Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [197]
Guiaou watched them, seated calmly on his horse. Toussaint’s right hand lapped over Labarre’s forehead, and his left palm cupped and pressed the base of the skull, warming and securing the spirit in its seat. Guiaou seemed to feel the same two hands cradling his own head, and indeed the name of Guiaou had just occurred in Toussaint’s murmuring.
“Guiaou will bring you more men, good marksmen . . .” Toussaint’s purring voice went on. But Guiaou did not wait to hear any more. With a click of his tongue to bring Guerrier, he turned his horse down the trail by which Placide had departed with the gunrunner Tocquet and his man. Soon they met the boy coming back up again, leading a hundred more field hands up from the lower trenches. Guiaou fell in with them and brought them up to Toussaint and Labarre. Already the new men had begun singing as they climbed.
A l’assò, grenadyé!
Sa ki mouri, sé pa zafè ou
Nanpwen maman
Nanpwen papa
Sa ki mouri, sé pa zafè ou!
Guiaou knew the quality of these men very well. A long time ago he had been the same sort of fighter as they. These men might charge furiously, inspired by their chant and the drumbeat in the blood. But perhaps they would not charge many times, if they met firm resistance. It was also possible that they would not hold so very long against the charge of massed blanc soldiers. That was the difference between these men and Toussaint’s trained soldiers such as Guiaou had now become.
But these hundred men were not going into the line to meet a charge. Labarre was going to fan them out across the rim of the ravine. They would shoot down on the French soldiers filing along the bottom and cover them with fear, confusion, and death.
Guiaou turned his horse to follow Labarre. But Toussaint called him and Guerrier back, to give them a different order. The key with which the order would be enacted Toussaint took from a string around his neck; Guiaou slipped his own head through the loop. In his lowest voice, breathing into Guiaou’s ear, Toussaint told him where to go, where he must leave their horses, how to find the necessary place, and how he must judge when the time was right.
Then Toussaint himself had slipped away, skidding down a path so steep and worn it was more like a ditch, now and then catching a handhold from an overhanging branch as he swung toward the bottom of the ravine, which was now heaving up a roar of gunfire. Guiaou and Guerrier followed Placide across the clifftop. Now, after all, they did overtake Labarre, who had scattered his company along the edge of the cliff to take cover behind trees and boulders there. These men did not fire in volleys, but singly, upon such targets as they could pick out in the French column advancing below. Their aim seemed to be very good, for many of the blanc soldiers were falling, and yet the column never stopped—if it contracted, it soon thrust forward again. Monpoint’s cavalry, ranged on the wide gravel shoals beside the stream, barred the blanc soldiers’ way to the first entrenchment. The silver helmets of his riders glowed in the light of the lowering moon. Long shadows of the surviving palms stretched over them like bars.
Then came the crump of a cannon firing, and confusion as a shell exploded among the horses below. Guiaou reined up and stared across the ravine. The French had maneuvered a couple of cannons onto the high ground there, and now the second gun discharged a round of mitraille. Below, the horses were bucking and whinnying, and Guiaou’s own mount was uneasy beneath him. Toussaint appeared, on foot, the red and white feathers floating high above his bicorne. His movements were quite deliberate and slow, and he used his cane, instead of his sword, to direct the movements of both the horsemen and foot soldiers. So conducted, Monpoint was beginning to file his cavalry back through the palings of the first entrenchment, while another gang of field hands moved up to absorb the shock of the French advance. The French column trembled,