The War of Knives

by Broos Campbell

  I sat down on my own accord. “I also speak Creole, apparently,” I said, and Juge clamped his hand over my mouth and sat on me. I continued watching from around the edge of the rocks.

  The hussars’ bugler sounded the recall and their colonel stood in his stirrups, waving his sword overhead. He pointed toward the burning town in the distance.

  A company of cuirassiers lumbered up the road toward the hussars, haloed by the inferno behind them. At their head rode Pétion on his gray war-horse. The hussars faced about and charged. Wild yells—a hollow thump of horse colliding with horse—the clang of steel on steel and the soft snickety-snick of long blades slicing through muscle and bone. The cuirassiers reeled, recovered—and then broke as a mass of infantry smashed into their flank. Pétion fled with the black hussars in chase.

  The colonel let them go and turned to direct the infantry: “The Second Demi-brigade, form up on me!” His horse carried him near our hidey-hole.

  “That’s Christophe,” I said, but Juge had already leaped up onto the rocks, waving his arms over his head. “Chef de Brigade Christophe!” he called. “It is I, Juge! Over here, Citizen-Colonel Christophe! Do not shoot!”

  The mounted cadre that had stayed with the colonel closed in on our hiding place, their horses prancing and their sabers drawn, and infantrymen rushed at us with their bayonets gleaming in the moonlight, but Christophe ran his horse alongside us and plied the flat of his sword among his men until they backed off.

  “Well met, Lieutenant Juge!” he said at last. “I trust I find you in good health on this delightful evening—and M’sieur Graves, as well! Father Toussaint will be happy. Sergeant-major, a guard of honor for these fellows. You will excuse me, Juge, but I have urgent work this night.” He sloped his saber on his shoulder and trotted off into the silvery moonlight, with the Second Demi-brigade baying the battle song of the grenadiers as they loped after him:

  Grenadiers, à l’asso!

  Se ki mouri zaffaire à yo.

  Ki a pwon papa,

  Ki a pwon maman.

  Grenadiers, à l’asso!

  Se ki mouri zaffaire à yo!

  Grenadiers, to the assault!

  Those who die, that’s their affair.

  They have no papa,

  They have no mama.

  Grenadiers, to the assault!

  Those who die, that’s their affair!

  Eighteen

  “An empty bucket is soonest mended,” said Surgeon Quilty as he finished bandaging my head. “It’s a lucky thing Mr. Connor didn’t hit you someplace vital, ha ha!”

  I had a vicious headache, and even the muted light of the Rattle-Snake’s sick berth was like an auger in my eyes. I closed them, but that was worse. I seemed to spin in darkness, and my stomach started knocking at my tonsils. I opened my eyes as little as I could. “What did he hit me with?”

  He looked at me closely and then nodded as if to himself. “A small knife that he carried in his waistband, apparently. Seems he tried to trepan you with it, but your skull is so hard that the blade snapped off.”

  “What’s ‘trepan’?”

  “It means to drill a hole in the skull. We do it to relieve pressure on the brain, mostly.”

  I touched the bandage. “It feels like he stuck it in my head.”

  He moved my hand away. “None of that, or I’ll lash your hands to the cot again.” He dropped his mock scowl in favor of his usual cheerful look, saying, “Indeed he did stick it in your head, young sir. You might even say he stuck it in your ear, ha ha!”

  “Please, Mr. Quilty.”

  “Yes. I beg pardon. Well, young sir, the point of the knife struck the left temporal bone, partially severing the ear, passed along the os parietale—that is to say the temple—and lodged beneath the os zygomaticum, which forms part of the orbit. You would call it the cheekbone. There the blade snapped off, leaving the tip of it stuck in your head, as you say. However, I removed it without incident—the blade, not your head—and sewed your ear back where nature intended it to be.”

  “He cut my ear off?”

  “Near enough as makes no difference, ha ha!” He was entirely too cheerful for my taste. “However, please God it is healing nicely, and the masticular muscles escaped damage for the most part. I was more concerned with your eye, but though the edge of the blade lay alongside the orb, it neither punctured nor even scratched it. At any rate, the danger has passed.” Despite the confidence in his voice, he touched the wood of my cot when he said it.

