Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Everyone gathered around to inspect the nine notches on the butt of each pole and the beads on the hoop’s thong spoke. Broken Foot began the complicated process of tabulating the score.

  “Here comes your horse again,” said He Who Yawns.

  Morning Star watched his pony approach at a diligent canter. The dun had an innocent look, as though convinced that Morning Star had called him.

  “The herd boys are lazy,” grumbled He Who Yawns. “They play cards all day and let the horses run where they will.”

  “Coyote sits back on his tether and breaks it,” Morning Star said. “My sister has seen him do it. And he chews through hobbles.”

  “He’s a coyote, all right,” added Broken Foot. “He came into my wife’s camp yesterday and ate her meal cakes.”

  The horse that Morning Star had stolen from Hairy Foot’s two friends had a sharp, slender muzzle and roguish eyes. His long, loose-jointed legs tapered to oversize hooves giving him a clumsy, shuffling walk that rolled into smooth, light-footed flight when he galloped. He was coyote colored, with a dark brown mane and tail and stripe running along his backbone. Like Old Man Coyote he favored the ladies, and he wooed the mares with enthusiasm. He acted as though he accepted Morning Star’s authority because doing so amused him.

  Broken Foot declared Loco the winner, and Red Sleeves shrugged out of his blue coat and handed it to him. He had already lost the last two buttons, so Loco wore the coat open and hanging loose over his breechclout. Since the Pale Eyes had distributed presents to the Red Paint leaders several days ago, the new blankets and calico, the mirrors, knives, and shirts had flowed like a river among the winners and losers at hoop-and-pole. All Red Sleeves had left of his splendid suit of clothes was the fringed, gold epaulet dangling from the back of his belt.

  Red Sleeves took up his pole again, ready to recoup his losses, but He Who Yawns raised himself onto the balls of his feet so he could murmur into his ear. Red Sleeves looked up at the sun, just disappearing behind the peak to the west. He glanced regretfully at the coat, whose sleeves Loco was rolling up so they didn’t hang past his fingertips.

  Red Sleeves sighed. He Who Yawns was right. At tonight’s council they would plan the raid into Sonora to avenge the massacre of their women and children at Janos. By the time they finished the meal that Red Sleeves’s wives were preparing and gathered at the council fire, the night would be well along.

  Everyone knew that the revenge scout preoccupied He Who Yawns. Even though he wasn’t a member of the Red Paint Chiricahuas, Red Sleeves had sent him to invite allies to this council. He had traveled across the Pale Eyes’ new imaginary line between here and Mexico, and climbed the steep track to the stronghold of Long Neck and his Enemy People. He had ridden to Cheis’s Tall Cliffs People in their aerie among the crags and spectral stone columns on the western side of Doubtful Pass. He had visited Skinny’s band at Warm Springs. Wherever he went he spoke of little else but revenge.

  He had married Alope at seventeen, younger than most, and he had loved her and their three small daughters with all the fervor of youth. No one had lost more to the Mexican lancers at Janos than He Who Yawns. Even though he was young and inexperienced, and he lacked the tact and generosity that would make him a great leader, Red Sleeves had decided to place him in charge of the raid. Now Red Sleeves would have to persuade the other warriors to agree with his decision about He Who Yawns, but in his thirty years as chief he could count on one hand the times his men had refused to do that, and he would have fingers left over.

  RED SLEEVIES GAVE CHEIS THE HONOR OF BEGINNING THE council by smoking to the four sacred directions. Cheis rubbed his tobacco pouch between his thumb and fingers to show it was empty. He looked at his younger brother, Coyundado, who sat farther down in the ranks of warriors. In Spanish coyundado meant “tied to a yoke,” but in naming Cheis’s brother that, the Chiricahua meant the ox himself.

  Cheis’s strength was of the tall, supple variety, swaying almost imperceptively, like an oak, to accomodate the vicissitudes of life. His brother Ox was powerful, too, but built low to the ground. He took more than the usual amount of time to consider every question, which gave him a reputation for being slow to act. Cheis relied on him for advice, though, and rarely went anywhere without him.

