All Souls' Rising (23 page)

The doctor set his glass aside and rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips.

“Can you imagine such bestial cruelty?” the captain said.

“Unfortunately I don’t have to imagine it,” the doctor said. He held his hand out before him flat and planed it back and forth across the air as if to show himself that it was steady.

“What does it mean?” the captain said. “What can it mean?”

“Ours is the age of reason,” the doctor said. He took from his pocket the wedge of broken mirror he’d saved from Nanon’s room and squinted into its minute reflection. “Reason must afford some answer to your question.”

At that the captain only sniffed and rolled the remains of liquor in his glass.

“Hogs may eat their young,” the doctor said. “They sometimes do. But not display a piglet as a trophy.” He put the bit of mirror back into his pocket.

“The woman Nanon,” said Maillart.

The doctor raised his head and stared at him with his bloodshot eyes. He’d been helplessly filling Nanon into Fleur’s situation and now he only expected to hear some such event described more closely.

“
Oui, ta petite amie
,” the captain said. “I happened to meet her before she’d been harmed. I took her to Les Ursulines…”

The doctor exhaled. “You astonish me,” he said. “I passed by her place—it looked as if the slaves had sacked it.”

“Yes,” the captain said. “She’s quite all right. A little frightened. One might look out some other lodging for her. I don’t suppose she’s very well suited for convent life.”

Then over the captain’s protest the doctor went out again into the smoking evening. There was a new tumult in the streets because the main body of troops led by Thouzard had just reentered the town, having fallen back from Limbé in time to repulse a horde of blacks who’d overrun Fort Bongars. News of the garrison’s massacre there…The roof of the house next to the Cignys had caught fire from some floating spark no doubt and a mixed part of slaves and whites were hurrying to extinguish it. But at
chez Cigny
the liveried footman was still at his post and when ushered into the drawing room, the doctor found Madame Cigny playing carelessly with her son Robert.

The boy had undone a little kit of
nécessaires
and Isabelle Cigny was laying out the instruments and prattling to him about their use. A compass, a pair of glass vials, a penknife and a small scissors…That dainty fop, Pascal, balanced on a spindly chair and played a country air on a violin with a disconsonant expression of seriousness. The doctor could not quite make out whether all this insouciance was courage or idiocy, but remembering Madame Arnaud he thought he would do well to reserve his judgment. Soon he found himself telling the story of his trials again under Madame Cigny’s cheerful questioning, though as briefly as she would allow. While he was speaking she quietly removed the scissors from Robert’s hand before he could do himself the injury he seemed to intend and raised the boy onto her lap and held him there. The doctor paused.

“Not to fatigue you with these horrors,” he said. Through the cloth of his pocket he fidgeted with the bit of mirror glass. “I came for another reason…to ask your hospitality, your charity, I mean.” He fumbled. “Not for myself but another…”

“A woman?” Madame Cigny said with her provocative smile.

“
C’est ça
,” the doctor said. He picked up the
nécessaire
box and examined the miniature painted on its side, a couple standing by the steps of a tiny Grecian temple all open to the air. “
Une femme de couleur
…hmmm…her home has been rendered uninhabitable. And it seems unsafe generally now.”

“A woman in whom you must have some peculiar interest?” Madame Cigny lifted a fan and hid her mouth behind it; above its fluted rim her eyes looked dark, almost angry. The violin abruptly ceased and in its absence shouting voices reached them more plainly from the street. The doctor felt that he was turning purple. He knocked over the
nécessaire
box in replacing it on the table and had to reach again to set it right.

“What are her virtues, this girl?” said Madame Cigny. “Has she accomplishments?”

“Why yes…” The doctor bethought himself that most of Nanon’s accomplishments were strictly unmentionable. “Well, she can cook. And sew.”

“
Vraiment?
” Above the fan, Madame Cigny’s eyes turned merry. “Then I suppose we may find some place for her here. Out of Christian charity, as you suggest. And temporarily,
bien entendu
.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said. “May I bring her directly? Or no, the morning would certainly be better.”

When he took his leave he was surprised to find that Pascal would accompany him out. Robert wiggled his plump hands happily, trying to reach the scissors again. And as the parlor door closed they heard Madame Cigny begin singing him a little song in Creole.

“Indeed you are a very droll fellow,” Pascal said when they had reached the street.

“What do you mean?”

“To ask a Creole lady to harbor your mulatto wench?”

“I didn’t see it in that light,” the doctor said. “The town’s in a state of emergency.”

