Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [274]
Behind the eye of her dream, she was aware that it might have been the tale of Cigny’s murder that raised these images: details that Arnaud had kept from Isabelle, but which Nanon had heard him mutter to Tocquet. It did not matter. The dream eye glided over the ground as if on the soundless wings of an owl, over the ruin of Petite Rivière, which smoldered and fumed in its ashes. It was night, overcast or moonless, but the mild slope above the town was spotted with greenish-yellow lights the size of candle flames, each picking out the mangled carcass of a blanc, and there were hundreds of them strewn across the hill. The owl wings lumbered over the wet air. At first sight Nanon recognized the body of Antoine Hébert, though all its members had been scattered, and the head was gone. Only his glasses lay across a little stone, the witch fires gleaming on cracks of one shattered lens. Beyond the ditches, in the shadow of the fort’s wall, a pack of wild dogs waited: casques. They were huge and brindled, their heads dropped low beneath heavy shoulders, eyes red-glowing. The dogs were coming toward the bodies. Then the dream eye sheered away.
Nanon sat up with an ugly jerk, wrenched upward in the swirl of a terrible scream. After a moment she could know the voice had not been her own, for the inside of the case was quiet. Paul breathed softly in sleep beside her, and no one else had stirred. Perhaps she’d dreamed it. She sat with one hand covering the pounding of her heart. It was very dark inside the close little room, but after a while she began to discern the outline of the curtained doorway. There was a different beat behind her heart, in time with it: a drum somewhere outside the case, sustaining a single steady stroke. When her heart had stilled, the drum continued.
She got up then, picked her way over the other sleepers, and pushed out through the curtain. Above her was a pantheon of brilliant stars. The night air cooled the sick sweat of her dream. Bazau sat crosslegged by the doorway, a musket cradled across his knees. He nodded silently to Nanon as she passed.
The drum had stopped, but not before she’d marked its direction. In starlight she walked behind the chapel, toward candles flickering deep in the bamboo, and entered the mouth of the tonnelle. Under the arched and woven stalks it was very dark, and the stars were hidden, but at the entrance of the hûnfor, four candles were placed on the cardinal points around Legba’s stones. Nanon stopped there, a hand to her throat.
“Ou mêt antré.” It was Moustique’s voice. You may come in.
Nanon stepped past the stones and candles. Here the space opened to the dome of stars. Before certain niches, other lamps were lit, but Nanon did not look at these too closely. Isidor sat near the drum, and Cléo and Fontelle were also attending. But Nanon’s attention went to Ghede, crouched like a cricket at the far edge of the peristyle, greedily scooping up rice and beans from a plate between his legs, with the help of a big wedge of cassava. The loa was incarnate in the body of Claudine Arnaud, but Claudine had never known such an appetite. She wore man’s clothes, black shirt and trousers, and her head was tied up in a deep purple cloth, skewed to cover her left eye.
Nanon stopped before Ghede, a few paces distant.
“I dreamed my husband’s death,” she said.
Ghede looked up. His open eye fixed her in her place.
“Your sleep is a mirror,” Ghede said. “Sometimes, all you see there is your own fear.”
“Let me keep him, Ghede,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. Then, after a pause, she said more steadily. “I would give all I own.”
Ghede dropped his cassava on the plate and licked his fingers. With one long stride he closed the distance between them. Though the body he used was thin and angular, Ghede’s hips