Ghost Warrior (13 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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As Broken Foot ended the first four-song series, Lozen glanced at Stands Alone. She was marking off the songs by twisting a fringe on her tunic whenever his voice died away and he gathered himself to start the next song. Lozen wondered if she would have enough fringes.
Broken Foot's singing lasted until sundown when the dancing began. Lozen and Stands Alone danced continually, striking the ground with their staffs at each step. She Moves Like Water danced beside Lozen, and Corn Stalk accompanied Stands Alone.
After standing motionless all afternoon, Lozen's legs ached, but She Moves Like Water smiled encouragement at her. She danced so gracefully that Lozen couldn't shame her by stumbling or grimacing. Fortunately, this was only a halfnight dance. When the full moon hung directly above them, Broken Foot and the drummers stopped.
Lozen and Stands Alone, Grandmother, and Her Eyes Open could sleep a few hours. At dawn the girls walked out onto the dance ground. On the hides laid out in front of them sat baskets of pollen and others holding cowrie shells, chicle, nuts, tin cones, and fruit symbolizing the gifts that White Painted Woman would give to her people.
For the rest of the morning the girls danced in a jingling of bells with She Moves Like Water and Corn Stalk next to them. Now and then Grandmother lifted Lozen's heavy fall of hair and wiped her neck and forehead. She let her sip water through the drinking tube. At midmorning, Grandmother motioned for Lozen to lie on her stomach on the hide, and she massaged her all over to make her vigorous and strong.
When Lozen stood up, she felt taller. Her legs no longer hurt. Her feet and hands, then her legs and arms tingled as the power of White Painted Woman surged through her.
At midday the dancing stopped, and people crowded closer. This was the climax of the ritual, and no one wanted to miss it. To the east Broken Foot set a basket containing sacred pollen and ocher, a deer-hoof rattle, an eagle feather, and a bundle of grama grass. Spectators lined the track.
Lozen looked down the narrow open space with dread. The welfare of her people depended on her four runs. What if she stumbled? What if she fell? What if she overturned the basket?
This was when Grandmother earned the title She Who
Trots Them Out. She pushed Lozen into the run and gave the high call as Lozen sprinted to the basket, circled it, and raced back. Broken Foot's assistant moved the basket closer, and Lozen ran three more times while the spectators shouted and the women added their cries to Grandmother's.
At the end of the fourth run Broken Foot sang in a voice almost too hoarse to hear.
White Painted Woman carries this girl
She carries her through long life
She carries her to all good things
She carries her to old age
She carries her to peaceful sleep
The crowd's excitement intensified as the Gaan dancers appeared with their tall, fan-shaped headdresses painted in the four sacred colors. They danced around the women through four more song cycles. Spectators began to shout when Loco in his guise as the Clown took a brush full of pollen dissolved in water and painted Lozen with it from her head to her feet. Lozen closed her eyes when the pollen crusted her lashes. When he finished, the Gaan danced away, and Grandmother wiped the pollen out of her eyes.
Her people's goodwill washed over Lozen. Tears ran down her cheeks, leaving tracks in the pollen. She felt as though she were rising off the earth and floating on the affection of those around her.
“It's almost done for her,” they shouted. “The end is coming!” “She's beautiful! She brings us joy.”
Broken Foot dipped the brush into the liquid pollen, and with flicks of his wrist, sprayed the crowd with it, turning so that the drops went in every direction. The din grew deafening.
Lozen picked up the deer hide on which she had been standing. She shook it to each direction, to send away any diseases that might harm her. Broken Foot poured one of the baskets of fruit and trinkets over her, and the children rushed forward, laughing and jostling to pick them up. Possessing
something from the basket assured them that they would prosper for years to come.
When he had done the same for Stands Alone, Grandmother offered the basket of pollen to the four directions and took some of it on her fingers. She marked a stripe from cheek to cheek across the ridge of Lozen's nose and painted another stripe along the part in her hair. Lozen marked her the same way.
People formed a line that circled the perimeter of the dance ground and stretched off among the nearest shelters. As individuals reached the front of the line, Lozen and Stands Alone marked them with pollen. Mothers held their children up for their blessings. When He Steals Love approached Lozen, she tried to avoid his eyes, but he gave her a look of such longing that she almost dropped the basket of pollen in her confusion.
When the last person had received a blessing. Lozen and Stands Alone went to the tall tipi of four poles raised to Broken Foot's exact specifications. They passed between the food and gifts to be given away later and lay down on the thick bed of pine needles. Tonight Lozen and She Moves Like Water, Stands Alone, and Corn Stalk would dance with four of the Gaan dancers, circling in complex patterns half the night.
