Master of the Crossroads (18 page)

Toussaint’s infantry had swept into the camp by this time, moving at a trot with bayonets at the ready. Biassou’s men scattered in all directions, still groggy from sleep and perhaps believing themselves caught in some communal nightmare. A couple of Toussaint’s men fired into the fallen tent where it flopped with its catch, but Toussaint held up a hand to stop them. He pulled up his horse and waited, straight in the saddle, his sword erect. A neat slit appeared in the canvas and Biassou popped out, holding a short knife in his right hand. He wore his dress uniform coat, bedizened with Spanish ribbons and medals, over his burly torso, but his short legs and his feet were bare. With a glance he assessed his situation and bolted for the trees.

Toussaint rode after him, alone. Biassou’s pink heels kicked up under the long tails of his coat. Toussaint’s teeth flashed white in his head:
Ou
pa blié Jean-Pierre.
His voice was not really a shout, but a speaking tone which carried. You will not forget my brother.

As Biassou reached the edge of the clearing, Toussaint stretched toward him, one hand holding the reins and the horse’s mane together while the other struck out with the sword, cleaving Biassou’s coat from collar to tail, and opening a red line on his back, such as might have been made by a whip lash. Biassou tumbled over the edge of a shallow ravine and struggled out of sight in the bush. Toussaint reined up and let him go.

A handsome colored woman erupted from the slit Biassou had cut in the tent. Shrieking prettily, she dashed in the same direction as her ravisher, running awkwardly with one hand covering her pudenda. The soldiers began to laugh and applaud, and several of them set off in pursuit of this delicate prize, but Charles Belair called them to halt, and they obeyed him. A commotion had begun at the western fringe of the clearing, and five or six Spaniards in civilian clothes came stumbling toward the center, chivied by black soldiers who pricked them with bayonets. One wore a turban, Arab fashion, the others broad straw hats which now hung down their backs by strings.

“Yo vann moun,”
said Jean-Jacques Dessalines. They’re selling people.

He looked at Toussaint and gestured toward the fringe of woods, where more soldiers were bringing a group of some thirty men and women bound together in a coffle either by iron chains or by split poles carried on their shoulders and lashed with twine to form collars round their necks. Slave traders, Maillart recognized; so the rumors had been true. The turban-wearing Spaniard opened his mouth to speak, but before he could draw breath, Dessalines cracked him across the mouth with the flat of his musket stock, splintering his front teeth and knocking him backward to the ground. At some stage of the attack on Biassou’s camp, Dessalines had removed his shirt, as he was wont to do before a fight, and now when he moved with his quick muscular grace the white ropy whip scars on his back crawled as if with a life of their own. He glanced across at Toussaint, who nodded.

“Ou mèt touyé yo,”
Toussaint said. You may kill them.

Dessalines simply set his boot across the throat of the turbaned man who lay on the ground, rolled his weight forward and held it there until the Spaniard had stopped kicking. Bayonets slammed into the bellies of the others. Maillart tightened the muscle across his own cut, and felt the skin shrinking on his face. An odd moment of indiscipline for Toussaint’s command, he thought as he looked quickly away. Other black soldiers were breaking rivets on the chains of the people in the slave coffle, and cutting the lashing on the wooden poles that connected them together in their files. The freed men rubbed their necks and wrists absently; some of the women had begun to cry, and others knelt before Dessalines or the horse of Toussaint Louverture.

By this time, considerable numbers of Biassou’s fighting men had regrouped and were filing back down into the clearing, holding their empty hands high to show they were unarmed and submissive.
Papa
Toussaint!
many of them were crying, and one who seemed to be their leader went skidding to his knees beside the charger.
Papa Toussaint,
nou rinmin ou,
he moaned, and wrapped his hands over the booted foot in the stirrup Papa Toussaint, we love you. Toussaint smiled and placed a palm upon his forehead.

One of the slave traders’ severed heads had been hoisted on a pike, and someone had unrolled the turban and ran in circles through the clearing with the purple cloth flagging behind him like a kite tail. Quamba and Guiaou and some other foot soldiers had torn open Biassou’s tent and were rooting through the contents, kicking over human skulls and glass bottles and clay
govi,
tumbling the ceremonial drums. Quamba straightened, calling for Toussaint’s attention, with a gold watch and chain swinging from one hand and a heavily jeweled snuffbox in the other.

