Tale of the Thunderbolt (21 page)

“Boul, have him beaten!”

Saunders stormed out, letting his stomping feet do his cursing for him. Boul's lips curled into an uneven grin, and two heavyset Haitians entered, wooden clubs in hand.

 

An hour later, Valentine consoled himself with the knowledge that this pain would not be forever. Pain never was; the body either died or healed. In either case, the pain subsided.

But for now, he had an existence of seeping blood and throbbing pain. Blood stinging his eyeballs — the sting coursed up the side of his face like a hot circuit. Blood in his mouth, blood in his urine from the hammerlike blows to his kidneys, he fancied his toes were bleeding where one of the jailers had stood on them with thick-soled boots. And pain underneath, pain as deep as the Cayman abyssal. Vomit covered his shirt, and worse filth stained the inside of his pants.

He felt a callused yet gentle hand rock his head. Some kind of leaves went into his mouth, and the hand worked his jaw. He chewed with loosened teeth and swallowed; it seemed important to the hand.

“
Oui, oui,
my child. This will help, yes,” a woman's voice said in Haitian Creole.

Valentine opened one blood-gummed eye and looked up into a black face. Warm dark eyes looked down at him, a tenderness glowing there thanks to some inner light. He felt he must be resting in a lap — though the arrangement of her legs seemed wrong — but he only had a moment to enjoy the sensation before fading out.

When he awoke, he was in clean cotton ducks of the same kind he had seen under the straw hats in the Cape Haitian market. Something had woken him, and a sniff of fresher air made him turn to the door, which the breeze told him was open.

A figure slid in, moving mostly with its arms like a chimpanzee. It was the same woman who had cradled his head in her caressing hands. She was disfigured: two fleshy stumps were all she had left of her legs, and one arm ended in a leather-covered knob at her wrist. She had a wide nose, so wide it seemed to touch every other part of her face, below a cheerful yellow bandanna tied tight around her head. Swinging on her arms, like a cripple using two short crutches, she was at his side in two strides. She pivoted on the wrist-stump as neatly as a ballerina en pointe.

“Feeling better, child?”

“Yes. Whatever was in those leaves helped.”

The door remained open. A lemon-sucking guard watched every move the woman made in the bare cell. Valentine noticed that she wore a man's wristwatch with a cracked crystal on her good arm.

“Food and water'll help more. I brought both. I'm Sissy. I tend to the poor souls in here.”

“Sissy?”

“Short for Narcisse,” she said, unrolling a bundle. A coconut and further food wrapped in bits of rag greeted him.

“Food doesn't sound that good, but that coconut — ”

“As full of milk as a cow, child. You want me to hold it for you?” She sniffed at the air above his waist, like a mother wondering if a diaper needed changing.

“I think I can manage.”

Valentine removed the coir plug and tipped the sweet, thin coconut milk down his throat. It tasted like pure honey.

“You're a good healer, child. I've seen men die from such a beating. Here you are with an appetite already.”

“I'm grateful,” he said, handing her the empty husk.

“You want the meat inside?”

“Maybe later.”

“I understand, child. Been there myself.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Grateful
and
sorry.” She chuckled. “That makes you two rungs up on every man in this town.”

“Narcisse,” Valentine said, not to his nurse, but to the ceiling of the cell. “That's a lovely name.”

“Twenty years ago, I was a lovely girl.”

“You still are. Nobody is more beautiful than someone who takes away pain.”

She half snorted, half laughed. “Child, you're a charmer. Now you're three rungs up.”

Valentine unwrapped a piece of cheese and nibbled at it with sore teeth. “Good of them to let you in here.”

“Captain Boul's orders. I heard the men talking. They want you to live.”

Valentine probed a loosened tooth with his tongue and refrained from comment.

“Ten minutes, and you'll need to pass water, bad,” Sissy predicted. “I'll be back with a basin.”

She swung herself to the door and glared up at the man blocking it. “Thank you,” she said as he moved aside. Valentine almost felt the air chill at her tone.

