Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Victorio turned and walked toward where his people waited. They would have to flee for their lives again, but he couldn’t blame Fights Without Arrows for losing his temper.

  ANOTHER HORSE COLLAPSED IN THE SCORCHING SAND. THE soldier who had been leading him unbuckled the cinch and wrestled off the saddle, bridle, and saddlebags. He threw them over his shoulder and staggered on through the cloud of alkalai dust.

  The lava rocks had torn up the men’s knee-high boots. The soldiers had stuffed their worn-out boots with scraps of leather, sacking, and blankets. The hot sand seeped into the holes, and poured in over the tops of the high boots. It grated like sandpaper on their raw blisters.

  No one talked. Even Private Simpson’s banjo had nothing to say. Each man set himself to the labor of picking one foot up, levering it forward, setting it down in a place likely to do the least damage to it, shifting the body’s weight over it, and starting the process again.

  The only good part of this scout was that Caesar had come along as a civilian to help Rafe with the mule train. He had confessed that he still hoped he and Dead Shot could convince Victorio to surrender. Neither Rafe nor Dead Shot thought that likely.

  Dead Shot put it best. “That Victorio, he one smart sumbitch.”

  Now Dead Shot slowed his pace so Rafe and Caesar could catch up with him. “Tank, plenty close.” He pointed his chin at the peak ahead, skirted about with lava outcrops and boulders.

  “Will it have water?” Rafe couldn’t imagine water anymore, except for the odorous, alkali sludge in his canteen.

  “Sure ’nough fine water.”

  Dead Shot pulled a flat packet from one of his sacks and unwrapped the oiled paper and the cloth. With a shy smile he held up the small photograph on a copper plate stored in a leather frame with a hinged lid and a clasp.

  The sunlight glinting across the silver coating of the oldfashioned daguerrotype gave the images an ethereal quality. Depending on what angle Rafe held the frame, the subjects faded in and out of view. The photographer had posed Dead Shot, his young Warm Springs wife, and their two small sons with the usual props—a barrel cactus, some striped Mexican blankets, and earthenware pots.

  The baby, all eyes and button nose and bristly spikes of black hair, was laced into the cradleboard leaning against his seated mother’s skirt. He looked startled by the whole enterprise. The young woman, in a calico dress, had her hands folded in her lap. With her head tilted slightly down, she looked up at the camera.

  Dead Shot sat with his sturdy legs spread and his hands resting on his knees. The two-year-old leaned against his father’s side, with his elbow set on Dead Shot’s thigh and his head resting in the palm of his hand. The child had crossed his ankles jauntily.

  Dead Shot had on his best checked gingham shirt. He wore a length of the same gingham wrapped around his head, the ends twisted and tied in a knot in the center of his forehead. He had tucked his cotton duck trousers into his high moccasins, and he wore a breechclout over them. The barrel of his Springfield rifle rested against his thigh. He stared straight out at Rafe with that direct, honest gaze of his.

  The photograph had cost almost a month’s salary. After his wife and children, it was his most precious possession. He was obviously waiting for some comment.

  “Ba’oidii,” Rafe said. “Ba’oidii zho. Handsome. Very handsome.”

  Dead Shot grinned. He wrapped the photograph back up and stowed it in his pouch. He turned his attention to the country around him. What he saw, or rather, what he didn’t see, puzzled him.

  “Horse, him too damned quiet,” he said. “Mule, him too damned quiet.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Rafe.

  He went back to his own language. “The horses, they should smell the water in that tank now. They should be saying to themselves, ‘Hey, I’m plenty thirsty. What are we waiting for? Let’s go!’”

  Rafe and Caesar exchanged a glance. Neither wanted to suggest that it had dried up. The possibility was unthinkable. Some of the soldiers were muttering to themselves, the first signs of the madness that thirst could trigger.

  The scouts led the rush for the tank. The soldiers staggered after them. Lieutenant Gatewood caught up with Rafe, who could not manage more than a slow jog. They saw Major Morrow standing on the tank’s rock rim. He waved his pistols to keep the men from reaching it.

  Rafe smelled the stench before he saw the coyote floating in what was otherwise a clear pool of water. Its rotting intestines floated out from the gash in its belly. Human feces bobbed around it. The meaning was clear to anyone who knew anything about the Apache sense of humor.