“It’s of no consequence. Though I suppose the ladies must inevitably be weary of seeing their husband’s bastard get in the arms of these colored women. And you must know that our Isabelle was one of the ladies who brought about the sumptuary law.”

“Oh but I have only been in the country a couple of months,” the doctor said.

“At the behest of our ladies an ordinance was passed which for-bade the mulattresses to wear their fine clothes—out of their own doors. Nor any jewelry or ornament…but the women rebelled and refused to go out at all. They refused to entertain. I think you know their touch with entertainment? And so the law was hastily repealed.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said. “You have been most enlightening.”

They parted, and the doctor went on to Les Ursulines where with some difficulty he persuaded the nuns to admit him at last. A nun was present throughout his interview with Nanon and so he remained across the room from the place where she was seated while he gave his news. After all he hardly knew how to comport himself and really it relieved him that they were not left alone. He had no wish to be touched or to touch anyone for the time being, if he could avoid it. And she seemed mute and uncomprehending; her still beauty was a mask; he had to repeat himself several times before he thought she’d understood. Then she crossed the room more quickly than the nun could stay her, sank down and wrapped her arms around his legs and laid her cheek against his knees.

Chapter Fourteen

A
RNAUD RODE UP THE RIVER VALLEY
from the ford, followed by his
nègre chasseur
Orion. The trail he’d been told of did exist but was hard to follow in its twistings along the mountain escarpments, going up and farther up the gorge. Below, out of his sight, he could hear the noise of some tributary stream, rushing to join the Massacre. They went slowly, their mounts picking their way, Arnaud’s horse less easily than the mule ridden by his slave, though oftentimes both men had to dismount to lead them. Twice they found their way barred by obstructions they must clear: a slide of muddy rock and a fallen tree trunk half rotted over the trail. Arnaud had no choice but to put his own hand to the work and at those moments he wished he had brought more niggers along to help, although in other ways they would have hindered his journey.

A cloud brooded over the mountaintop above and ahead of them, and the jungle grew denser and damper, edging its way onto the trail. As the sun passed its zenith Arnaud began to grow uneasy. There was no sign of the men he expected to meet and he dearly wished to complete his return from the mountains before night. Across the gorge from where they made their way was the vestige of a clearing with banana suckers sprouting from what might have been terraces cut into the nearly sheer slope. As if someone had tried to carve a dwelling place and since abandoned it. It put Arnaud in mind of the maroon bands who very likely traveled these hills. He shook his head dourly and pressed on, following Orion, who had now taken the lead. The black stopped short and wrinkled his nose.

“
K’eské sé?
” Arnaud said.

“
Fimé, lahô
.” Orion swept a hand widely around the area and surveyed the gorge with a slow rotation of his head. Arnaud imitated the movement, hoping to catch a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye. He saw nothing, but a ghostly odor seemed to waft his way, not smoke so much as a surreal unlikely smell of roasting meat. He and Orion exchanged a shrug and continued. Some fifty yards farther on the trail Orion stopped again and stared into the thickness of the jungle.

“
Là, là
,” he muttered.

Still Arnaud could not see anything at first. Then at last his eye discerned another clearing within the thick bush above them and at its edge three figures waiting, posed almost as still as the trees, two blacks and what he took to be a Spaniard dressed in the kilt and boots of a
boucanier
of half a century gone, his face shaded out of view by the wide brim of his hat. There seemed nowhere on earth this party might have come from but there they were.

“
De donde viene?
” Arnaud called out half believingly.

“
Donde va?
”

The Spaniard’s voice came from nowhere, or out of the whole jungle all around. Arnaud left Orion holding the horses on the trail and began to climb the slope dividing them. So high on the mountain the jungle was always very wet and his footing was so uncertain in the mud he had to haul himself up by clutching at the trunks of trees. The meat smell blew in his face again. When he reached the others he saw that they had spitted a shoulder of wild pig and were roasting it over a muddy pit. The Spaniard crouched at the fire’s edge companionably with the two blacks, who were pulling off strips of the loosening meat as it cooked and eating it with their fingers.

“Ah, Michel,” the Spaniard said, standing again as Arnaud came level with him. “I didn’t know it would be you.” He took off his hat, and with a start Arnaud recognized Xavier Tocquet, his long mass of hair tied back with a greasy bit of black ribbon, his chin obscured by a short pointed Spaniard’s beard he’d grown.

“Nor I you,” Arnaud said, trying to conceal his breathlessness. In climbing the grade he’d broken into a clammy sweat, though it was quite cool in the jungle shade.

“Have you yet dined?” Tocquet inquired.

