All Souls' Rising (20 page)

Duvel gave over the dance just then, pleading breathlessness, and strolled over to lean on the spinet. Héloïse and Madeleine faced each other, mirror images almost, and arms akimbo, then shrugged and took one another as partners. Doctor Hébert, quite red in the face, ferried Emilie around in a ragged ellipse, apologizing for his clumsiness even as he committed it. The spinet made a rattling sound to Claudine’s soured ear, like teeth shaken in a jar. A foolish smile spread over his face, Duvel was admiring the movement of Marguerite’s plump fingers over the keyboard, but suddenly she broke off and looked up crossly.

“What
is
that gruesome noise?” And suddenly she was on her feet; Claudine had never seen her respond to anything so quickly. Indeed the crackle was much louder than before and with the spinet silent it seemed to fill the room, along with a roaring behind it. Monsieur Lambert shifted in his seat, the ghost of a frown crossing his face. One hand pressed over her pale throat, Marguerite began walking to the door. The others remained frozen as she passed onto the gallery, but Claudine rose immediately and followed.

A dry wind blew toward the house, pushing a low roller of black burned-sugary smoke ahead of it. It was the wind that roared, and mixed with that was the feverish snapping of the burning cane, and something else: a low throbbing ululation like the wind howling over a broken bottleneck. The wind shifted and the billow of smoke rolled away. The gallery was flooded with a hot orange light, though the fire was still far back in the cane field. In silhouette against the blaze Claudine saw a larger host of devils than any hallucination had figured forth for her till now.

Then she realized that Marguerite saw them too. It must be that ululation came from human throats. Marguerite screamed, staggered down the steps and began running across the compound parallel to the fire. After hesitating a bare instant, Claudine pinched up her skirts in one hand and went after her. Unused to haste, the girl ran awkwardly and was easily overtaken. Claudine snatched her hair at the nape of her neck and hurried her along a great deal faster. The compound was bordered on three sides by cane fields and Claudine rushed them into an area of cane that was not yet alight.

T
HE DOCTOR GAINED THE GALLERY
a step behind Duvel, and by then the rebel slaves were already pouring up the steps and vaulting up over the railings. Duvel stopped with his mouth agape. A red-skinned man crouched and took a careful aim at him with a long nail spliced to a staff and drove it hard into Duvel’s neck. Duvel hissed, air rushing from his trachea. The red man drew back and made another strike and when he withdrew the nail this time, a crimson jet blasted from Duvel’s throat like wine spurting from a heavy, punctured skin. The bloodstream splattered a gallery post and passed beyond it into the darkness and indistinct firelight. Experimentally, Duvel placed a forefinger over the tiny wound, and a fine spray arced out to stain several of his attackers.

Someone struck at the doctor with a cane knife and he interposed his open hand. The blade cut deeply into his palm, though for the moment he did not feel it. Duvel had fallen on his side; his eyes showed white and blood was pooling darkly round his cheek and jaw. In the cane the flames shot suddenly high and brightened all with a hellish clarity. Monsieur Lambert appeared in the door frame. His lips moved in some speech the doctor could not hear for the choral voice of the rebels throbbing in his ears. Lambert’s hands were flattened before him in a mosaic gesture as though he would calm a turbulent sea. Meanwhile the blacks were tumbling through the windows at either side of the door, carrying away the mosquito nets as they burst through, and within all the women had begun screaming together. The doctor glanced through the naked window frame and saw a tall lean man with his head swathed in mosquito netting like a beekeeper’s veil snatching at Héloïse and divesting her of all her clothing in a single rip. Another smashed on the spinet keys with his fists, releasing loud discordant clusters of notes, while Héloïse shrieked and jigged up and down in a parody of the dance they’d enjoyed earlier, her white buttocks fluttering.

