I knew Riau would go back to Toussaint, but that would be another day. Merbillay was there when I came back to the case from the hûnfor. No one would know she had been away, except that she was still taking a few of her things out of a bundle. There were some crabs boiling in a pot with hot peppers on a small hot fire behind the case, enough for us and the three children. When I slept that night touching Merbillay, I did not dream of any cayman, though probably that cayman was still waiting at the bottom of the pool. It was a good thing that Merbillay had left the grand’case, because the next day the blancs did come back to Thibodet after all, not Elise or Tocquet, but Doctor Hébert and Maillart, with some other soldiers.
33
“Elise!” the doctor called. “Elise?” He continued further into the hall of the Thibodet grand’case, glancing into the rooms on either side. “Zabeth?”
The bare boards echoed back at him. He felt the abandonment of the house. And there was something else, not disarray exactly, but rearrangement. The bedrooms he peered into all looked to have been pulled apart and then quite recently reassembled. The difference was subtle, hard to identify. He stepped out onto the gallery in back.
“Merbillay?”
But there was no one in the kitchen compound behind the grand’case. The blackened fire circle was cold outside the vacant shed. He turned back into the house. Framed in the front doorway at the far end of the hall was the figure of Major Maillart, fists to his hips, waiting for some service or acknowledgment. Then the major paced away from the door, leaving a vacant square of morning light.
The doctor would not call Nanon’s name aloud. It struck him as unlucky to do it. He didn’t want that name to echo back with no response. She was not here. No one was here. Spiders shimmered in their webs in the high corners of every room. Most of Nanon’s clothes remained in her armoire, but she had always been inclined to travel light.
“Antoine!” Maillart’s voice, urgent, from outside. Beyond came a wordless, astonished shout from Bienvenu.
“Antoine!” Maillart called, “come quickly!” The doctor rushed onto the gallery. A dragon was heaving itself out of the pool, crushing the long stalks of bwa dlo to either side, or no, it was a great cayman—the largest he had ever seen. It moved deliberately toward Captain Guizot, with the manner of a dog expecting to be fed a scrap. Guizot took a step back, then drew his sword. The doctor walked down the gallery steps, stumbling on one of the risers, his eyes fixed on the cayman. Such an awkward-appearing thing, and yet it moved with a beautiful, fluid quickness.
Captain Guizot gained confidence enough to poke the cayman’s snout with his sword point. The cayman snapped. The width of its jaws and the rows of its teeth sent a gasp around the group of onlookers, all their party who’d ridden up that day from Gonaives. The cayman gathered itself and lunged with a startling alacrity at Guizot, who staggered backward, tripped over his own boot heel, and fell. The doctor felt the weight of his pistol in his hand, and yet he hesitated. He wanted to observe the cayman alive for longer. For weeks or months if it were possible. Never before had he seen such a specimen. But he also felt a certain interest in Captain Guizot, whose left arm he had saved from gangrene—it would be a waste to see him eaten by the cayman.
Guizot kicked at the probing snout, then scrambled backward in the dirt; he didn’t seem to have room to get his feet under him. The cayman whipped forward, jaws slicing toward the knee above the boot leather. The doctor braced his pistol and shot it through the left eye. The cayman convulsed, and Maillart raised his own gun for a second shot, but the doctor stopped him, hand on his wrist.
“The skin,” he said, and Maillart lowered his pistol. For a minute or more the cayman went on thrashing, clawing the dirt. The heavy ridged tail thumped spasmodically. At last it lay still. A black dribble from the penetrated eye caked the dust beside its head.
“What shooting!” Guizot had scrambled to his feet, was dusting himself off with slightly quavering hands. He stooped and recovered the sword he’d dropped, his eyes always fixed on the doctor, who felt a little self-conscious under this regard. Since he had succeeded in treating Guizot’s infected arrow wound, the young captain always looked at him rather too worshipfully. Probably he was also embarrassed by how near he’d come to dispatching the doctor along with all the wounded men Rochambeau had ordered slain in the debris of La Crête à Pierrot.
