Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [443]
At first Toussaint seemed completely unaware of them, so deep was his stillness behind the table, but in the next moment he was on his feet, the table overturned between him and the officers, and Toussaint had put his back into a corner where he could not be reached from either window, where any man moving toward him would tangle with the table legs. His sword was half out of the sheath, and his hip was cocked to complete the draw.
“General,” said Ferrari. His voice was careful, but warm at the same time; Daspir thought it was just the right note to have struck.
“We don’t intend any attempt on your days,” Ferrari said. “But you must know that the house is surrounded, and all your men have been disarmed.”
Toussaint made no reply to that. The grenadiers were jostling in behind Daspir, but they were pressing for a look, not to attack. The invisible half-circle between Toussaint and the soldiers remained inviolate, and Daspir knew he did not have the will to break the barrier, and he doubted if anyone else among them did. Then Toussaint settled on his heels, and sheathed his sword.
Dessounen: Fort de Joux, France
April 1803
The flagstones on the floor were frozen. Each step fired a bolt of cold from the arch of Toussaint’s foot to the top of his head. He crept to the hearth, curling his shoulders around the pain of his heartbeat and his ragged breath. His left arm was a dead weight in its sling. One-handed, crouching at the edge of the fireplace, he slowly teased a coal free of the ash and blew it to flame, then added tinder till the fire began to grow.
For some little time he rested, squatting on his heels, then pushed himself up and went to the table where his provisions were laid. He put a measure of oats and a measure of water into an iron pot and covered it and set it on the fire. A few beads of water sizzled dry on the outside surface of the iron. With his one good arm he dragged his chair to a spot almost within the hearth and sat.
As often, it seemed that the heat could not reach him. Though the flames were bright and lively, they felt cold as the snow outside the fort. There was a draft behind him, a current of cold air running from the grate that closed the far end of the cell to the crack beneath the iron-bound door. Behind him too was another figure which Toussaint saw in his mind’s eye, black-garbed and crouching like a cricket, twitching the bones of its fingers to make a rattling sound. The tall black hat slouched down to cover the dark left socket of the toothy skull.
Baron was here. In the bones of his left hand, he held the filigreed iron cross. Toussaint knew, in part, that the rattle came from his own labored breathing, but truly it belonged to Baron Samedi, who waited just a pace behind him, raising his cross high above the cemetery gate. But this time he was not afraid, though Baron owned his breath. On the cemetery ground stood Guiaou and also the one-eyed Moyse, and between them Quamba, the hûngan of Thibodet. Strangely, the earth of the cemetery had all been covered over with cement, and Quamba was explaining to the other two that it was done to stop bokors from stealing corpses and raising them to work as slaves.
But all this masonry had no strength. Quamba stooped and showed how it would shatter in his hand, crumbling as easily as any dried-earth clod. Then Moyse and Guiaou fell to work with the tools they carried with them, Moyse a pointed spade and Guiaou his coutelas. Together they began to open the earth. Toussaint recognized with a shock and a thrill that the hard carapace of the Fort de Joux was breaking apart at the touch of their blades. If he had known sooner, if he could have known how easily the stones of the fort would disintegrate, he would have been gone a long time before now.
He sagged in the chair, resting the swollen side of his face against the stones around the fireplace, and let his right