“Splendid!”
“It takes about an hour,” Antoine amended.
Hell’s bells. At one time I’d helped find a gigantic ancient metal mirror capable of setting whole ships on fire, and now I’d dragged a magazine’s worth of powder up a mountainside with no means of setting it off. We did have steel, but we were on a slope of wet clay. I sent men scurrying to find a stone capable of striking sparks, but the clinking and scraping was futile. I had as much chance of striking fire in this mudhole as finding dry kindling in a downpour.
I wished my genius had more consistency.
Down below, the company of infantry climbing toward us had stopped to take a breath, wary at the odd noises coming from above. They shouted for their sentries, but of course there was no reply. We watched them take their muskets off their shoulders. Then their officer snapped a command, and they came on again, wary but determined.
Meanwhile, Dessalines’s column was almost at the end of the ravine, ready to attack. If the sun climbed high enough to light their position, a single cannon loaded with grapeshot could sweep the defile like a hurricane, halting the rebels before they got started.
Unless we provided a distraction.
Think, Ethan, think! What would Ben Franklin do?
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail, he used to lecture me with his annoying homilies. He claimed I’d inspired at least half of them. This couldn’t be true, but it got his point across about my dubious character.
What else, what else?
Hide not your talents. They were made for use. What’s a sundial in the shade?
Sundials. Sun. The sun! Of course! I had more than one venerable philosopher to draw from. Archimedes had built a gigantic mirror to harness the sun in a terrifying way, and perhaps I could use the same idea to set off my kegs of black powder. The tropic dawn had cleared the mountains to the east, rays striking brilliantly where we stood. Fortunately, I still had the magnifying glass I’d bought to confirm the emerald that I would inevitably retrieve from Martel once I had my hands around his throat. Sometimes it helps to be prudently greedy.
In our scramble for spark-inducing rocks, Jubal had hunted up some dry firewood from the underside of forest logs. Now I directed him to put it where I could use my glass to focus the dawn’s new rays. “The convexity of the aperture may focus the radiative effect,” I told them importantly, not certain what I was saying myself. When playing the part of a savant, it’s best to be as incomprehensible as possible.
They looked impressed while I fumbled. Meanwhile, I could hear the advancing infantry shouting to one another below as they climbed toward us. We had nothing to slow them down. They were just a hundred yards away, in the trees.
I took the glass, oriented it to the tropical sun, and concentrated its light, tense with impatience. It’s not true that time is constant; depending on one’s circumstances, it crawls like misery or spurts like passion. It races through a spring day and drags through a sick, rainy one. Now it seemed almost to stand still as I waited for the duff to smolder, me groaning that the sun wasn’t already higher and hotter, and wondering if this would work at all.
Clouds were climbing, too, building on the eastern horizon. What if they blotted my light source? The wind was rising.
Hurry, hurry!
“Wrap my spearhead with dry fronds like a torch,” I ordered with a mutter as we waited. “Douse it with the rest of the rum. If this works, we’ll use it to ignite the fuses.”
The blacks nodded. They actually thought I knew what I was doing.
An eternity passed, as we heard the clank and slap of equipment as fifty Frenchmen labored up the hillside toward us.
“They draw closer, Ethan.” My companions lay while the water of the creek crept steadily toward spilling, lapping their bodies. When, when, when? How could I have forgotten something so elementary as nursing fire after sweating for hours with a barrel on my back? First I’d lost a son, then a wife, and now, apparently, common sense.
It had been a hectic week.
But I’d not entirely lost my ingenuity. The tinder began to smoke.
“Damballah, do not forsake us,” Jubal prayed.
And finally, a snake’s tongue of flame. “Get off the dam,” I warned.
The French saw movement, and a shot rang out from below. I could imagine heads turning on the redoubts from where regiments waited for Dessalines, puzzled by this disturbance in their rear. Perhaps it would alert the French to surprise from their front. The whole assault was about to be put in jeopardy by my stupidity.
