Maillart caught himself breathing through an open mouth. He had seen Toussaint take out the feather pillow only once or twice before; in rides of normal duration he didn’t bother with the cushion. What it implied was that he meant to remain in the saddle for several days straight.
“N’alé!” he said. A short sharp bark: Let’s go. And now, with a twirl of his left hand and squeeze of his heels, he was already gone.
5
Only two days since they’d made their first landfall, but each so wearily the same. As if in doldrums, the Jean-Jacques lay at anchor among the other ships of the French fleet, off the rocks of Point Samana. Captain Guizot climbed out of the forward hatchway to greet the same brilliant tropical dawn, a land breeze wafting toward him a scent of green jungle. On a coil of rope by the forward mast, that unfortunate sailor sat, staring morosely at the brown-stained bandage wrapping the stump of his left wrist. The day before, he and one of his fellows had conceived the idea to lower a small boat beside the ship and wash the maggots off the most fetid pieces of salt meat left in the bottoms of the barrels. But when he dipped the first piece in the water, his arm came back without the hand. His astonished shout brought half the crew of the Jean-Jacques gaping to the rails. His companion in the boat had saved his life by slapping on a rag tourniquet which stopped the spurting blood until the surgeon could reach him.
Well, it was quite possible the man would still die. Such grave wounds festered easily in the tropics—so at least Guizot had been told. The truth was that he had no experience of any real campaign before this one. He and Daspir were both comparatively recent recruits, and though they could hold their own in gambling and whoring, drinking and boasting, they knew little more of a soldier’s life than that. Guizot looked the other way as he passed the handless sailor. But Placide Louverture was standing nearer to the bow, gazing calmly out toward the surf beating on the shoreline, and Guizot did not wish to approach him either. He stopped and looked down at the water, its opaque surface glinting with the progress of the sun. Somewhere invisibly below, the same shark must be turning, in its belly the lost hand of the sailor clenching and loosening like seaweed as the flesh was loosened from the bones.
Presently Daspir came to join Guizot where he stood, yawning and stretching and scratching his untidy hair. Then he turned his nose to the wind and pointed, trembling, almost like a hunting dog.
“Oranges,” he said, and faced Guizot. “Do you not smell oranges?”
“No,” Guizot said, ignoring Daspir’s hopeful half-smile. “No, I smell nothing.” Although there certainly was some tantalizing odor on the breeze. But Guizot was weary and anxious and bored. So was Daspir, so were they all. It was the tiresomeness of waiting for action or even the news that there would be none. What they really seemed to be waiting for was the regathering of the scattered ships of the fleet; the squadron including the vessel of Captain-General Leclerc had arrived off Point Samana just yesterday. Leclerc had sent one small boat into shore; it brought back the rumor that Toussaint Louverture was supposed to be in Spanish Santo Domingo—perhaps very near, then, to this point where the Jean-Jacques rode at anchor.
“We might execute our pact, no?” Daspir turned to Guizot once again, the smile ingratiating. “If only we could get on shore.”
“Well, yes,” Guizot said, struggling for a more amiable tone. “I know I’m ready for it.” As he spoke, he did feel some returning flutter of the spirit that had moved him to propose that the four of them ought to be force enough to arrest the rebel Toussaint, though at this hour of the morning there was no rum or brandy in him to give it fire.
Daspir looked dreamily toward the shoreline, his soft lips working— sucking the pith of a fantasy orange. A sailor dumped a bucket of slops off the stern and at once all the gulls appeared out of nowhere, circling and shrieking and diving for scraps. Guizot scanned the water for shark fins and saw nothing. He glanced at the bow; Isaac had come up to join his brother. Both boys had certainly heard the news of Toussaint’s proximity yesterday; Guizot thought they must surely be more restless than he.
A rowboat bumped the hull on the starboard side, below where he stood; and a sailor ran over to lower a rope ladder for the messenger to climb: a youth of sixteen with a pimpled nose, the collar of his uniform coat rucked sideways. “New orders!” he piped, as he reached the deck. He shook out the scrolled paper in his left hand and looked down at it. “For the captains Guizot and Paltre. You are to rejoin your regiments.”
