Ghost Warrior (37 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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Caesar let Rafe do the reading. A black man who could read became known as uppity, which was not healthy. They settled into their canvas chairs near the fire's light, and Rafe began with Duke Orsino's first line, “‘If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me an excess of it …'”
Red's head went up, and his ears pricked forward. Patch growled, then barked, and all the dogs chimed in. A chorale of coyotes sang descant in the hills. The men scattered for cover in a clicking of breech bolts that sounded like a swarm of metal crickets.
They all waited on point like so many spaniels. Finally, the camp dogs grew bored and went back to sniffing each other instead of the wind. Rafe had dowsed the fire at the first alarm, which made reading out of the question. He rolled up in his blankets with his head on his saddle. He was floating so far out on the calm waters of sleep that at first he thought the woman's voice was a dream. A woman's voice here would more likely be a dream than reality anyway.
“Hola, Capitán
.
Capitán Pata Peluda.”
A chill ran through Rafe. The stir in his stomach wasn't butterflies, but more like beetles. The dogs started again. The lieutenant, his Springfield waving vaguely in the direction of the voice, hustled over to him. He wasn't desert-smart, but at least he had the sense to know who was.
“Who the hell is that?”
Rafe started to say, “An old friend,” but he realized that would be taken in all the wrong ways. The men already called him a nigger-lover. They would add Injun-lover.
Injun lover.
Don't wander into that wasteland, son, he admonished himself. Aloud he said, “Someone who wants to parley, I reckon.”
“I'll tell the men to saddle up, and we'll see to this.”
“If it's a ruse, then they want you and your command to chase the decoy so they can attack the wagons while you're gone.” Rafe knew the lieutenant was green, and not the brightest candle in the mineshaft. He was the one who had swallowed John Cremony's old chestnut about being killed by Apaches.
“Keep a close eye on Red,” Rafe said. “My man and I will go out and see what they want. If you hear gunfire, send Sergeant Mott and a few men after us.”
He'd found that acting as though the matter were settled
usually helped new officers make up their minds to do the sensible thing. He put on his hat, touching the hummingbird amulet on the hat band for good luck. He stuck his knife into his boot, loaded his pistols, and set them at half cock. Caesar did the same.
Rafe pulled a burning branch from the fire. He knew better than to insult Lozen by calling her name.
“Yo vengo,”
he called. “I'm coming.”
“Abajo el álamo grande al lado del rio,”
came the answer.
“She wants to meet us under the big cottonwood by the river.” From habit Rafe translated for Caesar, although Caesar had learned a lot of Spanish from Mercedes, Concepción, Pilar, and who knew whom else. He probably understood more than Rafe did.
“Who is she?” Caesar asked.
“I'd wager she's the hoyden who's been trying to steal Red.”
Patch maintained a low growl in the back of her throat. Rafe didn't have to see her to know that the fur stood up like the spikes of a teasel along the ridge of her back. Rafe knew how she felt. The fur at the back of his own neck was stirring.
Lozen's voice sent shivers all through him, mostly gen . erated by fear, but not completely. What did she want of him? What if this were a trick? What if he were poking at a possum and risking Caesar's life in the doing of it?
His blood drummed in his ears as he waited for the piercing warble of attacking Apaches. He listened for the whine of the arrows. Then he heard the steady crunch of Caesar's boots and sensed the quiet, rock-steady strength of him.
Caesar was brave, yes, but that was nothing special out here. Caesar woke up every day knowing that he might be singled out for insult or injury by some brute or other who had nothing close to his education, strength, and grace. That took fortitude of a special kind.
Rafe reached up and touched the amulet again. He felt the bit of blue stone, the hummingbird wings, and the skull that was smaller than the nail on his littlest finger. They calmed
him. The person he was walking toward through the darkness had given it to him. The fear left him, and he was relieved that once again he had kept quiet through it and had not made a fool of himself.
The torch burned quickly, but a few more bundles of flaming grass took them to the cottonwood. Rafe saw two shadowy figures standing under it. Once again the scamp had eluded the sentries.
“¿Qué quiere?
”
he asked. “What do you want?”
He waited while Lozen held a whispered conversation with her companion, a Mexican captive maybe. Finally she spoke in halting Spanish aided by whispered prompts.
“My brother, the one they call Victorio, he wants to talk to Tse'k.”
“Does your brother desire to live in peace?”
“Yes, if our people can stay in our own country.”
“You mean a reservation at Warm Springs?”
“Reservation?” Lozen consulted with her companion.
