All Souls' Rising (21 page)

He rode back to the house leading the mule at the end of a length of rope. Under Claudine’s direction the other women were loading a flat wagon with the plate and covering it over with straw and corncobs from the outbuildings, all moving like automatons. Marguerite came dragging from the well with two slopping pails of water. The doctor hitched the mule to the wagon and they set out.

There was no conversation. Claudine drove the mule and the doctor rode alongside, his heels dangling on the horse’s flank. Marguerite lay prostrate in the wagon bed and was perhaps unconscious. Claudine had forbidden her to wash herself at the well with the warning
You may yet meet a bridegroom on the road
. Soot-stained and mud-plastered as she was she was hardly an erotic spectacle.

The other women slumped silently around the wagon rails, staring blindly in different directions, but the view in all quarters was the same. When the doctor had come down this road the previous day it was like riding through a tunnel of cane, but now he could see across the wasteland as far as the warped line of the horizon. Though it was full day the sun had never really risen, as if the charnel fires had laid a permanent stain across the firmament. All around them the blasted fields still smoked dully, and fitful gusts of wind stirred up black masses of ash and blew them in their faces. Some of the cinders were still hot and the women were at pains to keep the straw in the wagon from igniting. The doctor rode along blinking often and painfully with his bare reddened eyelids. His eyebrows and lashes had been seared away when he’d raised his head from the trench to look at the fire the night before. The cut through his palm was swollen and sore. High in the soot-speckled sky a single vulture held a position directly over their heads. Every so often it spun away in an uneven loop and then returned magnetically to its pole.

They had traveled perhaps four miles in the direction of Le Cap when another party detached itself from the horizon of the road ahead. Madame Lambert turned her head wretchedly on the rail.

“Is it the troops?” she said in a cracked voice.

Claudine snorted. But the doctor didn’t think it was such a stupid question. The others seemed to march in a tight mass and a standard of some description was borne among them. In any case there was no possibility to turn aside with the wagon and they were already in plain view, so they simply went on at the same pace as before, Claudine snapping the reins occasionally across the mule’s dun back.

After fifteen or twenty slow-moving minutes, the doctor could descry that it was a band of blacks approaching. He could not quite make out the standard raised on the pole but thought he could guess what it was and well enough he did not wish to see it any nearer. But they were coming on apace. Claudine lifted her chin to him.

“You’ll outdistance them easily,” she said. “They have no mounts,
comme vous voyez
.”

This possibility seemed so repugnant to him it was almost comical. He didn’t bother to answer her, but she clucked her tongue and spoke again more urgently.

“Will you defend us with your riding crop? It’s the men they want to kill. If you save yourself we may come through.”

The doctor hesitated, shifting the reins off the slash in his palm. The band was near enough that he could begin to count its members, and he thought they were probably about twenty strong.

“Go,” Claudine said, her voice dropping to a low mesmeric tone. “I’ll bring us through and we’ll rejoin you.”

Shrugging at her, he took the riding crop from his waistband and touched up the horse, bringing it quickly to a canter, and rode down on the center of the group ahead. If they had held their ground they might have stopped the horse or dragged him from it but as he bore down on them they moved to scatter as he’d trusted they would. As he burst through the shifting line he leaned out to cut with the crop into what faces he could reach. This effort nearly cost him his seat on the horse’s bare back; he dropped the crop and clung to the mane. The thing on the pole tilted toward him with its underjaw unslung as if it would bite. A hand seized at his knee and was torn away.

He had hoped to anger them with the crop and so draw them off, and a few of them did come yelling after him for a short dash before they saw the futility of the chase and gave over. The doctor pulled up the horse and swung it round to a standstill, but the band would not try for him again. They were all moving down the road toward the wagon now.

A
CRAZED TATTERDEMALION CREW
, uniformed in grease and bare skin or in odd assortments of the clothing they’d looted. They bore the arms of any peasant rising: sticks and staves, machetes, hoes and makeshift pikes. Some carried the whips that had been used to drive them. A few had guns and some of these Claudine could recognize from the Flaville house. One went along swinging a fowling piece by its barrel like a club and the others who had blundered into possession of firearms seemed to have little clearer idea of their use.