  “I don’t recollect a dang thing.”

  “This is entirely usual.” He pulled the sheet up to my chin and tucked me in. “When there is an injury to the head, often the patient remembers nothing of the blow, and sometimes nothing of what happened during the several minutes or even hours beforehand. And sometimes he lies comatose for days, weeks or indeed sometimes for the rest of his life, such as it is.”

  “No, I remember now,” I said. “Someone shot me. I remember the flash and the bang.”

  “It would be natural to interpret the blow that way, but it is not a true memory. A blow of such violence would rattle what little brain you have around in your skull, which would account for your perception of a ‘flash and a bang,’ as you put it.”

  “I see.” I remembered going into Pétion’s office and seeing Connor there, but I was a little fuzzy about what had happened next. “Is Franklin aboard?”

  “Not aboard the Rattle-Snake, no. Mr. Towson brought you and your entourage off while he was fetching the guns from shore, but my colleague in the Croatoan would not let Franklin move once he saw his condition. You, however, insisted on coming here. You made such a row that they were glad to indulge you. Even after you had returned to the bosom of your shipmates, it took quite some doing to convince you that you had indeed arrived home.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Oh dear is right. You blackened Mr. Horne’s eye for him. It took great forbearance on his part not to return the favor, I dare say, but instead he sat on you till you had calmed down. Speaking of calm, you must remain so for several weeks more. A dim room and a vegetable diet for you, and this time I mean to hold you to it.”

  He made me count the fingers he held up and moved a finger back and forth while I followed it with my eyes.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “A history of head injury—you nearly got your brains dashed out in the Bight of Léogâne, I remember.”

  “Yes. A gun blew up next to me. Knocked me clean out of my wits for a while.” That was only last January, but it seemed like something from another lifetime.

  “And you have a number of lumps on your head, and your nose has been broken recently. Do you recall bumping your head at any other time?”

  “I don’t remember, Mr. Quilty. Maybe. I seem to remember falling off a horse at some point.”

  He nodded. “A loss of consciousness accompanied by a loss of certain memories but not others. Any seizures?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Numbness in the extremities?” He put the back of his hand against my cheek.

  I turned my face away. I didn’t want to be touched. “No.”

  “Nausea and vomiting.”

  “Only when I stick my hands into rotten corpses.”

  “I’ll take that as a no, but earlier you were a veritable fountain at both ends. Weakness and lethargy, I dare say?”

  “You could call it that.” Quilty was a kindly cuss, but he was getting on my nerves. “Say, what’s this all about, anyway?”

  “And personality changes,” he said, as if ticking off the last box on a mental checklist. He said it as if it were a fact, not a question. I asked him what he meant by it—and pretty sharp, I guess—but he just put his things away, told me to get some sleep, and left.

  As soon as he had gone I pushed the sheet off me, the better to take advantage of a cool breeze coming down the forward hatchway. From the schooner’s smooth swoops and the way we were heeled over to larboard, I calculated we were saili
ng large under a brisk topsail breeze on the starboard tack. Which was odd if we were bound for the Leeward Islands, as I supposed we must be.

  “Saint Kitts, probably,” I muttered, picking at a long scratch in my side. It didn’t hurt much, but it itched like Old Harry. I snugged myself down for a nap. “Cousin Billy, that old soak, has overshot his mark, and now we’re having to run up from south of Nevis.” Commodore Truxtun was based in Basseterre in Saint Kitts, of course, and naturally we would rejoin him now that we had delivered our convoy and Mr. P. Hoyden Blair to Port Républicain . . .

  Lightning bolts of pain fired in my head as I sat up. We hadn’t been attached to Truxtun’s Leeward Islands squadron since a month or more. Billy was dead, Peter was captain . . . I swung my feet to the deck, meaning to run up to the quarterdeck to ask whither we were bound, but a wave of nausea washed over me and I had to hug the cot till it passed.

  “I shouldn’t, old man,” drawled an English voice. “The sick-room attendants are right terrors in this ship. Mind, they’ll strap you down again if you ain’t careful.”

