The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1

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The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 18

by R. A. Lafferty


  “Oh yes, I have been a sort of foil to Catherine,” Elaine said, “but I only shine with her light and life. When she is not present, I simply do not attract. I believe that it is the way she positions me. It is worth it. I am never so alive as when I am with her.”

  “Mariella Cima will be my shield and my disguise now,” Catherine Dembinska said. “Who will notice me when Mariella is in the company? And there will be many times when I have to go unnoticed. Mariella is larger than life, and more beautiful. Why have men not noticed this? There is nothing like her at all on the world. You are as beautiful as Donzelle Moeras is ugly, Mariella, and the two of you are about of the same size. Is that possible? Could anyone else be of the size of either of you?”

  “Who is this Donzelle Moeras?” Mariella asked. “I have only a very slight foreknowledge of her. I do not like her. Should I?”

  “No, you should not like her, Mariella,” Catherine said with passion, “not if you are the wonderful person I believe you to be. Nor should you love her either, not even in the compulsory Christian way. I tell you do not love her at all unless God specifically orders you to. Better yet, let Him give you the order three times. Still better yet, let Him put it in writing. Even in that final case, Mariella, love her grudgingly. She is the complete opposite of you, and her group is the complete opposite of yours, of ours.”

  “Then would I not become a great actress lady if I could become this Donzelle Moeras?” Mariella asked slyly. She was sparkling her eyes with delight at the new idea.

  “Stand back,” Dana cried. “Mariella has a new notion, and the neighborhood is not safe for man nor mule.”

  “What, my girl?” Tancredi asked, “do you intend to make our name an abomination in Paris before we even come there?”

  “It will be a very dangerous game and I'm not sure you understand what you are about,” said Kemper. “It isn't a thought-out thing at all. I have heard of these persons.”

  “When in doubt, let the bugle blow Charge,” Charley Oceaan cried. “All the way, Mariella, up the hill to the barricades.”

  “I am never in doubt,” Mariella said. “But yes, sound the Charge.”

  “I am never in doubt when I am with you, Mariella.” Catherine also began to come alive on the idea.

  “I will do it, and at once,” Mariella was smiling in a way to curdle the strongest blood. “Charley Oceaan, see if you can hire an immediate night coach to take us all into Paris. Tancredi and Kemper, go with Elaine to get the things of both the ladies out of their hotel. Catherine, I can see the whole of the establishment of this Donzelle, inside and out. I can see the faces of all the villains who live with her there. I understand how such a thieves’ establishment works. I grew up in one: it was like this one in sum, but different from it in every detail. I can see it all, but I do not know the name of the section or the street.”

  “It is the Sainte Marguerite district, it is in the Rue Montreuil,” Catherine Dembinska said. “It is a lower respectable district, not a thieves’ district.”

  “Oh, we always kept a respectable appearing cave and buildings when we were in the robbing and murdering business,” Mariella said. Charley Oceaan had already gone out to see about hiring a night coach to take them to Paris, and Tancredi and Kemper had gone with Elaine Kingsberry to get the ladies’ baggage from their hotel.

  “Oh, all the pieces will fly apart just as they should when the time comes,” Mariella beamed. “I believe that for every one of those rotters there is a counterpart in our own company. We will move in on them and eject them. And we will let them howl in the streets over the thing.”

  “Will I have a counterpart among them?” Dana asked. “Will he be too salty for me to eject? I have heard about them and him. He is pretty salty.”

  “Catherine,” Mariella said suddenly. “You are a schoolteacher on fire.”

  “I am, yes, and I burn a little now. Listen, all you people — ” (but their company had now been reduced to the three of them) — “to restrict an analogy may be a sin. I tell you that there are things in the world even beyond the ends of our noses. The long-nosed devils will not believe this. They will extend their noses to reach further things, and they will extend them again, but they cannot extend them forever.

  “Listen, all you people, the green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not.

  “Listen, all you people — ”

  “Why do you say ‘All you people’ when there is only you and me and Dana present?” Mariella asked her.

  “I give lectures sometimes,” Catherine explained. “I want to talk to many people, to all the people. Perhaps some needy one will overhear me accidentally. I even say ‘Listen, all you people’ when I talk to birds in the parks or to cats sunning themselves in windows. Listen, all you people: no, I am not a pantheist, not even a green one. To be that is to confuse the bridge with the ultimate shore. It is to confuse the pot with the potter. But I am a living pot; I am a green vessel of earth; I am the perfume of a full vase.

  “Beware of those who manufacture final answers as they go along, of those who will catch you on their catch-phrases and let you perish in their traps. All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen. They may be too bright for us, they may be too clear for us. Well then, we must clarify our own eyes. Our task is to grow out until we reach them.

  “We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time. It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above and beyond. And we must be rooted deeply. A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one.”

  Dana was whistling Mountain Bridges, one of the raunchy tune-dance-games that the horn-piper had played in Jane Blaye's place in Hendaye.

  “I remember the tune and the game,” Catherine Dembinska smiled. “I heard it and watched it from the roadway outside. Well, we must be such strong bridges that even elephants could cross over on us if there was reason for it.

