Chapter Sixteen
THE UNIFORMED FOOTMAN laid a tray of coffee on the table before Isabelle Cigny. Her spoon jingled cheerfully against the edge of a china cup. Doctor Hébert watched the movements of her small white hand. When she beckoned him, he came forward and accepted a cup and saucer and returned to his chair. Captain Maillart, meanwhile, leaned forward from his seat on the sofa to help himself to a plate of cakes. He turned to offer one to the girl Marguerite, who sat beside him there.
Doctor Hébert inhaled steam from his coffee, without yet tasting it. The odor of the sugared brew reminded him oddly of the smell of burning that blew daily from the plain. Isabelle Cigny looked up at him teasingly, as if she had read his mind.
“Our sugar is still of a perfect whiteness here,” she said at large. “We do not follow the vicious saying of that English minister.”
“Pardon?” said Marguerite. She looked blandly about with her large blue eyes. She had declined the proffered cake, leaving her hands demurely folded on her lap.
“William Pitt has remarked on our misfortune,” Captain Maillart said. “‘It seems that the French prefer their coffee au caramel.’”
The doctor surprised himself by blurting out a laugh (although he’d heard this bitter jest before). Madame Cigny looked at him rather sadly, three fingers pressed against her small pink lower lip. The doctor’s eyes slid away from her, toward Nanon, who sat apart from the others at a small sewing table in the corner, a basket by her feet and work on her lap. By her position in the room it was unclear to what degree she might or might not belong to this social group, though of course an untrained eye would probably not have doubted her perfect whiteness. She had not taken coffee. Her dress was vastly simpler than before, merely a pale loose shift a little better than what a household slave might wear. Her eyes were lowered to her sewing. The doctor had had no opportunity for as much as a private word with her, nor was he certain he’d have sought her intimacy, were it more available to him. Though he came here often, twice a week, he had little idea how to comport himself with her in these half-public circumstances. She tossed a lock of hair from her face and bent again to her work; the movement was not quite enough for him to catch her eye.
“Oui, vraiment,” Marguerite said almost tonelessly, peering into the sugar bowl. “C’est évident.”
Captain Maillart looked at her, at a loss for a direction to continue. He had been trying to flirt with the girl for the past half hour, but she was most unplayful.
“And you,” Madame Cigny said to the doctor. “You will be leaving us as well, I understand.”
“Yes,” the doctor said, and sipped his coffee.
“You tear yourself away”—Madame Cigny developed her theme with a brittle vivacity—“from our fair city, with its…spectacles. The gallows and gibbets. The execution wheels.”
“Painfully,” the doctor said. It was not an ideal choice of word. “Affairs at Habitation Thibodet have been neglected…”
“During your long absence,” Madame Cigny said, helping him along, “and will require your most earnest attention.”
“Yes, as you say.”
“No word from the mistress?”
The doctor shook his head, understanding her to mean Elise. He smiled at her, in thanks for her tact. It had entered his mind that his sister might have returned to the plantation, especially if news of her husband’s death had somehow reached her. But he had had no communication from anyone there and so could not know if the plantation itself was still in existence, for that matter.
“I do wish you would dissuade this child from undertaking such a foolhardy journey,” Isabelle Cigny said, looking at Marguerite, who was perhaps four years her junior. No one answered her. The doctor set his cup aside, on a small table. Marguerite had been offered hospitality at the Paparel plantation, in Marmelade, and she was intending to set out for the place the next morning, escorted by Captain Maillart and a party of militia.
“You might do very well to stay here,” Madame Cigny said directly to Marguerite. “I will gladly open my house to you. In any event we seem to have become a hostelry for displaced persons…of various sorts.” Coolly she glanced at the doctor, who dropped his eyes toward the toes of his boots.
“You are kind,” Marguerite said, “yet I have always preferred country living to the distractions of a town.”
“It must be admitted,” said Madame Cigny, “that for the moment our town is less than an ideal setting for a girl such as yourself—much as I regret to say it. Still I wonder at your journey. Is it wise?”
