Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Rafe had been more than glad to see the soldiers. Thirst had swelled his tongue until he felt as though he were sucking on a saddle horn. Added to that inconvenience was the blight of life with Bascom. Rafe and Sergeant Mott had tried to convince the lieutenant that Apaches couldn’t send for reinforcements the way the U.S. Army could. Hence they would not attack stone walls, and they would not take on overwhelming odds, but the lieutenant had swung from bravado to gibbering terror and back again several times between every sunup and sundown.

  As the days dragged on, stretched out by boredom and fear, the soldiers had commenced quarreling. Those from the North argued with the fervently secessionist Southerners. Their political discussions ended in brawls as often as not. By the time the infantry from Fort Buchanan arrived, Rafe had been ready to whistle to his dog, saddle Red, and load his pistols and Jim Wallace’s fine new slant-breech Sharps rifle. He had been ready to ride through the gate to take his chances with Cochise and his minions.

  He discovered that Dr. Irwin was cut from the same cloth as Bascom, but at least Irwin had allowed Lieutenant Moore to take his men on a three-day scout. They had returned yesterday to announce that they had found only old tracks and hastily abandoned camps. They said the Apaches had left for parts unknown, but Rafe didn’t believe that. People believed that the Apaches had no feeling for friends or kin, but Rafe felt sure Cochise wouldn’t abandon his family.

  Now the soldiers were headed for Fort Buchanan, seventy miles away. They had stopped when they came to the abandoned campsite. Rafe walked to the clearing sheltered by the canopy of four huge oaks, their limbs as parallel to the ground as ridgepoles. Three bodies lay strewn like so much litter in a shallow gully. Irwin and Bascom were standing over the fourth near the cold remains of a campfire.

  “Can you say who this is?” Bascom’s face had turned as gray as last night’s ashes.

  Rafe looked down at the wreckage of flesh and bones and entrails that once had been some mother’s son. His stomach wanted to add his breakfast to Bascom’s, but he only hawked and spit out the bile that rose in his throat.

  The Apaches had staked the man spread-eagle on his back. They had stripped the body and cut off various appendages. His abdomen had been ripped open and charred areas covered his chest. Gaping holes left by lances had obliterated his features. Rafe took a deep breath and crouched for a closer look. The sun glinted on a gold tooth in the bloody hole that had been a mouth.

  “It’s Jim Wallace.”

  “What kind of men could do this?” Irwin asked.

  “This is woman’s work,” Rafe said. “Probably they were kin of the people we’re holding.”

  “Well, let’s see justice done and then get moving.” Irwin polished the dusty toes of his boots on his trouser legs. He swiveled on his heels and strode toward the six men, the boy, and the woman holding a baby in a sling on her hip. They were all tied in a line and guarded by a dozen men with rifles.

  “Lieutenant, assign a detail to bury these poor bastards. We’ll need a second one to hang the prisoners, two men to a tree. We’ll hoist them so high the wolves can’t get them. We’ll leave them here as a lesson to any thieving, bloodthirsty savage who passes.”

  Rafe knew that was a bad idea. It would only make matters worse, although he didn’t see how they could get any worse. Even so, the sight of Wallace made his gut writhe with fury, revulsion, and disillusionment. He had thought Cochise honorable, and he had been wrong. Cochise had allowed this to happen to the man he had called friend.

  The torture had a significance lost on Irwin and Bascom. The Apaches believed that their victims would have to pass to the other world as they had died. They had damned Wallace to spend eternity deformed.

  And damn the Apaches for it, Rafe thought.

  Soldiers began untying the ropes that held the canvasshrouded crates and sacks in the wagon.

  “You speak some Spanish, Collins,” Irwin said. “Explain to these bucks that they’re to be executed for the death of those men.”

  Rafe pointed out the obvious. “But they didn’t kill them.”

  “Just tell them.”

  “What about the woman and the two kids?”

