Chase the Morning

Then he gestured, a strange circular movement slashed sharply across – once – twice. The crowd fell back, still dancing. An acolyte sprang down and tipped maize flour from a bowl on the ground before the stone, and as he poured his shuffling feet traced the same design, a circle quartered by two lines.

Men and women burst out of the crowd swinging fluttering bundles – chickens, dangling helpless by their feet. Up towards the stone they held the birds, swinging them in time to the dance; and suddenly a long blade caught the firelight in Don Pedro’s lean yellow hand. Across, back it licked, and with an exultant yell the acolytes flung the headless bodies, still flapping and struggling and spattering blood, high in the air to crash in their death-throes into the quartered circle. Don Pedro flung his arms above his head and sang out

Carrefour! Me gleau! Me manger! Carrefour!

The crowd howled and swung forward, Carib, Wolf, white and all, dancing and reeling from side to side. A young black woman seized one of the headless thrashing things and tearing open her robe sprayed its blood down her naked front; then she pressed it to her breasts, swaying and singing. And in her high clear voice I began to catch words I knew

Mait’ Carrefour – ouvrir barrière pour moins!
Papa Legba – coté p’tits ou?
Mait’ Carrefour – ou ouvre yo!
Papa Legba – ouvri barrière pour li passer!
Ouvri! Ouvri! Carrefour!

Carrefour – that was crossroads in French. And Legba – My fists clenched. Not a French word – a name, one I’d heard before. With a shout like breathless laughter the crowd drew back, pointing. In the open space before the blood-spattered design two or three figures limped and hobbled on sticks they plucked from the fire. One, a plump middle-aged mulatto, came lurching past us, leering and blinking with rheumy eyes. But as mine met them I felt a cold thrill of excitement. There was no real resemblance – it was more like an expression that flickered across that wholly different face, and a strange one at that. A grimace, twisted, distorted almost beyond recognition – but all the same it was unmistakable. It was the look of the old musician from the New Orleans street corner – from the crossroads. And Legba was the name Le Stryge had given him …

Desperately I called it after him. The man hesitated, glanced back at me, and I couldn’t be sure whether I still saw that look about him or not. Dry-throated, I raised my tethered hands to him. But then Don Pedro cried out Carrefour! again, and the crowd echoed the name like thunder. The dancers stiffened, straightened, no longer leant on their sticks. Rising to their full height and onto their toes, they spread their arms in great sweeping gestures of blocking and defiance, their faces settling into a mode of grim negation. The crowd crowed in welcome.

The man before me laughed a horrible bubbling laugh that seemed entirely his own, took a vast swig of rum – and spewed it out over the still-glowing stick at me.

Fire showered down on me like a rush of stinging hornets; I thrashed and yelled in my bonds. Stryge caught some, and snarled his anger. The man just laughed again, vindictively. ‘Pou’ faire chauffer les grains, blanc!’ he spat, and shuffled back to the dance. To warm up my –? My balls. Nice of him. But momentarily, as he’d turned away, I could have sworn I’d seen his face twist, as if in the throes of some terrible doubt or agony – and there was that Legba look again! Something more than malice had flashed into that slack malevolent face, something different – as if he were pleading to me?

Me again – always me. What did they want of me? What could I give?

‘Calling on him?’ muttered Stryge darkly. ‘You might have saved your damned fool’s breath.’

‘He helped me in New Orleans!’ I protested.

‘Maybe! Though how or why –’ Stryge wagged his head grimly. His voice rattled like the açon gourds. ‘But here he will not. He cannot. The haut chant was fed with living blood. He could not resist. It called his shadow-self, his distorted form – the Dark Guardian. Carrefour. Not the Opener of the Ways, but the Watcher at the Crossroads. And Carrefour is no man’s friend.’ He hunched his head down into his shoulders. ‘Now the ways stand open. And the Others must follow, when it’s blood that calls …’

Lines of maize flour traced out another, more complex vever pattern. The drums boomed and stuttered, the crowd swayed – and suddenly another hellish libation of rum flared over the fires. Men and women in the crowd dragged a few goats forward, and others some dogs – miserable skinny mongrels, but pitiful in the way they wagged their tails uncertainly and snuffled about. Don Pedro’s reedy howl rose high again.