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

  Dana climbed into the sheep hills, the goat hills, the brown-cow hills. He wound through the black-pig valleys and the red-pig thickets. He came over small stubble land inside stone fences where poor oats had just been cut with hand sickle. These oat fields were smaller, a visiting Scotchman had once said, than were the crockery bowls in which oat porridge was served in Scotland. Oh, the oat fields and the wheat fields were quite small. The berry thickets were small. Some of the meadows were so narrow that horned cows could not pass each other in one. Some of the brooks were so narrow that two brook trout could not pass: when two of them met, one must always back up till they came to a wider pool to pass. And some of the dogs that wrangled in these scraps and dells were so narrow and skinny that two fleas could not pass on one dog. It was a very small world.

  The mountains here were rough enough and over-hanging enough to the eye, and they were very tall — unless the eye had something to compare them to. But here, here, this tall cliff was really no more than five man-heights tall, and none of them was really grand. They weren't meant to be. This was a world in miniature, all the bays, and the splintered hills between the bays. But outside there was a larger world.

  But the small country was all green, too green. The rain had been far too bountiful that year and the year before. The rot and the blight was brought on by this excessive moisture. And all above the green turf and fields was something like a low red mist: the red fungus, the companion of the blight, the parasite that hovered like thin bloody fog over the greenery and preyed on it.

  “My information is that you are going to Spain of the Spanish,” Peter Gorman said. Peter Gorman was a sheep-man who came up behind Dana softly, but Peter could not have had any information of the subject of Dana's going at all.

  “I go to Hendaye,” Dana said, “and from there I do not know.”

  “You will go to Spain, to the Carlist Hills,” Peter insisted. “There is one high mountain there, Dana, the highest in the world except Ararat, and it is only one cubit less high. At the time of the flood, there was one thing on this Carlist mountain that was not quite covered by the water. It was the powerful arm of a man extending up from the waves, and its hand held the Carlist flag. You can see them all there yet, the arm, the hand, the flag, all turned to stone. I have seen these things. I also was a hired soldier in Spain in my youth. There are wonderfully solid things there, Dana, but they do carry the petrifaction a little far. Look out for it. We are not meant to be like rocks absolutely.”

  “It is the rumor that you will go to Pamplona of Spain and then to Paris of Spain,” Dennis Keene said a quarter of an hour and a mile further on. Dennis also had come up behind Dana Coscuin softly. An Irishman always delights in coming up behind another Irishman unseen and beginning a conversation in the middle.

  “The rumor cannot be correct, Dennis,” Dana said. “Paris, and I did not know that I was going there, is of France and not of Spain.”

  “Are you sure of that, Dana, are you quite sure of it?” Dennis asked with apprehension. “I have heard others say that it was in France, but my father always maintained that it was in Spain, and I will maintain it after him. You will know for sure, I suppose, when you get there. Why don't you go to America and work for money and send back money for passage for all of us? Then we can all be gone from Ireland, this leprous angel whom we love.”

  “I may go to America, Dennis, I don't know. Bright Fate, I believe, has caught me by the scruff of the neck and picked me up. And Bright Fate is capable, for I've heard of her doing it again and again, of dropping me just as suddenly to be spitted on a mountain spire or drowned in the ocean. But I'll not forget Ireland.”

  “How could you forget her, Dana, and the smell of the rotting potatoes of Ireland filling the whole world wherever you go for remindance? There are people lying dead and unburied in Cork. And the famine, they say, has hardly started.”

  Dennis Keene was a pig-man. He was likewise a fowler, a birdman. He netted and limed the birds from the largest to the smallest, and down to the very small birds that make sparrows look like eagles. Nowhere but in the West Bay Country of Ireland will they take birds that require fifty of them to the pound. And pluck and clean and roast them carefully — a hundred of them to make a meal. There are bugs in other countries larger than these smallest birds. But the birds were inexhaustible. On some days they would fill the valleys and the low air almost solid to the depth of a man. On some days they would fill the sky almost as solidly and cover the sun. One could always eat in the Bay Country if one was willing to eat small.

