Chapter Two
THE WHITEMEN BELIEVE that everything is a story. In their world that may be so. I will never live there. What men may do is flat like a road and goes along the skin of the world but because it does not begin in one place or end in another it is not a road at all. At the crossroads is where we must always meet but the other road does not lie on the earth. It comes out of the sky down the poteau mitan and through the earth en bas de l’eau, where Guinée is the sunken island beneath the waters, where the loa wait to meet us. That is the cross and what it means and it is everywhere. The white men say they nailed a man onto it, the man which their god chose.
Their story is not the same as ours. This is a story told by god, but a different god chose me.
In the summer before Boukman danced the death of all the whitemen at the edge of Bois Cayman, we were near the top of Morne Cochon, at the place we call the Pig’s Ear. There was a long narrow way between the rocks and then a wider lower spot and on the slope behind a shallow cave with a spring below it. A good place. At the bottom below the rocks we made a hut where a man would wait and watch for the maréchaussée, but we knew the maréchaussée would never come so high. The going was too steep for horses. A man who sat on the rock above the cave could see a long way over the northern plain to the curving of the ocean where the boats of the whitemen would come and go.
We were few and there were more men than women with us. I did not have any wife of my own, but I had been with Merbillay for three days in a place behind the Pig’s Neck, and I believed that she was big because of me, although Achille did not think so. Achille said that the child would be his and that it would be a son. He said that his ma?t’tête Ghede had told him so when Ghede was in his head, and no one would say differently because Achille was the h?ngan. Achille was small and ugly and shriveled. When he was born his back was not straight and it never did straighten, and at the habitation which he had come from the whitemen used to laugh when they said his name. But he told us that he had poisoned the gérant and seen him dead on the floor of the grand’case before he ran away, taking the rifle. He had the rifle, that was true. It was our only gun.
Merbillay stayed with Achille again after we had come back from behind the Pig’s Neck, and I did not mind whatever she did, although I sometimes would remember how fat and tight her skin had felt, those three days and nights around the peak of the mountain. We had gone out gathering, I much farther than anyone else, to find new trees that no one had shaken or climbed. I went so far I thought no one could be near me, and so when I saw her coming through the lianas that hung from the lowest branch I knew that she must have been following me all that way. When I asked she showed me the white of her eyes and said that she had only come looking for something to fill her and I asked her what it was she hungered for. When I asked, she showed me the soft brown of her eye, so we both knew. Sometimes I could see again how she looked then, later when she was sitting with Achille and I sat on the rock above the cave and looked out over the ocean, or if at night I should suddenly wake and feel my ti-bon-ange traveling from my head.
There is my ti-bon-ange and my gros-bon-ange and my gros-bon-ange belongs to the life of all, but my ti-bon-ange is I, Riau. Waking at night, I would think that I wanted to take Merbillay and go around to the far side of the mountain with her to stay there, or to take her and go south perhaps. Or I heard my voice tell how I might whisper to the others and turn them from Achille, or pick poisonous herbs for him, or give him graveyard dirt to eat. Then my ti-bon-ange would whisper that after all Achille was a strong h?ngan, who served the loa very well, and he was honored of the loa, even if Ghede had lied to him about the child. Also that we had all followed him from one good place to another, and that no harm had come to anyone in following him.
Merbillay changed in her grossesse, and from where I was watching I saw her temper sour. In the spring when we fed the loa, it was always the beautiful and loving Ma?tresse Erzulie who came down into her head, who smiled with joy at the gifts we made her, a madras cloth or a polished stone or a bit of glass to see herself. But in that summer when we danced, it was Erzulie-gé-rouge that took her body, so red-eyed with weeping it appeared that her eyes themselves had been torn out from their holes. Erzulie-gé-rouge sat on the ground and clawed and beat on the dirt with her hands and screamed and cried and no offering could comfort her for her terrible losses. Also we had little to offer her by then.
Every day it was hot and dry and the winds on the mountain would make the skin rasp. Above us the peak of the mountain had turned red and bare. This Morne Cochon was not a true high mountain where a cloud always sits, only a small hill above the plain. The spring began to falter, running a little less each day. The wild pigs had gone lower on the slope, and the dry meat was coming to an end. Our only fresh meat was small birds caught with glue on the branches. Also there began to be a smell because Ti-Marie, who was old and lame, would not go farther than the edge of camp, and because it would never rain.