Marguerite smiled, sweetly or stupidly, as the disposition of an observer might interpret it, and said nothing at all. Madame Cigny got up and quickly crossed the room to her. Seating herself lightly on the arm of the sofa, she took Marguerite’s face between her two hands and twisted it up toward her own. It was an abrupt movement, and to the doctor it didn’t seem entirely friendly. Isabelle Cigny was examining her visage much as a horse trader might examine an animal. Captain Maillart stared at the pair of them, open-mouthed.
Seeing himself unobserved, the doctor thought he might at least exchange a glance with Nanon. But when he looked her way she would not meet his eyes, or else she was insensible of his regard. She had stopped her sewing for the moment and sat with her hands folded over the work, which looked to be a garment meant for Madame Cigny’s infant Hélo?se. The looseness of the shift she wore gave no suggestion of her body’s shape, so that the doctor, recalling what he’d been told of Isabelle Cigny’s opposition to finery for colored women, wondered if she were used unkindly here.
Nanon sat with her face half turned to the wall, so that he saw her profile. Despite her pallor, there was much of Africa in her head’s shape at this angle, the slant of the cheekbones, full and heavy meeting of the lips. Her face seemed fuller, rounder than before, or perhaps he was imagining this. Her eyes were open, but she seemed entranced; she might have been asleep or dreaming.
There was a sort of whisper and the doctor turned to see Marguerite’s head swinging away from Madame Cigny’s hands, slackly, as if its support had been abruptly severed. The girl’s plump lips were parted a little, and her breath passed through them with that whispering sound he’d heard. A strand of her honey-blonde hair had come down and with her fingertip she reached absently to adjust it. Madame Cigny was looking down on her with an expression of terrible sorrow.
Captain Maillart then jumped to his feet, loudly slapping at the thighs of his breeches. “Well then, we must be going,” he said. “Off to subdue the brigands.” He smiled wryly. “Provided we can find them…”
AT MIDMORNING THE NEXT DAY their party set off from Le Cap, passing through some low earthworks hastily erected since the rising; before, the city had had few landward fortifications. Now, on one of the dirt ramparts, a pike carried the severed head of Boukman, the skin shrinking yellowly to the skull, leathery lips peeling back so that the whole head grinned deathly toward the gently smoldering plain. Briefly Doctor Hébert considered whether Marguerite would term this vision one of the “distractions” of town life; for the moment she did not seem to take notice of it at all.
Their party was some forty strong, a larger group of soldiery than the brigands (as all the black insurgents on the plain had come to be known) would commonly dare to attack. Save for Captain Maillart and a couple of other officers, these were not regular army troops, but militiamen, and an uneasy combination at that. Twelve were white Creoles, young and healthy enough, but too soft from pampering for a campaign in rough country (as Captain Maillart had somewhat bitterly explained). The rest were all mulattoes, a little older on the average, and most of them veterans of the maréchaussée. They were ill-trusted, for many still believed that the mulattoes were wholly responsible for the rising of the blacks, but indispensable just the same.
They carried with them two eight-pound cannons, drawn by mules, but no wagons, for the ways they’d take would be impossible for wagons to navigate. For the same reason Marguerite must go horseback; the doctor was surprised to see her riding astride like a man. Indeed, she sat the pretty gray mare she’d been given most confidently. Riding seemed to bring her out of herself. She rode alongside a lieutenant of Maillart’s regiment whom the doctor knew slightly from the theater and other such occasions, and she responded to his conversational sallies with more animation than he’d ever seen in her.
The doctor himself rode behind this pair in silence, half attending to the mild flirtation going on between Marguerite and the young lieutenant. Captain Maillart, who now rode at the head of the column, had provided him with a huge dragoon’s pistol, whose long scabbard scraped at his knee with every movement of his horse. But there was no enemy, no menace within view. The trail—it could not quite be called a road—went winding beside a bank that was tall with tawny lemon grass. That amiable lieutenant leaned from his horse to pluck a stalk which he presented to Marguerite, and the doctor saw the girl smile at its fresh odor of sweetness.
They were going through open country: low, gentle hills under a clear sky. Sometimes they crossed the now familiar fields of ash, but elsewhere nothing had been burned and the birds still sang. Once, at a great distance, they saw a band of the brigands who hooted and whistled at them from half a mile away, then scattered into the bush. Captain Maillart went a little more cautiously after this, despite the strength of his party and the fact that the gangs of brigands were thought to lack the skill and discipline for an organized ambush.