“Now?” Guizot said stupidly, with a thrill and a wobble in his belly.
“The boat is waiting,” the courier squeaked.
Guizot exchanged a quick glance with Daspir, then made for the hatchway. “Paltre!” he called into the dim, as he thumped his way down the ladder. “We’ve orders!”
Without a question, and in no particular haste, Paltre commenced gathering his belongings from his berth. Guizot began to stuff his own things into his pack. When he realized his hands were slightly trembling, he stopped and forced himself to breathe more deeply till they stilled. He resumed his packing more slowly, making sure of all his things. When he climbed back toward the deck, with Paltre and Cyprien following, he was outwardly calm, though the flutter in his stomach persisted.
Somehow he’d expected to enter the colony in the company of the more seasoned soldiers, Paltre and Cyprien. But now he’d be separated even from Paltre, who belonged to the command of General Boudet, while Guizot himself was billeted to General Rochambeau. They’d both been plucked from their ordinary postings to this duty of escorting Toussaint’s sons.
“Wait!” Daspir called to Paltre, who’d already swung a leg over the rail to the rope ladder. Daspir’s face had paled a little, Guizot saw; he too was startled by the change. Daspir beckoned the others in toward him. “Give me your hands.”
Paltre’s boot heel hit the deck, retracted from the ladder. At Daspir’s urging the four of them stacked their hands. The pimpled courier looked on curiously, while at a longer distance Placide and Isaac seemed also to have turned their way.
“We’ll keep our compact, gentlemen,” Daspir said excitedly, “though we be separated.” Daspir’s palm spread dampness over the top of Guizot’s knuckles. With relief he felt that his own palm was dry. It irritated him a little that he’d not thought of this reaffirmation.
“We’ll keep it still,” Daspir said and lowered his voice slightly. “It shall be one of us four who brings the old raghead in.”
Guizot restrained himself from looking toward Isaac and Placide, somewhere behind him.
“Well enough,” Paltre said. He seemed impatient with the exercise, which did indeed seem a little foolish, now it was not fortified by rum.
“And the winner shall have . . .” But Daspir seemed not to have thought this sentence through to a conclusion.
“His life,” Cyprien muttered.
“Hurrah!” Daspir shouted, tossing all their hands into the air with his own. A strange retort to Cyprien’s grim remark, but it did produce a surge of conviviality—all four of them pounding each other on the back and making loud promises of reunion.
Then they were over the side, descending. A deep roll of the Jean-Jacquessent Guizot in a sick swoop over open water, his pack and his heavy sword dragging him out toward a free fall, then slapped him back against the hull. His knuckles were bruised on the cords of the ladder, but he kept his grip, and a moment later had safely dropped beside Paltre, onto the boards of the gently rocking rowboat.
Vice-Admiral Magon sailed his squadron westward out of Samana Bay. The larger portion of the fleet, commanded by Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, made for the open ocean, and soon its sails were lost to the sight of Magon’s ships, which hugged the northern coast. Guizot, with nothing else to do, remained on deck, watching the shoreline slip by. Long gray-green flats were interspersed with heavily wooded collines, and in the farther distance a range of high mountains stood sharp against the clear sky. As they sailed on, that mountain range verged slowl
y nearer to the shore, until its backbone bound itself to the cliffs immediately above the waterline.
At evening, when the setting sun had cast a copper gleam across the ocean, they sailed round the point of Monte Christe and into the Baie de Mancenille. The spot was named, Guizot had heard, for a poisonous tree frequent on the shore, with a caustic sap which burned and blistered skin at the least touch. In the bay they saw for the first time a number of dug-out canoes and slightly larger wooden boats, some of the latter fitted out with trapezoidal sails, angled in the manner of Chinese junks. These must be fishermen out of Fort Liberté; of course they might also function as spies. But darkness covered them absolutely, almost the instant the last burning curve of the sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving only a flicker of firelight from one of the forts which covered the passage into the harbor of the town.
