Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [30]
“Hold him, if you please.”
Guiaou and Quamba knelt and held Mazarin with his shoulders pressed hard into the turf and shale. The white doctor took hold of his foot and pulled backward as if he meant to detach it from the ankle. Mazarin surged against the hands that held him.
“Mezi mezami,” he said instead of screaming. Thank you, friends. The ankle popped again, and Mazarin subsided, releasing his lower lip with blood-stained teeth.
The doctor, who had sent someone else for water, made a poultice of herbs he produced from a bag tucked into his inner coat pocket, and strapped up Mazarin’s joint tightly with strips of clean pale cloth. His rust-colored ears waggled unconsciously as he worked; a ring of sweat droplets had started up among the sparse hairs of his balding crown. When he had finished, Mazarin could rise, supported by one other man, and with support could hobble on one leg. With one man helping him, he was dispatched back in the direction of Petite Rivière.
The column resumed its way down the gorge, at a somewhat slower pace than before. In less than an hour they halted on slopes that had recently known cultivation—coffee bushes sprung untended in the jungle, and there were rows of cotton now overtaken by weeds and strangler vine. Moyse circled the group and selected ten men, Quamba and Guiaou among them.
They crept forward, crouching in the overgrown cotton planting, until they reached fresh furrows of the hoe—someone had begun a reclamation of this abandoned place. Across the waves of newly tilled ground they could see the house and mill. In the barnyard were some thirty horses tethered. The black men milling in the compound were armed as soldiers, though some carried hoes too. Also there were some colored men dressed in militia uniforms and white Englishmen wearing the red coats of the British army. Moyse pulled down his lower lip with his forefinger, calculating. Then the whole scouting party returned to the main column.
Toussaint sat his horse, digesting Moyse’s report: fifty black soldiers—armed slaves rather, as the English had restored slavery in the area of Saint Marc—with twenty-five or thirty colored militiamen and twenty of the British regular army.
“Bien,” said Toussaint, laying his fingertips lightly on Moyse’s left epaulette. “You will know how to manage it.” His smile had a strange sweetness to it, for what he said. “Et bon courage.” He reached into his saddlebag and handed Moyse the brass-bound spyglass they had shared before. Then he touched up his horse and rode away up the river gorge in the direction from which they’d come that morning. Six horsemen, including the white doctor, broke from the line to accompany Toussaint, as if it had all been prearranged.
For most of the next hour, Moyse studied the English through the spyglass, occasionally passing the instrument to a white officer in his company, Captain Vaublanc. They spoke in low tones, discussing the movements of the men in the compound below. At last Moyse chose ten more men to add to the scouting party he had first selected. Vaublanc led the main force farther up the gorge.
Led by Moyse, the smaller group crept down through the cotton planting, crouching for concealment as before, though this effort seemed wasted now, since they were leading two horses whose empty saddles could plainly be seen from the compound. In fact, Guiaou saw the first of the armed slaves take note of the horses; the man straightened from what had been his task, stiffened with attention, then turned to call to one of his fellows. Moyse took a conch shell from his pocket and sounded it; the sound washed over Guiaou in a red wave and he was running across the open ground toward the buildings; all twenty of them were screaming as they charged. Moyse and Quamba vaulted into the saddles and swept ahead of the foot soldiers, Moyse controlling his horse with one hand and still blasting on the lambi shell with the other. Quamba was brandishing