Lozen threw pollen to each of the four directions; then she held up the child and chanted prayers for his well-being. When she finished she handed the baby to Niece so she could nurse him. She washed out the blanket that Niece had knelt on and threw it over a bush to dry. She wrapped the afterbirth and the umbilical cord in a scrap of cloth and found a mesquite tree to hang it in. The mesquite renewed itself each year. It bore fruit that sustained them, just as the child would renew his people and sustain them.
Lozen sat on the riverbank and took stock of their situation. She and Niece had a three-day supply of parched corn and dried venison between them. They could gather food on their way, but Niece needed more than cactus fruits and berries if she was to feed her baby.
Lozen scouted along the river until she found a cattle trail. She lay out on a flat boulder overlooking it. When the longhorns came to drink, she picked out the fattest one. As the cow passed under her, she leaped onto her back. She gripped the longhorn’s sides with her knees and put an arm around her neck. The cow bucked and twisted, but Lozen drove her knife through the cow’s ear and into her brain.
She cut out the stomach to carry water in; then she skinned off part of the hide and put as much meat into it as she and Niece could cure. While the strips of beef hung on the bushes in the hot sun, Niece and Lozen flensed the hide and tanned it as best they could. When it dried, they used pieces of it to resole their moccasins. Crooning the proper songs and prayers, Lozen made a crude cradleboard of willow shoots, the blanket, and thongs cut from the hide.
Lozen sat cross-legged in front of Niece, watching her nurse the child in the shade of a palo verde. “I saw some Mexican soldiers camped downstream. I’ll swim across and steal one of their horses.”
Niece tried not to look frightened. “How long will you be gone?”
“I should be back by the morning. They cannot chase me across to this side of the river.”
Lozen cupped the baby’s tiny shoulder in her hand. With her other hand she stroked Niece’s hair. Then she set the carbine, the ammunition, and her supply of food with Niece’s few belongings. Shiyi, her husband the carbine, was the possession most difficult for her to leave behind.
“If something happens to me, take the gun and walk northeast. Keep the rising sun on your right.”
Chapter 58
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.”
Chapter 59
AID AND COMFORT
Almost 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 knel
t 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.”
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