The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I will sign one other seaman here in Hendaye,” the Ship Master said, “or I will sign two. There are seamen of all sorts in Hendaye and it will be no trouble getting a fair-haired one. I know that the two of your are going other places. You are going land-soldiering, I believe, and the ocean will not keep you now. Besides, you are the worst seamen in the world.”

  “I myself am the best seaman in the world,” Dana Coscuin said.

  “I suppose so,” the man answered, “and Kemper is the worst, but it hasn't been too bad. Oh but I would like to come to a hot quarrel with someone here while you two are still at my side!”

  “Why have we landed some bales on the Spanish shore and some on the French?” Kemper asked the Ship Master.

  “There are more gold and green plants to be plucked along a crooked shore than a straight,” the Ship Master said. “We sell certain things to the smugglers on the Spanish side and certain other things to the smugglers on the French side. And tonight each group will cross the border to the other side with their goods. And all parties grow rich by this.”

  “Why not land the bales for the French on the French side and the bales for the Spanish on the Spanish side?” Kemper asked with some reason.

  “And how then will the smugglers thrive?” the Ship Master asked, but he winked broadly.

  Here on the green parts of the land, more even than in Ireland, it seemed to Dana that there was a faint red dust or growth on all the greenery, and a thin red mist over it all.

  “Is the blight here also?” Dana asked out loud. “Have all the potatoes rotted here too?”

  French Hendaye was not large and it had never been. But there was everything there, one of everything. It had a cosmopolitan landing. It had a resort beach which was in some ways the most modish and entertaining one in Europe. It had shops for every curiosity and supply. It had people who made it their business to be accommodating and friendly, and Dana and Kemper were friendly with them. It was a rattling seashore town, sharp and bright and noisy in the late summer noontime. The Hendaye girls were all short and stocky and laughing. They had round cheeks like apples; they had round rumps and bellies like melons; they had round eyes like muley cows. It could have been a gay town.

  “But I cannot provoke a quarrel anywhere,” the Ship Master told them as he returned from one of his forays. He had his new seaman with him, half again as big as Dana, two-thirds as big as Kemper. “I really wanted a land-quarrel with someone, this one time when I have two such handy fair-haired men as you with me, and this new one here also,” the Ship Master said. “I may never have your like again. But I cannot provoke a quarrel with anyone: not the Englishmen or the Frenchmen or the Dutchmen or the Savoy-men; not with the Spanish, not even with the Basques. They are all pleasant and friendly and they will not be provoked. I steal a mile from them and they go along the second mile with me. Should I rip a shirt from a man's back, I believe that he would have a cloak brought from ship's stores to give me along with it. Their fists and their knives will rot away from non-use. I believe that the people of this place are tainted with Scripture and are beyond hope. We leave you two now. We will meet you again someday if you remember where the ocean is; I will not forget. It is very likely we can provoke a bloody quarrel with somebody the next time we are all together and so we will not waste the opportunity.”

  A lady came and handed Dana a potato. She had overheard him ask whether the potatoes had all rotted; she had believed Dana to be destitute and begging for one potato.

  The Ship Master had started back to his ship with his new seaman.

  Dana, however, had already noticed that not all the people of this place were tainted with Scripture. There were men here who would slit your gullet rather than go one inch with you, men who'd gun you down before they'd turn the other cheek. They were the men of the furry eyeballs, as one old saying has it.

  There was a squarish bearded man who had been looking Dana in the eye and drawing the edge of his hand across his throat with a ‘we will cut you down’ gesture. And this squarish man came and blocked off Dana's way as soon as the Ship Master had finally left.

  “You are going up into the Carlist Hills,” the man accused.

  “I am not at all sure where I am going,” Dana told him, “but it does not concern you or your beard.”

  “We will burn down the Carlist Hills,” the man said. “We will break them up into pieces and burn those pieces in lime kilns. We are the charcoal-burners and we know how to burn everything. We will shove the Carlist Hills into the ocean to build a new quay here. We will have out of them all the blood of those people there. We will sell it for pigs’ blood. We will sell the meat of those people in the meat shops. We will chop the clerics to pieces and feed them to the swine.”

