Ghost Warrior (56 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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REUNIONS
A
day's ride from the three high hills known as Tres Castillos, Fights Without Arrows led one group of men off to scout for ammunition. Chato took another party to hunt for meat. Victorio and Broken Foot divided the remaining fifty-three warriors between them.
The three hundred women and children waited until Victorio and his men cantered past to take up positions as the front guard. Broken Foot and his group lagged behind to scout at the rear. Her Eyes Open reined her horse, gray as the cold autumn morning itself, into line at the end of the column. Her niece, Wise Woman, and Kaywaykla's nine-year-old cousin Siki, pulled their mounts in front of her. Kaywaykla's sister rode in her cradleboard on Wise Woman's back.
Broken Foot had hung his necklace of deers' shinbones from the cradle's canopy. From his seat behind his grandmother's back, Kaywaykla could hear the bones rattling cheerfully. He burrowed under the blanket draped across Her Eyes Open's shoulders. He fell asleep, lulled by the rocking of the horse and the familiar, smoky scent of his grandmother.
As the sun was setting, the procession rounded a knoll and Kaywaykla saw why Victorio had chosen to camp here. A bench of level land along the side of the mountain overlooked a grassy plain and a lake. The men had dismounted, and the herd boys were leading the horses to water.
People left the procession as they saw places to camp. Her Eyes Open rode uphill to a sheltered spot among boulders. She unsaddled her horse and started gathering wood. Wise
Woman bathed her daughter, wrapped her in a shawl, and laid her on the blanket. Cousin Siki had hung the water jugs from her saddle pommel and started toward the lake when gunfire sounded from the surrounding slopes. Mothers and children screamed for each other.
Her Eyes Open ran against the current of people fleeing the valley.
“Nakaiye!”
she shouted after Siki. “Mexicans!”
Wise Woman lifted Kaywaykla onto the mule, but when she tried to mount with the baby, the mule balked. He lunged and sidestepped while Kaywaykla clung to the saddle. Wise Woman put the baby on the blanket and tried to calm him.
A Mescalero man ran toward her. “Ride toward the mountain,” he shouted.
“Get my baby.” Wise Woman managed to mount the mule.
She held out her arms for the child, but the man scooped her up and kept running. When Wise Woman saw that he didn't intend to bring the child back to her, she turned the mule uphill. She stopped on the bench of land, and she and Kaywaykla looked back toward the lake.
Darkness was falling there in the shadows of the mountains, and the flashes from the rifles of Victorio and his men were scattered and infrequent. They had used up almost all their ammunition. Kaywaykla heard the rumble of shod hooves on the trail below. The Mexican soldiers were riding to cut off escape.
Wise Woman dismounted and lifted Kaywaykla off. She struck the mule and sent him galloping away; then she and Kaywaykla began climbing. She squeezed into a narrow cleft between two rocks and called to Kaywaykla, but he hesitated. Rattlesnakes hid in crevices like that. Wise Woman grabbed him and pulled him in to sit in front of her, their feet barely inside the opening. Kaywaykla could feel his mother's heart pounding against this back.
A soldier dismounted nearby and leaned his rifle against the rock. Kaywaykla could see him silhouetted against the darkening sky as he smoked a cigarillo. After what seemed forever, he dropped the butt almost at Kaywaykla's feet, ground it out with his boot, and moved on.
Wise Woman and Kaywaykla started creeping up the slope again. Below them came sporadic shots, and the sound of hooves galloping back and forth. The Mexicans were hunting down survivors.
“A narrow arroyo cuts across this bench,” Wise Woman murmured in his ear. We must crawl along it to the bushes at the far end. From there we can reach the high ground. If the moonlight comes before we reach the other end, the soldiers will be able to see us.”
On the way, they found Tall Girl and her granddaughter. “It's too late,” Tall Girl whispered. “The soldiers are everywhere.”
“We have to try,” whispered Wise Woman. “Kaywaykla will go first.”
“Keep low,” Wise Woman whispered to Kaywaykla. “When you hear something, stop and lie flat.”
Kaywaykla slithered into the dry ditch and started to crawl. Rocks bruised and cut his knees, and cactus thorns stuck in his hands, but he kept moving. He heard voices and the snort of a horse and knew the animal had smelled him. He dropped and waited. The drumbeat of his heart seemed loud enough to vibrate the ground under him, to shake the rocks around him.
He found the bushes at the far end of the arroyo and hid under them. A puddle of moonlight spread along the edge of the bench they had just crossed. Soon it would flood into the arroyo, making anyone in it plainly visible.