  Ox unrolled of top of his moccasin and retrieved the small leather sack he had folded into it. Before he opened it he fingered the contents. Amusement and chagrin flitted across his round face too quickly for anyone to see except those who knew him well. Cheis’s impassive expression never shifted as he watched his brother.

  The rest waited while Ox wrapped the thick fingers of one hand around the sack to hide the angular, untobacco-like bulge in it, and reached in with the other. He poked around and pulled out a pinch of tobacco. He closed the sack, replaced it in his moccasin cuff, and rolled the tobacco in a sumac leaf.

  He handed the cigarillo to Cheis, who accepted it solemnly. No one gave any sign that they knew what had happened, but most of them had heard of the wanderings of the rooster feet. The story circulating among the nightly fires was that when Cheis was thirteen, he put a rooster’s foot into seven-year-old Ox’s gourd of stew. Instead of making a fuss, Ox had acted as though it weren’t there. When Cheis went on his first scout as an apprentice, he had found the foot in his water sack. It and its sucessors had been passing between them ever since, in a blanket roll, in a moccasin, under a saddle, or tied to a war cap along with the feathers, and with never any indication that it existed.

  After the opening ritual, Red Sleeves started the discussion. The Americans intrigued, puzzled, and irritated everyone. If the Ndee complied with the Americans’ demands, they would not be able to avenge the massacre at Janos. That was unthinkable.

  “Wah-sin-ton says this. Wah-sin-ton says that.” Morning Star looked around the council fire. “Who is this Wah-sin-ton?”

  “Maybe he’s the Pale Eyes’ most powerful chief,” Red Sleeves said.

  “The Pale Eyes want our leaders to ride many days to visit this fellow, Wah-sin-ton. Why doesn’t Wah-sin-ton come to us instead?”

  “Maybe he’s too old,” said Loco. “Maybe his joints ache when he camps anywhere but in his own lodge.”

  “Why won’t the Americans give us guns and powder and ammunition to kill Mexicans?” Loco said. “The Mexicans are their enemies, too. We’re not asking them to fight the Mexicans for us. We’ll kill the treacherous coyotes ourselves.”

  “We don’t need their guns,” said He Who Yawns. “When we use bows, we do not have to depend on the Pale Eyes for powder and bullets.”

  Cheis and Ox, Morning Star, and Broken Foot had faces that fell easily into smiles. He Who Yawns did not. His eyes glowed like coals from under an overhanging brow. His sharp nose, wide mouth, and thong-thin lips gave him a look of ferocity that was almost perpetual.

  “The Americans and the Mexicans fought for two years.” Red Sleeves fell silent and stared off into the past, something he did more often these days. “We’ve seen the ground strewn with their rotting dead. The coyotes and the buzzards grew fat during that war. In all our years of making war with the Mexicans, I doubt we killed as many of them as the Americans did.”

  Something else was bothering all of them. Broken Foot spoke of it first. “Are we children that the American colonel should tell us what we can and cannot do in our own country? We have always gone to Mexico for horses and slaves. Mexico is our second home.”

  Red Sleeves turned to a compact individual dressed in the white shirt and loose white cotton trousers of a Mexican farmer. Juan Mirez had taken off the breechclout and moccasins he had worn since Red Sleeves had captured him in Mexico at age nine. On the pretense of looking for mules to buy, he would find out where the soldiers had taken the captives.

  “Do you have everything you need, my son?” Red Sleeves asked him.

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  Since Red Sleeves had recommended He Who Yawns as the leader of the biggest war raid anyone could r
emember, he had become even more overbearing than usual. He recounted again the perfidy of Mexicans soldiers and the warriors’ obligation to the spirits of those murdered at Janos.

  He committed the most basic discourtesy. He talked so much that he didn’t allow others to make their own pictures in their heads. By leaving nothing to the imagination, he demanded that they see it exactly as he did. A good speaker said only enough to encourage the listeners to open up their thinking and travel in their minds to the place being spoken of, to see the events there for themselves.

