Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [347]
“Riau has gone back to Toussaint—I can smell it,” Maillart grumbled from where he’d piled up on the bed. “Riau is an incorrigible marron— he has more desertions than I have fingers on both hands. In France he would have been shot long ago.”
“You don’t want to see him shot any more than I do,” the doctor said. “Besides, we need him to get safely to Le Cap, it seems.”
“It ought to be quiet enough, when Leclerc has just taken a division that way.”
In this country, the doctor thought, such an army may pass, but when it has passed it is as though it had never been there. He kept this observation to himself. Maillart had put in for a leave in order to accompany him, and probably he did not like to think that Riau must also be depended on. The doctor rocked slowly in the hammock he’d chosen in preference to a bed—he thought it cooler, and the weather was heavy. He watched a pair of geckos walking on the ceiling.
“What was that question of Paul Lafrance?” He peered at Maillart, between his bare feet. The major seemed to stiffen on the bed.
“A suspicion that Leclerc has come here to restore slavery.”
“Ah,” said the doctor. “At La Crête à Pierrot, it was treated as a fact, not a suspicion. That was the thing they all cried from the walls.”
“But it’s not true,” Maillart blurted. “You’ve seen the proclamations.”
“Not everyone who’s seen those proclamations believes they tell the truth.” The doctor hesitated. “Leclerc has other orders, maybe, that he has not revealed.”
“I am not so much in his confidence,” Maillart said, his voice barely audible; he seemed to be speaking to his bolster. “But—”
He cut himself off. The doctor peered at him through the notch of his big toe. Maillart seemed to be fidgeting with something at his throat. The doctor eased his head down into the hammock. Maybe it would be better not to pursue the topic, though he felt there must be something to pursue. But he didn’t want to make his friend miserable, and possibly he’d be better off not pondering the matter himself. The light had dimmed in a green, watery way, and the atmosphere was still heavier than before.
“It will rain, I think,” the doctor said.
“I hope it rains soon.” Maillart rolled onto his side. “One can barely breathe.”
A wisp of something barely visible detached from the spot of ceiling between the two geckos and came drifting down toward the hammock with a faint, increasing whine. As it came near it resolved into a mosquito. The doctor pinched it, glanced at the blood dot between his thumb and forefinger, then sifted crumbs of the insect body onto the floor and closed his eyes. A dream rushed up suddenly, full of black vomiting. In Port-au-Prince, before they’d started up the coast, a few cases of mal de Siam had been seen among the new French soldiers, and the doctor had felt a quick touch of his own recurring fever. Now in his sleep he was sweating heavily and abrading his face against the hammock’s mesh. But when he woke it was dark and considerably cooler; the rain he’d expected had already begun.
In two days’ time they were riding north, with four pack mules following their horses. The doctor had loaded up some extra clothes for Nanon and Elise and all of the children. From what had been left, none of them seemed to have packed for a long absence. One of the mules bore the skin of the cayman, scraped and salted though far from fully cured; it had been some trouble to find a mule that would accept it.
The river of Ennery was running high, and the south slopes of Morne Pilboreau were refreshed and a little greened by the rain. As they mounted higher the terrain grew more dry; a hot wind breathed over the height from the Savane Désolée to the south. Ascending the tightening turns of the trail was like climbing the internal windings of a conch shell, the doctor thought, down to the bleached-shell white of the stones above and below. Beyond the peak, it was damper, greener. The crossroads market there seemed to be functioning as usual.
They halted, to rest their horses