“Indeed,” said Maillart. “It is very well placed.”
The doctor nodded absently. “We’ll have the whole hide off him.” A sadness settled over him as the rush of action faded. The hot yellow diamond of the cayman’s unhurt eye was beginning to cool and glaze. Descourtilz would have loved to see such an animal in action, the doctor thought, he who had made such a study of the cayman. He wondered if Descourtilz were still alive.
A small crowd had materialized out of nowhere, as always when anything of interest took place—women and children smiling, giggling, nudging each other as they looked at the long, scaly carcass of the cayman.Now the doctor found Merbillay in the group and near her Caco, Yoyo . . . what was the name of her youngest child? The little girl came slowly forward. Then with sudden daring she touched her fingertip to the cayman’s hide, shrieked, and ran back to her mother’s skirts.
And where was Paul? The doctor was about to put that question to Caco, who would be likely to know something, but before he could speak he saw Riau come striding down from the coffee terraces. When Riau noticed Maillart, he looked for a moment as if he would veer off in another direction, but instead he came on and embraced the doctor.
“You have lost flesh,” Riau said as they held each other at arm’s length. Maillart was inspecting him with a certain curiosity from where he stood.
“Oh, it is only from a few days of shoe leather at La Crête à Pierrot,” the doctor said. Though he was no longer so skeletal as he and the other survivors had been when they left the fort, he knew his eyes were hollow still, and his clothes hung slackly on him. “I’ll soon recover.”
“Fok’w pran sang.” Riau shook his head. “You need to take some blood—Merbillay!”
And Merbillay quickly went off to wring the necks of a dozen pigeons and set her daughters to kindling the charcoal. Quamba, encouraged by a few of the old men bystanding, was sharpening a coutelas on a stone, preparatory to gutting and skinning the cayman. The doctor stooped to help him with the difficult, delicate work around the head—he wanted the skin off in one piece. Merbillay returned for the butchered joints, and marshalled some children to carry them off to be tenderized in great vats of papaya. The skin of the cayman, once finally stretched on the outside wall of the cane mill, was three feet longer than the door was tall.
In the midst of this work the doctor had learned as much as he could of his family—all the whites had left Thibodet for Le Cap some weeks before, and that was as much as anyone knew of them; no word had come back since, not that any was expected.
But the scent of roasted pigeon distracted them all from this subject as they settled around the table. Merbillay brought out a platter of nicely browned birds, with a plate of greens and stewed sweet potatoes. Then she vanished toward the rear of the grand’case. Riau, however, joined them for the meal. He had gone to his dwelling while the pigeons cooked, and put on the tunic of his uniform for the occasion. Indeed it was the coat of Toussaint’s honor guard, the doctor took note, an elegant costume, only a little worn, with a couple of holes in it meticulously darned. Tearing into the breast of his pigeon, Riau urged the doctor to follow his example. Pigeon meat was believed to fortify the blood. But the doctor, whose stomach was still shrunken from the siege of the fort, approached his bird more cautiously, nibbling on the end of a drumstick.
“You’ve wandered a little way out of your road,” Maillart remarked to Riau, once his first hunger had been blunted by pigeon and potato.
Riau only looked back at him blandly.
“I mean the road from Croix des Bouquets to Port-au-Prince,” Maillart pursued. “It does
not ordinarily pass through Ennery, no?” Maillart pulled shreds of meat from the ribcage of his bird with the point of his knife. “We were a long time waiting for you to come back from the delivery of that dispatch.”
Belatedly, the doctor kicked him under the table.
“Maybe Toussaint is still waiting for you to come back from your mission to Port-au-Prince from Point Samana,” Riau said smoothly.
Maillart froze for a moment, then shrugged. “It may be so,” he said, and forced a laugh. “I accept your point. But possibly you are the one who can tell us, Riau, more exactly what Toussaint may be expecting.” He scraped his chair away as the doctor kicked at his ankle once more. Guizot had laid aside his fork and was looking from Maillart to Riau, bemused.
