Read Online All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell - Free Book Online

habitation with perhaps a visitor.”
    “You say so,” Jean-Pic said. “But listen…”
    I thought I heard voices then, calling the dogs together, but it was so far, so faint, I wasn’t sure. Jean-Pic plucked at my wrist and led me. Not far from us was a dry gully and above one side of it a pointed shelf of rock stuck out, from where we could look down the gully to the plain. I didn’t see anything when I looked, but it seemed I could hear more plainly.
    “Well, they have not shot all their dogs,” I said. Then down on the plain I saw a spark, another spark, a chain of orange lights, and I knew that they were lighting torches.
    “They have not,” Jean-Pic said, between his teeth.
    “Still, they’re far,” I said.
    “And they’ll come fast,” said Jean-Pic. “We have to go higher on the mountain where horses can’t follow.”
    So we climbed down from the rock then, and began to trot into the bush to overtake the others and warn them. The sound we made was enough to cover the barking of the dogs, if they were still barking, so far away behind us. Under the trees it was already very dark, so that running at arm’s length from Jean-Pic I could hardly see him. I didn’t know how the others had gone so far ahead of us. We must have waited longer than we knew, looking over our back trail. Then there was a sound, a crashing sound very near, and I went up a tree so fast it seemed that it had sucked me onto its highest branch.
    In a tree nearby I could hear Jean-Pic breathing, it made me angry how loud he breathed. When I looked for a long time I could just see him plastered against the gray-green gleaming of the bark, with his sides blowing in and out like the skin of a frog. The noise had stopped. Then I heard it again—it was in one place—a thrashing sound, and someone groaned. It wasn’t far away at all.
    Slowly I slipped down from the tree. The insides of my legs and arms were sore from the sudden climb.
    “Where are you going?” Jean-Pic said.
    “It’s not them,” I told him.
    Jean-Pic hissed at me, no word, just anger—fear.
    “It isn’t them,” I said, and I went back the way we’d come. I could hear the thrashing stop and start again, and stop, to the left down the slope from the path we had broken for ourselves. The sound of the maréchaussée was still far below, but I thought I knew what they were after now. Not us. Or not only us. I smelled him before I saw him, the sweat from running and the sweat from fear. He had fouled himself too. My toe found a little wet at the bottom of a drying stream and I stopped and saw him there on the other bank where I had expected, bent double with the spikes of his tin head-stall tangled in the vines. He was trying to be still now, because he felt that I was near, but I could still hear the sob and the catch of his breath.
    It surprised me he had managed to come so far. I remembered him, the night before—they had unlocked the gate over his mouth when he left the field, so he was eating meal cakes, and drinking clairin , and he had danced for a long time, tossing his long-pronged head whenever the powder flashed with the drumrolls. I moved a little closer now, and he jerked away like a horse shying. His back and legs were scratched and bleeding from running in the bush.
    “Be still,” I said. He jerked and pulled a little away. The whites of his eyes rolled in the headstall. I saw they had locked the gate again. He must have been running a long time without water.
    “Kill him,” Jean-Pic said. He had come up behind me on cat feet.
    “I don’t know,” I said. The slave made a strangling moan with many syllables but no words and began to thrash his head from side to side. The vines tightened on the spikes of the headstall. At the back of his neck where the rivet closed the tin there was a thin line of blood.
    “It’s a trick,” said Jean-Pic. “He came to see which way we would go.”
    “Maybe not,” I said. The slave stopped moving and lay