Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [23]
“So be it, then,” he said. “I’ll drink to that.”
There was a squeeze of all their hands, and all at once they cheered. Then Daspir broke the circled handclasp, reaching one more time for his brandy bottle.
Placide woke with such a start he knocked his head against the wall. It was a minute or two before the movement of the sea reminded him where he was. There was that, and Coisnon’s snoring, and the muttering of that young ensign, who often talked unhappily in his sleep. A ship’s rat scuttled in the bilges beneath his plank berth. Through the partition he could hear the muffled, unintelligible voices of the four army officers at their cards and liquor.
What had he dreamed? Billows, above which were billows, rolling one into the next like ocean waves, but these were waves of sand. A searing light over golden dunes, and then rising from the sand the august scarred face of the Sphinx, looming over him with her wounds, the weight of all that stone—it was then that he’d begun to be afraid (his heart still thumping even now) under the weight, fear of the Sphinx and her terrible stony voice, but then it was night, the sand was sea, and there in the place of the Sphinx (but still enormous) was the mermaid spirit Lasirène, glowing blue-green like phosphorescence or like stars, the dark pull of her gravity bearing Placide down beneath the waters.
He put his hand against the curving boards, feeling the pulse of the ocean. The rush of the water outside helped to calm him. He listened to the breathing of the other three in his compartment, to the persistent scrabbling of the rat. What was it they were sailing toward this time?
He needed to relieve himself, but he did not want to walk out to the jakes abovedecks; he didn’t care for the way the four captains looked at him, so late, when they’d been drinking—nor the way they avoided looking at him, sometimes. He found a bottle he’d laid by for such situations, unstopped it, and directed his stream so that it ran soundlessly against the glass wall. When he was done he corked the bottle and wedged it back in the same place. Isaac coughed and shifted in his sleep, and Placide stepped across the narrow space and leaned over him, listening, till his younger brother’s breath grew regular. Then he lay down again on the hard boards of his bunk.
Drowsiness carried him back toward the fearful immanence of the great loa. Lasirène, Erzulie of the waters! Placide had been a long time out of his own country; he had remembered the beauty of this mystery, but not her weight. Coisnon had taught them of Odysseus, how he stopped his crewmen’s ears and ordered himself bound to the mast, that he might hear the siren song without being carried down by it to his own drowning. But that was only an old Greek story.
Placide worked his shoulders against the plank bed. This berth was a privilege of a sort, and yet he would have slept more easily in a hammock such as the ordinary sailors used. But in his discomfort he had pulled away from the dream vortex and the fish-tailed goddess waiting at the bottom. He was thinking with his mind. Surely it must be no accident that this ship itself was called La Sirène. No accident either that she had not yet sailed ahead of the main fleet.
“Your father,” the First Consul had told them when he summoned them to his cabinet at the Tuileries, “is a great man; he has rendered eminentservices to France. You will tell him that I, the first magistrate of the French people, I promise him protection, glory, and honor. Do not suppose that France has any intention to bring war to Saint Domingue: the army which she sends there is not intended to fight the troops of the country but to augment their force. Here is General Leclerc, my brother-in-law, whom I have named Captain-General, and who will command this army. Orders are given such that you will be fifteen days ahead in Saint Domingue, to announce to your father the coming of the expedition.”
Following this reassuring address, Placide and Isaac had been guests of honor at a grand dinner, attended by the Captain-General