by H. G. Parry
In reality, both sides had supporters of varied races and creeds; both desired to cultivate economic ties with Britain and the United States. Both, essentially, wanted the same thing, and it was a simple one. The country as it stood was split between them. Each wanted the other half.
Rigaud struck first, as it happened. In June, four thousand of his troops entered Petit-Goâve and Grand-Goâve in the southwest, which were under the command of one of Toussaint’s officers. They routed Toussaint’s forces and took control of the towns. Their victory rippled across the country. One of Toussaint’s best officers, Alexandre Pétion, defected to Rigaud’s troops, and others went with him. In the north, revolts broke out in Le Cap and in the restless areas around the Môle and Port-de-Paix. Toussaint’s carriage was riddled with bullets on the outskirts of Saint-Marc; he survived only because he was riding behind it.
The troops in the north moved in to suppress the revolts with swift, cold efficiency. Toussaint entered the uprising around the Môle himself with a crash of thunder and a swell of rain; lightning struck the center of the mob, and it flinched apart. The mob struck back with fire and fury.
In fact, the uprising came closer to victory than expected. Back in Toussaint’s camp, Fina was lingering inside the head of a young man wielding a machete and abruptly felt the force of the storm die around him. The young man looked up, bewildered, to clear skies and blazing sun. Fina, out of the corner of his eye, saw Toussaint pull up his horse as if equally startled; to his right, a woman drew back her hand. It jolted Fina out of her own confusion. The woman wasn’t armed, which told Fina one thing: she didn’t need weapons.
There was no time to shift to the woman’s head. Instead, Fina pushed a little deeper and took control of the young man’s tongue. “Toussaint!”
His eyes glanced first in the direction of the voice, then at the pointed finger; he wheeled his horse about just as the woman sent a burst of mage-fire hurtling in his direction. The edge of the fireball struck Toussaint’s sleeve and blistered his hand before he could beat it out, but his nearest battle-mages moved in to cover him. He recovered swiftly, riding one-handed through his fighters and directing their own magic with rapid-fire commands. There was no more rain, and no more wind.
Soon, the land was quiet again. By the end of the day, many lay dead on the ground: not only the rioters, but many of those who had tried to flee or hide. In other regions, anyone suspected of supporting the rebellions was executed without mercy.
“You’re a weather-mage,” one of Toussaint’s officers said when he reprimanded them for so many dead. “You should know better than anyone. When it rains, everybody gets wet.”
With the revolts quashed, Toussaint fought back. His forty-five thousand troops outnumbered Rigaud’s fifteen thousand, and many among them were strong magicians; Rigaud, it transpired, had expected support from France that never came. At first, Rigaud’s forces were better armed, but soon Toussaint persuaded America to offer support in the form of ammunition and naval blockades to the southern ports. The fighting raged from the north to the south: sharp, brutal, devastating.
In all that time, nobody saw a trace of Toussaint’s weather magic. There were no storms beyond the usual unhelpful autumn squalls, no bolts of lightning; sun and wind remained unsoftened for the approach of the northern armies. Few commented; perhaps few noticed. Toussaint said nothing about it himself, and certainly not to Fina. But Fina watched with a feeling in her stomach that was mixed hope and dread. She thought she knew what had happened, and she didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.
As Rigaud retreated, he told his magicians to leave the land a desert of flame. The fires blazed across the plantations, scorching sugar and grass and trees. No rain came to put them out. When Fina heard that, she knew for certain.
The final siege took place at Jacmel on the southern coast. It was a beautiful town, with graceful white houses and wide streets, cooled by the breeze from its shallow seaport. Rigaud’s supporters were forced within its walls, and they held their position there for three months.
Through the winter, the town starved. A great warship from America blockaded the port, so no aid could come from the sea. Toussaint’s troops surrounded it by land, flinging stray magic at the city to test the bounds of its magic. At times mage-fire would fly back from the other side of the wall, but it never struck, and soon it stopped altogether.
At last, on a still, quiet evening, an emissary from the town came onto the wall to speak to the besieging army. They offered their surrender in exchange for their lives. At least in Jacmel, the war was over.
Toussaint had left the south weeks ago. Fina had argued with him—she had been inside the heads of Toussaint’s lieutenants too often to trust them.
“You know what they’ll do to wear that town down,” she told him.
But his orders had remained unchanged, and when the surrender came, Dessalines and Christophe were in charge of the siege. They accepted it, as they had been instructed. Then, as the last of Rigaud’s supporters filed out through the gate, weak with hunger and the last of their defiance burned to ash, they cut them down where they stood. Most were taken by surprise; a few fought back. Some who tried to run were brought down by Dessalines’s magic. Blood stained the ground. It wasn’t, after all, the first time. The country had been nourished on blood for a very long time now.
Fina was many miles away, among Toussaint’s soldiers at Le Cap. But she watched it all—not through Dessalines’s eyes, but through the eyes of the men and women who were cut down as they fled for safety. She tried to stay in their heads until the very last, but in the end she couldn’t. She broke away, shivering in fury and in horror.
