Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  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 fa
ll, 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.

  Talks A Lot and the three others reached the base of the peak rising abruptly from the desert floor and started up it. Lozen veered to the west. The narrow path started behind the bison-shaped boulder where Victorio had said it would. This was not so easy an ascent as the other one. When it became almost perpendicular, she grabbed the spiny bushes and hauled herself along.

  The massive outcrop of limestone towered at the top where Victorio had said it would. A narrow defile ran between it and the side of the mountain. Victorio had studied her when he told her about it. “The boys are too big, but you’re small enough to fit through it,” he had said.

  She put a hand on one of her small breasts, firm as cactus fruit under the shirt. She hoped they wouldn’t grow any bigger. They were a nuisance already, getting in the way and attracting attention she’d rather not have.

  She took off the pack, the shirt, and the breechlout. In the pack she found the yucca leaf tied with agave fiber. She opened it, dipped her fingers into the grease inside, and rubbed it over her body. Holding the pack and her clothes over her head, she turned sideways, sucked in her chest, and started inching through. In the middle of the opening she became so tightly wedged she feared she could go no farther.

  She wondered how long Victorio would take to find her here and what he would have to do to pry her out. The prospect of his friends and the boys witnessing that served the purpose. She held the pack higher and shoved. She rubbed a patch of skin off her back, but she made it through. She put her clothes back on.

  As she started along the ridge on the other side, she noticed a ranch in the small canyon below. The house was built around a courtyard in the usual manner, but the house didn’t interest her. The corral behind it did. She could see that the corral’s adobe wall stood high and thick. She watched the men of the hacienda drive at least twenty horses into it Four men were required to swing the door closed behind the remuda as it milled inside. The door was made of huge oak planks, strapped with iron. Lozen watched one of the men pass an iron chain through rings sunk into the wood and fasten the ends with a padlock.

  She gave a ghost of a smile, careful not to let any water escape from her mouth. So this was why Victorio told her to take this route. She turned right and followed the path away from the canyon. When she reached the crest of the ridge, she took a roll of rawhide from her pack. She laid it out at the brink, sat on it, and slid down the talus slope. She hit the valley floor in a shower of gravel, picked up the tattered piece of rawhide, and started running.

  She could see no one ahead of her. The boys would be gloating about now, thinking that she had quit. She would beat them all back to camp, and when she arrived, she would tell her brother how many horses were locked up in the corral and how many men guarded them. As for the corral’s massive adobe walls, she already knew what to do about those.

  Chapter 14

  TO WITCH THE WORLD

  The light of the rising moon didn’t reach the rear of the hacienda’s adobe-brick corral where Lozen crouched. She had rubbed sage into her hair and cotton shirt. When stealing horses, it helped to smell like a pasture.

  Pastures had smells other than sage. She smeared horse manure on her cheeks and arms and legs. Victorio, Loco, and He Makes Them Laugh did the same.

  She was amused by the image of He Steals Love doing this. He had asked Victorio if he could come on this expedition, but he had changed his mind when he heard that Lozen would be along. Victorio had reported the struggle in the young man’s face when he approached Victorio at the hoop-and-pole field, and in a low voice took back his request to go. Victorio knew what he was thinking. On the one hand, he could spend days in Lozen’s company. On the other hand, he would have to spend days in Lozen’s company.

  Since Lozen’s feast last fall, he had been trying the usual ploys to get her attention. He had laid double rows of stones along the paths she took to the pasture, the river, and the cornfields, He hid nearby to see if she walked between them, but she walked around them instead. He had left a haunch of venison outside her lodge at night but had found it back at his door in the morning. He had hovered near her at all the dances, but she would not ask him to step with her.

  As much as he desired her, the thought of going after horses with her dismayed him. Young men did not associate with young women, and He Steals Love could not break that most basic rule. That Lozen broke it all the time bewildered, bothered, and intrigued him. Also, the possibility that he might do something stupid terrified him.

  Unmarried women were not supposed to spend time in the company of their brothers, either. She Moves Like Water had started to protest this latest breach of decorum but stopped. Dancing together at the ceremny of White Painted Woman had made her and Lozen so close they now called each other Sister, but even so, her pleadings with Lozen to stop going to the horse pasture every day had changed nothing. Protesting to Victorio about her training with the boys had been futile. So She Moves Like Water had given Lozen a bag of mescal meal cakes mixed with sumac berries and honey, and said, “May we live to see each other again.”

  Lozen had to put her head back to see the moonlight lying like a tarnished tinsel ribbon along the top of the wall. When she did, the eagle feather from the ceremony of White Painted Woman dangled from her hair, along with an amulet that Broken Foot had given her to protect her from snakes. Loco laced his fingers together and held his palms up so she could put a foot on them. She stepped from there onto Victorio’s shoulders, then to his head. She grasped the top of the wall and hauled herself up, with the men pushing on the soles of her feet.

  Even though the wall tapered from its base upward, the top was wide enough to accommodate her. She lay on her stomach and stretched her hand ou
t to help He Makes Them Laugh. Then the two of them hauled up Loco, with Victorio pushing from below. When Loco reached the top, he held one end of Lozen’s rope while she lowered herself into the corral. When her toes touched the ground, Loco, still on his stomach, pulled the rope up and dropped it down the outside of the wall for Victorio.

  Inside the corral, Lozen paused to let the horses adjust to her presence. They whickered and crowded together at the other side of the enclosure, their ears pricked forward, eyes wide in the moonlight. Murmuring, Lozen walked toward them. She couldn’t see their conformation or their color in the darkness, but she could almost sense their thoughts, their collective individualities that made up the personality of the herd.

  Still talking softly she ran her hands over them as she moved among them. She checked the arch of their necks and line of their backs. She ran her hands over their withers, haunches, legs, and their hoofs. She pushed back their lips and felt their teeth.

  As soon as she stroked the big mare’s muscular withers, short back, and well-set hindquarters, she knew she was the one. She caressed her velvety muzzle and blew into her wide nostrils to mingle her breath with the horse’s. She put a loop of her rope around the mare’s lower jaw. She put her mouth near the mare’s ear and whispered.

  “You’re mine now. We’ll ride everywhere together. You’ll run faster than the wind.” She knew that what she said didn’t matter. “You’re the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the bravest. No one will catch us.”

  The mare shoved her cheek against Lozen’s chest and cocked her ear so that it lay cupped against her lips. She stood without moving while Lozen whispered to her. The two stayed that way while Loco and He Makes Them Laugh chose which horses they would ride. Victorio picked the remuda’s leader, a big, long-necked stallion. Lozen remembered him from that day she had watched the horses driven into the corral. He was what the Mexicans called de cria ligera, of racing stock.

  The three men sat with their backs against the wall where the shadows were deepest, draped their blankets over themselves, and fell asleep. Lozen joined them. Even if one of the hacienda’s workers looked inside, the blankets would help them blend with the wall.