Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [190]
“Stay by me,” Toussaint breathed in his ear. He whispered something to the other three men, who separated and disappeared into the darkness, moving up the slope under the trees. Toussaint plucked again at Placide’s sleeve, and Placide followed him, climbing up over the curve of the boulder, setting his boot toes into cracks, grasping vines that clung to the stone. A patch of moonlight revealed his father on the rock, motionless as a lizard; then he flashed forward into darkness. Placide followed, groping his way from sapling to sapling. Then he stood by Toussaint on the brink of the ravine again, looking down. There was a glitter, metal? No, it was only moonlight on the water.
Toussaint turned from the cliff’s brink. They went back, picking their way to the stone where they had separated. Presently Guiaou returned, then Guerrier. Neither had encountered anyone. They waited. Placide felt his watch in his pocket. Panzou did not return.
Finally Toussaint grunted, and they all began to move back in the direction of the troops. When they came in sight of the waiting horses, Placide could not hold back the question.
“Where is Panzou?”
“I don’t know,” Toussaint muttered. “Maybe the enemy has taken him.”
“Can they have reached Barade before us?” Placide felt a quick sharp thrust of alarm. “But we saw no one.”
“No.” Toussaint grasped his forearm. “And yet one feels that they are here.”
“What will we do?”
“What we must do.” Toussaint’s gapped teeth flashed briefly in the moonlight. “Advance. Engage.”
At sunset, Rochambeau’s column came at last within the shadow of the hills that bordered the plateau. Slow as their progress had been through the mud, Noël Lory had led them faultlessly to the pass. On the slope of Morne Barade the going was still slippery, but easier than it had been on the flat, for water could not pool on the rising ground to make a swamp. Guizot’s detachment blundered into a small settlement, too small to be called a village really—just a few mud huts with about a dozen people shouting at the sight of the soldiers, scattering with their dogs and goats, disappearing eastward into the brush, in the direction of the high savanna. Abandoned, their chickens ran cackling this way and that. With a quick burst of speed and concentration, Sergeant Aloyse ran down a hen.
Rochambeau gathered his officers on the western brow of the hill, where he stood scanning the gorge below with a spyglass. He grunted as he collapsed the instrument, then turned to Noël Lory.
“Where exactly is this powder depot?”
“It is in the ravine,” Noël Lory said. “A little farther.”
Guizot looked out, then down. The sun was a red blur melting on the blade of the horizon—mare’s tail clouds fanned out from the burning haze. The gorge snaked away from the side of the hill where they stood. In the gloaming he could see pale strands of gravel at the bottom and dull reddish glints from the water moving in the stream. The bushy tops of palm trees pushed up from the gravel. The cliffs on either side were heavily wooded. A trace of a path running through the trees was the only sign of any human use.
“Captain Guizot.” Rochambeau had turned to face him, tapping a forefinger on the tube of his spyglass. “We must hope that the spy who escaped your guard has not alerted the enemy to the direction of our approach.”
Guizot cast down his eyes. “So indeed we must, mon général. ”
Rochambeau took a backward step, then raised his voice to include all the officers in his address. “No matter if he is prepared for us,” he said. “We have only slaves to fight, and they will not dare look us in the face— we who have carried our triumphs across the Tiber, the Nile, and the Rhine. We have not come these thousands of miles from our country to be defeated by a revolting slave.”
He turned again to Guizot. “Captain, how goes your wound?”
Guizot stiffened his back as he raised his head. “Sir, it scarcely