Toussaint himself sent for Fina soon afterward. The long months of civil war had been a blur to her of tents and carriages and horseback rides in the dark—in a way, she had fought by Toussaint’s side, but she had done it in the bodies of others. It was a short ride to Toussaint’s new outpost, and she found herself looking about her with her own eyes as though seeing Saint-Domingue for the first time. Some of these roads she had walked, stiff and footsore and sick with fear, as a newly escaped slave from Jamaica many years ago. Then they had been lined with corpses the white plantation owners had planted to scare the Black population into submission.
Those roads at least had grown over; the fields were being worked again. Some were back in the hands of the white men who had flocked back to Saint-Domingue after Toussaint had granted them amnesty, though others had been commandeered by the men and women who had once worked them as slaves.
That was Toussaint’s idea of a prosperous Saint-Domingue. When he had control of the country, he would do everything in his power to ensure that the former slaves returned to the plantations to work, by force if need be. In his head, this was part of the fight for the liberty of the country as surely as the 1791 uprising had been. They needed to show France there was no need for slavery—that the colony could still be profitable when worked by free men and women. Fina understood that; she could even appreciate his ambition. But in the more rural areas, she saw people working their own small plots of land, their children running through the fields as their parents tended gardens. If she could choose, that would be her Saint-Domingue. It was a glimpse of true freedom, fragile, bittersweet, and hard-won as the fresh grass poking its way through the burned earth, and she clung to it.
Toussaint’s encampment, on the borders of the troubled areas in the north, was set amid ruined landscape and blackened fields. Yet when she entered his tent, he stood as straight and proud as before. If anything, his face glowed more fiercely.
“You were right about the stranger,” he said without preamble.
Fina needed no preamble. She knew exactly what he meant. “He took your magic from you.”
“He snatched it away in the midst of the revolt at the Môle,” he said. “And there has been no trace of it since—no trace, that is, except the feeble trickle of weather magic I already held in my veins.”
She had known. She had known when the fires had burned across the country with no rain to extinguish them. But hearing it reawakened the strange mix of feelings she felt then. Fear, of course. Yet stronger than the fear was satisfaction, even triumph, touched with a thrill of anticipation. They were at war now, not with each other but with something deeper and stronger. And this war was right.
“It’s the same trick he played on Robespierre,” she said, folding her arms. “Waited until he needed his magic desperately, and then took it from him.”
“Yes,” Toussaint said. “But he underestimated me. I didn’t die. And we’re very close to taking the south now—you probably know how close better than I do.”
“The country is on fire.”
“It is, and I regret that very much.” He meant it, but he wasn’t thinking about it at that moment. His mind had consigned the burned fields to necessity and left them there. “But Rigaud will surrender very soon. For all practical purposes, I’ll have control of the colony. And then I think it’s time I kept my promise to both you and the stranger.”
Her heart tightened. “You want to tell the British about his hold on Jamaica?”
“No. He was right about that—the white government there can’t be trusted to believe us. And if any of the plantation owners do, there’s a very real chance they might react by killing their slaves out of fear rather than break the spellbinding. We need to break that hold ourselves. We need to free those slaves.”
She had waited a very long time to hear those words. Now that they were here, she found she was a little afraid after all. “When?”
“Very soon. Once we’ve entirely broken Rigaud’s hold on the island. In the meantime, I’ve been making plans.”
Of course he had. Toussaint, she had learned long ago, had plans within plans.
“What are they?” she asked, when he didn’t go on.
“Before I say more, I want to ask one question. If the spellbinding is broken on Jamaica, will that be enough to break the stranger’s hold?”
“Yes.” She didn’t need to think about it. “Jamaica isn’t his territory. The only influence he has there is through the spellbinding.”
“Then as soon as we can, we need to move to do just that. I’ve had contact with the maroons in Jamaica—the so-called bandit armies in the hills of whom you told me. If we make a landing on Jamaican soil, a number of their leaders have already agreed to support us. We can move and liberate as many plantations as we can. Once those are free of the spellbinding, they can join us and liberate still more.”
She could see it, like a great wave moving across the island. Like the wave that had risen at Toussaint’s command that day on the beach that had swept the invading ships back. “The plantation owners will make the people they’ve enslaved fight against us as long as they can.”
“They will. Which is why I want to be there in person, to try to keep the number of deaths on both sides as low as possible. It’s one reason why I so badly want to show that cooperation between free workers and plantation owners is the best and most productive way for these colonies to work—so that an agreement can be reached in Jamaica and increasingly in other colonies without the years of fighting we’ve suffered. But it will still be violent and ugly at first, Fina. Revolts always are. Are you ready for it?”
She remembered the day she had seen the maroons raid her old plantation—the first day she had stood on her own. She had been young then, trapped inside her own despair. She remembered willing them to see her, to save her, to take her into their protective circle and hold her until she belonged to herself and nobody else. She imagined them now, with Toussaint beside them and herself beside Toussaint, seeing another young woman making that same silent scream. She imagined that scream never going unanswered again.
