Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [194]
Maillart jerked on his coat and boots and, with Léveillé and a few others, reached the prison in time to see Laveaux coming out of the gate. He was haggard and filthy from his days in the cell; Perroud, a pace or two behind him, looked even worse. But Laveaux raised his right hand over the people who met him, like a priest giving absolution.
It was dawn, though the sun’s face would be hidden for some time more behind the hulk of Morne du Cap; the light was coming up quickly. The crowd swept Laveaux directly to the main audience room of the municipal building, where he turned to face the men who had imprisoned him. Once more he raised his right hand, which trembled only slightly from his ague. He announced that, for the love of the Good, he would not seek to punish the guilty parties.
Eighth man back in the column, Doctor Hébert rode up the south face of Morne Pilboreau. Riau was ahead of him, Guiaou behind; leading the file was Toussaint Louverture. Still stronger forces, led by Dessalines and Charles Belair, had gone before them to Le Cap. They would not be called upon to fight this time. Nor would the troop with which the doctor rode. Toussaint’s word alone had been sufficient, his finger wagged in warning more than enough. Villatte’s conspiracy was foiled without a shot.
The doctor’s mule picked a delicate way up the switchbacks of the mountain trail. It was the same mule which had carried him to Habitation Fortier and through Toussaint’s campaign around Grande Rivière. He had come to prefer the mule’s surefootedness for mountain rides. With a paysan straw saddle the comparative discomfort of a seat on the mule’s bony back was not worth considering. He had even come to appreciate the mule’s self-interested intelligence, which was far greater than that of a horse, though not always placed at the service of the rider.
A balloon of hope seemed to lift him toward the peak. They would reach Le Cap before night. There he might find traces of Choufleur, if not Nanon herself . . . and Paul. Choufleur had been billeted there before he had come to ravish Nanon away from Habitation Thibodet. His involvement in l’affaire Villatte was to be suspected. And Nanon, if left to her own resources, might have returned there. She knew how to manage in the town; it was where she and the doctor had first met.
Lost in these images, he floated up the trail. His American long rifle tilted across the saddlebow like an outrigger. The weapon was too long to be side-slung in its scabbard; the barrel would have furrowed the ground.
Farther back in the column some hoof or boot or horny bare foot dislodged a stone which fell over the trail’s edge and went skittering down the dry, dusty slopes, gathering smaller pebbles and clods as it went down. Lizards sidestepped away from the miniature avalanche. The doctor twisted in his saddle and looked back. The switchbacks of the descent behind them were giddily steep. Scrub pine and cedar ran down the gorges, to the sparse raquette trees on the dry mud flats. Dry wind had withered a corn planting on a terraced face of the hill opposite. Far below, the chalky plain fanned out toward Gonaives. A blue haze at the horizon marked the coast.
Automatically the doctor touched the mirror shard in his right pocket, then, switching the reins from hand to hand, the empty snuffbox in his left. In this way he recentered himself. In the crushing heat, it dizzied him to screw his head around, but he thought there was no danger of sunstroke. He reached to check the brim of his straw hat. Beneath it he also