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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

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BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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Two Mexicans stood guard over the covered freight wagon parked in front of the inn. They wore the usual blankets and tight leather pantaloons that flared below the knees. The lacing on the sides allowed the white cotton drawers underneath to show through.
Painted on the side of the wagon was a rendering of the
Virgin Mary with a complexion that suggested jaundice. A swarm of cherubim buzzed around her head. Their expressions were probably intended to be pious, but they looked constipated instead.
Strings of what resembled dried figs hung along the wagon's sides. They were dark brown and shriveled. Rafe knew they were General Armijo's collection of Apache ears. When Armijo had occupied the governor's palace in Santa Fe, he had adorned his office with them. Now he carried them with him. Rumor said that he left them on display even while he was distributing guns from the tailgate of the wagon to possible relatives of the ears' former owners.
During the long hours Rafe spent driving his own wagon, he entertained himself with Shakespeare. He could quote hundreds of passages. The one that occurred to him as he looked at the strings of dried relics was, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” But the line that seemed most apt in Mark Anthony's funeral speech for Caesar was, “The evil that men do lives after them.”
Armijo probably sold the guns in Chihuahua with the understanding that the Apaches would use them only on the inhabitants of the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. After all, the Indians stole Sonoran cattle, horses, and mules and sold them to the grateful citizens of Chihuahua. The Apaches were as adept as Armijo when it came to playing factions against each other.
Rafe found General Armijo seated on a bench in the corner of the inn's front room. In the dim light he loomed like an outcrop of rock that had gone soft. He wore a white shirt that could shelter a small family. His belly hung in folds over the waistband of white pantaloons stretched taut across his thighs. The straps of his leather sandals sank into the flesh of his stubby feet like harnesses on an overfed pair of piglets.
An Indian woman crouched in the opposite corner. She was a slave most likely and Apache by the look of her, though she wore a Mexican skirt and white tunic blouse, and her hair was neatly plaited in a single braid long enough for
her to sit on. If looks could kill, Armijo would have been attracting even more flies than he already was. She was lovely and young, probably not more than fourteen, and Rafe didn't have to guess what use the general made of her.
You'd best not allow a knife anywhere near her, General, Rafe thought. She will find your gullet under all that suet and divide it in two for you.
Rafe thought it a good thing that Armijo had been both governor and commanding general when Stephen Watts Kearny and his ragtag army entered Santa Fe five years ago and claimed the province for the United States. Armijo had capitulated so fast that the occupation had been bloodless. The bloodletting came a year later when the Pueblo Indians rose up and slaughtered every American man, woman, and child they could find in the town. Rafe suspected that Armijo had been behind that. During his tenure as provincial governor he had been behind most of what was greedy, venal, murderous, and dastardly in New Mexico.
Manuel Armijo smiled broadly when he saw Rafe. “Mr. Collins! What a pleasure.” His English had improved since the Americans took over.
“No.”
“You are not Senor Rafe Collins?” He had a booming, jovial voice. When he smiled, his small black eyes disappeared into the rolls of fat around them like currants into bread dough.
“The answer is no.”
“But you do not yet know my proposition.”
“Doesn't matter. The answer is no.”
“They say you're the only one who has carried goods between here and El Paso without losing a side of bacon or a grain of corn to the savages.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“My driver has fallen ill from an excess of Pass whiskey. I would say he is more driven than driving.” Armijo might have winked, but since the flesh of this face almost obscured his eyes, Rafe couldn't be sure. “I'll pay you two hundred
and fifty dollars to take my lead wagon to Chihuahua—and bring it back, of course.”
What Rafe had in mind to say was, “I'll do it when there's enough frost in hell to kill snap beans.” What he said instead was, “No.”
Rafe turned and left, although putting his back to Armijo made him uneasy. He had heard the stories. Armijo was the winner in a walk when it came to vindictiveness.
Night had fallen with a thud by the time Rafe reached the wagon yard behind the hostler's shop. Horses, mules, burros, and oxen and vehicles of all persuasions had filled the trampled field since he'd tethered his mules that afternoon. As he approached his old Packard wagon, he realized that Absalom was sitting with his back against the front wheel. He passed a bottle to the man sitting with him.
In the darkness the second man seemed to have misplaced his face. The space between the wide brim of his floppy straw hat and the ragged shirt collar was blank except for the startling round whites of a pair of eyes. Then Rafe walked close enough to see that he was a Negro.
