"My men reported that they are on the move. They will attack in the night the garrisons north and south of our route, and screen our movement into the central mountains."
"Rations?" Valentine had been asking the same questions for weeks, then offering advice until he got the answers he wanted. Now it was a matter of routine.
"Each man has two days, and we have a further two days on packhorses."
"Let's take a walk."
Valentine took a turn through Monte-Cristi's campsite. Two hundred armed men, aided by thirty "pioneers" who carried extra supplies and tended to the pack animals, were gathered in chattering groups. Valentine expected more tension on this, the morning of the expedition. Instead he heard singing, joking, and laughter from the clustered men. There was little formal command structure to Monte-Cristi's "regiment"; some of the guerrilla leaders had eighty men under them-some commanded a dozen. Valentine knew the names of only the leaders, and the men under them were a nameless mass, though he knew many faces by now.
They looked at Valentine as he passed through, smiling and nodding. He caught a word in Creole and smiled as he silently translated it. Valentine had heard a few men call him "Scar," and it seemed that the moniker had become general.
"How did you become responsible for all this?" Valentine asked after they had passed through the men.
"My 'sacred knives'? Pure obstinacy, Captain. It is not well known, but I am Santo Domingan."
"Why shouldn't it be well known?"
"The two sides of the island have bitter feelings going back before the Kur."
"I see. How did you end up on this side of the line?"
Monte-Cristi walked him out of the village and up the hillside and found a shady tree. They sat on the ground side by side and looked down at the lounging soldiers in the village. War, as always, was endless stretches of waiting. Fingernail-sized wildflowers bloomed in the morning sun.
"I was in the Santo Domingo underground. And we were literally an underground. We lived in natural caves and tunnels. I was in the 'cadre,' which I suppose meant officers. Mostly we exhorted others to join, and our men to stay.
Eventually they hunted us down to our caves and blocked us up. Two times they went in after us. None ever came out to tell how strong we were. So they turned to words. The National Guard promised us good treatment if we would come out, and we refused. They tried to smoke us out with burning tires. There is not much gasoline on this island, but they even used that. Some died choking. Have you ever seen a body of a man who is air-poisoned?"
Valentine shook his head.
"We began to go hungry, and the next time they sent a prisoner in with food and more promises, I gave my men a choice. They could leave with honor-they had already been asked to endure more than any man could be expected to survive and remain sane--but I would stay and die. I asked only that they leave me their knives, so I would have something to remember them by as I stayed in the cave."
"How many stayed?" Valentine asked.
"Very few, perhaps one in eight. And you know, I was glad. I felt that no man should have to die as we were, like some kind of vermin. Even if they marched them out to a firing squad, I thought that a better end.
"Those that remained ... became ugly. We stayed alive in there seven months. No food but what we could catch, water that tasted like sulfur. They sealed the entrance and made the cave a tomb though we were not yet dead. We sickened and died. Some of the men took their own lives. We kept alive in ways that only one who has been through it before would understand. I kept up hope by looking for other exits, or seeing if we could enlarge the air holes to get out. We did find a cave with bats and we ate them, and I remember those days as you might remember one of the finest feasts of your life.
"So how am I alive and out, you are wondering? Some of the very men who left me their knives had slipped away, and came into the hills to get our bones. Our remains were to be relics in a secret monument to the resistance, you see. When they found us, I had to be pulled up and out. We were walk-
ing skeletons. Sadly, three more men sickened and died eating too much when we got out. But I still had their knives, and offered them back to their families. When I was well enough, we slipped into Haiti. My heart is weak and sometimes I think I am a little crazy, for all I dream of is those days in the darkness. I keep away the desire to return and die in that cave by fighting."
"So you became a leader because you refused to give up? That's as good a way as any to become a hero."
"But I do not deserve it. There are legends already about our ordeal. In Santo Domingo they say I turned my men into zombies, and ate them; Here in Haiti they say Baron Samedi came and brought us food from the other world, and anyone who has eaten it is never the same again. Both legends are part truth and part falsehood. Ever since then I have been Monte-Cristi, the one who lives for revenge for all those who died in the cave. I fear I will return to the cave, either in body or spirit. Both would mean the death of me."
"Narcisse told me that you were the kind of man to fight to the last drop of your blood. Sounds like you came closer to doing it than anyone I've ever heard of."
Monte-Cristi did not smile. He was the only Hispaniolan Valentine had met who did not smile at the slightest opportunity. "The men are interested in you, too. Your ship, the Grogs, the Jamaican pirates, they already say you are a white Toussaint-Louverture. A man of cunning alliances."
"They say too much," Valentine said. He thought of adding a platitude, like, 'We all do what we can,' but decided it would be trite. The man sitting next to him was beyond aphorisms.
"I think someone looks for you," Monte-Cristi said, pointing down the hill.
"Lieutenant Post. Thank you for the story ... err ... do you have a rank? Colonel, perhaps?"
"I am just Monte-Cristi. I would feel happier if I were Jacques to you."
"Then I will always be David to you, sir."