  “In this growing out there are no really new things or new situations. There are only things growing out right, or things growing out deformed and shriveled. There is nothing new about railways or foundries or lathes or steel furnaces. They also are green-growing things. There is nothing new about organizations of men or of money. All these growing things are good, if they grow towards the final answers that were given in the beginning. But in their medium growth they must not be rigid. It is not a girder-steel bridge we make; it is a living liana-vine bridge that we grow and fling out in exaltations of arches. Only the final things are beyond change, being beyond time: but rigidity is too small a word for them. All grows well for a while, you see, and then —

  “ — the devils stroll the earth again and infect with the red sickness. They must, at all cost to themselves, destroy the growing tendrils before such can touch the other side. For, whenever one least growing creeper touches across the interval, that means the extinction of one devil. It is a thing to be tested. Notice it that whenever there is this special shrilling, when there is the wild flinging out of catchwords to catch you in, when there are the weird exceptions and inclusions, when there are the specious arguments and the murderous defamations, when all the volubility of the Voltaire and the cuteness of the queers has been assembled to confound you, then one green growth has almost reached across to the other side, one devil is in danger of extinction. Oh, they will defend against that!”

  Catherine Dembinska had actually lectured Dana and Mariella at much greater length than that. “Yes, you are the schoolteacher on fire,” Mariella said.

  “Come along!” Elaine Kingsberry
was calling from the doorway. “Charley Oceaan has the night coach ready. All the luggage is loaded. There is a frolic waiting for you, but it is too un-English a thing for me. I will miss it; still I will go home tomorrow. Dana, you have lingered in your wife's lap long enough there. Drag the two of them out by the ears, Mariella, and let us be gone. You can hear the horses stamp their impatience.”

  They went to Paris in a rented night coach. They unloaded Elaine Kingsberry at a hotel that catered to the English trade. They went on then to the Sainte Marguerite district, to the street named Montreuil, to a large dark house that Mariella pointed out. They unloaded such things as they had in the small snow of the road. Only Catherine had much baggage. It was Catherine who paid the two men of the night coach, then the nightcoach had driven away.

  Catherine and Dana and Tancredi and Kemper and Charley Oceaan followed the indomitable Mariella up the rather sinister broken-stone steps to the darkened house. Already a small night-audience had gathered in the street. The people of the district had some fear of the house and its inhabitants, and what seemed to be an attack would be interesting. There were partisans: the old house people, the new people people.

  “They will shoot your heads off quickly,” a small nervous man said. “Why should they not? Who are you to be challenging houses?”

  Mariella Cima knocked loudly on the heavy outer door three times. Then she counted. “One, two, three, time enough for honest persons to open.” She breasted into the door powerfully and it opened with some splintering of frame and panel. It had been heavily barred, but the mortise bits into which the bars slid were old.

  The small front hall gave directly on a stairway, and a large woman was at the top of this stairs. She held a lamp in one hand, and in the other was a shotgun which she handled like a pistol. But her voice was all sweet and strong as wild honey.

  “I have no rooms to let. The house is entirely occupied. You were misinformed to come here for any reason. I see there has been an accident with the door. I will have my men fix it at once. There are good rooms to be found in the district west of here, a dozen squares west. Good night to you.”

  As big as Mariella, and with a shotgun which she handled like a pistol.

  “Who is it in my own house that tells me there is no room?” Mariella shouted boldly. “What do you here, big woman? Be gone at once. Who are you?”

  “What? What? What? I am Donzelle Moeras, the lady of this house. Are you insane? The police are friends of mine. Get out now, or there will be violence done to you.”

  “You are Donzelle Moeras?” Mariella howled, “I am Donzelle Moeras! This is my house. We return here from a gentle evening and we find our house occupied by a crazy woman. Out, out now, or we will have them come and take you to the crazy woman house.”

  “I am Donzelle!” Donzelle cried in anger, “the biggest woman in the whole Sainte Marguerite.”

  “I am Donzelle!” Mariella Cima cried in savage glee, “the biggest woman in the whole Sainte Marguerite.”

  It was close. Nobody could really say which was the biggest woman. They were almost of the same tremendous and shapely form. Catherine Dembinska had been mistaken when she said that Mariella was as beautiful as Donzelle Moeras was ugly. Donzelle was in no way ugly. She had once been an absolute sensation and had commanded the highest prices in town, higher even than had certain ladies of the nobility. She still had her wonderful looks, and she was dressed, even surprised in the middle of the night, finer than Mariella (or even Catherine) had ever dressed in her life. But twelve years had gone by since she had been the absolute sensation. She had given up much of her carnality; she had experienced a great religious conversion such as is often experienced by French women of the torrid sort; but she had been converted, not to the religion of Christ and Mary and the Saints, but to the religion of Babouvistic Communism. Worry and hatred and intensity had etched the Donzelle face somewhat, but it was still imposing, and it was not really ugly.

