Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [353]
I come from afar,
How are they?
How are they doing?
I’m going a long way
How are they?
Now he was lying in a bed, not a hammock, with four posts solidly planted on the floor of one of the back rooms of the Arnaud grand’case. With a start, he snatched for his glasses, and as he grasped them the whole string of events from when he’d left the bamboche to when he’d collapsed in Moustique’s peristyle came into alignment.
His watch had been laid on the table beside his glasses. The doctor covered his pulse with his thumb and watched the second hand tick off a minute.
“I don’t have fever,” he pronounced.
“Well and good,” said Maillart. “You’re fit to travel?”
The doctor sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He felt unusually calm and clear, as if his odd fit of the night before had somehow rinsed his brain.
“Yes, I think so,” he replied.
Early light came leaking through the jalousies covering the windows, striping over his bare toes. He could hear Cléo’s voice somewhere else in the house, murmuring to Isidor. The sound reminded him strangely of last night’s vacant mirror. Surely, one day all trace of his doing and his being would be effaced, but somehow this thought did not disturb him now.
“Riau has gone,” Maillart said. “With his horse and his gear.”
“Yes,” said the doctor.
“What—he can’t have told you he meant to leave us.”
“No,” said the doctor. “But he has brought us far enough. We won’t have any trouble on the plain today.” He polished his glasses and settled them on his nose. “Probably Riau has gone back to Toussaint at Marmelade, as you suspected.”
Maillart snorted as he stood up, stamping his feet down hard into the heels of his boots. He took his exasperation out of doors, and on the gallery poured himself the dregs of Cléo and Isidor’s coffee pot.
Romain’s men had filtered away during the night or the early morning. Maybe Riau had moved among them. At any rate there was no one now to be seen in the compound but women, children, a few halt old men. And here came Moustique with Guizot from the direction of the cases by the little chapel—Moustique shouldering an unwieldy bundle more or less the size of himself. A little boy trotted under the end of it, raising it above his head.
“You’re coming with us today, then?” Maillart said.
“Yes.” Moustique huffed as he swung down his load. The child swung himself astride the bundle, grinning. Maillart turned to Guizot.
“I trust you passed a restful night?”
Guizot only blinked at him, slowly and dreamily. Maillart rather envied him his girl. He himself had been wholly taken up by the doctor’s crisis. But the young captain’s air of beatitude was so innocent that Maillart found it difficult to sustain his annoyance.
They were on the road before the sun had cleared the treetops, and might have made very good time to Le Cap, had not the doctor insisted on detouring to the shore of the Baie d’Acul so that Guizot could bathe his healing wound in seawater. In the end, all of them went in swimming— the doctor and Guizot and Moustique and the gaggle of boys that trailed along to help them with their pack train, a couple from Thibodet and the rest more recently acquired at Habitation Arnaud. Maillart did not know their names. Only Maillart remained on shore, one hand on his weapon, keeping watch.
Sweat prickled him under his uniform. There was no sign of any life except for a couple of spotted pigs that came grunting down the trail they’d used themselves to wallow in the shallows. The strand was lined with sea grape and small almond trees. Around the further curve of the bay the jungle was a dense and featureless green wall. And if any enemy were to catch them here, their whole wet, naked party would be killed or captured soon after Maillart got off his one shot and perhaps half a dozen cuts of his sword.
He loosened his belt and let the heavy scabbards it supported settle to the ground,