That night they spent at a fortified camp on the lower slopes of the mountain range. All these mountains were now strung with such camps, a cordon meant to keep the insurrection from breaking through to the Department of the West and sweeping down on Port-au-Prince. It was true as well, however, that the brigand blacks were also encamped all through the hills. Loath to risk open confrontation with armed whites in force, they skulked and raided as they could.
The trees around the palisade were ornamented with the rotting bodies of blacks who had been captured and hanged. A recent novelty of country life, the doctor thought, passing beneath them to enter the camp. Their stench was almost overwhelming; one of the very young Creoles masked his nose and mouth with a scented handkerchief. But Marguerite seemed to take no greater note of these carcasses than she would of crows crucified on a barn door to warn away their fellows.
They slept uneasily in that rough place, the Creole youths complaining mightily of their discomfort; apparently a couple of them had never been anywhere before without a body servant. Soon after first light, they were on the road again. Now the way went winding in and out of the gorges that raked the mountainsides, so that they must go three miles of twists and bends for one in a straight line. But in two hours they came down into the lowlands. Coconut trees were growing on a swamp flat and among them dozens of land crabs came up from their holes to watch the party passing. One of the mulattoes jumped down from his horse and ran among the trees to snatch the crabs and toss them into a bag, for they were good to eat. The men laughed to see him run, and Marguerite tittered, holding her fingers to her lips.
There were others who had used the trail ahead of them. The roadside was littered with cut coconut husks, and back in the trees were the blackened rings of small cook fires. As they continued they found peculiar cairns of stones and eviscerated birds arranged to signify some meaning. Captain Maillart sent scouts half a mile ahead of his main body, and let a couple of men trail back, pairing a white Creole with one of the mulattoes in each case.
In the midafternoon they overtook the advance riders, who’d halted just below the summit of a round hill. The doctor rode up, after Captain Maillart, half hearing their muttered conference. There was a sound of drumming from somewhere ahead. They dismounted and led the horses to the hill’s crown. A long slope glided down into a grassy bowl where a hundred or more of the brigand blacks were dancing to the drums, many already transported into the queer ecstatic fits that possessed them at these calendas. The women were equal in number to the men, and a mambo seemed to be presiding over the whole affair.
Some of the more hot-blooded of the Creole whites wanted to mount a charge immediately, but Captain Maillart dissuaded them from this. There was no possibility of surprising them across this long savannah, and at their backs was jungle where they’d easily disappear. Outnumbered as he found himself, Maillart disliked to risk the scattering of his force. The doctor knew too that he was unwilling to endanger the girl needlessly, though he did not say so.
Captain Maillart ordered the two cannon to be brought to bear and charged. They fired the first eight-pounder down on the blacks from the hill’s brow. The brigand dancers were well out of range—if the ball reached them it did so by rolling down the incline. A number of the Creoles followed up the shot with an equally futile clatter of pistol fire, disregarding for a minute or two Maillart’s order to desist. A cannoneer touched off the second charge, the gun bucked in its carriage and recoiled. By this time most of the blacks had already filtered away into the forest.
On the ground where they’d been the grass was pounded flat and there were leavings of a feast, split yams and the bones of wild hogs and stolen sheep. Also in certain more orderly areas, portions of food and fruit and bowls of milk had been laid out in offering to the pagan gods. Captain Maillart passed frowning through this scene, leading his own party tightly bunched. They pressed on more speedily after that, and by nightfall had reached the Paparel plantation, at the border dividing the canton of Marmelade from that of La Soufrière.
At Paparel they grew mostly coffee, the bushy trees ranked in terraces on the slopes, red thumb-sized pods bright on their branches. Though there was plenty of water here, the land was too steep and rocky for sugar, and only a few carrés were in cane. Paparel did keep a small cane mill, also an indigo works, and he grew fields of provisions for sale to neighboring plantations and the towns on the coast. But the master himself was no longer present; he’d decamped at the start of the insurrection, leaving his property in charge of the gérant, his wife, and two grown sons and two daughters.