Absalom stood hastily and dusted the seat of his trousers with his hat. “Is this your wagon, Rafe?”
“It is.”
“I didn't think the owner would be back tonight.” He looked toward Mesilla and the sounds of celebration. “Loud, ain't it?” He grinned. “Those boys do murder sleep.”
Rafe smiled at the discovery of someone who could quote Shakespeare.
“We were fixin' to bed down with our horses.” Absalom nodded to the three animals hobbled nearby. He waved his hand to include his companion. “This is my man, Caesar.”
The black man stood up. He took off his hat and held it in front of his chest. “Pleased to meet ya, massa, suh.”
“Likewise.”
Rafe watched the two of them collect their blankets and lay them under another wagon. He thought it odd that Absalom would be sharing a bottle with a slave. Southerners would dine with hogs, drink with their horses, kiss their coon
hounds on the mouth, bed down with cattle, and dance a reel with a hairy, two-hundred-pound fur trapper, but they were fastidious about doing anything that might suggest social contact with a son of Africa.
Rafe had learned early in his twenty years not to pry into other men's business. He also knew that the racket from Mesilla would become more contentious and punctuated with gunfire. He pulled his blankets from the wagon's leather boot and laid them under it. Before he rolled up in them, he took a cloth packet from his pocket. He unwrapped the beeswax inside, pulled off two pieces of it, and stuffed one into each ear.
The army hadn't needed to teach Rafe to shoot. Any boy growing up in Comanche country could hit what he aimed at. It hadn't been able to make him obedient, except when survival demanded it; but a young West Point lieutenant had taught him to read. A captain had lent him tattered copies of
Hamlet, Macbeth
, and
Julius Caesar.
He had sat spellbound in the rowdy audience of soldiers while the officers performed
Othello, As You Like It
, and others.
He drifted off to dreams with the Bard in his head. “Innocent sleep
I
sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.”
REAR GUARD
T
he coyote hustled, nose to the ground, following a jackrabbit's scent through the desert darkness. When he heard the soft, bubbling cry of a quail, he veered toward it. Saliva flooded the coyote's mouth at the prospect of tearing into the quail's succulent flesh. He could almost feel the feathers tickling his nose, the tantalizing flutter of wings against his face before it went limp in his jaws. With muzzle down and bony hindquarters and banner of a tail up, he put one paw out, eased over it, and set another. The muscles of his shoulders and haunches bunched to pounce.
“
Ba'ts'osé,
Brother Coyote …” The voice came from a rounded lump next to a large creosote bush. Twin reflections of the full moon shone in the dark eyes that looked out from it. “I have troubles enough,” the mound said. “Play your tricks on another.”
The mound stirred as Sister shifted under her blanket to relieve a cramp in her leg. By the moon's bright light she thought she could see chagrin flash in the coyote's eyes when he realized she was not a quail. He turned and sauntered back to the jackrabbit's spoor.
Sister had spoken Coyote's name aloud deliberately. Speaking someone's name put great weight to the request, but that might have been a mistake. Old Man Coyote was a trickster. Sister wondered if evil consequences would follow her talking to him.
Coyote was responsible for death. Back when the earth was new and animals spoke like people, Coyote had thrown a stone into water. He had declared that if it sank, all living things would experience a sleep from which they would not
awaken on this earth. The stone sank, and people and animals and plants had been dying ever since.
Sister wondered if death and the Mexicans had taken everyone she knew. She imagined walking north alone. She imagined arriving at her village and finding her grandmother and the other old ones dead, too.
She withdrew deeper into the cave of her blanket and stared out at the expanse of thicket along the river. Night and the pale moonlight had changed the landscape and made it menacing. Thorny mimosa vines wove the willow, acacia, and cactus into an impenetrable wall. She walked along it, but she could not find the narrow trail made by wild pigs and deer passing through it on their way to the water. She could not even find the stubby cylinder of gray rock standing near the path.
Her brother had pointed it out. “It looks like Mouse's penis.”
Sister had laughed. Everyone knew the story of Coyote trading his big penis for Mouse's small one so he could woo a beautiful woman.
Now the rock was gone. Maybe Trickster Coyote had taken it the way he had taken Mouse's penis. Sister took a long, deep breath to still the panic rising in her. In her life she had experienced danger. She was familiar with death, with hunger and thirst, bone chilling cold, and intense heat, but she had never lived alone.