  Irwin looked about to snarl at Rafe for pestering him with questions; then he remembered that Rafe wasn’t an enlisted man. “My inclination is to squash the nits with the lice, but Lieutenant Bascom advises turning them loose. He seems eager to be rid of them. He didn’t want to hang Cheis’s three bucks, either, but I convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

  Rafe wanted to observe that if Bascom had come to his senses ten days earlier about the woman, the children, and the three bucks, none of this would have happened. He walked over to the six Apache men who watched the proceedings as if they had far less importance than a card game or a new horse. Then, joking and laughing, the soldiers tied knots in the ends of the ropes to weight them. One stood on the wagon seat and threw the first rope over a high limb. The prisoners became more intent.

  Another soldier led the wagon’s team forward so the man on the seat could heave the second rope five feet farther along the limb. Then he led the team to the next tree. Behind him two men began tying nooses in the dangling ends.

  “They’re going to kill you,” Rafe said.

  Coyundado stepped forward from the group. He was shorter than Cochise, and he had coarser features, but he was as muscular. To Rafe, he radiated a nonchalant menace that was remarkable even among people for whom menace was second nature.

  “¿De garrote?” Coyundado put a hand to his neck, above the necklace of silver conchos. Will they strangle us?

  “Sí.”

  “Tiranos,” he said.

  Rafe turned to Irwin and Bascom. “They want you to shoot them.”

  “What do they care?”

  “Vanity. If they die hung in a noose, they’ll have to spend eternity with their necks stretched.”

  “Their necks are the least of their worries in eternity. I will not grant depraved thieves and murderers the honor of a firing squad.”

  Rafe translated the decision, although the men undoubtedly had guessed what it was.

  “Entonces, danos pulque.”

  “They want whiskey,” Rafe said.

  “This isn’t a goddamned tavern.” Irwin motioned to the soldiers to finish the arrangements.

  “No importa.” Coyundado hands were tied behind his back, but he shook his head, as though dismissing death like a bothersome fly. “I killed two Mexicans recently,” he said in Spanish. “I am satisfied.”

  The soldiers unhitched seven horses from the wagon teams. The six Apaches’ hands were tied, so the soldiers helped them mount. They positioned each horse under a noose. The seventh soldier mounted and arranged the nooses over their necks and tied the other end to their saddle horns. As he did it, he looked not at all sure they wouldn’t find a way to kill him even while trussed up.

  The young soldier jumped visibly when he reached Coyundado, who began to chant in a loud, steady voice. Rafe would have sworn Coyundado did it as much to scare the lad as to celebrate his own death. Apaches did like their little jokes.

  The older of the two boys looked to be about ten or twelve years old. He stood as silent and expressionless as his mother and the child riding in a sling at her hip. They stayed that way when the soldiers lashed the horses with their quirts. The animals bolted, cutting Coyundado’s song short and hauling the prisoners up until the tops of their heads hit the limb bringing the horses to an abrupt halt. The men swung and kicked so hard they bumped into each other. When the last one had stopped twitching, the soldiers tied the other ends of the ropes around the oaks’ trunks.

  The sergeant untied the woman and gave her a shove between the shoulder blades. Rafe watched her and her son walk away without turning back. He wondered if she would be capable of torturing a man the way Wallace had been tortured. He was pretty sure she would. He wondered how she would find her husband, if indeed Cochise and his men had gone to Mexico.


  Well, that wasn’t his problem. His problem was to make it back to Fort Buchanan alive with this bunch of greenhorns. That should keep all of them occupied for the duration of the trip. Then he would try to stay alive each day after that, just as he always had.

  Chapter 26

  THE GIFT

  If Cheis was going to drive out the Pale Eyes, his warriors would need weapons, ammunition, and provisions. Mexico was where they had always gotten them. Victorio and his men came with Cheis to trade the horses and cattle they had stolen on their way south.

  The comanchero pushed his fingers up under the conical crown of his sombrero, knocking the wide brim askew enough for Lozen to see one eye black as a midnight abyss, if she had bothered to look. Profound contemplation settled onto his pock-cratered face as he scratched through the tangles of his hair and waited for Lozen to select a string of beads. He harvested a louse and popped it into his mouth.

