Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [305]
“Why, he’ll kill him,” Daspir said, in his surprise. A number of men stood watching the flogging, among them the brigadier who commanded the post. Also an old black crone looked on from several yards distance. Rags of a striped skirt hung from her withered hips. She leaned heavily on a crooked stick and held a small black pipe, unlit, between her gums. If the spectacle of the beating distressed or impressed her, she gave no appearance of it.
“Here, you, whoever you are,” Lacroix snapped. “Stop that at once.” He turned to the brigadier. “What do you mean by it?”
The sergeant stopped beating and leaned on his cane. The old man turned on his side and drew his knobby knees up to his chest.
“This pair was trying to get up to the fort,” the brigadier began, with a gesture that included the black crone, and all at once several of the bystanders began to dispute that version, saying that the old couple had been seen coming out of the fort instead. General Lacroix hushed the dispute with a gesture.
“At all events, we take them for a couple of spies,” the commander said.
Lacroix shrugged away the accusation, and stooped to help the old man up. At first, the old man did not seem to take the meaning of the hand extended to him. Then he did grasp it and struggled to his feet. Lacroix let go his hand and took a pace back from the rank smell of him—the scent of corruption even reached Daspir where he sat his horse several yards away. The old man had a full head of stone-white hair turned gray with dirt and matted with debris. There was no iris to his eyes; they were all black pupil floating in the yellowed whites. The dark eyes gave him an unearthly aspect.
“They’ve been searched,” Lacroix said. “Interrogated?”
“There’s no sense in anything they say,” said the post commander. “We meant for the stick to encourage their tongues.”
Lacroix glanced at Maillart, who took a step forward, wrinkling his nose.
“Di mwen, granpè, sa w’ap fè isit?” he said. Tell me, grandfather, what are you doing here?
The old man turned his strange eyes on Maillart and bleated like a sheep. Maillart looked at the crone and rephrased the question for her. She made no reply at all, only mumbled her pipe in her gums from one side of her mouth to the other, always staring into the middle distance across her hands folded over her stick, with a gaze of rapt senility. Of a sudden the shirtless sergeant shifted the stick to his left hand and smacked the pipe out of her jaws with his right. The old woman seemed almost unaware that she’d been struck, though she missed the pipe, and searched for it with her rheumy eyes, and finally found it on the ground some yards away. In agonized slow motion she leaned over to retrieve it, working her way hand over hand down the cane she leaned on. Finally Maillart crossed the distance, retrieved the pipe, and offered it to her. He said something more to her which she seemed not to comprehend at all. He laid the pipe in her wrinkled palm and folded her fingers over it.
Perhaps she’s deaf, Daspir thought, as he watched this comedy. He wrapped his left arm around himself, reaching to rub the torn muscle below his right shoulder blade.
“A pair of idiots,” Lacroix pronounced. “What harm can there be in them?”
“They had this,” the sergeant said. He opened his hand to reveal a silver ring strung to a loop of greasy cord, depicting a big dog’s head or maybe a bear’s. Mouth open in a fanged snarl, it appeared to slaver. It had two chips of a dull red stone for its eyes. The officers passed it hand to hand; it made a solid weight in the palm. Maillart looked as if he would speak when