  Desperate with thirst, men tried to veer around Morrow. He fired shots over their heads, but some of them reached the water and started drinking.

  “I thought the Apaches had a superstition about killing coyotes.”

  “Killing a coyote is bad medicine,” said Dead Shot, “but if they find a dead one they can do that.” He nodded toward the gutted animal. “A man with coyote power could do it. Geronimo, he has coyote magic, but he’d have to make medicine afterwards to chase away the bad spirits.”

  Rafe put a hand on the chestnut’s neck to steady himself. Pain pounded behind his eyes. His tongue had acquired the texture and tautness of a horsehair sofa. It made talking and swallowing an arduous and unsettling task.

  Shouting, one of the soldiers set a zigzag course into the desert. Sergeant Carson ran after him and tackled him. Two other men helped subdue him, but they had to tie his hands and feet and carry him back. Rafe gave Carson the reins of his chestnut so they could load the man onto him.

  “We have to go back,” said Morrow.

  Rafe wanted to cry with relief. He wanted to turn on his heels and start north immediately. He wanted to throttle Gatewood when he protested.

  “We can’t stop now. Dead Shot says we’re almost up with them.”

  “The men are played out,” said Morrow. “We have to go back to that last well or we’ll all perish.”

  “Parker took seventy of his scouts into the field,” said Gatewood. “We can rendezvous with them and keep on Victorio’s track.”

  “Us red fellows,” said Dead Shot. “We catch ’em.”

  Morrow looked at him in surprise. “Where’s the next water?”

  “Mebbe a day.” Dead Shot pointed his chin toward the south.

  “How will you survive?”

  “We find water.” Dead Shot poked a squat barrel cactus with the muzzle of his Springfield. “Little bit here, little bit there.”

  “Keep things stirred up then, until my troops recover.”

  Gatewood looked over at Rafe. “Are you with us, Collins?”

  Rafe wanted to say no. He wanted to say. “Hell no.” He wanted to say it more than anything, except maybe, “Howdy, ma’am. Give me a double shot of whiskey,” to the pigeonplump señora who ran his favorite cantina in Central City. The words stuck in his mouth, maybe stalled behind that overstuffed tongue. Maybe saying no was too damned much trouble. Maybe it was too damned humiliating.

  Damn Gatewood, anyway. Why did he have to be such a dead-game gent? He was so frail, he wouldn’t make a support for pole beans. What’s more, waiting for him back at the fort was a lovely, willowy rib of steel, a bride named Georgia. He had no business going on with a bunch of wild, madcap Apaches.

  Furthermore, he had the gall to be stoic about it. Once, when they were crossing a particularly pernicious stretch of desert, he had turned to Rafe with that bootjack face of his, “If you cannot put up with a certain amount of thirst, heat, and fatigue from nature, then it’s best to stay at home.”

  The Apaches were bred to this country. They trained harder for it than Rafe could imagine. Still, he couldn’t walk away and prove them superior to him. He couldn’t let the scouts think that only one white man could keep up with the red ones, and that one white man wasn’t him.

  Wearily he nodded.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Caesar.

  “What about
your family?”

  “Lieutenant Gatewood’s missus has taken a fondness for the chi‘run. An’ Mattie’s cooking up fatback and collard greens for the officers’ mess. They’ll take care of her till I gets back.”

  Rafe, Caesar, and Charles Gatewood hoisted their rucksacks onto their backs. They set out with the scouts, all of them on foot, with Dead Shot and Gatewood leading the way.

  Gatewood nodded to the scorched, rocky country ahead and the devastated column of men straggling off in the opposite direction. “The damned shame is that all this could have been prevented.”

  Rafe wanted to tell Gatewood that he was the first officer he had ever heard admit that in thirty years, but he didn’t have the energy.

  “They try to shift these people around like so many marbles in a game of taws,” Gatewood went on. “If only we had someone in authority who kept his word and made his decisions stick.” He sighed. “Think of the lives saved, the untold misery averted.”

  They walked in silence for a time; then Caesar asked, “Sergeant Dead Shot, where’s Dreamer?”

