Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  “Makes no never mind to me what they do.” Bill said.

  Rafe knew how he felt. The squabbles of ambitious men in cravats, striped trousers, and patent leather pumps seemed remote, irrelevant. Renegade Mexicans, murderous Americans, implacable Apaches, and the desert itself were already slaughtering honest and dishonest folk alike here on a regular basis.

  Then the realization hit him.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmured.

  Bill looked at him, one furry eyebrow arched.

  “Oh, shit,” Rafe breathed again.

  IN SPITE OF A STORM THAT SENT JAGGED BLADES OF LIGHTNING slashing into the ground and thunder booming like heavy artillery, Rafe found the fort in the uproar he expected. He tied Red in front of the stable, shook the excess rain from the brim of his hat, and with Patch at his heels, wove off to find the captain.

  The captain glanced up from the account book lying open on the desk in the quartermaster’s tent. “You. heard the news?”

  Rafe nodded, though the captain had returned his attention to trying to make out the quartermaster sergeant’s scrawl.

  “Some of the Southern soldiers have already deserted us here.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “We’ve received orders to pull out. They need us at the front.”

  “The front?” Rafe had fought alongside hundreds of Southerners in the war with Mexico. He tried to imagine fighting against them. He wondered if the government might call him up, force him to fight, too.

  “The latest dispatch just arrived.” The captain held up the rumpled paper. “We’re to burn everything and march east by the first week in July.”

  “The Apaches will slaughter people like cattle.”

  The captain shrugged. “I have to follow orders.” He looked up at Rafe. “Come with us, Collins. You’ve not contracted gold fever like those other fools. Leave this godforsaken territory to the savages. The Apaches deserve it, if you ask me.”

  The thought had never occurred to Rafe. For a few moments he considered it. Maybe Fanny Kemble was touring the Unites States doing readings of Shakespeare. Rafe had seen a lithograph of her in an old copy of Frank Leslie’s magazine, worn tissue-thin by the hands through which it had passed. The picture was ghostlike, but he could see that she was beautiful. He tried to imagine sitting in an ornate theater, with cherubim painted on the ceiling, and women with plumes in their hats, listening to Miss Kemble’s voice.

  He shook his head. “I reckon I’ll stay.”

  “Better the evil you know, I suppose.”

  Rafe realized there was a distinct possibility that the army might conscript him into the fighting if he went east. Besides, he might as well go to the moon as cross the Mississippi. He had heard the stories of what the east was like. Crowded. Smelly. Noisy. Nowhere to stretch your arms or your soul. A man couldn’t howl at the moon there, if he’d a mind to.

  The captain considered this country a wasteland, but Rafe disagreed. He realized that somewhere along the treacherous, hot, dusty road, he had come to love it. He couldn’t divorce it now.

  Chapter 28

  TUCSON, TUBAC, TUMACACORI, AND TO HELL

  The Bluecoats were leaving. Broken Foot wasn’t surprised. He glanced over at Victorio and Lozen, then back at the fort in the broad bowl of a valley below. “All that lightning worked magic for us.”

  “The Bluecoats have lots of iron.” Victorio couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Iron thwarts lightning’s power.”

  “I’m telling you, brother, my prayers to lightning have driven the Pale Eyes away.”

  Red Sleeves had no trouble believing that the spirits, Lightning or otherwise, had answered everyone’s prayers. He held his arms out at his sides with his palms up. He tilted his slab of a chin so the hot sun beat down onto his face. With his eyes closed, he started to dance. He hopped on one huge, flat foot and then the other, waving his arms and circling in place. He looked like a vulture trying to get into the air after eating too much of a dead mule.

  Lozen lay on her stomach next to Victorio while he studied the Bluecoats through Hairy Foot’s far-seeing tube. Broken Foot lay nearby, with Geronimo next to him, and the rest of the raiding party was hidden across the ridgeline. The Bluecoats’ collection of wooden buildings in Doubtful Pass controlled access to the only spring for a day’s journey in either direction. They hindered the Chiricahuas’ travel between Cheis’s stronghold to the west of the fort and the Red Paints’ country to the east.

