Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [46]
Guizot’s heart bulged and his breath went short. He looked at the master sergeant. What was his name? It was an order Rochambeau had given; certainly it amounted to an order and its purport was sufficiently clear. Guizot’s mind scurried. There was no evading the order. No matter where his thoughts went scrambling, there was no way out. It would be necessary to set the example for his men.
Guizot reached for the sergeant’s musket; for a moment their eyes met. Aloyse, that was the man’s name. Sergeant Aloyse. Guizot felt a pulse of affection for him. The sergeant had been at his elbow all that day, ready to support him if he hesitated. But Guizot had not faltered. He had done every necessary thing.
There was a shuffle of boots on stone as Guizot’s men moved up, a pace behind him. One step more would bring him into contact with Barthelmy. Guizot held the sergeant’s musket, bayonet fixed, low by his hip. He caught the acrid, slightly foreign odor of the black commander’s sweat. Behind him, the row of loopholes in the blockhouse wall stared like empty sockets. Barthelmy stood in a correct posture, erect though not stiff, his hands apparently relaxed at his sides, though the skin of his face looked tight on the bone. A handsome face, in its alien way: strong jaw under a day’s growth of beard, mouth set firm, eyes deep-set and intelligent, the whites of them vivid against the dark skin. He must not look at the man’s face, Guizot realized, and shifted his focus to the spot below the breastbone. The bayonet’s point shuddered at his side.
“Aba blan,” Barthelmy pronounced. Guizot didn’t know if he was shouting or whispering.
Aba lesklavaj!
Guizot stepped forward, twisting his hips into the hooking upward thrust, a movement he had practiced many times before on bales of straw.
At dawn of the next day, Guizot joined a burial detail, digging shallow graves for the grenadiers who’d fallen outside the walls of Fort Labouque. Or rather he helped to supervise the digging, for although he would have liked to occupy himself by throwing his strength against the handle of a spade, it was no work for an officer of his rank. The graves were shallow of necessity, since the ground on the promontory by the fort was rocky and hard. The ordinary soldiers covered the bodies of their dead fellows as best they might, and at Guizot’s suggestion piled cairns of stones to mark each spot. As for the bodies of Barthelmy and his men, they had been tumbled into the harbor the day before, a feast for the sharks or for crabs.
Guizot watched the awkward heaping of the stones. His head ached and his tongue was thickly swollen in his head. Great stores of colonial rum had been tapped after yesterday’s fighting. Guizot had swallowed his ration and more. While thoroughly drunk, he’d done his best to wash his uniform in the mouth of a creek that ran into the harbor. The effort had not been wholly successful—today the bloodstains on his tight white trousers persisted as blurry streaks of brown.
Crouched barelegged by the bivouac fire, Guizot had drunk a great deal more rum, listening to stories of other battles told by the veterans and the sergeant while he waited for his trousers to dry. Despite the ugliness of those tales, they were only strings of words and served well enough to distract him from the actual events of his day, until at last he’d had rum enough to suck him down into a dense unconsciousness.
The ornamented sword of Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp stuck out of the cairn of stones that marked his grave. The general himself had thrust it there, nodding to Guizot as he did so. A gesture of approval, Guizot supposed. He might have made progress in his commander’s favor, though this thought seemed distant from him now, masked in the fog of his hangover.
How quickly the light came up in this tropical place! As they turned from the grave site it was already blazing day. Already it was growing very hot.
There was much work to be done in the town. The fortifications they’d done their best to shatter yesterday must be slapped