Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [249]
“Who are these people?” the doctor hissed.
“Mamzel and the Docko Maroons,” Riau told him, glancing toward the leader of the band. “But today, they are our Twelth Brigade. Toussaint organized them like that, when he was at Mirebalais before.”
The doctor digested this information thoughtfully. “And their weapons?”
“The gifts of Sonthonax,” Riau said, laughing cheerfully.
To call the Dockos a regular brigade was a stretch of credibility but, under the direction of Mamzel, they moved with a united purpose. They went loping out from their village in a single column, lacing through the mountains with a snake-like movement. Though the heat was mounting rapidly, they held a sharp pace and stopped only rarely for a scant mouthful of water. The doctor poured sweat. His long gun seemed the weight of several cannon—Riau had advised him not to carry it . . .
At last they made a full halt on a peak above a grassy savanna, while Riau undertook a signal with two flags. He scanned the hills beyond the plain with a little spyglass, and he must have seen the answer to his signal, for he told Mamzel they would press on, and quickly. They came down from the mountain and set off at a dead run across the savanna toward the town of Las Cahobas. The doctor jogged with his long gun clasped crossways in front of him, his pistols banging on his hips, his chest about to explode. A herdsman tending cattle on the plain was staring at them, frozen in astonished dismay. A little too late, he caught his horse to ride for the town, but the Dockos ran him down and dragged him from his horse, and one of them swung into the saddle where he had been and rode at the head of their charge. By that time they already heard the ragged sound of gunfire, for Toussaint had struck the town from the other side with his main force, so when the Dockos rushed into the street, the rout of the defenders had already begun, Spanish soldiers and British redcoats scattering in full flight. With a honking of conch shells and high, thready war cries, the Dockos ran after them into the western hills.
Las Cahobas was taken. Riau had rejoined his regular troops and was organizing a house-to-house search for any enemy soldiers who might have gone to earth. Gasping, the doctor limped through the settling dust to the town square, still crading his long gun, which he had not once fired. Below the overhanging roof of a tavern opposite the church, Captains Maillart and Vaublanc sat with a bottle of rum between them; with them was Xavier Tocquet.
Vaublanc half-rose to drag another chair to the table, into which the doctor collapsed with a sigh and a puff of dust from his trousers. He balanced the barrel of his long gun against the table’s edge.
“Hóla,” Tocquet offered.
“Bonsoir,” said the doctor, looking about himself in a daze. Tocquet pushed the rum bottle in his direction.
“Is there water?” the doctor inquired.
In his racing march among the Dockos he had drained the quart canteen he carried, though Riau had counseled him to drink less. The more you drank, the more you sweated, was Riau’s idea of the thing, and that was waste. True enough, the doctor had been able to observe that his maroon companions seemed to perspire a great deal less than he did.
“Look inside,” said Maillart. “The servants seem to have run away.”
The doctor pushed through the slatted door and stood blinking in the dull, dust-swirling light of the tavern’s large common room. Five or six of the Dockos were tossing a sizable cask back and forth—each man who succeeded in catching it without letting it fall rewarded himself with a long draught direct from the bunghole. Their hair and faces and shoulders were streaked and shining with spilled