"Can you find them?" Valentine asked.
"They will find us."
Valentine would have slept through the dawn were it not for the birds. The parrots hollered back and forth between the trees like argumentative neighbors, while thousands more greeted the morning with song and call. Victo and the dogs slept in a snoring mass, and Narcisse lay with her back pressed up against his. He felt something disquieting in his crotch.
"Sissy," Valentine whispered.
"Yes, Dav-eed?" she yawned.
"I think a bug or something crawled up my leg."
"That is bad, especially if it is a centipede. Turn yourself so it rests in your trousers, rather than against your skin."
Valentine shifted, wondering if after all the hazards he faced he would finally be brought down by an insect. Whatever it was decided to cling to his thigh.
"It's still there."
"Take down your pants."
Victo woke up and looked at the operation. Valentine got into a position as if he were doing a push-up, and Narcisse helped him take down the loose cotton pants.
"It is a centipede," she said, smiling. Valentine looked down. It was long and black, with painful-looking pincers
waving back and forth. Narcisse maneuvered her head and blew on the centipede. It didn't care for the breeze and began crawling down his leg. Still blowing, she herded it onto his lowered trousers, and from there used a stick to encourage it to return to the debris on the floor.
"They can kill, though for a man as healthy as you, it might just be very painful."
"The same thing happened to a friend of mine," Victo said. "It bit his sack-he said it swelled up like a mango. Oh, how he howled."
Valentine grimaced. "Thanks for waiting to tell me that."
Valentine heard the guerrillas first as he cast about that morning with his hard ears. The dog-led trio was following a game trail west up yet another hillside. Five or six men, keeping concealed, paralleled their track up the slope. He picked out their step from the cacophony of the Haitian forest: birdcalls, creaking trees, and wind in leaves.
He called a halt. The dogs startled at the sound of the guerrillas' approach down the hillside. Two came down to greet them; the rest observed from above. Valentine was relieved to hear glad words of greeting rather than a challenge when they caught sight of Victo. They were well fed if scantily dressed, with rifles tied across their shoulders and short wooden spears tipped with metal and thorn-bristled clubs. They embraced and descended into a bantering conversation Valentine couldn't begin to follow.
Victo turned to him with a smile. "They were sent to find us, Captain Valentine. Word of your escape reached the hills. They are also in contact with your ship. It is waiting off Labadee not far from here."
Valentine's growling stomach asked the next question. "Do they have food?"
"Soon, soon. Their company watches the road out of Limbe at the river. They have a camp there. It is a downhill walk."
"Thank God."
"But soon you will be climbing mountains again, my friend. You must see the keeper of the weapon against Kur."
"So you do know. What is it? Don't tell me I traveled a thousand miles for an old voudou curse."
"No. Papa Legba will tell you more. I do not know much about how it works. A very old magic, they say. But even the Whisperers fear to cross into this part of Haiti."
"Where do I find Papa Legba?"
Victo's eyes furrowed. "They did not tell you? You must go up to the Citadelle. To meet the Kurian there. We call him Papa Legba. He will show you the weapon."
niola, April: The largest island of the Caribbean has a record of woe. The rugged land remembers only moments of peace in its long history of strife and sorrow. Rule by colonial aristocrats, despots, corporations, or military dictatorships made no difference to the impoverished inhabitants. The new boss, as the twentieth-century song said, was much the same as the old one. The passage of the Kurians across their green island made the rest of their unhappy past a mere warm-up for the horrors to come.
The island's role as one of the first gateways of the Kur's invasion shrank the populace from the millions to the thousands. When the Kurians arrived, their Reapers hunted down the Hispaniolans in even the most remote villages on their way north, south, and west. The few slaughter-shocked inhabitants of the island remember these years in oral tradition as "La Fiesta de Diablos."
The beauty of the island stands in contrast to the ugliness of its history. Royal palms tower over empty towns, vanishing under a carpet of leafy vines. Nature left to itself covered the eroded scars left by charcoal gatherers in a dozen years. Cackling colonies of birds flit from enormous palm to enormous palm over an ocean of lesser trees and creepers. Gulls and sandpipers congregate on empty beaches, nesting in washed-up fishing boats. Further inland, wild dogs and pigs hunt and root through new and thriving forests.