Merbillay was swollen at the belly but her face and her arms grew thin. There were new lines on her face which all pointed down and at night I knew she whispered to Achille that she wanted to go down to the plain, and for us all to go. My gros-bon-ange did not want to go raiding on the plain, and my ti-bon-ange was silent. I knew that Merbillay wanted to go to a habitation where other young women would be, she wanted to make a tall cone of cloths around her hair, and eat meal cakes and drink rum and dance at a big calenda. About being caught and sent into the cane field with a heavy chain on her feet, she was not thinking of that.
Then I went down to the hut below the rocks and sent Paul Lefu back up. There I stayed for most of two days. It was quiet and I had stopped talking in my head and my ti-bon-ange was silent. The runoff springs had stopped completely, but I had brought a little water with me in a skin, and I did not move much so I did not often need to drink, and I was not hungry. On the second day I saw a pig who had himself become thin, and I went after him for a way, but I could not catch him. Then there was a sound which was not the pig. I hid myself and saw Jean-Pic coming from behind a ceiba tree.
“Riau,” he said.
“Well, you have come back,” I said.
Jean-Pic was coming back all alone, and the sack on his back was wrinkled and limp. If he had got any food he had eaten it on his journey, and he had not any rum or gunpowder either. I went with him back to the main camp. The spring had become only a wet spot on the ground. I got water by pressing the back of my hand in the wet leaves and waiting for my palm to fill. The smell was worse. Merbillay was sitting on the rock above the cave, looking toward the ocean and saying that she wanted to eat a fish. Then she said only the one word again and again, pwas?, pwas?. Jean-Pic had not brought anything back in his sack except for a little cornmeal.
When the sun began to go down to meet the ocean I stood up and crossed over to Achille and asked him to make a vévé for Og?n. He looked at me a little time before he nodded. His face was thin and sharp and he had a long nose like a whiteman’s, but there was no white blood in him. He nodded and picked up a spear and put it into the ground for a poteau mitan. He picked up the bag of meal. There was too little to waste and not enough to save. Achille mixed meal with some ash he took from the edge of the fire and crouched to make the vévé at the left of the poteau mitan. The mixed meal spilled in fine lines from the bottom edge of his hand and he moved over the ground like a spider, making the diamonds with the stars inside and lacing them together, never stopping till he made the last twirl at the corner of the square.
The vévé of Og?n was there. Achille knocked on the ground beside the poteau mitan and stood and raised the asson. The strings of stones clashed on the side of the gourd. Achille turned and shuffled and began to sing.
Og?n travay o li pa majé
Og?n travay-o
Og?n pa majé
Yé o swa Og?n dòmi sa supé…
The asson said aclash-aclash and behind me I heard César-Ami beating the little drum, but there was a stone sitting on my teeth and my mouth would not open. Jean-Pic had begun to sing and Merbillay stopped saying pwas? and slipped down from the rock and began to sing the song for Og?n.
Og?n works, he doesn’t eat
Og?n works-o
Og?n hasn’t eaten
Last night Og?n went to bed with no supper…
Clash-aclash the asson said. Og?n was talking to the drum but my feet were buried in the ground, I couldn’t lift them. My eyes were looking at the sun where it cut down through the clouds toward the water. It was round and red and its edges were sharpened like a knife. Jean-Pic stood up to dance. Merbillay’s hips went back to front and side to side. Then my knees loosened and my feet came free and I was moving with the two of them and with Achille. The asson said clash-aclash and the drum changed. My eyes were still on the red of the sun. I saw Achille jerk his head and he began to sing the song for Ghede.
Mwê li brav-o
Rélé brav-o, gas? témérè
Bat’ banan li témérè
Mòso pul li témérè
Gnu ku kléré li témérè
Mòso patat li témérè
M’apé rélé brav Gédé—
Then we were all dancing because we were hungry and others too were singing the song of Ghede.
I say brave-o
Call him brave-o, a bold fellow
His banana end is bold
His piece of chicken is bold
His bowl of rum is bold
His piece of sweet potato is bold
I am calling brave Ghede!
Achille’s mouth had fallen loose. His head was rolling unstrung on his neck. The asson swung low at his knees like an end of rope. Jean-Pic took the asson from his fingers and propped him up a little from behind. Achille had stopped singing but the others went on.