She gave the quail cry again, and this time she heard an answer from the thicket. It would probably have fooled another quail, but she recognized it as her brother's. He had taught her to make the cry, after all.
It sounded again, and she walked along the shadowy wall of vines and bushes, following it. She found the path and crawled into it, relieved to have the thorny branches close in around her. Soldiers on horseback could not follow her here. Even Ghost Owl would not likely risk becoming entangled in the thicket's treacherous embrace.
She stood up in the clearing.
“Enjuh,”
Morning Star said. “It is good.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and felt the strength of him encircling her. She held on as if he were a log floating in a flood. She inhaled his aura of smoke and sweat, tobacco and horses. She felt the sharp pressure of the hawk-bone amulet that hung around his neck.
“I was afraid they had killed you,” she murmured.
“Soldiers from Sonora attacked the camp. The people of Janos say they knew nothing about it.”
“Our father is gone.”
“We must not speak of him again.” He stood back and pushed her tangled hair away from her face, something he hadn't done since she was a small child in need of comfort. “If we mention those who have left, we call them back and hinder them in their journey.”
Women and children emerged singly or in small groups from the bushes, but Morning Star waited for one who had yet to come. The boy, Talks A Lot, arrived to tell him the men were gathering for a council and Skinny, the band's leader, wanted him there.
“Tell him I'll come soon.”
When She Moves Like Water finally appeared, she was carrying a sleeping child on her back. “This is Little Squint's daughter,” she said. “A soldier's horse stepped on her arm and broke it.”
The girl whimpered when Sister lifted her and held her against her chest. Sister laced her fingers to form a seat for her, and the child laid her head on Sister's shoulder, her broken arm dangling at her side.
Morning Star enfolded She Moves Like Water in an embrace so passionate that Sister knew Skinny and the rest of the men in council would grow impatient before it ended. She turned away, unable to bear the sight.
Sister wanted to rejoice in her brother's happiness. She wanted to like the woman who had displaced her in his affections. She wanted to admire She Moves Like Water's beauty and grace, two qualities she was sure she would never have herself, but all she could manage was a false courtesy.
Sister went off in search of Little Squint, walking among
those looking for lost relatives and friends. People spoke in hushed voices. The women and children were scratched and bruised. Many were bloody. The children lay exhausted where they fell. In the chill night air, they cupped together for warmth and shared what blankets they had. Broken Foot's wife, Her Eyes Open, distributed food and water jugs from the cache of them hidden in a crevice under a heap of boulders.
Sister found Little Squint huddled in her blanket. She rocked back and forth, desperate to grieve out loud for her lost child, but knowing she dared not.
“
Ta'hinaa,
she lives.” Sister put the girl in her mother's outstretched arms. “Ask Her Eyes Open to mend her bone.”
Little Squint was so grateful she blurted the words that were used only in extreme circumstances. “
Na'ahensih
, I thank you.”
Sister was weary all the way through, but she went looking for the kin of those she knew the soldiers had killed. The news that she had gone among the dead traveled faster than she did. Some people avoided her, as though the ghosts clung to her like smoke, as though she were the killer and not merely the messenger. In a way, she was. As long as they didn't know for sure, they could believe that their loved ones had been captured or they had only been delayed reaching here.
They could hope that the missing ones would appear days, weeks, even months or years later. That had happened before. The missing were not dead until Little Sister said so. She felt like Ghost Owl, spreading dark wings of grief.
In her sad wake she left orphaned children staring into a darkness that wouldn't dissipate with the sun's rise. Women sawed off their long hair with their knives. They pulled their blankets over their heads and rocked silently back and forth, shaken by grief.
The last one she found was He Who Yawns, on his way to the council.
He spoke to her first. “They say you walked among the dead.”
“Yes. Your people have left on their journey.”
“The Mexicans killed all of them?”
“Yes.”
His mother, his young wife, and his three daughters lay dead and mutilated. No one had lost more than He Who Yawns.
She returned to where She Moves Like Water slept wrapped in her blanket. She unrolled her own blanket next to her. She fell asleep to the low drone of voices as the men argued whether to take revenge now or wait until later.
She woke when Morning Star shook her shoulder. “We are going home,” he said in a low voice.
