Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  “Grandmother?” Rafe’s eyes appeared above the bulletriddled carcass that was beginning to bloat and stink in the heat of the day. He raised his head a little higher so she could see he was grinning at her. “Those boys must have let their guns get dirty and pitted as usual. They don’t have range or accuracy.”

  Lozen walked around the horse and crouched beside him. His arm was covered with dirt and dried blood. She could see from the hole next to him that he had buried his shattered elbow in the ground to staunch the flow from it.

  She held her canteen out to him. Rafe didn’t comment on the fact that it was army issue. He took only a few sips.

  “Drink all of it,” she said, “but slowly.”

  “Only have two cartridges left,” he muttered in English. “Planned to use the last one on myself.” He shook his new Winchester rifle, rattling the sling rings. “A problem with a long piece like this. Was trying to figure out how to use my toe to pull the trigger, but I’m an old fart and not that limber anymore.”

  “Come with me.” Lozen felt a rush of affection for him, and comradeship. She wanted to hug him in a warrior’s greeting.

  She realized she felt more at ease with Hairy Foot than with Chato these days. She realized, too, that he was no longer the young man he had been when she first tried to steal his big red horse many years ago. He and she had grown old together. They had grown old together, and apart.

  He struggled to stand, pulling himself up on the Winchester, and Lozen saw that a bullet had passed through his thigh, too. He had stuffed his bandana into that hole, but it fell away, and the bleeding started again. She tied the bandana around the top of his thigh to slow the loss. Supporting most of his weight, she walked him toward a distant arroyo choked with mesquite trees, palo verde, cactus, and catclaw. He probably had been heading for it when Chato and his men shot the horse out from under him.

  Lozen glanced up. The hillside was empty. Chato and Fun and the boys must have left, but Pale Eyes used this road often. She was now in more danger than Hairy Foot was. The thicket would be a good place to hide. She could hobble her horse there. He could eat the mesquite beans and graze on the grass at the upper end of the wash.

  When they reached it, Rafe collapsed. She could see that he would be unconscious for a while. She sliced away his trouser leg around the wound. She cut a cactus pad, split it, and bound it in place with the yellow trim from the dead soldier’s trousers.

  Rafe’s lips had a blue tint to them, and he shivered. The sun was almost down. Already the night’s chill was creeping up on them, but another cause of his trembling was the loss of all that warm blood. She retrieved his blanket roll from the back of the dead horse and unwrapped her own blanket from around her waist. She laid his on the ground and moved him gently onto it. She draped hers over him and tucked in the edges so the cold couldn’t slither in like a rattlesnake.

  She went to collect her horse and medicine bag. She had seen a pack rat’s nest in the meadow where she left the gray. The mound was almost as high as her waist and probably full of piñon nuts. If the herd boys hadn’t plundered it, she could collect the nuts.

  RAFE LAY ON HIS UNWOUNDED SIDE WITH HIS KNEES DRAWN up and his arms pressed against his chest. Whenever he swam near the surface of consciousness, he heard Lozen singing. Her voice was quiet and rhythmic, hypnotic and unending, but the blackness he floated in was bitterly cold. He dreamed he was submerged in an ice-covered river. He wanted to strike out for shore, but he couldn’t move his frozen arms and legs. His own quaking waked him.

  Lozen slid under the blanket to lie along his back. She bent her legs to fit into the folds of his. She put her arm around him and pulled him close until her breasts pressed against him. He was surprised to feel her shivering, too. He had half believed the stories about Apaches being oblivious of cold, heat, pain, death, and sorrow.

  His shivering lessened, and so did hers. He laid his good arm along hers, holding on to her forearm with his hand. It felt as muscular as a man’s. He fell asleep with her breath warm on his neck, her aroma of smoke and horses in his nostrils.

  When he woke up, the sun was beginning to burn off the chill, but he kept the blankets wrapped tight around him. The only parts of him that didn’t ache suffered stabbing pains. He looked under the blanket and saw that Lozen had splinted his elbow with yucca stalks and wrapped it in the calico cloth she used as a headband.

