Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Victorio opened the wooden box and began handing the firesticks to those with the most people dependent on them. Then he called the names of the fiercest fighters among the older warriors, and finally the younger men in order of their accomplishments.

  Lozen was lost in a reverie of the dancing that would follow this. She thought of how men and women let their hands, their shoulders, their glances brush each other. The dancing was always suffused with desire, but it had never touched her before. Would she have the courage to ask Gray Ghost to dance?

  She jumped when Stands Alone poked her. “Take the firestick.”

  “Firestick?”

  Stands Alone gave her a shove, and Lozen stumbled into the fire’s light. Victorio held the musket out to her and a pouch of bullets and another of powder. Her hands shook when she took them from him. Talks A Lot, Flies In His Stew, Chato, and the others would be angry that she got one and they didn’t, but if anyone protested, she was too dazed to hear it. She walked away holding the heavy musket to her chest. The women crowded around to see it.

  “She thinks she’s too good for any man.” Tall Girl observed. “She’ll need that gun to hunt, or else she’ll have to dance for the warriors and beg gifts from them.”

  She Moves Like Water glared at her. She was beginning to accept that fact that Victorio was right. The spirits had other plans for Lozen. Maybe she wouldn’t find a man with whom she could have children and share her life. The possibility made She Moves Like Water sad.

  THE NEXT TWO MONTHS WERE JOYOUS MISERY. GRAY GHOST moved into a lodge near She Moves Like Water’s camp, and he spent most of his time with Victorio and the friends who gathered at his fire in the autumn evenings. Even Skinny joined them as often as not. Lozen was quick to offer to take them food and drink. Gray Ghost was polite, but he always treated her as nothing more than the younger sister of a friend.

  As he learned The People’s language, he could talk more about the troubles in the east. This night Red Sleeves was visiting, and Gray Ghost told his story again in words and gestures.

  The Pale Eyes had overrun the land where his people had always lived, he said. They chopped down the trees. They killed the game or drove it away. They ripped into Mother Earth with big metal blades dragged by horse and mules. When they tired of chopping and digging, they set fire to the forests and the prairies, destroying what was left of the ancient hunting grounds.

  Gray Ghost had watched his people die in agony, disfigured by diseases that no one had experienced before, and against which they had no medicine or magic. For more than a hundred years the Pale Eyes had made promises to his people, and they had broken all of them. Gray Ghost had decided to journey west in search of a refuge.

  “To trust a Pale Eyes is like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you,” he said with a sad smile.

  “There is one Pale Eyes I trust,” said Red Sleeves. “His name is Tse’k. He’s a good man.” His heavy lids drooped over his sad, bulging eyes. His mouth sagged. “He promises us food if we live with him at the fort and plant corn and beans and squash. When winter comes and my joints feel like water freezing, I am going there with those of my people who are willing to follow me.”

  “When you did that before, the Pale Eyes agent robbed you,” said Victorio. “He sold your warriors whiskey that made them fight with each other and beat their women.” He didn’t mention the beating that the diggers gave Red Sleeves. No one spoke of it in his presence.

  “This one will not do that.” Red Sleeves pulled a sigh up from his chest, like a man would draw a heavy bucket from a well. “I am tired. My bones ache. They have worn me down, those Pale Eyes, like water wearing away stone.” He hunched over to prop his elbows on his bony knees and stare gloomily into the fire.

  “There is no end to them,” said Gray Ghost. “I have seen their cities teeming like ant heaps. I have been to Washington.”

  “Wah-sin-ton!” Victorio and the others came to attention. “The Pale Eyes always talk of Wah-sin-ton. Who is Wah-sin-ton?”

  “It’s the town where their Great Father lives. It covers more land than your canyon here. It has paths wider than two hoop-and-pole fields set side by side. It has stone lodges as big as the cliffs that surround us.”

  The men stirred and looked at each other. No one would call Gray Ghost a liar, but his stories stretched belief to the snapping point.

  “It has more people than in all this country,” he added.

  “Maybe that’s where they come from,” said Skinny, “The way snakes breed by the hundreds under the same rock.”

