Ghost Warrior

  When all that was finished, the dancing started. The crowd milled in and out of the light thrown across the ground by the huge fire. They greeted friends. They chatted and laughed, at ease with each other and at home in a situation that felt totally alien to Rafe. Rafe and Caesar stood with the men, aware that they were being scrutinized by the women in particular. Rafe watched for glimpses of Lozen in the crowd, and he knew Caesar was looking for Pandora. Then Skunk Head appeared and held a conference with Maria.

  She turned to Rafe and Caesar. “The one they call He Makes Them Laugh wants to give these to the black Pale Eyes.”

  He Makes Them Laugh carried a pair of tall moccasins, covered with beadwork. He started talking, and María had to speak fast to keep up.

  “I told my woman when she cut these out four years ago that they were so big she could use them to carry the baby in. She said they would fit the black Pale Eyes and that some day she would give them to him.” He Makes Them Laugh handed them to Caesar.

  “Don’t say, thank you,” Rafe muttered.

  “Why not?”

  “Not polite. Say you’ll wear them a long time, or something like that.”

  Caesar took off his hat. He held it to his chest with one hand while he accepted the moccasins with the other.

  “Tell your woman these are very beautiful.”

  “She says to tell you she named our son Ch‘inayihi’dili,” said He Makes Them Laugh. “It means Sets Him Free.”

  “I’d surely like to meet him.”

  He Makes Them Laugh and María held another conference; then he sent a boy off with a message. Stands Alone arrived soon after with her five-year-old son walking behind her.

  “Don’t talk to her directly,” warned Rafe. “No matter what white people might think, Apache women are as chaste as Desdemona.”

  Caesar crouched down and held out a penknife with a deer horn handle. The child stared fixedly at it while Caesar demonstrated how to open it. He held the blade so the haft pointed toward Sets Him Free.

  “Please tell him it’s a present for him,” said Caesar.

  Maria obliged.

  The child ran forward, snatched the knife, and retreated to his mother’s skirt. Caesar laughed so heartily everyone turned to look.

  “Tell him I’m gonna call him Charlie.”

  Stands Alone bent down and whispered something to her son. He walked out to stand in front of her.

  “Shida’a,” he said.

  “Shida’a means uncle,” said María.

  “Uncle,” Caesar beamed at Rafe, “I gots me some kinfolks.”

  A second boy joined Charlie Sets Him Free. María said he was Victorio’s son by his second wife and his name was Washington. Before long the two of them were riding on Caesar’s shoulders. Before the dancing ended, they had fallen asleep in his lap.

  By the time Victorio announced the last dance, Rafe was dozing, too. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. Lozen walked away from him and onto the dance ground where couples were gathering. Rafe wanted to decline the invitation, but he had seen what happened to men and boys who did. Broken Foot and Loco seemed to be in charge of the dance, and they dragged the reluctant ones out to face their partners.

  Rafe joined Lozen so that they stood a pace away from each other. At least he wouldn’t have to touch her. The step was simple enough, and he’d been watching them do it all night. Together they swung back and forth, she taking five steps forward and he backwards, and then reversing so that he advanced on her.

  The singing, the drumming, the crackle of the leaping fire, Lozen facing him; her strong, lovely face now in shadow, now lit, all seemed like a dream, except that he would never have dreamed of doing this. The throb of the drums and the sway of bodies around him mesmerized him. He drifted away from his reality to a world more fantastical than he could have imagined.

  When the drums and the singing stopped, he and Lozen walked toward the crowd standing around the dance ground. She spoke to him in Spanish, though she looked straight ahead and she hardly moved her mouth. Maybe she didn’t want people to see her talking to a Pale Eyes.

  “¿Donde está su perra? Where is your dog?”

  “Tiene niños. She has little ones.”

  “Dogs are useful,” Lozen said. “They have far-sight. They can warn of enemies.”

  “I will bring you a puppy.”

  “Enjuh, good,” she said. She looked slantwise up at him, a mischievous smile playing across her full lips. She knew he was ignorant of the customs. “The man is supposed to pay the woman for dancing with her.”