When they were little better than a handspan away, Claudine let the exhausted mule halt and stood straight up on the wagon seat. Her rust-colored dress clung to her stiffly and her mud-matted hair stuck out in several directions like a Medusa’s snakes.

“As God sees you,” she said in her raven’s voice, “or whatever demon of hell you may worship, there is nothing more to be taken from us. Let us pass.”

The group stopped staring. A Congo detached himself and approached the wagon. A gentleman’s powdered peruke was crookedly perched on his huge shaven head and his ragged teeth had all been carefully blackened to resemble little chunks of coal and he had put on backward the sky-blue dress Emilie had worn the night before. The V of its back could not close over his chest and so he was bare almost to his navel. He carried a soldier’s bayonet stuck through a rip in the cloth so it knocked against his belly and at the back of her mind Claudine wondered how he might have come by that.

He passed her, laid his hand on the wagon rail, and walked around it, humming tonelessly. Claudine felt that he was looking at the other women though she did not turn her head to see.

“Those have had the juice well wrung from them,” she said. “As you may know.”

The Congo grunted, circling around the wagon tail. Claudine could not help herself from glancing briefly back at him. It might have been comical, how his shoulder blades protruded from what had been meant for
décolletage
. He reached into the bed and gouged into Marguerite’s leg with one finger, but the girl lay catatonic and did not stir.

“I think she’s dead, that one,” Claudine said. “Although perhaps that’s what excites you.”

The Congo spat into the mat of ashes that covered the road and continued his circuit. The lusterless gaze of the other women drilled through him on its way to the charred horizon. Claudine watched the mule’s ears revolving, forcing her eyes away from the spot in the straw where the plate was hidden. There was a blue cross over the mule’s dun shoulders where several flies were rising or alighting. As the Congo passed below her again she saw framed in the bodice of the dress gray cicatrice ropes of old whippings on his back.

His eye caught the wedding ring on her dangling hand and he turned back and clutched at it. Reflexively Claudine pulled back, then relaxed. Another jerk brought her down from the wagon. The wig had slipped forward over his eyes and he stopped and used both hands to adjust it, for all the world like a fop before his mirror. Claudine twisted at the ring, but her finger was so swollen to it, it would not even turn. While the Congo still fiddled with the wig, she snatched the bayonet from its cloth hanger.

A murmur ran through the band and the pole tilted, the severed head of Émile Duvel slackly smiling down on the scene with its even bloodstained teeth. The Congo surged upon her, but she indented his belly skin with the bayonet’s point and made him hesitate.

“
Attends
,” she said. “
Regardes
.”

She turned and laid her hand over the wagon wheel, the one finger flattened on the iron-shod rim and the other three pressed down against the side of it. She pushed her weight against the hand to separate the finger more completely from its fellows and better expose the joint behind the ring. The blade rose to the length of her right arm and came down with a whistle and a flash. The edge of it clashed on the iron wheel rim, and ring and finger sprang from her hand in opposite directions.

The stump was mottled pink and white, too suddenly shocked to bleed at first. She tried to ball it in a fist; her other hand let the bayonet drop in the cinder-strewn roadway. “Now you will let us pass,” she said woodenly, and clambered back upon the wagon seat.

The Congo stood with the ring in one hand and the finger white and wormlike in the other, gazing up at her with round vivid eyes. She crushed her left hand into the fabric of her skirt and with the other cracked the reins lightly on the mule’s back. The wagon wheels began a slow turning. The Congo spoke gutturally in some African tongue and the band divided itself silently and the wagon passed through.

By the time they reached the doctor, Madame Lambert had gathered herself to climb onto the wagon seat and take the reins. She would have put an arm round Claudine’s shoulders but Claudine shook her off and sat a little apart from her with her head slightly bowed. Several times the doctor sought to examine her wound but she would not allow it. They kept riding on and on speechlessly along the bald burned turning of the earth.

