Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [292]
At an embrasure beside the gate he stopped and looked out along the cannon barrel. Under the rounded roof of stars he could discern some indistinct movement among the hundreds of corpses scattered over the field. His glasses were smudged, but when he took them off to clean them they slipped through his numb fingers, rang off the cannon barrel, and went spinning away. When he leaned out to snatch for them, he overbalanced and was falling too, whirling, nauseated . . . he saw the glasses shatter against a stone. Then he was on his feet again, suffused in the warm smell of Nanon, and Nanon was handing him his glasses.
The doctor blinked and caught his breath. He steadied himself against the wall. Where he’d thought he’d seen Nanon stood the commander Magny, looking at him with mild interest or concern. His glasses were in his hand, unbroken. He polished them on the hem of his shirt and put them on.
“Dogs.”
Was it himself or Magny who had spoken, or maybe the sentry who had just joined them from the gate? In any case the dogs were there, great bristling, brindled casques out of the mountains, packs of them, moving among the cadavers to feed.
“It is not acceptable,” Magny said. He looked at the doctor, as if for confirmation, but the doctor could not draw his eyes from the view. In the bluish light of the icy stars, the wild dogs hunched their shoulders and lowered their heads and jerked their jaws to loosen and gulp cold chunks of human flesh.
“We’ll put an end to this.” Magny turned and muttered something to the sentry. Ten minutes later they were leading a sortie from the fort, to drive away the dogs and pile the bodies between stacks of wood for burning.
29
In the days since the battle at Ravine à Couleuvre, Sergeant Aloyse had adopted a more tender attitude toward Captain Guizot. Before, he’d treated the captain with the sort of kindness a grown man might show to a boy at risk of hurting himself. But since Guizot had dragged Aloyse clear of the wreckage of the exploding powder magazine, the sergeant mixed a measure of respect with his concern. Indeed, Guizot found that his various prodigies of activity that day, however slim their actual result, had won him admiration from more than a few. His orders were obeyed with more alacrity by all his men, and General Rochambeau, when he addressed his remarks to Guizot, no longer alluded to the escape of Xavier Tocquet.
Their instructions were to proceed inland, across the Grand Cahos mountain range to the town of Mirebalais: a key, so it was told, to controlling the interior. Toussaint might retreat to this pocket of the mountains, some had speculated. It took them two days, however, to begin the march. There were enough French dead to be buried that Rochambeau was moved to lie about their number in his report, and time was needed to get the worst wounded in condition to be evacuated to Gonaives, and the more lightly wounded fit enough to march with the division.
All symptoms of the cold Guizot had carried down from the rainy plateau disappeared the day after the battle, but his arrow wound from Grande Rivière swelled and began to fester. All through the day, the puncture leaked a putrid matter into its bandage. By nightfall the captain was usually somewhat feverish. Sergeant Aloyse cared for him and helped him conceal the worsening injury. The chief medical officer of Rochambeau’s division had succumbed to fever on the march from Saint Raphael, and his instruments were now manipulated by a man more skilled as barber than surgeon, if one judged by the ugly stumps of his amputations.
They limped into the Cahos mountains, hindered by inaccurate maps and unreliable, perhaps treacherous, guides. Maybe no map could ever convey the interminable twisting and spiraling of the jungle pathways that always only revealed another more demanding ascent beyond the peak just mastered. As for the guides, all they ever would say was “It is a little