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By Root 2167 0

at the idle building. A little brown wren had nested under the eaves; she put her head out and turned the black bead of her eye toward him, then withdrew, into the cobwebbed shadows. Arnaud shrugged and walked on, depending a little more on the stick he carried in his left hand as the trail grew narrower and the ground more uncertain. He’d only sprained his ankle in the disastrous fall that had destroyed his horse— not broken it, which was a bit of good luck. In these last days the swelling had almost completely receded, thanks to the hot soaks that Cléo and Claudine forced him to endure morning, noon, and night, but the joint was still weak and he must go carefully. He did not heal as fast as he had done when he was younger.

In his right hand he held an unsheathed coutelas, and as he progressed toward his distillery he swiped at the brush overgrowing the trail. Most branches only bent from the dull blade, springing back into place after he had passed. What did it matter? The effort made him sweat, though it was still early morning. He stopped for a moment to rest and listen, but heard only birdsong, and the drone of children reciting some lesson for Claudine in the school beside the chapel. No drums, no shots, no war cries. He went on.

The area around the vats was suffused with the sour smell of fermenting cane. Half his crop was fermenting in the field at this point, but here at least there was some profit in it. The chief refiner touched his forehead in greeting as Arnaud limped toward the coils. He’d shifted his talents to distilling rum because they no longer had labor enough to make sugar. The fields were as empty as the mill. From an atelier of many hundreds, barely two dozen adult men remained, and many of those were halt, lacking a hand or a leg or an arm . . . In the old days, Arnaud had practiced amputation, as a punishment for runaways, or thieves sometimes. Many of those men stayed by him now; he fed them, and they worked as they could.

As for the rest—they’d abandoned the mills and the fields, if not the plantation altogether. Arnaud was confident that a good many of his erstwhile mill and field hands were still living on the place, getting their sustenance from its provision grounds, or at any rate were frequent visitors. Many had uncached their muskets and gone off to join Toussaint, or some other leader, in fighting Leclerc’s army. In the mornes above Limbé, whose green rising Arnaud could see from where he stood beside the coils, Romain led a quasi-maroon insurgency against the French.

And be damned to the French! Arnaud snapped mentally—as resentfully as if he were not French himself. But he was Creole, and more and more these new arrivals struck him as invaders, and it was a bungled invasion at that. He might have shared this complaint with Bertrand Cigny, except that Cigny was dead. They’d got the news a few days earlier, from an exhausted squadron of Leclerc’s cavalry, the men drooping in the saddle from fatigue and slow fever. They’d come with a wagon to purchase rum for the troops, and had with them Isidor, Arnaud’s old houseman who’d disappeared a decade before, in the midst of the risings of ninety-one. They brought the news of Cigny’s death but not his body, though they’d seen it by the scorched wreck of Cigny’s house at Haut de Trou, impaled, disemboweled, the genitals cut off and stuffed into the bearded mouth . . .

Arnaud thrust the point of his coutelas in the ground, took up a clay cup from a flat stone beside the blade, and held it under the coil, interrupting the drip into the barrel. He rinsed his mouth with the oily white rum and swallowed. The refiner watched him carefully. Arnaud nodded as the thread of warmth worked through him. The rum was good. And Grâce, la miséricorde, for poor Bertrand Cigny. Arnaud shook the last drops onto the ground and replaced the clay cup on the stone. Lord, have mercy . . . Though Arnaud had never been remotely devout, he sometimes caught himself muttering prayers unconsciously, as if Claudine’s religious mania had infected him. What happened to Cigny