Arnaud looked distastefully at shreds of meat and roasted plantains still in their skins, spread on a glossy banana leaf. It was not the plainness of the provender which displeased him so much as the casual way Tocquet partook of it alongside the blacks.

“
Merci, mais non
,” he said. “I haven’t time.”

“Of course.” Tocquet’s deep-set eyes were glittering; perhaps his beard concealed a smile. He was a head taller than Arnaud, big-boned but lean in his loose clothing. His hands were huge; he raised one and waved it farther on. “
Allez, regardez
,” he said.

Arnaud climbed a little higher. From the far side of the fire pit he could see the clearing better: another abandoned cultivation, with the plantains running wild. Here six pack mules in a train were foraging on the jungle floor. Arnaud turned back the canvas from the back of one; beneath, the blunt muskets were bundled like firewood. He went on examining load after load, roughly calculating as he went along; Maltrot had let him know that payment had already been made through some other channel, but still he thought it best to check. His habit. As he went from mule to mule he looked all around the jungle and the borders of the clearing but there was no track or any other sign to show how the pack train might have reached this place.

“Satisfactory?” Tocquet called to him, from where he hunkered over the firepit.

“
Ouais, bien sûr
,” Arnaud said. He walked back to the lead mule and slipped a finger through its halter. All the mules were harnessed in a line and the whole string came behind him docilely, stopping when he stopped and nosing again at the jungle floor.

“You’re welcome to eat,” Tocquet said. “Call your man up if you like.” The two blacks had stopped eating; they sat back on their haunches and watched Arnaud with a quiet animal concentration. Above, invisibly, a cloud drifted over the forest ceiling and the space where they gathered grew darker.

“I want to be off the mountain before night,” Arnaud said. One of the blacks relaxed himself to lift a fresh whole pepper pod from the banana leaf and begin eating it.

“You’ve become altogether a Spaniard, Xavier?” Arnaud said. On the plain or in the coast towns he would not have addressed Tocquet by his first name, but it was difficult to muster any formality now.

“What does it matter here?” Tocquet tossed his head back. His neck swelled against the mass of his hair. Arnaud saw the uneven curls of beard sparse on his throat.

“This place was here before our nations,” Tocquet said. “I’ll trade you for your horse.” He jerked his head at three saddled mules which were tethered to thorny saplings at a brief distance from the fire pit. Arnaud stared at them for a moment and then burst out laughing.

“It’s harder going down than up,” Tocquet said.

“
Vous êtes gentil
,” Arnaud said. He peered down toward the trail. Orion, holding the horse and mule, had pressed himself partly into the trees for shelter from the light spatter of rain that was now tapping down on the leaves overhead. “I think not, however…”

“As it pleases you,” Tocquet said, gazing neutrally at the fat dripping onto the coals from the spitted shank, whose white bone glistened through tears in the flesh.

Arnaud tugged on the lead mule’s halter, meaning to guide the pack train down the steep slope to the trail. He had not gone more than twenty paces before his feet shot from under him in the mud and leaf mold. An arm crooked over a branch stopped him from falling altogether and saved a portion of his dignity. Tocquet, expressionless, snapped his fingers, and the two blacks rose from their meal and completed the task of guiding the pack train down. Arnaud heard Orion speak to them and heard that they answered, but he could not make out if they were speaking Creole or some African tongue; it irked him not to understand what they said.

His boots were clubs of mud, and when he slipped he’d strained a muscle, his legs splaying in opposite directions. He used the branch to straighten himself and took his weight shyly on both legs.

“Go with God, Michel!” Tocquet had risen to bid him good-bye, his huge hands paddling before him like flounder. “
À la rencontre
…” Arnaud smiled at him speechlessly over his shoulder. With care he made his way back to the trail.

At first he took the lead on the way down, while Orion brought up the rear of the pack train. The cloud that had been raining on them detached itself from the mass that clung to the mountain peak, drifted away and dissipated. The sun began to redden, westering over the hills. Making the best haste he could, Arnaud thought of Xavier Tocquet, the times they’d ridden together after runaways in the
maréchaussée
. When the going grew too rough for horses, Tocquet would always shed his boots and go up with mulattoes and the black slave-catchers, quick as a land crab over the rocks. On those occasions Arnaud had sneered at him, along with other whites who remained with their mounts. Now he wondered, if Orion had not seen them, if Tocquet would have let them pass and climb the mountain endlessly…It had been more than strange to hear Tocquet mention the name of God.

