Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [128]
“If it is a miracle, it must be from God,” she said.
“But you are hurt,” said Arnaud, and reached out to touch the two scabbed vertical scratches on her right cheek.
“It’s nothing,” Claudine said. She unfolded his hand from her face and kissed the palm. Then she seemed to take in for the first time his sun-blistered, sleeveless arm, the stick, the melon-sized ankle and the bare foot battered by the road.
“Cléo,” she called. “Moustique! Come quickly.” Then Arnaud finally felt his legs grow weak.
Placide found that he was easier in his mind once Arnaud had left their party. When Cigny also turned away, a little later, flanked by the two hussars assigned to him, Placide felt better still. Now there were no colons among them anymore, except for the woman, Isabelle Cigny. Placide did not consider the doctor to be a colon. As for Cyprien and Daspir, he was used to them, which did not mean he liked them, but they were merely strangers in his land, like all the other French soldiers. No matter what he might do or what happened to him, a colon could not lose the memory nor the habit of having owned black men and women to use as beasts of burden. Placide had been a small child when Arnaud and his kind had tortured their slaves through the doors of death, but he had heard the stories.
He glanced at Isaac, wondering if he felt the same; they could not speak freely, since Coisnon rode within earshot. Last night at Héricourt, Coisnon had slept in the same room. He was a good preceptor to them, and Placide knew he cared for them profoundly, and yet there could not be the frankness among them here that there had been in France.
Isaac’s horse stumbled over a stone, and Isaac clucked his tongue and tightened the reins sharply. “Come up,” he hissed, as though it were the horse’s fault. Placide turned his eyes to the road ahead.
In some way Coisnon had shared in the shock of their return. Their disappointment. They’d had several days to contemplate the burned shell of Le Cap from the deck of the Jean-Jacques, once that ship had entered the harbor and moored. After all they’d told Coisnon of its beauties and joys, their tongues were frozen in their heads. They’d spent their passage to Héricourt in a similar silence, turning their heads around like owls, toward wasteland that stretched to all horizons.
But now Placide’s mood, at least, was changing. Now they had passed Haut Limbé and were mounting the steep and winding ascent to Plaisance, jungled mountains towering over them, with plots of corn or groves of bananas terraced into the cliff sides, by the little houses that clung there. I lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my hope. Placide’s father had catechized him with this line long ago, though now he could not number the chapter or the verse. Yet he felt now how powerfully Toussaint had attached his hope to the hills, and to these mornes in particular; the range of peaks called the Cordon de l’Ouest, running back through the interior to Dondon and the Spanish border.
There were no French troops on this road through the mountains, except for those of their own escort, and there was no sign of war. The market women at the crossroads shouted out their excitement at their appearance, and packs of small children, dogs, and goats, came scampering after them on their way out of Plaisance, until they fell back, breathless, no longer able to keep pace with the horses.
The horses were beginning to be winded too, with the increasing altitude and steady climbing. The way between Plaisance and Morne Pilboreau looked almost flat, but still their mounts had to take it slowly. From the roadside a cliff fell giddily away into the Plaisance river valley. All seemed tranquil, at peace there, along the serpentine turns of the slow stream, except for the vertigo that seemed to pull them toward the brink. Placide realized he was looking down upon the backs of flying hawks which hovered over that deep space.
They rode on. The peak of Pilboreau was sheathed in cloud—a sudden chill as they rode into it, cool droplets condensing