Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [39]
It was then that Maillart had it confirmed how much more a horse could count than its rider. Not that he would belittle Toussaint’s abilities in the saddle. But at his urging, Bel Argent swung out into a gait so swift and smooth that the white horse seemed a different order of being from the other horses expected to follow him. Maillart was proud enough of his own horsemanship and also thought well of his mount, a strong bay gelding he’d named Eclair as much for its speed as for the lightning blaze in the center of its forehead. But the best he could manage was to hold his pace a length or two behind Riau’s mount—that same blue roan that Toussaint had broken just three days before.
Toussaint and the white warhorse had been out of sight for half an hour by the time Maillart and Riau rode onto the peninsula above Samana Bay. His round hat with its plume and cockade lay on the ground, and Bel Argent stood by him, reins slipped under stirrup, huffing and flanks heaving with the strain. Riau slipped down and went at once to Bel Argent and began to walk the big horse in a long looping circuit to cool him down. It was utterly unlike Toussaint to leave an overheated horse standing. Maillart began to walk Eclair, with Riau’s mount on the other side, which was awkward since the blue roan kept trying to reach across his chest to bite the bay. Meanwhile the rest of the honor guard gradually grew from dots in the middle distance; at last they came trotting out onto the point. The men dismounted, muttering to each other and their horses. No one dared to approach Toussaint, who stood at the cliff’s edge, observing the mouth of Samana Bay with a folding brass spyglass. Every so often he lowered the instrument and polished the lenses on the tail of his coat, then raised it to his eye again with a disbelieving shrug.
Maillart passed Eclair’s reins to Guiaou, and led the blue roan toward Riau, who stood still holding Bel Argent, a respectful ten paces in back of Toussaint. The white stallion snorted, shook off a fly. Its breathing had calmed considerably. Toussaint turned his back to the sea.
“Get ready to die,” he said. His face was gray. “All France has come against me.” He passed one hand across his mouth and added, in a steadier voice, “They have come to enslave the blacks.”
Maillart lifted the glass from Toussaint’s slack fingers and pulled the telescoping joints to their full extension. The messenger had not been quite accurate in what he said, for the ships had not actually entered the bay, but stood a good distance off the point. At that distance it was hard to ascertain their number; Maillart kept losing count, but he thought there must be between thirty and forty.
He folded the spyglass and held it toward Toussaint, but the black general seemed blind to the offer. He had taken his sheathed sword from his belt and stood leaning on it as if it were a cane. His face remained bloodless; he seemed to shrink inside his clothes. For the first time Maillart saw the man’s age visible upon him.
Finally Toussaint did reach for the spyglass. Unconsciously he dropped it into a coat pocket, then walked haltingly to a boulder at the cliff’s edge and sat down, balancing the sheathed sword across his knees. At a little distance, Guiaou and Couachy and the others of the guard stood by their horses, staring at the fleet with an impassivity they could barely maintain. It was not the number of the ships that frightened them, Maillart realized, but that their commander had been so obviously shaken.
But how could Toussaint have known the magnitude of France? The black general had made himself so absolutely master of the island that Maillart had forgotten that he had