The captain popped awake with a jolt. He had slumped over onto Doctor Hébert’s shoulder; the doctor shrugged him off with a sardonic smile. But finally the sermon was at an end, and the captain rose and joined the line of people shuffling toward the altar rail. He knelt, and accepted a morsel of bread from the hand of Delahaye. Then Moustique was coming with the wine, murmuring, the blood of Jesus Christ, the cup of your salvation . . .
Maillart swallowed, returned to his seat. Dream-fog still covered him, like a spiderweb. He covered the worst of his yawn with his hand. The occupants of the front pews began to file out of the church, following the cross. Maillart rose and marched in line behind Toussaint and the Spanish officers with Doctor Hébert walking immediately behind.
Outside the little building was a flurry of activity. The black captains, Dessalines and Clervaux and Belair, had all hurried to mount their horses, while the priest Delahaye, together with his acolyte and cross-bearer, had vanished as if the earth had swallowed them. A ripple of restlessness ran through the black troops surrounding the church; Toussaint had come to Marmelade in unusual force this time, bringing nearly three thousand of his men. But the black commander himself seemed calm and unhurried. He handed Maillart his bicorne hat to hold, and withdrew from his breast pocket a kerchief unevenly stained a brownish red.
Major Verano watched Toussaint with his slightly slanted, olive-colored eyes, as the black commander pinched the kerchief at diagonal corners, pulling its square into a triangle. Verano put the end of his beard in the corner of his mouth and drew on it as if it were a fine cigar. Maillart, who found this habit revolting, looked away, drumming his fingers absently on the brim of Toussaint’s hat. Guiaou and Quamba were leading over Toussaint’s horse, the sleek white charger Bel Argent.
“Such a fine devotion,” Verano said, pulling his beard out from his lips and molding the damp tip with his dirt-creased fingers. His speech had the Castilian lisp. Maillart was unsure whether his tone of light sarcasm was addressed to himself and the doctor, who stood at his right shoulder, or directly to Toussaint. Verano tasted his beard tip once more, and then withdrew it and squinted at the end. “He fights with the lion’s ferocity,” he said half mockingly, “but communes with the meekness of the lamb.”
Toussaint, flipping the tails of the red kerchief over his head, seemed oblivious to the remark at first. His eyes went white for an instant, as if they were looking through the back of his skull at his fingers tying the cloth. When the knot was accomplished, his eyes came clear; he took his hat back from Maillart and settled it carefully over the red headcloth.
“Blessed are the meek,” Toussaint pronounced, “for they shall inherit the earth.”
As he spoke, he drew his huge cavalry pistol and shot Major Verano through the center of his chest. At the explosion, Bel Argent jerked his head back against the reins; Quamba and Guiaou restrained him. Verano had snapped over backward like a broken cornstalk; his body sagged into the arms of one of his Spanish subordinates.
“Vive la France!” Toussaint cried out, glancing at Maillart as he swung into the saddle, his long, bright sword whirling high around his head. All over the town square the black cavalrymen were riding down the scattering Spanish troops. One of Verano’s fellows rounded on Maillart with a shriek of outrage and astonishment. Maillart stood too near to bring a weapon effectively into play. He struck the Spaniard with his fist, then stepped back, hand on his pistol grip, but Guiaou had already skewered the man from behind; the spoon-shaped blade of Guiaou’s coutelas thrust out for a moment from between the Spaniard’s coat buttons, then retracted as the dying man fell.
“Vive la France!” Maillart shouted; his voice came back to him with a small, tinny sound, as if someone else had shouted the phrase from a far distance.
He looked for Antoine Hébert, but the doctor had already run to his own mount and was unshipping his long rifle from the scabbard lashed to the saddle. Vaublanc had made it into the saddle and was riding down a side street, his face blank with confusion and his saber pointing at the sky. Maillart scrambled onto his own horse. The snout of his drawn pistol quested this way and that.
“What did you know of this?” he called to the doctor. Hébert, who had remained afoot, bracing his rifle barrel across the saddle of his horse, shook his head. Toussaint had not taken the blancs into his confidence . . . Both men held their fire now; there was no target. The black cavalry had swept the Spaniards from the square and were picking off the stragglers in the side streets. A pair of men had already struck the Spanish colors, and begun to run the French tricolor up the flagpole.
