana had seen at least three of these men in Paris. Every person there had suffered death in his own family within the last twenty days, and every person seemed completely happy with this family affair in their midst. Dana did not understand all the jokes; some of them were translated for him into German, and some of them into French. Some of them could not be translated at all.

  There was music on a sort of concertina. There was a regular procession of people going out for a while and then coming back bearing gifts. There was a sort of dancing, very intricate and very merry. Somebody brought a cake, and cheeses and confections. The wedding celebration would be before the wedding, due to the very unsettled state of affairs.

  Catherine — even the back of her neck was erotic, even the backs of her knees, the joints of her wrists, the tip of her tongue. Her voice was nine-toned. It went on for quite a while.

  “It is midnight now,” Catherine said. “This is enough for Dana and me. It is the vigil of the sacrament for us now. Oh all my family, all my people, we will laugh again together someday, either here or in another place.”

  “And here is an older man with bad news for you, Catherine,” Dana told his passion (even the nose on her face was enough to rouse a man), “and he doesn't know how to tell it.”

  “Your house is on fire, Panna Dembinska,” he said. The whole low raftered room was silent for a moment, and Catherine looked as though she had been slapped. The older man who had brought the news stood in an agony of guilt. But all that was for a very short moment.

  “Whoop, whose house isn't on fire these days!” a heavy lady shouted. “Catherine wouldn't want to be above us and have an unburned house.”

  “I am like the Irishman,” Catherine laughed. “His hat blew off his head, or was it his head blew out from under his hat? The hat went bouncing down the street. It was kicked by a boy, it rolled in and out of a mud-bog, it was desecrated by a dog, it was crushed to death by the wheels of a carriage into a pile of horse manure. ‘I am only glad my head wasn't in it when it came to its untimely end,’ the Irishman said. I am only glad that I wasn't in my house, or coming out of it. That is when the people are killed, coming out of their fired houses.”

  “Or going back to look at them,” a man said sagely. “My own brother, as you know, was murdered the past week when he came to look at his own burning house.”

  “Nevertheless, Dana and myself will go to see my burning house,” Catherine insisted. “Now. At once. Dana has never seen my house. How will he know who I really am if he has never seen my house? We go now to see everything that remains of it, to see every last possible wall and beam of it.”

  They came out into a street, not a street that Dana had seen before, not the street that they had gone in by, a horse alley really. There they had two riding horses from a mietstall, from a public stable there. In these livery stables there was always someone awake all night, or sleeping in the hay there and easily wakened. They had white horses, and it was a White night, very lightly wintered over. They rode across the Vistula (it was not a river there, it was only a stream) and up the hill to Wavel Castle. They turned on their horses there and looked out at the flat city across the little river.

  “See it, Dana. It is myself, it is my overcoat, it is my very skin, it is my father and my mother. I have never seen it look prettier, though there was always a sort of flame to it. Now the roof is swaying and the beams are beginning to crash. In a little while it will be gone and nobody will ever see it again. But why do I say that? Of course it will be seen again. Good houses like good people are raised again on the last day and clothed in their same bodies.”

  “I count thirteen houses burni
ng, Catherine. Wh — ?”

  “Hush up, Dana. If you ask ‘which?’ I will pull the tongue out of your head and mangle it. Of course you know which house is mine. It is the one that looks exactly like me.”

  Yes, there was a burning house that looked like Catherine. Dana hadn't expected it to be so large a house or he would have known immediately which it was. The fine eyes of Dana could pick out every detail of it, each facet as it crowned in flame and tumbled in. Catherine's own high window exploded outward in globs of hot glass, the little turrets fell down, and the roofs rippled like waves. Catherine had danced on all those high roofs in her childhood and in her womanhood too. Walls peeled away like burning wreaths. Then it was all down except certain stone chimneys that stood and stifled.

  Catherine laughed, a rather brittle laugh for her.

  “It's gone, Dana. Now you are my house and I will live in you. Dana, why did you never learn to ride? Are there no horses in Ireland?” And she wheeled and skidded her horse so violently that it struck sparks from the rocks.