  Lozen sat cross-legged nearby. Her hair fell in two dark curves around her face as she bent over her fire drill. The line from a song the Irish soldiers sang ran through Rafe’s head. “Her dark hair would weave a snare that I would someday rue.”

  She twirled the juniper stick between her palms so the drill’s blunt point created friction in the notch cut in a flat piece of sotol stalk. A thread of smoke rose from it, and she fed in bits of dry moss and blew on it gently. At the first bloom of a flame, she added pine needles, twigs, and then mesquite branches.

  She poured water into the cornmeal on the tin plate of Rafe’s mess kit and mixed it with her fingers into a sticky dough. She patted it into thin cakes and set them on a flat stone in the fire to bake.

  She was dressed as a warrior, and the muscles stood out in well-defined curves on her legs. In any war party she would look like just another handsome Apache boy. The soldiers would not notice the few strands of gray in her hair.

  “How do you feel?” she asked in Apache.

  “Like a herd of mustangs stampeded over top of me, then wheeled around and made another pass.”

  “You slept a night and a day and another night.”

  “No wonder I’m ready to drink a river and eat my dead horse down to the hooves and the tail.”

  She handed him the canteen. He shook it.

  “Where did the water come from?” His voice sounded odd to him, as though his tongue were a rusty bolt sliding back and forth in an even rustier breechblock.

  Lozen nodded toward a hole in the arroyo’s sandy bed. She took his bandana from the bottom of it. She had rinsed it out earlier and let the water seep into it again. She held it up, raised her chin, opened her mouth, and squeezed the water into it.

  “Give me your gun,” he said.

  She handed it to him, and he inspected the breech. It was fouled, as he expected. He had never seen an Indian who kept his piece clean. He took the emery paper, oiled rag, and prick from his kit, and cleaned it. He handed it back to her, and she gave him a yucca leaf heaped with piñon nuts and another of grapes, chokecherries, and mulberries.

  While he ate, she unwrapped the bandage from his leg and inspected the wound. She laid a freshly split nopal on it and tied it back up. He tried not wince at the touch of her fingers on his bare skin.

  Next, she broke off the big thorn on the end of an agave leaf and pulled it so that several long strands of fiber came attached to it. Sitting cross-legged, she sewed up a tear in Rafe’s blanket. As if mesmerized, Rafe watched her casual skill in the simple details that were the basis of life.

  He wanted to ask where she had been, why she was alone, where she was headed, but he knew that would be a mistake. She might think he was trying to find out her people’s location and numbers. He hoped that she knew he wouldn’t betray her to the army, but he didn’t want to give her any cause to wonder.

  “I have to go,” she said, “But I’ll leave you my horse.”

  “What will you do for a mount?”

  “I’ll steal one.” The corners of her full lips twitched, and mischief lurked in her eyes. “I think you are not so good at stealing horses. You’d better take mine.”

  When he sat up, a groan escaped him. Trying not to jar his leg or elbow, he slid closer to her.

  “Stay here.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “I can’t.”

  He put a hand on hers. “Stay with me.” Rafe couldn’t believe the words came out of his mouth, but like wild horses cut loose, he could not call them back. She didn’t move her hand, though. For a moment that thrilled and terrified
him, he thought she might agree to it.

  “I have to find my people,” she said quietly.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “If they surrender, the army will take care of them. We could be together then.”

  “They won’t surrender.”

  “You can’t fight all of Mexico and the United States.”

  “Yes, we can.”

  “You must know you can’t win.”

  “We have already lost. We are indeh.”

  “Indeh? Dead men?”

  “The Pale Eyes killed us years ago.” She looked at him sadly, but without self-pity. “My people are ghosts. We live. We talk. We walk around on the earth, but we are dead.” She stood up. “The wagon road is well traveled. Someone will come along soon.”

  She helped him to his feet, but he didn’t let go of her once he was standing, nor did she pull away.

  “If you came with me, I would try every day to make you happy,” he whispered.

