Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  If trouble came its way, the mescal plant could defend itself. Leaves like fat, green spearheads radiated from its center. Each blade had a double row of thorns along its edges, with a thumb-size spike at the end. It would not let anyone take its heart without a fight, and its heart was what Lozen wanted.

  The mescal plants here in Long Neck’s country were bigger than those she was used to. The thick red flower stalk at the center of this one was four times taller than she was. When Lozen jabbed her piñon limb into the center of the bush, a rattlesnake as long as she was slithered out the other side and into the brush.

  “It was a year ago,” she murmured, to confuse the evil spirits that the snake possessed.

  She lay on her stomach, pressed a leaf downward, and with her drinking tube, sucked the water that collected at the bottom of it. It was hot and musty, and she spit out the ants and beetles in it.

  Lozen was used to heat, but here in northern Mexico it burned like the side of a hatchet blade held in the flames. She plaited her damp hair into a thick braid that hung to the backs of her thighs and tucked the end of it into her belt. She placed her foot between the two rows of thorns at the base of a leaf. She pressed it and several more down and cut through the leaves close to their bases. When she had cleared the way to the bone-white bud of the flower stalk, she wedged the sharpened end of her piñon limb under it and pounded the butt of it with the side of her hatchet. Stands Alone and Maria came to help.

  Stands Alone and María’s two youngest sons, He Throws It and Darts Around, were almost five years old. They chased the eddies of wind that raised spirals of dust and zigzagged across the ground before vanishing. When they tired of that, they stalked sparrows and cactus wrens, mice, ground squirrels, and pack rats. They caught beetles and let them grab their earlobes with their pincers and dangle as earrings.

  “Look out for snakes,” María called to them. “They have powerful magic. Do not shoot them or touch them. If you happen across one, say, ‘Grandfather, I do not want to see you, so stay out of my way.’”

  Daughter arrived with her baby girl in the cradleboard that Lozen had made. “Her Eyes Open said to tell you we have enough mescal.”

  Lozen leaned on her stick and surveyed the broad slope where the mescal grew. Little Eagles was the season of flowers. Patches of blue, purple, orange, red, and white were woven into the yellow blanket of poppies. The blossoms of the palo verde flowed like a golden waterfall into a ravine.

  Lozen, Stands Alone, María, and Daughter finished cutting the bud out. It was so big that Lozen could hardly wrap her arms around it, but she put it and the others into burden baskets and lashed them onto the pony. They called to the two boys, who raced to the packhorse and started the process of clambering aboard. Lozen and Daughter rode double with the little one’s cradle hanging from the saddle horn.

  They followed the other women down the sweep of country that flowed off into the desert and away. They rode along a deep ravine filled with clouds of the tiny, fragrant yellow flowers of the white-thorn bush. They threaded through a thicket of ocatillo cactus and passed the prickly pear and stunted mesquites.

  The Warm Springs women had set up camp in a grove of junipers. They had stacked the woven trays they would use for drying the baked mescal. They had hung the water jugs and the babies’ cradles from branches to catch stray breezes. They had built their brush-covered lean-tos against the trunks. They had laid stones in circles for their cook fires and spread hides in the shade for the toddlers to play on.

  The women enjoyed being on their own. They could build their shelters close together, and at night they could call conversations back and forth. They could tell whatever stories they wanted and laugh as loudly as they pleased.

  The young girls explored the new site, looking for colored seeds to string into necklaces. They built miniature lodges and improvised grinding stones. They made cooking utensils of acorns for their dolls.

  The boys were a different matter. The women needed someone to keep watch for enemies while they worked. They had had to cajole the boys with promises of new moccasins and shirts. Even then, the only ones who would agree were those like nine-year-old Sets Him Free and Wah-sin-ton, who were too young to go on raids as apprentices.

  At fourteen, He Bends Over was the oldest. He came along because Knot’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Mouse, had addled him until he didn’t seem able to function unless he could sight on her the way a night traveler followed the Fixed Star. The women knew it, and they took advantage of him. With oblique glances at his beloved to see if she was noticing, he carried the heaviest burdens and did the hardest work. The women praised his strength and his good looks while the shy object of his passion pretended to ignore him.

