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By Root 2030 0

sitting in the shadow of the salt-withered pine tree, greedily scooping up food from a bowl with the fingers of his right hand. His left hand reached out as if to gather and protect another bowl, but Guiaou saw with a pulse of alarm that Ghede’s left hand was hovering above the head of sleeping Couachy. It seemed to him then that Ghede wore the face of Moyse, who had lost an eye in battle with the blancs, so that the lid sagged wrinkled and gray into the empty socket, but Moyse had gone to be with the dead already—Guiaou rolled awake so quickly that his own horse snorted and jerked at its tether. It was still night, but the clouds had dissipated, and a slender new moon had risen among the stars. In the cold light the path lay palely visible, running from hummock to hummock through the mangroves.

Guiaou walked around the cold feathery ashes of their fire, and stooped to rock Couachy by the shoulder.

“Ann alé,” he hissed. Let’s go.

Couachy came awake with a grumble. He slapped at a clutch of mosquitoes that battened on his neck and wiped the wreckage of their legs and wings in a blood smear over his collar bone. His eyes came clear enough to take in the new moonlight and the plain lie of the path between the hummocks.

“Dakò,” he said. All right.

Guiaou woke Guerrier by tapping the flat of his coutelas across the ball of the sleeping man’s bare foot. Guerrier came up into consciousness without a whisper. There was no coffee to be brewed so they were on their way at once, going single file among the mangroves. By the time first light had begun to lift the blue herons and white egrets out of the hummocks and into the air, they had come to the edge of the swamp and reached the junction of a broad road which ran south through the lowlands from the edge of the bay.

In this spot they paused for long enough for Guerrier to share out the last of his dried beef. They rode on, at a brisk trot. The road was wide enough for them to ride all three abreast. Guiaou wished for greater speed—he feared ships would be outdistancing them around the cape, and the lingering images of his dream filled his head with chilly fog. One did not meet Ghede in dreams without a reason. But Couachy was the better horseman and more knowledgeable of the country where they were and the distance they had yet to go, and he would not press their pace for fear of overheating the horses. It was true that the heat rose very fast once the sun had cleared the mountains east of the wide savanna where they rode. Guiaou held his morsel of dried beef in his mouth, encouraging it to dissolve slowly with just an occasional pump of his jaw.

By midday the taste of that beef was not even a memory. They came in sight of a small cabin seated some twenty yards from the road. Though they’d passed several small herds of cattle grazing untended, this was the first evidence of human habitation they had met. A small black boy stood at the roadside watching their approach, covered to his knees in a dirt-brown canvas smock.

“Salwé,” Couachy said as they drew near, and when the Creole greeting drew no answer, “Holá.” The boy turned and ran for the house, dashing in the open door. Two kerchiefed heads of women peeked out the doorway and as quickly withdrew. Then a white man dressed in a pair of loose cotton trousers stepped barefoot into the dooryard and stood yawning and scratching at the hair above his waistband as he inspected them. A young woman came out behind him, carrying a pail. With her free hand she traced a line of string that ran from the house to a small cocotier off to the left. Beside the tree she stopped and began drawing water from the well.

The white man left off his scratching and beckoned. Guiaou would have returned to the road. But Couachy clucked to his horse and rode down into the packed earth of the yard, dismounting without waiting for an invitation.

“You come from Toussaint?” By his accent it was plain he was a Spaniard, though he spoke in Creole.

“No,” said Couachy. “We come from Clervaux, at Santiago.”

It was a good answer, Guiaou thought, a lie well