  Lozen stood motionless, like a restive pony listening to someone with horse-magic croon in her ear. She had traveled, camped, suffered, and gone into battle with men. She knew more about them than most women ever would. She knew their strength, their loyalty, their humor, bravery, and stoicism. She knew their arrogance, their vanity, their cruelty, and their weakness. But other than the unspoken love of her brother, she had never known a man’s tenderness.

  She let Rafe put his good arm around her and pull her to him. She laid her head against his chest. She felt as though she would melt under the caress of his hand moving up her back, stroking her neck, rubbing the base of her skull, then tangling his fingers in her hair, tugging it gently at the roots. She closed her eyes and allowed herself this small comfort in a harsh world.

  “I could never live as a white person.” She looked up at him. “I could never live among them.”

  “I know.” He smoothed back her hair, though it sprang out away from her face as soon as he lifted his hand.

  He bent to kiss her, but she turned her head. He realized that kissing was not her people’s custom. He put his face into the wildness of her hair instead. Reluctantly, he let her go. Longing, regret, and loneliness engulfed him, as deep an ache as that of his wounds.

  Lozen saddled the gray and tied Rafe’s blanket roll behind it. She supported his weight while he put his foot into the stirrup; then she boosted him up. He winced as he swung his bad leg over the horse’s back. Lozen walked around to the other side and put that foot into the stirrup.

  He looked into her upturned face. He reached down and touched the tips of his fingers to her full lips, as though to pass to her whatever small portion of magic he might possess. Her mouth moved in the slightest of smiles under his touch. She understood.

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

  “May we live to see each other again.”

  He watched her start south at a lope, her cartridge belt slung low on her slender hips. Her blanket roll, her clean trapdoor Springfield, and her bow and arrows hung between her shoulders. Her flat pouch of food and supplies rode at the small of her back.

  She was setting out to look for her people in Mexico, a journey of three hundred miles or more across the worst terrain God ever created. She went knowing that anyone she met would try to kill her on sight.

  We are dead already. We are ghosts.

  “May we live to see each other again, Grandmother,” Rafe murmured.

  Chapter 60

  BELIEVING IS SEEING

  Lozen knew they couldn’t all be dead. When her brother’s spirit appeared on the trail, he had told her to take care of her people. He wouldn’t ask her to protect bones and ghosts. But as she rode from one meeting place to the other, she began to doubt her vision.

  She began to believe that her worst fears had come true. She was alone in the world. The realization frightened her to the marrow. She dismounted and led her stolen Mexican pony at a walk through the old campsite in the willow grove. She could find no sign that anyone had occupied it recently. The reins quivered in her trembling hands.

  “Grandmother!”

  She whirled and leveled her carbine at the figure silhouetted at the crest of the low ridge. She watched him slide down the steep incline in a shower of gravel and larger rocks. When Fights Without Arrows reached the bottom, he and Lozen walked into a warriors’ embrace.

  “Enjuh,” he said. It is good.

  It is very good, Lozen thought.

  He said he had come here to look for survivors. He and Lozen sat by the river, and he told her of the slaughter at Tres Castillos. He could not use any of the dead ones’ names, but she knew whom he meant.

  “I was hunting for ammunition when the attack happened. We stole plenty, but we were too late. When I found Nantan Broken Foot afterward, he asked me to take a few men and see to the dead.”

  “Broken Foot lives?”

  Fights Without Arrows flashed her the boyish smile she remembered from their childhood. It was like sunlight on a mirror. “Who could kill that old man?”

  “And how many others live?”

  His smile vanished as he listed the few survivors. “We found almost seventy dead. We sang over them. The Mexicans killed all the boys over nine years of age. They scalped everyone. They burned many of the bodies.”

  “And my brother?”

  “Enemies lay dead around him. He had driven his own knife into his heart. There were no crevasses, so we piled rocks on top of him.”

  “What does Broken Foot plan to do?”

  “He’ll take revenge.” The smile returned. “He’s sent messengers north, asking men to join him.” Fights Without Arrows paused. All his life he had haunted Her Eyes Open’s camp, listening to Broken Foot and his wife banter and tease. He had basked in the good humor that hung about the place like the fragrant smoke from the cook fire. Her Eyes Open was as dear to him as his own mother.

