Ghost Warrior (18 page)

Read Ghost Warrior Online

Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
6.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Lozen was waiting for him on the other side of the defile.
She was sitting in the shade of a cedar and teaching Maria to play the rock game. She tossed a small stone into the air while she picked up four more, one at a time, and set them on the knuckles of her other hand.
She stood and hiked her old deerskin skirt up under her belt. She lifted Maria onto the mare, took a short run, and leaped. Placing her hands on the mare's rump she vaulted onto her bare back just behind Maria. She reined the pony over to walk beside Victorio and Coyote. Her face lit up when she saw the musket. She reached out to stroke the barrel.
“We took twenty-four of these from Hairy Foot,” Victorio said.
“Did you kill him?” The possibility bothered her.
“No.”
“Was he riding my
colorado
?”
“Yes. He Steals Love chased him all day.”
“That horse belongs to me, not to He Steals Love.”
“He Steals Love lost that red horse at Dead Woman's Pass,” said Loco. “Hairy Foot looked like a cactus with all those arrows sticking out of him. Maybe he has magic against bullets and arrows.”
“He tied a blanket around his neck,” Victorio added. “Its flapping knocked the arrows away.”
“We should have burned the wagon,” Loco grumbled.
“If we burned his wagon, how would Hairy Foot carry more things for us to take from him later?” Victorio and Loco had argued about this ever since they left the wagon standing as forlorn as a three-legged bison after the herd had moved on. Victorio leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I left pollen for Hairy Foot in the pouch you made for me, the one with the long fringe and the hawk feathers.”
Stands Alone owed her freedom to Hairy Foot and his friends. Victorio felt some regret about harrying him, but it wasn't as though they had taken the goods from Hairy Foot himself. He was only carrying them for others. The pouch would give him something to think about. Victorio liked to
give people something to think about, even Pale Eyes, who generally didn't seem to think at all.
Lozen handed Victorio a packet of corn husks tied with a twist of grass. Victorio unwrapped it and took one of the crisp piñon-meal cakes that were inside.
“The boys offered to help us women hoe the corn yesterday,” Lozen said.
Victorio knew she meant her suitors, although Poppy, Short Rope, and Big Hand were not boys anymore. After the battle at Arizpe, the council had voted them all the rank of warrior, but Lozen still dismissed them with a wave of her hand.
“While Poppy was clearing the new cornfield he made a noise.” Lozen pursed her lips, puffed out her cheeks, and blew three loud explosions of air. Stands Alone laughed so hard she had to sit down.” Lozen grinned.”Poppy turned as red as
naletsoh,
his namesake. No one has seen him since, although his sister says he came prowling like a coatimundi around her fire looking for food after dark last night.”
Victorio laughed, and he thought how boring life would be with a sister who was normal.
“Aren't you married yet?” Loco asked.
“None of those boys is ugly enough. I'm waiting for you to ask me.” She raised her right hand in the sign that she was joking, with her palm forward, the first and second fingers up, and the thumb folded over the third and fourth.
“We brought someone back with us,” said Victorio.
Lozen turned around and saw the gray stallion and his rider emerge at a trot from the opening in the cliff face. As the rider came closer, she could see that he looked like a red man, but he was wearing brown canvas trousers. Broad bands of silver around his upper arms gathered in the full sleeves of his calico shirt. He had on the type of hat the Pale Eyes wore, but a white plume curved over the edge of the wide brim and lay in a cloud on his shoulder. Sunlight glinted off a silver crescent that hung above the crimson sash across his chest. Even from here she could see that he was handsome. She stared, her lips slightly parted.
With a flick of his wrist Victorio caught a fly. It buzzed in his fist. when he held it out to Lozen. She looked up, startled.
“It's easier to catch them this way,” he said, “than to trap them in your mouth.”
She leaned closer to him. “Is he Gray Ghost?” she murmured.
“Yes. You don't have to speak low. He can't understand you.”
“How did you meet him?”
“Pale Eyes were chasing him along the canyon floor. We shouted to him and showed him the Tall Rock trail. We met him on the other side, and he consented to come with us.”
“Who is he? Where does he come from? Who are his people?”
She wanted to ask, Is he married? Does he have a sweetheart?
“I don't know. He doesn't even speak Mexican, but he knows sign language. He says he comes from the east.
“His people live so far to the east,” Loco added, “that the rising sun bakes their bread for them.”
Victorio handed two of the cakes back to her. “Give him these.” Lozen wanted to refuse, but she took them and rode toward Gray Ghost.
He had the high, strong cheekbones of her own people, but his face was thinner, his features more delicate, his skin a lighter brown. She guessed that he had seen about thirty harvests. His eyes were as gray as his horse. Each tendril of the white plume quivered and danced in the sunlight. The sun had faded the red cloth of his shirt to a pale pink. He wore moccasins of a type she had never seen before.
A roll of blankets rode behind his saddle. Fringed saddlebags hung on either side of the gray. He carried a musket in a saddle holster. From another leather case protruded the working end of a curved war club, a heavy wooden ball with a bear's tooth set in it.
He gestured “Greetings,” in the silent language everyone knew.
She returned the sign and held out the mescal cakes. He accepted them with a smile that made her feel as if her insides were melting and flowing into her moccasins. She reined the mare around and urged her at a trot to where Victorio rode.
She felt as dizzy as if she had drunk a gourdful of tiswin. She felt as foolish as a child, but the longings that stirred in her weren't a child's. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry.
Love. This was what the women talked about when they wove baskets in the morning. It's what they joked and teased about as they gathered berries and tanned hides. It was terrible. She wondered if Grandmother or Broken Foot had a song that would cure it. And if they did, would she want to be cured?
PLUNDERED
L
ozen should have been excited about the muskets, but when Victorio distributed the plunder from Hairy Foot's wagon, she couldn't take her eyes off Gray Ghost. She stood in the gloom beyond the fire's light and pleaded silently with him to look her way. She asked the spirits to persuade him to come to her and stand by her here in the shadows.
She longed to hear him speak to her, even if she couldn't understand him, and even if she were too befuddled to answer him. She hadn't talked to anyone about the uproar going on behind her calm eyes, but she wanted to complain to She Moves Like Water and to Grandmother. Why had no one told her that love would make a fool of her?
Victorio opened the wooden box and began handing the firesticks to those with the most people dependent on them. Then he called the names of the fiercest fighters among the older warriors, and finally the younger men in order of their accomplishments.
Lozen was lost in a reverie of the dancing that would follow this. She thought of how men and women let their hands, their shoulders, their glances brush each other. The dancing was always suffused with desire, but it had never touched her before. Would she have the courage to ask Gray Ghost to dance?
She jumped when Stands Alone poked her. “Take the firestick.”
“Firestick?”
Stands Alone gave her a shove, and Lozen stumbled into the fire's light. Victorio held the musket out to her and a pouch of bullets and another of powder. Her hands shook
when she took them from him. Talks A Lot, Flies In His Stew, Chato, and the others would be angry that she got one and they didn't, but if anyone protested, she was too dazed to hear it. She walked away holding the heavy musket to her chest. The women crowded around to see it.
“She thinks she's too good for any man.” Tall Girl observed. “She'll need that gun to hunt, or else she'll have to dance for the warriors and beg gifts from them.”
She Moves Like Water glared at her. She was beginning to accept that fact that Victorio was right. The spirits had other plans for Lozen. Maybe she wouldn't find a man with whom she could have children and share her life. The possibility made She Moves Like Water sad.
 