Sister could tell by the moon glowing through the trees that dawn would not come for quite a while. She draped her blanket over her shoulder and joined the line, walking next to her brother. As one of the youngest warriors, he guarded the rear of the march.
She expected to see Nah-tanh, Corn Flower, glaring at her. He always followed Morning Star around, hoping for the privilege of being sent on some errand, or for the honor of leading his favorite pony to the pasture. He had not returned, and Sister knew the Mexicans must have taken him. Fourteen-year-old He Steals Love followed them instead, his handsome young face alert for any indication that Morning Star had a favor to ask of him.
As they walked, in a voice almost inaudible, Morning Star told Sister what had happened in council. The young men, led by He Who Yawns, had wanted to take revenge on the soldiers immediately, but Skinny, Broken Foot, and Morning Star had prevailed. When they were not burdened with wounded women and children, they would perform the dance called To Take Death From An Enemy, and leave on the war trail.
Sister passed He Who Yawns standing beside the trail. The scowl on his square, homely face looked as permanent as the wind-chiseled crevices in the face of an outcrop of basalt. He spoke to no one. She glanced back and saw him fall into line and lag until he was no longer visible in the darkness.
The healthy ones helped the wounded as the weary column started north in the darkness. No one spoke, but Sister could sense the presence of the people around her, like moving shadows. She could hear the prolonged sigh of their footsteps.
The men had turned their ponies loose. On a journey like this, horses would be a liability. They left tracks. They made noise. They had to forage. The men could steal more horses later.
Sister remembered the route. By the time the sun rose, they would climb up into the first of the ragged peaks. They would travel for two days and three nights along the high ridges, stopping only so some could sleep briefly while others kept watch.
The Ndee men raided often into Mexico. They knew the location of every spring and water tank. They knew the safest places to camp and where the women had hidden food, utensils, and blankets. They would look for medicinal plants along the way, and they would treat the wounded. They would wear out their moccasins long before they reached home.
Sister considered telling her brother about the spirit that had warned her of the soldiers' coming, but maybe he wouldn't believe her. She didn't believe it herself. Why would the spirits speak to a child—and a girl child, at that?
Maybe she should call the Wind Spirit back and politely refuse its gift. People had been known to do that. Magical powers came at a price. The ones who held them must always be at the service of those who asked favors of them or expected extraordinary feats from them. She decided not to tell even her brother.
 
 
SISTER AND THE PEOPLE OF HER BAND REACHED THE PRAIRIE to the south of their village as the sun was rising. The plain was the holiest and most beautiful of all the beautiful places in The People's country. There White Painted Woman had taught Sister's ancestors the ceremony that gave the gift of
blessing to girls and brought them into womanhood.
Sister's bare feet were raw and bloody from walking, but she wanted to dance with joy when she saw the peaks rising ahead of her—Old Man, Round Nose, Big Breast, and the long sinuous ridge called Sleeping Woman.
Sister could tell the time of day and the season of the year by the mountains. They glowed with the color of pale sand at dawn, then took on a greenish tinge. The green darkened and shifted to a pinkish brown, deepening to the color of tobacco. As the angle of light changed the mountain's colors, it altered the shadows that Sleeping Woman wore. It shrank them and shifted them into long tatters around her contours and crevices.
When they reached the old camping spot where Sister was born, she lay down so her brother could roll her in the four directions. The custom reminded her that she had come from this earth and she was part of it.
“Respect the Earth,” her brother often said, “And it will always take care of you.”
The women pulled the stones from the opening of the shallow cave near the collection of
kuugha,
domed lodges, that made up their
guuta,
their village. They divided up the blankets, wickerwork water jugs, and burden baskets, the grind stones, kettles, and dried venison, parched corn, mescal, and acorn meal, and the dried fruit they had hidden there.
They found their camp as they had left it. The huge cottonwoods lined the narrow stream that raced noisily along over rocks even in the summertime. For as long as anyone could remember, Sister's band of Red Paints had lived in this canyon. High rock walls protected it; deep green cedars and pines, walnut and ash trees shaded it. The two pools known as Warm Springs lay not far away.
Sister raced through the tall grass where the ponies grazed, and she pelted across the dance ground. The old people who had stayed behind laid down their mending and the sticks with which they were weeding the small corn patches. They stood to watch the weary procession that trailed behind Sister.
BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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