“Your torch, white man.”
They handed me the spear, its head wrapped with fronds and wet with fiery rum. I dipped it into my tiny fire, and it flared.
“They’re lining up to shoot!” one of the rebels called.
I turned to our dam. The water was at the brim, kegs poised below, fuses poking like wheat stalks, and down the slope more than two score men gave a great shout at the sight of me standing up with my torch. They knelt, pointing their muskets up the mountain. It was suicide to leap down in from of them to light the gunpowder, but this was all my idea, wasn’t it? I looked at my companions. No slaves anymore to do the dirty work. Only me and the need for rash courage.
So I jumped and swung my makeshift torch, its smoke leaving a trail in the air as it swooped to touch the first barrel. With a flash and hiss, the fuse ignited.
Gunshots cracked.
I sprang to the next keg and it lit.
More shots, and now I could hear bullets whapping against the mud of our dam, a sound that had become disturbingly familiar in recent days. Thank goodness they had inaccurate muskets instead of precision long rifles. Water began to dribble down the dam face, running toward the explosives.
“Hurry, Ethan!” Jubal called.
What the devil did he think I was doing?
Three kegs, then four, five, a rattle of musketry, a bloom of smoke from the French volley rising prettily into the dawn light, fuses burning merrily and sending up their own plumes, me bright as a coin in the sun, shouts now up and down the main French line far below. I was scrambling like a target in a shooting gallery across the face of our dam, lighting each gunpowder keg. Madness.
“Ethan, the first be burning down!” Jubal warned.
Men were charging toward me now, bayonets fixed as they struggled up the steep slope, an anxious lieutenant waving his sword in my direction. They were shouting warnings about the powder kegs and clearly meant to put them out.
We’d no weapons to fire back.
So I turned and hurled the spear, a fiery meteor, giving a grunt like an African warrior. The young officer was only yards from me, face red with exertion. His eyes went wide at my missile. What did he think in his last moment, thousands of miles from France, half his companions dead from yellow fever, his commander a cruel lecher, and a black army pounding on his garrison doors? And now a flaming spear thrown by a mud-smeared lunatic, a line of smoldering powder kegs, and the heads of six sentries on the crest of the dam gaping sightless in his direction?
The spear struck, and the man gave a cry, his sword arcing harmlessly across the air, spinning like a windmill blade. Then he somersaulted back toward his comrades, my primitive weapon in his breast.
I scrambled to one side of our construction and noticed that the day had abruptly dimmed; the clouds I’d seen earlier were continuing to mount. The sun was already winking out. It was sheer luck I’d had light for my glass.
The first keg erupted.
The others went off in a chain like fireworks, a rippling explosion from one end of the dam base to the other, mud and sticks blowing out toward the advancing infantry in a great, gaping gout of woody splinters. Then the rest of the structure and its severed heads collapsed and thundered down on the attacking infantry like an avalanche, skulls bouncing, and after it came a wall of water.
The blacks were whooping while the water roared and became a chaotic slurry of mud, trees, and foam. The tide
caught the slowest victims and snatched them with it as livelier soldiers sprang out of the way. On the redoubt between the cane field ravine and the camp reservoir, gunners turned and gaped. The unleashed waters poured down the mountain and crashed into the encampment, sweeping up tents, scattering screaming horses, and roaring across to dash against the backside of the earth-and-log redoubt like a breaker. Artillery was abandoned as soldiers ran in both directions to escape the punch of the cascade.
The flash flood didn’t break the redoubt but briefly topped it, and then left a tongue of wreckage from the base of the mountain to the French front line. Everything was in chaos.
Then came the charge.
The coiled serpent of blacks that had been creeping forward in the ravine gave a tremendous shout that echoed across the battlefield and punched toward the confused gap in the defenses. It was a column of steel, bayonets gleaming, and then a ripple of brighter light as they shot a volley. There was a bloom of smoke. The answering fire was fierce, and both black men and women fell like scythed sugarcane. The attackers simply charged faster, surging up against the French. Their leader Francois Capois, that keg of energy I’d seen at Dessalines’s headquarters, led them through a hail of bullets while waving a sword. His horse went down, and Capois sprang up. Another bullet took his hat off. When a Haitian banner fell, he scooped it up, waving it high to rally his men and women.
