Mariella really should have been a general. She had captured an enemy division headquarters in the middle of the night. But strong men armed would be returning to that headquarters. The situation was a little unusual and not entirely comic. One does not ordinarily walk into a den of cut-throats and tell them that they are being evicted. It has not been sufficiently explained just what sort of persons were Donzelle Moeras and the devils who lived in her house. The situation, in fact, defies explanation. Catherine Dembinska, from long and detailed study of the two revolutions, understood what sort of nest this was. Mariella Cima understood it intuitively. The four men had all heard of the complex, but each had his own imperfect idea of it. And the four men looked forward a little too avidly, a little too wrongly to the next stage of the take-over. Catherine felt herself required to correct them.
“There is one thing that seems inseparable from bravery in men and from bravery in Mariella,” Catherine was saying. “It is embodied in a frequent saying of Dana's little brown-skinned snake, though she learned it from another and much larger snake. ‘The high hilarity of blood and death’ is the name of that phrase, and indeed it is a rippling and inspiring thing — but for certain critical moments only. It is not the thing that one would build a house upon, however.
“And I say that it is not inseparable from bravery in men and in Mariella, and I intend to separate it right now. If we should live by that thought, how would we differ from those of the other revolution?
“Listen now to a series of sayings that always come hard to brave people. Our task is to extirpate by prevention. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all. Try to understand this.”
“Schoolteacher, your shirt-tail is on fire,” Tancredi said with gentle mockery. But Tancredi was extremely fond of Catherine. He had taken her into his love as his wife Mariella had done.
“We will launch visitations, yes,” Catherine said. “We will warn. I have no sympathy for the old Cagoulards of France or for any other masked society. We will not go masked, we will not disguise. We will be ourselves under our own names, except here in this house under the Mariella antic. We will interfere with the blight wherever it is manifest. We will judge, which is an august and frightening thing for anyone to have to do. We will prevent the blighting, but not in all cases will we have to kill to prevent it. Remember, Mariella replaced Donzelle Moeras without killing her.”
“Oh Catherine, how is it possible for you to misunderstand so much?” Mariella asked. “Of course I will kill her. For a little while I leave her alive for bait, so she can squall her outrage and bring some of her old people to this place. But soon she will be worn out for bait, just as crayfish meat is soon worn out. And then I will kill her, and all the honey from Catherine's tongue will not prevent it.”
“You disappoint me,” Catherine said. “But it is better to have people who can do it this way than to have people who cannot do it at all. The pieces of the blight will come to us in our new house for a while, and we will deal with them. But there are more various pieces that we will have to search out. To do this we will often have to read strange minds, some of the minds not entirely human. Luckily, of the people of special talent, we have Dana, we have Mariella, we have myself. And all of us show signs of this intuitive ability.”
“Show us the sign of it, curious Catherine. Who is the man who will come to this door in just three minutes, and what is to be read in his mind?”
“Oh, I don't know that at all. I don't apperceive anybody coming right now.”
“Luckily, of the people of special talent, we have Tancredi Cima,” tall Tancredi said. “And lucky it will be for Tancredi if he comes through this one alive. That is a rough mountain goat coming, as rough as Tancredi himself, and nobody is allowed to help poor Tancredi in his ordeal.”
“You had better find one more talent in yourself, Tancredi,” Mariella said. “Yes, he is a rough mountain goat and a woolly one. I may have to throw the code away and save you from him. Or I may have to accept it gracefully. I was lonesome before I had you, Tancredi, but I will not long be lonesome after. With my looks, I will not be a widow for long.”
This was along about cloudy noon of their first full day in that house.
“I pick him up now,” Catherine said. “My own intuition begins to reach and touch. He comes easily but cautiously. He knows that his den is being taken over. He is murderous and he is mad.”
“After all, he is Tancredi's counterpart,” Dana grinned. None of them doubted that the rough mountain goat coming was Tancredi's antagonist. None of them doubted that Tancredi would have to handle him alone. And they all sensed the incursing man pretty clearly.