  Dead Shot grinned at him and made the sign of the cross, like a priest blessing them all. “He gone Black Robes’ house in Santa Fe. Mebbe forget how to be Red Man.”

  “Dreamer is studying Catholicism with the priests in Santa Fe?”

  “You bet.”

  Adversity, friendship, Rafe thought. They could make men agree. Religion, he wasn’t so sure about. Still, what harm could come from Dreamer becoming a Catholic?

  Chapter 57

  RIFLE’S WIFE

  Lozen never let her carbine out of reach. She ate with it across her knees. She slept with it next to her. Stands Alone called it shiyi, my sister’s husband. Other people called Lozen Ilti Bi’aa. Rifle’s Wife.

  Lozen stood shiyi against the trunk of a juniper while she cut a pad off a prickly pear cactus and singed the thorns from it in the tiny fire. Around her, people glided from the darkness, guided to the meeting place by the fragrance of the flowers of the acacia trees massed in the arroyo. They searched for missing children and other family members.

  Lozen’s spirits had not warned her of the Apache army scouts’ approach. She was as surprised as everyone else when they started shooting into the camp at dawn the day before. Lozen and the warriors returned fire to cover the escape of the women and children.

  Now some of the survivors went to the Rio Bravo for water. Those who were too tired to walk that far dug holes in the arroyo and waited for water to seep into them. They soaked cloths in the moisture and gave them to the children to suck on. Many lay down in the sand, still warm from the day’s late summer sun, and fell asleep.

  Lozen unwound the bloody strip of calico from around Victorio’s thigh and removed the cactus pad she had put over the hole. When the bullet hit him yesterday, the world had gone dim before Lozen’s eyes. In a rage she had screamed at the scouts that they would never see his body. Their Pale Eyes masters would not cut his head off as they had done to Red Sleeves. They would not slice off pieces of him to keep as trinkets.

  She and Wah-sin-ton had lowered him on ropes down a precipice to make their escape. Now she held the burning brand up and gently probed the swollen, purple skin of his leg.

  “The flesh is firm. No flies have laid eggs there.” She placed the raw side of freshly split cactus pad onto the wound and tied it in place with her headband.

  She sat next to him in the sand. Broken Foot, Fights Without Arrows, Chato, He Makes Them Laugh, and a few other men joined them. Broken Foot’s five-year-old grandson, Torres, hovered nearby, and Victorio beckoned to him. He put a hand on Torres’s head.

  “From now on this boy will have a new name. We will call him Kaywaykla, His Enemies Lie Dead In Heaps.” Victorio smiled down at Kaywaykla. “May the name bring you victories and honor, my son.”

  Victorio lowered himself back down. The warriors laughed when Kaywaykla squeezed in between Victorio and his grandfather, Broken Foot.

  After Broken Foot blew tobacco smoke to the four directions and prayed to Life Giver, he spoke.

  “Many of my second wife’s people will be going to the place the Pale Eyes set aside for them.”

  Victorio grunted. The Mescaleros weren’t the first to drift away once the Bluecoats and their scouts began outmaneuvering them now and then. People had thought the Bluecoats were a foolish lot, easily beaten, but they were wrong. The soldiers were smarter and more tenacious than anyone had anticipated.

  Time and again Victorio’s men approached water holes and found them surrounded by Bluecoats. Time and again the band had to move stealthily past without drinking. The constant pursuit was wearing away at them. Victorio’s people were thirsty, ragged, and low on ammunition. Now the Mescaleros’ departure left him with less than a hundred warriors.

  “We will wait until we’re sure everyone who survived has found us. Then we’ll cross the river and ride into Mexico.” Victorio didn’t know that the Mexican government was offering a reward of three thousand dollars for killing him. Knowing wouldn’t have made any difference. He had had a price on his head before. “We’ll steal horses on our way south and trade them for ammunition.”

  Broken Foot’s second wife’s niece should have gone north with her Mescalero people, but she had not. She was in no condition for a flight through the sand-and-lava deserts of northern Mexico, either. She had married Sets Him Free and would soon give birth to his child.

  “I’ll stay behind and help Wide’s niece with the child.” Lozen said. “After I take them them back to Mescalero, I’ll find you.”