Chapter Twelve

W
HEN NIGHT CAME DOWN TO COVER US
we left the women and children hiding in the jungle on the mountain slope and we came down on the plantation of Noé, only our band going along together at first, Achille and César-Ami and Jean-Pic and Paul Lefu and Aiguy who was one of us now, also some of the others who had come out to meet us from Le Cap. We came to the edges of the Noé cane fields and we began to see others there hiding in the cane, the slaves of Noé itself and some of those who had been at Bois Cayman with Boukman. They said that Boukman was there himself somewhere though I never saw him. In the cane piece where we were waiting was a
commandeur
of Noé who had been at Bois Cayman and he had some direction to give to everyone but of course none of us maroons had to obey him and many of the Noé slaves did not obey either. They had left their families in the quarters, and we passed them going through the cane, rows of neat cabins whitewashed and well kept, but they were too quiet now, silent as death, though not empty. If I had been a whiteman in the great house I would have heard the silence and known. And maybe they did hear it, but knowing did not help them.

A moon was in the sky curved to a knifepoint at both ends of it, and the sky so clear we could see well all around. I went along between Achille and Bienvenu. Achille had found some powder and shot for his long gun and when we paused he crouched down and loaded it. Then through the stalks of cane we could see the clearing and the candles burning inside the
grand’case
.

Someone down the line from where I waited began drumming on a little drum, a dry rasping sound, shallow, but the Noé
commandeur
came crashing through the cane leaves and stopped the noise. We waited while the quiet returned, the insects singing and nothing more. There was no sign of anything from the house or the outbuildings, only I did see a few house servants come out and go scattering into the cane at the left. It was windy, a dry wind rising and falling and knocking the cane leaves together like blades. I took my cane knife from the piece of cloth that tied it to my hip and tasted the bitter edge of it with my tongue and held it flat across my knees as I squatted. I heard Aiguy begin to hum low in the back of his throat and down the line Jean-Pic took it up and César-Ami and Paul Lefu and others too. A deep drone like a hive of bees, and the Noé
commandeur
could not stop this.

I wanted to swallow but my throat was stuck. As I might feel coming to a woman for the first time, or some special time. The drone was there inside my head and I was not quite Riau any longer and not quite yet Ogûn. My mouth was full of water and my tongue floating but I could not swallow and the water ran out at the sides of my mouth. On the far side of the compound fire broke out all at once in the cane and everyone was up and running altogether toward the buildings and Riau running too. Before this I had thought I would keep near Achille that Riau might be protected by his gun (or if he died then I might get the gun) but now Riau was not thinking about the gun or anything. He whirled his cane knife running toward the house, and felt his bare heels banging on the battered dirt of the compound. The drone of many voices pulled tighter and tighter as if it must tear and just ahead of Riau they were already splintering in the door.

Most of the whitepeople in the house had been already in their beds but for one young man in the main room, who was in shirt-sleeves and had taken off his boots. He had just the time to rise from his chair when Achille fired at him from the hip. Even so near the bullet missed him but Achille had overcharged the gun and the blast of powder blew back the whiteman’s hair and burned his face. He put a hand in his breeches pocket and raised a shout, but no one answered. One of his eyes was blistered shut from the powder burn and the other was brown and swimming with fear. Riau came near enough to see this and he hacked his knife at the whiteman’s head, but the whiteman dodged it partly and the stroke only caught his ear and left it dangling. He didn’t seem to notice this because someone else was already stabbing him between the ribs on the other side and he folded his fingers over the blade and let them be cut to the cords inside as the other withdrew the blade very slowly, all the time looking into the whiteman’s one open eye.