“Vive la France,” Maillart said again, wonderingly, looking again at the doctor. L’Abbé Delahaye appeared for a moment in the door of the small house behind the church. He made the sign of the cross and then withdrew, pulling Moustique after him as he shut the door. The doctor pulled his rifle down, put it back in the scabbard. Ten minutes and it was already over, the last man of the Spanish garrison wiped out; the French were, in theory at least, masters of Marmelade. Someone tied the Spanish flag to the tail of a donkey and drove the braying animal through the dusty streets, to much laughter and flinging of stones. But fifteen minutes later Toussaint had organized his force and was riding from the town at the head of his cavalry, leading two thousand-odd men on foot at a fast pace toward the north. Maillart rode in the vanguard, following the doctor; they still exchanged bewildered glances, but the euphoria of victory washing over all of Toussaint’s troops had caught them up as well.
Biassou, installed at Habitation La Rivière, had not attended church that day. Toussaint’s advance guard reached the outskirts of his camp before noon. Biassou had no real pickets posted; Toussaint’s men overran a few wanderers gathering wood or wild mushrooms, and silenced them by slitting their throats. The surprise was perfect, for Biassou’s camp was still asleep. Only a few breakfast fires had been lit, and most of the men still snored in their shelters. The trampled ground before Biassou’s tent, surrounding a pole striped with the serpentine images of Damballah and Ayida Wedo, suggested that the ceremony had gone late the night before. Nearby, a lone old woman pounded coffee in a hollowed stump, her withered breasts flapping as she worked the long stave she used as a pestle. Her mouth popped open when she saw the riders, but no sound came out; she dropped the stave and ran in silence toward the ragged edge of the trees.
Biassou’s tent was festooned with snake bones, cat skulls and other ouangas strung to the exterior ropes and corners of the canvas. The flaps were down and the tent was quiet, except for a series of little brass bells which gave a ghostly ringing in the breeze. Toussaint pressed Bel Argent into a canter. Not for the first time, Maillart took note of what a superb horseman he was, as he drew his sword and rode down on the tent, handling the weapon with a remarkable dexterity, considering it was more than half the length of his own entire person. Circling on the horse, Toussaint cut all the support ropes, then leaned low from the saddle to strike down the center pole with the flat side of the blade. The tent collapsed on itself like a net drawn tight.
Toussaint’s infantry had swept into the camp by this time, moving at a trot with bayonets at the ready. Biassou’s men scattered in all directions, still groggy from sleep and perhaps believing themselves caught in some communal nightmare. A couple of Toussaint’s men fired into the fallen tent where it flopped with its catch, but Toussaint held up a hand to stop them. He pulled up his horse and waited, straight in the saddle, his sword erect. A neat slit appeared in the canvas and Biassou popped out, holding a short knife in his right hand. He wore his dress uniform coat, bedizened with Spanish ribbons and medals, over his burly torso, but his short legs and his feet were bare. With a glance he assessed his situation and bolted for the trees.
Toussaint rode after him, alone. Biassou’s pink heels kicked up under the long tails of his coat. Toussaint’s teeth flashed white in his head: Ou pa blié Jean-Pierre. His voice was not really a shout, but a speaking tone which carried. You will n
ot forget my brother.
As Biassou reached the edge of the clearing, Toussaint stretched toward him, one hand holding the reins and the horse’s mane together while the other struck out with the sword, cleaving Biassou’s coat from collar to tail, and opening a red line on his back, such as might have been made by a whip lash. Biassou tumbled over the edge of a shallow ravine and struggled out of sight in the bush. Toussaint reined up and let him go.
A handsome colored woman erupted from the slit Biassou had cut in the tent. Shrieking prettily, she dashed in the same direction as her ravisher, running awkwardly with one hand covering her pudenda. The soldiers began to laugh and applaud, and several of them set off in pursuit of this delicate prize, but Charles Belair called them to halt, and they obeyed him. A commotion had begun at the western fringe of the clearing, and five or six Spaniards in civilian clothes came stumbling toward the center, chivied by black soldiers who pricked them with bayonets. One wore a turban, Arab fashion, the others broad straw hats which now hung down their backs by strings.