 
THE NEXT TWO MONTHS WERE JOYOUS MISERY. GRAY GHOST moved into a lodge near She Moves Like Water's camp, and he spent most of his time with Victorio and the friends who gathered at his fire in the autumn evenings. Even Skinny joined them as often as not. Lozen was quick to offer to take them food and drink. Gray Ghost was polite, but he always treated her as nothing more than the younger sister of a friend.
As he learned The People's language, he could talk more about the troubles in the east. This night Red Sleeves was visiting, and Gray Ghost told his story again in words and gestures.
The Pale Eyes had overrun the land where his people had always lived, he said. They chopped down the trees. They killed the game or drove it away. They ripped into Mother Earth with big metal blades dragged by horse and mules. When they tired of chopping and digging, they set fire to the forests and the prairies, destroying what was left of the ancient hunting grounds.
Gray Ghost had watched his people die in agony, disfigured by diseases that no one had experienced before, and against which they had no medicine or magic. For more than a hundred years the Pale Eyes had made promises to his
people, and they had broken all of them. Gray Ghost had decided to journey west in search of a refuge.
“To trust a Pale Eyes is like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you,” he said with a sad smile.
“There is one Pale Eyes I trust,” said Red Sleeves. “His name is Tse'k. He's a good man.” His heavy lids drooped over his sad, bulging eyes. His mouth sagged. “He promises us food if we live with him at the fort and plant corn and beans and squash. When winter comes and my joints feel like water freezing, I am going there with those of my people who are willing to follow me.”
“When you did that before, the Pale Eyes agent robbed you,” said Victorio. “He sold your warriors whiskey that made them fight with each other and beat their women.” He didn't mention the beating that the diggers gave Red Sleeves. No one spoke of it in his presence.
“This one will not do that.” Red Sleeves pulled a sigh up from his chest, like a man would draw a heavy bucket from a well. “I am tired. My bones ache. They have worn me down, those Pale Eyes, like water wearing away stone.” He hunched over to prop his elbows on his bony knees and stare gloomily into the fire.
“There is no end to them,” said Gray Ghost. “I have seen their cities teeming like ant heaps. I have been to Washington.”
“Wah-sin-ton!” Victorio and the others came to attention. “The Pale Eyes always talk of Wah-sin-ton. Who is Wah-sin-ton?”
“It's the town where their Great Father lives. It covers more land than your canyon here. It has paths wider than two hoop-and-pole fields set side by side. It has stone lodges as big as the cliffs that surround us.”
The men stirred and looked at each other. No one would call Gray Ghost a liar, but his stories stretched belief to the snapping point.
“It has more people than in all this country,” he added.
“Maybe that's where they come from,” said Skinny, “The way snakes breed by the hundreds under the same rock.”
Lozen's cousin, He Makes Them Laugh, trotted up panting. “Twelve men on horseback are coming. And a wagon that looks like an arbor on wheels. They speak the Mexicans' language, but they aren't Mexicans.”
He Makes Them Laugh was right. The wagon's cover was not curved like those of the Pale Eyes. It had a flat, red-and-white-striped top attached to four upright poles. The sides had been rolled up and tied in place. Thick red fringes jostled along the top edge of it as the wagon jolted along. Tassels and bright brass bells flounced and jangled at each corner. Four white geldings pulled it. They were handsome but thin. Broken Foot rode ahead of them.
People clustered around him asking questions, but he didn't know much. “We found them stranded and thirsty and led them to the nearest spring. I told them they could rest here until they're ready to travel on toward the sunset.”
Everyone tried to see inside the wagon, but the twelve dusty men, dark-haired and dark-eyed, ringed it. They sat in their saddles with a ferocious ease, their muskets held upright with the stocks resting on their thighs. From under the wide flat brims of their black felt hats they watched like birds of prey.
The wagon's driver set a wooden box on the ground. An old woman, solid and formidable, took the driver's hand and stepped down. A much younger woman appeared behind her. She wore a long dress of a blue cloth that shimmered with streaks of purple and green in the sunlight. The bodice clung to her like a second skin and emphasized a waist that reminded Lozen of a wasp's. She laid one pale hand on the old woman's shoulder and lifted her skirts up past her tiny black shoes and slender ankles with the other. The skirts rustled as she descended.
When she pushed the fringed black shawl back, the murmuring rose in volume. She was beautiful. Perfect hair framed a perfect face with perfect features set perfectly in it. Lozen looked at Gray Ghost and almost cried out in despair. He was staring at her with the same dazed expression that came into Lozen's eyes whenever she saw him.
 