  They hadn’t kept Cheis’s Tall Cliffs men and the Red Paint warriors from stealing the army’s horses and mules. They had attacked supply trains and sniped at patrols, but the Bluecoats had taken their toll, too. Companies of them rode into the mountains and harried The People. No one could sleep in peace.

  Now they were leaving. They gathered on the parade ground and formed their ritual lines, angular and precise. The drivers pulled their loaded wagons up in formation behind them. The few head of stock that the Chiricahuas hadn’t stolen made a pitiful showing at the rear.

  Soldiers walked from building to building with torches. They reached up and touched the flames to the roofs whose shingles were dry as punk. The fires spread quickly. Lozen could hear the distant crackling, like insects in rotten wood.

  “The day must not be hot enough for them.” Victorio passed the telescope to Broken Foot.

  “Maybe they’re planning to have a feast before they leave.” Broken Foot peered through the tube. “Maybe they’re going to toss those few sorry mules onto the flames to roast.”

  “We killed Mexicans without their help.” Geronimo’s thin lips warped into a smile. “Now we can kill them without their interference.”

  Behind them, Red Sleeves, still dancing, started chanting a victory song. The Chiricahuas had driven away the Bluecoats. This country would be theirs again. Red Sleeves had made excuse after excuse not to go to the talks that would force him to surrender his people’s land. Now he would have to endure no more of Tse’k cajoling him to pick up the writing stick and make an X mark on the Pale Eyes’ talking leaves.

  Red Sleeves feared those pale, angular, whispering leaves more than thunder, lightning, Ghost Owl, or as many guns as the Bluecoats could level at him. The paper derived its power from a magical place called Wah-sin-ton, or maybe a powerful di-yin named Wah-sin-ton. Whatever it was, it had the power to take his country from him, to drive his people from their homes.

  A tardy soldier, hoisting his rucksack onto his back, ran to fill the last empty spot in the ranks. The bugle gave its cry, and the drums started a cadence so compelling that Lozen’s feet twitched in time to it. The mounted Bluecoats left first, and the walking soldiers followed. The wagons started in the squealing of axles; then the drovers whistled and shouted to get the cattle and mules moving into the cloud of dust.

  Lozen realized that they were marching from west to east, as she had seen in her vision, but this was not how she had interpreted it. She braced herself for the ridicule. Victorio, Broken Foot, Loco, and He Steals Love said nothing, but not Geronimo.

  He looked at Victorio with a satisfied smile. “Perhaps your sister is not so wise as she thinks.”

  Victorio ignored Geronimo as a wolf would ignore a hound pup. Lozen could hear the others start in, though. They pointed with their noses at the retreating army.

  “It’s just as nantan’s sister said,” they chortled. “The Bluecoats are marching from west to east.”

  They had a lot more to say, and Lozen remembered what Broken Foot had told her more than once. “A seer has much more difficulty holding on to his reputation than acquiring it.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to them.” Victorio said. “You saw correctly, but we interpreted your vision wrong.”

  Lozen stared at the men, wagons, and animals disappearing into their own dust. She hadn’t misunderstood the vision. This was not what she had seen. This was not what it meant.

  BATS TRAVELED SWIFTLY, AND THEY WERE GOOD AT CLINGING. People who rode well w
ere believed to have bat magic. People said Lozen had it herself. She suspected that the tall Pale Eyes named Hairy Foot had Bat magic, but she started calling him Ch’banne, Bat, for another reason.

  She knew his big red stallion’s hoofmarks as well as the footprints of each member of her family. On her trips with Victorio she often found them on the trail in the morning, where they had not been the night before. To avoid Cheis’s war parties, he had become a night creature, like Skunk, Ring-tail, or Owl. Like Bat.

  Victorio and some of his people had been visiting Cheis, and now he, Lozen, and few others were enjoying the freedom to roam unhindered. If they came across a supply of ammunition or some cattle, so much the better. Cheis’s people had plundered the country so thoroughly, though, that cattle were scarce.