“Si,”
she said.
“Reservación. Bina'nest'thl'oo,”
she added.
“Been a nest loo?”
Lozen laughed, a soft ripple of sound.
“Bina'nest'thl'oo.”
She repeated it as though instructing him in the correct pronunciation. “It means …” She paused, searching for the words in Spanish. “‘A fence goes around them.'”
“Where does your brother want to meet Dr. Steck?” asked Rafe.
“He will wait in the willow grove in the small canyon east of Alamosa.”
“When?” Rafe wanted to ask Lozen if she would be waiting there, too.
“A month from now. At the time of the new moon.”
“I'll talk to Dr. Steck.”
“Enjuh,”
she said.
Rafe knew that meant “good,” and that she probably considered the parley to be over.
Caesar touched his arm. “Ask her about Pandora.”
Rafe obliged. “Is the captive well?”
“She lives still.”
She lives still. Rafe supposed that was as much as one needed to know in these perilous times. He realized he finally had the opportunity he'd wished for from time to time. He stood face-to-face with an Apache who would talk to him without trying to kill him. But he couldn't think of anything to say, except maybe to ask if she and her people had eaten the horses they stole from the fort a month ago. And if she still had his telescope.
“Are your people suffering?” The question sounded ridiculous to him. Of course they were, but that they might be hadn't occurred to him before. Apaches served up suffering, they didn't partake of it themselves.
She held up a fist, palm inward, with only the little finger extended skyward. “We carry our lives on our fingernails.” She said it without emotion or bitterness, though it was a bitter thing.
While he pondered that, Lozen and her companion disappeared. One moment he could see them standing there, outlined in a pale glow of starlight, and the next, they were gone. They reminded him of the very ghosts Apaches feared so much.
“What do y‘all s'pose she meant?” Caesar asked. “‘We carry our lives on our fingernails.'”
“I don't know.”
Rafe did know. He just couldn't explain it.
DAVID AND GOLIATH
R
afe found Dr. Steck slumped behind his desk in Santa Fe. He was responding to the latest fiat from General Carleton, and he wasn't in a good mood. He slid the glasses to the end of his thin nose and looked over them, brightening when he saw Rafe. He lit up when Rafe told him that Victorio had asked to meet with him and arrange to live in peace on the land his people already occupied.
He was humming to himself when he set out on horseback with Rafe and Caesar the next morning. They read
Twelfth Night
aloud, passing the book among them as they rode.
“I like this play the best,” Casesar said.
“Why is that?” asked Dr. Steck.
“'Cause Sebastian, the brother Viola thought was drowned, he turned up live and kickin' in the end.”
“Do you have a brother?”
“I did. He's gone on to the Lord, though.”
“We only have the brothers and sisters that God allotted to us,” Dr. Steck said, “but there is no limit on friends.”
Friends, Rafe thought, are rarer than hen's teeth in this country. He was grateful to have found one in Caesar.
Twelfth Night
occupied them for most of the ninety-mile trip to Bosque Redondo, but General Carleton was not happy to see them.
“I forbid it!” Carleton pounded the desk top so hard the quill pens, ink well, and account book did a little jig. “As far as the Indians are concerned, I am the sole authority in New Mexico.”
Dr. Steck tried to slip reason sideways into the tirade. “Victorio's proposal to live on a reserve in his own country
is a sensible one. I'm sure he and I and the other Chiricahua Apaches can reach an amicable arrangement.”
“You will have nothing to do with them. One of my officers will parley with Victorio. He will give him and his tribe two choices. They can submit to the authority of the United States Army and go peaceably to Bosque Redondo, or they will be hunted down and killed.”
“That's monstrous!”
“You will leave immediately,” Carleton's eyes bulged. “If you return here, I shall have a detail of soldiers escort you away.”
Michael Steck rested one hand on the table, leaned into Carleton's fury, and pointed a finger at the general's nose. “You are a madman,” he said in a low, calm voice. “You are a hypocritical, greedy, cruel, stupid, short-sighted megalomaniac.”
Megalomaniac. Rafe had never heard the word, but he liked it. He thought the maniac part particularly suited Carleton.
 
 
RAFE MET CAESAR AT THE OUTSKIRTS OF ALAMOSA BEFORE dawn and they headed southwest. Caesar rode his dapplegray gelding, the only horse around who stood as tall as Red. Caesar gave Rafe a quizzical look.
“Are ya'll sure you want to ride that hoss into the lion's den?”
Rafe flashed him a sardonic smile. “If an Apache steals Red, it will be over my dead body and Red's, too, I reckon.”