  “Broken Foot’s first wife did not return,” he said. “We think she and her niece were captured.”

  They both knew what that meant. Mexicans considered the older women useless as slaves. They usually killed them.

  SOMEONE HAD TO PUSH UP ON ARTHRITIC, CRIPPLED, OLD Broken Foot’s wrinkled posterior whenever he climbed onto his pony, but once in the saddle, he could ride the roughest country for days without stopping. He could make any Pale Eyes who crossed his path sorry for it.

  He never spoke his first wife’s name. He showed his grief in a more practical way. He and Lozen performed the gun ceremony so that their weapons would not jam. They sang to make their followers impervious to bullets. They prayed over the ammunition that Fights Without Arrows had brought.

  Lozen joined Broken Foot and his army of forty warriors and more than a hundred dependents. She fought alongside him as he swept through southern New Mexico. He did more than take revenge. He proved that neither the Mexicans nor the Americans could kill the fighting spirit of the Ndee. “If you believe you can do something,” he told his people, “then it will be done.”

  In a month and a half, living off the land and what they could plunder, he and his people rode over a thousand miles. They did it with more than a thousand cavalry troops and two hundred civilians in pursuit. They fought a dozen skirmishes and won most of them. They didn’t keep count of their enemy dead the way the Pale Eyes did, but they killed about fifty soldiers, ranchers, miners, mule drivers, and sheepherders, and they wounded twice that number. They burned ranches and slaughtered stock. They stole more than two hundred horses.

  Whenever the exhausted men of the Ninth Cavalry managed to catch up with them, they scattered into the mountains. If the army pressed too close, they crossed into Mexico where the Bluecoats couldn’t follow. They suffered casualties, but not many. Everyone knew that was because of Broken Foot’s canniness and Lozen’s gift of far-sight

  “If Grandmother had been at Tres Castillos,” they said, “the Mexicans would never have killed her brother and the others
.”

  Now Broken Foot, Lozen, and their people were moving north again, into Arizona. They circled to the west, away from the usual trails, and headed toward a place called Cibicu, two days’ ride above San Carlos. The Mescaleros had told them about the former army scout, Dreamer, and the medicine dance he held there.

  Dreamer had the power to drive out the Pale Eyes and return the country to them, the Mescaleros said. He said he could bring back his people’s three greatest leaders, Red Sleeves, Cheis, and Victorio.

  That was a frightening prospect. No one had ever tried to call back a spirit that had left its body. The Mescaleros said Dreamer wasn’t promising to bring back a ghost, though. He would restore life to the men themselves.

  Everyone talked about it long into the night. Would the dead men want to leave the Happy Place? Would the desperate need of their people pull them back into this conflict? Broken Foot and his people had to see for themselves.

  CIBICU CREEK RAN THROUGH AN AVENUE OF TREES IN A broad, green valley dotted with meadows, cornfields, and peach orchards. Fires flickered in the darkness of the surrounding hillsides where thousands of people camped. On a level area near Dreamer’s camp, the shuffle of the dancers’ moccasins had worn the earth bare and packed it down. Hundreds of people formed a huge wheel with the lines radiating like spokes from the center where Dreamer prayed with his arms up. The dancers moved backward and forward in rhythm with the drums while Dreamer sprinkled them with pollen from his basket.

  Lozen had drunk from one of the gourds of tiswin being passed around, but that was not why she had the sensation of flying. Dreamer could send his power out to his people. He could increase what they returned to him. As Lozen danced, she experienced the tingle and heat of energy flowing through her. She felt as though she were hovering and looking down at the largest gathering of Ndee that had ever happened.

  Dreamer’s quiet manner and peaceful words had convinced them to set aside old animosities. White Mountain and San Carlos people, Tontos, Coyoteros, and Lipans mingled with Chiricahua and Mescalero, Nednhi and Bedonkohe. Army scouts and members of the San Carlos Apache police danced with the people they had hunted.