“Be cautioned,” big Kemper warned. “Ambush in the city is not the same as ambush in the high rocks.”
“Ambush everywhere is the same as ambush in the high rocks,” Tancredi said. “But we have been careless. We haven't yet examined our own high rocks here.”
“Oh, I have not been careless, man,” Mariella said. “I have already learned every spire and cave and cliff of them. And he will already know them: he has denned here. It may go bad with you, Tancredi, but I remember that you are a real mountain man.”
“I have lost him now,” Catherine moaned. “My intuition has dried up like an August creek. He has disappeared into the cloudy air.”
“Oh, he climbs cliffs now,” Mariella said.
“What cliffs?” Catherine was puzzled. She was not a real primitive like some others of them. After all, they were in the middle of Paris: what was all this about? What was all the talk about high rocks and mountain goats and cliffs? She should have known.
“I will be about it now,” Tancredi said. He went up through the house, up through the high attics, up through the roofs, by window or trap, then up again. Here it became private and he may not be tracked or followed.
Tancredi was a shy man. His curious whispering voice that carried so strongly and to such a distance was a shy one. He was shy in his love-making, to the infinite puzzlement of his wife Mariella. “Wait, there is a ram on the crest, wait till he goes,” Tancredi would say when were in their own Carlist mountains. “The ram does his business, now you do yours,” Mariella would tell him. “Wait, there is a dog of our acquaintance hunting up that draw,” Tancredi would say. “Even if he sees, who would he tell it to?” Mariella had asked. “Wait,” Tancredi had said, “there is an owl.” A shy man.
And also in his stalking and man-conflict he was shy. What he did, he did in the secrecy of the high rocks. He always got above his man and hunted down. A very shy killer, but could he get above his man now?
From the roof, Tancredi was across to higher roofs, and still higher. How high do these steep roofs of Paris go? Very high. There is always another one above. Even where there should be no buildings below, there seem to be roofs extending up and beyond. On very cloudy days the roofs go up still higher and steeper. There is no limit to them. They melt into the clouds themselves.
Tancredi and his foe stalked each other on the high roofs of that square, and then on more distant and higher roofs. Some of the streets in the Sainte Marguerite district were narrow, and many of the roofs had great overhangs. They went higher and farther, and both of them, as it happened, were excellent mountain men. They went onto still higher roofs till they were lost in the clouds of a gathering storm.
Rain fell on them. Tempests fell on them. The tile and slate roofs became slick with rain and dangerous with wind, even for mountain men. And in the early afternoon, half a dozen squares from the house in Rue Montreuil, a tall craggy man fell out of the stormy sky to his death. He was named Louis Saussure. He was known as an instigator. He was from a region in the Savoy Mountains called the Graian Alps.
Another tall craggy man, named Tancredi Cima
, returned to a house on Montreuil street half an hour later, coming out of the rainy slate-colored sky and through the steep complex of roofs. He was shaken and silent. He had been through a private passion. He had the look of a man who had been dead, and who lived again.
“This is the fulcrum, here and now,” Catherine said. “It is the last small fulcrum ever from which the world may be moved. This is Paris which is the center and cerebrum of France, and also of the world. In another year, two years, three years, it will no longer be the center of the world, but now it is. From this small fulcrum the world can really be moved. And Paris herself can be moved from an incredibly smaller fulcrum. This is the Paris of today, the Paris of the one hundred persons which can shape the world. It were good if we had encounter with all one hundred of those persons, today, tonight, tomorrow. We will deal with all of them, as soon as we can, as powerfully as we can.”