  Lozen chose the string of red glass beads and added them to the pile laid out on top of two folded wool blankets—a pouch of lead balls, and another of gunpowder, three looking glasses, ten yards of calico, a sack of corn, and a knife. She handed over the lead lines of the mules. She began packing her new possessions in the rawhide pouches that hung behind the mare’s saddle.

  If the trader thought it odd that a young Apache woman would be on a raid, he gave no sign of it. The new mules had his attention, anyway. They had developed a sudden and contrary fondness for Lozen, and they didn’t want to leave her. The comanchero hauled them toward the milling herd of army mules taken from the stage station.

  The trader’s nine companions were short of stature and principles, but long on guile and nerve. They were dealing, after all, with people who had been killing Mexicans for three centuries. They were mostly Tarahumara Indians. Luxuriant black mustaches draped the lower halves of their faces and the sombreros threw the upper halves in shadow, which was just as well. Their eyes wouldn’t instill confidence. Their trousers and short jackets were the color of the desert dust.

  Cheis and Victorio had no trouble finding them. They had only to follow the broken cottonwood axletrees discarded from the traders’ lumbering two-wheeled carts. When in place, the ungreased axletrees sounded like the din a double-bass horse fiddle would make if the double-bass horse fiddle were being castrated. The carts had wheels sawn from the trunks of oak trees. They required six oxen to pull them when loaded.

  They could never make the climb up the zigzag trail into the sharp-sided mountains where Long Neck and his people lived. The traders had arrived at Long Neck’s usual meeting place with pack mules that were as raffish, unkempt, and ungovernable as they were. They looked like foothills of goods plodding along on hooves so frayed they resembled their masters’ mustaches.

  When the leader of the comancheros finished his trade with Lozen, he turned to Victorio. He spoke a mix of Spanish, Apache, and sign language. “Jefe, we have a present for you.”

  His men hauled on a rope, the other end of which was looped around Shadrach Rogers’s neck. Rogers’s wrists were tied behind his back, and a twisted length of sacking hobbled his ankles. He struggled, sobbed, and pleaded, although no one understood what he was saying.

  The comanchero made an offhand wave in his direction. “This coyote is a Hair Taker. I think maybe he scalped some of your people. He killed an old man and old woman of our people, after they fed him and gave him shelter. We were going to hang him upside down until he died, but”—the trader shrugged in a gesture of magnanimity—“we thought maybe our good friend Victorio would like to have him.”

  “He was at the diggers’ village ten years ago,” Lozen murmured to her brother. “I took the cartridge belt from him while he was drunk.”

  “I remember him,” said Victorio. “He was apprentice to the pesh-chidin, the ghost of the iron.”

  “He was a bad man then,” Lozen said. “And he’s a bad man now.”

  Victorio took the rope and passed it to Chato and Talks A Lot. A dark, wet stain spread across the front of Rogers’s already filthy trousers. The comanchero beamed. He looked as though he would like to stay around to see what a crew of drunken Apaches did to a Hair Taker. It would be an entertaining show, but not a prudent move.

  Some of the Chiricahuas were already upending the bottles of pulque they had gotten from the traders and were letting the contents gurgle down their throats. The comancheros knew better than to stay around while the liquor worked its devilment. Cracking their whips and shouting the most scurrilous of oaths, they clattered around the first fold in the trail, leaving behind a cloud of dust and the phantom braying of the mules.

  Victorio and Lozen walked away so they would not see what the young men did to the Hair Taker. They could still hear his screams, though, so they mounted and rode until the cries were no louder than the raucous calls of the chachalaca birds.

  “What did Long Neck say to Cheis’s proposal to drive out the Pale Eyes?” Lozen asked.

  “He says his quarrel is with the Mexicans, not the Pale Eyes, but he’ll listen to what we have to say.”

  “Will you hold council at Long Neck’s village?”

  “No. Cheis knows he’ll need more help from the spirits than usual. He wants to go to the holiest place to discuss it.”

  “The Canyon With No End?” Lozen had heard about it all her life, and all her life she’d wondered if she’d ever see it. The Mexicans called it Barranca de Cobre, Copper Canyon.