An enormous ink-black rebel whose muscles shone with oil swung a long-bladed hoe down at Monsieur Lambert’s head. Still in the midst of his temporizing discourse, Lambert sidestepped. The hoe fell on his collarbone and the doctor heard plainly the crack as it broke and Lambert pitched forward on his knees. He was surrounded, but the rebels confused themselves, all striking at once with their blades tangling in midair. Lambert’s hands were upturned now; a palm filled with blood. For an instant the doctor caught his liquid eye. The hoe swept down again, the blade raking away the scalp to expose the hideous whiteness of his blood-skeined skull. Under the force of the blow Lambert’s head dropped forward and remained. A rebel directly in front of the doctor drew back his
coutelas
to swing at the exposed neck, but the doctor locked an arm around his throat and dragged him away.

The main wave of attackers had passed on into the house or beyond it to the sugar mill, and no one seemed to notice the struggle the doctor was engaged in. As the rebel tried somehow to bring his knife to bear, the doctor tightened his stranglehold and overbalanced backward. His hip broke the rail as they both fell over into a patch of darkness which the house corner shaded from the fire. They wrestled there, the doctor’s hands slipping on the rebel’s oiled body, feeling the first pain of his slashed palm. His choke hold was broken but the other had apparently lost his knife and was content to run away once he had freed himself. A cloud of smoke blew over and the doctor gathered himself on hands and knees, coughing and spitting. When the smoke swirled away he saw Marguerite at the border of the cane field east of the compound. The white dress she wore picked her out plainly even though the fire did not much illuminate that area, and she was struggling as it looked with some darker figure. He scrambled up and ran to her.

What seemed an attacker was only Claudine in her rust-red dress, hustling the hysterical Marguerite along willy-nilly through the cane. The doctor drew abreast of them. Claudine was moving with a firm purpose though he had no idea where she thought she was going. Then some hundred yards ahead of them another fire exploded, leaped high and fanned on either side. The ululation rose again like a wall and there was a more fragmentary hooting on conch shells. The doctor swung an arm at the fire, staring at Claudine.

“Keep moving,” she said, her face twisting as she splattered his face with spittle. “The ditches—”

Marguerite’s feet turned under and her weight sagged. The doctor caught her other arm and went with Claudine half dragging the girl along between them. He had no notion why they should run toward the new fire and the rebels they could hear approaching them from it, except there was no good reason to remain at the compound either. Ahead, the marauders were so near that the single wall of sound they uttered began to separate into individual voices howling this or that. But before they came in sight the doctor’s foot slipped out from under him and he slid down on his coccyx into a narrow irrigation trench.

Instantly he understood, and flattened himself facedown to the bottom of the ditch. With the drought there were only a few inches of water here; it was a hot sticky mud hole. Claudine was lying almost nose to nose with him, her arm across Marguerite’s back. The girl said something and began to raise her head, but Claudine mashed it back into the mud and held it there, fingers digging into her scalp. Small clouds of mosquitoes moved toward them from either direction along the trench. Claudine’s eye glittered in an almost reptilian way. The doctor would have liked to kiss her. Mud was sucking at his ear hole and he could see out of only one eye. Beyond the women’s prostrate bodies, twenty or thirty yards along the ditch, a new band of blacks began to jump the barrier, lit now by the fire in the other
carré
. A couple of them stumbled or fell crossing the ditch but even then they hardly looked about themselves, so great their haste to reach the compound or outdistance the fresh fire racing up behind them.

When he thought they had all passed the doctor raised up on his elbows, in spite of Claudine’s angry glance, and looked to where they’d come from. The fire was lacing through the standing cane stalks and, with the wind behind it, the speed of its advance beggared belief. A blast of heat parched his eyeballs; he dropped his face into the ditch. He’d thought the trench must halt the blaze, but the flames were shooting out laterally as if thrust from dragons’ throats, across and into the cane on the other side. For a minute or more the three of them were overshot by long sheets of fire. A flight of mosquitoes combusted all at once with no flame touching them, only from the pure heat; they glowed like transfigured ideas of mosquitoes for an instant and were gone. The fire caught at Marguerite’s loose hair and tore among Claudine’s crooked fingers there. The doctor scooped a handful of sludge from under himself and doused it.