  “The word has come to me, Dana, that you will go to Spain, and to France, and to the Eastern Marches,” the priest Croinin said a little later and a little further along as he came up behind Dana Coscuin in the brown-cow hills. “I have certain unholy visions about you in the circumstances, and I blame you partly for that. I see you dying a different death in each of the three places. What worries me is that in the first instance I see you dying dishonorably. Myself, I have died a number of deaths, and one of them must have been dishonorable or I would not be so dried out in my spirit now. One can live the dangerous life, the dedicated martyrdom, for a year, or ten, or thirty. Then a little of the danger and hardship is lifted and it is seen that it was only the difficulties that kept one going. One comes to question whether there was ever anything worthwhile except the grinding poverty and the living like a hunted animal. The juice has all gone out of me, except the final juice which we have as a promise. But you are young and virtuous, Dana, and full of the real springtime and summer juices. Now I talk to you sternly, young man: think twice before you die dishonorably in Spain.”

  “If I have time for it, I will think twice before I die at all, and three times before I die dishonorably in Spain.”

  The priest was very old and very much dried out in body and mind and spirit. The time was past, more than fifteen years past, when priests might be killed merely for being priests in Ireland. Now they were killed for other reasons; but this dried-out priest was no longer in any danger. He missed, he missed most bitterly, the daily danger of death. He had delighted in life because it had stood up as a challenge, and now there was nothing left to challenge his spent life. Besides, he had missed sanctity, and that was expected of very old priests in Ireland.

  A last afternoon in the hills. There was the incredibly clear sunlight that made the colors of everything stand up and sing. There was black sky and rain twice, and then there was the incredibly clear sunlight again. Along about dark, and dark came very late at that season, Dana came to laughter and to the stone house of his only kindred, the lady Aileen Dinneen.

  She was already at supper with her suitors, there were four of them this evening, and they gave Dana a howling welcome.

  “Moladh, moladh,” Danny McGivern cheered, “Dana is the scapegoat elected to assume our sins and take them out of Holy Ireland to be drowned with him in the sea. You'll be perfect in the role, Dana.”

  Aileen was quickly setting a place for her cousin Dana at the long table.

  “Dana will split his great wealth in five parts and give a fifth to each of us to have masses said for his soul,” Collin O'Connor sang his welcome. “And we'll celebrate your soul with your own wealth, Dana, but not all of it upon masses.”

  “Aye, leave us and go to the foreign lands, Dana,” James O'Nolan lilted, “and by your going you'll raise the moral and mental level of old Ireland that you leave behind and of the foreign land that you enter. ‘Twill profit the entire world, Dana. The going out of the Irish is a wonderful thing.”

  “Go out from the too close passion inside the lines, Dana,” Samuel Lively said, “and leave the field to the licit suitors. It was for fear of the too close love that one great hero went out of Iolcus and another out of Clonmel.”

  “I have not said that I was going anywhere,” Dana said as he embraced Aileen. “Where should I go?”

  “Oh, we know much about the Spanish man who brought you your instructions,” th
e suitor Danny McGivern said while they were all busy eating bay trout, “but there is a great argument about him. Now you must tell us exactly what he wore and what was his mien when you talked to him.”

  There was no enmity and not much rivalry between the four suitors of Aileen who were eating in her stone house this evening. Because of the troubles, nobody married early in Ireland in those years. For the last several years, nobody seemed to marry at all. They merely talked about it. And such a lady as Aileen might have several suitors, none of them yet in a position to file his suit. This Danny McGivern was a hedge schoolteacher, an instructor of the young. But there was no money forthcoming for that.

  “I don't remember what he wore, Danny, and nobody else saw him, except Mikey Moloney from the distance,” Dana said. “But in Ireland of the crookie tongues there is no need to see a thing to talk about it. The Spanish man wore a cigar in his face, he wore dandy shoes on his feet, and he must have worn something in between. He was a man who smiled more with his nose than with his mouth. Hey, is that possible? I don't know for a fact that he was a Spanish man. I don't know how the report of him got to the conairt of you, unless an eel brought it, or a bay trout, or a bird.”