The Gaan dancers wore black masks. They painted their bodies gray with magical black designs. The sight of their tall crowns silhouetted against the orange sunset sky as they came down from their hiding places had always terrified Lozen. As a child, she had screamed when her grandmother held her up so they could thrust their wands at her to drive away evil spirits.
Now she knew who the men were inside those costumes. She also knew that her brother had had to use all his charm to persuade them to perform. If a man made a mistake in the ceremony, he could become ill or call evil down on everyone. If he didn't put the mask on with the proper gestures, he could go mad. The touch of a dancer who had been made up by a stronger shaman could paralyze him.
When the Gaan finished their performance, the social dances would begin. People would pair off and dance all night. This was the best of all possible nights to fall in love, and many would, but Lozen knew she wouldn't be one of them.
She didn't care. Her brother had promised her something better. If she could endure the training that the boys received, she could go with him on a raid for the horses they desperately needed to replace the ones the family had given away. She fell asleep exhausted and smiling. She knew she would never feel such ecstacy again, but she didn't care about that, either. To have experienced it once was enough.
1852 Apprentice
Coyote Makes Women Valuable
 
 
A long
time ago, they say, Coyote saw a pretty woman. Coyote's not bashful like those boys over there. He's always wanting to have intercourse with women. They don't even have to be pretty, but this one was.
He smiled at her, and he joked with her, and he walked with her in the moonlight that shone through the branches of the cottonwoods by the river. He was about to put his penis inside her when he saw rows of sharp teeth in her vagina. So instead of his penis he poked a stick in there. Those teeth bit that stick in two with a loud crunch, and they gnawed the pieces into tiny little splinters.
So then Coyote put a rock in and broke the teeth right off. Because he did that, the woman's vagina became like it is today, without teeth.
The woman was happy about it. She said, “From now on men will desire me, and I'll be worth many horses and other good things.”
That's why these days men give horses and blankets and saddles and other valuable gifts to a woman's family when they want to marry her.
I'm talking about fruit and flowers and other good things.
GETTING A LEG UP
I
n the desert Rafe was used to light, heat, thirst, and his own inner imps playing tricks on him, but something here was amiss. Red whinnied. The four mules brayed and pitched their ears forward.
In their haste to get to California, the gold rushers had left behind the usual broken-down wagons, furniture, cast-iron stoves, trunks, and millstones. Clothes caught on the prickly pear or blew along the ground like wounded birds. In the distance, though, two rows of dark forms paralleled the rutted trail.
Coffee-colored Othello performed his mincing sidestep, rattling the traces in the process. His partner, the smaller, shifty-eyed Iago, tried to sit down. In front, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern each gave a kick, setting the iron chains on the whiffletree to jangling.
Rafe squinted into the glare of the morning sun. The shimmering waves of August heat caused the figures to undulate. As he drove closer he saw pairs of oxen and mules, horses and sheep facing each other across the trail, each pair fifteen or twenty feet away from the next one. They were all dead. Their blackened skin had shriveled around their parched bones and held them together. Someone had propped them up with limbs and rocks and boards. Rafe estimated that at least a hundred of them stood silent guard, and he realized that for the past few miles he hadn't seen any dead animals with the abandoned wagons.
Beef-on-the-hoof brought such a high price in California that driving them west could make a man rich, even if most of them died on the way. The ordeal of the trek killed
thousands of dray animals, too. Whoever did this hadn't lacked material for their creation. Rafe wondered who the jokesters were and why they decided to haul the corpses into place. Were they blessed with a sense of the ridiculous? Was this their comment on the folly of mankind? More likely, Rafe thought, a couple fellows had gone mad with the heat.
The first animal in line was an ox with a desert wren perching in his eye socket. Flies still buzzed around the fresher bodies. The scene was eerie, unnerving. It was the sort of multitude that could make a man feel more than alone in the universe.
He had neared the end of the line when he saw a horse with a saddle still attached. Hanging from the saddle was a holster with a book inside. Rafe stopped the wagon and climbed down. The book looked almost new.
Romeo and Juliet.
He glanced around, half expecting this to be an extension of the joke of the mummified entourage.
He reached out a hand; then he drew it back. He could see no rock or plank scratched with the dread words, in various spellings, “Died of Asiatic cholera,” but that didn't mean anything. No telling where this particular horse had expired or where his owner might be.