  Her Eyes Open had sized up the heaps of buds and figured they would need at least two pits. The women loosened the hardpan with bayonets, saber blades, and sharpened sticks. They dug with the scapula bones of oxen or with rusty shovels. They handed baskets of dirt to others to dump in a heap nearby. The small girls carried the rocks away, but left the larger ones so the women could use them to line the bottom of the pit.

  They worked until they had two chest-deep holes as long as two women. Before dawn the next morning, they built fires on top of the stones. When the flames burned down to a bed of coals, they laid on the mescal buds, turning their faces aside to protect them from the searing heat. Then they covered the pits with a layer of grass.

  With a forked stick, Lozen held a mescal stalk upright in the center while the women tossed rocks around it to hold it erect. They shoveled dirt on top to keep in the heat and steam. Tomorrow, Her Eyes Open would pull out the stalk to see if the bottom of it was cooked and the mescal buds ready.

  While the mescal baked, they collected yucca leaves and wove more drying trays. Lozen took Daughter to look for the plants she would use as remedies. As they walked through the undergrowth, Lozen told Daughter what she had heard countless times before.

  “When Life Giver created the world, he gave a purpose to all the plants.” She pulled up a bush with small purple flowers. She broke off the root, brushed the dirt from it, and shared it with Daughter. It had a sweet taste. “If you boil the stems, the liquid is good for colds and coughs. It will cure stomachaches and pains in your muscles.” She crouched next to a vine with yellow flowers and leaves that looked like a hand.

  “That’s called Five Fingers,” Daughter said. “It eases toothache and sore throat. It cures ague and fluxes.”

  When they had filled their bag and were walking back to camp, Daughter asked, “Grandmother, will we go home again?”

  “Yes.” Lozen stared north. “We always go home.”

  “Nkah le.” murmured Daughter. “Let it be so.”

  “HOLES IN THE EARTH.” LOZEN PRONOUNCED THE NAME for the Santa Rita mines exactly so that the young ones would know the right way to say it. To speak of the Earth carelessly was to show disrespect. After a long pause she said, “The Place Where The Widows Stopped To Cry.” She rode in silence for a while, then added, “Flat Rocks Stacked Up.”

  The return trip from where the mescal grew to the Warm Spring people’s encampment near Long Neck’s village took most of a day. Lozen passed the time naming the places between the high plateau where they had spent the last four years and their home country to the north. She did not care if anyone heard her. This was her journey. The rest could come along it they wanted. Some of the women and children paid attention. Others rode at the back of the procession, where they could talk. Each time Lozen paused, those who listened remembered what had happened there, and how it had looked the last time they saw it. In their minds, they made the journey home.

  At dusk, they reached the sheer walls of the flat-topped mountain. As they rode along its base toward the single trail leading up to Long Neck’s stronghold, Lozen neared the end of her own journey, the places close to where they had always lived. By now, most of the women and even the children were listening.

  “Dzil ndeez,”
she said. “Tall Mountain.”

  They imagined the lavender peak outlined against the glow of the eastern sky at dawn. It was the first sight to greet them when they went outside their lodges at Warm Spring each morning.

  “Shinale. My Grandfather.” That was name of the sacred spring. At its origin the warm trickle of water seemed insignificant, but it filled a basin in the rock and overflowed into the larger one below it, into the pool they called The Eye.

  When Lozen said, “Bidaa’, the Eye,” a collective sigh went up, like a soft, sad wind. The women remembered bathing in The Eye’s warm water in the winter. Someone sniffled. Another blew her nose.

  From The Eye, water ran into the stream that had carved a slot in the high bluffs, giving an easily guarded access to the outside world.

  “T’iis bidaayu tu li ne. Cottonwood tree, around it, water, it flows, the one.” By now the words had become a chant, a medicine song to heal aching hearts.

