Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [247]
The muster had begun before dawn and just as the sunlight began to yellow, they were riding out. Morriset, who commanded the dragoons of Toussaint’s honor guard, led off the column, with Toussaint back by several ranks, riding among his aides and pocketed by the helmeted dragoons. He sat smoothly, easily erect on his huge charger, the white plume waving gaily in his hat. The women and children were lining their way, watching, calling out to certain men and applauding all of them. The children capered about and ran at the heels of the horses. The doctor saw Paul and Sophie come running from the grand’case, pursued by Pauline who was shouting remonstrances, but when she overtook them, she did not make them go back; instead all three joined the other spectators. The doctor pulled his horse out of the line and stood on the bank on the other side of the road, his horse prancing restlessly beneath him. Across the stream of marching men he caught Paul’s eye and smiled and saluted the boy with a touch of his finger on the brim of his straw hat. Paul had found Caco, and the two boys were running up and down the line of the march, taking turns rolling a wooden hoop with a stick. The girls, Pauline and Sophie, stood hand in hand watching more quietly; Zabeth had also come out to join them, though Elise was nowhere to be seen.
Maillart’s troops passed, the captain winking, grinning at the doctor, then Vaublanc, then Riau, who pulled his horse up to stand where the doctor had halted. Sober, expressionless, Riau reviewed his foot soldiers as they passed. Caco jumped and whooped on the far side of the line, but Riau gave him no notice. He was studying the men in their motley: uniform coats over torn canvas trousers or ragged relics of the tricolor, horizontally striped breeches brought into the colony by republican sans-culottes. These breeches were sometimes trimmed down to shorts, sometimes simply shredded to the hip. Many wore straw replicas of European military hats, and some had remnants of the originals in felt, and many wore tricolor cockades pinned to their headgear and were further ornamented by tribal scarification out of Guinée or brands inflicted by their erstwhile masters on breast or cheek or shoulder, along with punitive mutilations: lopped ears and slit nostrils, and some lacking fingers, a hand, an arm, and a few went along one-legged managing a crutch with one hand and a musket with the other, and some had no garment whatsover but a binding round the genitals and a belt bearing a knife and cartridge box, musket in hand and ready. It was this Riau surveyed (the doctor knew): the condition of their weapons.
They passed, and finally Riau raised his head and whirled his hat at Caco, whereupon Paul and Caco both leapt in the air in the ecstasy of this recognition and came down clutching one another. The next squadrons were still marching up, but the doctor fell into the ranks and rode beside Riau.
That day they came to Petite Rivière and camped around the fort: La Crête à Pierrot, raised on a peak above the town, with the slow curl of the Artibonite winding around it. Next day they rode the river valley to Verrettes, where Toussaint had garrisoned another fort, and there they crossed the river and pressed on into the mountains to the south. Before night they came to the crossing of the road that ran from Mirebalais in the interior to Port-au-Prince, where the English were. They camped that night at the fort of Gros Figuier. No cart nor anything on wheels could pass the road to Mirebalais, so during the night the men unshipped the cannon