Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [31]
It was all confusion in the compound—the armed slaves milling, crashing into each other, while Quamba and Moyse rode among them, striking in all directions with saber and coutelas. The horses tied to the barn rail were bucking and screaming from the smoke. Some of the red-coated English appeared, trying to form a line, a square, but the armed slaves were too frantic to obey them. Guiaou saw two mulatto militiamen dash for the barn; one began cutting the tethers of the horses while the other stove in a wall with an ax to release the animals within. He knelt, as he had been trained to do when he fought with the Swiss, and sighted carefully on one of the red coats before he fired, but the red coat did not fall. He reloaded painstakingly, not too fast, and this time other shots sounded with his own and two of the red coats fell, but from whose shot he didn’t know.
Moyse and Quamba were riding back, Moyse shouting for retreat. The horses passed and Guiaou turned and followed them, his musket empty now. As they fled into the cotton planting he tripped and fell headlong, but instead of getting up to run again he turned, knelt, and reloaded. A military drum rattled in the compound. A dozen of the mulatto militiamen and a couple of English officers had managed to mount for pursuit and were coming quickly across the cleared ground while in their rear the other English had formed up the armed slaves in a line now advancing on the double. They were many, and Guiaou choked in the back of his throat, but he swallowed and set his sights on the head mulatto among the horsemen. The man was a honey-colored sang-mêlé—the same shade as those men who had betrayed the Swiss and finally sent them to the sharks—and Guiaou waited till the mulatto rider filled his eyes. He wanted to taste the man’s death completely, but as he squeezed the trigger someone knocked down the barrel of his gun.
The horse shied and bucked from the shot and the mulatto fell, but rose immediately, cursing but unhurt. Guiaou tore out his coutelas, but was undecided whether to attack the enemy before him or the man beside him who’d spoiled his shot and now seemed to be whispering in his ear.
“Leave this one—then we will kill them all.”
Guiaou was running again, following the other across the cotton—they were the last ones now in the retreat. A pistol ball hummed past him, not too near. Guiaou turned and did a mocking stiff-legged dance, waving his arms and sneering. Another of the mounted mulattoes was coming to ride him down, but at the last possible moment Guiaou broke to the side, slashing his blade at the rider’s calf above his boot top. He was running again, stumbling on the stones of the river gorge, with that other man just a pace or two ahead of him, breathless but also seeming to laugh, and he could feel the presence of the other men hidden in ambush all around him, though he could not see them.
He kept scrambling up the gorge, bending forward as the terrain grew steeper. The mulatto militiamen were excellent horsemen (experienced from the maréchaussée, no doubt) and managed to remain in the saddle, though their pace was slowed, while the English had all been obliged to dismount and proceed more slowly still. Guiaou dodged behind a boulder at the stream’s edge and reloaded his musket, then aimed again and shot the first mulatto out of the saddle. When the man had fallen, Guiaou jumped on top of the boulder, took down his trousers and bent over to waggle his bare buttocks at the enemy. Shots flattened on the rock below his heels and the pursuers howled with outrage. Guiaou did up his trousers and made ready to run again, but when he glanced back he saw that the trap had closed: the larger party under Vaublanc was firing from both rims of the gorge and men were already jumping down to dispatch the fallen with their knives.
Guiaou charged back down the path of his retreat, dragged forward by the rounded point of his coutelas, which slipped sweetly between the chest ribs of a colored militiaman, then twisted