 
LOZEN THOUGHT SHE HAD KEPT HER PASSION SECRET, BUT Grandmother knew all along. When Grandmother was about Lozen's age, she had thought she would wither and perish because the boy she loved went to live with a Mescalero woman. Now Grandmother couldn't remember his name. She had married a man who had made her happy until the Hair Takers killed him at the Santa Rita mines, how along ago? Fifteen harvests?
Sometimes Grandmother wished she could travel back through the years the way she traveled across deserts and mountains and high, green valleys. She wished she could tell that unhappy child, herself, that all would be well. But she couldn't, not any more than she could tell Lozen that this ache would fade, and she would smile one day at her foolishness. Young people had the gift of certainty, and they were certain that no old person had ever felt the way they did.
Grandmother watched as the wagon and its passenger rumbled away in a clangor of brass bells. All anyone knew was that the young woman came from beyond the wide water to the east. She was headed for the land that bordered the endless water at the western rim of the world. Her father lived there, she said, and he had sent for her.
The stranger's wagon had arrived with twelve men as an escort, but it left with thirteen. Gray Ghost rode his big stallion alongside it, his possession in the new saddlebags that Lozen had given him, and his blankets tied behind the saddle. The children ran after the wagon, shouting and laughing. The women drifted off to their chores, and the men returned to their hoop-and-pole games.
Lozen and little María stood staring at the dust it left. María took Lozen's hand to comfort her. The child was learning to speak Apache, but she already knew the language that required no words. She called Lozen
shidee,
“my older sister,” and she could sense her sorrow.
Grandmother, Her Eyes Open, and Grandmother's friend,
Turtle, watched Lozen as they ground corn and acorns into meal.
“She'll get over him.” Her Eyes Open scraped the ground acorn meal into a shallow basket.
“Marrying a Mescalero or a White Mountain man is bad enough.” Turtle had a narrow chin and a small hooked nose. Wrinkles around her close-set eyes made her look more like her namesake every year. “But to marry a man who doesn't speak your language would never do.”
“At least if he scolds her,” said Her Eyes Open, “she won't understand him.”
“Love is more common than flies,” said Grandmother. “And at least as bothersome.”
“I don't see love bothering you these days, old woman.” Turtle said.
“No, but the flies still like me well enough.” Grandmother glanced up to see Lozen walk into camp. Her hair hung in a ragged line that ended above her shoulders.
“Who cut your hair?”
“I did.”
“No man will want you with your hair like that.” She Moves Like Water offered her a gourdful of stew, but Lozen waved it away.
“I will not marry, so it makes no difference.”
“How will you live if you don't marry? If you don't have daughters, who will care for you when you grow old?”
Lozen turned to Victorio. “Brother, your woman has her sister now to help her, and her mother and Maria. I want to be your apprentice. I want to accompany you on the war trail.”
“That's impossible.” She Moves Like Water frowned at Victorio, in case he was inclined to agree with such a preposterous request. “Unmarried women don't go on the war trail with the men. You'll disgrace the family. People will ridicule you.”
“My woman is right,” Victorio said. “They will talk about you.”
“They already talk about her,” Corn Stalk put in quietly.
Everyone stared at her. She rarely spoke up in family discussions, much less disagreed. Maybe the nights she spent laughing softly in her lodge with Victorio had made her bold.
“They say she isn't like others,” Corn Stalk went on. They say the spirits have blessed her with the power to heal, the magic to make horses follow her, the gift of far-sight. They don't expect the usual of her. I think they would be disappointed, maybe, if she behaved like other women.”
 
