The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

by R. A. Lafferty

  “In the system of the queer creatures, there is no need to dispense justice. Porneia, in its several forms, will do as well, and it is cheaper. The new Disestablishment and its whorishness becomes a perpetually established thing. Cowardice is really a better thing than bravery, and a perversion is cheaper to maintain than a child. Puf! Puf! Pu! Let the stones rise up! They will be better people than one half the people we have now.”

  Who says all that? The Black Pope, of course. Dana had gone to him at night. There was flinty truth in what the old man said, and it was the kind of talk to bring derision forever from almost exactly one half of the people of the world.

  “I have seen more of the porneia in the last two years than you have in your whole life, father,” Dana told him. “You are like a child.”

  “I am not a child. It is the pornocracy which will apparently possess the future forever,” the Black Pope was saying. “It is the easiest way, the cheapest way, the stultifying way, the indulgent way. It is only required to bawl aloud in the streets and in the journals for fame and fortune in that.

  “Conjure up a prototype in your mind, Dana. It is a small shrill man, still on the fringe of youth in years, but he had never been young; he had never drunk ale in the land of the young. He was a preacher forever; he was born in the pulpit, and he had never left it to see what the world was like. That did not restrict him. His master is called Prince of the World, and he knows what half of the world is like. The pulpit of the preacher, you see, was the streets and the journals. The preacher affected comparison and concern. His voice was full of oily indignation. But he was seven kinds of a pornographer, and he was no other thing at all.”

  “This is no prototype, father,” Dana said. “This is a person, was a person that you tangled with long ago. Is he dead?”

  “He is dead, yes; he is with his father the Devil.”

  “I have heard lately from a live man who has the Devil for his father,” Dana said. “Did you kill the preacher-pornographer?”

  “Possibly I did. I had a checkered youth.”

  “Can you always tell the past from the present, Father?”

  “Not always, but mostly I can. The thing, the thing we were talking about, Dana, is the left-handed devil and it wishes always to rule deviously. Should it become the actual government in any locale, and this will be rare, it will have no choice but to mock itself, as in our present Spanish instance. But it will prefer to maintain straw governments which it will pretend to oppose. But it will oppose only the rare good that is to be found in them.

  “Is it so difficult to feed the poor in this world, Dana? Actually, it would not be very difficult; it seldom has been. It would even be easy for them to do it, and to do their whorishness at the same time. But the poor are as much to blame as the rest. Offer them a snake in one hand and a loaf in the other. One half of them will take the snake; one half of them will take the loaf. Those who take the snake will most often refuse the loaf even though they could have both. There is a syndrome between their misery and their whorishness. Offer them the snake only, as is done in Spain today, and all will go hungry. But half of them will take the snake avidly. Yes, the porneia will apparently take over the world, Dana.”

  “I want to marry the lady Elena Prado, Father,” Dana said softly before the old man could begin another sentence. The old man swelled up like an angry frog. And he burst like one that has swelled too far. But when he had resumed his former size, then there came a quick glint of compassion and sanity into his eyes.

  “All right, Dana. Bring her here. I will marry you: and I will guarantee you that there will be no trickery and no ambush. I wonder whether God or the Devil will be the more puzzled by it.”

  “I haven't been to see her yet. I'll have to devise a way. I believe that finally it will be that I marry her in her own place by her own priest.”

  “That is almost a certain death-ambush. Be careful.”

  “No. I am not even allowed to be careful in this. It's like crossing ice-fields or crumbling earth. The slow and careful man will fall. Worse than that, the careful man will fail. What I have to do I will do in as few hours as possible.”

  “There is something unnatural about your girl now, Dana. Last week we had a light snow. And of course she came as the snow witch and led a dozen of our young and not so young men to their deaths. Nobody knows why the men follow her on these Carlist raids that are death to the Carlists. But that is not the unnatural part.