  Only Lozen, and maybe Broken Foot, saw the shadow of uncertainty cross Victorio’s face. Only the two of them knew how much he depended on his sister.

  “You can meet us at Long Neck’s village,” Victorio said.

  Wah-sin-ton frowned. “What about our people still at San Carlos?”

  Victorio nodded toward the weary folk sleeping wherever they could. “The Pale Eyes’ scouts killed more than twenty yesterday. They pursue the rest of us like the dogs they are. The old ones, the sick ones, the new mothers, the very young, they cannot endure this life.”

  “I’m going to San Carlos.” Wah-sin-ton glowered at his father, angry that he would desert his own people. “On the way, I’ll steal as much as I can to take to those we left there.”

  Wah-sin-ton proposed to ride into the country of the enemy. It was as foolish as crawling into a den of rattlesnakes, but Lozen understood why he was determined to do it. Wah-sin-ton missed his sweetheart, Maria’s daughter. Lozen also knew that some of the young men would go with him, those who longed to see their own sweethearts or their wives, those who yearned to hold their children again.

  ALMOST THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE LINED UP AT THE EDGE of the river. Rain in the mountains to the north had swollen it and made it live up to its name, Bravo, Wild. It ran fast and deep between its high banks.

  While Sets Him Free took Niece aside to say good-bye, others gathered to make their farewells to Lozen. They were frightened that she was leaving. They depended on her far-sight to protect them. Victorio waited until they all had finished.

  For a year and a half Lozen and Victorio had not been out of each other’s company for more than a day or two. Neither of them did anything of importance without consulting the other.

  “May we live to see each other again,” he said.

  “May we live to see each other again, my brother.”

  Lozen felt a thrumming in the bones of her skull. She stood back to listen. She turned until she faced west. The hum was faint.

  “Soldiers?” Victorio asked.

  “They’re still far away.”

  “Get the women and children across the river. Tell Her Eyes Open she is in charge until we return. Broken Foot has instructed the boys to follow her orders. They’ll ride rear guard.”

  Victorio ran for the horse that He Throws It held for him. He and the warriors rode to intercept the troops.

  At the river, the women sang t
he prayer for a safe crossing and made their shrill cry. They tossed bits of turquoise into the river to calm it, but no one attempted the deep current. Her Eyes Open, with her grandnephew, Kaywaykla, perched in front of her, tried to ride her little claycolored gelding down the steep bank and into the rushing river, but he balked.

  Holding her carbine over her head, Lozen rode her big black horse toward the river. The long column of riders parted to let her through. The black hesitated before he plunged into the water. She turned his head upstream, and he started swimming.

  Her Eyes Open followed. Those on foot held on to the ponies’ tails and let them pull them across. Soon horses were lunging through the shallows on the other side and up the embankment where they shook water off in sprays. While people wrung out their clothing and blankets, Lozen delivered Victorio’s orders to Her Eyes Open. Then she turned and headed back across the river. She found Niece holding her belly with both hands. She had the look of panic in her eyes that Lozen had seen so often in young mothers.

  “Are the pains coming close together?”

  “Yes.”

  Lozen rode upstream with her to a thicket under an outcrop of granite. The roaring in her ears had become a nuisance, but now she felt the enemy coming from the east. A second band of Pale Eyes must be on the way. She helped Niece dismount and flapped her blanket to drive the two horses away.

  Niece lay on her side and wriggled into the thicket. Lozen swept away their tracks and crawled after her. The two of them crouched in a cleft of the rock. Niece put her hands over her mouth to muffle the sound of her panting as the contractions racked her.

  The soldiers thundered by so close that the impact of their horses’ hooves brought dirt and small rocks down on Lozen and Niece. When Lozen was sure they had gone, she helped Niece to an overhang surrounded by vines and bushes near the river’s bank.

  Lozen spread out the blanket, and Niece knelt on it with her knees apart. She braced her hands against the rock wall. While Lozen massaged Niece’s stomach, Niece tried to push the baby out. When the baby’s head appeared, Lozen eased him onto the blanket. She cut the cord with her knife and knotted the end. She tore off a piece of her own blanket to wrap around him and carried him to the river to wash him.