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By Root 2134 0

hunkered, his back to the wall, just beside the tatters of his ajoupa, which had several times been raked by exploding iron. The first shell landed not three feet from him, but the doctor did not move, only looked at it indifferently. Bienvenu jumped up from his side and threw his body to cover it. Then indeed the doctor’s heart began to pound—he couldn’t bear to lose Bienvenu, who’d shielded him from so many dangers. But already the man’s skeleton was thrown into harsh black relief by the red glare of the explosion, and he’d flopped over onto his back, jerking like a fish out of water. A fountain of blood splashed from his chest. The doctor knelt over him, pressing the blood back, trying to gather it into the shattered pump of the heart. The trumpets started, with the drum and the almost inaudible violin; whenever the bombardment began, Lamartinière exhorted the musicians to play! play! . . . ever brighter and gayer airs. The only necessity was to stop the bleeding; the doctor would stop it with his whole weight. Blood was bubbling up around his wrists. Bienvenu shook him by the shoulders. The doctor looked up at him, bewildered.

“Let him go,” Bienvenu hissed. “You have to let him go—he’s dead.”

Bloody to his shoulders, the doctor crept back to his place against the wall. Bienvenu remained at his side, whole, as yet unhurt . . . so it had not been Bienvenu blown to bits just now, but some other, someone the doctor did not know. Unless Bienvenu’s presence now were the hallucination, the other the reality. It had become increasingly difficult to distinguish, these last days. However, the shelling seemed to have stopped. The sound of birds was audible, beyond the walls. And the music stopped, which was also a relief. The grasshopper whine of the violin had grown unbearable, though it was always faint. Sometimes the doctor thought he heard it when it was not really playing at all. There were times when he wished a shell would demolish the violinist, or his instrument at least.

Bienvenu squatted, facing him, his dark face furrowed in concern. The grayish yellow foam around his mouth came from the musket ball he was sucking. Many of the men had taken up this practice as the shortage of water became more severe.

“Don’t do that,” the doctor said. “It will make you ill.”

Bienvenu only looked at him sadly. Lead poisoning had added an extra dimension to the experience of the men who sucked the balls— who were already sufficiently deranged by starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion. The doctor groped in his pocket and to his surprise discovered in the lining a pair of English pennies. One of these he proffered to Bienvenu.

“Take this,” he said. “Use this instead.” He held the brown circle between thumb and forefinger, in what suddenly struck him as a parody of priesthood. That notion inspired a desire to laugh, but he bottled it up—one must not open the door to hysteria.

Bienvenu spat the sloppy musket ball into his hand and accepted the penny in its place. The doctor laid the second coin on his own tongue. After a moment, a little saliva started. He felt his dry lips cracking under the heat of the ascending sun. From the red aura of his closed eyelids emerged a white-haired Negro who held out to him a paper inscribed with letters of blue fire. The doctor recognized the hand of his son Paul, but here was no ordinary recital of the week’s events. Grâce, la miséricorde,Papa! The letters flamed into his face. Grâs-o, Grâs-o, n’ap mandé grâs-o . . . The doctor recoiled. I am not God! his mind burst out. May God forbid that I should be invested with the powers of a god.

Like as not there was no God.

With that thought his eyes rolled open. Beside him, the violinist Gaston was masticating a strip of leather cut from the leathers of his boot. He offered another to the doctor. If he let his eyes go out of focus, the scrap of leather more or less resembled a strip of meat dried on the boucan.But the doctor had no appetite for it. For the moment, the copper on his tongue sufficed him. It occurred to him to wonder whether copper was more