Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

His good-Samaritan gesture seemed to have become slightly harder to break off than it had been to get into, but with nothing but time on his hands he was cheerfully resigned to letting it work itself out.

“Where were you going?” he asked in French, and she pointed up the road.

“Là-haut.”

The reply was given with a curious dignity, but without presumption. He was not sure at what point he had begun to feel that she was not quite an ordinary peasant girl. She wore the same faded and formless kind of cotton dress, perhaps cleaner than some, but not cleaner than all the others, for it was not uncommon for them to be spotless. Her figure was slimmer and shapelier than most, and her features had a patrician mould that reminded him of ancient Egyptian carvings. They had remained mask-like and detached throughout the ministrations of the doctor, although Simon knew that some of it must have hurt like hell.

He drove up again to the place where he had found her. Two other older women were sitting there, and they greeted her as the jeep stopped. She smiled and answered, proudly displaying the new white bandage on her leg. She started to get out.

He saw that there were three baskets by the roadside where the two women had waited. He stopped her, and said, “You should not walk far today, especially with a load. I can take you all the way.”

“Vous êtes très gentil!”

She spoke French very stiffly and shyly and correctly, like a child remembering lessons. Then she spoke fluently to the other women in Creole, and they hoisted the third basket between them and put it in the back of the jeep. Her shoes were still on top of its miscellany of fruits and vegetables, according to the custom of the country, which regards shoes as too valuable to be worn out with mere tramping from place to place, especially over rough rocky paths.

Simon drove all the way to the Châtelet des Fleurs, where the road seems to end, but she pointed ahead and said, “Plus loin.”

He drove on around the inn. Not very far beyond it the pavement ended, but a navigable trail meandered on still further and higher towards the background peaks. He expected it to become impassable at every turn, but it teased him on for several minutes and still hadn’t petered out when a house suddenly came in sight, built out of rock and perched like a fragment of a medieval castle on a promontory a little above them. A rutted driveway branched off and slanted up to it, and the young woman pointed again.

“La maison-là.”

It was not a mansion in size, but on the other hand it was certainly no native peasant’s cottage.

“Merci beaucoup,” she said in her stilted schoolgirl French, as the jeep stopped in front of it.

“De rien,” he murmured amiably, and went around to lift out the heavy basket.

A man came out on to the verandah, and she spoke rapidly in Creole, obviously explaining about her accident and how she came to be chauffeured to the door. As Simon looked up, the man came down to meet him, holding out his hand.

“Please don’t bother with that,” he said. “I’ve got a handy man who’ll take care of it. You’ve done enough for Sibao already. Won’t you come in and have a drink? My name’s Theron Netlord.”

Simon Templar could not help looking a little surprised. For Mr Netlord was not only a white man, but he was unmistakably an American, and Simon had some vague recollection of his name.

It can be assumed that the birth of the girl who was later to be called Sibao took place under the very best auspices, for her father was the houngan of an houmfort in a valley that could be seen from the house where Simon had taken her, which in terms of a more familiar religion than voodoo would be the equivalent of the vicar of a parish church, and her mother was not only a mambo in her own right, but also an occasional communicant of the church in Pétionville. But after the elaborate precautionary rituals with which her birth was surrounded, the child grew up just like any of the other naked children of the hills, until she was nearly seven.

At that time, she woke up one morning and said, “Mama, I saw Uncle Zande trying to fly, but he dived into the ground.”

Her mother thought nothing of this until the evening, when word came that Uncle Zande, who was laying tile on the roof of a building in Léogane, had stumbled off it and broken his neck. After that much attention was paid to her dreams, but the things that they prophesied were not always so easy to interpret until after they happened.

Two years later her grandfather fell sick with a burning fever, and his children and grandchildren gathered around to see him die. But the young girl went to him and caressed his forehead, and at that moment the sweating and shivering stopped, and the fever left him and he began to mend. After that there were others who asked for her touch, and many of them affirmed that they experienced extraordinary relief.

At least it was evident that she was entitled to admission to the houmfort without further probation. One night, with a red bandanna on her head and gay handkerchiefs knotted around her neck and arms, with a bouquet in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she sat in a chair between her four sponsors and watched the hounsis-canzo , the student priests, dance before her. Then her father took her by the hand to the President of the congregation, and she recited her first voodoo oath:

“ Je jure, je jure , I swear, to respect the powers of the mystères de Guinée , to respect the powers of the houngan , of the President of the Society, and the powers of all those on whom these powers are conferred.”

And after she had made all her salutations and prostrations, and had herself been raised shoulder high and applauded, they withdrew and left her before the altar to receive whatever revelation the spirits might vouchsafe to her.

At thirteen she was a young woman, long-legged and comely, with a proud yet supple walk and prematurely steady eyes that gazed so gravely at those whom she noticed that they seemed never to rest on a person’s face but to look through into the thoughts behind it. She went faithfully to school and learned what she was told to, including a smattering of the absurdly involved and illogical version of her native tongue which they called “French,” but when her father stated that her energy could be better devoted to helping to feed the family, she ended her formal education without complaint.

There were three young men who watched her one evening as she picked pigeon peas among the bushes that her father had planted, and who were more impressed by the grace of her body than by any tales they may have heard of her supernatural gifts. As the brief mountain twilight darkened they came to seize her, but she knew what was in their minds, and ran. As the one penitent survivor told it, a cloud suddenly swallowed her: they blundered after her in the fog, following the sounds of her flight: then they saw her shadow almost within reach, and leapt to the capture, but the ground vanished from under their feet. The bodies of two of them were found at the foot of the precipice, and the third lived, though with a broken back, only because a tree caught him on the way down.

Her father knew then that she was more than qualified to become an hounsis-canzo , and she told him that she was ready. He took her to the houmfort and set in motion the elaborate seven-day ritual of purification and initiation, instructing her in all the mysteries himself. For her loa , or personal patron deity, she had chosen Erzulie, and in the baptismal ceremony of the fifth day she received the name of Sibao, the mystic mountain ridge where Erzulie mates with the Supreme Gods, the legendary place of eternal love and fertility. And when the houngan made the invocation, the goddess showed her favor by possessing Sibao, who uttered prophecies and admonitions in a language that only houngans can interpret, and with the hands and mouth of Sibao accepted and ate of the sacrificial white pigeons and white rice, and the houngan was filled with pride as he chanted: