"You know your George Orwell," Valentine said.
She shrugged. "Never met him. It was one of Boul's sayings." Boul was the man she cooked for before Valentine had brought her out of Haiti.
"Boul struck me as more the Machiavelli type."
"Daveed, you're troubled. You worried about the baby?"
Valentine was dumfounded. The letter Mali had left him with, with orders not to read it until he reached the Ozarks, had never left the pouch around his chest, where it rested among his precious seeds.
"Did Mali tell you?"
"Oh no, Daveed. I smell the child in her when we left Jamaica. She young and strong, Daveed; your girl'll be fine."
"It's a girl?" Valentine was ready to believe that someone who could smell a pregnancy could also determine the sex of an embryo.
"Daveed, you got to quit being a prisoner of the past. Forget about the future, too. Come back to the here and now; we need you."
Valentine glanced into the other room. Maybe it was the soft Caribbean tone of her voice, a bit like Father Max's. It reminded him he needed to confess. He lowered his voice. "Narcisse, there are people dying because I let them down. You know how that feels?"
Narcisse put down her spoon and joined Valentine at the table. Someone had spent some time varnishing the oak until the grain stood clear and dark-the Free Territory had been filled with craftsmen. The pattern reminded him of grinning demon faces.
"I've never been a soldier, child. Spent a lot of time run-nin' from them, but never been one. The men, wherever they're from, even those ape-men... they believe in this fight too. They're not as different from you as you think. They don't follow you blind, they follow you because they know that if it comes to a fight, they want to look out for you as much as you want to look out for them."
"Think so? Narcisse, I ran outside of Bern Woods. I got up and ran."
"No. I saw Ahn-Kha dragging you away with my own eyes."
"I still left."
"Dying with them wouldn't have done your people any good. You saved yourself for the next fight. You saved the wood, at least some of it."
"That was an accident. A lucky accident. An officer belongs with his men. If he doesn't share their fate, he hasn't done his duty to them. It's the oldest compact between a leader and the led. Goes back to whatever we had for society before civilization."
Narcisse thought this over. "Was it wrong of them to surrender?"
"Of course not. It was hopeless from the start."
"But you fought, they fought."
"Couldn't help it. It was instinct."
"When you left, Daveed, that was instinct too, no?"
"Not the kind you should give in to."
"The past can't be changed, child. You keep worrying at it, you'll be doing the same thing as you did at the fight. Running away. Don't pick at a scab, or a new one grows in its place. Let the hurt heal. In time, it'll drop off by itself. Better for you, better for the hurt. If there's one thing I know about, child, it's getting over a hurt."
The Vaudouist didn't refer to her injuries often. She answered questions about them to anyone who asked, but Valentine had never heard her use them as a trump card in an argument before. Valentine let her unusual statement hang in the air for a moment.
"Narcisse, it sounds fine, but... a bit of me that isn't quite my brain and isn't quite my heart won't be convinced yet."
"That's your conscience talking. He's worth listening to.
But he can be wrong ... sometimes."
* * * *
Valentine half dozed in front of the field pack with the headset on. Ahn-Kha snored next to him, curled up like a giant dog. Like most Quisling military equipment, the radio sitting on the table before him was ruggedly functional and almost aggressively ugly. Late at night the Quisling operators became more social, keeping each other company in the after-midnight hours of the quiet watches. Someone had just finished instructions on how to clear a gummed condensation tube on a still. His counterpart was complaining about the quality of the replacements they'd been getting: "Shit may float, but you can't build a riverboat outta it." Valentine twisted the dial back to a scratchier conversation about a pregnant washerwoman.