Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [135]
The box was full of slim black Spanish cigars. Arnaud declined. Tocquet chose a cigar and bit the end off it.
“Steadies the nerves, I find.” He lit his cigar and tucked the box into an inside pocket of the lieutenant’s coat.
“We’d best be off,” he said.
“Have you gone mad?” Arnaud hissed at him. “It’s a slaughterhouse out there.”
“Faute de mieux.” Tocquet exhaled smoke and smiled. “I don’t think much of our chances here. If we aren’t disemboweled by the blacks, we’re quite likely be hanged by the Spanish—we have killed two of the bastards, you’ll recall. And that pair of servants will certainly give us up, wherever they stop running.”
Bazau had found a proper sidesaddle to strap on the Spanish mare—perhaps it belonged to the young woman who was now locked in the pantry of the house. Thus Claudine was more comfortably mounted; Tocquet took care to adjust her stirrups. She was a poor rider, but fortunately the mare seemed gentle and steady, and Arnaud and Tocquet rode close on either side of her, with Bazau bringing up their rear.
Once they had turned off the Rue Bourdon, they passed a block strewn with bodies of men and women and children of all ages. On the next block they overtook a party of black men loading corpses on a cart—a man with epaulettes on his coat was collecting money and watches and rings in a sack. The general slaughter in the streets seemed to be finished, but the blacks were still breaking into the houses to ferret the French survivors from their hiding places. There was no fire. Near the edge of town they passed an impassioned warrior on the point of putting a torch to a roof, but a black cavalryman broke away from a patrol and knocked the torch out of his hands with a gun stock.
Tocquet fumed out smoke as he rode, and sternly returned the looks of whomever they passed. Twice he saluted black patrols on horseback, and each time his salute was dutifully returned. No Spanish soldiery was evident anywhere—they must have all locked themselves into the forts. Arnaud kept his eyes fixed on whatever appeared between his horse’s ears. In fact his horse, the gelding they’d taken from the house on the Rue Bourdon, was skittish, perhaps unnerved by the stench of blood, but the work of managing the animal helped Arnaud keep calm himself. Sometimes he glanced across at his wife, whose veil hung motionless but for the tremble of her respiration. A crust of white dust formed on the cloth below her nostrils. Where was she? Arnaud knew her haunted by phantasma still more awful than his own. Sometimes he was moved to believe that the mind could not produce such things from its interior—that the demons must be external, real.
They rode at a brisk, businesslike trot and stopped for nothing. No one attempted to hinder them, or paid them much attention at all. When they came out of the town they could see Gros-jean holding the laden donkey and waiting for them at the head of the trail on the hill. Once they had come up with him, he fell into their train without a word and they rode on, toward Ouanaminthe and into the hills beyond.
14
All the north country had grown smaller since I, Riau, had last been there. Toussaint had threaded the mountains with his posts of the Cordon de l’Ouest, which pulled all the land up tight like the drawstring of a bag. At Marmelade and Plaisance and Dondon were soldiers who answered always to Toussaint, and also at other smaller posts in the mountains in between. Not so many soldiers at each post, because Toussaint had taken most of them to fight the English in the Artibonite. But those there were had eyes and ears and memory.
In the mountains I shot a goat with my pistol and cured the meat at the boucan. I rode to the market of Marmelade to trade a part of the smoked meat for a straw saddle. At the market were women who wove straw saddles very well. But before I had this saddle strapped to the back of Ti Bonhomme, there came a soldier of the post to ask who was Riau? What was his business there at Marmelade? Worse, this soldier looked at the horse as if he knew him from another