Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  He’s doing this to keep me here until dark. January turned, irresolute, to study the old man’s wrinkled face and shut eyes. Did he send one of the children to fetch help from town?

  The Egbo?

  Tullio might not be the only person working for the planters …

  The thought of sleeping in one of these rickety little huts – and he was tired enough from walking that he knew he’d sleep, even if he didn’t drink whatever was in the gourd he’d been offered – made his stomach clench. The thought of sleeping in the woods was worse.

  When Olympe did the ‘full tale’, she’d give the querent stories connected with where the beans fell: the gods, she said, would guide the right choice. Other voodoos, he knew – and Olympe sometimes, if the question was a simple one – would just scatter the beans as Ximo had done, sometimes all at once and sometime a few at a time. At long last Papa Grillo came to the end of his invocations and began to shift his shells from hand to hand, dropping a few as he did so and studying the way they fell into the dust on the tray. Then in his shrill, droning voice he began a story of a hyena and a crocodile and of a night when the moon bled blood on to the land.

  A liar, a bokor, a sorcerer, Tullio had said. Men who go in his door don’t come out again.

  The last daylight was draining from the air with visible speed. Small fires burned before each of the houses around the court, where families gathered around pots of stew. Children ran back and forth laughing between them, with outspread arms, pretending to be birds, the way January and his little friends had done in the quarters at Bellefleur, and a woman called out (as his own aunties had) to stay close, else Tonton Macoute – the evil spirit Uncle Gunnysack – would come along and snatch them right up! (Shrieks of terror.) Frogs – those guardians of the way to the Underworld, the Greeks had believed – peeped and burped and rattled in the hot dark beyond the palings.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ The hougan widened his eyes, startled at the shells on the board. ‘It say, your friend is safe.’

  ‘What? Where? How—?’

  ‘That it don’t say.’ The old man shrugged. ‘Or at least it don’t say to me. But there it is, clear as clear—’ He paused, and his white brows puckered as he regarded January again, more closely. ‘It also say, brother, that it’s better you don’t sleep in the forest tonight. That Tullio, he tell his friends in town of you. Don’t need no loa to tell me that, for sure, nor you neither I bet. They know it’s twenty miles to Gonaïves. They be following you. You sleep in the jungle, they come for you.’

  January made no reply to this. He didn’t believe Tullio had been what he said he was, but it didn’t mean Grillo was to be trusted, either.

  Your friend is safe so you can relax and stay here …

  He was hungry, too. Above the smell of woodsmoke from the courtyard came the scents of stew and chicken grilling in lemon juice.

  ‘Don’t think ill of my mistrust,’ he said at last. ‘And I thank you for your reading, about my friend and about my wife.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, man,’ retorted the hougan roughly. ‘You know they watching my gate here for you when you come out.’

  January shook his head. ‘I take my chances,’ he said. ‘You can help me one more way, if you will—’

  ‘I can help you by locking you up like the moun sòt you are!’

  ‘Other than that.’ January couldn’t keep himself from measuring how many strides it would take him to reach the compound gate, and whether he could get over it …

  As if he read this in his eyes, Grillo made a disgusted gesture and gathered up his shells. ‘What you need, then?’

  ‘Tell me about Dr Maudit.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Ah—’ Grillo’s breath slid from his lips in a long sigh.

  Stillness in the flickering dark of the peristyle.

  ‘Did he kill M’aum Amalie?’

  ‘He kill them all.’ There was a trace of surprise in the hougan’s voice that January hadn’t known this. He shook the holy dust from the carved board, blew on it, and wrapped it up again in a tattered velvet shawl. ‘M’aum Amalie and her little maidservant, those two girls from Le Cap, the two men he buy for them, at three thousand francs per man – light-skinned as white men they were, and the next thing to blond, and handsome—’

  ‘The houseboys?’ demanded January. ‘For three thousand francs? For a place where his master never lived? I know what he did to the men he’d buy, and a cheap slave, an old slave, a man ill or crippled, would have served him as well.’