Sissy helped him urinate at the end of the predicted ten-minute interval in such a matter-of-fact fashion, Valentine almost laughed at the procedure.

“Christ that burns,” Valentine groaned.

“Pain means you're still breathing,” she commiserated. “Told myself that before — and before that, too.”

She put his head in her lap again and started to sponge blood clots out of his hair. “You're wondering, and you're too polite to ask. I'm like this from my own beatings, from trying to run away out of here. I started out in the sugar fields. Tried to get away once too often. I'd be dead, except I can cook better than anyone this side of the island. And they're afraid of my juju.”

“Actually I was wondering about the watch. It doesn't fit you.”

“Hmpf. Most people just see a woman with stumps. This belonged to my man, Robert,” she said, pronouncing the name
Rowberr.
“He went to join the guerrillas, and I never seen him since. I think he's dead.”

Valentine lay back, trying to fall asleep. There was no pain in sleep. “Do you ever think of running again?” he breathed, his voice hardly a whisper.

“Hard to run with no legs, child,” she said, cradling his head again and bringing her face close to his so he could hear.

“When you bring me dinner . . . ,” Valentine began.

Narcisse listened, gently stroking his head. But Valentine felt her body tremble with excitement as he spoke.

 

Valentine lay down, and tried to sleep away the afternoon. He'd gotten up and walked around the cell. There was one final wall of pain to get through as he did so, and then he felt his strength coming back to him as though a dam had burst. He put his back to the wall where the guard couldn't see him and squatted and stretched and tried a few push-ups. The exertion left him as limp as water. He tried to sleep. He told himself he would never be able to rest: there were gaping holes in his plan, beginning with the necessity of him staying in this cell for another meal. He tried to relax, worried that a change in mood could alter his lifesign signature. He hadn't seen any Reapers on Haiti yet, or felt their presence, but that didn't mean they would not come for him. And with all those worries, sleep still ambushed him.

He woke with a start at the sound of Sissy's voice outside the door. “What, you on hourly wages? Food's getting cold, boy. Get this thing open.”

The door swung inward, and Valentine rolled over to see Narcisse. She had changed into heavier long-sleeved clothes, and the yellow bandanna had been replaced by a blue-green one.

Valentine rolled onto his side and knelt, as a hungry man looking forward to his meal. The guards looked in Narcisse's bag, poking through the contents.

“Awful lot in here.”

“You know the cap'n's orders. He wants him well fed. He didn't eat much earlier owing to the beating — he'll be healing-hungry now. I'm going to give him a wash, too. That's what the water's for.”

The jailers exchanged a look. One stepped aside so she could pass. She executed a neat hop over his foot, but her trailing culottes caught on his boot. Something fell from between her stumps and clattered to the floor.

The guards and Valentine looked down. It was a filleting knife — with a razor-sharp blade and a sturdy handle.

The guard outside the door reached for his rifle. The one inside bent to grasp at the knife. Valentine took his chance. Excitement overrode the stiffness in his body.

He sprang, bringing his fist forward. The defunct but heavy watch that once belonged to Narcisse's lover was wrapped around his hand in an improvised brass knuckle. The jailer turned his head at the blur of motion. What was left of the crystal shattered against the bridge of his nose, even as he tried to bring up the knife.

The other raised his rifle. To Valentine it seemed as though the guard moved in slow motion, and a rifle is an unwieldy weapon for a close-quarters fight. Valentine whirled around the pain-blinded guard at the door and stepped past the long barrel. He brought his watch-covered fist against the second guard's jaw in a haymaker blow, trapping the gun under his other arm. The gun fired; its bullet went into the cell, splitting the air between Narcisse and the broken-nosed man at the door.

Sissy had the knife now, and stuck it up and under her opponent's rib cage. Valentine grabbed his guard's head and pushed it as hard as he could into the wall behind him. Two sickening, crunching thumps, and he let the man drop.

“Get the keys,” Valentine said, blood and cordite in his nose.

