Master of the Crossroads (86 page)

Dessalines, meanwhile, pressed his advantage, via his usual tactic of moving his men at horrible speeds over terrain believed by the enemy to be impassable. Soon he had occupied the heights surrounding Petit Goâve, where the Rigaudins had retreated. They might also have been annihilated there, except that their commander sent two of his men to an outpost in the guise of messengers from Toussaint—Dessalines was to wait for reinforcement before he advanced. The ruse produced enough hesitation for the Rigaudins to slip out of the trap and regroup at the bridge of Miragoâne.

That was a strong position, especially after Pétion had cut the bridge and dug entrenchments on the bank he defended. The most suicidal determination of Dessalines’s men could not carry them across the ford, under the constant barrage of grapeshot which refilled the hospitals every day and transformed the surrounding swamps into a cesspool of blood and putrefying corpses. A thousand men were lost in a single day.

While continuing this frontal assault, Dessalines sent a part of his force across the inland mountains and down through a mangrove swamp to the rivershore. Rigaud had raised no defense in this area, but the swamp was not so impenetrable as he had believed. By night, Dessalines infiltrated more than half his army to the rear of the Rigaudins. At dawn, Pétion saw that he had been outflanked; he spiked his cannon and abandoned his position at the bridge. Rigaud, with a separate force directly under his own command, engaged his enemy on a field nearby, but by the end of the day was obliged to give up Miragoâne. Dessalines pursued the Rigaudins as far as Saint Michel and had soon taken this town as well.

There, Toussaint ordered him to halt, on the theory that Rigaud must now be ready to sue for peace. But Rigaud had no such intention. Wherever he was made to withdraw, he left the land a desert, burning the fields and fouling the wells with the carcasses of dead horses or cattle.
Leave the trees with their roots in the air
was always his parting order.

Toussaint had moved south to Port-au-Prince, where he was obliged to unravel another conspiracy to assassinate him. Furious at the latest attempt, he sent Dessalines back to the attack. Of the thirty thousand men that had composed the army of the north, less than half now remained effective, but still the Rigaudins were outnumbered by a factor of ten to one and were roundly defeated on the plain called Fond des Nègres.

“Is he mad, or drunk, or both at the same time?” Captain Maillart inquired at the end of the day. Seasoned soldier that he was, the carnage had made him miserable.

“Who can tell?” the doctor answered, as he scrubbed the blood of the wounded from his forearms. “Maybe he is insane with pride.” He dried off, stretched out on his back and looked up at the night sky. “Or maybe Toussaint was right, that Rigaud truly believes his is the superior race. After all, there was a time when the French army and the colonial militia believed that one white man was the equal in battle of ten, or twenty, or fifty blacks . . .”

At that the captain bit his lip and glanced across the campfire at Arnaud, who volunteered no reaction; perhaps he had not heard.

Rigaud had fallen back to the town of Aquin, where he ranged the remnants of his men for another hopeless battle on the open field. Mounted at the head of his cavalry, he led charge after charge, breaking against the mass of Dessalines’s troops like surf against the ironbound cliffs, till all his clothing was ragged with bullet holes. In the end all of his men were scattered, and Rigaud himself was driven to headlong flight, amid a general rout, all the way to the town of Les Cayes. Over the debris of the battle, Dessalines’s men pursued the work of extermination against a few isolated pockets of Rigaudins who’d failed to find any escape route.

In the last hour of that day, Arnaud appeared at the hospital with a summons for the doctor. Dessalines wanted him on the battlefield. When the doctor asked his reason, Arnaud only shook his head. Somewhat ill at ease with this mystery, the doctor brought Riau along with him, leaving Guiaou to manage the wounded as best he might.

Flanked by Arnaud and Riau, he crossed the field of battle, which was littered everywhere with corpses and the carcasses of animals, and still adrift with clouds of smoke, though most of the shooting had stopped. Waste, waste was everywhere. How much Toussaint objected to such wantonness, the doctor thought, and touched the pistols on his belt. Here and there were tatters of musketry, shouts of rage and other cries. Amid a cluster of men ahead, the doctor saw the winking metal of Dessalines’s plumed helmet.

