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By Root 1229 0

to see them there, I wondered if maybe they did not have an order to arrest Riau. But they only stood outside the ajoupa, breathing hard as whitemen do when they have had to climb a hill. They spoke about the weather and the fineness of the view. It was true that you could see a long way from that hilltop, all over the deep valley and around the mornes which closed it in. The white captains asked my leave to come inside the ajoupa. There was not a lot for them to look at in there, but Maillart asked that I take down the banza and play a little, and afterwards they took it up and turned it over and passed it between them, comparing it to instruments they knew from France, though it seemed it was not very much like any of those.

Then the two white captains left the ajoupa and made ready to start down the path, only Maillart turned back to me suddenly and placed one hand carefully on my chest and took in a deep, important breath.

“You must not fight Guiaou,” he said. “Riau, I tell you as—as your brother officer.”

So that was what it had been about, from the beginning. I said nothing, though I had the angry thought that Maillart, even if he had been my parrain to teach me the whiteman ways of fighting, Maillart was not my father. The words of the Creole song came in my head. We have no mother. We have no father. We come from Guinée . . . but we did not come out of Guinée because we wanted to.

Maillart would not have understood any of that. I saw that he had come out of friendship, perhaps brotherhood, even if he could not say the word without some difficulty. Another blanc would not have come at all. I had not even known that Maillart bothered himself to know where Riau stayed at night. He was shaking his head now, smiling a little, in the manner he might have had with another white officer.

“Women,” he said. “They are to admire, to serve, to enjoy, perhaps . . . but not to die for.”

“But if you were in my case, you would fight a duel,” I said.

The Captain Maillart turned some of those colors that rise so easily in a whiteman’s skin. He could not very well say that it was not the same for me. I did not know if he thought this either.

Vaublanc, who had been watching us, spoke then. “You are an officer, and Guiaou is not,” he said. “You cannot challenge an enlisted man. No more can you accept his challenge, or even notice it.”

Blanc rules. Maillart was nodding to agree. I thought, yes, if I wore my officer’s coat, I might order Guiaou what to do, and Couachy too (but neither of them was in my company), and yet this would not make the problem of the woman go away. What would Maillart do if his woman went with a man not an officer? I did not ask him this, though, because I could not think of any time when a blanche had done such a thing, so maybe it was not possible.

The white captains must have thought they had said enough, because they made ready to go down the trail again. When Maillart had taken a few steps, he stopped and looked at me again.

“There was a time when I was in your place,” he said. “And I did not fight the other man.” He looked at me to know if I thought that fear had prevented him, but I did not think so, and then he went after Vaublanc, down the trail.

I took leave for one night and one day and went to another higher mountain where there was bwa danno. I cut a danno from the ground, measuring it to be longer by two hand’s lengths than Guiaou’s coutelas. I had thought a lot about that coutelas, because Guiaou was very quick and skillful with it, and he preferred it to a gun.

With my own coutelas I peeled the danno, all the way to one end of it, but on the other end I left enough of the smooth, gray shiny bark to cover the place where my hand would grip. Beneath the bark the wood was pale and slightly supple, like a whipstock, but also very, very hard. I liked it better than the longer heavy clubs which some men fought with, like Bienvenu. Those heavy clubs would strike a killing blow, but they moved slower than a knife.

If Maillart had not come to speak to me, though, I might have chosen something