Maillart was saddle-weary by now, and thirsty too, his throat caked with dust. But they did not stop in Ouanaminthe. Couachy led them straight to the Massacre River, where they forded, the horses going down to their withers, the setting sun blood-red on the calm water as it curved away to the west. They rode up a ravine on the other side and entered the Spanish town of Dajabón.
Toussaint was not here either, it turned out, but they found meager accommodations for themselves at an inn. The men stacked up, triple and quadruple and some sleeping on the floor. Thanks to his status as Toussaint’s aide-de-camp, Maillart had to share his room with only Couachy. A barrel of rum was quickly discovered, and some chickens commandeered for their supper. Maillart turned in and slept without dreams. At dawn they were riding again through a low pass eastward toward the Saint Yago River.
By midmorning they had reached the river valley and were riding eastward along the low bank. The mountains rose towering on either side, dark verdant peaks thrusting into the clouds. There were few signs of cultivation or even of habitation, except every so often a thread of smoke from a charcoal fire hidden on a jungled slope. Once, when they rounded a bend of the river onto a wide flat shoal of gravel, they came upon a dozen black women washing clothes. The laundresses must have come out from some maroon settlement nearby—there had been movement over the border, since Toussaint had claimed the Spanish side of the island for France. The women straightened from their work and stared after the riders, in a grave silence, without a smile or a wave. They and their families would be fugitives, Maillart thought, from Toussaint’s labor laws.
In the late afternoon their party was startled by a runaway horse rushing down the river toward them, on the opposite bank. The shoreline was too high and rocky to cross in this place, so there was nothing they could do but pull up and watch the spectacle. It was a splendid animal, however wild, a magnificent blue roan. The horse came down the far bank full tilt, punctuating its gallop with episodes of explosive bucking. Through it all the rider was fixed in the saddle, as tight as a barnacle—no daylight to find between his rump and the leather. He was in shirtsleeves, a white shirt open to the breastbone. When he came nearer, Maillart saw the yellow madras headcloth.
“My Christ,” he said, with a glance at Couachy. “It’s the Governor-General.”
Toussaint and his furious mount shot past them by a hundred yards or more. Then at last the run petered out and the exhausted roan collapsed into a walk. No choice now but to accept the rider. Toussaint turned the roan and brought it back up the bank on a fairly short rein. Now Riau and Guiaou had appeared on their horses, riding toward Toussaint at an easy canter. Riau held a braided lariat coiled in his right hand, but Toussaint waved it away—no need.
Couachy called across the river to Guiaou, who beckoned them to follow. They went at a walk, since Toussaint’s horse was blown. The roan had run something more than a mile downriver, Maillart realized. It was at least that far when they reached a ford, and above it on the farther shore was a long oval corral which penned about thirty more as-yet-unbroken horses.
Maillart had heard from Tocquet and others that Toussaint maintained a hatte like this, somewhere across the Spanish border. Apparently Tocquet had once been charged to herd a string of these horses down across the Central Plateau to Gonaives. Maillart splashed across the ford and raised his hand to salute the others. Riau returned the salute smartly. Toussaint, smiling more openly than was usual for him, was buttoning his shirt with his free hand. Soaked with sweat, the white cloth clung transparently to the ribbed muscle of his torso. Only a tuft of grizzled hair at the throat betrayed his age.
“Mon général,” Maillart said. “When you risk yourself so, you risk the colony.”
Toussaint wiped away his smile with a hand and looked at Maillart closely. In truth it had been a heart-stopping moment for the major. As in the case of many French officers in a similar position, Maillart felt a strictly personal loyalty to Toussaint: the prospect of any of his black subordinates succeeding him was enough to give one an uneasy pause.
“Oh,” said Toussaint, “if I make a brief return to the work of my youth, it is only for a moment’s refreshment.” The smile flashed again, then disappeared. By then they had come to the edge of the corral. Toussaint dismounted, stroked the neck of the gentled horse, clucked his tongue reprovingly when the roan tossed its head at his touch. He passed the reins to a bare-chested groom who’d appeared, smiling, beside him, nodded to Maillart and the others, and walked up the slope toward the cluster of low buildings above the corral.
