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
