Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [231]
I carried the danno to the ajoupa and kept it leaning just inside the door. I did not take it down to the compound or carry it at any time I must wear my officer coat, but shirtless, high on the morne, I worked and worked until the danno spun around my hand like the wing of a hummingbird, so fast you could see only the blur of it, whirling forward and then back with scarcely a hitch between the two directions. I worked the danno with both hands, and changing from one hand to the other, until striking from any direction I could cut a green branch big around as my thumb.
When I first returned from the mountain where bwa danno grew, Merbillay had been there and left one of her mouchwa têt spread over my sleeping mat, not the red cloth but a blue one. I put it across my face and breathed the scent of her. She came soon again, and often. All the time she was in that ajoupa with me, the danno leaned against the woven wall inside the doorway, but if she noticed, she did not say anything about it.
Once in the late morning of a day when there was no drilling of the soldiers down below, Merbillay and I lay naked on the mat side by side, dozing as the sweat dried on us in the breeze that blew through the sticks of the wall. What woke me was the sound of many voices, and when I woke, Merbillay had jumped up with a frightened look on her face and was winding her cloth to cover herself.
I picked up the danno as I stepped through the door. A shout went up from all those people, but when Merbillay came out they cried even louder. Bouquart came to me and when I saw his troubled face, I knew that he had wanted to come to me to warn me when he saw it begin—he wanted to tell me this now, but I stopped him from talking. Already the danno was twitching in my hand like the stiffened tail of an angry cat.
Guiaou stood forth, the baby Yoyo cradled in his left arm, and he was shouting, pointing at Merbillay, then at the baby, then at Merbillay again. The hum inside my head was too loud for me to understand his words. Caco was not anywhere, and I was glad for that. Guiaou’s coutelas was strapped to his right hip, and I saw only his hand passing above it, forward and back as he moved his arm to point. Then Merbillay was holding the baby somehow and the crowd had closed behind us, between us and the ajoupa and Merbillay was sucked away into the crowd. The crowd had made a circle around only Giaou and Riau. Down the hill I heard Maillart’s voice shouting angrily, but the crowd had blocked the trail head and would not let him come up.
Only once did I look into Guiaou’s face with the deep scar tearing it open so near to one of his eyes, and after that I looked only at his hip and shoulder and the space between, which the coutelas would come out of. But my good danno was longer and already it was whirling in my hand. I struck first, high, overhand, drew his parry and reversed the strike almost before the metal touched the wood. With this I hit him on the leg but not as hard as I should have because I was too excited. Still he stumbled and fell back, the crowd opening a pocket to receive him, and I charged, but he laid himself long and low and took the wood across his back while lashing the knife at my forward leg. The danno made a red welt on his skin, but the cut toward my legs drove me backward to the center of the circle.
We stepped around each other, left, left left, feinting. No advantage for either. I rushed him with two underhand cuts flowing one into the other without a break, but he skipped back and the crowd gave way and he found space to escape. I cut backward, up in a curve from his right foot to his left shoulder, and met the blade halfway. If I had thought sooner, I could have ridden the blade down to smash his knuckles so I tried the same stroke again, but the blade was not where I expected it, because he had flipped it under to lie along the outside of his forearm. He struck