Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [98]
The doctor left Héloïse trying to wake Isabelle and followed Arnaud to survey the sick and wounded. There were the predictable cases of shock and hysteria, a few people ill from want of food or water or both, a couple of incipient cases of fever . . . Several people had been injured by rock flying out from the explosion of the powder magazines. Most of these hurts were fairly slight, but one man had a hand so badly crushed that amputation was the only option.
For the next couple of hours he bandaged and poulticed, muttered and comforted as best he could. He awakened Michau and set him to brewing tisanes over a small fire. When it came time for the surgery, Michau and Arnaud were both engaged to hold down the hapless patient. There was no rum or any other liquor to blunt the pain, and the screams of the victim were most distressing to the other sufferers in the vicinity, until, finally, he passed out. By the time the tourniquet had been fixed, the doctor was sweat-stained and trembling and could have done very well with a tot of rum himself, though he didn’t think he was likely to get one.
He walked out of the building, swinging his arms to loosen his cramped shoulders. A cluster of people had gathered at the trail head and were watching a dozen soldiers of the Second who were climbing up. Perhaps they meant to bring some succor. But when they’d reached the hilltop, their officer declared that he had orders from Christophe to burn the houses here.
Télémaque, still an imposing figure though the vestments of his office were grubby with soot and torn in the trouser legs from last night’s struggle up the hill, drew himself up to protest. “You cannot mean to carry out such an inhuman action,” he declaimed. “There are women and children who are sick and hurt, and all of them have lost their homes. You cannot mean to destroy the last meager shelter which is left to them.”
“General Christophe suggests that you and your people remove to Haut du Cap,” the officer said stolidly, pointing to the town’s lower gate where the rest of the troops were still collected. “You will not be harmed. The houses on La Vigie are to be destroyed.”
“Impossible,” said Télémaque. “We have for example a man who has just lost his arm and he is in no state at all to be—” But the doctor had already turned from the debate and walked inside his makeshift surgery. Save for the amputee, who still lay moaning in a faint, most of the patients could shift at least a short distance under their own power.
“A moment,” he said, raising one finger to Christophe’s officer, who’d followed him into the building. The doctor knew the man, by sight though not by name; he was an acquaintance of Riau. Grasping his meaning, the officer followed him to the edge of the woods and helped him trim two stout green sticks and set one of his men to help Michau weave strips of torn palm leaf between them.
On this rude stretcher they moved the amputee to the shade where the horses had been tied. The first of the two houses was already being knocked down. The soldiers had not brought tar up the hill (perhaps that substance had been completely expended the night before) and the buildings were sluggish to catch fire. The soldiers fell to knocking them to pieces with blows from their boots and musket stocks. The woman with the cockeyed hairdo, whom the doctor had encountered that morning, ran at them, screeching incoherently. One of the soldiers rounded on her and marched her back to the other onlookers at the point of his bayonet.
They tried setting the rubble afire again before they left; the splintered planks burned fitfully. With the help of Arnaud and Michau, the doctor cleared horse manure from the area where the stretcher had been laid and began to rig up leaf-topped shelters to cover the feeblest of the refugees from the furiously blazing sun.
Perhaps it would have been better to go to Haut du Cap, though the doctor did not much like the thought of lugging the stretcher so far. Hand on his hip, he walked to the edge