Kaywaykla searched for his mother but could find no sign of her. Panic washed over him like the cold moonlight soon would. Maybe everyone he knew and loved was dead.
The older boys had told him that the Mexicans liked to roast small children on spits and eat them. They had been clear and detailed in their description of it. Kaywaykla's lips trembled. Tears stung his eyes and burned his cheeks.
He almost cried out when he saw something move and recognized his mother. On their way uphill, they stopped and looked down. The valley and the hillsides below swarmed with soldiers, a thousand of them at least. A huge fire danced
by the lake, its light reflected on the water. They could see silhouettes of people passing in front of it.
Almost as bright as day, the moon lit the narrow plain and the arroyo that cut through it. They could see that the ditch was empty.
“Where are Tall Girl and her granddaughter?” Kaywaykla whispered.
“They did not try to cross. Now it's too late. They can't make it.” Wise Woman paused. “Nobody can.”
 
 
VICTORIO SAW SETS HIM FREE LEAP FROM A BOULDER ONTO the back of the first of the soldiers pursuing him. He slit the man's throat, but fell under the onslaught of the others.
He Makes Them Laugh had been running just behind Victorio. Screaming with rage and holding his empty Winchester by the barrel, he charged the mob around his son. Victorio didn't stop to see if he killed any of them before they stabbed him with their lances.
Blood ran from Victorio's bullet wounds and the loss of so much of it made him dizzy. Doggedly he tried to find a passage through the cordon of cavalry, but each time riders turned him back. Slowly their advance forced him against a wall of rocks. Clucking and yipping, they shouted his name. They called him
amigo
, and they cajoled him to surrender.
By now Victorio had learned of the reward the Mexican government had offered to anyone who killed him. He watched the men riding toward him, and a smile played across his face. He would take from them the only advantage he could. None of them would collect that reward.
He held the haft of his knife in both hands, the point aimed at his heart. He sang his Enemies-Against song.
Right in the middle of this place
I am calling on the earth and the sky.
The black sky will enfold me and protect me.
The earth will enfold me and protect me.
He pulled the knife toward him with all the strength he could muster. When he fell forward, the weight of his body drove the blade in as far as the hilt. Light exploded around him. He felt himself spiraling upward like an eagle, soaring above the carnage. A sense of peace, of comfort flowed through him. He would put his arms around his beloved wives and his mother, his grandmother, and the grandfather the Hair Takers had slaughtered. He would hold his baby son and hear his laugh.
He would not have to be hungry or cold or exhausted ever again. He would not have to fight anyone ever again.
 
 
AFTER ALMOST TWO MONTHS ON THE TRAIL, LOZEN DELIVERED Niece and her infant to the reservation at Mescalero. Feeling as heavy as lead, she sat by the family fire while Niece's family chattered and hugged their lost child again and again. They handed Niece's baby from mother to aunt to cousin to grandmother and back again.
Loco was visiting from San Carlos, and he came to see Lozen. He wore a breechclout, but over it he had on a rumpled black coat missing two buttons so that it parted over his outcrop of a stomach. The coat's sleeves stopped short of his thick wrists. A small black bowler hat perched on top of his big head. He had punched a hole on either side of the crown, passed a thong through them, and tied them under his chin to hold the hat in place. His scarred eyelid still drooped, giving him a woebegone look under the hat's rolled brim. His eyes glittered with tears as he put his arms around her.
She poked his stomach. “Old Horse,” she said. “Grazing in the Pale Eyes' pasture is making you too fat for the war trail.”
“I have given up war, my daughter. War is for the young ones. You and I and your brother, we are no longer young.” He sat heavily next to her. “Come to San Carlos and live with us. The Pale Eyes aren't so bad there. The agent gives us corn and beef every week, and he doesn't steal too much.”
“Niece's people said the Bluecoats attacked your people.”
Loco's eyes saddened, though Lozen would have thought he could hardly look sadder than he already did. “We had camped near the agency. We were waiting to collect our rations when the Bluecoats rode through shooting. They killed thirty of our people, mostly the women and the little ones. Later they said they made a mistake. They were looking for renegades.”
“Were they punished?”
“The Bluecoat
nantan
himself came to our council and apologized, but he punished no one.” Loco sighed. “Also, soldiers killed your nephew in the Black Mountains. They said he was a renegade, that he intended to steal away his people from San Carlos.”
Brave, impetuous Wah-sin-ton, Lozen thought. He wanted to see his love. He wanted to bring her food and cloth, blankets and horses. Would the Bluecoats murder all her family, felling them one by one, as the boys took crows out of the sky with their slingshots?
