The Flame Is Green: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 1 Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  I MAN WITH THE SPANISH EYES

  II THOU CLOIG, THOU SCHED, THOU CRANE, THOU TALKING SKULL

  III DEATH DANGER, DANA

  IV HIGH HILARITY, BLOOD AND DEATH

  V MUERTE DE BOSCAJE

  VI SON OF THE DEVIL

  VII DANA, YOU HAVE THE WRONG GIRL

  VIII SELECT COMPANY

  IX OH, THE STEEP ROOFS OF PARIS

  X DEVIL UNDER THE TABLE

  XI A BLIND MAN IN THE DARK

  XII ONE MORE DAY UNTIL THE SKY FALLS DOWN

  I

  MAN WITH THE SPANISH EYES

  The Back Doors of the World are three bays in southwestern Ireland, all contained within the span of a little less than fifty miles.

  These are Dingle Bay which extends from Dunmore Head (once the most westward place in the world, still the most westward place in the Old World) to Bray Head; which lies between the Connor Hills and the Iuerach Mountains; which is fed by the River Maine; and whose towns are Dingle, Anascaul, and Castlemaine. The waters of Dingle Bay are gray and silver.

  And Kenmare Bay which extends from Bolus Head to Dursey Head; which lies between the Iuerach Mountains and the Cloonee Hills; which is fed by the Kenmare River; and whose towns are Dromare Castle and Kenmare. The waters of Kenmare Bay are blue and white.

  And Bantry Bay which extends from Dursey Head to Three Castle Head; which lies between the land of the Cloonee Hills and that of the Skibbereens; which is fed by no river at all but only by three streams; and whose towns are Castletown, Glengarriff, and Bantry. The waters of Bantry Bay are green and gold.

  These Bays were the Back Doors of the World when this region was truly the Back of the Whole World. When the ledgends of the Far Land were made, this was the Far Land. The Bays were the Back Doors of the World again and again in later times when they held illicit commerce with outlaw lands: with the rampant Scandinavias when the Viking commerce was a going thing, with Iberia when it was still Arab, with the African hump in a context that is nearly forgotten. And the Bays were the Back Doors again during the Slave Centuries of Ireland when these bays gave some contact with the free or partially free regions of the world.

  America was discovered, early and often, from each of these three bays. Hy-Brasil was discovered from them, and China, and St. Brandon's Land.

  The southernmost of the three, Bantry Bay or Spanish Bay, was in no way distinguished. Its westernmost point fell nine miles short of ever being the Westernmost Point of the World. Its hills were more tangled than those of the other bays, its upland farms were more rocky, its channels were more treacherous and less navigable. The potatoes and oats were poorer in the hills around Bantry, the cattle were runtier, the horses were smaller and less noble (though it was said that they were more intelligent, which cannot be proved).

  But the fishing was better in Bantry, and its fish-men and boat-men were better than in any of the other bays, better than anywhere else in the world. And of the superb Bantry boat-men there was one who stood supreme.

  This best fish-man and boat-man in the world was on Bantry Bay now, and his home was on the Castletown part of the bay. His name was Dana Coscuin. He was fishing now, but not for fish. He was fishing by handing himself down a weighted line and prowling old wrecks. What things he brought up, he hid in the trout; for Dana always caught his boat-load of trout first. Due to its treacherous channels, there were many more wrecks in Bantry Bay than in the other bays.

  Dana was worried this morning, for a thing had slid past him. He could track on water as another man with dogs could track on land. He could sense and analyze the wake of anything that passed, and he always knew what boats and ships were in the bay. But one had slipped passed him as if he had been morning-dreaming, and this had not happened before. It had come in as if veiled, it had created its own morning mist, it had gone by Dana, and it was somewhere at anchor in an inner cove.

  There had to be something special about this veiled ship. When a ship is invisible, even for a brief time, to the best of all sea-eyes, then there are more things than one strange about that ship. “At least it will not go without my knowing it,” Dana said. “I will be on it when it goes, but will I want to be on it?”