M’apé rélé brav Gédé—
V’ni sové z-afa la-o
M’apé rélé brav Gédé—
The drum changed. Ghede pushed himself up and away from Jean-Pic’s arm and walked away from him without looking back. Jean-Pic raised the asson high and shook it, clash-aclash. Ghede walked in a wide circle to the left around the poteau mitan. His knees came up almost to his chest as he marched, but his hands did not move at all. His arms were sticking at his ribs like the arms of a wooden man. Ghede’s neck was long and very stiff but he could not make Achille’s back come straight.
I am calling brave Ghede
Come and save the children here
I am calling Brave Ghede—
The voice was coming out of Merbillay, though her mouth was no longer seeming to move and her eyes had closed in on her dancing. The rapping of the drum slowed and began, slowed and began a new speed. Ghede stopped before Jean-Pic and began to accuse him: You have brought no bread for Ghede. You have brought no meat for Ghede. You have not brought any rum for Ghede. Ghede’s hunger is very strong. Why will you not feed Ghede?
I was dancing in a wave, rising and falling. I did not need to move my body anymore because the wave moved it all of itself in time to the changes of the drum. The wave came up over my head and then went down and then again. I could still hear Og?n’s song although no one was singing it out loud any longer.
Og?n travay-o
Og?n pa majé
Yé o swa Feraille dòmi sa supé…
Ghede stood before me, watching. His lips were thin and his eyes were glassy and wide so there was a white line all around the balls of them. Ghede put his head on one side and then on the other. I could not hear what he was saying because I was shrinking far away. Riau was shrinking, shrinking far away. He felt the pushing in his head as Og?n pushed out his ti-bon-ange to make space in the head to put himself. The drum changed and the wave closed over Riau’s head and Riau was gone and there was Og?n.
Og?n Feraille! Og?n turned his back on Ghede. Og?n took up a cane knife and swung it in circles around his head as he walked around the poteau mitan. He put the cane knife down into the middle of the fire and left it there to burn with heat. The sun had struck into the edge of the sea and was sinking in a blood-stained mist. The edge of the cane knife was glowing red hot when Og?n took it from the fire and kissed it with his lips. Og?n touched the knife with his tongue. The hot iron had no power to burn him. Og?n Feraille! He took the shining cane knife and stabbed it into the wet dirt of the dying spring. The hot blade sizzled and went dark and Og?n cried out in a loud voice that he was hungry too and that his hunger was greater than the hunger of Ghede.
ON THE NEXT DAY Riau was tired. The muscles in his arms and legs felt stretched and rubbery, as if he had been swimming a very long way against a very strong current. Merbillay put a piece of mango on a leaf down beside him and went away without saying anything. Riau ate a little of the mango, chewing the pulp a long time. It seemed hard for him to swallow it.
Riau saw his cane knife sticking out of the dead spring and went and picked it up. For a long time he sat with it on his knees. The heat had made a rippling pattern on the surface of the metal and there was a white ashy dusting where the blade joined the hilt. When someone called to him, Riau got up and put the cane knife into his waistband and began helping the rest of us get ready to leave. We had decided to go away from the mountain all together, and Riau was coming too although for the moment it seemed to make little difference to him whether we had decided to go or remain.
We cooked the meal into flat cakes and ate the fruit that we could gather. For two days there was no spring or stream and we got water by cutting vines and draining them. We did not go so very fast because Ti-Jeanne was always lagging. There were two children who could go as fast as anyone, and one boy named Epi who was too small, and so we took turns carrying him. When I had him on my shoulders he held on to one of my ears and said Riau, Riau, whispering it over. By then I had returned all the way from Og?n and I was once more I. On the sixth day we found the small stream called Petit Ruban that runs out of the ravine onto the plain and turns at the edge of the cane fields at Habitation Arnaud.
Then we all hid ourselves behind the rocks because a whiteman on a horse was crossing the stream. He was on the way to Habitation Arnaud but he did not know it. It was plain from the way he looked about himself that he did not know where he was at all. The horse was tired and walked with its head low. Jean-Pic wanted to follow and pull the whiteman down from the horse, but Achille said that it was not wise. There was no powder for his gun and he did not know whether the whiteman had a gun in his saddlebags. Jean-Pic said that he could take the whiteman so quickly and quietly that whatever might be in his saddlebags would be of no use to him but only to us. Achille said that if he failed he would bring out the maréchaussée, or perhaps even if he succeeded, for someone might be expecting the whiteman to arrive somewhere. If we were hunted through the low country not all of us would get away.