A couple of hours of daylight remained, and Maillart spent them watching the horse-breaking. He was offered a try at the game himself, but declined it. He might have ridden one of these animals to submission in an enclosure, but that mad dash downriver was not for him. The method certainly did work, however, and no one seemed to get killed in the process, though one man was thrown to the grassy verge, and some time was spent recapturing the horse with the lariat. Riau, who’d worked under Toussaint long ago as a slave on Bréda plantation, took a horse out and brought it back tamed. Guiaou was offered the same opportunity, but only ducked his head, teeth tight in a grin, and slid down the fence rail closer to Maillart.
They dined rather splendidly that evening, though in the open air. Chairs and tables were set out on the grass, and platters brought from the kitchen fires. In that cool altitude there were no insects to annoy them and they had a fine view of the evening settling on the mountains across the river. Wild pig had been roasted on the boucan, garnished with baked fruit and supplemented by rice and brown beans and a rich callaloo. Maillart fell on the food with enthusiasm, ravenous after the long day’s ride. All thought of Le Cap and the people who lived there was now far from his mind. Toussaint, he noticed, ate less sparingly than usual, taking a fair portion of meat and a bowlful of callaloo, along with his usual bread and whole fruits. He must have one of the old women he trusted to cook for him tucked away nearby. But when the rum went round he let it pass, drinking only cool water drawn from a spring above the hatte.
At the end of the meal, Maillart presented Tocquet’s note, and as Toussaint cut the seal with his thumbnail, he went to fetch the musket from the shipment he’d brought along to show. The demonstration struck him as a little excessive (and the extra weight had been irksome), but Tocquet must be feeling some immediate need to remind Toussaint of his usefulness . . . Nodding, Toussaint slipped the letter into his coat and stood up to receive the musket. Taking a step away from the table, he turned the weapon this way and that in the fading light, then pulled back the hammer to test the spring.
“It is not new,” he said. “French—the M-seventeen-sixty-three. But the condition is good.” He whistled sharply at one of the barefoot men who had served the tables, and when he raised his head, Toussaint tossed him the musket. Maillart’s eyes tracked its flight. The barefoot man caught the musket in both hands.
“Ki jan ou relé?” Toussaint said. What is your name?
“Guerrier, parrain,” said the barefoot man with a broad smile. “Guerrier,sé mwen-mêm.” Maillart realized he was, most likely, witnessing a promotion from worker to soldier—all the more enviable just now when for the first time in ten years they were not actually at war. He noticed too how naturally the man had addressed Toussaint as godfather.
“Lè ou wé envahissè, ki sa w’ap fé?” Toussaint inquired. What will you do when you see the invader?
“Tiré, tuyé.” Guerrier had brought the musket to his shoulder with an air of sufficient competence and was sighting down at the shoals of the river. Shoot to kill.
“Byen, kenbe’l,” Toussaint said. Good, keep it. Then, almost as an afterthought, he told Guerrier to report to Riau for an assignment and a horse.
Next morning Guerrier rode out among Toussaint’s guard, well mounted though without the silver helmet. He wore a ragged pair of Revolutionary trousers with the horizontal stripes, which was his only sign of a uniform. But he was a
horseman, Maillart took note, his carriage in the saddle as presentable as anyone’s. Toussaint rode third in their single file, with Couachy and Guiaou in the lead. As usual in the field he wore a simple blue uniform coat without epaulettes, and today he had put aside his general’s bicorne for a round hat, a plume fixed to it with the tricolor Revolutionary rosette. The change of headgear altered his appearance considerably, though of course Bel Argent was almost as recognizable nowadays as his rider.
