Ghost Warrior (57 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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“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.
BELIEVING IS SEEING
L
ozen 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.
Hope possessed those who had come here exhausted, starving, and numb with grief. A medicine man of unparalleled magic would rid their country of the Pale Eyes. He would restore the world to the one they remembered, the one they told their children about.
Lozen soared among dreams and visions of her own. Joy
and sorrow swept through her in waves. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she could not stop laughing.
When the sky began to pale along the mountain peaks, Dreamer brought his arms down and the drums stopped. The silence reverberated in Lozen's skull. Her heart pounded, and the hair stirred on her arms and the back of her neck.
- Dreamer was so small that when he strode though the lines of dancers, Lozen could only tell where he was by the people who moved away, clearing a path for him. In silence, they trailed him toward a hillside swathed in ground fog. He motioned for them to stay where they were and beckoned for Broken Foot, Lozen, Loco, Cochise's son Naiche, and Red Sleeves' son Mangas to follow him to the foot of the slope.
Dreamer raised his arms and began chanting to Life Giver. Lozen's stomach churned with fear and longing. What if he could bring her brother back to her? What if he couldn't?
Something took shape in the fog toward the top of the slope. The shadowy figures of Red Sleeves and Cheis rose slowly from the ground. Horses appeared, too, their heads first, then their necks, withers, and front legs. Victorio's head and broad shoulders emerged from the fog. Lozen shook with joy and reached out for him.
The three men rose as far as their waists. The horses cleared the ground to their hindquarters. Then they all began to sink back. Lozen cried out in anguish as the mist and the earth closed over them.
“Come back,” Lozen whispered. “Come back.”
 
 
WHEN RAFE AND THE SCOUTS ARRIVED TO ARREST Dreamer, he sat eating stew under his wife's brush arbor as though oblivious of the menace around him. He was as slender as a child, and so pale he could almost be mistaken for a white man. He looked up at his captors with an expression so mild that the word
Gethsemane
came to Rafe.
Dreamer's followers were not so meek. When the lieutenant ordered the scouts to hurry Dreamer along, outrage rippled though the hundred or more watching from a hillside.
The party moved out with Lt. Tom Cruse and his Apache scouts surrounding Dreamer. Dreamer's wife and son followed, and the soldiers guarded the rear. The Apaches trailed them.
Painted warriors emerged from every side canyon along the way. Rafe estimated seven or eight hundred of them were following Dreamer and his escort. He held his loaded rifle across his thighs and breathed a prayer to the Almighty. He was surprised when he arrived at the army's campsite without having to pull the trigger.
The soldiers waiting there had lit their cook fires and pitched their tents as though they were on a routine bivouac. They watered and fed the horses, and stacked arms. They made a circle of the pack saddles and the supplies, and Dreamer's guards ushered him into it. His wife laid their few belongings under a cottonwood close by and began gathering brush for shelter and a fire. His son led the horses to graze.
Rafe found the captain sitting in front of his tent while his orderly cooked his dinner. He was in a cocky mood.
“Do you think it wise to stack arms with the hostiles so close?” Rafe asked.
The captain laughed. “Don't fret, Collins. This outing is all bleat and no fleece.”
“This outing is not over yet.”
The colonel strode toward them. “Lieutenant Cruse says things looked pretty scaly to him back on the trail.”
“
Scaly,
sir?” The captain raised one eyebrow.
“Yes. Scaly. He says on the way here a number of painted Indians joined the belligerants.” The colonel waved his arm toward a group of them emerging from the dense brush and crossing the creek. “Clear them out of there, Captain. We can't have them skulking about.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Colonel …” Rafe started to suggest he send out ten or twenty men rather than one, but thought better of it. When the captain headed toward the creek, Rafe went looking for cover. He didn't get far.
The captain shouted at the warriors as though they were
bothersome children. “
Ugashe,
go away.” He waved his hand at them.
Rafe didn't see who fired first, but the captain went down. Through a hail of bullets, soldiers ran for their carbines. Rafe dived behind the barricade of saddles and supplies surrounding Dreamer. He knew that saving Dreamer would not stop the fighting, but killing him would make bad matters much worse.
Soldiers killed Dreamer's wife when she tried to reach him. They shot his son as he brought Dreamer's horse to him. Dreamer crawled toward them. Rafe saw two of the guards aim their Springfields at him.
“No!” Rafe ran at a crouch along the barricade.
Bullets thudded into the padded packsaddles and pinged into the boxes of canned peaches, spilling the fragrant juice. The two men fired, and Dreamer went down. He got back on his hands and knees and continued to crawl toward his wife, until a soldier dispatched him with an ax.
Rafe heard yipping and the thunder of hooves. The Apaches were stealing the stock. He dodged toward the meadow where the ammunition mules grazed, still loaded. One more idiocy to add to Colonel Carr's inventory.
Rafe had almost reached it when Apaches began shooting at him from the trees. He saw Lozen bent low against her paint's neck. Flapping her blanket, she rode straight through the cross fire of American and Apache bullets. The soldiers were surrounded and outnumbered. Rafe knew that if Lozen got away with those ammunition mules, he and the others were dead men.
He couldn't bring himself to shoot her, so he aimed for her horse. Maybe Lozen had magic against bullets, too. Rafe was a good shot, but she galloped away with the mules running ahead of her.
She had stolen three or four thousand rounds of ammunition, enough to keep her people supplied for a long siege. She had taken more than enough to finish off every man here, but when darkness fell, the Apaches stopped shooting and vanished. Rafe stood in the ringing silence and thanked God.

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