The whiteman went riding away down the road and instead of following we turned with the stream and went along the edge of the outermost cane piece, which was bordered by a thicket of orange trees. The stream was low but it was still running and the oranges were ripening there. We all picked and ate a few. Achille made Merbillay go back to pick up some peelings she had dropped. The hedge kept us from sight of the field but when we had gone a little way farther we could hear the voice of the commandeur crying out harshly.
We sat down quietly then and waited until the commandeur had gone by on the other side of the hedge and away into another part of the cane piece. We could still hear the sound of the cane knives cutting not very far away. There was a low gap in the hedge that a dog might have been using, and Jean-Pic and I crawled through. I did not like to be in a cane field again. The cane was very dry, too dry, and the long leaves were brittle when I touched them.
Jean-Pic put his hand on my arm to make me be still and he parted the cane leaves to look through. On the other side a man was bent over working. There were old scars on his back from the commandeur’s whip and a fresh stripe which might have been from that same day. His head was in a tin cage with four foot-long spikes sticking out on the four sides of it, closed on the back of his neck with a rivet. He put down his knife and went down the row to where a woman was working with a calabash of water beside her. When he lifted the calabash we saw that he could not drink because there was a mesh gate over his mouth, locked by a key. He wet a rag and worked an end of it through the mesh and stretched out his lips and tongue to suck on it. Then he put down the gourd and came back to the place where he had been working.
“Ho, gaso brav,” Jean-Pic said, speaking in a whisper that carried like a breeze. The slave jerked his head to the side and the spike in the front of the cage rattled among the leaves. His eyes found Jean-Pic on the other side of the row of cane.
“Be still,” Jean-Pic said. “What happened to you, did you run?”
“No,” the slave said. “I ate. They caught me chewing cane in the field.”
“Ah,” Jean-Pic said. “I don’t hear anyone singing in this cane piece.”
“You won’t hear anyone singing today,” the slave said. “The commandeur may wear out his whip hand but no one is going to sing today.”
“Why?” said Jean-Pic.
“He is killing a woman today.”
“Arnaud?”
“Himself,” the slave said.
“And what is it he is killing her for?”
“She is an Ibo,” the slave said. “Bought eight months ago, out of Le Cap. Last night she delivered herself of a son.”
“Does he kill for that here?” Jean-Pic said.
“The child is dead already.” The slave licked his lips and the underside of his tongue brushed over the metal mesh. “The woman is probably not dead yet.”
“Ah, so that’s how it is,” Jean-Pic said. He asked another question and the slave began to tell him how they planned to meet at night and dance the petro dances. But I was not much listening any longer. Though I understood now how it must have been with the woman and the baby, I was not thinking of that either, but I was remembering those many years when I myself had been dead to life.
THAT NIGHT there was a big calenda with food and plenty of clairin. I danced, but Og?n did not come to me. In the dark outside the circle of the fires I lay with Merbillay, then slept. At dawn I woke when Merbillay slept on, and nearby Achille lay on his back with his arms thrown out and snored. Ghede had carried him all the way into the dark. I got up and walked down toward the grand’case all alone, to the edge of the stable yard where the cabins of the house slaves were. It was in my head that there might be things to take from here, salt or sugar or even gunpowder, but also I was a little afraid to go among these cabins because the house slaves would know me for a stranger. Also I could hear a dog somewhere close by, barking in a loud deep voice.
While I was thinking there at the yard’s edge the horseman we had seen on the road the day before came out of the barn leading his horse. As he was mounting I heard the dog stop barking and then the dog was charging and leaping at the horseman, not barking anymore because this dog was trained to kill in silence. I never saw the horseman shoot, only the pistol pointed at the sky with the sharp powder smell smoking out of it, and the dog lying in the dust of the yard. I did not believe this whiteman had killed the dog of his own power, such a shot from the back of a bucking horse—it was the work of a loup-garou. The dog’s big paws were kicking the dirt and his jaws were snapping and he still wanted to get up and kill the horseman. It was the only thing he wanted. The house slaves had come out and stood near the dog, though not too near. The horseman had gone. Then I went away myself and ran into the cane field.