It was the gérant’s family who’d tendered the invitation to Marguerite, and the daughters quickly bustled the girl away to the rear of the house to freshen herself and arrange her things. She’d brought them letters from friends at Le Cap. The doctor stayed, with Maillart and the junior officers, to dine with the family. The food was plentiful and well prepared. Maillart had requisitioned a share of the crabs caught that morning, which were served stuffed, and had a pleasant flavor.
All was in good order at Paparel, they learned. The gérant remained optimistic about his situation, though many neighboring plantations had been razed. Of Paparel’s one hundred and fifty slaves only some thirty had defected, the others remaining loyal to the master. Mouzon’s worst complaint was that the whites from the hill forts were as likely to murder a loyal black as a rebel, indeed they killed whatever blacks they found at large.
But the plantation had suffered no depredations. There were three white men on the place, besides the family, all well armed, and Mouzon had also furnished guns to some of the most trusted slaves. Captain Maillart grumbled a little at this, but Mouzon declared that he had more faith in his best blacks than he could summon for the whites in the camps, and Maillart was bound to agree that these latter were a most uneven lot.
The doctor retired early and slept without dreaming, exhausted from the days of riding. It was pleasantly cool, a healthier climate than Le Cap; in fact the night air was almost chill. Captain Maillart awakened him next morning by kicking the soles of his feet. After a hasty breakfast they were back in the saddle once more, bound for another of the hill forts.
This next camp was tucked in a crête of the mountains beyond the Perigourdin gorge from Paparel plantation. Only half a day’s ride distant, this was one of the strongest positions in all the Cordon de L’Ouest. The gérant had been willing enough to acknowledge that its proximity meant a good deal to their safety at Paparel, however much he might dislike the details of the militiamen’s conduct. Maillart’s party expected to reach the fort shortly before noon.
They entered the gorge and rode for half an hour along its narrow stream, then began climbing a vestigial trail that rose along one side. Here the doctor’s horse picked up a stone, and he had to dismount to pick it loose from the hoof. A cool drizzle fell on the back of his neck as he stooped to the task. There was a cloud on the mountain raining down on them gently, while from another quarter the sunshine picked out a gilded aureole of mist. The doctor dislodged the stone from the frog and tossed it over the trail’s bank. He set the foot down so the horse could try its weight, then straightened, stretching his stiff back. Half the column had halted behind him, because there was no room to pass. From this elevation he had an excellent view back across the fields of Habitation Paparel, even despite the haze. It was not only haze, however, there was smoke. Buildings in the main compound were burning.
The doctor pointed and uttered a great shout. Captain Maillart heard him immediately, and saw the smoke stain on the misty sky, but he was at the head of the column and it was not a simple matter to reverse direction on the narrow trail. The cannon, traveling a third of the way from the column’s end, now became an obstacle. Meanwhile, six of the young Creoles who were bringing up the rear now quickly regained the floor of the gorge and began galloping pell-mell back to the plantation, with a dozen of the mulattoes following at a slightly more cautious canter.
Shouting orders and curses, Captain Maillart harassed the cannoneers until at last the gun carriage reached the bottom of the gorge. From here the remainder of the column gave chase to those who’d gone before, leaving the guns to follow as they might. The doctor rode half a length behind the captain. He had drawn the heavy pistol and its weight and awkwardness were interfering with his management of the reins.
At his left, one of the Creoles flinched and slapped a hand to his left shoulder. He rocked back in the saddle, as though his horse had stumbled, but then the doctor saw the bloom of blood across his chest. Helplessly, he passed the man by, still following Maillart at a gallop. Somehow he had heard neither shot. It was queer that the attack had begun in silence, without the usual preparatory shrieking and skirling on conchs. Behind Maillart, he reached the point where the gorge made a final twist before issuing into the outmost of Paparel’s fields. Here they were immediately taken by highly organized and professional enfilading fire.
Four of the Creoles who’d been at the head of the stampede had fallen in this place; one lay half in the stream with threads of his blood flowing into the water. Several of the mulattoes had abandoned their mounts and taken cover among large boulders around the stream bed, returning fire which came not only from the mouth of the gorge but out of the dense jungle above on either side, where those of the hundreds of blacks who lacked weapons were simply hurling down huge stones. Captain Maillart wheeled his mount, crashing shoulder to shoulder into the doctor’s horse. Straggling in the rear, the cannon had been overrun by swarms of blacks who now bore the guns away like ants carrying outsized clumps of sugar.