Hundreds of rebels swept the French lines, and I could hear the great shout of their valor from my high perch on the mountain. They came on so recklessly that some of the astounded French actually applauded.
There was still chivalry in 1803.
Then the former slaves surged over the battlements in a great dark wave, lifting high those red-and-blue battle flags with the white cut ominously from the middle. They butchered with bayonets and cane knives, seizing cannon and turning them on their foes. Their column spread out along the French line to flank it. Musket and artillery fire rose to a crescendo. Gaps were blasted in the attacking ranks. In return, whole lines of blue-coated Napoleonic infantry were cut down.
I’d made a temporary diversion, and the rebels had taken full advantage.
The overwhelmed French were ebbing toward Cap-Francois and the interior emergency lines they’d dug there, but I knew we’d checkmated their last great garrison. The fort at Vertiers had the height to command the eastern approach to the city, and the rebel guns would soon breach the final French line. The fighting was desperate-my view was soon obscured by huge rising thunderheads of gun smoke-but the ultimate outcome was no longer in doubt.
Rochambeau was finished.
I saw Dessalines, surveying his assault with the calm of a Bonaparte, seated on a rock and taking snuff as columns of cheering troops trotted past him. Real clouds were joining the plume of powder, and as if an answer to the clamor, lightning flashed and thunder growled. I felt like a god on Olympus.
“Ethan, get back!”
Jubal jerked my arm, and a bullet whizzed past. The French company climbing toward us had been decimated and disrupted, but the bravest were still shooting, determined on revenge.
I took one last look at the chaos we’d caused. Everywhere the rebels were sweeping forward, tricolors falling and Haitian banners lifting up.
Then the skies opened and rain sluiced down, flashes of electricity announcing a change in the world as white fled from black. In a moment, we were drenched, our view of the chaos lost as if a curtain had been drawn.
We retreated into the jungle.
Chapter 31
Our flight was brief. The French infantry surged over the lip of land where the dam had been, halted to shoot a volley into the jungle, and waited for return fire that might show where we were. When we declined to oblige, they prudently retreated. Their army was pulling back, and they didn’t want to be cut off.
We watched them from the ferns.
“Your loa Ezili protects you,” Jubal congratulated, “even though you’re a madman.” Word of my strange sojourn with Cecile Fatiman had spread like a contagion. “What did you do to her for such favor?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I followed her, but then I remembered my wife, and the loa vanished, although Cecile suggested she saved me from becoming a zombi. As usual, I don’t understand a thing that has gone on.”
“Man is not fated to understand anything important, especially about women,” my companion philosophized. “They’re as mysterious as the wanderings of the stars. But you are lucky.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “We’re going to win, my friend, which means I can follow the clue that Ezili gave me. Will you come to Martinique with me to rescue my wife and son and hunt for treasure?”
“If you have the loa ’s favor, yes. You’re foolish enough to be interesting.”
I was heartened. Jubal was the best ally I could imagine, as sensible as I was sly. I feared what Martel was doing to my wife and son and needed all the help I could get.
“Our companions believe in you, too,” he added.
I’d need them all to win through on a French-governed island.
By the time we cautiously crept back to the overlook, we were behind the lines of Dessalines’s triumphant army. Thousands of rebels were digging new precautionary trenches in front of the inner line of French defenses, while hundreds were turning captured cannons around and bringing up field guns of their own. The blacks had the high ground, and Rochambeau’s strategic position had become hopeless.
I looked out to sea and realized it was filled with new ships. Since I’d fled the city with Jubal, a fleet had arrived. If the vessels were French, my enemies (my ability to stumble from side to side surprises even me) might hold for a time. If English, it was over.
