All Souls' Rising (59 page)

“Look at her,” said Monsieur Cigny, laying his hammy hand on the doctor’s forearm. “Say what you will about Creole women—what should I care for the horns she gives me?”

Even under these extraordinary circumstances, the doctor thought it unwise to respond to that question. A spatter of gunfire from outside distracted them all. The doctor stepped to the shattered window to see. A squad of sailors was retreating down the street toward the harbor, hotly pursued by seventy or eighty blacks who could just barely be held at a distance by small-arms fire—there were enough of them to choke the street.

Isabelle had closed the trunk, Monsieur Cigny swung it up onto his shoulder and carried it toward the stairs. He seemed to handle its weight and awkwardness with ease, though he could not be much used to physical work, the doctor thought; no white man could be, in this country.

It was chokingly hot going down the stairs, from fire already pressing against the near wall. Monsieur Cigny descended first, balancing the trunk. The nurse led the two children after him. Her eyes were closed, and through her tight jaws came a keening sound, with now and then a word of Creole, song or maybe a vodoun supplication. The doctor followed them down. On the ground floor, Arnaud, Grandmont and Pascal had hoisted bundles and bags of the Cigny belongings. The horses of the household had bolted or been stolen earlier in the day, so they must make their way to the harbor on foot.

The doctor took the child from Nanon, and arranged his loads, two pistols in his belt, the rifle in his right hand, child in his left arm, forked across his hip. Balancing a bundle on her head with her unique grace, Nanon glided through the door onto the street. In the approach of his evening delirium, the doctor thought he saw her as he’d seen her first, striding ahead of him through the throngs at the market in the Place de Clugny, wearing the basket of fruit like a tiara. But the men who pressed around her now had less benign intentions.

The rifle discharged as he dropped it—the range was too short for him to use it now, even if he could have managed it one-handed. The doctor shot the nearest one point-blank in the face and handed the pistol to Isabelle Cigny to reload and drew the other to shoot the next man in the chest, twisting sideways to shelter the child on his hip the best he could. Isabelle handed him the first pistol reprimed and he dropped another man with a shot to the temple and the others ran away. There had been six of them, stragglers from the larger mob that had just passed through.

The doctor sank down onto one knee, heavily; his head hurt horribly and his fever was suddenly very much worse. The child clung to him, pressing his face against his chest. It had all taken hardly an instant, was over faster than any of the other men had even been able to train their arms, but this time no one paid the doctor any compliments on his marksmanship. He could not make out which were the men he had just killed because there were so many other corpses littering the street. Blood and scorched flesh covered them with its stench. The doctor saw that Robert, clinging to his nurse’s arm, was looking at the bodies too.

“Come quickly,” said Monsieur Cigny.

The doctor stood up. Nanon had reloaded his second pistol; he took it from her and tucked it in his waistband. In the house next to the Cignys’ a beam gave way and the entire roof collapsed in a cascade of sparks.

“We are not going to the ships,” the doctor said. “We have concluded to go instead to Ennery.”

Isabelle Cigny dropped what she was carrying and took a step nearer him. “You’re delirious,” she said. She looked at Nanon. “This man’s insane.”

Nanon gazed at her steadily; she could not gesture with her head, or the bundle would have fallen. “We have spoken of it earlier,” she said calmly. “It’s as he told you.”

Isabelle walked closer to the doctor. The fire illumined her face with a strange red glow; he thought that she might scratch him with her nails. “Is it your romance?” she said. “Is it
love?
Don’t be a fool. In another country she could pass for white.”

The doctor looked from her face to the others. In the hellfire light cast all about them, there was no longer any skin tone; Isabelle was exactly the same hue as her black servant. The doctor could not speak at all. Stupid, brutal as a beast, he only shook his head.

Isabelle Cigny turned again to Nanon. “The man’s insane,” she said again. “But save yourself. You must come with us.”

When Nanon had murmured her refusal, Madame Cigny’s shoulders clenched as with a sob. It was the first time, the doctor thought cloudily, that he’d seen her show the faintest sign of weakness. Her husband’s admiration might have been well placed. He watched as she leaned forward to kiss Nanon on the lips.

“God help you then,” she said. “I will not see you again upon this earth.”

A
RNAUD SAID NOTHING TO THE DOCTOR
as they parted; he could not think of anything to say. Armed with a pistol and a musket, he was bringing up the rear of the Cigny group. At the first corner, he looked back and saw the doctor and Nanon still standing near the burning houses; when he looked again, thirty paces farther along, they had gone. In the next block, the Cignys fell in with a platoon of regular army soldiers who were still making forays into the town to evacuate what citizens they could. There were several other families already in their charge, and in this strength they made their way to the harbor in greater safety than they could have hoped.

The ink-black surface of the water threw back eerie reflections of the flames that blanketed the town. Still, the fire would not pass across the wide stone esplanade dividing the harbor from the burning warehouses. Some hundreds of white refugees were clustered on the paving stones, babbling, weeping, or cursing their enemies—all those not struck completely dumb by what was passing. East-ward along the waterfront, a double line of soldiers fired alternating volleys in a regular one-two rhythm, holding off some two thousand of the blacks.

There were not enough boats, and too many people were trying to get into those there were. Someone was crying out in loud disgust that Galbaud himself had been seen to fling himself into the water in his urgency to secure a place in one of those few boats. Arnaud listened without attending. He had not thought of his wife all day, but now her image ballooned to fill his mind.