The ships swung at their anchors, moored well out from the shore. Guizot lay quietly in his hammock, his mind turning and turning in empty speculation as to what the next day would bring. He’d had little conversation with anyone during the day, for he was in the company of veterans now, not only his fellow officers but even the men directly under his command, and he felt that silence must be the best cover for his own innocence of war. He listened, but there had not been much to overhear; the soldiers were taciturn, looking to their equipment. In theory there was no battle to expect—in theory theirs was a peaceful mission, and yet the general assumption was that Toussaint Louverture was in rebellion and would be likely to oppose their landing. Of course there was no telling where Toussaint himself might be, behind the cliffs and heavy jungles that barred the coast.
Guizot had glimpsed a naval chart which showed the harbor: the shape of a broad-based wine decanter, with a short, narrow neck. The town itself, with its principal fort, lay at the bottom of this jug, while two others, Fort Labouque and the Fort de l’Anse, covered the narrow passage from opposite sides . . . Guizot lay in his hammock, listening to the snoring, inhaling the fog of human odor in the close space around him. Was that splash the sound of a paddle, or only a fish or a dolphin leaping? He was still thinking he would never sleep that night when the harsh clang of a bell awoke him.
At dawn the ships were sailing in close formation toward the harbor’s mouth. Guizot stood nervously on deck, without a function; he had nothing to do but keep out of the way. The artillerymen stood by their cannons, fuses already alight. Guizot’s jitters increased when he noticed that.
Some unintelligible shout came from the wall of Fort Labouque as soon as the squadron drew within hailing distance. General Rochambeau stood in the bow of the ship immediately to port of Guizot’s, and the captain could plainly hear his bellow: We are the Army of the French Republic! Make way for our landing!
Guizot had barely time to think that this was not the most temporizing greeting imaginable. Now he could understand the retort from the fort— Pas de blancs! Pas de servitude!—together with a puff of smoke, and an instant later the explosion and the splash, in the water before them, of an undershot cannonball. No whites! No slavery! The cannon nearest Guizot recoiled; he had not seen the gunner lower the fuse to the touch-hole. The explosion saturated him in a hot gunpowder smell, and all at once his fear dissipated (he could call it fear now it was gone) and was replaced with a quivering excitement like that of a pointing dog. One of his sergeants, who stood nearby, turned the ghost of a smile toward him, as if he’d somehow smelled his change of state.
Guizot wanted to act, but in the absence of action he found that he could observe, and with a reasonably clear head. In any case, his own ship was sailing away from this first engagement, following Rochambeau’s vessel into the mouth of the passage, leaving a couple of other ships to continue the bombardment of Fort Labouque. It was not clear to Guizot if the first shot had been fired from the fort or one of the ships of his squadron, but certainly the engagement became general without much in the way of a parley beforehand. He watched the naval gunners, smooth in the rhythm of their work. The artillerymen of the fort did their best to keep up a constant fire, but the mobility of the shipboard guns was too much for them, and within the hour the cannon of the fort had gone silent.
A landing commenced beside the smoking wreckage of the Fort de l’Anse. Guizot, half-deafened by the cannonade, responded to the gestures of Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp, a youth whom he knew to be a son of the Duc de Châtre, though at this moment, in the surge of excitement, he could not recall his name. He was able to marshal his men behind him in sufficiently good order once they were out of the boats. Another platoon was routing the surviving defenders out of the Fort de l’Anse, and lining them up against one of the broken walls. Aba blan! some of the blacks went on shouting. Aba lesklavaj! At thirty yards distance, Captain Guizot looked at them curiously. It was not often he had seen Africans before. Though the walls that covered them had been shattered, these men had never lowered their flag. Down with whites! Down with slavery! Under the leveled muskets, the chant continued.
Through his ringing ears, Guizot heard the order to move out. He about-faced his men as sharply as he might. It appeared that Rochambeau himself would lead this maneuver; a short and rather stubby figure, he wore on the battlefield a tall black shako, with a single plume pinned to the front. Guizot’s men fell into formation with the others as the column began to move eastward around the edge of the harbor. On the other side, the guns of Fort Liberté proper hurled shot that fell harmlessly short in the water.