  Dana was very nearly a perfect rider, but Catherine was far ahead of him, going down Castle Hill. Dana had the better horse and he melted into it and surged the animal. But Catherine was like a circus girl, out of the saddle, dancing on the horse's rump, touching quick feet to ground and coming up again. When Dana came up to her she swerved and leaped, knocked him off his horse, and they rolled over and over together in the thin fluffy snow.

  “Ah, we have lost the horses and they're hired ones,” Dana said. “We should have had more care of the thing.”

  “Dana, my boy, is it a log I am marrying? What matters one hundred horses? You are with Catherine.”

  He sat on her and stuffed her bosom full of snow for abusing the horses. Running and leaping then, they followed the horses halfway to Skawina. They saw white against white and whistled, and the horses came back to them, ready to be ridden home.

  Catherine seemed gay. She sang ditties like nursery rhymes in Polish and French and English.

  “Quickly, lamp-man, light the sun.

  Eleven days left till all is done.”

  And suddenly she asked Dana “Are you in grace?”

  “I am,” he said.

  “Wait here, then,” she said. “I'll go on across the river with the two horses and bring them to the stable. And then I will do other things. My wedding gown is burned up now. I will be borrowing one. The lamp-man is lighting the sun right now and you will see it in ten minutes. Wait an hour here, no more. Watch over the city from here lest someone steal it away. Our mass is the third of the early morning. My head is priced in my own town so we do these things a little quietly. When you come, come through the market and into the side door of Lady Church.”

  Dana Coscuin waited an hour, no more. He watched over the city lest someone should steal it away. The sun came up and Dana regarded him fiercely. “Remember that it is only a rhyme,” Dana told that sacramental orb. “We will have many times eleven days before it is all done.”

  Dana crossed the little Vistula into Krakow. He was lost for a while in unfamiliar streets and he was late. He came through the market and into the side door of Lady Church. His own wedding mass had begun but it was not yet the offertory. He joined Catherine. “Late for your own wedding,” she whispered happily, and he was not sure but what she put the tip of her tongue in his ear. She pinched him till blood came. Even her strong nails were erotic.

  She hadn't a wedding gown. She had a dress of the peasant style. It wasn't a nuptial mass; it was a quick low mass. But they were married tightly and to death. The mass was over, and they went out through the side door of Lady Church into the market.

  Another couple was waiting there. Everybody wanted to get married in Lady Church, but it was not now done conspicuously. Dana kissed the waiting bride there in the market, and Catherine kissed the groom. Dana had seen neither of them before; he didn't know whether Catherine had.

  This was the last Saturday of November of 1848 that Dana Coscuin and Catherine Dembinska were married in Krakow. They hadn't a house, they hadn't anything.

  “You can turn me in for the price on my head, Dana,” she said. “It's considerable.”

  “Shall it be alive or dead? Shall I bring your ears to them, or shall I bring your whole body? I could likely get enough for you to buy three more women.”

  “We will have to stay in a different house every day and every night,” she said. “We will look, every now and then, to see if there is any light at the end of the tunnel. I don't believe there will be. It won't matter, really. This house here is as good as any, Dana. In a moment you will see the terrified look on the faces of two very good persons when they realize that we mean to stay with them this day, and that our staying may bring the police and the soldiery on them, or even fire on their house. They know me. They even love me a little. And they are truly good. Watch their faces, though, Dana. It will be sheer delight.”

  Well, the faces of them (it was an Austrian couple and not a Polish couple who lived in that house) did turn as green as Dana's shirt. But that was only for a little while. They were terrified, but they were even more compassionate. In a bit they also became brave and merry, for Catherine was infectious. They gave to Dana and Catherine the main rooms of their house for as long as they would be there, and themselves withdrew to some rear quarters.

  This was the beginning of the marriage of Dana and Catherine, the happiest marriage that has ever been upon this earth. No, it is no use, nobody will be able to call to mind a happier one. None of the famous and storied lovers, no; they all lived snappish lives together. None of the great ones, none of the little ones. Nothing like this ever, not before, not since.