  Lozen’s cousin, He Makes Them Laugh, trotted up panting. “Twelve men on horseback are coming. And a wagon that looks like an arbor on wheels. They speak the Mexicans’ language, but they aren’t Mexicans.”

  He Makes Them Laugh was right. The wagon’s cover was not curved like those of the Pale Eyes. It had a flat, red-and-white-striped top attached to four upright poles. The sides had been rolled up and tied in place. Thick red fringes jostled along the top edge of it as the wagon jolted along. Tassels and bright brass bells flounced and jangled at each corner. Four white geldings pulled it. They were handsome but thin. Broken Foot rode ahead of them.

  People clustered around him asking questions, but he didn’t know much. “We found them stranded and thirsty and led them to the nearest spring. I told them they could rest here until they’re ready to travel on toward the sunset.”

  Everyone tried to see inside the wagon, but the twelve dusty men, dark-haired and dark-eyed, ringed it. They sat in their saddles with a ferocious ease, their muskets held upright with the stocks resting on their thighs. From under the wide flat brims of their black felt hats they watched like birds of prey.

  The wagon’s driver set a wooden box on the ground. An old woman, solid and formidable, took the driver’s hand and stepped down. A much younger woman appeared behind her. She wore a long dress of a blue cloth that shimmered with streaks of purple and green in the sunlight. The bodice clung to her like a second skin and emphasized a waist that reminded Lozen of a wasp’s. She laid one pale hand on the old woman’s shoulder and lifted her skirts up past her tiny black shoes and slender ankles with the other. The skirts rustled as she descended.

  When she pushed the fringed black shawl back, the murmuring rose in volume. She was beautiful. Perfect hair framed a perfect face with perfect features set perfectly in it. Lozen looked at Gray Ghost and almost cried out in despair. He was staring at her with the same dazed expression that came into Lozen’s eyes whenever she saw him.

  LOZEN THOUGHT SHE HAD KEPT HER PASSION SECRET, BUT Grandmother knew all along. When Grandmother was about Lozen’s age, she had thought she would wither and perish because the boy she loved went to live with a Mescalero woman. Now Grandmother couldn’t remember his name. She had married a man who had made her happy until the Hair Takers killed him at the Santa Rita mines, how along ago? Fifteen harvests?

  Sometimes Grandmother wished she could travel back through the years the way she traveled across deserts and mountains and high, green valleys. She wished she could tell that unhappy child, herself, that all would be well. But she couldn’t, not any more than she could tell Lozen that this ache would fade, and she would smile one day at her foolishness. Young people had the gift of certainty, and they were certain that no old person had ever felt the way they did.

  Grandmother watched as the wagon and its passenger rumbled away in a clangor of brass bells. All anyone knew was that the young woman came from beyond the wide water to the east. She was headed for the land that bordered the endless water at the western rim of the world. Her father lived there, she said, and he had sent for her.

  The stranger’s wagon had arrived with twelve men as an escort, but it left with thirteen. Gray Ghost rode his big stallion alongside it, his possession in the new saddlebags that Lozen had given him, and his blankets tied behind the saddle. The children ran after the wagon, shouting and laughing. The women drifted off to their chores, and the men returned to
their hoop-and-pole games.

  Lozen and little María stood staring at the dust it left. María took Lozen’s hand to comfort her. The child was learning to speak Apache, but she already knew the language that required no words. She called Lozen shidee, “my older sister,” and she could sense her sorrow.

  Grandmother, Her Eyes Open, and Grandmother’s friend, Turtle, watched Lozen as they ground corn and acorns into meal.

  “She’ll get over him.” Her Eyes Open scraped the ground acorn meal into a shallow basket.

  “Marrying a Mescalero or a White Mountain man is bad enough.” Turtle had a narrow chin and a small hooked nose. Wrinkles around her close-set eyes made her look more like her namesake every year. “But to marry a man who doesn’t speak your language would never do.”

  “At least if he scolds her,” said Her Eyes Open, “she won’t understand him.”

  “Love is more common than flies,” said Grandmother. “And at least as bothersome.”

