Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [279]
“It’s nothing,” Maillart snapped at Paltre. “They won’t attack us in this strength. They only mean to steal your sleep.”
With that he rolled over, and flattened his cheek against the leather of his saddlebag. But after all it was not so desirable to reenter his night-mares just now. He lay feigning sleep for Paltre’s benefit, remembering what he had said to Lacroix that evening. To declare the enemy less than human opened the door to every horror. Dessalines must have told himself the same today, before he put his victims to the bayonet: These are not human. Maillart had not been able to hold himself back from touching that woman, stabbed to the heart through the child she held. He had touched her on the cheek. The skin had been warm, perhaps only from the sun, but it seemed to hold some fading warmth of life.
. . . that they should have always before them the hell that they deserve— a phrase from Toussaint’s letter, which Chancy had been caught carrying. If the message had been intercepted, Dessalines was certainly acting in its spirit all the same. And certainly there was a human intention behind it. It was terrible, but not insane. In fact it was quite a lucid intention, plain and bright. Though he liked Pamphile de Lacroix a great deal, Maillart could never say so much to him. It might after all be taken for treason. Besides, his own ideas confused him. He wished Antoine Hébert were near. Antoine would have known better how to put it. Really this style of thinking was more in the line of the doctor than Maillart. Maillart did not like it when his thoughts boiled so. The activity of the thoughts stopped him from sleeping.
Or even Riau, if Riau were here now. He would say nothing on the subject, or very little, but Maillart thought Riau would understand what he himself could not formulate. Riau had a facility for acting and being without any sign of reflection, and this the major had always appreciated. But Riau had taken a message to Croix des Bouquets and had never come back from that errand.
Maillart sat up suddenly. Of course, Riau had gone back to Toussaint. He had known it from the second day Riau failed to return to Port-au-Prince, but had not recognized the knowledge. Well, there was nothing to be done about it. The next time he and Riau met, they probably would be obliged to try to kill each other. Such was the soldier’s lot. But tonight, Maillart felt resentful of it. It seemed more difficult to shrug it off than it had been when he was younger. This obligation was the most atrocious aspect of it all, he thought. But it could not bear much more thinking.
Eclair snuffled across the earth toward him, raised his head and whickered. Maillart clucked his tongue, stretched out again, balanced his head on the saddlebag. Above him, stars revolved in spirals. Eventually he slept.
In the morning a handful of deserters from Toussaint’s honor guard crossed the river, meaning to come over to the French. They’d lured their captain along on some pretext, though apparently he was not privy to their scheme to change sides. Among this party, Maillart recognized Saint James, one of the very few white men who rode in Toussaint’s guard. By Saint James’s account, discreetly murmured to Boudet and his staff, Dessalines had recently conducted at Petite Rivière a slaughter similar to the one they’d just come upon at Verrettes.
Boudet had been in a cold fury since the evening before, and at this news he rounded on the captain, who had been arrested but not yet restrained. “How many men have you murdered at Petite Rivière!” With these words Boudet snatched the captain’s arm. They struggled, chest to chest—then Boudet sprang back with a cry. He had been bitten in the thumb, bad enough to bleed. The captain meanwhile rolled under the belly of the horse from which he