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By Root 903 0

harshly to shatter the bones. And so with the next, and the next, and the next. At the bottom of the gorge where the ambush had cut off all retreat was an abattoir—the English had mostly already been killed, and the slaves were throwing down their weapons and crying for mercy. Guiaou reached a pair of English soldiers who were fighting back to back, quite skillfully, with their bayonets. His opponent was out of range of the coutelas but Guiaou paused a moment to judge the timing of the bayonet thrust, then swept his musket butt in an uppercut that stunned the Englishman. He pounced cat-like on the fallen soldier and opened his throat with the coutelas as one might let blood from a hog, then immediately turned the corpse face down and tore off the red coat before the blood could spoil it.

He stood up, panting, holding the coat by the shoulders. Everyone near him was dead or surrendered or of his own party. The stranger who had knocked down his gun barrel stood by watching him curiously.

“It looks that you don’t like the colored men,” he said.

“Sa,” Guiaou said. “I don’t like them.” He looked at the other, a small, wiry man with springy clumps of muscle bunched under his velvety skin. “What is your name?”

“I am called Couachy—and you?”

Guiaou folded the coat under one arm and reached out to embrace Couachy—they were each a little sticky from the blood of their enemies, so their skins separated with a slight tacky feel.

“M rélé Guiaou,” he said.

Before the end of that day they had reached Petite Rivière again, but they passed on without going into the village, marched an hour after darkness, and camped in the hills. Forty of the slaves who’d been armed by the English marched in the midst of their body, prisoners now. In the night some few of these slipped away and no one interfered with their escape, but on the next morning Moyse spoke to the ones who remained and said that if they would join the army of Toussaint they would be soldiers and free. A man named Jacquot, who seemed to be a leader among them, asked for what white nation or white general they would be fighting for then, and Moyse answered, for none; they would be fighting for their freedom and the freedom of other black people. Jacquot asked if their guns would be given back to them, and Moyse said that they would be given weapons after they had come to the main encampment in the north.

They went on. Guiaou began the day’s march wearing the red coat he had taken from the English soldier, but Moyse rode back down the line and ordered all the men wearing such plundered coats to take them off, so they should not be shot from a distance by others who might think that they were English invaders. Guiaou was not discontent—it was hot to wear such a coat and he had more weight to carry than before: the Englishman’s boots and his musket and the pistol he had worn in his belt.

All during their return they kept to the mornes, avoiding any passage across the open country of the plain. They kept away from any villages or other encampments that they passed, bivouacking in the bush and eating food they carried or could forage. The distance and difficulty of this route added a day’s time to their journey, but they went in great good cheer, and during the last afternoon before they came to Ennery, hunters went out and killed wild pigs and goats. That day they reached Habitation Thibodet in time to shelter from the rain beneath their own ajoupas, and when the rain had stopped, many fires were built and the air was soon full of the smell of roasting meat.

Moyse and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who remained in command during the absence of Toussaint, ordered an extra ration of tafia for the men who had been in the fighting. Guiaou sat with Quamba and Couachy and the new man, Jacquot, drinking his share of rum and eating goat meat hot from the boucan. He wondered where Toussaint had gone, since he had not returned to this encampment, but the thought did not really trouble him and after he had drunk more rum he forgot about it. For the first time he looked into the pockets of the