  “You make the wrong move, square man, and I will have the beard off your face and the eyes out of your head,” Dana said in that pleasant fashion in which sparring men sometimes confront each other. “Why are you, a Frenchman, concerned about whatever goes on in the Spanish hills?”

  “I'm no Frenchman, I'm a world-man,” said the fellow with the beard. “For freedom, we will grind down those hills and have all the sick blood out of every man there. There is nobody left in the hills now except worn-out old men, and they are entirely discredited.”

  “So, why do you fume and puff about them, charcoal-burner?” Dana asked.

  “For freedom,” said the man with the beard. “For freedom we cannot leave one man alive in all those hills. Watch to yourself, straw-hair. It's a pig-knife between your own ribs before this day is done.”

  Dana looked at the black-bearded man standing in the white-dust road and he knew that this man was as fundamental as were the Carlist Hills themselves. He was a little afraid of this man. ‘Well, perhaps this man is a little afraid of me also,’ he told himself. ‘Most often it runs in both directions.’ And aloud he said:

  “Let it come, beard-man, by sun or by dark. I have strung more pigs than yourself has.”

  The bearded man went away for a while. His stature, but not his menace, diminished with the distance.

  “The bearded man is named Jude Revanche,” a lady told Dana. She was the same lady who had given Dana the potato.

  “He is Judas,” Dana said.

  “What? No, his name is Jude, not the other.”

  The Ship Master in his boat was half-way to the ship. He would go to unload spar-timber at Santander of the Timbers, and whale oil at Gijón of the Whales. This was a little like carrying coals to Newcastle or guano to Chincha, but the Ship Master was a man who understood sea commerce. He brought his goods to the world market, or the Europe market for them.

  It was a bright beachy town of white sunlight and curiously buzzing air. There was a very large and very handsome girl there. She was named Margaret. She looked at Dana, but she joined hands with Kemper Gruenland. She went off hand-in-hand with Kemper, but she still looked back at Dana, telling him to come to the same place.

  There was another girl there. A very odd girl.

  “That one is a saint,” said the lady who had given Dana the potato and who had told him the name of Jude Revanche. “Go with her if she wants you to go. She is a saint.”

  The girl was very young, no more than twelve, huge and shapeless, with eyes that were almost entirely white, and an expression that Dana had seen on sheep, hares, and doe-deer, seldom on a woman. The girl was possibly moronic. Dana knew at once that she was without speech, but that she had a special sort of understanding.

  She clasped Dana tightly. She even lifted him off his feet and carried him some steps. She pulled him along.

  “Go with her. We call her Sainte Erma,” the lady who was there said. The huge young girl wanted Dana to go with her, and he went.

   — to an unmodish seaman place where the bee-buzzing in the air was the loudest. The white-eyed girl brought Dana to a woman and delivered him to her with an empty motion. And that woman engulfed Dana completely with a smile and with the clasp of her han
ds.

  “I did not know your name or appearance,” the woman said. “I sent my daughter to find you. What she knows, she knows in another way. Go sit with those revelers till I come.”

  The revelers included Kemper Gruenland and Margaret Gretz, the large handsome girl, and others: a small Sardinian man, a large Frenchman, several other men of unfathomed nations, several Hendaye girls.

  The ate salt fish from Brittany while the Hendaye fish beyond the surf lept in such multitudes that they dazzled the eye. They drank sour wine from Spain while the sweet grapes of France wept in their profusion. (The woman, the mother of the odd girl, had joined them now.) The sweethearts wore lace from Flanders; in Flanders, some of the sweethearts wore lace from Hendaye in France. A black seaman there talked Dutch. There was only one black man there and he went by the name of Charley Oceaan. The French talked Basque; the Italians talked French; the Germans talked Polish and Wendt. The Sardinians talked Spanish. There was a buzzing in the air yet. There was also an infectious laughter from all the corners of the room.

  “What is the bee-buzzing that seems to be everywhere, inside the walls and over the roofs,” Dana asked the woman who now rocked him in her bosom; this was the mother of Sainte Erma the odd girl.

