Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [76]
“Ou mèt touyé yo,” Toussaint said. You may kill them.
Dessalines simply set his boot across the throat of the turbaned man who lay on the ground, rolled his weight forward and held it there until the Spaniard had stopped kicking. Bayonets slammed into the bellies of the others. Maillart tightened the muscle across his own cut, and felt the skin shrinking on his face. An odd moment of indiscipline for Toussaint’s command, he thought as he looked quickly away. Other black soldiers were breaking rivets on the chains of the people in the slave coffle, and cutting the lashing on the wooden poles that connected them together in their files. The freed men rubbed their necks and wrists absently; some of the women had begun to cry, and others knelt before Dessalines or the horse of Toussaint Louverture.
By this time, considerable numbers of Biassou’s fighting men had regrouped and were filing back down into the clearing, holding their empty hands high to show they were unarmed and submissive. Papa Toussaint! many of them were crying, and one who seemed to be their leader went skidding to his knees beside the charger. Papa Toussaint, nou rinmin ou, he moaned, and wrapped his hands over the booted foot in the stirrup Papa Toussaint, we love you. Toussaint smiled and placed a palm upon his forehead.
One of the slave traders’ severed heads had been hoisted on a pike, and someone had unrolled the turban and ran in circles through the clearing with the purple cloth flagging behind him like a kite tail. Quamba and Guiaou and some other foot soldiers had torn open Biassou’s tent and were rooting through the contents, kicking over human skulls and glass bottles and clay govi, tumbling the ceremonial drums. Quamba straightened, calling for Toussaint’s attention, with a gold watch and chain swinging from one hand and a heavily jeweled snuffbox in the other.
Toussaint drew up to his most rigid martial posture, the saddle creaking as he shifted his weight. “Return those articles to their owner,” he declared. “Undoubtedly he will not stop running till he has reached Saint Raphael—return them to him, with my compliments. We are not thieves or pirates—we are soldiers of the Republic of France.”
Captain Maillart looked at the doctor and found his own astonishment reflected on the other’s face. “Vive la France!” the captain shouted. After all, what did he care for slave traders? The words seemed a better fit in his mouth than they had done before.
By nightfall they had swept all the way to Dondon, in the mountain pass above Le Cap and the northern plain. Toussaint raised French colors at every camp along the way; it was the work of moments to eliminate the scatterings of actual Spanish soldiers who opposed them. At every camp from Petite Rivière to Dondon, Toussaint’s lieutenants had been prepared in advance for the coup, so that sometimes the Spanish had already been gutted or strung up to the trees by the time Toussaint’s own party rode in.
That night in Dondon was a subdued celebration, with a double issue of clairin, but no more. Between bites of roast chicken folded in cassava bread, Toussaint instructed Moyse, who commanded at Dondon, to do everything necessary to hold back Jean-François, should the latter attack from his camp, now thought to be at Grande Rivière. If any Spanish had survived the day of massacre, they would probably have fled to join him.
After the meal some of the black infantrymen began drumming around the central campfire, and there was song, a long sonorous chanting in Creole, but the doctor and Maillart and Vaublanc