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By Root 2278 0

enough to set his foot on shore, and readier still for the fresh provender that might be found once they landed. The idea of confronting savage Negro armies gave him a more ambiguous feeling. Perhaps before the end of this day he would be facing enemy fire for the first time. Somehow it did not seem so light a matter now as it had when he and the others had toasted their compact with the excellent brandy he had brought out on this voyage from his father’s cellar in France. All gone now, that brandy, squandered, except for half of the very last bottle, wrapped in a shirt in Daspir’s pack. But wonderful things were said of Saint Dominican rum . . . If his mind could dwell on such a prospect, Daspir thought, then he must not be afraid—the wobbly sensation in his belly must be no more than excitement. Still, he wished the other three were with him, or even just one of them, whether Guizot, with whom he might have shared his innocence of combat, or one of the other two, who were at least somewhat familiar with this country.

The molten coin of the sun was boring through the flat plane of the ocean by the time the squadron had reached the mouth of the Baie d’Acul. The word went round the ships that they would wait till the next day to effect their landing. Daspir ate his evening ration without much tasting it. He thought wistfully of a dram of brandy, but decided to conserve it for some time of greater need—and he had no acquaintances on this ship he cared to drink with anyway. He found his hammock and lay rocking from the cross timbers of the lower deck, breathing the fetid air as shallowly as he could. There was a throbbing of drums on shore and he wondered if it had a meaning, if perhaps those drums were signals. The next thing he knew, someone was shaking him awake with a hard clasp on his bare ankle and he came bolting up from a host of dreams he could scarcely remember.

He pulled his boots on, collected his arms, and clambered to the upper deck, yawning behind one hand and scratching mosquito bites with the other. The staff officers were clustered around General Hardy, who was studying a map by lamplight, as it was not quite dawn. Daspir joined the edge of this group, just as Hardy raised one hand to point at the surface of the bay, which lay calm and silvery with starlight.

“There,” he said, comparing with the legend of his map, “it was just there that Columbus sank one of his first ships, the Santa María, and on that shore where he raised the first settlement in this land.”

Daspir shivered in the morning chill. The thought of the ancient beams of the Santa María dissolving in the silt somewhere below their own vessel rang ominously against something in his unremembered dream. And he had heard how Columbus’s first settlement here had been sacked and destroyed by Indians, when the great explorer was voyaging somewhere else . . . But Hardy’s forefinger had settled on the map again. Daspir leaned in to peer more closely. A road was marked out from the lower end of the Baie d’Acul, back across the peninsula they’d sailed around the previous day.

“Here there is something of an ascent,” Hardy said, tapping the parchment. “Once we have achieved the height, we descend thus—and from that point the road should be open, through Morne Rouge and Haut du Cap to Le Cap itself and the harbor there. Or if it is not, we shall open it.”

At first light the boats were plying between the ships and shore, as a cool mist drifted up from the water of the bay. There was the usual splashing of paddles, creaking of oarlocks, grunting and cursing of soldiers and sailors. The troops had formed on shore before the sun had cleared the top of the hills above them. There’d been no opposition to their landing in this place. In fact the whole area was quite eerily empty of any human sign at all—not so much as a fisherman’s canoe here on the bay. But when they began to march up the steep road Hardy had indicated, a dry rattle of drumming started off to their left, hidden somewhere in the jungle.

The first rays of sun slanting in through the treetops