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
