Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [200]
Guizot’s sling hung loose around his neck. He tried the wounded arm experimentally and felt no pain, or almost none—no more than a catch where the torn muscle moved over the bone. Someone shook him by the shoulder.
“Captain.” It was Rochambeau. “Do you see there? The doorway in the cliff wall?”
Guizot squinted through the dust. He’d tumbled away from the main action. Twenty yards ahead the French infantrymen were plunging one after another into hand-to-hand fighting in the rebel earthwork. Beyond that battle line, set into the north bank of the ravine, with a stone door, with another rag-head Negro, this one nearly naked, crouched on the lintel like a gargoyle. Guizot rubbed his eyes and looked again. The darkness was dissolving quickly, and he could see more clearly in the plain gray light of the dawn.
“That is our target,” Rochambeau was saying. “A powder magazine, according to this one.” He nudged Noël Lory for confirmation; Lory returned a gloomy nod.
“You will secure the magazine, Captain,” Rochambeau said. “As soon as the way is open, at whatever cost. Do you hear?”
“Oui, mon général,” Guizot replied. Sergeant Aloyse, happily, was just at his back, nodding emphatically to affirm the order.
“Excellent,” Rochambeau said as he moved away. “See to your men.”
Since Guizot had been so far forward when the fighting began, he’d been cut off from his company, and when he tried to rally the men now, no more than half of them reported. Surely not so many could be casualties; surely most of them had only been scattered in the confusion. Enough had been found, he thought, for the task at hand.
Guizot waited, a little anxiously, though he was happy not to be fighting in the trench. He rolled lightly from heel to toe, flexing the muscles of his thighs, thinking of the little man in the feathered hat—where had he vanished to? And probably Guizot had just been closer to him than any of his comrades of La Sirène had got . . .
“Allons-y,” Sergeant Aloyse hummed, Let’s go. The trench had been definitively breached and the French troops were now pouring through. Guizot beckoned the men behind him, stumbled into the ditch, and scrambled out the other side on his all-fours, scraping the back of his hand on a splintered stake. As he emerged he broke into a run, hard on the heels of Sergeant Aloyse.
The key Toussaint had given him was loose in the lock, and Guiaou was not very much practiced in the use of keys. It took him several tries before it engaged the lock and turned. The iron-bound door sank smoothly inward, but Guiaou remained poised on the sill. The smell of the cave came wafting out toward him. He could see nothing at all inside, and yet he felt, beyond a doubt, that the lost caciques of long ago had served their spirits here.
“Ki sa w’ap tann?” Guerrier said from his post on the lintel. What are you waiting for? It was his good luck to stay outside and watch, though Guiaou had been honored with the more crucial task. With a grimace, he moved through the doorway and flattened himself against the wall. His heart was booming like a big asoto drum. In his head he sang his song for Agwé.
Mait’ Agwé, koté ou yé
Ou pa we’m—
But here he faltered. Master Agwé, where are you?—don’t you see me . . . maybe Agwé could not see him at all, here in the dark blind stomach of the earth. Here was no place for Agwé, and no place for Guiaou either.
As he clung to the wall, he began to notice that the familiar tang of gunpowder was stronger than the cave smell. This reassured him just a little. Also, daylight was coming on outside, and in a short while his eyes adjusted so that he could make out the shapes of barrels and boxes of the gunpowder stacked high against the walls and stretching back a long way into the cave.
Just as Papa Toussaint had told