Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [73]
Guiaou stood up, his head gone red inside from frustration and rage. He might have shot the blind girl or stabbed the grieving woman in the back. Instead he caught up a brand from the cookfire and set three corners of the house thatch alight. The fire was burning hungrily by the time he got onto his horse, and several of the militiamen had to stop to try to put it out. As for the rest, Guerrier and Guiaou still had the better horses. They rode in a wide curve around their pursuers and lost themselves in the pine forest once more.
All through that afternoon they picked a way through the pine woods, headed generally south, still toward Santo Domingo City, though under the trees one could not reckon by the sun, and they could not be certain that the edge of the forest was parallel to the road they’d been traveling earlier that day. It was Couachy who had known this country. Couachy had fought beside Guiaou more times for more years than could be counted now. They had both been so concentrated on the work of killing white men and mulattoes that their heads were one red blaze together in each fight. Now Couachy was dead, because he had wanted to eat a fresh egg, or because Ghede had been ready to take him this day, down below the mirror of the ocean to the Island Below Sea.
They stopped that night by a pooling stream, still within the shelter of the woods. As Guiaou dipped water to wash himself, he thought of Couachy on the other side, and the cold clasp of the water on his wrist seemed like the handgrip of Baron Cimetière, that same shadow that had drifted through his dream the night before. With a snatch of both arms he swirled away the ghost of his reflection from the surface of the pool and threw water in his face to drown the thought.
Guerrier, who’d submerged himself completely in the pool, watched Guiaou rinse his shoulders and torso with the water he dipped from his kneeling position on the grassy bank. Guiaou knew that Guerrier was looking at his scars and wondering why he did not come all the way into the water himself.
“What happened to you there?” Guerrier said, pointing at the ragged tears that showed stone-white on Guiaou’s rib cage and underneath his arm.
“Reken,” Guiaou said shortly. Shark. He raised his forearm to a warding position over his head to show how the cut on the inner arm flowed into the deep furrow across his cheek and down his shoulder. “That one was a sword cut from a blanc.”
Guerrier nodded and asked no more, turning in the water to face the declining sunlight in the west.
“I thought you were not a soldier before yesterday,” Guiaou said, to show he was not offended by the question. “You fought well today. And how well you ride!”
Guerrier smiled up at him from the sunset-reddened water. “I spent much time training horses at the hatte of Papa Toussaint.” He climbed out of the pool and shook himself briskly, hurling water in all directions, then drew on his trousers and dried his hands on his shirt. Sitting down crosslegged, he drew the musket captured from the Spanish militia onto his knees and began to unfasten its bayonet.
“Why do you not use that musket instead?” Guiaou asked him. “It is newer than the other.”
“Is it?” asked Guerrier. He had now undone the broken bayonet from the musket he had started with. “But this one was given me by Papa Toussaint.”
Guiaou was silent, considering this. The lock of the first musket given him by Toussaint had broken irreparably long ago, so that weapon had been discarded. But that musket had only been issued to him at Toussaint’s order, it had not come direct from Toussaint’s hand like Guerrier’s. He sat crosslegged opposite Guerrier, fondling his helmet in his lap. There was a deep dent in the front of it, and though Guiaou had something of a headache now, he thought