They were all Polish people in that house and they talked for some hours. The insurrection was over with for that year, as far as Poland was concerned; only the attrition remained.
The only real battles had been waged by the forces of Louis Mieroslawski and they had been mostly in the Prussian sector. Although they had several splendid victories, these Polish were not able to contend long with regular Prussian units that knew their every intention and move.
In Russian or Crown Poland, the Cossacks had simply come in in very great numbers and occupied everything; they also had been informed of every contemplated move. In Austrian Poland (there really wasn't much to Austrian Poland except the one large town of Krakow and a little bit of countryside), the occupying armies had the best information of all; all the plotting and insurrection had originated in Krakow, and it had all been betrayed from there.
And all the leaders had been knocked off, dozen by dozen and one by one. And the heads of those who remained were priced.
“Another year, or two, or five,” one of the men said, “then we will try it again, only more carefully and with no possibility of treason. It will take several seasons to grow back our lost blood.”
“It is so much like Ireland that it makes me homesick,” Dana said. “ ‘And with no possibility of treason!’ Indeed.”
Catherine was a little bit doctrinaire that evening, as she had not been lately. She believed that the Green Revolution was still growing apace. And she believed that the Red Revolution, for all that it had thrown in with the ancient tyrannies here (as it will do every time) to forestall the Green locally, was yet coming onto lean days. The withering thing had itself begun to wither.
“Everywhere, over all, it is better and greener at the end of this year than it was at the beginning. The people have more than they had before. They even learn, for all their threshing around, a little bit what to do with what they have.
“And we have done such as we have with great disadvantages and impediments. We are compelled to truth, and they are not. We are constrained from unreasonable murder, and they are not. Oh, it would be wonderful to combat them,” (Catherine had a rather devilish brightness in her eyes at this moment), “for a while, with all the rules abjured.”
“The land is too much forgotten,” a morbid man said. “Both sorts of revolutionaries think only of the cities and the industries and the industry workers.”
“Oh, the land will be forgotten more and more,” Catherine said. “What is the novelty about land? It will be forgotten for a hundred years and more. And then one day the people will wake up in panic and ask ‘What ever happened to the land?’ ”
One evening Dana and Catherine were in the company of bohemian people, arty people, philosophical people, futuristic people, literary people, musical people of the several races of Krakow, and some of them truly seemed to be of no race at all. They held near as intelligent talk as may be heard in the back-bays cottages of Ireland. Only the names and the notions were different. The spirit was the same. And the spirits, though different, were equivalent. One man's whisky is another man's cognac.
Dana learned with some surprise that the shambling chunky-faced Balzac who used to walk about Paris in a sort of absentmindedness was the greatest writer in the world. He heard that the hairy Marx who wrote for English journals from Paris actually had adherents, that his third sort of Communism might outlast the other two sorts.
He heard that folk art might come back. “Who but folks have art?” he asked artlessly. “The goats and the crows do not produce anything beyond song, and the pooka and the sioga are on the level with children. If not art of the folk themselves, then of whom?”
Dana learned that night who the greatest poet in the world was. He was a young Russian man who was present in that very room. The greatest painter in the world was also present, a slightly older man and a native of Krakow. The greatest sculptor in the world was likewise with them. He was one of the men who seemed without a clear race or nationality; he had worked on monuments in nearly every city of Europe.
“It just seems as though I should be the best in the world at something,” Dana said. “Everybody else here is.”
“You are, Dana,” said an older lady from Prague. “I haven't the name of your particular art, but you are the best in the world at it.”
It was not anything there that you could hold in your hands to put into words, but it was an especially pleasant and stimulating and raffish night, one to be remembered in other years and places.
They rode out one day on horses, rode for nearly twenty hours, changing horses twice at town stables; they made a circuit of close on one hundred miles. They rode all north of Krakow on the eternal plains. The whole thing and character of these plains was that they were boundless. A boundless thing has a different texture from a bounded, however much you say they are composed of the same things. It was still only a very scanty snow in the country, and it seemed that Dana and Catherine could not get enough of riding.
“Ice on the Triton that lives in the Fount.
Three more days by the counter's count,”
Catherine sang. She sang constantly now, all sorts of songs, and she was her own orchestration. Nobody, not even Aileen in Ireland, had a more varied voice. They had come by a frozen fountain in a winter-white park. Triton did have an icicle hanging from his nose.
They fenced one day. Catherine had acquired a beautiful pair of matched rapiers. This was none of the business of the foils that have buttons on the ends. These were blood-rapiers.
“It will not hurt that we let a little blood, Dana,” she grinned wickedly. “We both have so much blood in us nowadays that we will burst.”
They fenced in the cellar of a house, the last house, as it happened, that they would occupy in Krakow. They had moved from house to house several times so that their hosts would not have the roofs burned over them on account of such guests.
They fenced easily and agilely, barefoot on the earthen floor, both stripped to the waist. There was no toying with Catherine; she was too quick and to skilled for that. It really seemed as if she would run Dana through. She drew first blood, and second, and third.