  All Rafe had in his pockets was lint, except for a shiny copper penny. He held it on the palm of his hand so the engraved likeness of the Indian faced up.

  Lozen’s smile was radiant, though Rafe knew she had no use for a coin as currency. She took it and slipped it into the small pouch hanging at her waist. She reached out a hand and touched the leather pouch that he had found in his old wagon years ago, and in which he kept whichever of Shakespeare’s works he was reading. Her smile turned a little sly, and he knew for sure, finally, who had made it.

  Without saying anything more, she put her arm through that of an old woman with a ringtail’s elfin face and flared ears. The two of them walked off into the assembling dawn.

  Her grandmother, Rafe thought. The old one is probably Lozen’s grandmother.

  Lozen had a family. She had a life far different from anything in Rafe’s experience, and yet similar, too. Rafe had had a grandmother, until the Comanches, frugal with their arrows, clubbed her to death.

  Victorio took Rafe and Caesar to a brush-covered shelter at his wife’s camp. Someone had put down two heaps of fragrant cedar branches inside. Rafe and Caesar picketed their horses at the entrance. The camp grew quiet except for occasional coughs and snores and the brief fussing of a baby. Rafe slept more soundly than he would have thought possible, being in the den of the lion and all. He left his boots on, though.

  When the sound of women’s laughter woke them, the sun had already risen. Charlie Sets Him Free and Wah-sin-ton stood in the doorway.

  As soon as Caesar stirred, the boys shouted, “Shida’a.” They ran in, jumped on him, and started bouncing on his chest.

  Caesar spoke in gusts as his new relations jolted the wind out of him. “What’s the word for nephew, Rafe?”

  “I think it’s shik’a’a.”

  Rafe left them wrestling in the tangle of the blankets and stepped outside. The first thing he noticed was that both Red and the gray were munching on piles of grass that someone had left for them. The second thing he noticed was that the valley was on fire, or at least it appeared to be. Smoke hovered over everything. It came from the cookfires scattered along the river and across the surrounding hills as far as the eye could see.

  The rancheria covered much more area than he had thought, and all of it was in a ferment. In spite of the fact that they had spent most of the night dancing, women and girls swarmed in and out of Victorio’s wives’ arbors and the cookfires scattered around them. Rafe saw Lozen and her grandmother and Pandora sorting, chopping, peeling, skinning, and gutting with the rest. A second arbor contained baskets and trays of food and trinkets. Leather pouches bulged with goods. So much for Victorio’s claim that his people were poor.

  Other women hurried to and fro with loaded burden baskets and water jugs. Some bent at the waist under heaps of firewood. The young children collected kindling and carried small water jugs, or they chased each other around, more excited and frenetic than the day before. An army of small boys rubbed down the hundreds of ponies and led them to better grass. A group of girls sang and danced where the boys would be sure to see them.

  Victorio, Loco, and fifteen or twenty men were clearing rocks and pebbles from the dance ground, then sweeping it with bundles of brush. Some of them laid a foothill of wood for a fire and dragged in four thirty-foot-long saplings that seemed to have some special purpose. Steam rose from a hut by the river, and Rafe heard the muted chant
of male voices from inside it.

  Caesar came out, hoisted the boys onto his shoulders, and stood next to Rafe. He was wearing his new moccasins with his wool trousers tucked into the high tops. Rafe felt a twinge of envy.

  “Looks like they’s fixin’ to throw a hoedown,” Caesar said.

  “I don’t know what to make of it, pardner.”

  María arrived with a cradleboard on her back.

  “Look at this.” Caesar walked around Maria to admire the baby.

  María half turned so Rafe could see the wide-eyed child staring at him from under a shock of black hair.

  “Boy or girl?” Rafe asked.

  ““She is a girl.”

  María had brought them a gourd of stew, a sotol stalk for a spoon, and an explanation. Victorio’s daughter was to participate in the ceremony of becoming a woman, she said. People had come from all over the Apacheria for it. The celebration would go on for days. It was the most sacred of their rituals. The Pale Eyes would have to leave.