  This morning the sun had caught Hairy Foot just north of the old Mexican church called Tumacacori. He was far from a cave or outlying rancho, or wherever he holed up when daylight caught him between destinations. Talks A Lot, Ears So Big, Chato, and He Steals Love were jubilant. They all wanted Hairy Foot’s horse.

  Kicking their heels into their ponies’ sides, they slid down the slope in a shower of talus, hit the valley floor running, and galloped after him, trailing their war cry. Lozen followed them. Victorio and Broken Foot knew better than to waste their time. They had chased that big red chimera before.

  Lozen had no illusions of catching Hairy Foot. She only wanted to pull ahead of the men and get between them and their quarry so they couldn’t kill him. She was riding a gray gelding that she had recently stolen from a hacienda. He had good wind and strong legs, and he had almost paralleled Chato when he raised his musket and fired.

  Hairy Foot jerked; then he regained his seat and his horse leaped forward. Steals Love nocked an arrow and raised his bow. Lozen wanted to shout at him, to tell him not to kill this yellow-hair. This one should not die like a deer on the run. But warriors did not tell others what to do. The men might refuse to consider her a warrior, but she would give them no reason to think of her as a meddling female.

  He Steals Love’s arrow sank into Hairy Foot’s back, but he didn’t fall. He pulled away from them with the arrow still stuck in him, bobbing behind him. It looked as though it were waving at them in the silly way white people flapped their hands in farewell.

  Talks A Lot turned his smoke-colored pony around to ride alongside Lozen. “You’re right about that one,” he said. “He’s hard to kill.”

  RAFE SLOWED RED TO A WALK WHEN HE SAW THAT HIS pursuers had given up. He reached behind him and tugged at the arrow. The arrowhead came out attached to the shaft only because it hadn’t penetrated his body. The Apaches fastened the points with deer sinew that stayed taut as long as it was dry. Once wet with blood, the cord loosened and left the head inside to work more mischief when the shaft was pulled out. Often the Apaches coated the arrowhead with poison.

  He tugged his shirttail out of his trousers and took the beaded pouch from where it rode at the small of his back. It now had two holes in it, a round one and a triangular tear. He took out the book inside.

  When he opened it, pollen fell out, staining his fingers yellow. He leafed back, separating the pages stuck together by the passage of the ball. He found the flattened piece of lead in Act V, punctuating the line, “The time and my intents are savage-wild, / More fierce and more inexorable far / Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.” The bottom of the ball was wedged into the back cover, dimpling it.

  He pried it out and tossed it in the palm of his hand. He started to throw it away but put it into his coat pocket as a keepsake. He murmured thanks to the Almighty that the Apache who fired it had been either careless or frugal when he measured his powder. If this bullet had had a few grains more force behind it, it would have torn through the slender volume and severed his spine.

  He let Red blow while he waited for Patch to catch up with him. The dog bustled out of the brush, sniffing every rock and bush as she came. She stood in front of Red with her muzzle raised. Red lowered his head so he could touch noses with her in their usual greeting.

  Rafe pulled his coat closer in the chill February wind and started out again. Patch coursed ahead of him, casting here and there. She alerted Rafe whenever Apaches were near, and she knew how to avoid them when they arrived.

  He turned in at the ranch where he often stopped, but he found the roof of the main house burned, and the front wall battered in. Broken furniture, torn mattresses, and pottery shards filled the courtyard. The naked bodies of the two men who had lived here lay sprawled behind an upturned oak table splintered with bullet holes.

  “Dear God,” Rafe breathed.

  Lances jutted up from the corpses. A pitchfork had been sunk to the base of the tines in the chest of one of them. Rafe wanted to bury them, but he had to reach Tubac, and the Apaches might return at any time.

  He checked the stone-lined cistern in the center of the court. At least nothing dead floated in it. He let Red drink. He found a copper pot among the debris, filled it, and set it down for Patch. Then he filled the canteens hanging behind his saddle like two clusters of big wooden grapes.