Loco talked of the old times until the day's first light glowed along the tops of the mountains. Finally he called for a sleepy boy to bring his pony. He mounted slowly, like an old man. He rode away at a walk. When he had gone, Lozen went off by herself to cry out her grief for Wah-sin-ton.
Lozen stayed at Mescalero long enough to name the new baby and preside at the ceremony of cutting her hair and piercing her ears. When she left, Niece's people gave her government-issue corn and dried beef in fringed parfleches. She tied the parfleches onto the big, gray, cavalry mount she had taken from a lone Bluecoat she had ambushed in a narrow canyon. He was the first man she had killed with a knife. He was much easier to kill than the longhorn at the Rio Bravo.
She took the soldier's saddle, bridle, and saddle blanket. She added his new trapdoor Springfield, full cartridge belt, and pouch of bullets to her arsenal. She took his thick wool blanket, his wool shirt and coat, and most valuable of all, his canteen. She cut the yellow stripe off his trousers and used it to tie her hair at the nape of her neck. When she
started back toward Mexico, she was outfitted better than she had been in years.
Without Niece and her child along, Lozen could travel faster and take greater risks. She did not have to worry that the baby might cry when enemies were near. She missed them, though. She had never spent this much time alone.
Day after day she and the gray traveled southwest through the mountains. They followed dry streambeds, the horse's shod hooves clattering on the rocks. On steep inclines the gray lowered his head and started sliding. While dirt and rocks pelted past him, he floundered down the slope sitting on his haunches. After climbing steadily with no view but rocks and cactus and stiff brown clumps of grass, the gray would heave himself up onto the spine of a ridge, and Lozen would look out at the world spread before her, vast and intimate.
As she approached the Florida Mountains just north of the border, she began to see sign of troops. She started riding at night, ignoring the dread of Ghost Owl. She and the gray were walking in the bright moonlight just below a long ridgeline when she felt a wave of fear and a sharp pain in her chest. She looked up to see Victorio standing in the trail ahead of her.
He looked young. He had on the white fringed buckskin shirt and breechclout he had worn at her feast of White Painted Woman so many years ago. Lozen's horse snorted. He tossed his head and sidestepped, and she reined him to a stop. She knew she should be frightened, too, but how could she fear her brother?
“Take care of them,” Victorio said.
“I will.”
He vanished, and she knew there was no sense saying, “May we live to see each other again.”
AID AND COMFORT
A
lmost at sunset, Lozen found the tracks and heard rifle fire. She hobbled her horse in a meadow where thirteen others grazed. She tried to joke with the five apprentice boys who were playing cards there. They only answered, “Yes, Grandmother,” and “No, Grandmother,” in low, respectful voices, but they did tell her who was in the raiding party.
She followed the noise of the guns to a ledge overlooking the Pale Eyes' wagon road. In years past, she and the young men had watched the trail from here, and they had taken a lot of plunder. Chato had done the same today. Three wagons were charred, but the fire had died. Chato must have attacked them this morning.
Chato and eight or nine warriors had fanned out across the slope below the ledge, taking cover behind boulders. Lozen recognized Burns His Finger and Geronimo's half brothers Fun, Eyelash, and Little Parrot, but she didn't know the others. The men were shooting at a dead horse. Now and then the horse fired back. The dead horse's aim was better, and the warriors were keeping their heads down.
Lozen ran at a crouch and knelt on one knee beside Chato. He didn't seem surprised to see her, and he made no comment about the ashes she had smeared on her face. With so many dead these days, a lot of people wore ashes to ward off restless spirits. Lozen loved her brother, but she didn't want him visiting her again and delaying his last journey. The ashes would keep him away.
“Hairy Foot,” Fun called out in Spanish. “You're a brave man. Join us. We'll make you a chief.”
“I'll make you buzzard bait, you son of a bitch,” Rafe shouted in the same language.
“Hairy Foot is down there?”
“Old Man Hard-To-Kill himself.” Chato grinned at her, but his smiles had never had joy in them. “He must be a witch to have gotten away from us all these years. When he uses all his bullets, we'll hang him up and build a fire under his nose to burn the bad spells.”
“Stop shooting at him.”
Chato glared at her. “The yellow-hair might be your friend, Grandmother, but he's not mine.” He nodded toward his companions. “He's not theirs.”
