Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [286]
“His hat?”
Maillart straightened and offered his hand; Daspir clasped it briefly.
“He threw his hat into the fort and tried to go after it,” Maillart said. “It’s a miracle he’s hurt no worse than this. I think every man who followed him died.”
Daspir gaped. Paltre struggled up and spat out more blood.
“I’m going,” he said. “If Daspir goes, I go back too.”
“Calm yourself,” Maillart said. “You’ve proved your courage! You can’t go on till the bleeding stops. There’s no sense in it.”
Daspir opened his mouth to explain their bet and the competition. Was it likely Toussaint was in that fort? Leclerc had certainly thought to find him when they marched this way from Saint Marc. He would have asked Paltre to confirm it, but at that moment Cyprien rode up to remind him that he should be hurrying the wagons up to the line.
The fort was silent, motionless, though the cannon mouths breathed a little smoke, and Maillart’s ears still hummed with the din of the recent battle. The carpet of dead men on the slope appeared to wriggle. Maybe it was only the shimmer of the broiling noon heat. But no, a couple of wounded men were trying to crawl down the slope to the new French line. Three men broke from Leclerc’s ranks to help them, but one was immediately picked off by a marksman hidden in the fort—dead before he hit the ground, though his heels still drummed in the dust. The other two soldiers shook their fists as they skipped back. Another long shot dispatched one of the wounded men who’d kept on crawling.
There’s a man with a rifle, Maillart thought. He considered his friend Antoine Hébert, such a surprisingly good marksman with his long American gun. The notion momentarily froze him, but of course the doctor would not be anywhere near this place and would not be firing on the French if he were; he was always reluctant to use his unexpected talent against human life. But surely the sniper in the fort must be armed with a similar weapon.
Leclerc had brought a good number of black troops with him out of Saint Marc, men of the Ninth Demibrigade, incorporated into Debelle’s force after the surrender of Maurepas. Some hailed from the Thirteenth Demibrigade as well. Leclerc had put them in the front line, but they seemed a little reluctant to advance across this killing ground. Maillart knew these were no cowards. He had trained some of them himself, in earlier days, when Toussaint first began to organize a real army. Under Maurepas they’d repulsed both Debelle and Humbert, defeated them really, and inflicted considerable losses too. In fact, Maurepas might never have surrendered if Lubin Golart had not turned his coat and joined the French generals. Golart had been a subcommander of the Ninth and was able to bring his regiment over to the French; he’d hated any partisan of Toussaint’s ever since the War of Knives; and moreover he knew the terrain around Port-de-Paix as well or better than Maurepas. These men of the Ninth were brave and well trained, Maillart knew, well seasoned in battle also, and if they hesitated now it was because they knew what was going to happen.
As Leclerc should have known also, or at least Dugua. Maillart’s mind began to race. He was still quivering from the shock of Boudet’s rout and his own forced flight before that cavalry charge. The same thing that had happened to Boudet this morning must have happened to Debelle the week before. Dugua ought certainly to have learned that much when he assumed Debelle’s command. Now Leclerc was re-forming his line, replacing the black troops with French, who were all more than eager enough for a charge. Leclerc was going to march blithely into the same trap for a third time.
A mostly naked black man appeared on the wall of the fort, wearing Paltre’s hat, and a rag of a breech clout. He capered like a goat on the parapets, dancing the chica, wriggling his spine and flapping his arms, thrusting out his chest and hooking his pelvis upward. From inside the walls