The hooves of the horse were still beating down the allée. I could not catch him up no matter how I ran, but I knew where the road turned alongside the cane field, and I thought that I might meet the horseman there, if he chose to ride back the way he had come. I went running through the cane field with the broad leaves stroking along my back, crossways toward the orange hedge at the far corner. Then I ran into an irrigation ditch and fell and bruised my arm against a stone. When I got up again my arm was numb because my elbow had struck, and I saw that the horseman had turned and was still going at a canter, so that I would never reach him.
But they were coming into the bottom of the cane piece now, and I heard the voice of the commandeur calling “Chantez! Chantez!” Silence, and the whip’s braid uncurled through it and snapped, and snapped again at the end of a long uncoiling. I heard one voice take up a weary song and then another, I could not make out the words. I got up out of the irrigation ditch and shook myself and began to hurry out of the cane piece.
When I came near the orange hedge I could hear harness jingling and the creak of the wheels of a coach. I hid myself behind the trees and bent down a branch. The horseman had stopped to ask his way and I could see him, sitting his horse, who was still nervous, shifting and turning, like his hooves were on coals. The rider sat well, but he didn’t try to stop the horse from shying. He was a small man, with small neat hands, pale on the reins. He had taken off his hat and I could see that he was balding, the top of his head round as an egg, but speckled and peeling from sunburn. His beard was rust brown and clipped to a short point. I didn’t know why I had wanted to see him again, to see him nearer and remember him. There was nothing strange to see him near. What power he had came from his pistol, I thought then, but inside my head I saw the flash and saw the dog drop, still. I didn’t know. He had put the pistol away out of sight.
When the coachman spoke I was so amazed to hear that voice that I almost gasped out loud. Though after all it was not so far from Haut du Cap. I moved a step or two along the hedgerow to a wider gap and saw him then, sitting on the box. His coachman’s dress: the worn green coat with the brass buttons, and ribbons at his knees. His feet were bare. Both his hands were on the reins and the whip was in the stand. Toussaint had never whipped a horse or needed to.
From inside the coach Bayon de Libertat said something in a thin silvery voice. The horseman bowed from the saddle and replaced his hat and rode by. Toussaint gave the reins a shake and the coach began to creak and jingle along the road. There was white dust, I saw, on the shoulders of his coat.
The slaves had fanned out into the field and I could hear them weakly singing, some not far from me. These were not the songs of the night before, during the petro dances. The slaves were weary, and unwilling. It was a misery to hear them. I crawled through the orange hedge into the road and began to run again, around the three corners of the cane piece and back toward the stable yard. The sun had come up out of the mountains and I felt naked in the bare new light. The coach was standing in the stable yard as I had hoped, and he had already unhitched the horses. Of course there was nowhere to go on this road except for Habitation Arnaud.
Someone had carried the dead dog away, and there was a ragged stain where his blood was darkening on the dirt. People were going back and forth on different errands between the cabins and the grand’case, and I waited for them to stop, but the yard was never empty. At last I stepped out into the yard and began walking toward the barn. A chicken ran squawking from under my feet, and I was afraid then. A woman in a long checked dress looked at me curiously but she said nothing. Then I came under the high lintel of the barn door and into the shadows of the hall.
Toussaint was standing by the water trough at the back, brushing one of the matched pair of grays. One of Arnaud’s grooms was going away from him—Toussaint would have sent him away. I waited until the groom had gone and went a little nearer.
“Parrain,” I said. When I was a small boy, I called him so, and now it came again out from my mouth.
Toussaint looked over the horse’s back and nodded. “Riau,” he said. “You’re thin.”
“It’s dry,” I said. “Besides, you’re thin yourself.”
“It’s how I’m made,” Toussaint said. A thick band of leather bound the brush to his palm. He stroked it over the gray’s back and shoulders, sweeping away the dust of the road.
“Fatras-Baton,” I said. I used the old nickname of Thrashing-Stick because I thought he didn’t like it. It made me angry that he wasn’t surprised to see me there, to think that he had somehow known my presence earlier, on the road. It was not possible. Toussaint smiled his secret inward smile.
“I remember when you were fat,” he said. “Wasn’t that two years ago?” He came around the near side of the horse and took my upper arm and squeezed it. “Oh, but you are still strong,” he said.
“What did you come here for?” I said.
“To drive the master.” Toussaint turned from me, and brushed along the horse’s flank.
