Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [336]
At this height, at this hour, it was rather chilly. A sliver of moon hung over the bowl where the army had camped, like a shaving of ice—but the men were gone. The main force had been filtered out earlier, in what direction the doctor did not know. Toussaint’s little entourage was following a different route, apparently, for no one else was near them.
In silence, single file, they rode down a rocky defile in the general direction of Jean Rabel. The doctor stroked the withers of his mare. She had grown somewhat calmer, these last months, and was actually easier to manage by night, when less was visible to alarm her nervous eye. The doctor yawned, but quietly as a cat. At a turn of the descending path, he caught a glimpse of Toussaint. The size of his warhorse set him above the others, but he was not wearing his general’s hat tonight, only the less conspicious madras headcloth.
At the bottom of the ravine, the trees closed over them; they moved on through thick, damp darkness, silent but for the whirring insects and the sigh of horses’ breath. It was warmer here, and the road underfoot was damp and plashy, and there were a few mosquitoes, whose whine and sting would rouse the doctor from the doze into which he kept drifting. Just behind him in the dark, he thought he heard the rasp of Maillart’s snore.
Then for some reason the horses bunched up, jostling each other as they clustered. The doctor raised his head from a nod, as someone at the head of the column struck a light, revealing for an instant the great bole of a tree knocked down across the trail. At Toussaint’s hissed order the light was extinguished. But immediately there flared up a great silent bloom of red and orange light, and the doctor’s mare let out a hideously human-sounding scream as she reared and bucked. He was airborne before he heard the roar of the cannon and explosion of the shell. He seemed to float for a long time, and in his trajectory he saw a man struck dead in the saddle, his horse falling with him as he went down. Then the earth struck him all across the back like a barn door, knocking the wind so completely from him that he was paralyzed, though hooves were lashing dangerously near him as the panicked horses reared and milled amid the blaze and racket and the reek of blood and smoke. When he heard more shrapnel tearing overhead, he managed a painful inhalation, rolled over and wormed his way to shelter in the flank of a downed horse, whose hindquarters were still twitching though the animal was dead.
Above the trail, the trees were full of fiery light, and the doctor caught a glimpse of his mare running full tilt into the middle distance—his long gun still scabbarded by the saddle, he recalled with sudden distress. But his pistols were in his belt, and his coat pocket was full of spare cartridges. He drew a pistol and crept up the bell of the horse’s ribcage. His free hand, groping, came back to him sticky with warm blood. A dead man was flung backward over the horse’s tail. All around them came isolated cracks of muskets, and the doctor trained his pistol on the firelight, but there was no target; the enemy was not visible. He seemed to feel a nudge at his side, perhaps a last expiring twitch of the dead horse. A shot would be useless, would only call attention to himself.
He slipped down to a better-covered position below the horse’s belly. On the other side of him from that fresh cadaver was another living body, which exuded calm, like the form of a peaceful sleeper. The doctor turned on his hip and found himself looking into Toussaint’s eyes, glittering with the red firelight, below the tight crease of his headcloth. He remembered the warning nudge he had felt. Toussaint held a pistol in one hand and a dagger and the other, but he seemed to have drawn the same conclusion that at present these weapons were best left unused.
In the first dim light of the dawn they found only two men dead, though several others were lightly