More sure-footed, the lead mule kept nosing into the hindquarters of Arnaud’s horse. Yet he was too stubborn to dismount, until at last the horse’s footing failed it on the muddy shale and it fell spraddled across the ledge, dumping Arnaud into the bush. He picked himself up, wiped a hand at the slick of mud on his shirt sleeve. The horse lay with its neck stretched, flanks pumping air, a foreleg broken. The lead mule overlooked the disaster with a supercilious expression, as it seemed. Arnaud backhanded it across the muzzle with all his strength but the mule scarcely bothered to draw back its head.

“Well, kill it then,” Arnaud told Orion, as the black made his way to the head of the train. He turned his back, and waited for the horse’s final sigh of expiration before he looked again. The tendons stretched tight across Orion’s back as he squatted, straining to shove the dead horse off the trail into the gorge. Arnaud watched from where he stood. He felt a revulsion against touching the animal’s dead hide. Orion gave an enormous heave and the horse tumbled over the edge with limp legs flailing at the air and slid down the damp slope, crushing saplings and tearing away vines. A few yards down the carcass snagged on a cylindrical cluster of bamboo and hung there. Orion stood up, gasping from his effort. He looked over the edge and clicked his tongue.

They went on, Orion leading the pack train afoot, while Arnaud listlessly sat the uncomfortable mule saddle. Orion’s mount required little guidance and Arnaud let it pick its own way without interference. Still their progress was slow. They made their way around a deep involution of the gorge, from which the trail wrapped around another outcropping. At this vantage they could again see the horse’s carcass rucked up into the bamboo, but the sight of it was fading in the quickly thickening dusk.

Arnaud saw that they would spend the night on the mountain after all. They camped, if one could call it that, across the trail itself. Out of the dark came a smell of corruption, and Arnaud thought of the horse, though it hardly could have decayed so soon. At last he realized it was the birds Orion had shot, deliquescent in the saddlebag. He scooped them out and pitched them into the ravine. They had not water enough for him to rinse his hands; he scrabbled his fingers in the damp leaves and brushed them off but a vague odor of rot still clung to them. He interrupted Orion’s effort to start a fire; there was nothing to cook and he did not want to show a light. They were not provisioned for an overnight stay but there were some cooked yams in a saddlebag. Arnaud ate one of these without interest and left the rest for his slave.

The rain forest clouds sealed off the sky, raining on them fitfully. Arnaud huddled in his thin clothes. It was unpleasantly chilly, and remained so even when the rain stopped and a rent opened in the clouds so that the stars again appeared. The mules were restless on their short tethers and often Orion had to rise to quiet them. Arnaud did not think he slept at all, but when his eyes opened onto daylight he felt that he had been dreaming something which left him with a strange sense of dread. He thought his wife had somehow figured in the dream, though he could not remember it, and though he almost never dreamed of her.

His leg had stiffened in the night and was so sore he had to bite back a groan when he mounted the mule. Up the ravine, the dead horse’s belly had swelled and its legs stuck out rigidly from it. Arnaud ground his teeth and started down the trail. The day was fair and clear, and the sun and the saddle’s movement seemed to soften his injury. As they descended, the undergrowth above and below the trail grew dryer. Also there was a smell of smoke which Arnaud could not place, and so far there was no sign of where it came from.

Before noon they reached the ragged edge of the outmost hill where the plain and the Massacre River could be seen. Orion stopped so abruptly that the mule he was leading bumped him with its shoulder. He turned and looked back at Arnaud, aghast. Arnaud had cupped a hand over his mouth; he removed it, briefly, to speak.

“
Vasé
,” he said, “Go on.” But Orion remained in his frozen position.

“
M’ap di ou kou l’yé a
,” Arnaud said. “I’m telling you now.” He signaled Orion to proceed.

Orion faced forward and moved off along the trail. Arnaud felt a vague stirring of nausea, perhaps from the mule’s unfamiliar motion. Beyond the Massacre the cane fields were blanketed with a heavy black smoke. Apart from that it was eerily quiet and there was nothing whatsoever to be seen.

At last they came to the river ford and crossed it. Even muleback Arnaud was wet to his knees, but his trousers had dried by the time they reached the priest’s compound. Here they halted the pack train and Arnaud called out but there was no answer. He dismounted with less pain than he’d expected and looked into the
ajoupa
, then limped to the church. Both houses were unoccupied but seemed in good order; there was no sign of looting or violence, though the fires had burned up to the edge of the clearing where they stood. Seeing this, Arnaud felt somewhat reassured that things were going according to plan; fire was an unsubtle tool, but certainly the show of destruction would be all that Maltrot’s cohort had intended.