“No one knows for certain what Toussaint thinks about.” Riau smiled tightly. “But maybe he is expecting a bad answer to the question Paul Lafrance asked of your General Lacroix.”
Maillart seemed to flush a little, though the normal baked-clay shade of his complexion made it hard to tell. “And how would he know of that question if not from you?” he muttered. But he seemed to have lost confidence in his needling, and when Riau did not answer, he let it drop.
“And the way north?” the doctor asked Riau. “Is it secure?”
“There has been some fighting around Dondon,” Riau said. “But that was a few days ago.”
“I don’t think we mean to go so far east,” said the doctor. “I was thinking more of the road to Le Cap through Plaisance and Limbé.”
“The Captain-General Leclerc marched up that road not long ago,” Riau said. “He may have met some trouble . . . perhaps at Limbé, or in the mountains before. But he had a lot of soldiers with him.”
“And how do you estimate the chances of a group the size of our own?” the doctor asked.
For a moment Riau appeared to be looking at the inside of his head. “I think you would get through,” he finally said. “If I go with you.”
The doctor nodded and returned to his plate. Chewing slowly, carefully, thoroughly, he was able to dispatch about two-thirds of his pigeon.
“You ought not to pick at Riau like that,” the doctor told the major later, when they’d both retired for a siesta following the midday meal.
“Riau has gone back to Toussaint—I can smell it,” Maillart grumbled from where he’d piled up on the bed. “Riau is an incorrigible marron— he has more desertions than I have fingers on both hands. In France he would have been shot long ago.”
“You don’t want to see him shot any more than I do,” the doctor said. “Besides, we need him to get safely to Le Cap, it seems.”
“It ought to be quiet enough, when Leclerc has just taken a division that way.”
In this country, the doctor thought, such an army may pass, but when it has passed it is as though it had never been there. He kept this observation to himself. Maillart had put in for a leave in order to accompany him, and probably he did not like to think that Riau must also be depended on. The doctor rocked slowly in the hammock he’d chosen in preference to a bed—he thought it cooler, and the weather was heavy. He watched a pair of geckos walking on the ceiling.
“What was that question of Paul Lafrance?” He peered at Maillart, between his bare feet. The major seemed to stiffen on the bed.
“A suspicion that Leclerc has come here to restore slavery.”
“Ah,” said the doctor. “At La Crête à Pierrot, it was treated as a fact, not a suspicion. That was the thing they all cried from the walls.”
“But it’s not true,” Maillart blurted. “You’ve seen the proclamations.”
“Not everyone who’s seen those proclamations believes they tell the truth.” The doctor hesitated. “Leclerc has other orders, maybe, that he has not revealed.”
“I am not so much in his confidence,” Maillart said, his voice barely audible; he seemed to be speaking to his bolster. “But—”
He cut himself off. The doctor peered at him through the notch of his big toe. Maillart seemed to be fidgeting with something at his throat. The doctor eased his head down into the hammock. Maybe it would be better not to pursue the topic, though he felt there must be something to pursue. But he didn’t want to make his friend miserable, and possibly he’d be better off not pondering the matter himself. The light had dimmed in a green, watery way, and the atmosphere was still heavier than before.
“It will rain, I think,” the doctor said.
“I hope it rains soon.” Maillart rolled onto his side. “One can barely breathe.”
A wisp of something barely visible detached from the spot of ceiling between the two geckos and came drifting down toward the hammock with a faint, increasing whine. As it came near it resolved into a mosquito. The doctor pinched it, glanced at the blood dot between his thumb and forefinger, then sifted crumbs of the insect body onto the floor and closed his eyes. A dream rushed up suddenly, full of black vomiting. In Port-au-Prince, before they’d started up the coast, a few cases of mal de Siam had been seen among the new French soldiers, and the doctor had felt a quick touch of his own recurring fever. Now in his sleep he was sweating heavily and abrading his face against the hammock’s mesh. But when he woke it was dark and considerably cooler; the rain he’d expected had already begun.