  “The Rattle-Snake’s a schooner, not a ship, you lubber. And they’re loblolly boys, not sick-room attendants.” But the voice was familiar, and I turned my head to see Treadwell propped up on one elbow in the opposite cot. “Why, you old cuss! You’re looking tolerable.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” He looked at me carefully. “You recognize me?”

  “Course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Oh, no reason, sir. No reason at all.” Emotions played across his face: caution gave way to bashfulness, which suddenly gave way to a great sunny grin. He patted a heavily bandaged leg. “Hang it, I’m delightfully well, Mr. Graves, I must say. Tip-top. It’s a wonder what a week’s rest’ll do, along with knowin’ one’s leg is still in its proper place an’ not feedin’ the sharks, ha ha! Pepin and his talk of the knife—the old quacksalver was dead wrong, ha ha!”

  “Well, dead at any rate,” I said, before closing my mind to the memory of the French doctor on Cravache’s wheel. I couldn’t remember if that had been before or after we’d hauled Treadwell out of the prison. It must’ve been before, but everything was all jumbled up in my head. “I’m glad you kept your leg, sir.”

  “Thank’ee ever so, Mr. Graves. Apologize for bein’ such a mewlin’ prat before. Don’t know what came over me.”

  “Forget it. I have. But say—what d’ye mean, ‘a week’s rest’? I brung you aboard just the day before yesterday. You’re out of your reckoning.”

  “I meant it in a general sense, sir. It’s been ten days, actually. But we have been underway, as you sea dogs put it, for a week now.”

  “Ten days! How you talk. I just come aboard this morning.”

  He shook his head. “Ten days, sir. Every day brings me closer to the day I’ll walk again, and so I count each one.”

  “Ten days,” I said again. “Where have I been these ten days?”

  “Out of your head, that’s where. And not quiet about it, either.”

  “Lordy. That must be what Quilty meant when he threatened to lash me down ‘again.’ The people must think I’m gone for a lunatic.”

  “I’ll say. But you seem to have come back to yourself. I’m glad of it, too. Bit disconcerting, bunking with a madman, y’know. There were a few nights I wished for a pistol under my pillow, ha ha!”

  I lay back, thinking it over. Except for the blinding headache, I felt fit enough. If we’d been at sea for a week, then obviously I’d had a week to recover. That was long enough for any old salt to be lying about idle, I guessed, but I thought maybe I’d have a nap anyway. I yawned. “Where are we bound?”

  “Dunno. Something about chasing a pink . . . erm, monosyllable, and a friggin’ arm-flute.”

  “A pink mono . . . ? Oh! The Rose-red Cunt and a frigate armed en flute, you mean?”

  He giggled. “Well, yes, that’s what they said.”

  I kicked the sheet the rest of the way off and hauled myself upright. “Ahoy! Ahoy, you loblolly boys,” I roared, despite the agony it raised in my head. When one of Quilty’s assistants stuck a wary head through the door, I said, “You there. My respects to the captain, and I’ll come on deck now.”

  He shook his head, prim as a maiden aunt in fresh-boiled flannel. “Oh no, sir, not without the surgeon gives the word.”

  “My respects to the captain, damn your eyes, and tell him I’m fit for duty.”

  “Being fit for duty is Mr. Quilty’s department, sir,” he said, the little priss. “Without he gives the word—”

  “Enough.” Getting angry just made the room spin around. I waited till it had stopped, and said: “My respects to the captain, and where the hell are my clothes?”

  “Them words exactly, sir?” He plucked nervously at a button on his shirt.

  “Yes, them words exactly, consarn it.” I pointed in the general direction of the quarterdeck. “I’m perfectly in command of my wits, and I just gave you an order. Go.”

  It took some persuading, pleading even, but at last Quilty allowed me to be strapped to a chair and carried up on deck. To my annoyance he insisted that I be wrapped in a blanket against the breeze, but he also insisted that a piece of sail be set up for an awning to shade my eyes, for which I was grateful. I kept my eyes shut during most of the operation, but after the hands had lashed my chair to a ringbolt between a pair of guns on the leeward side where I’d be out of the way, and most of all after they had stopped jostling me, I managed a few squints to get my bearings. It was a piercingly bright afternoon, with a few clouds scudding down the wind high overhead and a rainbow shining in the spray on the starboard bow. My lids were heavy and I settled in for a doze.