By the end of that day they’d reached the town of Santiago, occupied by the mulatto general Clervaux and garrisoned by about half of the four thousand black troops posted this side of the border—the rest were in the hands of Toussaint’s brother Paul, in Santo Domingo City to the south. At Santiago there was no feast to mark their arrival—Maillart and the guardsmen were left to forage, which they accomplished with a fair success. Toussaint was closeted with Clervaux for a long time, their candles burning deep into the night, with no one else invited to their council, white or black. Next morning they were off at dawn, riding eastward along the River Cayman into the wide expanses of the Consilanza Valley. The area was sparsely populated with Spanish cattlemen and their few black retainers, who were nothing so numerous as on the French side of the island. The Spanish herdsmen stood in their doorways or turned in their saddles to stare at the passage of Toussaint’s guard, with never a hail or a greeting. Black rule was not popular in these parts, though it hardly seemed to have had much effect on those who lived here. Maillart had never been so deep into Spanish Santo Domingo, and the vast plain struck him as desolate, though the grass was lush and green, seedheads flowing knee-high on men well mounted as they were.
They sought no civilized shelter that night, but camped out in the open, beating down the grass to spread their bed rolls and hobbling the horses, that they would not founder on the unusually rich pasture here. To Couachy’s great delight he was given leave to fell and butcher one of the half-wild grazing steers; there was bœuf marron that night to everyone’s content. Toussaint scrupulously sent a gold portugaise to the nearest hatte, in payment for this meat they’d requisitioned. Next morning they rode out as the first mist was rising from the dew-bowed grass, swinging down toward the pass through the mountains which would bring them through to Santo Domingo City on the south coast. But before they had begun the ascent, a rider bore down on them from one of the northern observation posts. He was breathless, with his horse in a lather, and before he was well within earshot he began to shout that many, many ships were gathering at the mouth of Samana Bay.
It was then that Maillart had it confirmed how much more a horse could count than its rider. Not that he would belittle Toussaint’s abilities in the saddle. But at his urging, Bel Argent swung out into a gait so swift and smooth that the white horse seemed a different order of being from the other horses expected to follow him. Maillart was proud enough of his own horsemanship and also thought well of his mount, a strong bay gelding he’d named Eclair as much for its speed as for the lightning blaze in the center of its forehead. But the best he could manage was to hold his pace a length or two behind Riau’s mount—that same blue roan that Toussaint had broken just three days before.
Toussaint and the white warhorse had been out of sight for half an hour by the time Maillart and Riau rode onto the peninsula above Samana Bay. His round hat with its plume and cockade lay on the ground, and Bel Argent stood by him, reins slipped under stirrup, huffing and flanks heaving with the strain. Riau slipped down and went at once to Bel Argent and began to walk the big horse in a long looping circuit to cool him down. It was utterly unlike Toussaint to leave an overheated horse standing. Maillart began to walk Eclair, with Riau’s mount on the other side, which was awkward since the blue roan kept trying to reach across his chest to bite the bay. Meanwhile the rest of the honor guard gradually grew from dots in the middle distance; at last they came trotting out onto the point. The men dismounted, muttering to each other and their horses. No one dared to approach Toussaint, who stood at the cliff’s edge, observing the mouth of Samana Bay with a folding brass spyglass. Every so often he lowered the instrument and polished the lenses on the tail of his coat, then raised it to his eye again with a disbelieving shrug.
Maillart passed Eclair’s reins to Guiaou, and led the blue roan toward Riau, who stood still holding Bel Argent, a respectful ten paces in back of Toussaint. The white stallion snorted, shook off a fly. Its breathing had calmed considerably. Toussaint turned his back to the sea.
“Get ready to die,” he said. His face was gray. “All France has come against me.” He passed one hand across his mouth and added, in a steadier voice, “They have come to enslave the blacks.”
Maillart lifted the glass from Toussaint’s slack fingers and pulled the telescoping joints to their full extension. The messenger had not been quite accurate in what he said, for the ships had not actually entered the bay, but stood a good distance off the point. At that distance it was hard to ascertain their number; Maillart kept losing count, but he thought there must be between thirty and forty.
He folded the spyglass and held it toward Toussaint, but the black general seemed blind to the offer. He had taken his sheathed sword from his belt and stood leaning on it as if it were a cane. His face remained bloodless; he seemed to shrink inside his clothes. For the first time Maillart saw the man’s age visible upon him.