  Dana, whose name may mean ‘The Bold,’ or ‘The Dane’ (perhaps it is another form of the name ‘Donncha,’ someone had once suggested; “No, it isn't,” Dana had insisted), was a ruddy and tow-headed, stocky and swift young man. He was greeneyed and grinning. He had this grin always: often it was friendly, and less often it was frightening. He was nearer to twenty than to twenty-five years old, but there is no way to come closer to it than that. He came up the weighted line now, and into his boat again. Then he saw, or he felt, a man on shore. And the shore was a mile away. The man had not moved down the shore or up the shore. He was simply there, and he hadn't been there a short time before.

  And there was another man coming behind Dana, crouching very low on a small boat that was nearly awash. He seemed to walk on water, this man. But Dana's grin was deep and friendly for the stealthy man behind. This was Mikey Moloney of the Bay who often tried to slip up on the sharp-sensing Dana.

  “Hullo, Mikey,” Dana laughed without turning. “Other things are slipping up on me this morning, but Mikey Moloney will never slip up on me. He can barely slip up on the fish and hook them into his boat before they see him, and only the old and deaf fish can he do this to. Where is the strange boat in the bay, Mikey?”

  “There are no strange boats to a man's eyes, only to a boy's, Dana,” Mikey said. “Only one ship has come in this morning, while you nodded like a noddy. It's a Scandinavian ship such as you have seen dozens of. It's in Black Thief Cove now, but it will move to Castletown quite soon.”

  “And who is the strange man on shore, Mikey?”

  “That I don't know, Dana. I had him in and out of my eyes but I lost him when he was coming over the hills. I don't know how he got to the hills from the ship, if he came on the ship. If he's a strange man, well, he has come to a strange land. Dana, there is a black blight that has come on everything.”

  Anyone watching these two men from a little distance would have thought that they were both standing at their ease on the water, so low did their small boats ride.

  “Not the blight on me, Mikey,” Dana maintained. “I possess a sovereign against all black blights.”

  “How much better it was in the old days,” Mikey Moloney was saying (and Dana was weighing the mile-away man on shore with his eyes and mind), “when the iron-workers and artifactors, the gnomes and the pookas, lived under the hills and worked there. Those iron-workers, those Industrialists, were not counted as people then, and yet they were on proper terms with people. They brought up their iron artifacts from their underground dens and they traded them to the people for ducks’ eggs and whiskey and fish and mussels and oats. That is the way it should be. They came up to traffic only on cloudy days. I believe that they were forbidden to see the sun.

  “But now they often work on the surface of the land, and they eat up the green land itself. Moreover, they pass themselves off as people, and sometimes they are accepted. Did you know that, Dana?”

  “I know that, Mikey. At one end of my last voyage, I met an iron-master who had one hundred boys and men working for him. Mikey, he looked so much like a human that I felt myself inclined to accept him as one.”

  “Ah, you laugh at me with your eyes and your mouth, Dana. But I tell you that it was better when many of the things and creatures remained under the ground. And beyond the Industrialists who should never have seen the light of day, th
ere is another blight, Dana. The potatoes begin to fail everywhere.”

  “They stink in the fields, Mikey,” Dana said, “but I never regarded the potato-eaters as much better than underground folk. If they eat what is ashamed to see the sun then they invite all sorts of blights. When the sea begins to fail, then I will worry.

  “Mikey, I must go and talk to that man on shore. I do not know what he is, but he has come quite a few hundred miles just to talk to me.”

  “Are you sure that he has even heard of you? He may have other errands, Dana.”

  “He may have, but I am his main errand. I'm a poor man, though. I haven't anything to give anybody except my eyes and my hands and a few things in my head and my trunk. He will have to know that I am not to be bought, and hardly to be hired.”

  “Go to him, Dana,” Mikey said, “and I'll back you up in any trouble, going in water-low behind you, and me quite a man myself.”

  “I don't need anyone to back me up,” Dana grinned, “but follow me if you want to, out of friendship and curiosity.”