  “You will remember, when you yourself followed her on a raid just two years ago, that she was very nearly killed by a shot from Mariella the wife of Tancredi Cima. Huge Mariella hates and pursued the witch, but she never got another shot at her until last week. In that raid, though, she did get a very good shot, from above and behind. And Elena the witch reined around and faced her. The witch raised her hands above her head and laughed and waited. Mariella then fired at her with a rifle five times at a range of under forty yards, and Mariella is a better shot than any of the men. Listen now. She did not miss.

  “Five marks appeared on the breast of the snow witch. On that raid she wore a snow-white smock under her red-lined cape. Five black marks appeared and then turned red. The Elena witch laughed again, wheeled her horse around once more, and rode off.”

  “And so there is one more colorful legend in the Carlist Hills.”

  “One more, Dana, but I believe it happened.”

  “I will make one more call, possibly two more calls tonight. May the Holy Ghost put new salt on your tongue, Father! The old is worn a little, I believe, and your tongue waggles woefully. I leave you in love.”

  “Go not that way, Dana. The only hut in that direction on the ridge is that of Tancredi and Mariella.”

  “This I am knowing, Father. If I cannot win them back, who can I win?”

  “He will kill you on sight: his sight; you will never see him. Then he will slit your gullet open and examine the rocks in your crop. He believes that humans have crops like birds. There will be one rock in your crop bigger than all the others together, he says. If it is green, then you were faithful after all, and he needn't have killed you. But if it is red, then you are faithless, as everyone here has believed, and you will have deserved killing. Your death will not matter in any case, he says. You will be with God afterwards, or you will not. And he is required to kill you. Tancredi is superstitious.”

  “So am I, Padre tordo.”

  “What color is the bigger rock in your crop, Dana?”

  “Green, Father. Sometimes it's bright hard emerald. And sometimes it turns to green bitter bile, and I vent it on the idiocy around me. You be careful of it, Father. A single fleck of it'll burn ye.”

  Dana went along through the stony dark towards the choza of Tancredi Cima. It was a dangerous business.

  “But he'll not hear me,” Dana told himself. “He has no ears of his own. And yet he has ears.”

  Somebody had ears there. Dana had traveled a short mile, and he had not much further to go there. He could sense that he was sensed.

  “And he'll not see me,” Dana cajoled himself further. “He has no eyes of his own. And yet he has eyes.”

  Somebody ahead had eyes and ears at the ready. It was Tancredi, or it was his spouse Mariella with her more clever mind and more clever body. They could not both be waiting in the front ambush because —

   — because one of them was now trailing Dana; and Dana was unable to distinguish which of them it was. The trailing one seemed a little too careless to be either of the Cimas: too noisy to be Mariella certainly, too light of weight (in spite of the noisiness of tread) to be Tancredi, or even Mariella for that matter. And yet Tancredi and Mariella were a couple forever, and there would be no third person in any mountain ambush of theirs.

  Dana let himself be almost overtaken. He had scented the trailing one as a familiar, as a dog would scent a remembered person, and yet it was as if this one was greatly changed from previous acquaintance. Dana scented uneasiness in the trailer,
a touch of fear, and an impulse to action that must be prevented. The trailing one was going to sound, and that would not do at all.

  Dana was onto the shadow-form quickly, bearing it down, pinning it, covering the mouth almost quickly enough, so that all that came out was the faintest of cut-off croakings: “Dana Cosc — ”

  It was a slight wiry male that Dana had there, yet stronger than expected. Dana whispered into one of the fearful ears in a voice softer than breeze over grass:

  “You are a boy named Pedro.”

  “Yes.” Dana would uncup the boy's mouth to allow only one single faint syllable out at one time.

  “You are the same boy who brought us word, two years ago, that another Pedro, the man Pedro Curado had been killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that it was the death-witch who had murdered him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you have followed me to give me something.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it does not pertain to the death-witch, as I first suspected.”

  “I believe no.”

  “It is a letter that you have for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not get it from a lady, and yet it comes at third hand from a distant lady.”