“Use them when you come to it,” she said once when they stopped to breathe. “Use this very pair. There is no way you can win with him with any other paired weapons.”
“Win with whom, Catherine?” But she slashed him, and they were at it again. Dana drew blood on Catherine. She was statuesque, scarlet on ivory now. Her throat, her bosom were statued perfection, firm beyond believing, and Dana added deep rich color to them. That man the other night was not the greatest sculptor in the world: he, Dana Coscuin, was the greatest, and he added incredibly deft touches to the greatest living statue.
With any other couple there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not. Catherine stuck her tongue out impishly, and Dana flicked it with his rapier's point, starting a fine red ribbon.
“My initials are on you there,” Catherine said when they were finished. She spoke a little slurred from her nicked tongue. This is the way Dana would remember her voice. “On your thorax,” she said. “They will scar and be there forever.”
“Some characters are there and they will scar, but are they your initials?”
“Yes. I am Polish Katherine with a K.”
There is, in the neighborhood of Czestochowa, a vivid Polish statue of a bloodied woman in pain and delight. This is sometimes called The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara and sometimes Our Lady of the Barbarians, but both names are suspect. Catherine looked like that statue.
It was that night that a man came and told Catherine that the price had been taken off her head. Catherine had good and powerful friends among the Krakow Austrians and their intercession for her had been effective. And Catherine's own striking beauty had had something to do with this. Austrians, especially those of the military and official sort, are often stricken by such. They have both a love and a sentimentality
for beauty.
“If we start for Amsterdam tomorrow we could easily be there by the first day of the new year,” Dana said.
“All right. We will start tomorrow night then, either both of us or one of us.”
“What do you mean ‘both of us or one of us’?”
But Catherine, that night, was carrying water for one of those baths of hers, to an iron tub this time. She was singing like a child, and, as often happened lately, she ended up on one of her number-day songs:
“All of our hope on the green-faced clown.
One more day till the sky fall down.”
Then she cried in the oddest voice that Dana had ever heard her use: “Oh! It falls down so sudden on one!”
Then, in the early morning, it was the passionate sacrament.
After this, they went out and to one of the smaller churches where Dana had never been, to a dawn mass; it was again the passionate sacrament with now all its fuller dimensions and aspects.
They parted after that for a few hours. Catherine went to dispose of various belongings that were kept by different friends. She was making and executing her will by sudden and impulsive donations as she rounded the city.
Dana went to terminate various pieces of business and to see about travel. He wished to go grand with his bride-wife, by carriage, by railway where such obtained, or by fine mount. Likely Catherine had slept on the bare earth near as much as he had, but it should not be so this journey.
They would go to Amsterdam because their whole company had intuitive appointment there on the first day of the year. That might be the gateway to the proposition that the world is larger than Europe, and that the growing green wave was in need of them to spread it. Their direction, which had always been present, though with infuriating gaps and frustrating silences, was directing them to that place and time. They would go there.
It had come on pleasantly and bitterly cold. Dana was as happy as he had ever been in his life.
Then it shattered, suddenly, completely.
Dana stood dazed in the street. He began to tremble. He discovered that he was crying. He began to run towards the house, the last house that they occupied in Krakow.
“Oh, it falls down so sudden on one!” Catherine had moaned the night before.
In blind panic, Dana knew that it was over with. A curl of smoke came out, and the door was shattered down as by a mad bear.
In the smoke-filled room Catherine was dead on her back. Horribly, unnaturally dead, completely broken and splattered, crushed and mutilated, red and black with her own blood, swollen and deformed. “Yes, Dana, I will kill that girl. You know it,” a monster had said once.
Dana cried out loud, like the Irishman he was, like the Polishman he had lately become. He wailed and choked. Nothing of dignity. This was death and the Devil.
Dana lay upon Catherine's body. Death could not end that love, but the monstrous death had ended everything else. He took a bone sliver that jagged out of her crushed head. “Not my head as Jane Blaye keeps that of her husband, Dana. Some lesser bone or bone splinter will do,” Catherine had said once. He rose up. He wrapped the bone splinter in a kerchief and placed it in the pouch inside his shirt as if it were the relic of a saint. It was.
A writing in the great hand of Ifreann was stabbed to the wall with a hand knife. Already the flames along the wall were flicking it, and Dana let it burn. “I'll not read your vaunt,” he said. He made out only the signature, Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil. Then it was all gone in the fire.
Dana took the beautiful pair of matched rapiers in their case. He took nothing else at all. He went out of the burning house, not answering the people who were coming to the trouble, not even answering the owners of the house who had been so kind to Catherine and to himself.
It was a little after noon. Dana went quickly through the town on foot, over a little bridge that spanned the little Vistula, south and west on the way towards Skawina and the mountains beyond.
Dana picked it up almost as soon as he was in the open country, in that monster's own country. What does a tracked Devil smell like? It is undeniable that he has a strong animal smell when he is pursued or at bay.
A little like a bear, a musk-mad bear. A little like a wolverine, which continental Europeans call the glutton, which is also called the son of the Devil. A little like an ape. Very strong and rampant.