“Yo vann moun,” said Jean-Jacques Dessalines. They’re selling people.
He looked at Toussaint and gestured toward the fringe of woods, where more soldiers were bringing a group of some thirty men and women bound together in a coffle either by iron chains or by split poles carried on their shoulders and lashed with twine to form collars round their necks. Slave traders, Maillart recognized; so the rumors had been true. The turban-wearing Spaniard opened his mouth to speak, but before he could draw breath, Dessalines cracked him across the mouth with the flat of his musket stock, splintering his front teeth and knocking him backward to the ground. At some stage of the attack on Biassou’s camp, Dessalines had removed his shirt, as he was wont to do before a fight, and now when he moved with his quick muscular grace the white ropy whip scars on his back crawled as if with a life of their own. He glanced across at Toussaint, who nodded.
“Ou mèt touyé yo,” Toussaint said. You may kill them.
Dessalines simply set his boot across the throat of the turbaned man who lay on the ground, rolled his weight forward and held it there until the Spaniard had stopped kicking. Bayonets slammed into the bellies of the others. Maillart tightened the muscle across his own cut, and felt the skin shrinking on his face. An odd moment of indiscipline for Toussaint’s command, he thought as he looked quickly away. Other black soldiers were breaking rivets on the chains of the people in the slave coffle, and cutting the lashing on the wooden poles that connected them together in their files. The freed men rubbed their necks and wrists absently; some of the women had begun to cry, and others knelt before Dessalines or the horse of Toussaint Louverture.
By this time, considerable numbers of Biassou’s fighting men had regrouped and were filing back down into the clearing, holding their empty hands high to show they were unarmed and submissive. Papa Toussaint! many of them were crying, and one who seemed to be their leader went skidding to his knees beside the charger. Papa Toussaint, nou rinmin ou, he moaned, and wrapped his hands over the booted foot in the stirrup Papa Toussaint, we love you. Toussaint smiled and placed a palm upon his forehead.
One of the slave traders’ severed heads had been hoisted on a pike, and someone had unrolled the turban and ran in circles through the clearing with the purple cloth flagging behind him like a kite tail. Quamba and Guiaou and some other foot soldiers had torn open Biassou’s tent and were rooting through the contents, kicking over human skulls and glass bottles and clay govi, tumbling the ceremonial drums. Quamba straightened, calling for Toussaint’s attention, with a gold watch and chain swinging from one hand and a heavily jeweled snuffbox in the other.
Toussaint drew up to his most rigid martial posture, the saddle creaking as he shifted his weight. “Return those articles to their owner,” he declared. “Undoubtedly he will not stop running till he has reached Saint Raphael—return them to him, with my compliments. We are not thieves or pirates—we are soldiers of the Republic of France.”
Captain Maillart looked at the doctor and found his own astonishment reflected on the other’s face. “Vive la France!” the captain shouted. After all, what did he care for slave traders? The words seemed a better fit in his mouth than they had done before.
By nightfall they had swept all the way to Dondon, in the mountain pass above Le Cap and the northern plain. Toussaint raised French colors at every camp along the way; it was the work of moments to eliminate the scatterings of actual Spanish soldiers who opposed them. At every camp from Petite Rivière to Dondon, Toussaint’s lieutenants had been prepared in advance for the coup, so that sometimes the Spanish had already been gutted or strung up to the trees by the time Toussaint’s own party rode in.
That night in Dondon was a subdued celebration, with a double issue of clairin, but no more. Between bites of roast chicken folded in cassava bread, Toussaint instructed Moyse, who commanded at Dondon, to do everything necessary to hold back Jean-François, should the latter attack from his camp, now thought to be at Grande Rivière. If any Spanish had survived the day of massacre, they would probably have fled to join him.
After the meal some of the black infantrymen began drumming around the central campfire, and there was song, a long sonorous chanting in Creole, but the doctor and Maillart and Vaublanc retreated to their bedrolls, where they shared out the second ration of rum, passing a single cup among them in the dark.
“It was neatly done,” the doctor said, glancing up at the stars above the treetops and the mountains.