  Victorio smiled. “It’s a hole big enough to put the world in.”

  WHITE CLOUDS SWIRLED IN THE AZURE SKY AS LOZEN walked to the edge of the precipice. She stood with the toes of her moccasins hanging over the edge of the world. She looked down at a land so far below that she thought if she dived forward she would fall until the sun set.

  Lush green forests covered the broad valley. Mist as white as the clouds floated over the silver ribbon of a river that snaked along the valley floor. Long Neck’s people called the Sierra Madre the Blue Mountains. Lozen could see why. In the distance the deep green of the forest cover shifted to aqua, then to a dark blue against the sky that rose from behind them. The size, the beauty, the grandeur, the richness of it stunned her. She felt as small as the ant crawling up her moccasin.

  Victorio said this wasn’t the Underworld, the Happy Country, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe she was standing at the opening where the dead went. All the spirits who had gone on their last journeys since Old Man Coyote let Death out of the sack could live comfortably in this valley and the thousands of others leading out from it. She imagined the ghosts hunting and gambling, making love, feasting, dancing, laughing, and telling stories. She imagined her mother and her father there, never cold, hungry, frightened, sad, or in pain.

  She walked along the cliff until she came to a narrow canyon branching off from it. She followed the eastern rim of it until long past time for the midday meal back at the encampment. The twists and turns, the wind-sculpted rocks drew her on. She had almost reached the place where the canyon narrowed to a cleft when night’s shadows began to pool among the rocks and trees below. She unrolled her blanket and sat cross-legged on it at the edge. She could throw a rock and hit the entrance to a cave just below the rim on the other side.

  She watched the sun slip behind the mountains. She watched the sky take fire and the clouds turn the brilliant hues of desert flowers after a spring freshet. She watched the color flow down the sides of the canyon and into the stream below, until the water glowed deep pink.

  Bit by bit night stole the canyon away from the day. The shadows met and blended until she could no longer make out the forms of the rocks. She sat all night listening to the rustle of animals going about their business and the calls of cougars and wolves and coyotes, the night songs of birds.

  The next day and the following night she left the blanket only to relieve herself. She was aware of hunger and thirst, weariness, and the icy night wind, but they didn’t seem important. She didn’t think about Victorio, either, or t
he council that he and Cheis, Red Sleeves, Loco, Broken Foot, Long Neck, and others were holding. Victorio was used to her wandering off in search of advice from the spirits.

  The third night she began hearing voices. She saw movements at the periphery of her sight. Coyote came. With his head cocked and his tongue lolling, he watched her for a long time. He told her the story of the time he shit on a rock, and it chased him until he apologized and cleaned it off. His story made her laugh, but she kept a wary eye on him. One could never tell what Coyote might do.

  Later that night the stones, sculpted by the elements into grotesque shapes, moved in the moonlight and whispered to her. Her own spirit helpers visited her, too. The last one swirled like a mist between the two rims of the canyon. Its message vibrated in the bones of her skull.

  “To know the strength of your enemies, watch the cave. To know where they will come from, watch the cave.” Three more times the spirit repeated its advice.

  On the fourth morning, as soon as Lozen could see the darker splotch of the cave opening against the pale face of the cliff, she stared at it. The sun hadn’t risen over the top of the cliff yet when she heard the beat of drums like those of the Bluecoat soldiers.

  Gusts riffled the wisps of hair that had pulled loose from her braid and curled around her face. A rumbling grew louder and then became the rhythmic tromp of the clumsy boots the Bluecoats wore. She saw the first rank of them, six across, appear in the cave entrance. Their shouldered rifles rose like spikes above them. Another line followed them, then a third, a fourth, and a fifth. The apparitions wore identical blue jackets and trousers. Under the stubby brims of their tall black hats, their faces were pale disks, without eyes, noses, mouths, anything that would distinguish them one from the other. They marched into the air in front of the cave and vanished, but more followed, rank after rank of them. The walking soldiers were interspersed with companies on horseback.