 
STANDS ALONE LOOKED DOWN AT THE GIFT LEFT IN HER blankets. It was a gourd with big eyes and a grinning mouth carved and painted around the long, curved end that formed a nose. The pupils of the eyes looked inward at the nose and tufts of rabbit fur had been glued at the base of it. The artist had painted the tip of the nose with a spiderwork of veins that resembled those of a man's penis. Even with the eyes and mouth, Stands Alone could not mistake what it represented. Inside was a bag of cactus candy, the specialty of He Makes Them Laugh's mother.
Stands Alone collapsed in laughter onto the blankets. Lozen and Maria looked over at her from their bed. Stands Alone held up the gourd so they could see it. Maria giggled and Lozen smiled, even though she had thought she never would again.
“Did He Makes Them Laugh give it to you?” asked Maria.
“Who else?” Stands Alone raised up on one elbow and studied the gourd “What should I do?”
“That's for you to decide, Sister,” said Lozen. “Do you love him?”
“I do, but he's so different from the others.”
“Do you care that he's different?”
Stands Alone thought about that. “No. I don't care. He's a good hunter. He's a good man.”
“Then do what your heart tells you to do.” Lozen felt suddenly old. Now that she had experienced the power of love, she felt qualified to give advice about it. “Like magic, love is a gift from Yusen.”

Other books

Wings by Terry Pratchett
Mr. West by Sarah Blake
Audition by Ryu Murakami
And Mom Makes Three by Laura Lovecraft
Eyeshot by Lynn Hightower
Dear White America by Tim Wise