  ‘The Devil asked him for different things at different times,’ responded Grillo. ‘Sometime he’d go to market, in Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, three days, five days, every day for two weeks sometime, looking for who the Devil would point out to him. He’d look at ten, twenty men a day, feel this man’s backbone or that man’s knees … and he’d buy women big with child as well.’ The old man’s brow darkened like thunder. ‘And after all that he’d buy a man with a hunchback, or a crippled leg. Then the Devil changed his mind, and he looked and looked – months he looked – only at the whitest, the fairest, the men that look like white men down to the freckles on their noses. Men that was trained up as servants, ’cause you know that’s who they did train as servants. The bright ones, the mamelukes and musterfines. Like the mulattos, givin’ themselves airs. Maybe the Devil, he got a taste for soft white flesh, ’stead of old black crocks like me.’

  He chuckled, a horrible sound. ‘Old Michie Absalon, he paid Maudit two million francs, that M’aum Amalie would deliver of a healthy boy. Maudit sold his soul to the Devil and gave him sacrifices, so be that M’aum Amalie would birth a healthy babe. And that’s what she did.’

  January was silent, thinking again of the girl Jacinta, alone among her husband’s family at Hispaniola.

  ‘Little good it did her.’ Papa Grillo’s white brows shot up, corrugating his whole forehead with wrinkles. ‘She knew too much then. She seen the Devil Maudit called up. She could tell her husband what he was doing. Maybe the child was the Devil’s child. But the Devil told Maudit to kill her, and Maudit did, on a night of wind and storm and hurricane that blew the roofs off the churches from Jérémie to Port-au-Prince. Then he sent the baby to Michie Absalon, and Michie Absalon, he looked after Maudit for the rest of his days.’

  ‘Until he came back here,’ said January softly. ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘Everybody know it. A man who ain’t so smart – who just got a regular mind –’ the old man tapped his temple with a gnarled finger – ‘the Devil turns him into a werewolf, to do his evil. But a man who’s smart, who got brains and education, the Devil can use him more.’

  In the dark behind his eyelids January saw again the neat, hideous engravings, of organs laid bare and bones disarticulated: a brain cradled in the sawed-off goblet of a head with open eyes staring in horror. ‘Do you know why he came back?’

  ‘The Devil called him,’ replied Grillo promptly. ‘That’s the trouble with working for the Devil, see. You owe him. In his old age, when his strength was giving out so he couldn’t do so much evil any more, the Devil told Maudit to come back to Haiti. And the Egbo were waiting for him when he did.’

  They came for him about two miles outside of the town.

  Red Beach lay where the hills broke, and a shallow pass led into the farmlands of the valley beyond. When he left the humfo, January followed the track in that direction, and about a mile from the village left the path and climbed swiftly up into the woods. Terrible confusion reigned in his heart: never, ever had he thought he would simply walk away from Hannibal, yet there was no way – none – that he would abandon Rose. He knew what he had to do to save her, and at this point he had no idea even in which direction to walk to help the fiddler, if he could be helped. If he wandered around the country-side looking, he wouldn’t last long enough to even locate him. That much he did know.

  He guessed, too, that he was being followed. Whatever the mulatto planters in the south were payin
g for a zombi, the worn-out condition of the farmers’ clothing, the shocking dilapidation he’d glimpsed on the edges of the town, told him that people here would do pretty much anything to feed their hunger.

  Particularly if the one who suffered was only a stranger who had no business in Haiti anyway and who might very well be a spy.

  Under the thick canopy of ceiba and pinón, the darkness was nearly absolute. He tried to keep the moonlight from the edge of the woods in sight, at least until he could find an outcropping of rock or a thicket of oleander that would hide him from those who knew the country, but even with eyes acclimated to the darkness it was hard to judge exactly what he was seeing. Listening behind him, he heard nothing.

  In time he sat down with his back against a tree – which he hoped wasn’t infested with spiders, like many he’d seen throughout the day – and drank the last of his water, thankful that he’d slept at noon. He could hear drums beating again, the sound of his childhood, like the cries of the night birds.