Aba blan! Aba lesklavaj! Behind the marching troops there sounded a patter of musket fire, and the chanting voices stopped. In the farther distance, Guizot could still hear the barrage around Fort Labouque. But now the ships that had shattered the Fort de l’Anse were bearing down swiftly upon the fort at the bottom of the harbor.
Guizot realized he had been under fire for the last couple of hours, though hardly in any real danger, and now the cannons of the fort were diverted by the rapid attack of the naval squadron. Now Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp grunted an order back down the line, flinging an arm up to gesture across the harbor. Reflexively Guizot turned to repeat the order; the pace of the march went double-quick. Behind the fort, a great black wing of smoke was spreading out above the town.
To reach the fort and the town by land was triple the distance as by water, around the long curve of the wine-decanter bay. The French column snapped along the shoreline at a pace just short of a jog, men stumbling over the rough ground and catching their woolen trouser legs on the low thorny scrub. It was midday and the sun was broiling; never in his whole life had Guizot known such heat. He had neglected to fill a canteen, and his dusty tongue clove to the roof of his mouth as they plunged forward, his sweat-soaked uniform also caking with dust, like the clothes of all the men around him.
Smoke was boiling everywhere as they entered the first streets of the town, and out of the smoke came several shots. Guizot saw Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp take a step backward, dropping his sword and gathering both hands gently over his belly. He swayed, then moved cautiously to the side of the street and sat down on a doorsill. For a moment, Guizot stared, transfixed, at the blood leaking out through his laced fingers. Then he stooped and picked up the sword the other man had let drop and swung it in flourish round his head. The son of the Duc de Châtre—hard as he tried, Guizot still could not recollect his proper name.
“Forward!”
That was his own hoarse voice. Away he sprang at the head of his troops; the men charging with him, bayonets fixed. But the smoke cloud at the end of the block contained no adversaries. The few shots still falling among them seemed to come from the rooftops—but what kind of fighter would hold out in a burning house?
No bullet struck Captain Guizot. At the first contact his heart, already pounding from mere physical effort, had made a swelling lunge into his throat, but now it beat more steadily, pumping his body through the necessary paces. He had only to lead, gesturing with the sword he had recovered (his own hung a dead weight at his side)
, propelling his men from one block to the next. At the third intersection they met an enemy skirmish line, and Guizot stepped aside as the sergeant formed the musketeers.
Ready. Aim. Fire!
At the second volley the skirmish line scattered and Guizot’s men advanced through their own powder fumes, mingled with the smoke of burning buildings. All at once they had broken through into the central square. No serious resistance continued here or in the adjoining streets, though there was still fighting at the fort. Guizot received the order to turn his men to douse the fires. With the help of the sergeant (what was the man’s name?) he organized a bucket brigade. As the vessels passed in the line he scooped a palmful of water to ease his throat. The partisans who’d set the fires had fled the town, and the several squads of impromptu firefighters were able to bring the flames under control before too many buildings were destroyed. At the end of this labor Guizot was exhausted, charcoal-stained, his throat raw from shouting and inhaling smoke, but the order came down for him to re-form his men and proceed on the double to Fort Labouque.
Again the rapid march around the contour of the bay. Guizot lurched forward as if in a dull dream. The sword of the fallen aide-de-camp still swung in his hand, for he had nowhere to sheathe it. Somehow the whole day had passed in this action; sunset stained the water of the harbor. They were bringing up the rear of the French column now, and by the time they reached Fort Labouque a white flag dangled from the battlement. The victory had not been without cost, for a good many corpses of French grenadiers were scattered around the outer wall.
As Guizot led his troop into the fort, Rochambeau was just receiving the sheathed sword from the surrendering black commander, Charles Barthelmy. Rochambeau drew the weapon from the scabbard, glanced for an instant at the polished blade, and then with a quick jerk broke it over his knee and tossed the clanging pieces aside.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 10