Out of habit, Rafe looked for Patch. Some mongrel with more charm than the rest had gotten past her curt refusals. She gave birth to four puppies last night. When Rafe left the tiny inn on one of Alamosa's side streets this morning, the innkeeper's children were staring raptly into the box they had lined with straw as a nest for them.
Rafe didn't ask Caesar where he had slept. Caesar wasn't welcome in places where Anglos predominated. Rafe would insist that his friend and partner be allowed to stay where he
did, and ugly scenes ensued. More than once both of them had stalked out of a hotel or boarding house and unfurled their blankets under a tree. Caesar usually found his own accommodations. He had a knack for finding accommodating accommodations.
They led two mules loaded with the gifts that Dr. Steck had asked them to buy in Alamosa's market. Steck hadn't said so, but Rafe assumed the gifts were an apology for the treatment Victorio and his men had received from Inspector General Davis, Carleton's envoy. Davis had delivered Carleton's ultimatum, and Victorio, being no man's fool, had refused to take his people to Bosque Redondo. He and his warriors had ridden up into the mountains, and no one had seen anything of them since.
Rafe knew the officer Carleton had sent. Afterward, Rafe had seen him in the officers' mess. He had raised his glass of brandy in a toast, “Death to the Apaches, and peace and prosperity to this land!”
Rafe had to admit that he was right. If all Anglos had been like Dr. Steck, coexistence might have been possible, but Rafe was amazed to have met even one man like him. There would be no peace or prosperity while Apaches and Americans tried to occupy the same space. Steck talked about the need to preserve this “interesting” people, as he called the Apaches, but he wasn't trying to earn a living running cattle or prospecting for gold or hauling freight.
Rafe and Caesar followed the small river, climbing steadily. It chortled past them as though tickled by the tips of the willow branches brushing it. A gentle night rain had washed the dust off the rocks, trees, and bushes, and now the sun was polishing them. Birds sang as if strife hadn't been invented. It was a lovely day to go courting death.
“Now how is it you know where Victorio and his people pitch camp?” Rafe asked Caesar.
“Josefa, she say the folks in Alamosa have trucked with the Warm Springs ‘Paches since her gran'mammy was a sprat.”
“Josefa? You mean you have a woman cached in Alamosa, too?”
“I reckon I catched her, all right.” Caesar gave him a sample of the smile that beguiled women of all ages.
“Did Josefa say why the Apaches never attack Alamosa?”
“She say they always treats ‘em fair. They ain't never bushwacked 'em, cheated 'em, sold 'em bad whiskey, nor stolen they women.”
“Are only saints allowed to live in that town?”
“Naw, but if you had rattlesnakes residin' in your back forty and you knew they was too clever for you to kill 'em, wouldn't you treat 'em with respect?”
“I would.”
“Do ya'll s‘pose the Apaches'll shoot us first or say, ‘Howdy do'?” Caesar asked.
“Too late to worry about that now.”
Around the middle of the afternoon the stream seemed to disappear into a wall of basalt towering a hundred feet into the clear blue sky. They dismounted and made themselves comfortable under the walnut tree that Josefa said was the customary meeting place. They heard the high whistling keen of a hawk, but they didn't see any birds circling overhead. The hawk's cry always sounded mournful to Rafe, but now it sent shivers along his spine. He was pretty sure no hawk had made it.
“How long did Josefa say we should wait here?”
Caesar scanned the top of the cliff. “Long as it takes.”
It took a few hours. When the sun was about to insert itself between the sky and the top of the cliff, Caesar said, “Mebbe this is the wrong place. Mebbe they's waiting under another walnut tree.”
“They've got to put on their best bib and tucker. And we're probably a goodly distance from their bivouack.”
“What is a tucker anyways?”
“Damned if I know. Something to do with female attire, I think.”
Red's ears pitched forward. Caesar's hand went to the butt of the old breech-loading flintlock in the saddle boot. At least
fifty Apaches rode toward them. They had put on their best bibs and tuckers, all right, but they hadn't painted the red stripe across their faces. That was a good sign. They were armed, though. Besides their usual cutlery, many of them carried old Mexican flintlocks. A few had the Spencer repeating rifles and the Smith carbines used by Union troops in the late war of the rebellion.
Victorio rode in front. He did not look like a harried fugitive or one of the ragtag beggars waiting for rations at the agency. None of them did. He wore a fringed leather hunting shirt stained white with clay and decorated with silver disks, tin cones, and beadwork. The lower parts of his tall moccasins were solidly beaded around the turned-up, red-painted strips of rawhide at the toes.