A glass bell that had covered a clock was swept to the floor and Riau saw the shards of it rebounding and pattering back down onto the boards as bright and slow as rain. Aiguy had seized the clock by its brass legs and danced around the room with it, shaking it and talking to it, trying to make it chime. Riau went toward the rear of the house where he heard women screaming now. A whiteman stepped into his path, dressed only in a shirt and a nightcap. His hair was gray between his legs and he was trying to charge a pistol but his fingers were shaking and he had no time to finish before Riau stabbed him in the belly, hardly breaking his step. Riau felt the blade go deep and catch between two sections of his backbone, and he twisted it loose and whipped it out the other side of the long sickle-shaped cut. Out of the hole smoked blood and a chitterling stink. Riau left the whiteman groaning, as some other blacks came up and began clubbing him with sticks. In the next room several had surrounded a whiteman who seemed to be in his sickbed and they were all flailing at him with machetes with no care to strike any vital spot, beating him as much as they cut.

Riau passed them, hurrying. In another room a whiteman hung upside down across a bed, gutted like a hog with his entrails swung from the breastbone tangling across his face, and below his stiffening open hands a naked whitewoman screamed and struggled on her all-fours. The man behind her was Paul Lefu, who kept jerking her up by the hips to meet his thrusts into her hindquarters, wanting her to support herself four-legged like an animal, but her palms would slip from under her on the blood-slickered floor and her face crash down against it.

Another whiteman, the
gérant
or the master, was pinned against the wall by the Noé
commandeur
. The whiteman was naked as if he’d been surprised in an act of love and he kept trying to talk about different acts of kindness he’d visited on the slaves of Noé, but the
commandeur
mashed the blade of his knife two-handed across his throat and held him to the wall with such a slow and steady pressure that it hardly cut at all, but only stopped his words. The whiteman choked and his eyes bulged out, while a second whitewoman, younger than the other on the floor, flung yelping around the room until someone caught her by the hair and threw her down, catching up the hem of her loose white shift and trapping her hands and swaddling her head in the wad of cloth. Her bared body flopped on the floor like a skinned fish, crooked elbows working like fins out of water. The man who’d pinned her so was squatting on her head, unable to see quite how to improve his position, so Riau was the first to fall upon her.

Then the Noé
commandeur
had a new idea and got himself behind the master and throttled him slowly with a lace from one of the whitewomen’s dresses, holding him so he was forced to watch. Each time the lace tightened the master’s eyes went white, and his tongue stuck out of his blackening face while the
commandeur
cried out in a loud voice, “See! I am making a new nigger here!” Then he would loosen the lace and give him air until his eyes reopened, and begin again. Under the strangulation the master’s member rose and pointed and the
commandeur
called out thunderously, “See how the whiteman is ready to take his pleasure!”

But he held the lace too long so that the whiteman died. The
commandeur
straightened, panting and sweating, and let the whiteman fall. Someone cut his penis off and crammed it into his mouth. Riau finished and got up, scrambling for the cane knife he’d dropped when he began. Another moved to take his place, but the white-woman had suffocated in the folds of her shift and she was dead too. A mahogany-framed mirror hung over the bed and Riau looked at it and I saw myself there and Riau smashed his knife handle into the reflection. The glass shattered but held to the frame and the image splintered into dozens of Riaus and Ogûns. Riau shouted and jumped out the window and ran howling up the slope to the sugar mill.

It was a
moulin de bêtes
, powered by donkeys who circled it endlessly, each harnessed to a spoke. The mill had been running when the raid struck, and the mill hands had overcome the white refiner but had not done him much harm before Riau arrived. It seemed that Aiguy had persuaded them to feed him bodily into the mill, and under Aiguy’s direction they had strapped his arms down to his sides with harness pieces and were beginning to push him in feet first. César-Ami and Jean-Pic and some others were happily poking up the donkeys to turn the mill faster. The refiner shrieked as his feet were crushed and thrashed so hard he broke most of his straps, but many hands came to hold him to the chute, Riau’s among them. Riau could not even see the whiteman he was holding; he had reached across Aiguy’s back to catch on, and he could see the scars the headstall had left on Aiguy’s neck beginning to flush purple with his excitement.

Someone had set fire to the building and there was no need to drive the donkeys now. Crazed by the fire, they bellowed and broke into a gallop and the mill whirled the whiteman through all at once into a mass of blood and bone meal on the other side. One of the mill slaves had not let go in time and the mill sucked him up to the shoulder and he was shouting for someone to stop the mill but there was no stopping it. The high round roof of the building filled with smoke. Riau cut a couple of donkeys out of their harnesses and followed them as they ran wildly from the mill.

