Master of the Crossroads (53 page)

My head was still all hot inside so that I could not understand what he was saying. But his words were calming, and his hands moved smoothly on the air between us, as if he were testing whether he might touch Guiaou or Riau without being stung or burned.

“La paix,”
said Quamba, to Guiaou and then to me. Bouquart drew on my arm and I let myself go back with him. Then we turned together, Bouquart and I, and were walking away from them all and away from the clay
case,
and after a few steps I shook my arm free of Bouquart’s hand.

“La paix,”
Quamba called in a slightly stronger voice, though not really loud. I looked back and met his eye to show that I had heard him. But there was no peace in me anywhere.

The next day Merbillay came again to the
ajoupa
on the hill. And afterward she came even more often than before. There was hardly a day when she did not come. I was glad, but part of this gladness was mixed with anger, and I knew there would be some more trouble.

Then, after some days, the
blanc
captains Maillart and Vaublanc came up the path to my
ajoupa.
I was so much surprised to see them there, I wondered if maybe they did not have an order to arrest Riau. But they only stood outside the
ajoupa,
breathing hard as whitemen do when they have had to climb a hill. They spoke about the weather and the fineness of the view. It was true that you could see a long way from that hilltop, all over the deep valley and around the
mornes
which closed it in. The white captains asked my leave to come inside the
ajoupa.
There was not a lot for them to look at in there, but Maillart asked that I take down the
banza
and play a little, and afterwards they took it up and turned it over and passed it between them, comparing it to instruments they knew from France, though it seemed it was not very much like any of those.

Then the two white captains left the
ajoupa
and made ready to start down the path, only Maillart turned back to me suddenly and placed one hand carefully on my chest and took in a deep, important breath.

“You must not fight Guiaou,” he said. “Riau, I tell you as—as your brother officer.”

So that was what it had been about, from the beginning. I said nothing, though I had the angry thought that Maillart, even if he had been my
parrain
to teach me the whiteman ways of fighting, Maillart was not my father. The words of the Creole song came in my head.
We have no
mother. We have no father. We come from Guinée . . .
but we did not come out of Guinée because we wanted to.

Maillart would not have understood any of that. I saw that he had come out of friendship, perhaps brotherhood, even if he could not say the word without some difficulty. Another
blanc
would not have come at all. I had not even known that Maillart bothered himself to know where Riau stayed at night. He was shaking his head now, smiling a little, in the manner he might have had with another white officer.

“Women,” he said. “They are to admire, to serve, to enjoy, perhaps . . . but not to die for.”

“But if you were in my case, you would fight a duel,” I said.

The Captain Maillart turned some of those colors that rise so easily in a whiteman’s skin. He could not very well say that it was not the same for me. I did not know if he thought this either.

Vaublanc, who had been watching us, spoke then. “You are an officer, and Guiaou is not,” he said. “You cannot challenge an enlisted man. No more can you accept his challenge, or even notice it.”

Blanc
rules. Maillart was nodding to agree. I thought, yes, if I wore my officer’s coat, I might order Guiaou what to do, and Couachy too (but neither of them was in my company), and yet this would not make the problem of the woman go away. What would Maillart do if his woman went with a man not an officer? I did not ask him this, though, because I could not think of any time when a
blanche
had done such a thing, so maybe it was not possible.

The white captains must have thought they had said enough, because they made ready to go down the trail again. When Maillart had taken a few steps, he stopped and looked at me again.

“There was a time when I
was
in your place,” he said. “And I did not fight the other man.” He looked at me to know if I thought that fear had prevented him, but I did not think so, and then he went after Vaublanc, down the trail.

I took leave for one night and one day and went to another higher mountain where there was
bwa danno.
I cut a
danno
from the ground, measuring it to be longer by two hand’s lengths than Guiaou’s
coutelas.
I had thought a lot about that
coutelas,
because Guiaou was very quick and skillful with it, and he preferred it to a gun.

With my own
coutelas
I peeled the
danno,
all the way to one end of it, but on the other end I left enough of the smooth, gray shiny bark to cover the place where my hand would grip. Beneath the bark the wood was pale and slightly supple, like a whipstock, but also very, very hard. I liked it better than the longer heavy clubs which some men fought with, like Bienvenu. Those heavy clubs would strike a killing blow, but they moved slower than a knife.

If Maillart had not come to speak to me, though, I might have chosen something else than a
danno.
I might have made ready to fight with a pistol or some other weapon more certain to kill. But that thought did not come to my head until later.

I carried the
danno
to the
ajoupa
and kept it leaning just inside the door. I did not take it down to the compound or carry it at any time I must wear my officer coat, but shirtless, high on the
morne,
I worked and worked until the
danno
spun around my hand like the wing of a hummingbird, so fast you could see only the blur of it, whirling forward and then back with scarcely a hitch between the two directions. I worked the
danno
with both hands, and changing from one hand to the other, until striking from any direction I could cut a green branch big around as my thumb.

When I first returned from the mountain where
bwa danno
grew, Merbillay had been there and left one of her
mouchwa têt
spread over my sleeping mat, not the red cloth but a blue one. I put it across my face and breathed the scent of her. She came soon again, and often. All the time she was in that
ajoupa
with me, the
danno
leaned against the woven wall inside the doorway, but if she noticed, she did not say anything about it.

Once in the late morning of a day when there was no drilling of the soldiers down below, Merbillay and I lay naked on the mat side by side, dozing as the sweat dried on us in the breeze that blew through the sticks of the wall. What woke me was the sound of many voices, and when I woke, Merbillay had jumped up with a frightened look on her face and was winding her cloth to cover herself.