  Behind the canteens rode the leather mailbags. They weren’t very full these days, but though he delivered less he charged more, so it evened out. Carrying messages, mail, and small loads was making Rafe a rather wealthy man, if he lived long enough to spend it. Few men would leave the safety of Tubac’s walls not far to the north of here. Tucson was the only other settlement in the part of New Mexico Territory called Arizona. Below Tubac was the deserted mission of Tumacacori. Tucson, Tubac, Tumacacori, and to hell, was how people described this road, but hell started well north of the border with Mexico these days. Rafe figured the devil was expanding his territory as much as the Apaches were.

  Rafe always collected his fees in advance. There was too much likelihood that the receiver would be dead when he arrived or the sender would be dead when he returned. He might be killed himself, of course, but that was a chance he and his employers would have to take.

  This rancho had been the last inhabited place on the road between Tumacacori and Tubac, and now Cochise’s men had destroyed it. With despondency weighing heavy, Rafe started out again, past the bones of dead cattle, burned wagons, abandoned houses, and ranches. In the past year something new had been added to the landscape. Canted, sun-bleached boards stuck vertically into the ground marked the graves of those caught by marauders of one race or another. Rafe felt as though he were riding through a vast graveyard.

  “Bascom.” Rafe said it aloud. He had taken to talking to himself just to hear the sound of a voice in the middle of so much desolation. Red’s ears flicked back to listen. “That damned, arrogant shavetail lieutenant. He set this butchery in motion, Red, and it may be the death of us all.”

  He thought of Cochise looking up at him while he loaded baggage on top of the stagecoach and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy. He remembered the slight smile of amusement Cochise had given him. He had a face that made you look twice at it. It was a wise face, a reasonable face. Not the face of an implacable murderer.

  An eye for an eye. The Apaches operated on that old biblical principle. They just didn’t care whose eye it was, nor did they keep a strict accounting. For them the dictum was a thousand eyes for an eye.

  Rafe knew better than to turn off at the road to the silver mine. He had gone there a fortnight ago to deliver a message from Don Esteban Ochoa, a merchant in Tucson who always paid him more than he asked. “Para suerte,” Ochoa would say with a smile when he handed him the extra coins. “For luck.”

  Rafe had found the mine’s American manager with a steel rock-drill through his chest. Bullets had perforated the two German employees. One of the Germans still lay on his cot, wrapped in his blankets, as though to use it as a shield against the bullets.

  Apaches hadn’t wrought that particular carnage. Rafe had found no lances, no arrows, and no Mexican corpses. Apaches would never have let the Mexican workers escape. He had studied
the trampled ground around the American’s body, circling outward until he found the print of a sandal. The rope sole swirled in a pattern peculiar to Agua Zarca in Sonora, just over the border from the Tumacacori mission.

  He guessed it was the work of the gang of Mexican roughs who had added their malevolence to the general evil plaguing the country. Once the army left, they had hustled across the border like bargain hunters to a fire sale. They probably had recruited their countrymen working at the silver mine. They had slaughtered the American and the two Germans and taken what silver had been smelted into bars.

  Rafe could tell that Apaches had been there since the massacre. He recognized the prints of their unshod ponies. Also they had chipped off hardened pieces of slag from the smelter furnace to use as bullets. The slag contained sulfur and arsenic as well as copper and lead. The wounds they created always became hideously infected. Rafe believed the Apaches knew that. For people without advanced industry of their own, they were swift to take advantage of any that came their way.

  He reached Tubac safely, but he stayed only until nightfall. When the United States soldiers decamped in July, they had burned all the supplies. They had heard that Col. John Baylor was on his way from San Antonio with a horde of Texans, and they didn’t want anything useful to fall into rebel hands. Rumor had it that Baylor had announced a plan to lure the Apaches with promises of treaties and presents, then exterminate the men and sell the women and children as slaves to cover the expense of his campaign. Rafe didn’t want to cross trails with him.