Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [250]
“Li byen,” Guiaou said. He is well. Guiaou sat down crosslegged and took Toussaint’s head into his lap. “Guerrier is near us, mon général—he is at the fort.” Guiaou held the herbs close to Toussaint’s face so that he caught their scent.
“B—Boulé . . .” He wanted to tell Guiaou to boil water and prepare a tisane with the herbs he had gathered. But the words would not come out. Guiaou dipped his fingers in the Marassa pot and stroked cool water against Toussaint’s temples. Why had he moved the Marassa pot from its place beside the spring? The cold was painful, but after the shock he felt relief. Parts of his being which the fever made it impossible to focus clearly together began to drift apart and float away from each other as separate spheres. As the strain of binding them together was relaxed, a warmth of calm grew within him. Guiaou would never sell Toussaint. Guiaou would be faithful to him always. Guiaou sat listening to the lizards ticking through the dry leaves of bamboo as it grew dark. He had understood that Toussaint meant for water to be boiled and a tisane to be made. He had helped in such preparations with the white doctor. But for the moment there was no fire, and he had needed the Marassa pot because there was nothing else to carry water. Also, for now at the height of the fever, maybe cold water was best. Later, when the tisane was more urgently needed, something would appear to serve the need. Guiaou went on laving Toussaint’s temples with the water from the spring. Presently he pulled his hands up to his chest and wet the insides of his wrists as well, there where the pulse beat fast and hot, so close under the skin. The general was now sleeping. Almost peacefully, it seemed. It might be that the fever had peaked, though he was still very hot. Guiaou glanced toward the sound of a lizard in the leaves and saw instead a little boy’s face peeping through the canes at the far end of the tonnelle. Then another face, a girl’s, bright with curiosity. They remained for a moment, then flicked away lightly as two birds.
Guiaou had said nothing to the children. He had only smiled. But after they had been gone for a time, after it was fully dark, the boy and girl came back again, each carrying a bundle of firewood (the little girl balanced her firewood on her head), and behind them an old woman lugging her tripod and kettle. Between the mouth of the tonnelle and the spring, the old woman built a fire and boiled water to make the tisane. Also she filled bottles with hot water and placed them into Toussaint’s armpits and under the arches of his feet.
In the morning when he woke Toussaint was hungry. The fever seemed completely to have passed. But before he returned to the fort and his men, he walked in a circle around the tonnelle with a stalk of armoise in his hand, then steeped the herb and washed his own feet in the liquid carefully, before he pulled back on his boots. With a smile he quickly hid behind his hand, he told Guiaou and the little boy and girl and the old woman grinning with her gums that if one used armoise so before a long, exhausting journey, one would feel neither fatigue nor any temptation to give up the course.
Dessalines! The dread Toussaint had felt at the worst of his fever was now gone. Once something that occupied one so completely, devouringly, had departed, one could not properly remember it any more. Still Toussaint knew, as his modest force circled through the mountains north from Petite Rivière, that he had touched upon a deep root of power there at La Crête à Pierrot—a force that Dessalines would draw on. Dessalines and all the others who would mount resistance there. They would bring this force up from the earth and water into open air where it would flower into flame. Toussaint’s own death was hidden in it somewhere, and maybe the death of Dessalines too. But a great many of the blanc invaders were going to die first, there at La Crête à Pierrot . . . maybe all of them would die.