  “I have war magic.” He announced it as if they hadn’t heard it before. “That night by the river, after the Mexicans had slain my mother, my woman, and my children, the spirits promised that bullets could never kill me.”

  “Did they give you the power to stop bullets from killing the rest of us?” Broken Foot said it in a voice too low for He Who Yawns to hear, but the men around him chuckled softly.

  While He Who Yawns talked, Morning Star let his mind wander. He thought about that invisible line undulating across mountains and deserts and rivers, the line the Mexicans were not supposed to cross. The People considered this an advantage. Mexican lancers could not chase the raiding parties across it.

  Morning Star didn’t agree. The Pale Eyes who called themselves American had taken a vast territory that the Mexicans considered theirs. If the Americans took land from the Mexicans, would they try to take land from The People, too?

  At first The People had thought that the Pale Eyes with their rods and strings were playing a game, like hoop-and-pole, only this game required a field as big as The People’s entire country. When they learned the real purpose of the chains and the poles and the far-seeing tubes, they had laughed uproariously around their fires at night. The Pale Eyes thought they could measure mountains and deserts and rivers the way a woman measured a buckskin to see if she could cut a shirt front or a moccasin top out of it.

  Morning Star didn’t laugh. He remembered watching with his sister from a ridge as a company of Mexican soldiers rode up the valley below. They had stopped at the ford in the stream, conferred, and then headed back the way they came. Morning Star told Lozen that the boundary lay there.

  “How can they witch a wall from the air?” she had asked. He had looked solemnly at her. “They urinate in a line like Brother Wolf when he marks his hunting lands. When the Mexicans reach it, they smell the urine and turn away.” She had exploded into that wild, infectious laugh of hers.

  Lozen. What to do about the child who was no longer a child? She was supposed to be helping She Moves Like Water and her sister, Corn Stalk, prepare for the ceremony that would mark her as a woman. Instead she was sneaking off with the boys and begging him to let her serve as his apprentice on his horse-stealing raids.

  After the ceremony of White Painted Woman, his little sister would be free to marry. She would spend her days in the company of women. She would bear children and raise them. She would care for grandchildren when her own daughters went on raids with their husbands. The thought should have made him happy, but it didn’t. She had horse magic and the power of far-sight and who knew what other gifts. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the spirits had other plans for her.

  Chapter 9

  SUN RUMBLES INSIDE IT

  Since before Lozen was born she had heard her grandlike Grandmother. Her brother she could mother sounded like Grandmother. Lozen wished she could have known her mother for as long as her brother had. When the Hair Takers attacked her people at the Death Feast, Morning Star had grabbed Sister’s cradleboard and run with it, but he had not been able to save their mother.

  When Grandmother sang, Lozen closed her eyes and pretended the voice was her mother’s. When she was younger, Lozen had wakened each morning to the sound of her Grandmother’s song, a greeting to the day and to Yusen, Life Giver. Each morning she had reached out and felt the warmth of the blankets where her grandmother had lain beside her.

  Lozen grew taller and Grandmother grew smaller with the years until now Lozen could look down and see the individual gray strands of hair growing from her grandmother’s brown scalp. Grandmother laughed and said that the rain and the sun had shrunk her like the Mexicans’ cotton cloth.

  Time had eroded a crisscross pattern of wrinkles in her cheeks. The bones of her skull formed large hollows around her eyes, leaving her sparse gray eyebrows perched at the apex, and giving her the look of a startled owl. She had the biggest ears and the kindest eyes of anyone Lozen knew. Her eyes were framed by the heavy lids above them and the pouches of skin underneath. When she smiled, the folds and gullies of her face shifted into a look of impish joy. Around her wrinkled neck she wore thirty or forty necklaces of shiny seeds and glass beads. Blue stones dangled from earlobes that looked like a pair of tree fungi.

  Grandmother was a di-yin, a shaman. Women with sadness in their eyes came to her fire to ask her to sing away an illness, or sing back a straying husband. Some came smiling, their palms caressing their swollen bellies, and asked her to sing a cradle into being and welcome a new baby into the world. Those were Grandmother’s favorite sings.

