Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [309]
At midafternoon Toussaint called a halt, to wait out the harshest heat of the day. While the men foraged bananas from a plantation on the slopes, Toussaint sent more messengers to search out Dessalines and Charles Belair. Though he’d sent other dispatches both last night and that morning, no word had yet come, and the silence seemed to worry him. Placide volunteered to go to Dessalines, but Toussaint refused him, on the pretext that he did not know the country well enough, and sent Riau in his place.
By sunset no news had come from any quarter and Toussaint put his men back on the march. They moved for four hours as the brief twilight deepened into darkness and halted again in a flat, dry country called Savane Brulée, not far at all now from Petite Rivière. Toussaint sent for Morisset and Guiaou and Guerrier and ordered them to go forward to scout the French rear. This time when Placide asked to accompany them, Toussaint allowed him to go.
As they drew near the lines surrounding the fort, Placide began to smell the charnel stench from the ravines below the town, blended with smoke from the half-successful burning. The odor was fainter now, though a pall hung heavily over the place. A waxing half-moon had begun to rise, throwing enough light to pick out their silhouettes a little too clearly. At the pole of the sky, the Great Bear hovered. They darted across the Cahos road and into the shadows of the trees beyond. Here in these woods the honor guard cavalry had sheltered in the first days of the siege, but now Hardy’s division had occupied the ground and pushed the siege line beyond the woods in the direction of the fort.
“Come back,” Morisset hissed in Placide’s ear. Cautiously they moved west of the road and began to circle down below the town, working their way behind the lines of General Pamphile de Lacroix. As they came near the heaviest smell of the ravines, Morisset reined up his horse and after a moment’s hesitation dismounted.
“What?” Placide asked him.
“We may do better on foot,” Morisset told him. “There are enough black turncoats among these blancs now. We might deceive them if we are seen—but leave your helmet here.”
Guerrier remained near the ravines, where the reek might discourage investigation, holding four horses and three helmets. Morisset, Placide, and Guiaou crept ahead on foot. They’d climbed perhaps two hundred yards when an artillery piece boomed and a fishhook of sparks curled down into the walls of the fort from the knoll above it. A moment’s darkness, then the explosion flowered. Placide did not know if he imagined the moan that followed, or if it came from inside himself.
“Keep quiet,” Morisset hissed urgently. “This way.” They were all a little blinded by the flash. A voice spoke out harshly, ahead and to the right.
“Qui vive?”
Without hesitation, Morisset stepped out into the glow of a torch just illuminated. Placide moved with him.
“We belong to the Ninth,” Morisset said and saluted.
The sentry was black, but a French corporal sat on a stone behind him. The black sentry ran his eyes up and down Placide and Morisset.
“Those are not uniforms of the Ninth,” he said. His expression shifted, then was replaced by Guiaou’s face. The headless corpse of the sentry took a step forward and went down on one knee to reveal Guiaou behind him, wiping his coutelas clean with his fingers and thrusting it back into his belt.
“Hurry,” Morisset breathed. Placide stepped over the body of the Frenchman, who lay dead against the stone where he’d been sitting. Guiaou ground out the fallen torch with his bare heel.
The half-moon glared down on them like a beacon now. The ruined town of