One of the young Creoles galloped past, stretched out to the length of his horse’s neck like a Cossack trick rider. Behind him came another, riding erect. Doctor Hébert saw one of the mulattoes hiding in the rocks take careful aim at the second young man and fire, at such near range that the youth was carried backward out of the saddle. He looked to Captain Maillart to see if he had witnessed this treachery, but the captain had rallied those of his men still in the saddle and was ordering a charge down the gorge toward the plantation.
Maillart spurred his horse and led the charge with his saber drawn. A black popped up from directly in front of him and took a hip shot with a musket, missing in spite of the point-blank range. Maillart dealt him a crooked saber cut and rode him down. To the doctor’s left another man was shot out from his horse. He saw the sudden vacancy from the corner of his eye, and then a big Ibo scrambled up in the white man’s place. The doctor gasped, the Ibo grinned. Another black swung up behind him. The doctor turned his pistol to cover this pair, but numerous hands reached from the ground to drag down his arm. He struck out wildly with his other fist, and broke free, still holding the unfired pistol, cantering into the open field. He felt a small pulse of jubilation at having carried through the ambush, but just then a bullet creased his horse, and the animal bucked and ran away with him. He was carried off from the other survivors, headed into the burning cane.
A swirl of smoke from the cane field swept through a gap in the citron hedge across the road. A heavy, thick, sweet smell like a pastry afire in the oven. The doctor coughed. The heat was terrible, and flame laced through the tightly woven branches of the hedge. Parts of the hedge itself were also catching alight, consuming. The doctor had just managed to pull in his horse, but at the fire’s crackling it shied under him, reared and tried to run again. Doctor Hébert held it with great difficulty, tightening the reins and twisting the horse’s head down and to the left, its blubbery lips foaming on the bit, its white eye rolling. The doctor was choking and the smoke stung his eyes so he could hardly see.
But then the wind shifted and the billow of smoke swung off ahead of it and that was when the doctor saw them riding almost directly out of the fire itself. For an instant he thought it was a regular cavalry column because the leader wore an officer’s shako, but it was set backward on his head and the man was naked but for that, bare skin all purple black like tar except for the whitened weals from his old whippings, everywhere across his back and arms and legs. Two human heads were slung across the shoulders of his horse, the man’s queue tied to the woman’s long blood-matted hair, in balance like a pair of saddle bags. Seeing the doctor he smiled in a brotherly way and whirled a long cane knife around his head. His teeth were filed to points after the occasional Congo fashion. He rode with confidence and skill. The next man behind him was dressed in a tattered blue ball gown with lace trim at the low-cut bodice and long slits ripped on either side to free his legs to straddle the horse. He had let the reins go dangling and hung on by the pommel of the saddle, grinning and looking foolishly about. A third rider waved a long crazy-looking fowling piece, the barrel bound to the splintered stock with bits of wire and string. Behind these three were more on foot, armed with knives or staves or carpenter’s tools. Out of the smoke and fire reached a severed forearm, impaled on a lance, fingers still wriggling and clutching at the vapors.
So it looked to the doctor, an illusion perhaps. He had his pistol cocked and ready, but the horse kept shying and lunging, spoiling his aim. He gave the horse its head and let it run, full tilt and out of control, holding hard with his knees, his hands tangled in the reins and mane and the pistol pinched awkwardly there too. A stench of scorched blood mixed with the burning sugar; the smell could madden horses, the doctor knew. At the end of the lane he gathered the reins and guided the horse across the corner of the cane field, galloping wildly across the provision grounds. No fire here, only a mat of potato vines and worked earth, where the hooves threw up great clots of dirt as the horse went by. The slope of the provision ground was steep and bordered on two sides with the jungle winning its way back over it again. The smoke had cleared but the doctor didn’t look behind him. His eyes were streaming and still it was hard to see, but he got fractured glimpses, down the hill, of hundreds of the rebel slaves bearing torches to the buildings all around the grand’case. They had flushed the gérant out of the sugar mill and were swarming around him like ants on a spill of syrup. The gérant held his fists by his ears, ducking. They had hemmed him in and were prodding him with the long poles used on the ladles. Thrust and poke, then one man swung a pole far back and let it come down with an awful languor across the white man’s shoulders.