  And what gave Donzelle her incredible stateliness (this was important in her current face-down with Mariella) was more than anything the red carpet. This ran from the little entrance place up the thirteen steps of the stairway, and across the upper landing where Donzelle stood. This was royal red in the light of Donzelle's upheld lamp. It was a rich, rapacious red; it was imperious, it was an overbearing red, it was the red of the superbious assumption.

  “I will have to do something about that red carpet,” Mariella Cima said out loud. Mariella could not win the face-down against both Donzelle and the red carpet.

  Mariella bent, and tore upward with the edge of that red carpet where it ended in the entry-way. She rolled it and got it firmly in her strong hands. But the red rich thing went up thirteen risers of steps and seemed to be tightly nailed or stapled or cemented. Moreover, it was anchored, on the top landing, by the magnificent weight of Donzelle Moeras which was not less than one sixth of a long ton.

  Mariella lunged with the end of the red carpet. She lunged with the impact of a double team of mountain mules. And the whole thing came in a pyrotechnic moment to be remembered. There was the brazen clangor of Donzelle (like a whole towerful of outraged bells) as that tremendous lady was upside down in the terrified air somewhere above the stairway; there was the double blast of her shotgun which roared and rattled like a loose bull; there was the crash and then the explosion of her flung lamp, and the fire immediately cascading upward. There was the resounding crash of Donzelle herself, and then her being rolled up in the red carpet by the energetic Mariella.

  “Carry it out!” Mariella ordered in a ringing voice, and Tancredi and Kemper carried the huge bundle into the street, then flicked it aroll, and the unfortunate Donzelle Moeras came to rest clear across the street, at the end of the smoking carpet, disheveled in the light snow. Donzelle bawled out in invective and defiance, but she had lost dignity, and she was defeated for the while.

  “Should we not put out the fire?” Dana asked rather reasonably.

  “No. I love it,” Mariella said. “Let it burn a little while. Then we will put it out.”

  “The whole house will go quickly,” Charley Oceaan said. “If we intend to use the house — ”

  “Of course we intend to use it,” Mariella said. “All right. Put out the fire. I love it, though. I wish people didn't always have to put out the fires so quickly.”

  They put out the fire, with much carrying of pails of water and tubs of water, with a great thwacking of wet sacks. People of the street and neighborhood helped them. The people accepted the victory and the new mistress of the house.

  But the entry of the house had a rakish and disreputable look now.

  “We will leave it like that,” Mariella said. “It will be our mark and our signature. And now we will set another signature. Kemper, go get a green carpet.”

  “What? A green carpet?” the big man gaped it out.

  “Kemper!” Catherine Dembinska remonstrated, “a good member of our company does not hesitate and ask questions when he receives an order from Dana or from Mariella or from  —  ah — myself. Go at once and get a green carpet, a rich green carpet of the size of the old angry red one, one with the sheen and the glory on it. It must cover the entry floor and the thirteen steps and the landing floor above. See that it is wide and deep. If, as it may happen, the shops are closed at this hour, find the owners and force them to open; or open the shops yourself. If you hesitate over a small order, how will you respond to the larger situations?”

  Kemper Gruenland gulped (with the sound such as a large bull-frog might make), shrugged his mountainous shoulders (that in itself was an event) and went to get the green carpet. There is something which may have been overlooked in this bulky and towering Germanish giant, this man who had done necessary and bloody work in Sardinia for several years, who had his heart full of scrappy poetry about the Maid Helen and his head full of incredibly detailed and often erroneous information, this man who prowled the world on genuine quest: this big man was ba
shful. He was terrified of hunting out and waking shopkeepers in the middle of the night. He was more than terrified of having to explain his mission of obtaining a great rich green carpet, not in the morning, not at a rational time, but right now. But it is to his credit that he did it.

  He returned in an hour, a giant with a giant bundle, and with four lesser men hanging onto the edges of it and dragging their feet in protest of the carpet rape. The four small men were making quite a large noise. Catherine Dembinska gave them additional money to quiet them. Carpets of that size and quality were quite expensive, and the men had not been, as Kemper believed they had, trying to over-charge him.

  They laid the new carpet over the entry and up the stairs and onto the upper landing. It was a rich green river. Charley Oceaan had meanwhile obtained a ship's lamp and hung it in the ceiling of that upper landing. He had also brought a barrel of lamp oil there, and he announced that the lamp would burn forever, day and night.

  They had moved all their possessions in. They were at home in their new house, and while they were in the house they would go by the names of the previous occupants. It was almost morning. It was almost time for a big first breakfast. Indeed, Catherine Dembinska and Kemper Gruenland had already gone out to bring provender and viands into the house.

  It was almost time for the first challenge, no — for the second challenge: the challenge of Mariella Cima to Donzelle Moeras had been the first. Now each new member of the house must face challenge, must oust his counterpart.

  “By such a sudden take-over we may reap an unexpected harvest,” Catherine Dembinska said. “By this, we may make contact with all sorts of unusual individuals that we wouldn't be able to locate otherwise.”

  “So said the barefoot man when he leapt into the snake pit,” Charley Oceaan had muttered. “There should be pleasure and excitement enough for all.”

 

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