Despite the brutal desperation of all that campaign, Dessalines’s appearance had assumed a greater and greater magnificence throughout. But now he was divesting himself of his splendor. A lieutenant stood by, receiving his vestments: the helmet polished to a mirror sheen, the lavishly decorated uniform coat. Finally the shirt as well. Over the heavy muscles of his back, the net of ropy white whip scars contracted and released.

Some half a dozen Rigaudins stood by, surrounded by three times their number of the men of Dessalines. They had been disarmed but not otherwise restrained. One of them, a
sacatra
by his skin tone, sat cross-legged on the ground, eyes fixed dully on his lap, his right hand clasped over a seeping wound on his left arm. The doctor’s attention was drawn to this. He did not know why he had been summoned. He did not want to look at Choufleur, who stood balanced forward on the balls of his feet, his coat removed and his shirt loosened, holding his cavalry sword with its point toward the ground.

Maillart was in charge of the guard party; the doctor shot him a questioning look, but the captain seemed unwilling to risk so much as a blink or a shrug. As the lieutenant handed Dessalines his sword, a sort of sigh ran round the men, and they shifted and widened the circle. With the swirling motion common among the black stick fighters, Dessalines rotated the blade one time around the outside of his arm. When the blade came up, it caught the red light of sun.

Darkness. The doctor coughed—smoke had got caught in his throat. The dark was only his exhaustion, rushing up behind his eyes. Why had he been called here? He did not want to be here. Choufleur’s face was very pale, though streaked with smoke and dirt. He was looking only at Dessalines, not at the man’s black visage but at the space between hip and shoulder, whence the blade would come. Choufleur’s right foot advanced, sliding over blood-caked dirt. His blade was low. Against the pallor of his face the freckles were compressed as husks of burned-out stars.

Dessalines stepped in screaming, the blade whipping around like a tornado, but Choufleur stopped it with a more economical parry, and slashed down on Dessalines’s blade at his hand, his teeth showing a tight white line with the movement, but Dessalines’s hilt held. They separated. Choufleur circled to the right. Dessalines’s expression clouded, compressed. He closed, the force of the rush pressing Choufleur against the ring of onlookers, which gave way to give him room. Again the thrust was parried, and Choufleur slipped under the blade with a back slash against Dessalines’s calf, which cut into his boot leather.

It was clear enough that Choufleur was the better fencer. Dessalines, though heavier, was certainly as quick on his feet, but Choufleur had the more practiced arm and hand. Dessalines’s men had begun to clap and sway, humming to their rhythm. The Rigaudins dared make no such demonstration in favor of their champion. The wounded man had been excluded from the circle, and between the legs of the others the doctor caught just a glimpse of him. He had lain or fallen on his side, with the wounded arm uppermost.

Dessalines rushed, with a complex under-and-over attack. Choufleur was inside the pattern of his sword, a little ahead of it even, for as Dessalines’s blade came down, the point of Choufleur’s sword opened a red line on his inner forearm from the elbow to the wrist, then caught the hilt of Dessalines’s weapon and twirled it out of his hand.

Amid the excited shouts of the Rigaudins, the doctor thought he heard Maillart’s cry of approbation—the sheer skill of the maneuver—but when he looked that way the captain had stifled his approval, his eyes lowered. Choufleur’s blade was centered upon Dessalines’s navel. The insolent smile. Perhaps a yard’s distance between them. Dessalines stood with his wounded arm forward. If he was concerned at the shift of position, he did not show it. When he flexed the fingers of his right hand, blood came running into his palm. Unarmed, he moved to close.

Choufleur stepped back and dropped his own sword on the ground.

After an instant of shocked silence, the black soldiers began to clap and sway again. The doctor glanced at Riau, who wore his most masked expression. Riau’s body swayed with the others around him, bending with the wind that moved them all, though he had not taken up the clapping or the chanting. Dessalines and Choufleur moved around each other. A rush and they were joined, struggling at each other’s shoulders, bowed legs straining. Dessalines’s wounded forearm smeared an arc of blood all over the back of Choufleur’s shirt.

Then the two men were on the ground, tumbling over each other, and somehow a knife had come into play, in Choufleur’s hand; it hummed slightly, shallowly, over Dessalines’s back, unrolling a new hammock of red lines over the white lines of the whip scars. Dessalines did not seem to be much affected by the deft cuts. He got an arm around Choufleur’s back, lifted and dropped, driving his shoulder into Choufleur’s midsection. Choufleur’s mouth came open, tongue thrusting out. When they separated, Dessalines held the knife.