  This was what they fought for, he thought, seeing in his mind the dark faces, the gleam of eyes in the firelight, the work-calloused hands clapping. Remembering his own childhood – drunken master, crowded cabin shared with other families, the daily possibility of losing everyone and anyone he loved at a moment’s notice, the daily possibility of a beating … and the magic of the nights, when there’d be a dance or storytelling in the moonlight by the bayou.

  The slaves who rebelled, the Africans who did the impossible, the unthinkable … This is why they wouldn’t give up. Against all odds and with the world screaming in horror at their ingratitude to their masters, they set themselves free.

  And they’re free still.

  Beside that, even the danger in which he stood, in which Rose stood – the hunt for past secrets, the peril of being stalked – dwindled to the status of flowers on a rock.

  Just let us alone. Let us drum our drums, let us dance our dances, let us worship our gods and raise our children.

  Poor, yes. Struggling, yes. Manipulated by leaders who thought only of squabbling for power amongst themselves. But the people said, ‘We’ll never be slaves again.’

  Silence fell, sudden and shocking. January’s heart seemed to freeze.

  There was only one creature in the forest for whom the others fell silent.

  A rustle, somewhere near. The stealthy scratching of feet treading with exquisite care in the leaf-mast underfoot.

  They can’t see in the dark, any more than I can …

  His ears searched, listening for where there was silence, for those shifty, whispered cracklings. If I run they’ll hear me.

  Can they smell my flesh?

  Suddenly, it seemed to him that he could smell theirs. Tobacco and dirty clothes, stale rum and body dirt. Tullio had smelled of it, on the path through the cemetery. The farmers, too, a hundred years ago that morning. After all day in the boat, another day on the road, and sleeping on the ground in between, I must be rank enough also, to find in the dark.

  He’d hidden from enough people – starting with his childhood master and the ‘pattyrollers’– to know that movement would show him up quicker than anything else. He had his pistol in his belt, but knew he’d only get one shot with it before being overpowered, and with his rifle, not even that much. So he sat where he was until the smell faded a little. (Did it fade or am I just used to it?) But the night noises didn’t return. Gently, gently, he crawled into the forest – into the darkness.

  Tullio’s men? The Leopard Society? Were they really cannibals, or was that just a tale?

  Will they be waiting for me tomorrow, on the empty road to Gonaïves?

  Can I make it twenty miles over the mountains alone like this? And what happens when I get there?

  He put his hand on what was obviously an anthill, bit his lip until he tasted blood, to keep from jerking, leaping, crying out. Backed away slowly, wondering if the next step would be on to a centipede or into the den of a tarantula the size of a dinner plate.

  For the first time, he doubted his endurance. Not just, Can I avoid the Egbo or the Tullios of this world and make it to L’Ange Rouge before Jericho’s men get there with Rose? But, Will the land wear me down?

  Even traveling outside New Orleans, in the land where every white man was a potential captor who regarded him as free money on the hoof, at least he knew the rules. He knew that most slaves could probably be trusted: to hide him, to guide him, to give him water that wasn’t drugged or advice that wasn’t lies.

  Here, there was no assurance at all.

  With the first trickles of daylight he found himself close enough to a spring to hear it chuckling. He soaked his hand, grossly swollen with ant bites, and drank, then followed it to the edge of the trees. With a whispered prayer to the Blessed Virgin (if she’s still speaking to me after two shell-throws and a conversation with Ogoun … ), January moved from tree to tree, skirting wide around the village and staying just close enough to the overgrown, potholed trace of the road above the sea to guide himself. Trying to listen and watch in all directions at once, like a rabbit in the open with the dogs baying near.

  Wondering what he was going to do when the forest gave way to scrubland again.

  Hunger gnawed him. There were lakou in the hills and certainly in the valley a few miles on the other side of them, but famished as he was it might simply be too dangerous to try to buy or beg food there. The families that made up those farming compounds might help him, but their male members were almost certainly members of one or another secret society.