The fear left her. In that moment, she felt as she had the day she stood beside Toussaint and watched the British fleet pushed back into the sea.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she said.
It was time for Napoléon to leave Egypt. His friend had been right, despite the campaign’s promising beginnings. He still held the country, and yet it had defeated him. The problem went deeper than mere military skill: he didn’t understand Egypt, and he suspected he never would. It was a disappointment to him, but not as bitter as it would have been once. His dreams of Egypt had been dulled by the reality and tainted by the knowledge of his friend’s hand in shaping them. He had bigger dreams now.
Besides, whispers were stirring across the sea in France. The royalist factions in Paris were growing in power; there was a very good chance that the Republic, such as it still was, would topple very soon. His career wouldn’t survive that. He had come too close to execution after Robespierre’s fall to risk it again. He needed to return to France to fight for himself.
After the close call with the British navy on the way to Egypt, his departure was a secret known only to a few. He had made his regretful farewells to Pauline the night before. He might have married her, if she had only given him a son with strong magic, but in all the months they had been together she had never been with child. As it was, he parted from her with tender kisses and promises that he would send for her to follow him to France, knowing that it was unlikely they would ever see each other again.
Pauline was wistful but pragmatic. Unlike Napoléon himself, she had never harbored any illusions about the depth of his feelings, and she was too certain of her own power to be afraid of losing his protection.
“At least I’m free of my husband,” she said. The two of them had divorced months ago, after Lieutenant Foures had returned unexpectedly and taken violent exception to finding his wife in the arms of the commander of Egypt. “He was too jealous. And I like it here, for now. My magic enjoys the battles.”
“You’re one of the greatest battle-mages I have,” he said, and unlike most of the nonsense he said in the grip of passion, he meant it. “I wouldn’t have missed the statue at the Battle of the Pyramids for the world. General Kleber is a fortunate man.”
He felt a flicker of jealousy at how lucky General Kleber might indeed become after his departure, but for once he subdued it. He had no doubt that it was he whom Pauline loved, even if she became the lover of another man, and this delusion made him seem far more reasonable than he actually was.
The following day he would sail down the Nile to the coast, supposedly to inspect French positions, and then on to France itself. He had but one thing left to do.
The stone his friend had told him about had been found some months ago at Rosetta. The spell on it had been written in three languages, one of them ancient Greek, offering the first ever frame of reference for translating the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Scholars and linguists had pored over it ever since. By the time Napoléon had been able to view it, it was at the center of a swarm of academic interest. The text that most interested him, however, was an odd row of symbols that bore no relation to the others, hidden away near the bottom of the stone. It was the language of the vampire kings, his scholars told him—not really a language at all, but a code used by those of vampiric bloodlines to pass messages over the heads of their inferiors hundreds of years ago. Perhaps a few among the Temple Church could read it, though most of the French knights had died or fled the country long ago.
Let me see, the voice in Napoléon’s head had whispered unexpectedly.
Napoléon had moved closer, nonchalant, trying to hide the rapid quick march of his heart. He didn’t doubt at all that his friend would be able to read it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this. Napoléon felt something quivering beneath his voice—not strain this time, as it had been when summoning the kraken, but excitement. I might give you a few wrong turns. But yes. I can tell you where to look.
Now, at the very end of his Egyptian adventure, Napoléon was looking. There had indeed been a few false turns, but fortunately deep in the bowels of the earth, dead ends had become quickly apparent. Napoléon had be
en under the ground amid tombs and sand and worn mosaics for a little under an hour when he began to feel the heat. There was heat everywhere in Egypt: he had marched the men back to Cairo in forty-degree sun, many of them barefooted and many of them ill. This was like no heat he had ever felt before. He was close.
There was a door in front of him, like so many others. This one, though, was decorated in faded red and gold with the image of a giant coiled dragon.
Napoléon opened his mouth, intending to ask how the seal on the door could be broken without harm, then closed it. He was confident his friend would hear him. But the answer was obvious.
He wore a dagger at his belt, a curved blade with a jeweled hilt that he had taken from his palace in Cairo. He drew it now and pricked the tip of his finger. A tiny drop of blood blossomed; he pulled his hand away and touched it to the center of the door.
The door opened. On the other side, coiled amid a glinting array of coins and gold statuettes, was a dragon.
It had been there all along, deep beneath the same pyramids that had watched the battle outside Cairo from the horizon, sleeping beside them as the French troops swarmed the city and tried to make it their own. It had been there for hundreds of years.
Be careful. His friend’s voice was tight. If you were alone, it would kill you in a heartbeat.
“I am alone,” Napoléon whispered.
You aren’t. I’m with you—the last true blood magician in the world. It should feel me in your mind, even though my body is far away. But it will have to be your magic that binds it, and you’ll have to be fast. This is the most important moment of your life, Napoléon Bonaparte, and the most dangerous.
Napoléon smiled. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said. He had plans for the rest of his life, and they were both important and dangerous. Still, his heartbeat quickened, and his breath came short and fast as he drew closer.
