Haitian Gold Page 8

  Later in the day the river started to narrow and move faster. Just ahead were the first rapids Pierre had warned us of. “We must leave the boats here. The snow from the storm is melting and the river further inland will be impassable,” he said and got out of the boat. On shore he unrolled the paper and crouched down in the sandy soil by the river. He motioned us over and, with a stick, he drew a rough map. I recognized several features on the coast as well as the river. He placed two small rocks inland.

  “Sans-Souci.” He pointed to a stone. “Citadel.” He pointed to the other and drew a light line indicating a road out the back of the palace.

  He spoke again and Shayla leaned in to hear his words. “He says the road leads into the hills, but it is heavily traveled. We will have to cross the hills here and go in from behind.”

  Still wary of the pursuit I went to the boat. “Whether they are on foot or not, we need to press on,” I said and looked for a place to conceal the boat. I happened to look up at the mountains, and, for the first time since my childhood, I saw snow. The clear sky revealed white-capped peaks. Pierre and I were the only ones who knew what it was, and we covered the boat with the surrounding brush while the rest of the group stared in disbelief at the hills. “It looks nice from here, but once you’re in it, it’s not so friendly.” Coils of rope and bolts of cloth lay in a pile by the boat. We had brought supplies, anticipating that we would be in mountainous terrain where the going would be difficult and the nights likely cold.

  With several hours of daylight left, we ate dried turtle, then loaded up the rope and cloth and headed out single file through the brush. Pierre worked tirelessly ahead, clearing a trail with one of the cutlasses, but the brush fought back and he was only able to create a narrow path. The sharp branches and fine teeth of the low plants cut our skin, leaving small rivulets of blood that the mosquitos used to find us, and soon clouds of nasty bugs swarmed us.

  It was almost dark when we started to gain altitude, leaving the brush and bugs behind us.

  “He says we should camp here tonight. That these hills are riddled with ravines and with the snow it will be dangerous to travel at night,” Shayla said.

  Just as he spoke, Pierre collapsed on the ground. She went to his side with water and when he didn’t drink, she put her hand to his head. She turned back to us with a scared look on her face.

  “He has a fever.”

  Lucy went to him, her bag open by her side. She lifted his eyelids and peered in, scolding us to move back and let her work. “Is very bad,” she muttered and pulled out several pouches. I had witnessed her expertise in healing several times. She had healed me when I thought I was dead after being clawed by the panther back in the Florida Everglades.

  “What can we do?” I asked. Without Pierre, our expedition was over.

  “We need fire.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fire can be a tricky business in the tropics, and after a storm like we’d experienced the day before, everything was soaking wet. We had already climbed out of the littoral range, leaving the coconut palms with their highly flammable husks behind. We split up and picked through the deadfall, trying to find the driest material.

  I was shocked when I returned. What had looked like a simple scrape on Pierre’s calf had swollen and turned bright red. In fact, it looked similar to my leg after that panther had gotten me. Lucy’s frantic movements obscured her skill as she combined herbs.

  “We need fire,” she scolded me. “Now, the evil moves fast.”

  Rhames had stockpiled the material and squatted over a pile of twigs and bark. He tried the tinder we had collected, but it was too wet. Giving up on the natural fire starter, he spread black powder over the kindling and moved to arm's length, where he struck the flint. With a whoosh, the material caught and burned brightly for several seconds before the powder burned off. He fanned the embers to a small flame and started adding larger branches. Minutes later the small fire turned into a roaring blaze.

  While we waited for the water to boil, Lucy pulled me to the edge of the clearing. “Something bad is here,” she said.

  “I can see that.” I thought she referred to the wound.

  “No, Mr. Nick,” she said in a whisper. “It is the voodoo.”

  The island was famous for its black magic, but I had never thought it real before. There was nothing I could say to calm her. “I know you can cure him,” I tried to reassure her.