  “I don’t see love bothering you these days, old woman.” Turtle said.

  “No, but the flies still like me well enough.” Grandmother glanced up to see Lozen walk into camp. Her hair hung in a ragged line that ended above her shoulders.

  “Who cut your hair?”

  “I did.”

  “No man will want you with your hair like that.” She Moves Like Water offered her a gourdful of stew, but Lozen waved it away.

  “I will not marry, so it makes no difference.”

  “How will you live if you don’t marry? If you don’t have daughters, who will care for you when you grow old?”

  Lozen turned to Victorio. “Brother, your woman has her sister now to help her, and her mother and Maria. I want to be your apprentice. I want to accompany you on the war trail.”

  “That’s impossible.” She Moves Like Water frowned at Victorio, in case he was inclined to agree with such a preposterous request. “Unmarried women don’t go on the war trail with the men. You’ll disgrace the family. People will ridicule you.”

  “My woman is right,” Victorio said. “They will talk about you.”

  “They already talk about her,” Corn Stalk put in quietly. Everyone stared at her. She rarely spoke up in family discussions, much less disagreed. Maybe the nights she spent laughing softly in her lodge with Victorio had made her bold.

  “They say she isn’t like others,” Corn Stalk went on. They say the spirits have blessed her with the power to heal, the magic to make horses follow her, the gift of far-sight. They don’t expect the usual of her. I think they would be disappointed, maybe, if she behaved like other women.”

  STANDS ALONE LOOKED DOWN AT THE GIFT LEFT IN HER blankets. It was a gourd with big eyes and a grinning mouth carved and painted around the long, curved end that formed a nose. The pupils of the eyes looked inward at the nose and tufts of rabbit fur had been glued at the base of it. The artist had painted the tip of the nose with a spiderwork of veins that resembled those of a man’s penis. Even with the eyes and mouth, Stands Alone could not mistake what it represented. Inside was a bag of cactus candy, the specialty of He Makes Them Laugh’s mother.

  Stands Alone collapsed in laughter onto the blankets. Lozen and Maria looked over at her from their bed. Stands Alone held up the gourd so they could see it. Maria giggled and Lozen smiled, even though she had thought she never would again.

  “Did He Makes Them Laugh give it to you?” asked Maria.

  “Who else?” Stands Alone raised up on one elbow and studied the gourd “What should I do?”

  “That’s for you to decide, Sister,” said Lozen. “Do you love him?”

  “I do, but he’s so different from the others.”

  “Do you care that he’s different?”

  Stands Alone thought about that. “No. I don’t care. He’s a good hunter. He’s a good man.”

  “Then do what your heart tells you to do.” Lozen felt suddenly old. Now that she had experienced the power of love, she felt qualified to give advice about it. “Like magic, love is a gift from Yusen.”

  With a rustle of pine boughs, Lozen turned over on her side and faced the lodge’s curved side. She could see the glow of the fire through the canvas covering that once had stretched over Hairy Foot’s wagon. Maria cuddled against her back, but the touch only increased Lozen’s longing for Gray Ghost.

  Tears scalded tracks down her cheeks. She was still awake when Stands Alone gathered her blankets and tiptoed out. She must have decided to go to the lodge of He Makes Them Laugh. Tomorrow she would cook for him, and everyone would consider them married.

  Her absence made Lozen feel even more bereft.

  Chapter 19

  A LIGHT DUSTING

  An icy wind blew gaunt gray clouds across the December sky. It played tag with leaves and trash around the corners of the adobe huts called Fort Webster. The soldiers wore their greatcoats with the collars turned up and the flaps on their hats pulled down over their ears. At night, Apaches drifted through the fort as silently as the occasional gusts of snow. No one in the garrison went out after dark without his gun primed, loaded, and at half-cock.

  Still, camping here was better than sleeping in the open, and Rafe had taken a liking to Dr. Michael Steck, the superintendent of New Mexico Territory. Rafe had found work as a driver for the government’s freight wagons, too. The army had returned to protect the miners and ranchers. Rafe suspected that the miners riled the Apaches up on regular basis to keep the army around.

