Victo nodded. "Let's sleep. It is safe-we are far enough into the Roots' lands that anyone after us will come slowly."
"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."
La Citadelle, Haiti: A black revolutionary known as "the Tiger"-who earned his reputation by sawing people in half-dreamed of Haiti's Citadelle as one of a ring of forts to guard Hispaniola against a return of the white slaveholders. The work of two hundred thousand laborers, of whom twenty thousand perished and, according to island legend, had their blood used as mortar to cement the stones, reshaped the top of the mountain with battlements faintly resembling a giant ship. This grim monument looks out on eroded mountains, now being reclaimed by the lush forests of the days when Christopher Columbus viewed them.
Set in walls a hundred feet high and fully thirty feet thick at their base, gunports like shaded black eyes look out on the north coast of Haiti and the steep track leading to La Citadelle. It is exactly the kind of cyclopean monument the Kurians make their refuge as they order the affairs of men. Behind walls of cannonballs piled like banks of skulls, there are storerooms and cisterns enough to feed an army for a year, space for troops, and catacombs beneath ready for untold horrors. The Kurian Lord has perches aplenty to stand, brooding at an altitude of three thousand feet while the stars whirl overhead. He could contemplate his domain in security, knowing that even a United States infantry division of the twentieth century would have a tough time blasting his men from the mountaintop, but their like no longer exist on Vampire Earth.