“Let’s get down to Dessalines,” I said. “I need a spyglass.”
We descended to the usual butchery of a battlefield, blood staining the mud puddles left by the downpour. Wounded crawled and groaned. Spouses and partners who followed the army and came to look for loved ones discovered and wept. Soldiers deafened by muzzle blasts bled from their ears. It’s corruption I’ve grown familiar with, made tolerable only by victory.
We skirted the French dead. One, I saw with sadness, was Colonel Gabriel Aucoin, shot through the breast and trampled in the charge. His last expression was sardonic. My betrayals had not saved him.
Corpses from both sides were being dragged for quick mass burial before becoming bloated in the heat. Operations for the badly wounded were performed by bloody machete in the same brutal way as Lovington’s sugar mill: a swift chop that was perhaps, in its speed, more merciful than the surgeon’s saw. However, some crawled off to die rather than face the steel.
Despite our diversion, the charging blacks had suffered several hundred dead and wounded. The heap of chopped-off arms and legs was a more powerful testament to their courage than the later medals would be, the dark flesh stacked like a cord of wood.
I watched Rochambeau’s man-hunting dogs being executed in their cages, the rebels firing muskets into the yelping animals with glee. Then the doors were opened so wild pigs could gnaw at the remains.
Dessalines himself was at the highest point of captured Vertieres, dressed in martial splendor. He was soaked from the tropical shower, but with his bicorn hat with black plume, gold-braided uniform, and French cavalry boots, he looked as magnificent and ruthless as the Mameluke warriors I recalled from Egypt. He gave crisp orders to a legion honed by a dozen years of war. I was about to witness a historical first, the complete triumph of a slave revolt. L’Ouverture was being avenged. Spartacus would be envious.
I waited for a moment between messengers, and then pushed my way. “Congratulations, Commandant.”
“Monsieur Gage,” he said. “You waited until the very last moment to spring your surprise, and I confess I feared you’d deserted us. But finally the flood came, as the Christian God promised Noah.”
“We had to wait for God to get the sun high enough to light our tinder. He took his own sweet time, I
’m afraid.”
“We almost had no sun at all.”
“Providence gave us just enough.” I decided to omit my lack of more reliable ignition methods, but he guessed my character anyway.
“You gamble, monsieur.”
“I improvise. It’s a fault I’m working on.”
“Well, victory is ours. British ships are offshore. Rochambeau is as trapped as Cornwallis was at Yorktown. My new nation will be born much as yours was. We’ll pay back the French. They have centuries of crime to answer for.”
I’d expected this response. The problem with being mean, as the French overseers had been, is that sooner or later your victims learn that same meanness and give turnabout. What terrified the French was that they were about to experience all the tortures they’d invented first. Our Savior hoped forgiveness would prove contagious, but so far I’ve seen little sign of it. People return the worst, not the best, and the habit makes me gloomy. The likelihood that I’d helped enable a massacre didn’t appeal to me, either.
“Maybe you can let bygones be bygones,” I tried.
The general looked scornful. “When did they ever offer that to us?”
“Yellow fever has taken all the collar out of them, you know that. It’s not like the French army hasn’t suffered. Cornwallis was allowed to surrender with honor.”
“If all white men are as meek as you, it’s no wonder they are losing. Perhaps I will not stop with Haiti. Maybe I’ll take my army and conquer the world.”
“You wouldn’t like most of it. Europe is cold and drafty. America, too. L’Ouverture could tell you, if he was still around.”
He scowled, and I decided the sooner I left Haiti, the better, given the color of my skin. “If those are British ships, let the English do your work for you,” I argued. “You can no doubt take Cap-Francois, but if thousands of whites are faced with extinction, they’ll fight to the death and take many of your soldiers with them. If they’re allowed to flee to English ships, you’ve won your cause without more bloodshed. Saint-Domingue becomes free without stain on its honor. Foreign nations will recognize your nation more quickly.”
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