“True enough,” Captain Maillart said, twitching a little as he swallowed his share of the raw clairin. “We might ourselves be done in as neatly.”
“What an extremely unpleasant thought,” the doctor said, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Surely you don’t mean to suggest that we should mistrust our commander.”
Maillart looked at him narrowly in the starlight, to see to what extent he was joking. “One might say that we ourselves have been mistrusted,” he said, “unless you were given more prior notice of this turnabout than I.”
“Not in the least,” the doctor said, “but one may also argue that the efficacy of a surprise attack depends on secrecy.”
Vaublanc drummed his fingers on an unraveling patch of his blanket. “Secrecy is something he has certainly achieved,” he said. “I’d give a good deal to know his aims more plainly.”
“The French Republic has declared for the general abolition of slavery.” The doctor tilted his cup to examine the finger’s worth of clairin he had conserved there. “Perhaps that is explanation enough.”
“And perhaps it isn’t,” Vaublanc said. “Sonthonax announced abolition nine months ago, and Toussaint did no more than to stake his own competing claim to the fight for general liberty.”
The doctor shrugged and sniffed his rum. “Maybe it has taken him until now to remark the inconsistency of his proclamation at Camp Turel with the actual situation . . . with Biassou and perhaps Jean-François still collaborating with the Spanish in the slave trade, as we saw today.”
“Do you really think he could have failed to notice that?” Vaublanc retorted.
“Well.” The doctor wet his tongue in his ration of rum. “You know I was with him when his coach was ambushed on the road to Camp Barade. Biassou was at the bottom of that attempt, I am certain. And behind his detention at Saint Raphael before that.”
“He jumped from the coach before the ambuscade and left you to take the fire meant for him,” Vaublanc said, “if I remember your reports of that episode correctly.”
“But there was no warning,” the doctor said. “I don’t think he meant to do what he did then, not in the ordinary sense of intention. It—” He broke off, lost in the strangeness of that hour on the road. “It was as if something had come over him, had taken him over, I mean,” he mumbled, shaking his head. Whatever he meant, he could not phrase.
“I see,” said Vaublanc. “Then perhaps he neglected to advise anyone of his plan for today because he had n
ot himself formulated it—he was seized with the sudden inspiration as he walked out the door of the church.”
“Come,” said Maillart. “Are his reasons really so inscrutable? The matter of emancipation must have some weight, and from what Antoine has told us, Biassou and Jean-François have been a long time intriguing against him with the Spanish high command.”
“Not to mention trying to murder him,” Vaublanc said. “Still and all, it seems a strange moment to join forces with the Jacobins, when they scarcely have a foothold left anywhere on this miserable island.”
“May I point out that we are Jacobins ourselves, at least since we left church this morning?” Maillart paused. “You know, Tocquet told me something to that effect before we parted at Port-de-Paix.”
“Oh?” said the doctor. With a feeling of resignation he swallowed the remains of his rum and laid his cup aside as the last threads of warmth spread through him.
“He put it that Toussaint didn’t need to choose the winning side. That he’d already determined that he would win, regardless, so his only chore was to pick his partners in the victory.”
Vaublanc laughed softly. “If that’s the case,” he said, “then we are fortunate indeed that he has chosen us, my friends.” He stretched out on his back and pillowed his head on his crossed palms, then added with a tinge of irony, “Vive la France.”
It seemed they had slept for only a matter of minutes when Clervaux woke them with a shake on the shoulder, although the stars proved to have shifted in the sky. The drums were silent now, and the fires had all been smothered with dirt, but all down the line came the jingle of rings on bits and the squeak of leather as horsemen tightened their girths.
Covering a yawn with his hand, the doctor shrugged at Vaublanc and Maillart, rolled and shouldered his blanket and carried it down the hill to where the horses were tethered at the tree line. His horse turned and whickered at him gently. The doctor fed it a bit of sugar loaf between its lips. It was chilly, and rather damp, so that he shivered and hunched his shoulders up. He changed the priming of his rifle and both pistols before mounting. Maillart and Vaublanc, grumbling under their breath, fell into line behind him.
Master of the Crossroads Page 17