Holding her Springfield over her head, Lozen left the shelter of the rock and walked down the slope toward the horse. Halfway there, she turned around. She set the butt of the carbine on the ground and grasped the barrel near the muzzle as she looked up at the war party.
“Fun …” She called his name, giving great weight to her request. A person could not refuse someone who did that. “This man has helped my people. I owe him a debt. I ask you not to kill him.”
She didn't expect a reply. She raised her rifle over her head again and continued walking toward the dead horse.
“
Shilah
, brother,” she called in Apache, “that's a smelly fort you have. Soon the buzzards and the ants will eat your walls.”
“Grandmother?” Rafe's eyes appeared above the bulletriddled carcass that was beginning to bloat and stink in the heat of the day. He raised his head a little higher so she could see he was grinning at her. “Those boys must have let their guns get dirty and pitted as usual. They don't have range or accuracy.”
Lozen walked around the horse and crouched beside him. His arm was covered with dirt and dried blood. She could see from the hole next to him that he had buried his shattered elbow in the ground to staunch the flow from it.
She held her canteen out to him. Rafe didn't comment on the fact that it was army issue. He took only a few sips.
“Drink all of it,” she said, “but slowly.”
“Only have two cartridges left,” he muttered in English. “Planned to use the last one on myself.” He shook his new Winchester rifle, rattling the sling rings. “A problem with a long piece like this. Was trying to figure out how to use my toe to pull the trigger, but I'm an old fart and not that limber anymore.”
“Come with me.” Lozen felt a rush of affection for him, and comradeship. She wanted to hug him in a warrior's greeting.
She realized she felt more at ease with Hairy Foot than with Chato these days. She realized, too, that he was no longer the young man he had been when she first tried to steal his big red horse many years ago. He and she had grown old together. They had grown old together, and apart.
He struggled to stand, pulling himself up on the Winchester, and Lozen saw that a bullet had passed through his thigh, too. He had stuffed his bandana into that hole, but it fell away, and the bleeding started again. She tied the bandana around the top of his thigh to slow the loss. Supporting most of his weight, she walked him toward a distant arroyo choked with mesquite trees, palo verde, cactus, and catclaw. He probably had been heading for it when Chato and his men shot the horse out from under him.
Lozen glanced up. The hillside was empty. Chato and Fun and the boys must have left, but Pale Eyes used this road often. She was now in more danger than Hairy Foot was. The thicket would be a good place to hide. She could hobble her horse there. He could eat the mesquite beans and graze on the grass at the upper end of the wash.
When they reached it, Rafe collapsed. She could see that he would be unconscious for a while. She sliced away his trouser leg around the wound. She cut a cactus pad, split it, and bound it in place with the yellow trim from the dead soldier's trousers.
Rafe's lips had a blue tint to them, and he shivered. The sun was almost down. Already the night's chill was creeping up on them, but another cause of his trembling was the loss
of all that warm blood. She retrieved his blanket roll from the back of the dead horse and unwrapped her own blanket from around her waist. She laid his on the ground and moved him gently onto it. She draped hers over him and tucked in the edges so the cold couldn't slither in like a rattlesnake.
She went to collect her horse and medicine bag. She had seen a pack rat's nest in the meadow where she left the gray. The mound was almost as high as her waist and probably full of piñon nuts. If the herd boys hadn't plundered it, she could collect the nuts.
 
 
RAFE LAY ON HIS UNWOUNDED SIDE WITH HIS KNEES DRAWN up and his arms pressed against his chest. Whenever he swam near the surface of consciousness, he heard Lozen singing. Her voice was quiet and rhythmic, hypnotic and unending, but the blackness he floated in was bitterly cold. He dreamed he was submerged in an ice-covered river. He wanted to strike out for shore, but he couldn't move his frozen arms and legs. His own quaking waked him.
Lozen slid under the blanket to lie along his back. She bent her legs to fit into the folds of his. She put her arm around him and pulled him close until her breasts pressed against him. He was surprised to feel her shivering, too. He had half believed the stories about Apaches being oblivious of cold, heat, pain, death, and sorrow.
His shivering lessened, and so did hers. He laid his good arm along hers, holding on to her forearm with his hand. It felt as muscular as a man's. He fell asleep with her breath warm on his neck, her aroma of smoke and horses in his nostrils.
When he woke up, the sun was beginning to burn off the chill, but he kept the blankets wrapped tight around him. The only parts of him that didn't ache suffered stabbing pains. He looked under the blanket and saw that Lozen had splinted his elbow with yucca stalks and wrapped it in the calico cloth she used as a headband.