  Some might say that the married saints, Stephen and Gisela, were as happy in their own time. Likely they weren't. They had very much, but they hadn't the glad garnish of the Coscuins. They hadn't the horsemanship, they hadn't the fencing, they hadn't the opera, they hadn't the mountains behind Krakow nor the plains before. They hadn't either bohemians or Bohemians to carouse at night with, they hadn't the Green Conspiracy, nor the sense of storm.

  Even in their carnal congress Dana and Catherine were certainly unusual. Was ever anyone so vivid and violent? There is an old and unchaste legend of a giant and giantess in Ireland who may have set all records, if the thing may be believed. The giant is said to have had inexhaustible passion and an instrument nine slata long. And the giantess — but those are only grotesqueries. Dana and Catherine were humanly accoutered. Both were of extraordinary physical liveliness, however, and of more than usual vigor and stamina.

  This was the Dana who was the strongest fast man from the whole west-bays area of Ireland. This was the Catherine who danced on high roof gables and rode horses as a circus girl might. And they had been given, as special award, an overrunning gaiety and apperception and awareness. Moreover, they were in love, they were in passion, they were in grace.

  This was another high hilarity, exceeding the hilarities of blood and death which are not sacramentals in the same sense as this.

  “Scrub, and dress in the gladsome rag.

  Eight days left in the bag-man's bag,”

  Catherine sang one early evening. She was carrying bucket after bucket of hot water up from the stove to the round high-backed tub of gray granite that was a feature of this rich house. (This was not the first house they stayed in; it was the second or third.) Catherine took baths every two or three days, to the amusement of Dana. This was the night they went to the opera, and they did go in gladsome rags.

  Can you imagine Dana done out in topper and monocle? Rough Brume would have flung the one-time jibe back at him if he could have seen him now. They went like a high Prussian couple, and who would recognize them so? Dana was far from adept in German, but he had picked up a hundred phrases and he was a perfect mimic in voice and bearing.

  The opera was Rienzi.

  “I wonder if they would let me play one of the fiddles?” Dana asked Catherine after
the thing had gone on for a little while.

  “Oh no no,” Catherine forbade.

  “Oh, I could go along with the tunes and surely add something to them. It seems a little lacking, and you have never heard me play the fiddle. That third fiddle-man is clearly bored and he isn't doing his part. I believe he would be glad to let me — ”

  “Oh no no. And yet, Dana, it would set them by the ears, and it appeals to me so — Oh no no no, Dana, it may not be.”

  A lady of Catherine's acquaintance talked to them in the entrance concourse in an interval between the acts.

  “I don't know if you remember him, Catherine, but Ifreann Chortovitch, that loutish grotesque man, is dead in Russia,” she said.

  “No. Ifreann isn't dead,” Dana said offhandedly.

  “No, he isn't. We would know it if he were,” Catherine said.

  “Well, that is the report,” the lady told them. “It may be that he will make a lie of the report. It is said that he is really a were-cat and that he will have several lives and deaths. There were so many strange things about him in his younger years.”

  “Tell me how strange,” Dana said. “I know him. In some ways I know him very well. But there are things about him that I cannot seem to know.”

  “Well, shortly after he was born, he had suddenly been huge, monstrous,” the lady said. “When he was two years old he was as large as a boy of twelve, and he talked like one.”

  “And he is really quite young?”

  “Impossibly young for his appearance. And wrong. In almost every way he is wrong.”

  Dana and Catherine did not get to see the end of the opera. After another act, a man whispered to them that they should leave, for their safety and their lives. They should not leave by the big entry doors, though, but by a side door which he showed them. They left that way.

  They picked their way through dark streets. And they came out of their thin disguises. Catherine, with a whispering laugh, suddenly shed all her gladsome rags from top to toe. She wrapped herself in a horse blanket (and the horse rolled big questioning eyes at her) and slipped along barefoot in the thin snow. Dana sailed his topper one way and his monocle another. They entered a dark house, not the house they had come out of that evening.