Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [201]
Papa Toussaint had told him that he must not light the powder unless the second trench gave way. That was where they were fighting now, with bayonets and knives and fists. It looked to Guiaou that the fight was not going very well for Papa Toussaint’s people.
The boom of the French cannons seemed to come from directly above him now. On the far side of the ravine, he could see one of Labarre’s snipers, firing out of a cleft of rock. He disappeared to charge his musket, then popped up and fired again. Guiaou could not make out what target the man was shooting at. But when he looked at the trench again, the French blanc soldiers had broken through and were swarming out over the fan of gravel just now yellowed by the rising sun. That was Guerrier’s voice, roaring the alarm. Most of the blanc soldiers were charging straight down the gorge, toward the third entrenchment. But one heavy-set man, with a big beaky nose and a gray pigtail, was rushing right up toward Guiaou, and behind him a thinner, pale-faced man with epaulettes on his coat and a grubby white sling flapping loose around his neck, and behind that one at least a dozen more. Guerrier’s musket exploded above him and he heard Guerrier shrieking because he had missed. The first man, the one with the big nose, had reached the bank and was scrabbling for handholds, beginning to climb.
Guiaou crouched and with a quick snap of both hands struck fire into the fuse he had laid. How fast the powder trail burned back! For an instant he could not take his eyes away. Then he hurled himself out through the doorway, both arms stretched for a loop of hanging vine.
That gargoyle black hunched on the lintel jumped to his feet, swung a musket across his hip and fired from that position. Guizot saw the muzzle flash, a spear-point blaze, but the hip shot did no damage. The black jumped up and down on the lintel, howling at them helplessly; he did not seem to think of recharging his weapon. Sergeant Aloyse had reached the bank and was already beginning to climb toward the stone door twenty feet above him. Higher still, at the top of the bank, a pair of cannon were firing down into the ravine—Rochambeau’s cannon, Guizot realized, dropping mitraille and explosive shells among the retreating rebels.
He found a toehold in the rock, caught hold of a protruding root, and hauled himself up. Aloyse kicked a cupful of shale and dirt down into his face. Guizot shook his head, looked up again and saw a second black hunkered in the doorway, cradling something in his hands that bloomed into a fierce incandescent glow.
Then the black came hurtling out of the doorway, all his limbs spread wide, like a flying squirrel. Guizot did not see where he landed. In the instant that he understood what the burning powder trail foretold, he clutched at Aloyse’s heel and cried a warning, but the sergeant kicked free and climbed out of his reach. Guizot dropped eight feet to the gravel, rolling across his wounded arm, and came up running as the blast threw the whole cliff up into the sky. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw a broken cannon wheel spinning down amid smaller bits of debris and Sergeant Aloyse’s cartwheeling body and a great coffinsized piece of stone that might have been a doorpost, all drifting down in a strangely retarded motion as if they weighed no more than feathers. He scrambled back, under a shower of pebbles and dirt, to the place where the sergeant had landed. The ringing of his ears shut out all other sound. He pulled