Toussaint Louverture lay shivering in the icy March cold, tormented by a crueler warden than the last warden of this frozen fort which overlooked the narrow way through the Jura Mountains into Switzerland. The cruelties heaped upon him had been enough to set his last warden insane, gone mad in the tower above even as he finally broke Toussaint’s spirit. The one time Master of French San Domingo had been locked in this freezing stone trench for half a year, betrayed by his Master Napoleon and his Dog of a general, LeClerc.

Toussaint’s own faithful man servant, Mars Plaisir, had been dragged away in chains for massaging his rheumatoid joints and swollen legs. Toussaint, without a person to impress with his unbridled optimism, had Life’s leave to savor the bitterness of defeat.

He had been a loyal and obedient slave to his plantation master.

He had served his masters so well that he had been among the rare blacks to earn his freedom and buy slaves of his own, thereby absolving his masters of their sins by joining them in their hellish quest.

He had initially served the Royalist cause during the Revolution, had conquered both nations of the Island of Hispaniola, which was the very Jewel of the Caribbean.

In time, when Revolutionary France had earned a Monarch, Toussaint had served him, had even been named after him.

Had he not returned the expatriate white slave masters to power, and even returned their slaves—or replaced those lost to war with readily purchased flesh?

Had he not trusted LeClerc and trusted that butchering dog Dessalines—murderous servant to them both?

He had, in every way, upheld the world order, even when seemingly arrayed against it. Toussaint was a loyal man, and nothing is a sharper barb in the heart of the loyalist than betrayal from above.

And here he lay, betrayed by those who he had loyally served in the cause of his people’s enslavement. It was his own fault, he supposed, as he had risen like some wretched mսlatto to think of himself as a white man, knowing in his bones all along that the whites would never forget or forgive.

He had his warm memories to cherish—the blue mountains, the few children who had survived of his many, and even the kindness of the whites. There were the Jesuits who had taught him, the rogue priest who had smuggled himself into this very cell as a doctor to offer him a blessing under the wilting nose of his evil warden. Most of all—and offering the only warmth left in his belly—was the company of soldiers who had stopped him on the road up into the mountains from Paris, and had sung a song to honor him, for he had once been their commander. This warmed him, and reminded him that it was the pallor of the wicked hearts of his masters that had done him down into doom rather than the equally ghostly pallor of their skin.

He had no fire to warm his aching feet and no books to warm his aching mind. He did, ironically, remain the owner of a candle, which did flicker feebly in the fireplace where a warming fire should now be smoldering.

What was that he heard?

A slither, a slink, a scrape, or a word—a whispered word at that?

Was he receiving the visitation of an angel presaging his end?

Or had his sins outweighed his actions one behalf of Holy Mother Church and doomed him to—no, a man approached.

Toussaint looked into the shadows cast by the flickering candle and saw two figures there. One was his jailer, who stood framed in the doorway, wrestling with his own head and gibbering in the most muffled tones. He seemed to be clawing a thousand ants from his hair, to be seeking serpents that had entered his ears and nose—seemed entirely mad in fact.

Next to him, and even smaller, stood a once familiar figure, a man he had spurned as a voodou priest and exiled to the mountain jungles along with the savage maroons from whom he seemed to have sprung. Standing before Toussaint, who could not rise to meet this aspiration, was Jeannot, the blood-drinking witch doctor of the maroons, the conniving papaloi of the slaves, who Toussaint had sacrificed on the altar of Catholicism to win the support of the Church for the Cause.

“Gappy-tooth man,

What for Cause?” came the hissed whisper of the beg-headed opal-eyed fiend as his bare feet slapped the icy floor and his unnaturally long nails scraped along the drier stone of the wall.

Toussaint, a man among men—particularly black men, no matter this devil’s nature—would not lie quietly taunted on his death bed. He heaved himself up onto one withered elbow and croaked, “Freedom!”

The fiend crept closer, pointing all about at the confined space as the mad jailer scraped at his own face in a silent whimpering frenzy, “Freedom who, gappy-tooth man—freedom you?”

“No, you blasted devil in ebony skin!”

“Free-free We?” the man hissed as he seemed to indicate himself. “We papaloi no free—machete We—machete man sent Ye!”

“I have always been a man of the Church, not a child of the voodoo.”

The jailer was now clawing at his eyes, and then pushing his entire hand into his mouth as if it were an evil snake questing for his soul.

Jeannot’s large eyes seem to twinkle with a glassy shine in the candlelight as he regarded the man’s suffering with detached amusement. He then placed his unnaturally large hand between his thighs and whispered something to the jailer that was unintelligible to Toussaint. The jailer then removed his hand from his bleeding mouth and pushed both hands down into his own trousers.

Jeannot then slunk up onto the bed and crept to him, seemingly oblivious to the muddled shrieks of agony that came from the voiceless mouth of the jailer as its owner’s own hands began tearing away his manhood beneath the white slacks.

Toussaint recoiled from the sight, for the jailer had not been cruel, or wicked, and had indeed been tormented by the wardens.

Jeannot was soon close enough to whisper into his mouth,

“White boy black

We come to take you back.”

“Who is We?” stammered the warm weather man wracked with pneumonia in this icy dungeon.

Jeannot straddled his failing body, not putting weight on him but rather covering him like a naked tent of living leather, and Toussaint felt warm as the heat radiating from the voodoo priest’s body comforted him.

A terrible ripping sound followed by a deep moan sounded behind the large head, glassy eyes and lithe frame of the fiend, who smiled and cooed,

“We be he,

Ye be Me,

Me be We!”

The man then bit Toussaint’s tongue and kissed him like an overfriendly dog might some indulgent owner.

An eagle-eyed youth, proud son of the Christian nobility, sat upon a stool, looking out over the minarets of Istanbul. The boy was just coming into his spring time, and would taste so mighty sweet!

To him they walked, Hairy Hand and Clay Skin Man, Joshua and Beniah, Amur and Japon, Stephanos, Ibrahm and Suvee, Spider and Ibis, the Baby of the Lilies, Jeannot and Jay, and now Gappy Tooth, in their favorite form—the whirling wild-haired dervish who danced with heads in the night-shrouded plaza beneath the Grand Mosque—and who all cooed as one, “We is He, that pretty war boy!”

“He Be We—forever free.”