  At that distance it was not possible to see the man well but Dana knew that he was not a familiar of the Bay. Dana knew the lines and the stance of every man in the whole Bays region and this man didn't belong. But he hadn't come from the ship either, not directly from it.

  There was the illusion that Dana caught the man's eye, but Dana could hardly be sure that the man had eye or even head at that distance. Then the man crooked a finger at Dana to come.

  “I will not come to any man's imperious crooked finger,” Dana swore. “Let him hail me with a full hand like an honest man if he wants me to come.”

  The man turned away then, but it seemed as if he would wait. And Dana Coscuin also turned away and began to pull in his weighted line.

  Dana stowed the line, stowed certain small things that he had brought up from the wrecks, put on his shirt and his shoes, looked once more at the shore (the man was still there and it was not far from Dana's own Castletown shore), and turned to his oars.

  He would row the mile to the shore without once looking around at it. And when he was very near it, he would hunch, heave, give a mighty lurch, and set his boat ashore on the only narrow strip where it was possible to beach it so.

  (Ah, but the man there knew that this was the only narrow bit of shore around where a boat might be beached. Do not underestimate that man.)

  Then Dana would leap out clear, making a full turn in the air as he came up from the rowing bench, land with both feet on the pebbly shore, and set the end of his great finger right against the man's nose. Dana could do these things exactly and to the very inch.

  And Dana did it all exactly, or within the very beggar's inch of it. He did it, and quick fire stung the end of his finger. It was a Spanish man smoking a Spanish cigar, and Dana had jabbed his finger into the fire end of it. Well, he had come pretty close to blind-tagging the man on the nose, and yet that man had taken part of the play from him.

  “There will be times, Dana, when for your very life you must come closer than that,” the Spanish man said. The man was a dandy in dandy shoes, but he was mocking Dana and he had won the right to. He was standing on that little gravelly strip between the muds, and there was no mud on his shoes and no prints showing the way he had come.

  The man could not have come there by small boat. Dana, awake or asleep, knew every boat that was anywhere on Bantry Bay. He had even known of the veiled ship or boat: it was simply that he had not seen it for its morning mist. The man could only have come over the hills from Kenmare Bay, or have arrived that morning on the mystery ship or on the packet-boat to Castletown, and walked the mile from that shore to this place. But he couldn't have done either without soiling his dandy shoes.

  “All right, Spanish man, what is your name?” Dana asked easily. Dana had the poignant feeling that he knew this man. Dana had been to Spain twice, and had traded with Spanish men in the Bay, but this was no man he had met on those doings.

  “I haven't any name at the moment,” the man said. “Neither have you. It is said that you may win one for yourself later, if you are the man I believe you are. Go to Hendaye. That is all.”

  The man turned away and seemed to have dismissed Dana.

  “Turn back, man,” Dana said stoutly. “You do not go till I tell you to go. You are on my own untitled land and I will have words with you. What do you mean when you say ‘Go to Hendaye?’ ”

  “Acaso, I have the wrong man,” the Spaniard pronounced sadly, but there was something of a tricky humor about his nose and his mouth. “I was told to find the young man with Bright Fate written all over him, one who could see a crooked finger at a mile and who could tag a notion on the nose at a like distance, a man who could apprehend a simple instruction at first ear, one who would not need to ask questions.” The Spanish man seemed very sad in his disappointment at Dana. “I say to you ‘Go to Hendaye,’ and you look at me as if there were more to be said. Clearly I have the wrong man, one unable to understand at first ear.”

  “It may be that you do have the wrong man,” Dana granted. “I can be an unquestioning man also, but I will question you. By what authority do you tell me to go to Hendaye?”

  “At least you do not ask where is Hendaye and how you should get there,” the Spanish man smiled. He smiled more with his nose than with his mouth.

  “I know these things,” Dana told him. “It is the border town with the French landing and the smaller Spanish landing. But I do not know your authority.”

  “And I will not tell you the authority,” the man said shortly. “You will go there because you have been chosen to enter the employ of a certain man. You would not recognize his name if I told you, and I will not tell you.”

  “You recruit for him?”