“Why would he come?” I said. “He’s a different man from the master here.”
“They have affairs,” Toussaint said. “The times are strange. You don’t know—” He stopped speaking and turned the horse, crowding me over against the wall. A pair of Arnaud’s grooms were walking through, talking to each other.
“You don’t know, hiding in the mountains,” Toussaint said, when they had passed.
“Have I missed so much?” I said.
Toussaint shrugged, and put the brush in his coat pocket.
“It’s all right for you,” I said. “You have the coach and the horses and the ear of the master. You understand what there is in books.”
The horse nipped at the green cloth of his forearm and Toussaint slapped him lightly on the nose. “Stop it,” he said.
“I don’t understand why you are here,” I said. “Bayon de Libertat is a kind master, as it goes, and Arnaud is a cruel master.” I was wondering if Toussaint knew about the woman and the baby, and what he would have thought. But after all it was not so far from Haut du Cap, and I had heard the stories about Arnaud at Bréda when I was still a slave there.
Toussaint took a curry comb from his coat pocket and began to work out the tangles from the mane of the gray. The horse tossed his head against the pulling.
“Yes,” Toussaint said. “And if he catches you, Riau, he will bury you to the neck in the ground and wait till the ants have eaten your eyes.”
“Truth,” I said.
“Where will you go?” Toussaint said.
“Why?” I asked him. “Have you begun to ride with the maréchaussée?”
Toussaint stopped his combing and turned toward me, one hand still knotted in the horse’s mane. He looked at me till my knees grew weak. His eyes looked yellow, in the dim.
“I think we are going south,” I said. “I don’t know where we’ll go.”
“Go where God sends you, Riau,” he said. It was the pompous voice he used when he was reading Bible verses.
“Where else could I go,” I said. We did not mean the same thing, and he knew it. So I turned and went out of the barn, and heard my heart stop.
Arnaud, the master, was standing in the stable yard, switching his cane at the dark place in the dirt where the dog had lain. He looked at me, but he didn’t see me. He saw something, but not Riau; he saw something like a chicken or a horse or an ox. When I could breathe again I walked past him, under his eyes, until I had put a cabin between us. Then I began to run and I didn’t stop running until I had come all the way up the first slope among the wild trees, to the clearing where Arnaud’s slaves had their provision grounds.
Merbillay and Jean-Pic were digging up sweet potatoes with pointed sticks; already they had a heap between them. The two small boys were gathering greens and stowing them away in a sack. Achille stood at the edge of the clearing, propped on his gun barrel, its stock braced against the ground.
“Did you get any powder?” I said.
“It’s all locked away in the grand’case,” Achille said. “No, I couldn’t get any.”
“There was powder last night for the petro dances,” I said.
Achille stared at me. His eyes were unclear, they didn’t meet, he looked like his head was hurting him. “And you know what they did with it,” he said.
“They burned it for the petro loa,” I said. “Yes, I know. When does Arnaud let the people go to the provision grounds?”
“Two hours at midday,” Achille said. “We have already stayed too long.”
“Truth,” I said.
“I would be gone before now,” Achille said, and pointed. “Jean-Pic wanted to wait for you until the sun was there.”
We shared out loads of sweet potatoes and filed out of the clearing. We went along the lower slope, following the curve of the morne, moving as quickly as we could on the uneven ground away from Habitation Arnaud. By the noon hour we were far enough away that we could not hear the wailing and shouting of Arnaud’s slaves when they discovered all we had stolen from them. There was nothing to hear except birdcalls in the brush until the evening had turned purple, and Jean-Pic caught at my arm.
“Listen,” he said.
I stopped, but there was nothing to hear, only insects singing in the twilight.
“No, listen,” said Jean-Pic.
I could hear the others going away from us along the slope, passing out of earshot. Then a long long way away, down on the plain, there was something barking.
“That is a mile from here, or more,” I said. “That is only some habitation with perhaps a visitor.”
“You say so,” Jean-Pic said. “But listen…”
I thought I heard voices then, calling the dogs together, but it was so far, so faint, I wasn’t sure. Jean-Pic plucked at my wrist and led me. Not far from us was a dry gully and above one side of it a pointed shelf of rock stuck out, from where we could look down the gully to the plain. I didn’t see anything when I looked, but it seemed I could hear more plainly.