The gérant fell, got up again, hunching his shoulders. The doctor saw another pole rise high. Then a wild ululation and blowing of conch shells seemed to rise up just at his feet, and he turned the horse frantically into the trees. A long loop of vine dropped over his chest and snatched him halfway out of the saddle, then it gave way, leaving him clinging to the side of the horse, one knee crooked where his seat should have been. Coarse hair of the mane scrubbed across his face. With a furious effort he got back astride. Something whipped at his cheek, opening a cut, and a bare rise of shale cleared out ahead. Then he was lying on his back, a crushing pain all through his ribs. The horse had rolled over him completely and lay on its side with two legs broken, screaming in a voice that was worse than human.
No sign of immediate pursuit, but the noise the horse was making could be heard for miles around, no doubt. Who would run toward such a howling? Hair lifted on the back of the doctor’s neck. He was still pinned by one leg under the horse’s shoulder and he couldn’t free himself. For a minute or two he ceased to be a conscious human being; there was nothing left of him at all but a blur of frantic struggle. Then his bare foot popped loose from the boot and he was up and running instantly, although the pain of his exposed ankle was almost incapacitating. Impossible for him to cover any ground like this. He went slipping over the shale, biting his lips against the pain. The moans of the horse seemed a proxy for his own. He looked back once and saw beyond the horse’s flailing shattered legs a single black, old and hunchbacked, his wrinkled face indented with old tribal scarification, carrying a carpenter’s saw. He didn’t seem to see the doctor, who rested, panting, behind a mapou tree, thinking how unusual it was to see a slave of that age in the colony, where most did not survive so long. The conch shell sounded again, very near, and there was crashing in the brush nearby. The doctor took a few more agonized staggering steps and then shot fifteen feet up a tree without knowing how he had conceived or accomplished the action.
Some kind of palm it probably was, with shiny grayish bark laid in triangular wedges, like snakeskin or scales, all pointing up. The doctor had cut his hands and his bare foot on the scales of bark while he was climbing. Still, the bark was the only thing that helped him hold his perch. There were no branches. He had thrust himself waist high into the long serrated fronds that sprang from the crown of the tree. They seemed to rattle with his breathing. There was a particolored patch on one that proved to be a giant katydid when the doctor nudged it with his thumb. Through its artifices it had turned itself the precise color of the palm leaf and mimicked veins and fibers, even a few patches of leaf rust, to make itself more completely frondlike. The doctor wished he had some similar ability.
His eyes went out of focus. He was tired, dazed. Thirsty too. It was uncomfortable to cling there in the tree and still less comfortable to speculate on what might be his chances if and when he ever came down. Supposing he escaped discovery by the blacks, he still had no way to get out of the area. The horse was still screaming in the shale. He imagined from what he had seen that the rebel slaves would be looting or destroying all the provisions on the plantation. Though one could live on the country here. There were fruit trees, other edibles too if he had known how to identify them. He licked a little blood from the heel of his hand, sliced in parallel lines as tidily as a razor could have done it, and peered down at his naked ankle. It hadn’t swollen so very much, and he hoped it was only sprained, not broken, but it couldn’t carry him very far or fast. The horse kept on screaming; he wished someone would shoot it. The pain in his ribs was soft, dull, not the sharp-edged sensation of a break, so maybe only bruising, though he didn’t know what internal damage he might have sustained. He laid his cheek against a shiny wedge of bark and as his eyes glazed over and slid shut he saw again the severed heads swinging across that lead rider’s lap. The woman’s head, he now recognized, belonged to the girl Marguerite; those slack lips pulling off the teeth had been her petal mouth, that matted bloody rope her wealth and treasure of long flaxen hair.