What if cholera clung somehow to the things its victims touched? What if it infected whomever touched those things next? After the war, Rafe had seen his first boss, an old army stager named Blue, die of it. Blue had vomited until the arteries in his forehead had burst. Rafe had watched in horror and fascination as the ruptures crept across Blue's face, like streams flowing under old ice.
Rafe had been relieved when Blue died. He suspected Blue had been, too. Rafe had heated an old army bayonet in the coals and burned the letters into the plank for Blue's grave marker. He had spelled the words right, too. The fact had given him some pride, him being so new to the magic of letters.
Cholera or not, this was Shakespeare. It was
Romeo and Juliet
. The officers of his brigade had favored the military plays, the Henrys, the Richards, and Macbeth, but Rafe harbored
a secret passion for this most romantic of the Bard's tragedies. He gingerly lifted the holster's belt off the saddle horn and threw it onto the high seat. He climbed up next to it. As he drove away, he eyed it as though it might bite him.
By the time he reached the end of the line he had become so accumstomed to the corpses that he jumped when he saw a horse moving on the trail ahead. He flicked the lines to speed the mules' saunter to a brisk walk. The man must have heard him coming, because he turned around and waited.
“Absalom!” For once the desert had coughed up a friend instead of an enemy.
Absalom shaded his eyes. “Rafe?” He waited until Rafe drove the team alongside him. “Did you ever see the like?” Absalom nodded at the boulevard of bones.
“Naw. And I reckoned I'd seen it all.”
“Is there water near?” Absalom upturned his wooden canteen to show that it was empty.
Rafe passed him his canteen. “There's a spring not far from here.”
Absalom wiped his face and neck with his bandana. “If I find a running stream, I shall do as the Indians at Yuma crossing.”
Rafe knew he was supposed to ask what they did, but as happy as he was to see Absalom, he had trouble making conversation. Days alone made his voice rusty and strange in his ears. The heat here in the part of the New Mexico Territory known as Arizona had a different quality and intensity about it. It was like standing in front of the open door of a lime kiln. It left him dazed.
Absalom didn't need prompting. “When the temperature rises to a point where the devil himself begins to perspire, members of the Yuma tribe sit in the river up to their necks with mud on their heads. I was treated to the spectacle of a group of mud balls talking and laughing together.”
“Apaches have been frisky in these parts. You shouldn't be traveling alone.”
“I'm not alone now.” Absalom grinned. “And neither are you.”
“How is your man, Caesar?” Rafe figured the question would keep Absalom occupied and spare him the need to talk at all.
“That is a long story.” Absalom glanced at the mass of cactus and snakeweed stretching to the distant peaks rising abruptly from the desert floor. “But I suppose I have time to tell it. Suffice it to say that the streets of California are not paved with gold. Nor does the average fellow come across it while digging a privy or washing his drawers in the stream. The rich veins have been claimed, and now men are killing each other over them. Most earn a pittance laboring dawn to dark at the stamping mills. Caesar decided he had had enough of grubbing in the dirt.”
“What's he doing, then?”
Absalom smiled. “He's not exactly fleecing the miners, but he's shearing them. He bought a tent and a barber chair and a pair of shears. He's perfected a pomatum of lard, spermaceti …” He saw the noncomprehension in Rafe's eyes. “Spermaceti is a waxy substance from whales. Caesar orders it and elder-flower water from a high-toned San Francisco bordello where the ladies think he is just the bee's knees. He cooks it all up with brandy and oil of nutmeg and tells the yokels that if rubbed into the scalp, it will grow a bumper crop of hair on a bald knob. It's proven quite popular.”
“And will it grow hair?”
Absalom shrugged. “At least it doesn't kill what's already there.”
“We can stay at Don Angel's hacienda tonight,” Rafe said. “He has a rancho in a canyon in yonder mountains.”
“That would be fine as frog's hair. I've not slept in a bed in a week.”
“Don Angel sets a good table, but I'd avoid the bed. It comes equiped with six-legged livestock. We can camp in the cottonwoods near the river and take turns keeping watch.” Rafe opened the saddle holster and pulled out the book.
Absalom's grin widened. “I saw Miss Fanny Kemble herself perform Juliet.”
“You never! Where?”
In the opera house in San Francisco. She put the brogan-and-canvas-trousered set into quite a fervor.”
Rafe opened his mouth, then closed it. He wasn't ready to confess, even to Absalom, how much he longed to see Shakespeare acted on a real stage.