“Well, they have not shot all their dogs,” I said. Then down on the plain I saw a spark, another spark, a chain of orange lights, and I knew that they were lighting torches.
“They have not,” Jean-Pic said, between his teeth.
“Still, they’re far,” I said.
“And they’ll come fast,” said Jean-Pic. “We have to go higher on the mountain where horses can’t follow.”
So we climbed down from the rock then, and began to trot into the bush to overtake the others and warn them. The sound we made was enough to cover the barking of the dogs, if they were still barking, so far away behind us. Under the trees it was already very dark, so that running at arm’s length from Jean-Pic I could hardly see him. I didn’t know how the others had gone so far ahead of us. We must have waited longer than we knew, looking over our back trail. Then there was a sound, a crashing sound very near, and I went up a tree so fast it seemed that it had sucked me onto its highest branch.
In a tree nearby I could hear Jean-Pic breathing, it made me angry how loud he breathed. When I looked for a long time I could just see him plastered against the gray-green gleaming of the bark, with his sides blowing in and out like the skin of a frog. The noise had stopped. Then I heard it again—it was in one place—a thrashing sound, and someone groaned. It wasn’t far away at all.
Slowly I slipped down from the tree. The insides of my legs and arms were sore from the sudden climb.
“Where are you going?” Jean-Pic said.
“It’s not them,” I told him.
Jean-Pic hissed at me, no word, just anger—fear.
“It isn’t them,” I said, and I went back the way we’d come. I could hear the thrashing stop and start again, and stop, to the left down the slope from the path we had broken for ourselves. The sound of the maréchaussée was still far below, but I thought I knew what they were after now. Not us. Or not only us. I smelled him before I saw him, the sweat from running and the sweat from fear. He had fouled himself too. My toe found a little wet at the bottom of a drying stream and I stopped and saw him there on the other bank where I had expected, bent double with the spikes of his tin head-stall tangled in the vines. He was trying to be still now, because he felt that I was near, but I could still hear the sob and the catch of his breath.
It surprised me he had managed to come so far. I remembered him, the night before—they had unlocked the gate over his mouth when he left the field, so he was eating meal cakes, and drinking clairin, and he had danced for a long time, tossing his long-pronged head whenever the powder flashed with the drumrolls. I moved a little closer now, and he jerked away like a horse shying. His back and legs were scratched and bleeding from running in the bush.
“Be still,” I said. He jerked and pulled a little away. The whites of his eyes rolled in the headstall. I saw they had locked the gate again. He must have been running a long time without water.
“Kill him,” Jean-Pic said. He had come up behind me on cat feet.
“I don’t know,” I said. The slave made a strangling moan with many syllables but no words and began to thrash his head from side to side. The vines tightened on the spikes of the headstall. At the back of his neck where the rivet closed the tin there was a thin line of blood.
“It’s a trick,” said Jean-Pic. “He came to see which way we would go.”
“Maybe not,” I said. The slave stopped moving and lay there gasping his crying gasp.
“He brought them after us,” Jean-Pic said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Kill him or leave him,” Jean-Pic said. “You know what’s right.”
I took my cane knife out and looked at the edge of it. Above, the sky had silted over, a damp black. There was a single star.
“Go on,” I said to Jean-Pic, and again I said, “Go.”
Then Jean-Pic went padding off into the trees, and soon I heard him start to jog. The cane knife came up and up and pointed at the one high star. I thought, is it my z’étoile, or his? When we die the ti-bon-ange must leave the body, but that is only the beginning of the journey, and the z’étoile is master of where the ti-bon-ange will go and of what things it will do. I felt the handle turn in my hand and when the knife struck it was with the blunt edge, clanging on the rivet. The slave’s head bounced and sprang back from the snarl of vines, but the rivet held and I saw the knife rise and chop down once again and then the rivet broke. So I bent over and pulled the tin of the headstall apart. His head came free and he slid down the bank and lay in the creek bed with his face in the wet. He breathed and then his tongue pushed out and began to lick at the damp leaves.
The cane knife swung down at my side. The cage of tin was twisted up among the vines, broken edges shining in the starlight. Two or three smaller stars had come out next to the one big one and away down the mountain I heard the dogs’ voices toll as they found sign.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”
He spoke without lifting his head from the mud. “I can’t anymore.”
So I kicked him in the ribs a time or two until he rolled up on his knees. “Get up and run,” I said. “You don’t yet know what you can do.”