  With the names, Lozen took them into the valley and showed them the stream that flowed through it all year. She showed them the lodges scattered in the shade of tall trees. She let them see the sleek ponies grazing on the grama grass.

  Many were crying quietly now, but when she said, “The Place Of The Grandparents,” they began to sob. All had been related to at least one of the old people murdered in the cave overlooking their village.

  As they neared the path to the top of the mountain, Wah-sin-ton and Sets Him Free joined them. They carried strings of quail and ground squirrels. He Bends Over waited for them all to pass, and he reined his horse to parallel Mouse near the end of the line.

  She Moves Like Water led the procession. She turned in the saddle and called back, “The Water, It Is Deep There.”

  The women laughed. By invoking that place name, she could have some fun with love-befuddled He Bends Over without criticizing him or naming him directly. She Moves Like Water went on to tell the story so the children could learn from it. It was about boys who let their attention wander and who suffered because of it.

  “At The Water, It Is Deep There, at that very place, some boys are staying cool in the summertime.” She Moves Like Water used the present tense, as though this were a historical tale, but it was about Lozen, before people called her Aunt or Grandmother or even Lozen.

  I am so old, I have become history, Lozen thought. The idea made her smile.

  “Along comes a girl named Sister,” She Moves Like Water said. “This girl is like Coyote, always playing pranks. She sees those boys sitting in the water there. She sees their clothes piled up under the cottonwood tree. She sees a wasp’s nest hanging from the limb that stretches out over the stream.

  “She sneaks up on those boys. When they wade out of the water, she uses her sling to throw a rock and hit the place where the nest is fastened to the tree. It falls on them. Some of the boys run back into the water, and the wasps buzz around their heads. Some run for their clothes, but the wasps cover them like a blanket. Those boys are jumping around and yelling. They’re doing the Wasp Dance.

  “Sister laughs at them. Then just like Coyote, she goes along. It happened at The Water, It Is Deep There, at that very place.”

  Everyone laughed and looked at Lozen. She had been Wah-sin-ton’s age when she dropped the wasp nest on Fights Without Arrows, Ears So Big, Flies In His Stew, and their friends. Even now, sometimes the women would make buzzing noises while they pretended to be busy at their chores. The men knew what they meant by it.

  She Moves Like Water reached the place where the trail took a turn upward. The people of Long Neck’s village called the area at the bottom of the trail the Rubbish Heap. The hair stirred at the nape of Lozen’s neck when she passed through it. Bones and bits of leather and metal littered the place. They were the remains of Mexican soldiers who had tried to attack over the years.

  Lozen could feel their spirits clinging to their sand-scoured bones. She sensed their hatred and their fear. She heard their cries when Long Neck’s men pushed the boulders down onto them, but the other women were not bothered by them. They laughed and shouted back and forth along the line. The ponies’ hooves clattered on the rocks, and their loads swayed as they lunged up the steep trail.

  Her Eyes Open kicked her pony up alongside Lozen. She turned in her saddle to watch the parade winding away below them. “This is the way it was in the old days,” she said, “before we had to fear every shadow and crack of a twig.”

  She Moves Like Water dropped back to ride next to Lozen, too. She cut off a chunk of the baked mescal and handed it to her. “Listen, Sister, when your brother returns, let’s tell him we want to go home.”

  Lozen ripped off a piece with her teeth and started to work on it, like chewing hemp rope dipped in molasses. “Maybe he’s convinced the Bluecoats to let us live at Warm Springs,” she said.

  That was what he and some of the young men had ridden north to do. They had been gone a long time, though, and everyone was worried.

  “Even if he can’t convince the Pale Eyes to let us live in peace, we should still go home.”

  “We’re better off running like lizards and hiding in caves in our own country than staying here,” added Her Eyes Open.

  “Gunku, that’s true,” said Daughter.

  “Long Neck brings many good things when he returns from scouts,” Corn Stalk said. “Here, we sleep quietly at night.”

  She was right about that. The plateau was a two-day ride across. It had forests, streams, grass, and game. Long Neck could raid in Sonora and sell the stolen stock to the people in Chihuahua. He could strike north across the border and then ride back south where the American soldiers could not chase him.