It wouldn’t do to wonder what had happened to the rest of her. The horse was still screaming, hoarsely now. It would break off for a time and then start over. Somehow it bothered the doctor more than anything else that happened all that day and he knew he would be hearing it ring in his head for a very long time afterward, supposing he survived long enough to enjoy this experience or any other. A great commotion started up around the foot of his tree. The doctor parted the palm fronds and looked down. Several rebel slaves in the tattered cotton breeches of field hands were gesticulating at him and chattering loudly among themselves in Creole. The doctor couldn’t make out one word of what they said. The only arms they had were cane knives and he was a little relieved to see no guns among them. His dragoon pistol had been lost, it occurred to him now, when the horse fell or else earlier in the headlong flight.
Another man stepped into the clearing, carrying a sort of pike improvised by splinting a cane knife to a long pole from the sugar mill. The others clustered around him as if he had some special knowledge or authority. When he had spoken one ran off and the others drew a little back. The new man set the butt of his makeshift pike on the ground and stared up at the doctor. He was quite tall, emaciated, with a long face and a sorrowful expression. One of his ears had been lopped to a stump and the other was large and wrinkled like an elephant’s ear. He gazed at the doctor sadly, intently; the doctor found he couldn’t hold the stare. His own eyes went wandering over the treetops. There were other trees nearby he might have better chosen, taller, with branches for his seat and more leaves to hide him from the ground. The tall man said something to him in Creole, a question evidently.
“Comprends pas,” the doctor said. He showed an empty bleeding hand and smiled foolishly. The tall man lifted his pike over his head and probed, without especial vigor. The point of the cane knife pressed into the arch of the doctor’s bare foot. Too dull to cut with such a light thrust but the pressure hurt his ankle. There was nowhere to go. He bowed out his back and worked his knees a little higher in the tree, all the long fronds clashing loudly together with the movement. The crown of the tree bent sideways with the shift of weight and the doctor found himself hanging almost upside down, while the tall man nudged the pike into his thighs and buttocks. The other bystander laughed and clapped and capered a little. The tall man’s expression was gloomy and disinterested, like a bored child teasing a toad with a stick.
The doctor slipped a little way down the tree trunk, which righted itself elastically. But the tall man could now reach as high as his heart with the point of the cane knife. The doctor slapped the flat of the blade away from him, wondering if he might work it loose from its binding and get possession of it, but it seemed futile to try this project or even to succeed at it. Away out of sight the horse’s screams cut off with a gurgling sigh, and then another man entered the area below the tree, riding bareback on a mule. He spoke sharply to the tall man, who lowered his pike and backed away. The mule rider craned his neck and addressed the doctor in passable French.
“You look like an ape up in that tree,” the mule rider said. A red bandanna was bound tightly over his whole head, knotted at his skull’s base, and he was otherwise dressed in surprisingly fresh-looking coachman’s livery. He sat the mule as if he had sprouted from its hide. On his knees lay a pendulous cloth sack full of some sort of plant matter and pillowed across that a short military musket with a bayonet fixed.
“Are you an ape, or a man?” the mule rider said. “It’s hard to know.”
The doctor was too astounded to reply. He just stared back. The mule rider’s eyes glittered darkly under the tight crimp of the bandanna. A sprig of gray hair was caught under the edge of the cloth. He too was elderly for a slave in the colony, late forties or early fifties perhaps. His jaw was long and underslung and full of long yellowish teeth separated by little spaces which his half smile revealed. The mule’s long ears revolved and it dipped its head to nose at the base of the tree.
“Not a soldier,” the mule rider said musingly, studying the doctor’s clothes. “Not a planter. Not Creole, certainly. You’ll be some sort of artisan, perhaps, or one of the adventurers that come here.”
“Antoine Hébert,” the doctor said. The sound of his voice pronouncing the words made him feel faint and giggly. “I was born in Lyons and trained in Paris as a doctor.”
“A doctor.” The mule rider pursed his lips and nodded. “Médecin.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. He still felt like giggling, or weeping perhaps. “And yourself?”
“Toussaint,” the mule rider said, disarmingly, looking at the doctor sidelong. “Just old Toussaint.” A practiced obsequiousness in his tone. His eyes glinted below the bandanna and that simpering note left his voice. “Do you want to stay up in the tree and be an ape?” he said. “Why don’t you come down here and be a man with me?”
“I’m afraid,” the doctor admitted. It surprised him how good it felt to say it.
“Of course,” Toussaint said. “So are we all. Except the pure fools.”