Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [179]
“Where must we go, then?” Nanon swung up to the edge of the bed, arching her back as she shook her hair down.
Her question was a step ahead of the doctor; he had no idea of an answer. He yanked on his trousers, shrugged into a shirt, stuffed his feet into his boots. At the door he paused to take his pistols from their pegs and check their priming before he stuck them in his belt. The house was quiet except for his own bootheels thumping down the hall. He trotted down the gallery steps and across the yard toward the stable.
The cannon had stopped, but he could still hear small arms fire beyond the ridges to the north. In the musty dim of the stable he bridled a mule, then led it out and swung astride, bareback, clutching the mane. The reversed pistol grips gouged him in the belly as he moved. Paulette had come yawning out onto the gallery and stood there blinking at him curiously. The doctor clucked to the mule and slapped the reins against its neck and rode at a fast walk out of the yard, through a few spindly, neglected ratoons of cane, and up into the coffee terraces.
The field hands were moving among the coffee trees, but slowly, hesitantly, without song. In their silence their ears were doubtless cocked to the noise of musketry above. But in these folds of mountain, all sounds were deceiving; the ear could not reliably tell what was near or what was far. The doctor rode past Caco, standing on the fifth terrace to gape at him, his basket dangling. He wished that Riau or Guiaou was on the plantation now; Riau, especially, would be likely to know something about what that gunfire meant. Or Tocquet—it suddenly struck the doctor that Tocquet had not appeared at last night’s supper table, nor had he seen him at all the previous day.
Above the coffee terraces veins of provisions twined among the cliffs, and a few long-eared black pigs were foraging. Strayed from their keeper, they’d begun to root up yams, but when the mule approached they scattered snorting into the brush. The doctor leaned low into the mule’s neck to encourage it up a slope just barely short of vertical. He’d learned this technique watching Toussaint’s horsemanship, though he couldn’t have managed it here with a horse instead of a mule. Shale whizzed out from under the hooves, and twice the mule stumbled, slipped sideways, but finally came scrambling out onto the remains of the old Indian road that ran northeast along the ridges toward Marmelade and Dondon.
The doctor straightened, and glanced to the west. On a neighboring peak, a man was standing next to the tall flagpole of the hûnfor, shading his eyes to look for something in the distance. Quamba, the doctor thought. He squeezed the mule into a trot, for the going was relatively easy here. In a quarter-mile he came upon men of the Second Demibrigade, tattered and muddy and hollow around the eyes, hurriedly digging trenches or dragging deadfall timber to block the road. So occupied and exhausted they were that they did not seem to notice that the doctor had come on the scene. He halted for the mule to get its breath. By some trick of the mountain acoustics the musket fire sounded farther off now, though it must be approaching; this was clearly a retreat. There was an unobstructed view for several hundred yards to the east, and there where the road curved was some movement. The doctor patted himself for his folding spyglass, but he’d left it in the house. He flattened a hand above his brows, against the sun still low on the peaks. That figure in the general’s bicorne was certainly Christophe; he recognized the silhouette. The antlike movement resolved itself into men bearing litters of the wounded toward him, with Christophe directing them, calling hoarse orders behind.
At once the doctor turned his mule off the road into the brush. If he met with Christophe now, the black general would certainly impress him to care for his injured men, and while he would not