Toussaint drew up to his most rigid martial posture, the saddle creaking as he shifted his weight. “Return those articles to their owner,” he declared. “Undoubtedly he will not stop running till he has reached Saint Raphael—return them to him, with my compliments. We are not thieves or pirates—we are soldiers of the Republic of France.”

Captain Maillart looked at the doctor and found his own astonishment reflected on the other’s face.
“Vive la France!”
the captain shouted. After all, what did he care for slave traders? The words seemed a better fit in his mouth than they had done before.

By nightfall they had swept all the way to Dondon, in the mountain pass above Le Cap and the northern plain. Toussaint raised French colors at every camp along the way; it was the work of moments to eliminate the scatterings of actual Spanish soldiers who opposed them. At every camp from Petite Rivière to Dondon, Toussaint’s lieutenants had been prepared in advance for the coup, so that sometimes the Spanish had already been gutted or strung up to the trees by the time Toussaint’s own party rode in.

That night in Dondon was a subdued celebration, with a double issue of
clairin,
but no more. Between bites of roast chicken folded in cassava bread, Toussaint instructed Moyse, who commanded at Dondon, to do everything necessary to hold back Jean-François, should the latter attack from his camp, now thought to be at Grande Rivière. If any Spanish had survived the day of massacre, they would probably have fled to join him.

After the meal some of the black infantrymen began drumming around the central campfire, and there was song, a long sonorous chanting in Creole, but the doctor and Maillart and Vaublanc retreated to their bedrolls, where they shared out the second ration of rum, passing a single cup among them in the dark.

“It was neatly done,” the doctor said, glancing up at the stars above the treetops and the mountains.

“True enough,” Captain Maillart said, twitching a little as he swallowed his share of the raw
clairin.
“We might ourselves be done in as neatly.”

“What an extremely unpleasant thought,” the doctor said, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Surely you don’t mean to suggest that we should mistrust our commander.”

Maillart looked at him narrowly in the starlight, to see to what extent he was joking. “One might say that we ourselves have been mistrusted,” he said, “unless you were given more prior notice of this turnabout than I.”

“Not in the least,” the doctor said, “but one may also argue that the efficacy of a surprise attack depends on secrecy.”

Vaublanc drummed his fingers on an unraveling patch of his blanket. “Secrecy is something he has certainly achieved,” he said. “I’d give a good deal to know his aims more plainly.”

“The French Republic has declared for the general abolition of slavery.” The doctor tilted his cup to examine the finger’s worth of
clairin
he had conserved there. “Perhaps that is explanation enough.”

“And perhaps it isn’t,” Vaublanc said. “Sonthonax announced abolition nine months ago, and Toussaint did no more than to stake his own competing claim to the fight for general liberty.”

The doctor shrugged and sniffed his rum. “Maybe it has taken him until now to remark the inconsistency of his proclamation at Camp Turel with the actual situation . . . with Biassou and perhaps Jean-François still collaborating with the Spanish in the slave trade, as we saw today.”

“Do you really think he could have failed to notice that?” Vaublanc retorted.

“Well.” The doctor wet his tongue in his ration of rum. “You know I was with him when his coach was ambushed on the road to Camp Barade. Biassou was at the bottom of that attempt, I am certain. And behind his detention at Saint Raphael before that.”

“He jumped from the coach before the ambuscade and left you to take the fire meant for him,” Vaublanc said, “if I remember your reports of that episode correctly.”

“But there was no warning,” the doctor said. “I don’t think he meant to do what he did then, not in the ordinary sense of intention. It—” He broke off, lost in the strangeness of that hour on the road. “It was as if something had come over him, had taken him over, I mean,” he mumbled, shaking his head. Whatever he meant, he could not phrase.

“I see,” said Vaublanc. “Then perhaps he neglected to advise anyone of his plan for today because he had not himself formulated it—he was seized with the sudden inspiration as he walked out the door of the church.”

“Come,” said Maillart. “Are his reasons really so inscrutable? The matter of emancipation must have some weight, and from what Antoine has told us, Biassou and Jean-François have been a long time intriguing against him with the Spanish high command.”

