Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [220]
Daspir passed him the cask with a nod. His eyes were watering with the impact of the rum, but the burn in his belly heartened him. He looked down the street behind them, thinking of further foraging possibilities— in that direction the fires had been extinguished or had not completely taken hold, so there might be possibilities. Strangely, a handful of looters came bursting out of that block now, as if they’d been shot from a cannon.
“Good God . . .” Cyprien tucked the cask under one elbow and made a quavering gesture with the other arm. “It cannot be.”
Daspir wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and saw a phalanx of silver-helmed cavalry come fuming toward him like a crew of ghosts out of the smoke. A phantasm from the long day’s fight. Surely this manifestation could not be real. At first they seemed to come silently; there was a lag before he heard the hoofbeat.
“Form up the men!” Daspir looked wildly about and recognized no one of his own company. Captain-General Leclerc himself had jumped up from his camp stool by the steps of the burned church where the French had planted their battle flag, and stared at the charging horsemen with utter disbelief. Phantasmal no longer, the raiders had taken on a terrible concrete weight; they were cutting down confused and disordered soldiers all over the square.
Daspir ran toward his commander, unsure of his purpose. Leclerc was staring fixedly, not directly at him, but over his shoulder. He drew a pistol and fired it, to what effect Daspir could not see. There was a rush of air behind him as Daspir reached the church steps, and he turned to the horse bearing down on him, so near he could see the color inside the flaring nostrils. The rider was without a helmet, head bound in a red cloth, his features coppery in the firelight. Rag-head Negro. The flying mane of the horse cut up the face into bright lines, as one arm reached for the flagstaff.
Daspir caught hold of it with both his hands; for a moment they struggled for the flag. He didn’t know if it was the horse’s shoulder or the flat of a saber that sent him sprawling backward, his head recoiling from the corner of a step, hard enough that his vision broke up into whirls of golden motes. But he had not been knocked quite unconscious, and in another moment he was on his feet, shaking his head as he groped himself for damage; he seemed to have nothing worse than scrapes and bruises.
Cyprien and a couple of other captains had formed the troops into a square. The raiders, seeing their moment had passed, were wheeling their horses around to retreat. That rag-head Negro reined his horse into a curvet, so that the captured French tricolor snapped smartly on its rod. It seemed to Daspir that the rider raised his hand to him. Then he was gone with the others, into the smoldering street they’d emerged from. The French troops fired a volley after them, but no one seemed minded to give chase.
“One must grant them a certain flair, those riders.” The voice belonged to General Hardy, who’d come from somewhere to join Leclerc on the steps, behind Daspir. Leclerc’s only reply was muttered cursing. Those boots must cramp him now, Daspir thought, although with scant amusement. Behind the two generals, a few fire-blackened timbers of the burned church stuck up like ribs from a well-stripped carcass.
He crossed the square toward Cyprien, stepping over bodies of the recently fallen. The raiders had done a lot of damage in a short time— Leclerc had reason to curse, Daspir supposed.
“I thought you were finished,” Cyprien said. “But he held his hand at the last moment, that black dragoon who rode you down.”
Daspir halted and rubbed at the sore point on the back of his head. Rag-head Negro. But the horse was not the same, nor yet the rider; he had been taller, more lithe-seeming, longer in the leg, and his face certainly a lighter hue beneath the headcloth. One eye was hidden, squinted shut, but still that face was known to him.
“Placide,” Daspir pronounced.
“What?”
“It was Placide. Toussaint