  “I believe yes.”

  “You do not know who or where she is?”

  “No.”

  “Yet there will be a difficulty for me about this letter.”

  “Yes.”

  “The difficulty is that I will not be able to read it.”

  “I believe no.”

  “For you cannot read it, and you have tried. So it is not written in French or Spanish or Basque.”

  “No.”

  “So I will have to take it to the priest, to the Black Pope to read it for me.”

  “Yes.”

  Dana pulled the letter out of the boy's shirt.

  “Speak no more,” he said to the boy. “I almost didn't know you in the dark. You have grown and changed in two years. Count to one hundred silently as I leave you, and go quietly due north. That is down the angle of the ridge. When you come to your silent count of one hundred, then bleat loud and long like a sheep.”

  Dana withdrew on ghost-cat feet. He would solve the new mystery of the letter before he ventured into the lair of the Cimas. How fast would the boy count, though, and how sharp were the ears of Tancredi and Mariella Cima? Dana stopped on the knuckles of the ridge; there was a correct tree below him, leafless and stark in the partial darkness.

  The boy bleated loud and long like a sheep. Dana jumped, and came down into the high branches. The bleat should have covered the unnoisy leap down into the tree. And Dana descended the tree from the almost darkness of its crown to the total darkness of its lower branches. He climbed down it with none of that audible scratching that a cat or a squirrel is guilty of. When he reached ground he would be on a divergent path, and he would come to the Black Pope's place by another ascension. It was fun to trick Tancredi and his Mariella, to walk right into their open mouths, and to walk out again before they could snap him up.

  Dana came down to the lowest branch. He smelled ground twenty feet beneath his feet. He dropped. But his feet did not come to ground.

  He was caught in mid-air, and there was an explosive “oof.” He was upended and slammed to the ground, and not on his feet. He was covered by a substantial weight. He received a sudden sharp slash in the throat, and the blade stayed there, freezing him for his life while his own hot and pungent blood oozed out of him in some quantity. ‘One of the Cimas, at least, is smarter at night ambush than I am,’ he phrased in his upended mind.

  “You are the boy Dana,” Mariella Cima mocked him, “the same who left his dear friends and joined the Queen's faction.”

  “Possibly, Mariella,” Dana said, and shed more blood. He would have to choose his words carefully, words that would not bobble his Adam's apple still more bloodily into the relentless knife.

  “As the Father told you, Dana, we believe that humans have crops like birds,” Mariella was chuckling her deep woman's chuckle, “and we do have. I have cut more than one human crop open to see what was in it. Now I will cut yours open and see whether the great rock in it is red or green.”

  “No, you will not, Mariella.”

  “You believe, because I love you, that I will not kill you, Dana? Oh, I can love you as well dead as alive. I can love every dismembered member of you. When I was with my brothers and cousins and uncles, they often killed men, and I fell in love with one of them after he had been killed. I kept his body in a cave all one winter and I loved him completely. And my Tancredi loves you as he loves no other man on earth, and yet there is no man he would so willingly kill. What, Dana, what? The stone stirs in your crop? Is it the treason of the red rock or the faithfulness of the green? Let us see quickly.”

  The big chuckling bloody-hearted saintly woman thrust two fingers down Dana's throat. He heaved, he retched. And Mariella chortled in triumph.

  “I have it, I have it. Tancredi, come quickly! Fire the lantern. Let us see the color of the rock!”

  Tancredi came noisily down the ridge. He fired the lantern as he came. He brought it into their midst like an explosion of light.

  “It's green, it's green,” he cried, and he had the big green rock out of Mariella's hand and into his own. “Oh, this gladdens my heart! Dana was faithful all the while. Our love for him was not misplaced. Now I almost wish that we hadn't had to kill him.”

  “I live and I will continue to live,” Dana swore. Mariella had withdrawn her knife, and Dana tumbled her off and rose up. “By all the Saints of Spain, my throat will heal and I will live.”