“They ain't good for the outer door,” she said, slamming the door to the interior staircase shut. “I got the captain's. Boul's asleep for the rest of the day, and not much use to anyone for a while after that. His chicken curry had a pinch of magic in it.”

Valentine looked at both rifles and took the better of the two, an old Ruger Model 77/44. There were no spare magazines, but one of the guards had a handful of .44 cartridges in his pocket.

“Food and water?” Valentine asked. He took one of the guard's sandals off and put them on his bare feet.

“Got it,” she said, throwing the bag over her shoulder.

Valentine knelt. “Okay, get your arms around me. We're out.”

Narcisse wrapped her arms around his neck, holding on to her mutilated forearm with her good hand. Valentine came to his feet easily; she weighed no more than a loaded backpack. He went to the dead bolt on the basement exterior door.

“It's the shiny steel one with the longest barrel,” she said in his ear.

The door opened, and Valentine brought the rifle barrel up the stairway.

“Most of the men that weren't wounded are behind sandbags in the harbor. They expect your ship to come back for you. The white man with the chicken neck wants to spring a trap once they land troops.”

Valentine kept the rifle to his shoulder and ascended the stairs. Where his eyes went, the iron sights of the rifle followed. He heard banging on the door Narcisse had locked back in the cells.

A trio of navy-uniformed men approached the stairway, rifles held ready, hunched over as if trying to make themselves smaller. They hugged the wall, all in a row, like the three blind mice. Valentine ducked when he saw the rifle barrel come his way. The shot
ping
ed off the wall behind his head.

He popped his head and gun back up and shot the front man as he worked the bolt on his rifle. The other two dropped to the ground and fired without aiming.

Valentine ran, popping off another shot from his hip as he crossed the street, trying to keep the other two soldiers hugging pavement. His opponents looked more interested in getting behind the twitching body of their leader than in shooting at him. He made it into an alley chased only by the sound of a gunshot from the roof.

“You okay?” Valentine asked.

“You'd be running a lot lighter if I wasn't,” she said in his ear.

“I want to get away from the waterfront, if that's where the soldiers are. You wouldn't have a suggestion on how to get to the resistance, would you?”

“We'll get out of town and head west. Hope you're feeling better and some kind of athlete, child. These mountains'll kill you if the captain's men don't.”

Sissy guided him out past the standing buildings and into a mass of rubbled buildings. A shanty town of sorts grew out of the ruins, homes created from rebuilt walls and roofed with everything from corrugated aluminum to old doors to woven palm fronds. Gaping locals got out of Valentine's path. He was running with gun ready and Narcisse clinging to his back like a baby monkey riding on its mother. He ran to the canebrake beyond the rubble, then to the trees and momentary safety.

Valentine crossed the Plaine du Nord at a steady, loping run. Narcisse clung tightly to his back, Valentine's shirt tied around both their waists, to keep her from being bounced like a sack. They moved through the muted light of the forest, crossing old roads that were now only paths and the occasional overgrown foundation. During a break, he took a look to the south, at what looked like a tabletop mountain.

Narcisse panted: “How you run like that, child? Don't you tire?”

Valentine did not want to be reminded. “Oddly shaped mountain,” he said.

“That's no mountain, that's the Citadelle. An old fortress. It took many years and many lives to build, they say. It belongs to him now.”

“The local Kurian?”

She nodded.

“Why are we running toward it?” he asked.

“They wouldn't be expecting me to take you there. Once we come near the ruins of Sans Souci, we turn west into the mountains. Then you'll be among friends.”

The dead air of midday enveloped them. Sweat poured off the pair and mingled as it ran down Valentine's back. Narcisse mopped his brow and eyes as he ran.

By nightfall they hit a grade that made Valentine slow to a walk. Evening birdcalls and air flowing like a slow stream seemed to whisper a promise of relief from the day's heat. Valentine found a heavy tree trunk and set Narcisse down between two roots. He passed her the water, and she spat out a beaded chain she had clenched between her teeth, and fingered the charm on it with her good hand.