  This time She Moves Like Water had brought her the traditional four presents of tobacco, yellow pollen, a well-tanned buckskin, and a black-handled knife. She asked her to make a tsoch, a cradleboard for her three-day-old daughter. She Moves Like Water had held out her arm, and Grandmother had used a buckskin thong to measure from the crook of her elbow to her closed fist. She Moves Like Water could hold a cradle this wide comfortably when she nursed her daughter.

  At dawn this morning, Lozen and Stands Alone went with Grandmother to collect the materials. Both of them knew that White Painted Woman had given the instructions for cradle-making back at the beginning of time, but Grandmother always explained them again.

  “The materials must be gathered and assembled in one day,” she said. “Pine is easy to cut and shape for the frame, but it attracts lightning. Black locust will make the child grow straight and strong.”

  Grandmother sang while she cut locust for the frame, a willow branch for the canopy hoop, cedar for the footrest. She sang while she gathered absorbent moss to pack around the baby and yucca stems for the back slats. While they were at it, the three of them cut strips of willow bark to grind into a powder that would soothe rashes. They collected cottonwood down to stuff the baby’s pillow.

  Stands Alone helped Lozen hoist the loaded basket onto her back, and they followed Grandmother back to their family’s camp. Next to the arbor Grandmother stirred up the fire she would use to shape the locust and willow into the frame and canopy. Stands Alone laid out cowhides for Grandmother to sit on while she worked.

  Lozen arranged the materials in the necessary pattern and order. She went into the lodge and searched through Grandmother’s storage pouches until she found the bags of bird bones, shiny pebbles, and bits of lightning-struck wood to hang from the canopy’s rim as protection against lightning and illness.

  Grandmother began by rolling tobacco into a dried leaf and smoking to the four directions. She asked Life Giver to send his power through her hands so the cradleboard would give health and long life to its tiny occupant. When Grandmother used the gifts the spirits had given her, she radiated a serene confidence.

  Time, hard work, and old injuries had swelled Grandmother’s knuckles and bent her fingers at rigid right angles to her hands, and she needed more assistance these days than in the past. With the knife She Moves Like Water had brought, Lozen helped Grandmother scrape the yucca stems smooth for the back slats. Grandmother fastened them so that everything fit together tightly to make a cradle that was strong and graceful. As she shaped the frame into an elongated oval, bent the willow into its graceful curve for the canopy, and lashed the back slats into place, she sang the most beautiful song of the hundreds she knew.

  Good, like long life it moves back and forth.

  By means of White Water under it, it is made.

  By means of Rainbow curved over it
, it is made.

  Lightning dances alongside it, they say.

  Good, like long life the cradle is made.

  Sun rumbles inside it, they say.

  When she wasn’t singing one of the cradle-making songs, she repeated the refrain that would create a special bond with her great granddaughter. She had sung it while she made Lozen’s cradle fourteen years ago and Lozen’s mother’s forty years before that.

  “Look at her, this pretty little one. She calls me Granny. She calls me Granny. Look at her.” She had made so many cradles that most of the children called her Granny, and so did their parents.

  She let Lozen stain the buckskin with the sacred yellow pollen and taught her the words to sing while she did it. Lozen made a line of holes in it with her bone awl and held it in place while Grandmother laced it tightly around the canopy and frame. Then Lozen helped her attach the buckskin pieces that would lace in a zigzag, like lightning, up the front to wrap around Daughter and hold her in place. With fine stitches Grandmother sewed the buckskin sides on in two sets so that the top half could be left open in hot weather.

  She worked more slowly than she had in the past. Lozen worried that she might not finish by dusk, but the sun was just setting when Grandmother attached the rawhide tumpline to the sides and cut the half moon in the leather covering of the canopy to signify that the occupant was a girl. She tucked a packet of sacred pollen and gray sage into an inner pocket for added protection against lightning. Into the other pocket she put a small, turtle-shaped bag with a piece of Daughter’s umbilical cord and a slice of fragrant osha root to keep away colds and sore throat.