  As they were saddling the horses, Victorio and his number-one wife approached them. At least Rafe assumed she was his number-one-wife. She had taken charge of distributing the gifts to the women the night before. She held out a rawhide saddle pouch with painted designs on the carrying straps and long fringes. The tin cones on the ends of the fringes jingled when Rafe took it.

  “This will be very useful.” Rafe tried to think of something he could give in return, but last night he had divided out all his tobacco. He had not packed clothes, and what he had was old and shabby.

  “Give her my darnin’ kit,” Caesar murmured.

  When Rafe opened Caesar’s saddlebag to look for it, he noted that nothing had disappeared in the night. He retrieved the leather packet that contained a small quilted sack with two steel needles, heavy black cotton thread wound around a peeled stick, a few wooden buttons, and a packet of straight pins. The name ELLIE was embroidered on the sack.

  “I can’t take this, Caesar,” he said. “It belonged to your mother, didn’t it?”

  “She’d be proud.”

  Rafe hesitated.

  “Go on. Shake a leg. They wants us out o’ here so’s they can get on with the fandango.”

  Rafe handed the sewing kit to Victorio. “For your daughter, in honor of her special day.”

  Victorio passed it to his wife, who gave the slightest of smiles, then turned and went back to work. Victorio shook their hands the way he had seen Pale Eyes do. María continued translating.

  “Nantan says, ‘May we live to see each other again, my brothers.’”

  “God keep you,” said Caesar.

  As they mounted, Victorio handed Rafe a war club. The round stone head was encased in a cow’s tail which had been wet, slid over a stout oak handle, allowed to shrink in place, and tightly wrapped with sinew. A flexible section of hide was left between handle and the stone so the head moved freely. The design allowed it to deliver a skull-crushing blow without breaking off. A loop through the butt of the handle fit over Rafe’s wrist. Rafe took the Green River knife and sheath from his belt and gave it to Victorio, who smiled his gratitude.

  Rafe and Caesar put on the blindfolds again. This time a few young boys escorted them away. Caesar started singing to himself as soon as they were out of sight of the rancheria, and Rafe smiled.

  Rafe realized that Caesar had had kinfolk even before Sets Him Free called him “Uncle” yesterday. Rafe himself had come to think of Caesar as a brother. He knew he would fight to the death for him, and that was no idle proposition. He knew that Caesar would do the same for him.

  Chapter 41

  AMONG THE WILD MEN

  “They’re mean people.” Grandmother folded the blankets as though she were wrestling them into submission. “How will you find Long Neck’s wild men?” she muttered as she stuffed the blankets into the saddlebag. “They live like coyotes, just anyplace.”

  This was the third time she had asked the question this morning, but Victorio answered it again. He knew she was upset by his decision to move south and take with him whomever would follow. He knew that fear had run off her smiling disposition and left this quarrelsome one in its place.

  “Geronimo says Long Neck will leave a sign for us at the Place Where Rocks Are Stacked Up,” he said.

  “Who’s Geronimo?”

  “He Who Yawns.”

  “He Who Yawns! He’s a coyote, that one. He persuades the young men to hunt Mexicans with him all the time. He’s gotten many of them killed. He and Long Neck don’t care how much we suffer because of their wild ways.”

  “He Who Yawns knows the trail south better than anyone.”

  “You don’t like Long Neck.” Grandmother returned to the subject at hand. “Nobody likes him.”

  “I’m not going to take my blankets to his lodge and marry him.” Victorio tried to make her smile, but she wasn’t having it.

  “Long Neck’s people eat wild pigs,” she said. “And pigs eat snakes. You are what you eat. That’s why the Enemy People act like snakes. If you live among them, your daughter will marry one of those wild coyotes.”

  “I’m going to marry Short Rope.” Daughter looked up from the moccasin she was mending and gave Grandmother something else to fuss about.

  “Short Rope’s not even a warrior yet.”

  “The men voted him warrior rank after the last raid.”

  “You had your feast only two moons ago. You’re too young to marry. You have a lot to learn about being a wife.” With her gnarled fingers Grandmother struggled to tie the saddlebag’s laces. Victorio wanted to help her, but she didn’t like to be reminded that she needed help.