  “It is the whispering, the spy-whispering, Dana my young love,” the lady said. “Hendaye is nothing but nests within nests of spies. The spies live in old storks’ nests on the roofs and in the chimneys. They live in old cranes’ nests on the rocks. In a big stork's nest one can make four little cubicles, walling them off with thin walls: one cubicle or nest each for an Emperor's Spy, for a Pope's Spy, for a King's Spy, for a People's Spy.” This woman had as crookie a tongue as Dana's cousin Aileen back in Ireland, but it is harder to judge such things when they are spoken in French.

  “Jane Blaye, who owns this house, is rich from renting out the storks’ nests on her roofs and gables,” said the large and handsome Margaret Gretz who was with Kemper Gruenland. “A man might do well to learn just how rich she is.”

  “There is one doctor here in Hendaye,” said the lady who rocked Dana, “who is rich from nothing but fixing the sides of mouths. The spies talk out of the sides of their mouths so much that they wear them sore. There is another doctor who is rich from nothing but fixing left eyes. Spies, as everyone knows, wink with the left eye only, and they wink till the eyes are red and puffy. But the richest of all the doctors is the thumb doctor. He fixes the thumbs for spies who have worn them out signalling and gesturing. He is the richest man in all France.”

  “Ah, but the richest widow in all Hendaye is Jane Blaye,” said the large and handsome Margaret.

  “Who is Jane Blaye?” Dana asked.

  “She who rocks you in her bosom, and she is rich, Dana,” handsome Margaret said.

  “It is myself, boy Dana,” the lady said. “Wherever you go, remember that Jane Blaye is in Hendaye, that this is the place to come back to.”

  A man was playing a horn-pipe there, and Dana suddenly felt the enormous vitality that was in the place. But it was sprawling with wickedness. The horn-piper might well go to Hell for that he piped the concupiscence of the flesh so strongly and with such a raucous magnetism.

  “It is as I said,” Kemper declared as he took hold of the large Margaret and went to dance, “my sweetheart is twice as big as your sweetheart, Dana. You could never have mine.”

  “He could have me for the asking,” big Margaret said, “but there is no way I could get anything away from Jane Blaye.”

  “It is all right that I am small, Dana,” Jane Blaye told him. “The Hendaye girls are the strongest in the world, and I am one of them. And the Hendaye dances are like nothing anywhere else in the world, and for this the world can be thankful. Dana, you do not have to go where they tell you to go. You can stay here in Hendaye. Nothing wrong can come to you in Hendaye.”

  “Have I said that I would be told where to go?” Dana asked. The horn-piper was playing the whirl-around dance that is named toton. But in Hendaye, to the sprawling unholy music of the horn-piper, it was the girls who whirled the men.

  “I have a pack made up for you if you do go, Dana,” Jane Blaye said. “I made it up several days ago.”

  “I was on the high seas several days ago.”

  “I know that. I have a mountain pack made up for you. There is the goatskin winebag that is named gourde here, and is named bota when you are over the border into Spain. It is filled with a full gallon of rough Spanish wine; that is what goes best on a rough journey. There is cheese for you, and the hard sausage, and a four-pound loaf of bread. And there are sandals. Your Irish brogues would not do in those mountains; they are designed to protect the feet from the rocks. But the sandals, which will be named alpargatas after you have crossed the Spanish crest, were made to unite the feet to the rocks and the roads and to blend them in one friendship. There is a blanket, and there is an American pistol. There is a cap that is named gorra. You may have to travel in the mountains for seven days with this food and equipment. I will give it to you in some unexpected place this evening, after you have made your false start. This, of course, if you really do go.”

  “Why should I make a false start?” Dana asked.

  “For the saving of your life,” Jane Blaye said. “Don't you want to save it?”

  Who understood what he should do? Dana did not. Jane Blaye had her own ideas, and some of them seemed to apply to somebody else, not to Dana Coscuin. The mute girl, the daughter, understood, perhaps, in her own way; but she could only communicate in her own way. Dana hugged the grotesque girl to him suddenly.