Lozen sat cross-legged nearby. Her hair fell in two dark
curves around her face as she bent over her fire drill. The line from a song the Irish soldiers sang ran through Rafe's head. “Her dark hair would weave a snare that I would someday rue.
”
She twirled the juniper stick between her palms so the drill's blunt point created friction in the notch cut in a flat piece of sotol stalk. A thread of smoke rose from it, and she fed in bits of dry moss and blew on it gently. At the first bloom of a flame, she added pine needles, twigs, and then mesquite branches.
She poured water into the cornmeal on the tin plate of Rafe's mess kit and mixed it with her fingers into a sticky dough. She patted it into thin cakes and set them on a flat stone in the fire to bake.
She was dressed as a warrior, and the muscles stood out in well-defined curves on her legs. In any war party she would look like just another handsome Apache boy. The soldiers would not notice the few strands of gray in her hair.
“How do you feel?” she asked in Apache.
“Like a herd of mustangs stampeded over top of me, then wheeled around and made another pass.”
“You slept a night and a day and another night.”
“No wonder I'm ready to drink a river and eat my dead horse down to the hooves and the tail.”
She handed him the canteen. He shook it.
“Where did the water come from?” His voice sounded odd to him, as though his tongue were a rusty bolt sliding back and forth in an even rustier breechblock.
Lozen nodded toward a hole in the arroyo's sandy bed. She took his bandana from the bottom of it. She had rinsed it out earlier and let the water seep into it again. She held it up, raised her chin, opened her mouth, and squeezed the water into it.
“Give me your gun,” he said.
She handed it to him, and he inspected the breech. It was fouled, as he expected. He had never seen an Indian who kept his piece clean. He took the emery paper, oiled rag, and prick from his kit, and cleaned it. He handed it back to her,
and she gave him a yucca leaf heaped with piñon nuts and another of grapes, chokecherries, and mulberries.
While he ate, she unwrapped the bandage from his leg and inspected the wound. She laid a freshly split nopal on it and tied it back up. He tried not wince at the touch of her fingers on his bare skin.
Next, she broke off the big thorn on the end of an agave leaf and pulled it so that several long strands of fiber came attached to it. Sitting cross-legged, she sewed up a tear in Rafe's blanket. As if mesmerized, Rafe watched her casual skill in the simple details that were the basis of life.
He wanted to ask where she had been, why she was alone, where she was headed, but he knew that would be a mistake. She might think he was trying to find out her people's location and numbers. He hoped that she knew he wouldn't betray her to the army, but he didn't want to give her any cause to wonder.
“I have to go,” she said, “But I'll leave you my horse.”
“What will you do for a mount?
”
“I'll steal one.” The corners of her full lips twitched, and mischief lurked in her eyes. “I think you are not so good at stealing horses. You'd better take mine.”
When he sat up, a groan escaped him. Trying not to jar his leg or elbow, he slid closer to her.
“Stay here.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I can't.”
He put a hand on hers. “Stay with me.” Rafe couldn't believe the words came out of his mouth, but like wild horses cut loose, he could not call them back. She didn't move her hand, though. For a moment that thrilled and terrified him, he thought she might agree to it.
“I have to find my people,” she said quietly.
“I'll go with you.”
“You can't.”
“If they surrender, the army will take care of them. We could be together then.”
“They won't surrender.”
“You can't fight all of Mexico and the United States.”
“Yes, we can.”
“You must know you can't win.”
“We have already lost. We are
indeh
.
”
“
Indeh?
Dead men?”
“The Pale Eyes killed us years ago.” She looked at him sadly, but without self-pity. “My people are ghosts. We live. We talk. We walk around on the earth, but we are dead.” She stood up. “The wagon road is well traveled. Someone will come along soon.”
She helped him to his feet, but he didn't let go of her once he was standing, nor did she pull away.
“If you came with me, I would try every day to make you happy,” he whispered.
Lozen stood motionless, like a restive pony listening to someone with horse-magic croon in her ear. She had traveled, camped, suffered, and gone into battle with men. She knew more about them than most women ever would. She knew their strength, their loyalty, their humor, bravery, and stoicism. She knew their arrogance, their vanity, their cruelty, and their weakness. But other than the unspoken love of her brother, she had never known a man's tenderness.
She let Rafe put his good arm around her and pull her to him. She laid her head against his chest. She felt as though she would melt under the caress of his hand moving up her back, stroking her neck, rubbing the base of her skull, then tangling his fingers in her hair, tugging it gently at the roots. She closed her eyes and allowed herself this small comfort in a harsh world.

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