  “I do what I can, but the magic, it is strong,” she said and walked away. I set the boiling water by her supplies, then doused the fire, not wanting the smoke to give our location away.

  “What’s that she told you?” Rhames asked me.

  I was about to answer when suddenly Pierre’s body shook as if possessed. He grabbed his chest and screamed in pain. Whatever had a hold of him subsided and we huddled around his body. Beads of sweat covered him and he writhed in pain. Shayla was beside him, doing her best to soothe him.

  “Quiet him,” I told her and took the group to the side. There was no reason to hide what Lucy had said.

  “He spoke of this man named Jean-Jean,” I said over my shoulder so Shayla could hear. “He knows Pierre is here.”

  “What do you mean? The bastard general put a curse on him?” Rhames asked.

  “Is true. It is the voodoo,” Lucy said.

  I could tell by the look on her face that she believed it. There had to be something I could do to convince her that it was merely a scrape from a poison plant that Pierre suffered from.

  Lucy went back to Pierre and held the poultice on the wound, working it back and forth while humming under her breath. “I can do that,” I said. “You need to go look for what it was that he suffers from. There is no voodoo.”

  She looked at me as if I were a fool. “Surely there is. I have seen it as a girl. Look at the wound. That is not from any plant or animal we passed.”

  I looked at the clean edges of the cut. In truth, it looked like a knife had done the work. The incision was a series of zigzags, all equal in length and depth.

  I didn’t want to concede to her, but we had to try all options and get moving. There were surely troops out looking for us. “If it is a curse, what can be done?”

  “I have seen things as a child. The magic is not strong enough to kill him. Without some of his person—hair, skin or nail clippings—the curse will not be as effective. The old woman at my village, she would make dolls and baptize them to remove curses.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Mr. Nick. Maybe the snow will purify the wound,” Lucy said.

  I thought for a minute, wondering how snow could help, but remembered something from my childhood in Amsterdam. My mother had used snow to stop the swelling when I had hurt my ankle. If nothing else, it would give the men something to do. “Right then. Let’s get on with it.”

  I called to Blue. “Take Red and Swift and fetch some snow.” The light covering I had seen on these hills earlier was melted now, but above us on some of the north-facing hills I could still see white patches.

  This might or might not be voodoo, but it could serve the same purpose for Jean-Jean. He would suspect we were stationary and the fire might have shown our position. Rhames and I set a perimeter and stood guard while the women fashioned a doll.

  “This is a strange business we’re in,” Rhames said as the circles we were patrolling converged. “Maybe we should get out of here while we can.”

  I had the same thought, but feared Jean-Jean would be reading our minds. “We have to assume that Jean–Jean is as paranoid as Pierre says, and will be guarding any coastline that a ship can approach. If we are to risk it, we might as well have the gold to show for it.”

  He nodded and we continued our patrol. An hour later, the men were back with several cloth bundles the size of cannonballs. Water dripped through the bundles, and I guessed they had been much larger before they had started their descent.

  “We’ll take it to Lucy,” I said, assigning them to the p
erimeter to patrol while Blue and I grabbed the bundles and returned to the clearing. I was shocked to see Lucy straddling Pierre with a knife in her hand. With a deft cut, she freed a swath of his curly hair and moved down his body, chanting while she worked, to his hand. She sliced his fingernails and placed the cuttings in a small bowl. Shayla kneeled by his side, holding him still.

  The doll was crudely fashioned of material cut from his shirt, stuffed with leaves and colored with soot from the fire. Lucy took the bowl and stuffed the clippings into a hole where the head would have been. If we were not in such a serious situation, I would have laughed.

  “We are ready. If you are an unbeliever, you must leave,” she said.

  I knew this applied to me, but was curious when Shayla stayed. Before I left, I took one of the bundles of melting snow to Pierre and covered the wound with it. He moaned, showing he was still alive, but didn’t move or react otherwise.

  I walked away and soon heard chanting from behind me. A few minutes later Shayla appeared at my side.