  “Your daughter here, I have wondered, is it all right with her?” Dana asked.

  “She is the dumb saint,” Jane Blaye said, “and God will take care of her. But you, Dana, are another sort of person, and God will need considerable help in taking care of you. I will give Him and you some of this help, as will my mute daughter. Many others along the road will give you help, and do not refuse what is offered. Even so, I doubt if you will make it. My husband used to see you dead, and it depressed him.”

  “Your husband, and he is dead since you are a widow, never saw me or heard of me.”

  “Maybe not. But he used to have clammy dreams of the death of some young adventurer, and I believe that it was you.”

  The horn-piper was playing the Dance of the Unbreakable Dolls now. In this dance, the girls (who are the unbreakable dolls) had to maintain any position they were placed in, however twisted or comic. And they had to remain silent and blank-faced as real dolls are. If they broke position, or if they laughed, they lost the game that was the dance. And the men had leave to break the Unbreakable Dolls any way they could. How is a girl not to laugh or break position when her man jumps on her with both feet? The horn-piper was wild and raunchy, and the happy Hendaye girls were truly unbreakable and they were truly dolls.

  Two English ladies, going by in the road with parasols, looked in with curious tittering. Then they continued on their way, looking back. A man went by with a barrowful of fish, and some of them would have been strangers in Bantry Bay. Blue-bloused children whistled. Soldiers looked in and chewed the ends of their moustaches.

  “You need not go where they tell you to go,” Jane Blaye said again. “You need not hear at all when they call you to come. Let your ears be stubborn and closed. There are other fates to be had.”

  “I have not been called to go anywhere but to Hendaye yet.”

  “The caller will call you very soon, Dana. What you do then will be a secret between yourself and God and Jane Blaye. Come, I will show you something.”

  The evil horn-piper was playing Mountain Bridges now. In this dance, the girls lay down to bridge with their bodies the space between two tables or two stools, and the men — (“Come along, Dana, such licentious things are not for you,” Jane Blaye said) — and the men walked across on the girls’ backs.

  Jane brought Dana into a large and cluttered room, her own quarters. In a big cut-off corn
er of it there was an angry shrine. There were two, perhaps magnificent, perhaps grotesque, pieces of peasant art. One was a large wood statue of the Blessed Virgin with an expression that is not usually found on representations of the Virgin. It could only be called murderous glee. Oh, she was a wild country virgin, an unbreakable Hendaye virgin of a girl! And she was killing a snake, but not an ordinary snake: it was, of course, the serpent from the beginning. She was crushing it with her bare feet which were bloodied and had fangs broken off in them. She had the snake now, burst and smashed and stark-eyed; she had it near dead. The serpent's lips were foam-flecked, but so were the virgin's. There were comic elements to the strong carving: comic statues of the Blessed Virgin are not unknown in the south of France, but this murderous glee was completely unknown elsewhere, except perhaps in the living original. But nobody seeing this could not see the towering importance of the battle between the two, and the forever present time of it.

  “We have her, they have the snake,” Jane Blaye said. “I will bet on us in the long finality; with my body and soul I will bet on it.”

  The other artwork was a rough peasant painting of Christ coming through the wall. The doors were closed and bolted in that room, and He was coming through the wall. And the first words He would utter would be “Peace be to you!” But Oh it would be an enigmatic and contradictory peace and a long time coming! There were things in that rough painting too profound for any peasant to have conceived; there were other things there that were possible only from the wholeness of a peasant's mind and hand. The man who had done that one had been a peasant, but also he had been things other than a peasant.

  The third noteworthy thing in the angry shrine was not exactly a piece of peasant art, and yet almost certainly it was of peasant formation. It was a human skull.

  “When they murdered him, they hacked it off and took it with them,” Jane Blaye said. “So his body received Christian burial, but his head had not yet. I received it back from them exactly one year later. They flung it (fleshless by then) through my window at night, hoping to frighten me from harboring certain persons I even then had hidden. They did not frighten me. They brought me consolation. I don't know how I lived that one year without something of him.