Dana knew nothing and everything about the creature he tracked. It had become a creature to him now and not a man. That it was not a normal man was clear. Even that it was a madman would leave much unexplained. It was an animal plainly (who is not?), but animal to an excessive degree. It was ghost and devil, it was monstrous hybrid. It was, according to the stories of all those who knew it earliest, a hulk of no more than eighteen years old that had the appearance of a man twice that age. Boy monster! Aw hell! Och Ifreann!
It was a man-magnet, and it was drawing the man Dana over the miles now. Yet it had been genuinely the heartiest creature ever. Its sweeping offer ‘It is I and thou, Dana, and the wonderful blood in the gutters’ had been made in towering friendliness. To kill the girl was something ordained to it from the beginning.
Dana had had more encounters with the Ifreann in dreams than in the waking world. He had seen the creature clearly in a daytime dream when he read its first letter: the mouth too big for the face, the almost purplish face too big for the head, the head too big for any body, the body too big for any thing.
Dana traveled with the untiring jog that he had learned from Brume. The fine rapiers in their case were not really a-rattle; they were a-whisper. The case was green velvet within, rather rich.
The Ifreann could not have been a great distance ahead. Its track was strong, repugnant, overwhelming, the concentrated forced stench of a zoo animal. Ifreann was a zoo animal on earth.
The Ifreann would not jog or bounce along. When it went rapidly it always went with a huge stride that was really a stagger. Dana found its tremendous tracks sometimes in slush runs in open fields. He had almost expected the tracks to be cloven, and there was something unusual about them. Whatever was the Ifreann wearing on its ungainly feet this day?
“What thou doest do quickly.”
As quickly as possible. No more than four hours, perhaps twenty-five miles. Dana was onto the broken toes of the mountains now. The Ifreann was not a mountain creature and Dana knew it would not retreat too deeply beyond these first hills. It had warmed in that afternoon and much of the snow had turned to slush as it came nearer to sundown. A winter raven came out of the hills, cawed and talked to Dana, and seemed ready to lead him to his prey.
Dana topped a south-west running ridge and came to a higher one. “Oudzie, oudzie,” the raven caw-hissed as its wings whistled in the air, “over there, over there.” And there was the Ifreann, standing on a chalky ledge only a little above Dana.
“Dana my love, my life, we spill a little blood here and it may be possible that one of us will die. I will mourn for you. I will mourn even more for myself. Have at me, boy! With your weapons or mine?”
Dana did not answer, but he uncased the rapiers and slung one of them up, end over end to the Ifreann. And Ifreann caught it neatly. It seemed almost a toy in his big hand.
The Ifreann stood on a chalky ledge topped with slushy snow. The ledge was about shoulder high to Dana as he came up to the battle. Now here was the difficulty: Ifreann wore the heaviest and tallest jack boots ever seen. It was these that had made the unusual tracks. They were very heavy polished leather, like iron. A rapier thrust, angling up as it must, would slice or pierce them very little. Indeed Ifreann was pretty thoroughly encased in heavy leather. It would be a hard go to score on him at all.
But it was not at all hard for the monster to score on Dana; it began to cut him to pieces. Dana was in too much of a fury to back off, and there would be little left of him in a bit. He parried skillfully and daringly, but the battle was all against him. “Nie jeszcze, not yet,” the raved cawed.
&nbs
p; “If not yet, then when will it be?” Dana demanded. But he saw it now, as the raven had seen it, and he eased off a little, drawing back from the deathly point of Ifreann, making Ifreann reach for him more and more. And more.
The devil is an unnatural creature, and he will miss little points about nature.
He will not notice intimate details about chalk rock; he will not understand the effect of snow and slush and sudden pressure on it. He will not know at quite what point it will crumble. But Dana knew chalk and snow.
A little more to the left. Entice the creature into shifting a giant foot a little more. Entice it into reaching a little further. Pray that the chalk will act like chalk and crumble to proper stress.
“Prendko, prendko, quickly, quickly!” the winter raven screamed, and Dana was onto the split second when the chalk ledge crumbled under the heavy forward-shifting foot of Ifreann. The big creature slipped on one foot and came down within reach, and Dana drove the rapier point under the leather lorica or breast shield. The big creature came all the way down, and the point went all the way through, protruding from the back. Ifreann lay at Dana's feet now. He rattled in his throat, he gushed dark blood, he twitched; then he was silent and motionless.
It was the moment of sundown and it darkened perceptively in that single instant.
Dana turned away in horror and stumbled down the slope. A changed stench had indicated a changed state in the monster, and Dana took it for death.
“Oh my God, let it be that I will never kill again! Let someone else be called to it.”
Red monster-blood soaking into green moss that had been uncovered of its snow in the scuffling! Dana was away from there, away from there anywhere, in the almost dark now, in the woods and the short hills, striking out west and south, stricken and retching. The raven came after him, excited, almost frantic, flailing wings and cawing in flopping excitement. “He is not dead, he is not dead!”
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 27
