The Emerald Storm

Chapter 30

Sunrise came from behind Dessalines’s army, shining in the face of the French. Given our height above the impending battlefield, it was in our view before anyone else’s. I watched the Battle of Vertiers unfold as if studying the diagram of a military textbook, columns of soldiers moving like arrows on a map. Some black, some white.

The purpose of my dam was twofold. One was to cut off the flow of water to the garrison below. Indeed, at first light there were shouts of surprise when the soldiers’ watering pond began to drop. A company of infantry was roused and began climbing laboriously up toward us to investigate why the stream had suddenly gone dry. We had to finish before they got in musket range, or we’d all be killed.

Our second objective was to create a timely diversion. We’d turned the lazy stream pool into a substantial reservoir at our altitude by dragging logs and rocks, cutting saplings, and hurling mud. Now we took the kegs of powder and strung them along the dam’s base, each with a jutting fuse. We had to surprise the French lines below at the precise moment when Dessalines’s best regiments were prepared to storm the defending redoubt. My plan was to send a flash flood into the enemy rear just the way Harry and I had broken our own dam at Nimes, enjoying the havoc it created by swirling away leaves, sticks, and insects. Astiza had shaken her head at our excitement.

I watched the reservoir fill, enjoying my own cleverness with the satisfaction of a child. The blacks lay on the crest of the dam, watching the French climb toward us. Between each was a severed head. My men had arranged them like trophies, recalling the worst days of the Terror back in Paris.

“I suppose we should prepare to light the fuses,” I told my band. I was so slathered in mud by this time that we looked identical, a dozen grubby, grinning beavers, or mules. The reservoir would soon top our dam and threaten to wet the powder kegs. I felt in my vest pocket for a tin I’d brought with some coals, and brought it out with some tinder I’d carried from camp.

I frowned. The tinder was soggy. The tin was cold.

In my enthusiasm for dam construction, I’d failed to remember I was getting quite wet. Water and mud had penetrated the ventilation holes of a coal tin I’d neglected to nurse, thanks to enough swigs of mobby and rum. I opened the container. My little bit of fire had gone out. I looked at it stupidly. Well, hell.

I was a three-year-old, indeed.

I cleared my throat. “Now, who brought flint and steel?”

Jubal and his companions looked at me blankly. “Lots of steel, Ethan,” he said. “No flint.”

“A pistol, then.” We could use the flash of its pan.

“You ordered us to leave all the guns back at camp.”

“I suppose I did.” I was thinking furiously. “The weapons of the French sentries?”

“You told us to throw them in the water to avoid any discharge.”

“That is entirely correct. I have been very careful to keep us quiet as mice.” I realized I hadn’t thought the contingencies of my plan entirely through, which is a habit of mine. Perhaps I should start writing things down.

Then I thought of a trick Fulton had told me. “Phosphorus, anyone?”

“Who they?” one of my doughty dam builders inquired.

I’d experimented in Paris with a phosphorus bottle. One uncorks the airtight container, inserts a splinter, and the chemical ignites when lifted into the air. Quite magical.

“Ethan, there’s no phosphorus in the black army,” Jubal said.

“You are correct. A pity.”

“Some of the men can make fire with sticks.”

“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.