  She Moves Like Water lowered her voice. She had her own name for Long Neck. “Old Ugly Buttocks has a bear’s temper. I do not like it here. Sister, talk to your brother. He listens to you.”

  LOZEN CAME HOME EXHAUSTED FROM THE FOUR-DAY SING for Long Neck’s ailing wife. She ate a few mouthfuls of stew, drank from the water jug, and fell headlong into sleep. She woke to the wailing of women.

  “Sister.” She Moves Like Water called in to her. “Long Neck returned from the war trail, but many of his men did not.”

  “What happened?” Lozen pulled on her moccasins.

  “The warriors attacked a Pale Eyes wagon train. They found bottles and thought it was whiskey, but maybe it was a Pale Eyes trick to poison them. Many of them got sick.”

  Corn Stalk looked up from her grindstone. “Maybe the bottles did have whiskey in them. The men got drunk and fell into cactus.”

  “Their wives have spent all day picking the thorns out of them.” The niece of She Moves Like Water and Corn Stalk was a new addition. Her husband had been shot while on a raid with Long Neck. The women in the family built a lodge for her near theirs, and she moved in. No one thought Victorio would object. She was good-natured and hardworking. She was Daughter’s age and had a laugh like a meadowlark’s song.

  “Long Neck wants you to come to council,” said She Moves Like Water.

  When Lozen arrived at the council ground, Long Neck gave her a small nod of his head. They had been waiting for her, which surprised her. Maybe this was Long Neck’s way of acknowledging that her medicine had made his wife stronger than she had been in two months.

  Lozen sat at the rear with the women, but attending a council without her brother seemed strange. She felt even stranger sitting among people who weren’t Chiricahuas. Many of Long Neck’s warriors came from the Mescalero, the Coyotero, the White Mountain people, and even the People Without Minds. Some of them had sought refuge from attacks by the Bluecoats, and some were fleeing punishment from wrongs they had committed among their own people.

  The main topic was the new Bluecoat lieutenant. Many had lost relatives in his attacks on their villages. He was thin and sandy-haired, quick, furtive, and relentless. The warriors called him Weasel.

  Weasels attacked prey several times their size, and when they smelled blood, they even ate injured sib
lings. The men admitted that the Bluecoat weasel probably didn’t eat his own family, but he would go anywhere in search of his prey. Once his blood was up, he killed every Apache he could find, young or old, male or female.

  For a long time the men discussed how to stop Weasel. Finally Long Neck asked if Victorio’s sister had anything to say.

  “We can steal the boxes of silver disks that come from the east in wagons,” she said.

  “Zhaali? Money? What do we want with that?“Long Neck looked irritated at such a foolish suggestion.

  A Mescalero said, “We can use the disks in Janos to buy horses and cloth and corn.”

  “The comancheros will take them for ammunition and guns,” added a Coyotero.

  Long Neck snorted. “We know what a horse is worth.” His words became more halting as he grew more agitated. “We know what a blanket is worth, or a basket of pinole or a bundle of hides. Who among you knows the value of the silver disks?”

  No one spoke.

  “They will cheat us.” Long Neck glowered at Lozen.

  “We do not have to use the coins.”

  “Then why should we steal them?”

  “The Bluecoat soldiers fight because they receive those disks instead of a share of plunder.”

  “That’s so.” Almost everyone had been at a fort on payday. They had seen the effect the silver disks had on the Bluecoats.

  “Without the silver disks, the soldiers will not fight.”

  Long Neck’s leg started to jiggle while he pondered the plan. It was a sign that he was perturbed. “I don’t like that idea. We will hunt this lieutenant down and kill him our own way.”

  Lozen wanted to say that this lieutenant was smart. Catching him off guard would not be easy. She wanted to say that too many men had already died fighting the old way. She wanted to say that the spirits had told her to seek peace with the Pale Eyes, but she didn’t. Long Neck rarely accepted any opinion other than his own, much less that of a woman.