  Rafe appreciated the irony of the fact that the army paid him to haul beef and corn to feed the Indians whose thefts and murders the soldiers had come here to stop. And why not feed them? Warfare hadn’t worked. Bribery might—for a little while, anyway.

  On this trip Rafe planned to bargain for some mules and harnesses and recover his wagon. A recent patrol had told him it was still sitting in the Jornada del Muerto. In the meantime, he was playing a game of two-handed euchre with Dr. Steck.

  Steck watched as Rafe set the rest of the pack facedown on the table and turned over the top one. Steck studied the five cards in his hand. “Some of Red Sleeves’ people put on an exhibition of horsemanship the last time they came in for rations,” he said. “It was quite a performance.”

  Rafe said nothing, and Steck glanced at him over the cards. “The Apaches don’t impress you?”

  “They impress me, all right, but not their horse savvy.”

  “Ah, yes. You’re familiar with Comanches, aren’t you?”

  “You know what they say … .” Rafe took one of his cards and placed it crosswise under the undealt pack.

  “What do they say?”

  “A white man will ride a mustang until he’s winded. A Mexican will take him and ride him until he’s dead. The Comanch will then ride him wherever he’s going.”

  “That says more about their indifference to life than their man horsemanship.”

  “I thought the Comanch were about as indifferent to life as the human species could get, but that was before I made the acquaintance of the Apaches.”

  “Considering the insults and betrayals that Chief Red Sleeves has suffered, I would say he’s shown considerable restraint.”

  “Then I reckon I’m not familiar with the definition of restraint.”

  “The miners raid their camps and attack their women and children. The soldiers confiscate horses that they obtain legally from Mexican traders.”

  Rafe let that delusion slide right on past, and Dr. Steck continued with the list of crimes and injustices against his wards.

  “My predecessor, that rascal Fletcher, stole the docile Apaches’ rations. He sold them whiskey. The government neglected to send them the tools they needed for agriculture.”

  “Docile Apaches. Now there’s a notion.”

  “I firmly believe that many of the thefts and murders in this country are committed by our own criminal element, and blamed on the Apaches. I tell you, they have become quite tractable. I’m expecting them here for their rations at any tim
e. Red Sleeves says the Warm Springs people will come in with him.”

  “Of course they will.”

  Steck looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a good man, Michael.” Rafe meant it. Dr. Michael Steck was moral, honest, kind, exacting, and resolute. He had taken on the superintendent’s job with responsibilities that Job, Solomon, and Hercules would all decline if they had sense. He had done the job so well that even the Apaches liked him; and they didn’t like anybody, as best Rafe could tell. But Steck was new here, and he had more to learn about his charges.

  Dr. Steck waited for an answer to his question.

  “What I mean is that winter is not a good time for raiding. They’ll let the government feed them and give them blankets and kettles and knives and gewgaws for the next few months. When spring comes, they’ll head south again, and we can all be grateful we’re not Mexicans.”

  “I think you’re wrong, Rafe. This time they will stay, and they will farm.”

  And that, Rafe thought, is like expecting a wolf to hoe beans. He changed the subject. “Have you heard of a man named Rogers?”

  “The scoundrel who whipped Red Sleeves?”

  “Among other transgressions.”

  “They say he went to harry the good folk of California. Good riddance to bad cess.”

  The door opened and let in the draft that had been waiting outside like a cat. A lieutenant, his face red from the icy wind, poked his head in. “They’re here, Dr. Steck.”

  “Did Victorio and the Warm Springs people come, too?”

  “I reckon. They all look alike to me.” The head disappeared; then it popped back in. “Mr. Collins, the boys brought back your wagon. It’s missing its cover and has a load of sand in it, but it looks none the worse for wear, considering. They took it to the wagon yard.”

  With Red trailing after him, Rafe accompanied Dr. Steck to the storehouse where the Apaches had gathered. The first detail he noticed was the absence of young men. He shook his head with a small, rueful smile. He wasn’t surprised. The young ones hadn’t waited until spring to raid into Mexico.