“Not to mention trying to murder him,” Vaublanc said. “Still and all, it seems a strange moment to join forces with the Jacobins, when they scarcely have a foothold left anywhere on this miserable island.”

“May I point out that we are Jacobins ourselves, at least since we left church this morning?” Maillart paused. “You know, Tocquet told me something to that effect before we parted at Port-de-Paix.”

“Oh?” said the doctor. With a feeling of resignation he swallowed the remains of his rum and laid his cup aside as the last threads of warmth spread through him.

“He put it that Toussaint didn’t need to choose the winning side. That he’d already determined that
he
would win, regardless, so his only chore was to pick his partners in the victory.”

Vaublanc laughed softly. “If that’s the case,” he said, “then we are fortunate indeed that he has chosen us, my friends.” He stretched out on his back and pillowed his head on his crossed palms, then added with a tinge of irony,
“Vive la France.”

It seemed they had slept for only a matter of minutes when Clervaux woke them with a shake on the shoulder, although the stars proved to have shifted in the sky. The drums were silent now, and the fires had all been smothered with dirt, but all down the line came the jingle of rings on bits and the squeak of leather as horsemen tightened their girths.

Covering a yawn with his hand, the doctor shrugged at Vaublanc and Maillart, rolled and shouldered his blanket and carried it down the hill to where the horses were tethered at the tree line. His horse turned and whickered at him gently. The doctor fed it a bit of sugar loaf between its lips. It was chilly, and rather damp, so that he shivered and hunched his shoulders up. He changed the priming of his rifle and both pistols before mounting. Maillart and Vaublanc, grumbling under their breath, fell into line behind him.

Two hundred and fifty horses rode westward from Dondon at a quick trot that soon broke into a canter. Doctor Hébert had come to believe that both Toussaint and his white charger must have the night vision of a pair of bats. At times the trails wound clear of cover and their way was lit by wheeling constellations, Bear and Eagle, the Northern Cross, but mostly their way lay under the tight-knit ceiling of tree branches and was dark and tortured and treacherous as the slick bloody twistings of a dragon’s entrails. For all that, Toussaint never set a pace slower than a brisk trot, and often enough they seemed to be riding a full gallop through the pitch black of the night.

Twenty minutes were sufficient to secure Gros Morne for the French Republic. It was still full night even when they reached Limbé, did away with a couple of Spaniards hustled from their cots to meet their fate, and informed the black garrison that they had just become French. Toussaint sent a detachment of twenty-five riders to carry the news up the mountain to Port Margot, then on to Borgne, on the north coast, while his main force rode south again, climbing the mountains on trails so steep the doctor had to lie full length across his horse’s back to help the balance. At Plaisance, Toussaint left Paparel in charge of the newly republican post, and they rode on with hardly a pause. The stars were just fading when they had reached the height of Morne Pilboreau.

Toussaint called a halt, mysteriously, for there was no settlement, only a goat path running down the precipice, then forking toward Marmelade in one direction and Ennery in the other. Perhaps the
kalfou
had some meaning for him here. At any rate Toussaint got down from Bel Argent and walked backward down the line, murmuring a word or two to different riders, laying a hand of the flank of a horse to be sure it had not overheated. The scabbard of his sword snicked over stones in the path as he walked.

Several of the men had begun taking out bread and cold meat from their saddlebags. The doctor saw he would have time to dismount. His legs were rubbery after such a long time in the saddle, and the inseams of his trousers chafed him painfully as he walked. He stood at the trail-head and looked down the dark gulf. It seemed impossible that they should have come so far—full circle or nearly—in the space of a single night. No one could succeed in such a ride; surely he must be dreaming it all. Indeed he did feel half asleep. But somewhere down there in the darkness were Nanon and Paul and Elise and Sophie, as safe as they could be in such a country, he supposed, now that Toussaint had redrawn the lines to surround them. The peaks of the eastern mountains were just discernible against the sky as it gradually lightened into a blue—this was the Cordon de l’Ouest, French now, suddenly, all the way back to the Spanish frontier. All the passways and crossroads along the distance they had come were now charged with the power of Toussaint Louverture.