Finally Toussaint did reach for the spyglass. Unconsciously he dropped it into a coat pocket, then walked haltingly to a boulder at the cliff’s edge and sat down, balancing the sheathed sword across his knees. At a little distance, Guiaou and Couachy and the others of the guard stood by their horses, staring at the fleet with an impassivity they could barely maintain. It was not the number of the ships that frightened them, Maillart realized, but that their commander had been so obviously shaken.
But how could Toussaint have known the magnitude of France? The black general had made himself so absolutely master of the island that Maillart had forgotten that he had never been anywhere else—that he was born in Saint Domingue and had never left its shores. As for himself, he had been twelve years in the colony, and France, the motherland, might just as well have been a fancy, or a dream.
A smaller frigate had detached from the fleet and was sailing northeast around the peninsula. They would be landing a small party, Maillart supposed, to get the news and maybe look for pilots. Toussaint seemed indifferent to the movement, if he had noticed it at all, and presently the ship had disappeared around the headland. Maillart remembered what he’d said two nights before, when he’d tossed the musket to Guerrier. But why must this advent be taken for invasion, why not the simple arrival of a friendly force? After all, Toussaint had always professed his loyalty to France and almost always seemed to act on it. Could not this point be put forward? Maillart took a step and cleared his throat, but Toussaint had already spoken.
“Riau.” Now the voice was crisp and clear, though not too loud. “Vin’pal’ou.” That radical compression in the Creole phrase, Come here to me so I can talk to you. Riau lowered his head to Toussaint’s lips, then dashed to Bel Argent’s saddlebags, took out a folding writing desk, and returned to sit cross-legged below the boulder where Toussaint was stationed.
Maillart remained where he was. He felt—no, he knew himself to be held at exactly this distance, just a few paces from Toussaint and his scribe, but, with the noise of the waves slamming into the rocks below, completely out of earshot. Toussaint was on his feet now, pacing, gesticulating, while Riau bent over the desktop on his knees, pen point grooving the parchment. Now and then Toussaint paused, weighing one phrase against another, and once he even glanced at Maillart, but did not ask his opinion. He had not yet recovered his fallen hat, and the yellow madras seemed to throb with the heat of his concentration.
Maillart wondered if someone might have turned a spyglass on him from the fleet, an admiral, perhaps Bonaparte’s brother-in-law Leclerc, who was rumored to command the military force. What would it
matter if they were watching? he thought. They won’t know what they’re looking at.
Riau was melting wax in a small flame; Toussaint ground his ring down on the seals.
“Guiaou, Couachy,” he called sharply. Then, after a pause, “Guerrier.” The three men jogged to him.
“Take these messages,” Toussaint said. He had two letters in his hand. “Go to my brother, the General Paul, at Santo Domingo City . . .” He lowered his voice and turned his back so that Maillart could no longer hear him, but he saw that while Couachy had put one of the letters into his outer coat pocket, he’d shoved the other down inside his waistband, and was adjusting the tuck of his shirt to conceal it.
“Maillart!” The major trotted over and threw up a sharp salute. The party for Santo Domingo was already swinging into the saddle, moving out. Toussaint extended a single letter. Maillart grazed the seal with his thumb, warm and still a little malleable.
“Go with Riau,” Toussaint said. “Take the rest of these men and bring my messages to the General Dessalines—he should be at Port-au-Prince, but wherever he is you must reach him.”
For a moment Maillart’s eyes locked with Riau’s. Well, he thought, have I got the real dispatch or the decoy? He had already dropped the letter into an inside pocket. He had been through a number of battles with Riau, and trusted him as much as any man of any color.
“But yourself, sir?” Maillart said. Toussaint had left himself no escort with these orders, not even a pair of heralds.
Toussaint had picked up his round hat and jammed it back on his head. He folded his arms across his chest, took one deep breath, and exhaled through his nostrils so forcefully that Maillart expected to see dust stir on the ground between his feet. He strode to Bel Argent, dropped the folded desk into one of the saddlebags, and from the other pulled out a fat feather pillow sheathed in rose-colored silk. Because of his short legs, his head barely reached the horse’s shoulder, but a one-handed vault put him into the saddle. He stood high in the stirrups, adjusting the pillow beneath him, then settled down upon it.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 9