  “Are you a man or a ghost?” Tancredi cried and took hold of him.

  “Every complete man is both and I tell you that I am both. I'm alive, of course.”

  “Oh, it heals already,” Tancredi jubilated, probing Dana's throat with his big fingers. “In spite of the blood, I now see that the cut has become quite a small one. Unless — Mariella, Mariella! Did you really take that rock from that cut in Dana's throat?”

  “Certainly, Tancredi. Wherever else would I have gotten it?”

  “Then it is a miracle,” Tancredi said with great reverence. “It is the complete and miraculous vindication of the innocence of Dana. Already the cut is so small that a stone one quarter that size would not go through.”

  “By God and Mary and Teresa, it is a miracle this night,” Mariella said with deep feeling.

  “It does give a man mixed emotions to be the object of so great a thing,” Dana said. He did have mixed emotions. That devious Mariella had hurt him damnably with her knife. She was the most playful person in the world, but she did play rough.

  “I love the two of you more than I can find the words to say,” Dana told them honestly, “but I will leave you for this night. I have several other pieces of business to transact.”

  “No. We will go with you,” Tancredi said solidly.

  “We want to know what is in the letter,” Mariella said innocently.

  “How could there be a letter in the middle of the night?” Dana asked.

  “Could there be something the matter with our ears?” Mariella grinned in the lantern light. “We want to know what is in the letter.”

  “And who she is who writes to you,” said Tancredi.

  “No. This I will go and find out alone,” Dana insisted. “It may be that, in some future time, I will tell you two about the letter. You are entirely too long-eared. You should not so much as know that there is a letter.”

  “I said that we would go with you,” Tancredi insisted in his turn. “What are friends for if they do not go along at such times? Dana, I have known miracles to be reversed!” And Tancredi had his own sharp knife at Dana's throat.

  “As you say, my best friends, you will go with me,” Dana murmured.

  They went up by the different ascension towards the Black Pope's place for the reading of the letter. Tancr
edi went on ahead, and Mariella drew Dana back a little.

  “I played a great joke on my man Tancredi,” she whispered. “I did not, and you may have guessed that I did not, take the rock out through a hole that I cut in your throat.”

  “I know that you didn't. Mariella, you are wonderful,” Dana told her.

  “But I also played a joke on you, Dana,” she whispered. “I did not take the rock out of your mouth either.”

  “You did not, Mariella?”

  “The green rock, Dana, I had it in my hand all the time. I played a great trick on the both of you, you both being no smarter than boys. Your own great rock is still in your crop, Dana, and the color of it is known only to God and His Saints. It isn't true that I'd love you as well dead as alive. I love you best alive.”

  Who was the kidder in all this? Who was the kidded? Mariella tilted Dana's head back and licked the blood from the still oozing nick in his throat, licked it with a great, sweeping, lioness tongue. This husky girl was a primitive, a purring growling lioness indeed, and Dana was sometimes her cub. Mariella could heal with the same high amusement as she wounded.

  They followed Tancredi on the blind, less-than-path climb. They came to the cave of the old priest, the Black Pope, and Tancredi had already set the oil lantern on the rough table.

  Nobody had ever caught the Black Pope in a state of undress. As always, he was cleanly robed in complete black, with only his wax-white face and hands and ankles offering contrast.

  “Dana has a letter for me to read,” the old man was saying in his clacking voice (do not mistake the sound of this voice; it was not clacking like pieces of wood striking together but like pieces of flint striking; there was even the smell of struck flint in the voice, and sometimes the sight of fire-spark). “If I read a letter for Dana, how is that the business of Tancredi and of Mariella?”

  “The three of us have a single soul,” said Tancredi, “and what concerns one of us concerns all of us.”

  “The two of us have a single curiosity,” Mariella said more honestly. “We have itchy ears. We must know what the letter says and who it is from. We will spill blood to find out what it says. I am sorry, but our curiosity is always a passion.”