The fire had passed. A spiral of silence twisted at the doctor’s ear as the roar of it receded toward the compound. He felt with his fingers around the trench. Most of the moisture had been baked away and the walls of the ditch were parched and cracking. The wind began to silt it in with flat flakes of hot ash. He could hear the shrieks of the women in the house, and horses screaming in the stable, which made him wonder if it too were afire. But now the fire was lowering at the edge of the compound, where the cleared area was too large for it to pass. At the edge of it three of the blacks did a wild dervish dance together, each holding a small keg of rum and alternately drinking from the bunghole or splattering liquor to boost the dying flames.

Inside the house the cries of the women kept ascending as if they would eviscerate themselves with screams. Marguerite lifted her fire-blackened head to peer over the rim of the trench, but there was little to see; the house was dark.

“What are they doing,” she quavered. “What are they doing there?”

“They’re getting married,” Claudine snapped. “Didn’t you want to get married too?”

The girl began to moan, her teeth chattering, and Claudine pushed her face down in the dirt. “You’d best keep silent,” she muttered stiffly, “or someone will come along and
marry
you.”

A
T DAWN, WHEN IT HAD
everywhere been silent for an hour, the three of them crawled out of the ditch and approached the house across the ashen waste of the cane field. None of the buildings had been destroyed except the sugar mill, which had been dismantled board by board and all the clay forms shattered. It seemed the horses had all been stolen or driven from the stable, though it had not burned. The bodies of Lambert and Duvel lay tumbled in the yard below the gallery, identifiable chiefly by their clothing, as neither any longer wore a head. Reluctantly, the doctor followed Claudine into the house. As they entered, Madame Lambert stirred on the floor and moved her hands to cover her blood-smeared thighs.

“It is worse than death,” she said, but tonelessly.

“It is not,” said Claudine. “But if you don’t stir yourself you’ll have a chance to make the comparison. You must get up and look to your children.”

The Lambert girls were huddled in a corner, tangled with each other like a pile of terrorized puppies. Roughly Claudine hauled on their limbs to make them rise. At the opposite end of the room, the doctor looked them over, with what detachment his professional point of view could still achieve. They were bruised and torn between their legs but he thought no direct attempt had been made against their lives. Their nakedness was that of corpses; their eyes stared through and through him as though he were made of glass. Behind him, Marguerite uttered a choking sound and collapsed sobbing in the doorway.

“
O tais-toi, tu m’enmerder
,” said Claudine. “Go find some clothes to put on these people—anything, sacks…”

This seemed pretext enough for the doctor to retreat into the rear of the house. In the room he’d been meant to occupy he found his spare clothing had all been taken and the pistol was gone from his saddlebags. His medicaments had been scattered but few removed; he gathered them back into their drawstring pouch. In another room he found strewn about some articles the women might wear but when he came back to the main chamber they had already managed to cover themselves with shifts and trousers the slaves had discarded during their sack of the premises.

Claudine had entered the broken storeroom and stood there clucking her tongue. “Look,” she said as the doctor joined her. She peeled back a cloth covering from a silver coffeepot. “The Flaville plate—they left a fortune here.”

“Strange,” the doctor said. He followed Claudine out onto the gallery. It was in some ways an odd pattern of looting. They’d made off with all the wine and rum and everything resembling a weapon. The women had been stripped of their personal ornaments and yet a pair of solid gold candlesticks were abandoned in plain sight in the main room.

“Well, we may save that plate at least,” Claudine said.

“Along with our lives, if luck favors us,” said the doctor.

“Yes, and what are you standing there for?” she said. “Go and catch that horse.”

The doctor looked along her pointing finger and recognized his own mount, Espoir, picking his way along the edge of the burned cane field, trailing the broken reins of his bridle. Someone had tried to ride off on him then, and had probably been thrown. He was unsaddled and spooky as could be. Each time the doctor was within a hand’s reach of him he picked up his head and went jittering off. At last he was able to catch one of the dragging reins. He stroked the horse till he was reasonably calm, led him into the stable to search for a saddle, but there was none. On the way out he picked up a riding crop from the dirt and stuck it into his waistband. He mounted bareback and managed to overtake and noose a dun-colored mule he saw wandering near the wreck of the sugar mill.