Darkness. Once the doctor’s eyes had cleared, he saw Dessalines and Choufleur both on their feet, circling, Choufleur breathing painfully by the look on his face, bruised from the deep blow to his chest. His movement had become a little dull. Dessalines feinted with the knife, then grinned and threw it up and away, out of the ring. Gone. Beads of blood stood out all over his back, on the fresh lines which had just been cut. He ran his left thumb along his inner forearm, tasted his own blood and charged.

Choufleur’s abdomen was caught between Dessalines’s scissoring legs, so that he writhed and strained for breath. Twisting, he got his hip engaged against Dessalines’s thigh, caught a breath—his arms were useless, pinned in a bear hug against his sides. He sank his teeth into the black man’s throat.

The clapping and chanting stopped. There was a horrible, motionless moment. The witnesses closed tighter around the men who struggled on the ground. Dessalines strained and squeezed with arms and legs, but Choufleur’s jaws did not loosen. The doctor wondered with an astral detachment whether the teeth might not actually find an important blood vessel.

Dessalines took one hand out of his octopus grip and caught hold of Choufleur’s ear. He wrenched, lifting, twisting; the pain must have been unimaginable, but Choufleur kept working with his teeth, a rime of blood running around his jaws. When the ear tore loose, flowering blood, Choufleur lost his jawhold for just a second, enough for Dessalines to push his chin up, wrap an arm snake-like around his neck. He turned on his hip, cradling Choufleur’s purpling face with a strange air of gentleness. Squeeze and relax. The clapping and chanting had resumed. With each relaxation Choufleur sucked for air while his ear poured blood down Dessalines’s forearm. With each squeeze, Choufleur’s face turned scarlet. The impulsion of the black man’s movement seemed to come from the net of scars, with blood flowing over them, the scars binding and loosening, more than the man. The scars refused to release the pressure, and Choufleur’s face went from purple to black. His boot heels drummed a tattoo on the ground. Dessalines shifted his grip, catching Choufleur’s chin and the back of his head, and with an unwinding movement of both arms rotated the head around until, following a dreadful ripping, crunching sound, it hung flaccid from the broken neck. With a sigh, he rolled away from the body.

Silence. Dessalines was up on his knees, the hollow of his chest pumping. They could all hear him breathe, like a saw on a log. The doctor began to consider his wounds. The cuts on his back were probably inconsequential, though of course one must treat them against infection. Was this the task for which he had been summoned? The sword cut on the inner forearm might very well be more serious, though from appearances it had severed no important ligament or tendon. Unless Dessalines had gone on using his hurt arm and hand by the sheer implacable force of his will alone. But the bite would be the worst of all, undoubtedly a very nasty thing.

The sun threw a red stain over the ground, darkening as the rain clouds began to blow up. Buzzards came flopping down out of the sky like stinking ragbags, hopping from one corpse to the next. Dessalines was on his feet, retrieving Choufleur’s sword. He stopped and lifted one of Choufleur’s limp, dead legs, and inserted the sword point into the seam between his buttocks. With a quick, muscular thrust, pulling back on the leg he held at the same time, he impaled the body all the way up to the throat. The slack head rolled sideways and disgorged a little blood.

The doctor gulped. He could not seem to close his eyes or move his head. Riau stood by him, neither more nor less expressive than a tree. Dessalines levered the sword upward with the sound of breaking bone, cutting through Choufleur’s sex and his trunk all the way to the join of his rib cage. With a twist of the sword point, he spun the guts out over the ground.

Silence. Dessalines held the sword horizontally between both hands and snapped up his knee to break it. He dropped the pieces on the body. The ring of men watching slackened, began to dissolve. That same lieutenant came forward and began handing Dessalines the various articles of his clothing, which he assumed with a queer formality, as though he were being dressed by a valet. If he wanted medical help, he did not say so, and the doctor felt reluctant to approach him without invitation. Arnaud was on his hands and knees, vomiting in the bloody dirt. No one seemed to look at him, but Captain Maillart helped him up when he was finished.

The doctor thought then of the wounded mulatto officer—perhaps he could do something for him now—but the man had bled to death during the fight, or at any rate was now dead. The other prisoners stood looking dully at their boots. With his wounded arm, Dessalines made a short, chopping gesture in their direction.