  “Your son will learn bad habits,” Grandmother scolded him. “He’ll forget the proper way to behave.”

  “When we find a good camping place, we’ll come back for you and the other old ones. You can teach him the correct way.”

  Victorio had told her that, too, but often these days she forgot what people said. She would stop in the middle of a healing sing, confused about what song came next. She had seen more than eighty harvests, so he shouldn’t have been surprised, but she had always seemed unchanged and unchanging, able to go on forever.

  As Victorio watched her carry her belongings to the mule, he realized how frail she had become while he was preoccupied with the troubles the Pale Eyes were causing. Streaks of white mingled with the gray in her long hair. Her wrists looked brittle as salt bush twigs. Her skin had a translucent quality, as though if she stood in front of the fire the light would shine through her, silhouetting the curved branches of her ribs.

  While Corn Stalk held the mule, Daughter kneed him in the stomach to make him expel his breath so she could pull the hempen cinch as tight as possible. It held the Mexicanstyle packsaddle, a flat leather pouch stuffed with straw. Grandmother tried to fasten the broad strap that went around the mule’s rump, but her gnarled fingers couldn’t maintain a grip and pull, too. She let Daughter tighten it for her, to keep the load from slipping forward on steep inclines. She also let Daughter tie the saddlebag in place. Daughter and Lozen were the only ones she allowed to help her, maybe because they had both done it since they were young and she considered them her apprentices.

  The Warm Springs women had already stored grindstones, baskets of food, blankets, and water jugs near the cave where the old ones would live. Corn Stalk smoothed over the fire pit, and She Moves Like Water carried the bed-frame poles to the dance ground where people were stacking them. They could not leave the village the way it was when they lived here because if they did, whatever happened here would affect them wherever they were. If enemies attacked here, they would be attacked. If a bear left feces in the old site, they would become sick.

  Victorio was relieved to see the mother of She Moves Like Water and Corn Stalk stop at the usual place near a boulder and stand with her back to them. He had an excuse now to end this discussion and leave so She Who Has Become Old could say good-bye to Grandmother.

  Victo
rio joined the men gathering at the dance ground. They had a lot to talk about. His people had become prey here in their own country. They had to plan the route south carefully. They would discuss which tanks and springs and seeps to camp at, and where to find the caves with supplies hidden on earlier journeys. They would decide who would ride ahead looking for enemy sign, who would guard the rear, and who would take up flanking positions. Until they crossed the invisible line between the Pale Eyes and the Mexicans, they would have to travel at night using the Fixed Star as a guide. They would have to risk Ghost Owl’s rapacious appetite for souls.

  Lozen returned from the pasture leading her mare and Victorio’s war pony. Grandmother met her with more objections.

  “Granddaughter, ask Hairy Foot to send word to Father Tse’k that we want to stay here.”

  “The Pale Eyes nantan, Cross-Eyes, won’t agree to it.” Lozen knew why her grandmother was in such a state. Lozen was afraid, too, and furious that the Pale Eyes had made this necessary. “Loco went to ask the Bluecoats for a peace council one month ago. Don’t you remember? While he and his men were away, Pale Eyes attacked when everyone slept. They killed twenty-three of his people. When we find a safer place for the women and children, we will try again to make peace.”

  Grumbling at Life Giver for creating Pale Eyes, Grandmother helped Lozen cut rawhide covers for her mare’s hooves and tied them in place. The men had debated leaving the horses behind. Horses made noise. Horses had to eat. They left tracks easy enough for even Pale Eyes to follow. The men in council decided to start out with them, though. They could turn the ponies loose or kill them if they became a liability.

  In the afternoon, with their belongings piled onto the backs of their ponies, people began gathering in the center of the village. Usually this would be a happy time. Usually the women would be heading for* the low country where they gathered mescal buds, and baked and dried them to make meal for the coming year. This time they didn’t know when they would return. This time they were leaving the country where they had always lived, the place that White Painted Woman had given them, the place where The People first walked the earth.