  “I trust you have found your wits again.”

  I opened my eyes to see Peter Wickett standing before me with his hands clasped behind his back. The stubble was black along his jaw and the skin was taut across his cheekbones, as if he hadn’t slept in several days—which he probably hadn’t, with a chase in sight.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. It wasn’t true that I’d found my wits, but the truth was too complicated to explain. “What’s our course and position?”

  “We are headed nor’west by west, seventy-seven degrees and thirty minutes west of London this noon. Unless we carry something away, we may cross the tropic sometime in the evening watch.” The leading edge of the fore-topsail snapped in the breeze. Peter said nothing, but he shot a bitter look at Mr. Rogers at the conn.

  “Watch your luff there!” said Rogers.

  “Watch your luff, sir, aye aye,” said the quartermaster, and the tiller-man repeated the order even though he’d already corrected the error. Rogers needed no rebuke, implied or spoken—but it was a sign of the strain Peter was under that he would notice the sailing master’s business at all, and Rogers let it roll off his back.

  I pictured the latitude and longitude on the chart in my mind. “That puts us in the Bahama Channel, sir, about ten leagues south of Andros.”

  “I have noticed this, yes,” said Peter. A faint pleasure shone in his cold gray eyes.

  “Are we going home, then?”

  He gave me a sardonic look. “Depends on our friends.” He looked across the starboard bow. “You cannot see from here, but we are in chase of L’Heureuse Rencontre—”

  “The Rose-red Cunt!”

  “—And a frigate called the Faucon. She is armed en flute.” He scratched the puckered scar on his cheek. “Do you recall either of them?”

  He’d gotten the scar from a musket ball during a fight with picaroons in January. An image came to me of him holding a bloody tooth in his hand and then throwing it overboard. I recalled it clearer than things that’d happened more recently. “Of course, sir. We fought L’Heureuse Rencontre off Port Républicain.” I recollected being in that fight very well, although most of my memories seemed to be centered on Mr. MacElroy’s hat. “But I disremember any ship called the Faucon.”

  “I did not know it myself till your Mr.
Franklin told us.”

  “En flute means her guns’ve been taken out of her. She’s got nothing but holes in her sides, like a flute. A transport, most like.” That rang a bell somewhere.

  He gave me a curious look, as if my answer weren’t all he’d expected. “Most of the guns, anyway,” he said, with the air of a schoolmaster dropping hints. “They still have their quarterdeck and fo’c’s’le guns. Ten long eights, I should think. That gives us a slight advantage in weight of metal, if we can take her while Captain Block engages the corvette. They will be loath to allow it. But more importantly they have several hundreds of troops aboard, which will make it unhealthy to grapple with them. I hope to do this in the Straits of Florida.”

  Little bits were falling back into place. “Is the Croatoan with us, sir?”

  “Did I not just say so? Last night she was close enough to use her bow chasers. The corvette yawed as if to give her a broadside, but he soon changed his mind when he saw Block was having none of it.”

  “Block can sail twelve knots to our ten. Why don’t he go in and knock ’em around some?”

  “I have not presumed to ask.”

  I chewed that over for a while. With his twenty-four 12-pounders and eight 9-pounders, Block could stand off and shoot ’em both to pieces if he wanted. But as Peter said, it weren’t our business to second-guess a post-captain.

  “Where did you find ’em, sir?”

  “Three days ago off Miragoâne, just as your Mr. Franklin said. They had the heels of us, at least at first.”

  “Where are they bound, sir?”

  “I do not know. Franklin lapsed into coma before he could say.”

  I could make no connection between Miragoâne and Franklin, but my blood stirred at the sound of his name. I recollected he had a couple of friends who were wrong ’uns. There was a gaunt white man who had a face like Death, or maybe he was just dead, and a dashing mulatto who was as white as I was, whatever that might mean. And the port town of Miragoâne lay some sixteen miles west of Rigaud’s stronghold at Petite Goâve. A man on horseback could make it in no time, assuming he lived to make the ride . . .