  “Oh, there were many who saw the man talking to you, but they disagree on their testimony,” said the suitor Collin O'Connor. (Wait you here just a little bit; there was something a little bothersome about Collin's way of talking, about the doings of his nose and his mouth.) “Is it not true, Dana, that he wore a proper suit, all black like that of an undertaker or a judge? And a topper on his head, and a Spanish scraggle moustache? That he carried a riding whip in his hand, though he was dismounted? Is it not true that he had a dark piercing eye and a forbidding scowl?”

  “That sounds only a little like him, Collin,” Dana said. “You sound like him more.”

  “But when he walked up the coast towards Bear Haven and Castletown, it is said that he changed with every step he took,” said the suitor named James O'Nolan. “It is said that his proper black suit changed into a sporty blue suit, that it changed gradually and mysteriously; that his black topper hat subsided into a billed cap; that his scraggle moustache burgeoned into a real basher; that his dark piercing eyes changed into a set of merry blue eyes. It is said — ”

  “Oh the crookie tongues of Ireland,” Dana said. “He didn't at all walk up the coast towards Bear Island or Castletown. Whichever way he walked, he didn't walk that way.”

  “It is said that he changed still more as he walked,” said the suitor named Samuel Lively, “that he changed from the Spanish sort of man into an English sort of man, then into an Irish sort of boy, big and awkward and laughing. Now the remarkable thing about this, Dana, is that the man was watched all the way from where he was talking to you till he luffed into Castletown itself; he was in sight of someone every minute of that time. He had been a Spanish man when it began, but do you know who it was when it ended?”

  “It was the same as when it began,” Dana said.

  “No, it was not,” Danny McGivern set things straight. “It was none other than Lump-Robert Oates, the young son of Brandon Oates. I collared him myself when he shambled into Castletown. ‘Here, here, what are you doing turning into various sorts of men?’ I asked him pretty roughly, and I shook him. ‘There is something unblessed about a boy changing forms,’ I said. Then Lump-Robert told me how it was, and him so honest and witless of eye that I had to believe him. ‘I went to sleep beside a haycock that I know,’ Lump-Robert said to me. ‘I dreamed that I was turned into a Spanish man to take a message to Dana Coscuin, and that he was to give me a silver shilling for it. I did it. Then I came back and slept by the haycock again till I should turn into myself. And there you grabbed me, Mr. Daniel McGivern, and dragged me by the throat into Castletown here. And now I am myself again, but not entirely. And Dana Coscuin owes me a silver shilling.’ That's what Lump-Robert told me, and it's a mighty queer happening, Dana my boy, and I hoped you might clear it up since one end of the happening happened to you. And if you will give me the silver shilling I will convey it to the boy Lump-Robert Oates, since you are leaving the country.”

  (The look that passed between the four of them, between the five of them including Aileen, the black fabricators, they!)

  “Oh, Ireland of the legends,” Dana grinned. “Oh the long and crookie tongues of Ireland! Every legend in the world has had this same beginning and setting: there was the young lady of bright fame (her own talented tongue had given her most of her fame), and there were her four suitors who were too poor and unpropertied to sue. They gathered in the evenings and told lies, they being too poor to do other things. Out of such eggs came the legends. Remember, bright people, what tales you tell in this creagach house tonight will be told tomorrow night in the Babylon of four thousand years ago. But how is it that Collin O'Connor resembles the Spanish man?”

  “Ah, it was Collin O'Connor who turned into the Spanish man for a joke; it was not Lump-Robert Oates at all,” Aileen said.

  “No, it was not,” Dana rippled, his green eyes shining in the lamplight. “It is that Collin is a great mimic, but he had to have something to mimic. He met the Spanish man this day, and perhaps he conspired with him. And now I will miss you all, boys, and you Aileen of the Dinneen blood which flows through the left side of my own body. Have none of you suitless suitors brought us a little whisky tonight so that we can hold wake for me who am leaving Ireland, which is the same as leaving the land of the living?”