Rafe was surprised to see Cochise riding next to him, and he thought about how many men would like to have had him in their gunsights. On the other side of Cochise was a tall, ferocious-looking individual on a coffee-colored pony. The stranger was almost the same color as the pony, darker than any Apache Rafe had ever seen, and much heavier. He carried over two hundred pounds, and all of them solid meat.
He fit Kit Carson's description of Juh, Long Neck, the most elusive and bloodthirsty killer in the whole tribe of them. Carson pronounced the name Whoa, or rather Wh-Wh-Whoa because of the man's stammer. “Wolf mean,” Carson called him. “Wolf mean with b'ar and painter thrown in. Old Wh-Wh-Whoa is wrath walking upright.”
On Victorio's left rode Lozen and an old man wearing a cap of hawk feathers and long gold chains dangling from his earlobes.
His name is Nanay, Rafe thought, but they call him Broken Foot.
Rafe was struck by how much Lozen and her brother resembled each other, and how handsome they both were. Lozen rode a bay mare with black feet. Rafe remembered the bay mare she had stolen from Don Angel at least thirteen years ago. He almost smiled at the memory. She had looked so brash and rafish in a boy's breechclout and shirt that day.
She reminded him of Shakespeare's Viola, both of them jumping the fence men put around their sex. Lozen was still doing it. She must be older than twenty-five by now, with no sign of a husband, and here she was, riding with the men.
Rafe tried not to stare at her, but that was difficult. She struck such a contrast with the warriors in their breechclouts and blankets, their headdresses of fur, feathers, bones, and antlers, and their motley assortment of Apache, Mexican, and Anglo attire, with the addition of army jackets, some with bullet holes neatly patched.
Strings of beads hung from Lozen's earlobes. Necklaces of beads and shells formed a collar around her neck. She wore a magnificent doeskin skirt and tunic, intricately beaded and stained a golden yellow with cattail pollen, probably.
The hoyden still prevailed, though. To accommodate the saddle, she had hiked the skirt up on her strong brown thighs. The long fringes on the tunic swayed gracefully as she moved in rhythm with her horse. The hundreds of tin cones around the tunic's square yoke jingled merrily.
Her long hair flowed across her shoulders like black water over smooth river rocks. The ends lay mingled with the fringes on her thighs. Her hair was clean and soft. Rafe wouldn't have expected that. What did Apaches use for soap, anyway? He tried to imagine the women washing their hair while the United States Army hounded them and gangs of drunken miners roamed the countryside on scalp hunts. Sparks glinted where the sun glanced off stray locks. Wisps curled like black swan's down around her face.
You're not here to admire Victorio's sister, Rafe thought. He figured that showing any interest at all in a man's sister could get him killed. At least it could in Texas where he grew up. Lozen looked at him as though she had never seen him. He returned the indifference.
Victorio dismounted, and as he and Rafe approached each other, a woman from the rear of the group rode up. She was dressed like an Apache, but she looked Mexican.
Before Rafe could say anything, Victorio put his arms around him and drew him into an embrace. Rafe fought the
reflex to stiffen and recoil. Men didn't hug each other where he came from.
“I bring greetings from Dr. Steck,” Rafe said in Spanish.
The Mexican woman translated from Spanish to Apache, then back again. Rafe recognized her voice as the one he had heard with Lozen under the cottonwood by the river that night a few months ago.
“Where is Father Tse'k?” asked Victorio. “The sight of him would make our hearts glad.”
“General Carleton is the
nantan
for this territory. He forbids Father Steck to meet with you.”
“Kal'ton.” Lozen stared at the end of her nose, bringing her dark irises close together. “Bidaa Digiz.”
The men laughed, and Rafe smiled. He could guess why she called Carleton cross-eyed. He was incapable of seeing anything beyond his own limited view of the world.
“Father Steck sends you these presents to show his friendship and respect for you,” said Rafe. “He asks me to tell you that he regrets the decision of
nantan
Carleton. He will try to convince him to let you stay at Warm Springs.”
“We do not need the permission of Kal‘ton to stay where we have always lived,” Victorio said. “We do not tell Kal'ton that he must take his wives and children and leave his home.”
A young man dismounted and walked toward them. He was small and wiry, and Rafe had the feeling he could run for days over rough country, but then he would have said the same for any of them. What set this one apart was his headdress, a skunk pelt with the head, the tail, the four legs, and some of the aroma still in place.

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