Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [182]
With just a little varnishing of the plainest truth, Captain Guizot had made a determined effort to turn Tocquet’s escape to his own credit. He’d given an energetic pursuit, after all, had struggled hand to hand with the fugitive, and had light injuries to show for it: the goose-egg bruise beside his temple, and the less obvious but more sinister scratch beneath his jaw. Rochambeau grumbled, but did no more than reprimand the captain, though the sentry who’d been sleeping on his feet was tied to a wagon wheel and whipped.
It rained all through that night and the next day; no movement of the troops was possible in the soup. Guizot moped under the canvas of his makeshift tent, nursing his cold, which had worsened. His head hurt also from the blow, and the tumble in the mud had done his arrow wound no good, though it seemed better after the solicitous Sergeant Aloyse had cleaned it thoroughly with scalding water. And the rum they’d salvaged from Saint Michel was a quiet comfort to both of them after dark.
In the small hours of that night the rain finally stopped, and the next day dawned clear and bright. They moved out in the middle of the morning, down the road Guizot had earlier explored, through mud still deep enough to slow them down considerably. By midday the weight of the sun was crushing, but the mud scarcely dried; it went on sucking at their boots and the wheels of the caissons. Guizot plodded onward, at the head of his men, with Sergeant Aloyse always at his back. His mind looped aimlessly, softening like butter in the heat. He thought of his companions on La Sirène, and Toussaint’s sons—where were they now? That episode seemed to belong to some other life.
There were rumors among Rochambeau’s men that Hardy had overrun Marmelade, and that Boudet was coming up the coast from Port-au-Prince to surround Toussaint at Gonaives. But where were Daspir and Cyprien and Paltre? Guizot lurched forward awkwardly, his balance unsettled by the wounded arm, clumsily riding in its sling. At moments he thought he felt Tocquet’s tobacco breath on his face again, with the knife point pressed into his gullet. If he had had the fortitude to pursue, even after he’d been dropped sprawling half-stunned in the mud . . . he had the queer, unsupported conviction that Tocquet might have led him quite near to the man they sought. The words of the wager he’d made with the other three captains were hanging, always the same distance ahead of him, above the mountains that bounded the western horizon. The mountains seemed to grow no nearer, no matter how they struggled through the mud.
The rain had made the night completely lightless; to move through it was like drowning in a cave. Tocquet knew every way across the high savanna as well as the lines in his own palm, but the night of his evasion from Rochambeau’s camp was so smothered in darkness that they did not find their way to the passes of the Savane Carrée before dawn. They’d abandoned the roads to cut across the grassland, where their horses were less likely to be engulfed in the mud, but still they were obliged to go very slowly, with direction almost impossible to determine in the rain. Tocquet had little fear of pursuit, but all the same he chafed at their poor progress. They’d left their pack animals, with their goods, to Rochambeau, and this loss also irritated him as they picked their way along.
The downpour was so heavy that daybreak brought no more than a vague, pearly gray illumination. It was not possible to conjecture the time, but after a period of riding through rain that felt like a waterfall, they finally reached a cavern on the slopes of Morne Basile. An overhang of the cliff provided partial shelter for their horses, and in the deeper recesses a store of dry wood had been laid