  Keep walking, he told himself. You can do this.

  Cloud gathered over the ocean, tumbled up against the mountains above him. The wind felt thick. Over the water he could smell storm.

  Keep walking.

  He focused his mind on Rose, on what Salomé Saldaña had told him of the little plantation of L’Ange Rouge.

  The thought was forming in his mind of what it was that Lucien Maurir had done, there at the feet of the mountains, by the salt lakes twenty miles from Port-au-Prince. He must have left notes. Even if he HAD made a pact with the Devil, Maurir was a scientist. Of course he’d keep notes.

  Purchasing crippled slaves, purchasing handsome slaves, the next thing to blond …

  Was that just his taste? Light-skinned as white men? How light had Caliban been, who had died on the beach with him?

  They have to keep her alive. And I have to find those notes – whatever it is they prove – before they reach L’Ange Rouge and put myself in a position where I can’t simply be overpowered. As he’d known last night, a pistol and a rifle would be of little use to him against five men.

  Not if they had Rose among them.

  Twenty miles to Gonaïves, and who knew what spiritual brethren of Tullio he’d meet when he reached the little port? If he reached it. Another week of walking to get to Port-au-Prince, and he’d have to buy or beg or steal food somewhere, somehow.

  Maddox and the Creeks were heading for Gonaïves. That meant they’d have to get horses and cut north through the mountains to Le Cap. Is Jericho meeting them there? They were three days ahead of him, and when they’d been to La Châtaigneraie they’d come south again by land rather than risk a brush with President Boyar’s navy.

  Dear God, don’t let them be killed by the Egbo before they ever reach L’Ange Rouge …

  One thing’s certain, January reflected wearily. Somebody needs to go back to Jeoffrey Vitrac’s father-in-law and tell him that his scheme to colonize freed slaves to Haiti isn’t going to work.

  Ahead of him, a small stand of boulders jutted from the forest’s edge toward the road, surrounded by ceiba trees. Ground high enough to provide concealment for an hour’s sleep …

  ‘Poli di umbuendo, my beautiful one,’ said a familiar voice, light and hoarse, as January came near. ‘I suppose we can inquire in town where the place lies, but I’d rather we weren’t taking out advertisements in the local newspapers declaring our intentions … That’ll teach
me to be discreet about the assignations of one’s friends with strange women—’

  ‘There will be many,’ replied a woman, in heavily Creole French, ‘who can say there was the place. But none will set foot there.’ And on the soft air floated the scent of cigar smoke.

  January stepped around the side of the rocks, and saw, tied to a piñon tree, a donkey. Two more steps, and he looked up to the high surface of the boulders, to see Hannibal – his arm in a sling, and rather like a cheerful Baron Samedei in his tattered black coat, patched and salt-stained and bloodstained, and his high-crowned hat – with a young woman whose red tignon was tied in the five points of a voodoo priestess. Hannibal had just taken her hand to kiss, and the woman turned her head and met January’s eyes.

  She took the cigar from her mouth and smiled.

  ‘And here’s your friend now,’ she said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘I knew they had to have at least touched on the beach somewhere near where that old villain put me ashore,’ Hannibal explained as the woman – her name was Mayanet, she said – dished congri from a gourd for January. ‘I could smell the smoke of their fire, so I stayed low and kept to the bushes when I came around the headland between my landing place and the next beach. They’d made a shelter, and they didn’t look in much of a hurry to leave: they were repairing something, and Maddox, the pear-shaped blond gentleman, appeared to be seasick … God knows, after that voyage I wasn’t feeling entirely well myself.’

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Five. Maddox and four Indians, one of them a woman, and very fetching she was—’

  Mayanet dug him hard in the ribs with her knee as she stepped across to hand January a bottle of what turned out to be ginger water. She was a tall girl, Spanish and Indian mixed with African in her features. In addition to the way her tignon was tied, the amulets around her neck – leather, string, and iron – proclaimed her a mambo despite her apparent youth. He would have put her age in her twenties, save for the wry amusement that aged those enormous eyes.