I picked up the
danno
as I stepped through the door. A shout went up from all those people, but when Merbillay came out they cried even louder. Bouquart came to me and when I saw his troubled face, I knew that he had wanted to come to me to warn me when he saw it begin—he wanted to tell me this now, but I stopped him from talking. Already the
danno
was twitching in my hand like the stiffened tail of an angry cat.

Guiaou stood forth, the baby Yoyo cradled in his left arm, and he was shouting, pointing at Merbillay, then at the baby, then at Merbillay again. The hum inside my head was too loud for me to understand his words. Caco was not anywhere, and I was glad for that. Guiaou’s
coutelas
was strapped to his right hip, and I saw only his hand passing above it, forward and back as he moved his arm to point. Then Merbillay was holding the baby somehow and the crowd had closed behind us, between us and the
ajoupa
and Merbillay was sucked away into the crowd. The crowd had made a circle around only Giaou and Riau. Down the hill I heard Maillart’s voice shouting angrily, but the crowd had blocked the trail head and would not let him come up.

Only once did I look into Guiaou’s face with the deep scar tearing it open so near to one of his eyes, and after that I looked only at his hip and shoulder and the space between, which the
coutelas
would come out of. But my good
danno
was longer and already it was whirling in my hand. I struck first, high, overhand, drew his parry and reversed the strike almost before the metal touched the wood. With this I hit him on the leg but not as hard as I should have because I was too excited. Still he stumbled and fell back, the crowd opening a pocket to receive him, and I charged, but he laid himself long and low and took the wood across his back while lashing the knife at my forward leg. The
danno
made a red welt on his skin, but the cut toward my legs drove me backward to the center of the circle.

We stepped around each other, left, left left, feinting. No advantage for either. I rushed him with two underhand cuts flowing one into the other without a break, but he skipped back and the crowd gave way and he found space to escape. I cut backward, up in a curve from his right foot to his left shoulder, and met the blade halfway. If I had thought sooner, I could have ridden the blade down to smash his knuckles so I tried the same stroke again, but the blade was not where I expected it, because he had flipped it under to lie along the outside of his forearm. He struck up with his elbow as the
danno
went by and the blade hooked out to bite deeply into the underside of my right arm.

The crowd sucked in a moaning sigh. I parried, parried, could not strike. I could do no more than stop his cuts. The blade rolled forward in his hand, quivering, sniffing for Riau. I stepped in, slashing the pattern of an 8, but Guiaou somehow escaped this without parrying and then the
coutelas
made three tiny weak flicks forward that cut a circle around my wrist.

That was Riau’s own blood on the ground, sticky between my bare toes as I circled, stepping, left left left . . . The blood was leaving my head to fall into the dirt through the cuts in my arm, and I felt cold in my head and a ring of darkness was all around my eyes.

Espri mwen,
I said in my head.
Ogûn. Ogûn Feraille vini mwen!

Guiaou must have felt that I had weakened, for he came in hard with the
coutelas.
I did not know what I did then, only afterward I knew it as if someone else had seen and told me about it all. My hand turned upside down in a reverse parry, and Guiaou flipped the blade toward his left side because he expected the swallow strike to come whipping all the way round Riau’s head to hit him there, but instead I caught the low end of the
danno
with my left hand and spun it up and around to his collarbone. With my right arm I would have broken the bone altogether, but the left-hand blow was hard enough that his hand with the
coutelas
dropped back against his knee. Already I had reversed the
danno
into my right hand, and as the
coutelas
came up wavering, I caught his wrist with a wheeling underhand strike and the
coutelas
flew up high, away, flapping like a bat’s wings against the sky.

The crowd made that same moaning of the breath. I looked again into Guiaou’s face and saw he had given himself up to Baron Cimetière. Death was not so much to him anyway—he had already died at least one time before, beneath the waters with the sharks. The
danno
in my hand began to turn. I could have struck him anywhere, but the
danno
left my hand and went flying off wherever the
coutelas
had gone. I don’t know why, but the same spirit that had given me the strokes that took away his knife gave me this action, and the spirit left me standing there, holding my empty hands out to Guiaou.

In the night the drums began at the
hûnfor
which was on a high, rounded hill behind the valley where the houses were and beyond the slopes of coffee trees. Riau walked to the drumming, alone at first, then with Bouquart, then with some others. I did not carry the
danno
or any other weapon, though we had found the
danno,
lying near Guiaou’s
coutelas
in the stones beside the streambed. My hands swung light and empty beside me, checked by a dull pain from the cut on my right arm, which was bandaged and poulticed with leaves. After the fighting Guiaou and I had dressed each other’s wounds, waving away the old women who came to do it for us.

Now we came up through the circle of torches onto the round, cleared top of the hill, and I turned to the left, circling the
poteau mitan.
The drums were strong already, and the
hounsis
swayed and sang, all dressed in white. On the far side of the circle the trees were cut, and I saw a long way out over the valley, under the sharp starlight.

There was Guiaou circling the other way from me, his arm in a cloth sling from the hurt to his collarbone. He wore a new shirt for the ceremony, and the poultice Riau had put over the
danno
slash on his back stuck here and there to the fresh cloth. Our eyes met for a moment, and we turned away from one another and looped back, moving among the others whose steps were shifting, lightening toward dance, our pathways swooping like the trails of swallows in the sky. As I turned and looked out over the valley, the stars began to run and bleed so that I saw the trails of them. Turning into the circle, I searched for a still point with my eye. Near the
poteau mitan
Quamba sat very still, cross-legged on the ground with the
asson
before him between his knees, the bead strings drooping over the gourd. Later, much later, he would call his spirit. His spirit would not be the first to come. On the far side of the clearing a woman in a high red turban stood up swaying behind the drums to lead the singing, and this was Merbillay.