Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [47]
The civil authorities of Fort Liberté had received Rochambeau’s division willingly. Today they went on cooperating, doing all they might to preserve their property. The fire damage, overall, was rather less than one might have expected. The partisans who’d fought the French troops street to street had evacuated the town when the battle turned against them, taking with them a good number of white hostages inland toward the Rivière Massacre. Guizot’s small detail went on their trail, following the road toward Ouanaminthe and the Spanish border.
Guizot marched in a rum-sodden daze at the head of his men. The heat increased his feeling of oppression. He thought of his brother novice, Captain Daspir, wondering what had come to him in the twenty-four hours since they’d parted. Had Daspir found the tasty food he always craved? had he caught so much as a glimpse of the general Toussaint Louverture? had he received his own baptism in the bloody art of war? When Guizot reached for the sense of competition he’d felt when he’d clasped hands with the other three captains at their parting the day before, he could find no trace of it. Then Sergeant Aloyse jogged his elbow and pointed, west of the road, to where the V-shaped forms of carrion birds were circling around a thread of smoke.
It had been a coffee plantation, and though the enemy in retreat had tried to fire the groves, the trees were green and had not burnt—some few were smoldering, but most would survive. Likewise the citrus hedges that lined the approach to the main compound. The plantation’s grand’case was burned to the ground; here the ashes were still hot, and the smoke still rising.
The house had been built on a low hill which afforded Guizot his first broad view of the surrounding country since they’d left Fort Liberté that morning. Eastward, the path of the enemy’s retreat was evident in more smoke fingers smudging the sky, receding toward the mountains. Unless, perhaps, they’d gone the opposite direction after all, or both at once. To the northwest, across the great Northern Plain toward Le Cap and the blue curve of the ocean, there were further blots of smoke scattered above what must be burning cane fields.
The vultures were making a tight spiral behind the smoking ruin of the grand’case. At Sergeant Aloyse’s nudging, Guizot moved in that direction and discovered the bodies of two white men spreadeagled on a hedge. The proprietors of this place, he supposed, or managers of someone else’s good. It was thus that shrikes, in European fields, would pin their kill to thorns. But there was something more, a sign.
Aba blan. Aba lesklavaj.
The scavengers had already picked the eye jelly from those two bloodless heads. As Guizot turned his face from the dead men, the image came to him unbidden: Charles Barthelmy spewing blood from his mouth as he doubled over the upthrust bayonet, the blood-slick on the surface of the harbor, under the hot sunset light, and bodies turning, thumped by the hungry sharks . . . In another flash he saw the stump of that unlucky sailor’s hand. An instant more and all those pictures disappeared, into the oubliette where Guizot wished with all his power to consign them. He shaded his eyes and looked away at the blotches of smoke on the sky above the distant plain.
The sun was directly overhead by now, and Guizot’s skin was burning. His thighs were chafed and burning also—there’d been too much salt in the water in which he’d tried to wash his trousers. He saw relief in the eyes of the men