  “I have a little left,” Aileen said (chafers in her voice, meadow birds in her lilty voice), “we will give you a wake, but it may not be so happy as many of them are. Can a man die, or emigrate, with a clean heart when he leaves things so unsettled behind him? And Samuel Lively here also has a half bottle which he hid in my north manure pile on his arriving. There is something going on between Samuel Lively and my north manure pile.” (Just one year ago, Samuel Lively had killed an English enforcer and hid his body in Aileen Dinneen's north manure pile; the body was still there.) “Go get it, Samuel,” Aileen said now. “The whisky, not the body,” Dana said to his own appreciative self.

  “And the Friday eels are near ready for eating,” Aileen sounded. Aileen was likely the most sparkling girl in the Cloonee Hills: stocky and swift and powerful like Dana, greener-eyed, fairer-haired, deeper-grinning; quite young and completely independent. She was roguish kindness itself, but an illicit passion for her would, in any case, have forced Dana to flee Bantry Bay, as other great heroes had fled Iolcus and Clonmel.

  “There is nothing like lingering over the whisky and the eels when the sun is down,” Aileen said. Samuel Lively had brought the whisky in now, and the eels were cooked.

  “Even in Heaven on a Friday night,” Aileen was talking, “what could the Saints find better to do than to drink the good whisky and eat the long eels and sit on the lap of Aileen Dinneen?”

  Was Aileen faulting them for her own empty lap? In a manless Bay house, when a group is gathered after supper or at party, the favored man-guest will sit on the lap of the woman of the house. This is to reign over that house from ‘Queen's lap’ or from ‘Widow's lap.’ The other men will feel or pretend jealousy of the man who sits on the lady's lap. But who was the favored guest here tonight?

  Dana lingered with his peers in Aileen's house for some hours. These four young men were the four best boat-men and hill-men in the world, after Dana Coscuin himself, but before all others. They all had the same glow on them under the lamplight. They all had the same sharp intelligence — “though it doesn't show,” James O'Nolan said. “It isn't our intelligent words, but Oh, it is our intelligent silences!” And Aileen was a young woman without equal anywhere, this on the word of all of them.

  Brazil coffee. Oh, oh, Madeira wine. Who had brought the Madeira? Collin O'Connor had brought it. What was he doing with Spanish wine? What was he doing mimicking the Spanish man so uncannily to Dana? A Spanish man had had to ask one of the suitors concerning the habits and w
hereabouts of Dana Coscuin. And he had had to pay for the information, in Spanish wine, apparently. He had known what sort of man Collin O'Connor was before ever he came to Dana. He was one smart Spanish man. Brazil coffee, Spanish wine, Irish eels, and holy Irish whisky.

  “Tell me who I will be working for,” Dana said to them, “you legend-makers, you crookie tongues, you black fabricators. Tell me who is the mysterious employer who sends my orders.” Dana seemed younger than the rest of them, and woozier. He was not usually such a one for the whisky as O'Nolan or Lively, certainly not such a one as Aileen. “Put your tongues together and make a story of it,” Dana said, “and I will make your story pass for truth till I know the truth.”

  “Why, Dana, it is the Count, of course,” Aileen said. “It is always the Count, of the name too august to be spoken.”

  “What Count, and of what country?” Dana asked.

  “Oh, of none of England or Ireland,” Samuel Lively fabricated, “or of none that can be revealed. This is a very ancient and mysterious Count — ”

  “ — so ancient that he dined with the Fathers at Trent,” Danny McGivern contributed.

  “ — and served three King Charleses in three different realms in three different centuries,” Collin O'Connor added.

  “ — and is the master puppet-master who manipulates the other puppet-masters,” the suitor James O'Nolan said.

  “His name, I must have his name,” Dana insisted.

  “His name, Dana, my love, my life, what name will we give him, this Count who is above kings?” Aileen asked. Her green eyes were now a green color that is found only underground. “He is the Master Spider who spreads the widest web across the world. He is the first intriguer of them all. And surely he is an Eastern King also.” Aileen had a curly smile for everyone, and a bosom of great depth. She had great affection for Dana, perhaps too great.