  “It is done,” she said firmly.

  “Can I go back now?” I asked her.

  “Yes. The spell is broken. He is conscious,” she said and led me back to Pierre.

  He was leaning against a tree trunk, drinking some of the snow that the woman had melted into a cup. Our eyes met, but his were still far away. I looked down at his leg. Water pooled around the wound and on the ground from the melted snow but the wound was clearly healing. The swelling was virtually gone, and the cut had become white around the edges rather than the bright red it had been earlier.

  “You’re looking better for it,” I said to him.

  He moved his head and I could see his eyes were clearing now, the fever leaving fast. He spoke to Shayla. “He thanks you for your assistance and acknowledges a debt. He thinks he would have died without all of you.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. It was my opinion that the snow had cured the wound, not the baptism of the doll, but I held my tongue. Whatever worked was good with me so long as we could keep going.

  “Are you fit to move?” I asked him.

  Slowly he rose to his feet and put weight on the injured leg. He took a few slow steps and nodded. We still had several hours of light left and I intended to make the best of it. With Pierre leading, we started to move out. The terrain soon opened up and became steeper. It was slow going, moving up and down through the foothills, gaining altitude as we went.

  We reached the peak of a large hill and stood amazed at the view. Behind us we could see the forest drop into a valley, where it turned into tropical bush, which quickly yielded to the ocean. To one side were steep mountains covered with snow and reaching into the clouds. I turned to the west and got my first glimpse of the Citadel.

  It was still far away, and the hundreds of cannon that Pierre claimed guarded her approaches were invisible. Nestled into a high hill, the fortress looked impregnable.

  “Those walls were built by a slave force of twenty thousand men over a decade,” Pierre said. “The blood of many men are on those stones.”

  I took a tactical eye to the area. A road, winding like a snake, emerged from a battlement on the east side. I lost count of the switchbacks as they faded into the lowlands. It was the road we had avoided, leading from the back of Sans-Souci, and now I could see that Pierre had guided us well to stay away from it.

  Sheer cliffs guarded the east- and west-facing approaches. The rear of the fortress faced south, built into the ridge that looked like the spine of a boar and extended into the mountains. It was there that we would attempt to breach the stone walls. I scanned the terrain we would have to cross and saw two other low ridges. As the crow flew, it was less than a few miles, but the route we had to take would be much longer and harder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I was thankful for the heat from Shayla’s body entwined with mine, but it was still barely enough to ward off the night chill. I had shivered alone under the light blankets we had fashioned from the cloth we had brought, until finally she joined me. We had chosen to do without fire; the clear night sky and the glow of the moon would have betrayed us if we had lit one. There was some conversation about traveling at night, but the terrain we needed to cross was difficult enough in daylight. In the dark it would be deadly.

  Pierre shook us awake before dawn and we moved to the outskirts of the camp, where we relieved Red from his watch to let him get what sleep he could before we moved out. We sat on a small outcropping of rocks just covered in sunlight. Pierre removed the parchment and laid it out on one of the boulders, orienting it the way the fortress sat. From our position I could just make out its outline in the growing light.

  He pointed out the main features on the plan and then we shifted our gaze to the newly completed fortress, its cut stones and plastered walls now fully illuminated. Rhames came toward us and Pierre called out the names of the batteries in French.

  “The foundations were complete and they had just set the gun carriages when he was arrested. There were to be three hundred and sixty-five cannon covering every approach. He says Henri was paranoid the French would invade in force and this was to be the last bastion of defense.”

  “Bloody hell,” Rhames said.

  Pierre spoke again. “Twenty thousand of his people were forced to work on it and many died on the walls,” Shayla said.

  I wanted to refine our plan before the rest of the camp rose. “The Batterie Coidavid is impossible to approach without being seen.” I referred to the sheer, pointed face of the Citadel. It looked like the bow of a ship and dropped hundreds of feet into an easily defensible clearing. The road from the castle wound in front of the point to the east where it disappeared into the Batterie Royale.

