Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [299]
Rochambeau looked ready for another hot reply, but Maillart interrupted, speaking to Lacroix. “Mon général, the message did not reach him,” he said. “Unfortunately, we arrived too late.”
At that both Lacroix and Rochambeau subsided. It was quiet, except for the cry of a hawk wheeling high in the air above the blood-soaked field.
The man who’d lost his hands to the shell had taken gangrene. Corruption climbed his forearms to the elbow and beyond. Without sufficient water there was little the doctor could do; he could not properly clean the wound or change bandages and dressings as often as required. He did not have the heart to take the arms off at the shoulder . . . which likely would only delay the outcome, in any case. And there was nothing at all for the pain. Yet the man was stoic, in his way; he did not cry out and seldom even whimpered, only stretched out his necrotic stumps to show to anyone who passed, as if he begged handlessly for charity. It really might have been best to shoot him, but the doctor could not uncover his weapons for that, and if he did Magny would not have allowed him to waste a shot.
At last, on the morning before Rochambeau attacked the redoubt, the man died. In a dull silence, Bienvenu found men to help him roll the body through an embrasure and let it drop over the cliff above the river. As the body unfolded its limbs to fall free, the first cannon sounded above the redoubt.
Descourtilz and the musicians crept to the wall to watch the action, but the doctor only squatted by the powder magazine, which offered him some protection against stray projectiles. If an odd shot chanced to blow up the powder, at least the end would be very quick. He brooded, his tongue rasping over dry lips, on the handless man who had just died. The action that had cost him his life deserved a more respectful burial, but they could not keep corpses in these walls.
The guns went silent in the redoubt, followed by shouts and the tearing sound of volleying muskets. Crouched with arms wrapped around his knees, the doctor listened for Marie-Jeanne’s rifle, a clearer, truer note than any musket issued. That morning, the Amazon had gone to join her husband in the redoubt with her long gun, cartridge box, and a sword as long as one of her legs strapped to her waist on a belt of steel. Every time her rifle sounded, a French grenadier was certainly dead.
Presently the shooting stopped and Descourtilz joined the doctor, his face drawn and gray.
“The idiots tried to charge the trenches,” he reported. “You can’t imagine the destruction.”
I don’t want to imagine it, the doctor thought, but said instead, “How many?”
Descourtilz shrugged. “See for yourself.”
But the doctor remained sitting where he was, perhaps for as long as half an hour. In that time there was no shooting. One could even hear birdsong from the wooded areas, with now and then a human voice calling some instruction. At last the doctor went to join Descourtilz and Bienvenu, who stood peering from opposite corners of one of the embrasures. The redoubt was still; no man showed himself above the earthworks. Over the dead and dying men a cloud of yellow butterflies was settling, drifting down like flower petals, like the snow the doctor hadn’t seen these last ten years. Among the powdery yellow wings were a few white ones, picked out with small crimson dots.
“How strange,” Descourtilz exhaled.
“It’s the blood.” The doctor’s voice was harsh in his dry throat. “I don’t know why, but it’s the blood that brings them.”
There came an explosive crump and a whistling rush of air, then a shell dropped out of the sky square into