Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [316]
The wounded man on whom the captain had fixed his advance got up, to the doctor’s astonishment, for he didn’t believe that man could stand. He backed to the wall and held out his empty hands.
“Pitié pou mwen,” he said. Have mercy on me.
The dead-eyed captain thrust his sword so hard that it chipped mortar from the wall when it came through the wounded man’s back. With an effort he pulled free the blade and used it to signal the troopers coming up behind him, their bayonets at the ready.
“Carry on,” the captain said, and almost simultaneously the doctor shouted, “Stop it!”
He was on his feet, holding both his pistols at hip height. He’d shifted the penny from his tongue to speak more clearly, and held it now between his cheek and gum. “How can you kill these men—they are wounded and offer no resistance.”
“It wasn’t I who raised those banners.” The captain jerked his jaw toward the red flags of “no quarter” hanging dully from the corners of the walls. Now the doctor could see that the captain’s eyes were not only lightless but floating in fever.
“The men who raised those flags have left the fort,” he said. “You have already killed them, maybe, as would be your right if they attacked you. But these—”
“Carry on,” the captain repeated, and the men behind him marched stolidly on the wounded, bayonets lowered. A surprising number of men the doctor had thought wholly incapacitated managed somehow to reach their feet. Some held out their hands for mercy, others scrambled and uselessly groped for anything that might be used for a weapon of defense.
“Stop it,” the doctor said again. He could not make his voice carry. “Stop this slaughter . . .” It did not stop. A short, stubby man in a general’s uniform topped with a black shako had just come at the gate below, and at his appearance the grenadiers seemed urged to wield their bayonets more fiercely. The general, however, paid no apparent attention to the massacre taking place, but toured the embrasures, pursing his lips at the cannon Lamartinière had been compelled to abandon.
“And you,” the captain said to the doctor, who noticed he had sheathed his sword and again produced his pistol. “You who are so attached to these murderous rebels—are you not one of them?”
“He’s been their prisoner, like ourselves,” Gaston called from where he crouched beside the water vases, against the wall of the powder magazine. “He’s nothing but a doctor.”
“Oh?” said the captain. “Then how does he come by those arms he carries?” He raised his pistol and bit his lip as he steadied the wrist of the hurt arm in its grubby sling. The doctor took in that his left arm was hideously swollen; suppuration stained the sleeve. But this thought was idle. He knew he could shoot the captain between the eyes before he could fire, and have a ball left in his other pistol for the pigtailed sergeant, or maybe the general in his shako (though the general would be a longer shot), and he knew he would do none of these things. The feverish captain, however, looked very likely to shoot him.
There was nothing more to say. The doctor flipped the penny to the center of his tongue. Now there were no survivors. The tangle of new-bayoneted corpses by the wall now stood for the sum of his labor here, and yet these dead were still his own. Their bodies swam before his eyes and merged into a single skeletal figure, white-eyed, grinning, dressed in formal black, approaching the doctor now with an oddly delicate courtesy. Baron de la Croix, or Baron Cimetière—he whom the blacks worshipped as Lord of the Dead and of the graveyard. It was time