  “I, ah yes, I recruit for him.”

  “But the wars are finished in Spain,” Dana said reasonably, “and the pay there was always indifferent and random. The Government has enough dogs for soldiers, and the Carlists also have enought worn-out dog-soldiers to lie on the high rocks and sun themselves in the recall of worn-out wars. There is nothing in that rocky country for me. We have rocks as high and as rough in Ireland.”

  “Not nearly so high, not nearly so rough,” the man said. “But I did not tell you that you would go to Spain from Hendaye. I certainly did not tell you that you would go to the Carlist Mountains. You learned this without words, for it is true that that is where you will go first. So it may be that you are the right young man after all. There is a special rock in that Carlist country and that is where you will begin. It's a harsh and glazed rock. I say this, Dana, and I am a partisan of it. There are many things wrong with it. It may be that it is fundamentally wrong, but at least it is fundamental. And you have not found any fundamental thing yet.”

  “But I have,” Dana maintained. “I have the rock itself, as have many in Ireland, as have many even in Spain.”

  “Go to Hendaye.”

  “I will go first and sell my boat and my bothan to a man,” Dana said.

  “No. Go empty-handed. Go now. Go to Hendaye.”

  “One or, one gold piece, is always given to a recruit on the bargain.”

  “To you three, Dana, and you have just received them.”

  “I had four already in my sparan.”

  “Now you have seven there. Could you not feel the added weight with your fine sensing? Enough of talk. Go to Hendaye.”

  They hadn't any full language in common. They spoke in mixed scraps of Spanish and Irish and English and French. Spanish men and Irish men had always been able to understand each other on Bantry Bay which was also called Spanish Bay. They had understood each other back when they spoke in scraps of Norman and Irish and Navarrone, back when they used Old Norse and Middle Irish and Dog Latin, back when they used Arabic and Gothic and Celtic, even back when they used Phoenecian and Milesian.

  Dana didn't look into his sparan, in his pouch. He knew that it now held three more gold pieces. He felt the added wigh
t without question. He asked no more questions. He had, in fact, been waiting for someone to name him a destination. It was the year 1845 and the rot was in the Irish ground. Dana understood, as many still did not, that there would be no crops in Ireland that year or the next, and very little in the third year. It was the big hunger. It was the famine come again in the extreme form that had been foretold in the cycles, and he who was on the Bay Shore need not turn back either to the Land or to the Bay.

  He realized also that Bantry Bay with its free ways was only the short tail of the island creature that was enslaved, that Ireland was more deeply enslaved than any country in the world had ever been, that there would be no alleviation at all from the slave masters, and that this blight would creep even over the Bays. It was the land that no good man could ever forget, and no free man could live in any longer.

  Dana Coscuin went to Hendaye on the French-Spanish border. He began by turning his back on the Bay, leaving his boat there (“The boat and the trout and the things under the trout are yours, Mikey,” he called out), and heading into the Cloonee hills that are behind Castletown. He did not look back at the Spanish man. He suspected that the man was somehow gone now.

  Dana was a little abashed that he had asked any questions at all. The man had spoken with the air of delegate authority. He had said that Dana should go to Hendaye. It would have been of much better effect if Dana had turned and gone there at once without words. And now he went there, with all proper directness.

  Into the Cloonee Hills then for a while: from their not great height Dana could see the Ship. It was behind Bear Haven right off the Castletown Landing. The ship was named Skaebne, Dana saw, so it was a Norse ship. A ‘cat-built bark’ it would be called, and the ‘cat’ had a Norse meaning of the shape of the hull. There was no style at all to it. It is all legend that the Norse had ever had stylish ships. It was squarish and seaworthy, with three masts, and no hint of an engine or a funnel. “Three hundred nineteen tons burden, one hundred and three feet long, ten knots sail,” Dana guessed from his far-seeing eyes (but his guesses were no more than close), “and she will carry a master and nine men, and one passenger with gold for his fare, myself. She is going, though she does not know it yet, to Hendaye. And she will go just before tomorrow dawn.” And now it was barely today afternoon.