In two days’ time they were riding north, with four pack mules following their horses. The doctor had loaded up some extra clothes for Nanon and Elise and all of the children. From what had been left, none of them seemed to have packed for a long absence. One of the mules bore the skin of the cayman, scraped and salted though far from fully cured; it had been some trouble to find a mule that would accept it.
The river of Ennery was running high, and the south slopes of Morne Pilboreau were refreshed and a little greened by the rain. As they mounted higher the terrain grew more dry; a hot wind breathed over the height from the Savane Désolée to the south. Ascending the tightening turns of the trail was like climbing the internal windings of a conch shell, the doctor thought, down to the bleached-shell white of the stones above and below. Beyond the peak, it was damper, greener. The crossroads market there seemed to be functioning as usual.
They halted, to rest their horses and the pack train and to stretch their legs. The doctor bought a basket of avocados to carry with them, and enough fat, juicy oranges to share around the group. As he bit into a halved orange, Maillart joggled him in the ribs.
“Look there—”
To the east the road coiled across a ravine and curled around a mountainside in the direction of Marmelade. The doctor spat out an orange seed, found his spyglass, and focused it on the switchback opposite. In the orb of the lens an indistinct scaly gleaming resolved into the silvered helmets of a dozen riders there.
“Garde d’honneur,” the doctor said, passing the glass to Maillart. The honor guard.
“Toussaint’s?” Guizot’s voice was startled. He looked back and forth between Riau and the distant horsemen; Riau today was crowned with the same silver helm. And the doctor was certain that they must be getting a similar scrutiny from the guardsmen across the ravine. But when Riau raised an arm and swirled his open hand in a fishtail spiral, the guardsmen wheeled their horses and rode out of sight around the bend.
Maillart exhaled. “And there you have it,” he said. “I’d wager a month’s pay, if there were any pay, that Toussaint has reoccupied Marmelade.” He glanced at Riau, then at the doctor. “Very well—you are justified,” he said. “Riau has already proved his value to us, and before the day’s half done.”
“Quite so,” said the doctor. “I think we’d better go on.”
Maillart was already headed for his horse, but Guizot remained planted, staring bemused out over the dizzying drop into the Plaisance river valley. The doctor rather enjoyed his uncertainty. When he’d first seen the young captain, bearing down with his bayonet, he’d seemed altogether too sure of his intention.
“Toussaint is there?” Guizot said, still staring toward the bend in the
road where the guardsmen had disappeared from view. “Just there?”
“One never knows for certain where Toussaint may be,” the doctor told him, “if he is not before one’s eyes.” He stopped, recalling the strange scene he’d witnessed in Place Clugny, a few nights before Le Cap was most recently burned. “Even if he is before one’s eyes . . .”
Riau was strolling idly toward them. Guizot still gazed, as if mesmerized, over the giddy plummet into the valley and beyond it to the turquoise recession of mountains into cloud. A wind sprang up and swept the height and rocked the three of them like trees.
“Beware of vertigo,” the doctor murmured. “It may call you, pull you down.” He felt Riau’s attention and went on, in spite or because of it. “The people here believe this air is full of spirits,” he said. “If you hear them, do not listen. Look away.”
They rode through Plaisance without incident, and on toward the hills of Haut Limbé. As the light yellowed toward a sunset orange, deep shadows of the trees advanced across the road. In the opposite direction, market women returned toward their villages in the hills, lightfooted, singing and swinging their steps as they passed by, with lightened baskets balanced on their heads.
On an ascent, the shadows thickened, grew legs, and swarmed across the road. It was too steep, too late in a long day, for them to get any sudden speed out of their horses up the grade, and before they could recognize it, they had been surrounded by a hundred men. One held the headstall of the doctor’s horse; the bare shoulders of many others pressed closely all around. His avocado basket had emptied quickly, green ovals passing from hand to hand. Maillart twisted in his saddle, looking back at him with a discontented stare. But the doctor made no movement to object to anything that was happening. His pistols were close at hand, but it would have been folly to reach for them. In fact he felt nothing but an eerie calm.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 76