The
grand’case
was burning now too and when Riau saw flames shooting out the windows he saw on his eyelids as if in a dream the pistol falling from the hand of the whiteman he’d stabbed and smoothly revolving under the bed. He climbed back in through a window whose smouldering sill scorched his bare thighs. The bodies of the white people there were all so cut and torn he could not distinguish who was who, and besides the rooms were full of smoke. He went along crouching with his nose and mouth covered with one hand and entered a room past a slumped corpse whose hair was burning fitfully and felt along the floor under the trailing bedclothes, where he found the pistol or another as good. It was a handsome little weapon with a carved handle and silver chasings and an octagon barrel. Because he’d cast off his trousers during the rape he had no place to carry or conceal it. He ripped a section from a sheet and rolled the pistol in it and tied it to his waist. Still carrying the cane knife, he scuttled toward the front of the house, bent double to keep his face out of the smoke as much as possible.

Other salvagers were looting the storeroom, handing out kegs and bottles as fast as they might. Someone gave Riau a bottle of wine still corked and he carried it out onto the gallery and paused for a breath. The gallery roof was burning but the wind carried enough of the smoke away that the air was breathable. Just then the fire reached the powder in the storeroom and the explosion sent Riau pinwheeling halfway across the compound. He sat up gasping and felt for the pistol; it was still there and his knife was lying near him. The core of the house caved in on itself and burned with the luminous heat of a smelter’s forge. The heat was baking Riau’s face and he felt like both his ears were bleeding. Somehow he had kept hold of the wine bottle and now he broke off the neck on a stone wedged in the earth and gulped at it, not feeling how it cut his lips.

People were beginning to scatter from the compound now, and Riau got up and went down toward the quarters, sucking on the wine as he walked. A naked man tiger-striped with fresh wet blood ran with a torch from cabin to cabin setting all the roofs alight for no good reason but bloodmadness. The women and the children came pouring out looking for where they might turn for some other shelter, but as far as the jungle on the mountain slopes there was nothing at all but walls of fire. A mass of the rebels was collecting at the bottom of the quarters and Riau went there. He was losing the momentum that had carried him this far and I began to feel the scrapes and bruises he’d got in the explosion, though the wine partly numbed him.

After this we went to Galifet, where they had already attacked before, but here the whites had taken warning and were barricaded in the house with guns. I took out my pistol to shoot at them but Riau had not got any powder or lead so I could only snap it empty and put it back where I kept it again. Some of us had already been killed by bullets from the house and their bodies were lying in the open in the compound. Riau took a pair of trousers from a man who was dead there in the yard. After that we set fire to whatever was not already burning and then we went away.

Some were going back into the mountains already and many were drunk on tafia from the houses and some were lying down right in the roadways to sleep. There was no place in the fields to rest because they were all burning. I was tired enough to lie down myself but I didn’t want to be alone with dreams of what Riau had done and seen although Riau wanted still to do more of the same. If Ogûn had done everything himself then Riau would not even have remembered it, but it had been part Riau and part Ogûn and I did remember but I did not know what to think or do. We went up and down the roads all night thinking we might meet some whitemen who were running away but we met no one but other bands. Of who had started with us there were just Jean-Pic and Paul Lefu and they didn’t know what had happened to the others any more than I. The rest in the group were strangers and there was a big Congo wearing a whitewoman’s dress that they all seemed to follow. We kept on walking that way all together until morning came.

There was only a red blaze in the smoke where the sun should have been, like it was one of the fires still burning in the cane fields all around. My eyes stung and ran from the smoke and there was a heaviness on me like I had awoken with some sickness. My mouth was swollen with cuts from the wine bottle and most of all I wanted water, but there was none. This was the hell where Jesus sends people who serve him poorly, and I saw that he had made it here for the whites as they deserved but that somehow we must be in it with them too.