“I have something to show you, too.” Absalom turned in the saddle, rummaged in the saddlebag, and pulled out a long package wrapped in a feed sack and tied with twine. “While in Tucson a few days ago I acquired the means of financing my return home and setting myself up in clover when I get there.” He started undoing it. “I met a poor fellow quite down on his luck and mad to get to California. He sold me this priceless war relic for a song. I figure to sell it in San Antonio.”
He held up a piece of pine carved in the shape of the lower half of a leg with leather straps on one end and a crude foot and misshapen lumps for toes on the other.
“What's that?”
“This … ,” Absalom paused for effect, “is the wooden leg that belonged to General Santa Anna.”
“If you paid a song for it, then you received fair value.”
“You don't think it's the real goods?”
“If it's Santa Anna's leg, then it has more lives than the shifty old polecat himself. I've seen a dozen like it, all sworn to be the genuine article. A fellow from Illinois told me that the actual leg is on display at the state house in Springfield.”
Absalom looked at it ruefully. “I reckon it would make a fine fire tonight.”
“It would.”
Rafe smiled, remembering when the American soldiers had looted Santa Anna's estate,
El Encierro,
after the battle of Vera Cruz. They had found the leg, left behind in a carriage abandoned in Santa Anna's flight. For weeks they had sung “The Leg I Left Behind Me,” to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Some of the verses were quite vulgar.
Rafe began singing them as they rode along. They would
have plenty of time for reading
Romeo and Juliet
aloud, and pleasure deferred was pleasure increased.
 
 
“I'M NOT YOUR FRIEND.”
Victorio had stayed at the hunting camp in the mountains behind her, but she heard his words in her ears anyway. She stumbled on a tuft of snakeweed, regained her footing, and settled back into the lope that had brought her this far across the desert floor. She had managed not to swallow the water Broken Foot had given her at the start of the run. Holding it in her mouth would force her into the habit of breathing through her nose so her body would lose less moisture. She wanted to let the water trickle down her parched throat, though. She wanted it more than anything.
“My woman is not your friend,” Victorio's voice murmured in her skull. “Broken Foot is not your friend.”
The horizon tilted. The cacti danced. The dust-colored peak in front of her floated on air thick as corn gruel. The figures of the boys running ahead of her wavered in the rising waves of heat. Each boy looked as though he were scattering like cottonwood seeds in a breeze and coming together again.
“No one is your friend,” Victorio told her. “After a battle, no one will come back for you. You must keep up or you will die.”
As she and the boys had gathered for the run, Victorio had instructed her to ignore the others, but she couldn't help glancing at them. She wished at least one of them would stop, would fall, so she wouldn't feel so badly if she did, too. She wondered if the boys' muscles ached as much as hers did. She wondered if the air seared their lungs with each breath the way it did hers.
The boys had to do this, or people would call them lazy. Men would laugh at them. Women would not want to marry them. But Lozen didn't have to do it. Lozen wasn't even supposed to do it.
“Your legs are your friends,” Victorio had told her. “They will carry you away from danger. Rub grease on them every
day to feed them. Your brain is your friend. With it you can outsmart the enemy.”
Lozen's feet hung like stones. The pain in her side was a knife blade twisting in her flesh. Lights flickered like fireflies in front of her. The straps of the pack she carried cut into her shoulders.
The air was cool back at Warm Springs. She could have been splashing with Stands Alone in the waters of the spring and gossiping with the women. She could have been helping Skinny tame the horses he had gotten from the comancheros, the Mexican traders.
Instead she wore a breechclout with a sweat-soaked, white cotton shirt belted over it. Victorio had brought the shirt back to her from Mexico, along with his new name and the child called María. After their great victory at Arizpe, he and Loco had raided a farm and taken the shirt, along with corn, beans, and the child. The others had wanted to kill the farmer, but Victorio said they had killed enough Mexicans. They had appeased the spirits of the dead at Janos.
Victorio said the farmer was María's brother. Victorio had taken the shirt and left him there, quaking among the stunted stalks of his third crop. Victorio didn't have to point out that Lozen couldn't train in only a breechclout as the boys did.
A sweat-soaked band of leather held back the loose black hair that reached beyond her waist. Lozen had rolled the tops of her old moccasins down. She carried an extra pair in the pack on her back. Stones inside weighted it, to make the run harder.
She glanced at Talks A Lot, Flies In His Stew, Ears So Big, and Chato. She wasn't gaining on them, but she wasn't falling behind, either. Victorio had trained her on the sly. He waked her before sunrise; then he went back to his blankets while she pelted up and down the mountain that overlooked the camp. On the coldest mornings he sent her to the river to break the ice and sit in it.

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