  Pierre pointed at the approaches and spoke to Shayla. “It is the western batterie we must enter. The defenses are low here and there is no gate. The Batterie du Prince-Royal is the only entry we can approach without being seen, but the terrain is difficult; some say impassable,” Pierre said and pointed to the mountainous terrain behind the Citadel. “We will have to cross these two ridges and make the climb to the tower. From there we will have to find the entrance.”

  “Find the entrance? You said it’s impassable,” I questioned him.

  “He says there are secrets to the Citadel. Like the room where the treasure is kept, there are several secret exits. That is why we need this plan.” He pointed to several notes written in French. Shayla bent over to read them. “Here is the vault. These marks note the entrance, and here are the passages.”

  Secret vaults and passages intrigued me, but looking at the terrain, I had to admit I had doubts we would reach them. “Are there trails?”

  “He says they are well disguised. A network was formed when they started the construction,” she said and rose.

  It was time to move out and we roused the others. The sunlight had taken the chill from the air, and I expected the last hour of sleep the rest of the group had gotten was the best. We ate dried turtle and broke camp. Before we started out, Lucy came up to Pierre with the doll that she had made. It had a string on it and she placed it around his neck to ward off any future danger. Though I didn’t believe in the magic, I would take any advantage I could get.

  We set out in a single line behind Pierre and started climbing into the foothills. With the exception of the northern exposures, the snow had melted, making travel treacherous. Rivers of water sought the least restrictive path downhill and that was usually the trail. Finally, when we reached the first ridgeline, the sun and heat started to dry the ground and we made better time. The southern- and western-facing slopes were passable now, but the northern slopes were still wet and we often lost our footing in the slick mud, grasping for trees and branches to break our fall.

  By nightfall we were just shy of the second and highest ridge. Pierre found a hidden clearing with a stream nearby out of sight of the Citadel’s walls. We washed the caked-on mud from our clothes and soothed our tired and scraped bodie
s in the cool water, then relaxed on the boulders warmed from the afternoon sun. The temperature had climbed steadily since morning and I expected the cold front had passed and the night would be more comfortable.

  We posted sentries and the women laid out what little food we had left. Water was not a problem here, but we had exhausted our supply of dried meat. Without fire, there was little use in hunting. Lucy and Shayla had gone into the brush and returned with a basket of greens and mushrooms, but they did little to ease the hunger pangs that had already started.

  The night proved to be warm and I slept well, but when the camp rose and assembled the next morning, I could tell by the mood of the group that the lack of food was already taking its toll. Rhames and Red led the grumbling and I had overheard bits of conversation between them yesterday about the folly of our mission. Without food, their patience would be thin. With at least another day of hard travel, I wondered what condition we would be in when we finally reached the walls of the fortress.

  My spirits rose when we crested the highest ridge early that morning and could see down into the country below. The footing was better with another day of sun and we moved quickly, arriving at the bottom of the last hill leading to the walls near dusk.

  The light breeze brought the smell of baking bread over the walls and my mouth watered. Pierre had the plan out, but I didn’t need to know we were near the kitchens.

  He pointed and spoke. “Here is the passage. The code says forty-four blocks from the southeast corner and six blocks high,” Shayla said.

  I had no idea how that was going to get us into the Citadel. The stone blocks were huge and looked well placed. We waited until the twilight had evaporated to darkness, all the while undergoing the torture of roast meat grilling above us.

  “Could use some of that,” Rhames said, sniffing the air.

  “Best to just get the business done with,” I said. “It’ll be shorter work down to the coast.” I knew this wasn’t going to be true if we were successful. I had no idea how we would carry the chests of gold down the mountains, especially if we were noticed and pursued. I watched him sharpen his knife and replace the flint in his pistol. We were ready. Blue took Lucy and Shayla to the side. He would lead them in search of food.