Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [355]
Beyond the Baie d’Acul the aspect changed: fire-blackened fields rolled away from the road they traveled, clear to the horizon of the north coast. The wood of Daspir’s cane stalk, drained of sugar, splintered in his mouth. He spat the pulp into the road. At the time of his first landing, this country had not been so devastated as now, though there had been some burning when he rode this way before. The orange he’d plucked from a slightly scorched hedge was the first fruit he had tasted in this land. Today there were no oranges whatsoever, and all that remained of the citrus hedges was a persistent stubble. The stone gateposts of the plantations that they passed were all soot-streaked, their iron deformed by the heat of burning. Except for the contour of the mountain to their left, Daspir could pick no familiar feature of their progress.
A little way short of Haut du Cap they came upon a large band of black irregulars in open insurrection, who fired one ragged volley at their column and then bolted. As the terrain seemed to offer them no shelter, Leclerc ordered a pursuit. Yet the burned fields, flat and featureless as they seemed, proved to be laced and wormholed with ditches and creeks into which their attackers swiftly disappeared. The three captains had to pull up their galloping horses at the steep bank of a stream, and then quickly dismount under fire from an unburnt patch of brush forty paces distant.
Paltre, furious that his horse had been shot in the hindquarter, turned his brace of pistols on the brush pocket. Daspir and Cyprien crawled toward it belly-down, under cover of Paltre’s intermittent fire. The brush was vacant when they reached it; only a scatter of torn cartridge paper proved that the snipers had been there. A few muddy footprints showed the path of their escape down the streambed.
“As well try to track snakes in a swamp.” Cyprien spat ash from a pinkish hole in his soot-blackened face.
“Makaya! Gadé Makaya!” An equally soot-powdered black was rushing toward them in a high state of excitement, waving his arms and shouting, “Watch out for Makaya!” Daspir, whose nerves were already jangled, would have shot him if Cyprien had not caught his arm.
“That’s one of the Ninth—he’s one of ours,” Cyprien hissed in Daspir’s ear, though he was simultaneously pulling him down into the cover of the streambed.
“Sé moun Makaya yo yé,” the black soldier babbled as he rushed by, high on the bank. They are Makaya’s people. He seemed to have lost or thrown away his weapon.
“And who is Makaya?” Daspir whispered.
“One of the brigand chiefs hereabouts,” Cyprien said. “I know no more.”
As soon as they started back toward Paltre, they were raked again by musket balls—now from a ditch between them and the road. The same volley knocked down Paltre’s wounded horse and he let the other two slip; they cantered off through the ash with their reins trailing. For the next half-hour, Cyprien and Daspir were pinned down in the brush patch and completely cut off from the infantry. They didn’t know if Paltre were dead or alive; all they could see was the pulsing flank of the downed horse. The other horses had drifted to the edge of the stream. Daspir crept around under cover of the bank and managed to catch both of them.
The voices of Makaya’s men and the men of the Ninth continued to halloo up and down the ditches, amid sporadic gunfire and the occasional howl of a wounded man. Any movement on the open plain stirred up such whirlings of ash that the content of the action was invisible in the cloud. Cyprien and Daspir crouched back to back with the horses between them and each of