Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [348]
“Look there—”
To the east the road coiled across a ravine and curled around a mountainside in the direction of Marmelade. The doctor spat out an orange seed, found his spyglass, and focused it on the switchback opposite. In the orb of the lens an indistinct scaly gleaming resolved into the silvered helmets of a dozen riders there.
“Garde d’honneur,” the doctor said, passing the glass to Maillart. The honor guard.
“Toussaint’s?” Guizot’s voice was startled. He looked back and forth between Riau and the distant horsemen; Riau today was crowned with the same silver helm. And the doctor was certain that they must be getting a similar scrutiny from the guardsmen across the ravine. But when Riau raised an arm and swirled his open hand in a fishtail spiral, the guardsmen wheeled their horses and rode out of sight around the bend.
Maillart exhaled. “And there you have it,” he said. “I’d wager a month’s pay, if there were any pay, that Toussaint has reoccupied Marmelade.” He glanced at Riau, then at the doctor. “Very well—you are justified,” he said. “Riau has already proved his value to us, and before the day’s half done.”
“Quite so,” said the doctor. “I think we’d better go on.”
Maillart was already headed for his horse, but Guizot remained planted, staring bemused out over the dizzying drop into the Plaisance river valley. The doctor rather enjoyed his uncertainty. When he’d first seen the young captain, bearing down with his bayonet, he’d seemed altogether too sure of his intention.
“Toussaint is there?” Guizot said, still staring toward the bend in the road where the guardsmen had disappeared from view. “Just there?”
“One never knows for certain where Toussaint may be,” the doctor told him, “if he is not before one’s eyes.” He stopped, recalling the strange scene he’d witnessed in Place Clugny, a few nights before Le Cap was most recently burned. “Even if he is before one’s eyes . . .”
Riau was strolling idly toward them. Guizot still gazed, as if mesmerized, over the giddy plummet into the valley and beyond it to the turquoise recession of mountains into cloud. A wind sprang up and swept the height and rocked the three of them like trees.
“Beware of vertigo,” the doctor murmured. “It may call you, pull you down.” He felt Riau’s attention and went on, in spite or because of it. “The people here believe this air is full of spirits,” he said. “If you hear them, do not listen. Look away.”
They rode through Plaisance without incident, and on toward the hills of Haut Limbé. As the light yellowed toward a sunset orange, deep shadows of the trees advanced across the road. In the opposite direction, market women returned toward their villages in the hills, lightfooted, singing and swinging their steps as they passed by, with lightened baskets balanced on their heads.
On an ascent, the shadows thickened, grew legs, and swarmed across the road. It was too steep, too late in a long day, for them to get any sudden speed out of their horses up the grade, and before they could recognize it, they had been surrounded by a hundred men. One held the headstall of the doctor’s horse; the bare shoulders of many others pressed closely all around. His avocado basket had emptied quickly, green ovals passing from hand to hand. Maillart twisted in his saddle, looking back at him with a discontented stare. But the doctor made no movement to object to anything that was happening. His pistols were close at hand, but it would have been folly to reach for them. In fact he felt nothing but an eerie calm.
A man with a large, shaggily bearded head emerged from the bush and moved idly toward them. The others all seemed to defer to him. Romain, Romain, some whispered as he passed. He stopped by the doctor’s horse and stroked a finger down the octagon barrel of the rifle which hung in its sling by his right knee. Romain peered