W
ITHIN THE WALLS OF
L
ES
U
RSULINES
, the nuns were at vespers, singing and praying for deliverance, but Claudine Arnaud had remained in the small cell she paid them for, embroidering a little dress for the layette of the infant she expected, in whose existence only she believed. When the fires overarched the convent roof, one of the sisters, Félicité, came in and urged Madame Arnaud to flee the place with them. Claudine ignored her. She had lately come to dislike the nuns, because they stole her baby clothes while she was sleeping, hoping thus to distract her from her mania.

“Maybe you have the right of it.” Sister Félicité was weeping, tears scalding on her round pale cheeks as the ovenlike heat from the stone walls blasted them. “It won’t go much better for us outside than in.”

But Sister Félicité was not long gone before the furnace heat drove Claudine out also. The nuns were descending the steps of the convent in orderly single file, demure in their black robes and white wimples, hands folded before them in prayer. As they reached the foot of the stair, the blacks laid hold of them and yanked their skirts above their heads to rape them, or sometimes simply slit their throats.

At the head of the stairs, Claudine Arnaud drew up her skirts and pushed her hands against the bare skin of her shrunken belly. All around her burning embers were crashing down from the roof.

“Now hell has finally come to us, little one,” she cried to the thing she addressed inside her. “Now at last you can be born.”

One of the blacks mounted the stairs to snatch at her. Claudine picked up a burning stake and stabbed it at his face, her skirts dropping around her legs again when she released them. The first attacker fell away, but another came from the other side; it seemed to her that he was that same Congo, from the other time, though he was no longer dressed in women’s clothes. She swiped the burning stake at him, but he grinned and swayed back from his hips, mocking her with his dancer’s grace, letting the fire pass over him, then springing back to his place. She thought to show him the stump of her finger then, but he only laughed at that.

She saw that she must show him something more. It was only a light shift that she had on; with one hand she could rip it to the hem. When she’d shrugged out of it entirely, she stooped and picked up a second brand, holding it by its hot coal, for its whole length was afire. She rubbed the flames over her bared skin, smiling to show her indifference to the pain and harm of it. Then she began to dance and shriek in much the same manner as the blacks all around her. Seeing her to be possessed by some spirit too powerful for him to master, the Congo ran off, and was followed by the others.

When Arnaud reached the convent, she had just had the inspiration of setting her hair aflame. He saw her in that fiery halo, raising a blazing sword above her head in her two joined hands. She stood on tiptoe, her head thrown back and to one side, resting on her collarbone, bare scorched breasts lifting and her muscles strained as if she were depending from a hook somewhere above her. Arnaud recognized her posture but without knowing why. When he called to her she did not seem to hear him. But when he was near enough, she brought her flaming sword down on him with all her force.

The brand cracked across his shoulders. Arnaud ducked, came up again, once more he called her name. Her hair had burned down almost to the scalp. She hissed and thrust the burning stake at him; he caught it firmly between his two bare palms and closed his grip. The shock of the pain slammed all the way into his shoulders, but he did not let go. Now he felt the very thing that she was feeling, and he saw, when he looked in her eyes, that she acknowledged this.

Together they rolled down the steps, and as they did so, much of the fire about her was extinguished. With his blistered palms, Arnaud beat the flames down in the blackened stubble of her hair. When he was done, he saw that she had fainted. He picked her up and carried her back to the harbor, where a few boats were still plying, picking up the last survivors. The town was all in flames around them as they went, and by some freak, no one troubled or hindered them all of their way.

T
HE DOCTOR TRIED TO SECURE
a dampened cloth across the nose and mouth of the child, to protect him from the smoke and ash, but the contact troubled him and made him cry. Without it he was quiet, so the doctor gave it up. He and Nanon began walking, generally in the direction of the Place d’Armes, although many detours were required because of the fires. A great number of bodies were scattered about—soldiers and sailors and civilians, women and children mixed with them indiscriminately, some mauled and mutilated, others just dead. Many of the black invaders had also been killed. In one block they traversed, the corpses had been dragged out of the middle of the street and neatly arranged along the house walls, so that the doctor was moved to wonder what agent had accomplished this work and with what purpose.

How exotic was this impulse to bring order into hell’s worst chaos! As the doctor was contemplating this phenomenon, two gangs of hostile blacks appeared at opposite ends of the street they were traveling. As it happened, they were just by an alleyway that would have let them directly into Crozac’s stable yard, but unfortunately this passage was sealed by walls of flame.

The doctor returned the child to Nanon and produced one of his pistols. Two men were rushing up in advance of the first group and one had painted designs on his face and chest with gouts of human blood. The doctor fired and brought him down and felled another with the second pistol, but Nanon was not yet ready with the first; he had passed them both to her too quickly, and she was busy with the child. The blacks did not seem greatly dismayed in any case. There were so many corpses strewn over these streets that a couple more did not much matter.

He aimed the rifle and pulled the trigger, but there was not even so much as a click; he had forgotten to reload it after it had accidentally gone off in front of the Cigny house. The blacks on either side no longer seemed to hesitate. The doctor thought that maybe there was nothing for him to hope for at Crozac’s—the whole place might already be destroyed. Certainly the tavern where he’d once resided was already rising in a crackling cone of flame. But as they were without alternatives, he gathered Nanon in the crook of his arm and rushed her into the burning alley.

Through the fire’s roaring came a hoarse scream that might have been either hers or his own; he could not tell. The carpet of coals they walked across was searing through his boot soles—he could well imagine what it must be doing to the fragile shoes she wore. He felt himself coughing but could not hear the sound of it. The flames leaping in their faces refined themselves yellow to blue, next to a crystalline, piercing white, finally a single colorless blade of heat.