Eden stared out the dusty windshield of the SUV as La Croix drove them up the mountain road, winding ever closer to the Citadel. Eden had never seen anything so enormous built without machinery. La Croix had the air conditioner blasting and was treating him to yet another lecture on Haiti, just as he had every day in the course of their journey around the country.
After a week of touring the island, La Croix was finally taking him to his new posting. The mission was in the barracks of the massive fortress. He and the other priests who arrived with Bishop Lomani were tasked with turning the rooms into an orphanage. A handful of Haitian nuns would be assisting them, forming the core of the nursing and teaching staff.
Eden was eager to join the others and get down to business. He felt guilty for starting off his new posting with a week-long guided tour, but Delatour, President Préval’s Interior Minister, had introduced him to La Croix only an hour after he stepped off the plane, and before Eden knew it he was whisked away from the others with the blessing of the bishop.
The Citadel, La Croix explained as he negotiated one hairpin turn after another, capped the entire summit of the mountain they were climbing, Mount Bonnet a L’Eveque, the Bishop’s Miter. Eden smiled at the name, and was sure that Lomani would approve. It was the largest fortress in a chain of more than two-dozen redoubts built between 1805 and 1820 across the northern highlands, to protect the new nation that lay to the south from a French invasion.
Eden looked around, taking in the rugged terrain. It was a patchwork of thick jungle canopy interspersed with swaths of denuded scrubland, where the locals had scrounged for firewood over the years. He had a hard time imagining the backbreaking drudgery it would take to simply climb these mountains, let alone construct a stone fort by hand under the bright Caribbean sun.
The driving force behind the project was King Henry Christophe, a hero of the slave revolt who crowned himself the first monarch of the nation. La Croix explained that the Citadel was the linchpin of Christophe’s defensive strategy for the northern coast. If the French ever dared to invade again after Napoleon had failed, Christophe planned to torch the entire coastal region, including his hometown of Cap-Haitien, and retreat with his army beyond the palace at Sans-Souci to the string of fortresses that guarded the narrow mountain passes.
Eden glanced at La Croix in surprise, and the man gravely nodded. The radical plan was testimony to the resolve of the slaves who had won their freedom in 1804, and they were determined to live free or die trying.
The price, La Croix explained to him, was staggering. The Citadel was the largest fortress that had ever been built in the Western Hemisphere, before or since, and it was accomplished at a cost of 20,000 lives. Each one of the more than three hundred cannon and mortar had taken a work crew over three months to transport from the coast. With a cache of ten thousand cannonballs, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the Citadel could have held out indefinitely, if any army had been foolish enough to attack. As it happened, none ever dared. Not even Napoleon’s.
After years of autocratic rule, with his court in turmoil, his country staggering under a crushing debt burden to France and his soldiers edging toward revolt, King Christophe suffered a stroke and eventually took his own life with a silver bullet through the heart. He was secretly buried somewhere under the courtyard, in a batch of the same mortar used to construct the outer walls – a blend of quicklime, molasses, and cow blood. The ghost of Christophe would always be on guard, seeing to the safety of his beloved country.
Eden and La Croix pulled to a halt at the end of the jungle road, where two young guides with a team of pack mules waited for them. The road was narrow and rutted the last few miles to the Citadel. Tiny Japanese pick-up trucks could squeeze through if they had to, if everyone on board had machetes to clear a path, but La Croix had no intentions of scratching his shiny white G550. Jungle shrubbery was unforgiving to any paint job, no matter what the factory said. Besides, La Croix reasoned with a private smile, riding on a mule would put the priest into the appropriate frame of mind.
He told Eden the last bit of Christophe’s story as the guides strapped Eden’s luggage onto the pack animals and readied a pair of mounts for them. According to legend, the king’s ghost still walked the grounds, forlornly searching for his loyal soldiers.
Eden just smiled, and La Croix kept his expression diplomatically neutral. In Haiti, a truly haunted land, such things happened all the time, but he didn’t press the point. Eden was in another world now, whether he knew it or not. He would soon find out about the ghosts and the zombies.