Dana Coscuin and Catherine Dembinska had begun to go out in society at night. Catherine was always dressed in the high fashion for these evening excursions, and Dana had his own easy way with the high people. Though they went stylishly, however, they did not go in a carriage. They went, more gaily, less intensely than Tancredi had done, over the roof-tops. Catherine was not a true primitive like some others of them, but she was a high hoyden. She was a town girl, a girl of many towns. They have roofs in Krakow also, and in Vienna, even in London. And Catherine had been in Paris before, in her girlhood (convent schools also have steep slate roofs for night-larking), and in her youngest womanhood (Bohemians and cats live up under the roofs and often travel on the roofs, and Catherine knew both the Bohemians and the cats of Paris).
Though Dana and Catherine went out in society at night, they were not always invited out into that society. Often they came into society dinners unasked: coming in through high windows, sometimes easily, sometimes shatteringly, coming down through attics and garrets, coming by servants’ stairways or doorways, coming in respectably with false names and cards. This was part of the Paris of one hundred people that could move the world, a small slice of those one hundred to be found in the evening society. Dana and Catherine talked to these people. They inculcated them.
Sometimes the inculcations were received willingly, sometimes at pistol or knife point. Catherine was no Mariella, but she did like to make her points redly and aptly, right under the chin, perhaps, but with only a small trickle to compel attention, while she might sit on a nervous gentleman's lap to give her lecture on the Green Revolution. Whether or not these people agreed with her, they listened to her for the moment, and they remembered her.
The cats and the Bohemians Catherine had known in her girlhood, but now there were new cats and new Bohemians. Many of the Paris of one hundred people were Bohemians in their lives and likings, and Dana and Catherine also visited them in the very odd hours. It was with these that the two came to have real reputations: the names of both of them were already known to most of the select Bohemians.
But it was a pleasure to see Catherine, long-skirted, huge-hatted, gloved, go over the dangerous roofs and down the crumbling walls, serving sometimes as ladder or platform for Dana, hoisting and being hoisted, dancing schoolgirl dances on the very top roof-ridges, whooping down chimneys, even going down chimneys, hanging by her heels to jimmy window locks ninety feet in the air, entering by sash or by crash, and appearing there, immaculate and modish, a lady out of a band-box, a lady in every part of her.
Kemper Gruenland had his encounter with his own antagonist several days after Tancredi had his. Kemper's was not so private nor so passionately skulking a thing, though. Bashful as big Kemper might be in some of his ways, he did his best fighting out loud and in public.
And his antagonist, his apparent perfect counterpart, came in broad daylight with a raucous Low German roaring such as had scared the very tails off the bears in earlier times. He was as big as Kemper, as German, as brash, as callow. He had been brought to Paris by men of the other revolution as a simple-minded and powerful killer. He even looked like Kemper.
But Bright Fate will have to get her eyes fixed one of these days. Kemper and the other young giant were only apparent counterparts. This young man really was callow. Kemper only seemed so: actually he was fletched and battle-feathered and was a veteran of the deadly Sardinian attrition. Kemper had whole heads full of wild facts that this oaf lacked. Kemper had mystique, and poetry about Maid Helen.
They clashed in battle, but it wasn't an even battle. They fought in the entry of the house on the green carpet itself. Kemper had come to a sort of maturity, and it showed now in his every move. In spite of the demolishing way that Dana Coscuin had handled him some days before, Kemper had become almost unbeatable. None but a lightning-like man could have touched him at all, and his present antagonist wasn't that. They had fought with short knives, and Kemper had sent both the knives clattering away; but the opponent was slashed and skewered much the worst in the exchange. They had fought with pistols in a close grappling go of it. Kemper was shot in the trapezius muscles, that are off the back of the neck, but he was like a bull or buffalo there and the pistol ball hardly made him stagger. He shot the opponent in the left thigh muscle, and also in the left foot, and the opponent (already slower than Kemper) became quite slow now. They used the pistols for clubs then, and used them savagely. But it was the pistol of the opponent that came apart first. Kemper's horn-handled pistol was well-made, and the bosses on it made it like a spiked club. It did real damage.
And then Kemper handled his torn-up hulk of an opponent bare-handed and clog-footed, knocking the man's legs out, bowling him over again and again, and out the front door and down the front stairs, rolling him like a barrel, like a hoop; leaving him then in the dirty runnels of the street. The wreck stayed there for several hours, until men came and loaded him on a cart and hauled him away.
There would be no sworn vengeance to that one. The battered nameless giant had had enough of Paris forever. He would go back to the Germanies as soon as he was able to travel. And Kemper was now a street hero, for the showy parts of the fight had taken place out of doors and in the street.
The counterpart of Charley Oceaan came along four days later. He had been doing devils’ work in Le Havre. They were not really close counterparts. This opponent was merely man-sized, as Charley was; he was clearly a seaman, as Charley was; he was brown, not black; he was from somewhere in North Africa, not from the Western Islands; he also had the puzzling aspect of one either completely simple or completely sophisticate. But, like all the ones homing in on the house, he understood the nature of the intrusion, of the dynasty-change there, at once.
He was older than Charley Oceaan and more devious. His name was Asad de Mogador. He was quite young in his movements, but a little weary in the face. This may have been a tiredness of spirit, or it may have been from the long hours of travel. Very many persons, most of them in some way noteworthy, were now assembling in Paris from everywhere; or they were called back to Paris which had already been the headquarters of their work. A big show was showing in Paris and the name of it was The Eve of the Revolution.
“The eagles are gathering,” Tancredi Cima had said in his smouldering Sardinian way.
“No. The hyenas are gathering,” Catherine Dembinska had said.
Asad de Mogador was neither eagle nor hyena but he was of the mixed floating nation now called to closer work in its capital. He was a lion, a panther, a pard; a big cat anyhow, a sea-going cat. So was Charley Oceaan.
Asad also had found something wrong with his own little world, the north-west African coast, and had ascribed it to something wrong with the bigger world, the world which had now begun both to interfere and to rule on that coast. Asad had come to make personal changes in the bigger world. He didn't care what his effect on the bigger world would be, only that it should weaken that hand on his own coast. Asad was a fetishistic man and he had accepted the Red Revolution as a fetish. He also had found that the bigger world had a small swivel base: Paris.
Asad came into Montreuil street and called to a boy there. He gave several things into the boy's hand: a piece of shell-fish, a small strip of sail cloth with something painted or written on it, a split iron ring, a longer thing which may have been a whistle, another small thing. Asad was a fetish man, and so to an extent was Charley Oceaan in spite of his having accepted the Faith. Asad told the boy to bring the things to the black man who was in the house there. These things formed a sort of code of challenge. Charley Oceaan understood them, and he came into the frame of the open front door.
There was the silent war of the eyes and the stance, and surprisingly it was Asad who wilted at this. He became quite angry and agitated at that intangible defeat.
“Fight, pup, fight!” Asad called to Charley, “but don't look at me with those eyes.” The second part of that call seemed to have come involuntarily from Asad and to add to his fury. Charley Oceaan came down one step, and Asad went up three.
Charley rolled a pearl-handled pistol out with motionless motion, and Asad slapped it away from him with so resounding a blow that it is not certain whether the pistol itself fired. The quick unbelievable blow numbed Charley's whole arm. Asad was in that moment shown as the swifter and stronger of them; and at that same moment there was a sudden welling up of fear on those steps.
There was a twist to the event, though. In which of them did the fear well up?
“Man, don't look at me with those eyes,” Asad gave Charley a fearful warning.
With the same rolling rapid motions they were both out with long knives, half-swords really. They parried swiftly and rattlingly; they bit and bit back with their blades. The knives glinted silver in the sun, and then glinted red-silver, though the play was really too fast for the eye. The knives scurried and scissored together with the sound that is made only when the lubrication between them is graphite or blood. And Charley Oceaan was the more bloodied of the two men. But Asad was the more disturbed.
The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Page 19