“Destroy me.”
“He’s an expert marksman. Why doesn’t he just stalk and shoot me?”
“He can no longer kill you that way.”
“Why?”
“It’s not your body he wants to get rid of, it’s your soul. Your real struggle is in the world of spirits. Raven knows this.”
“But I have the protection of the Zia sign.”
“Yes. So he figures out ways to get to you once and for all. He has killed you in prior lives, and maybe sometimes you got lucky and killed him. But you’re caught up in an eternal battle. That’s the meaning behind don Eliseo’s interpretation of your dream.”
Sonny shook his head. He knew Raven liked to play games. Ancient games. Taking Owl Woman was such a game. Now it was Sonny’s move.
“We’ve been at this for a long time?” Sonny pondered.
“Yes.”
“He’s getting closer,” Sonny whispered, feeling a worry in the gut, like a llano whirlwind enveloping a person in its fury even though the person had crossed his fingers and held up the sign to fend off the evil in the dust devil. Raven’s evil could not be turned away as easily.
Under his shirt the Zia medallion sat on his chest like an ancient heart beating its own rhythm. Sonny had tried to return the medallion to Tamara, and she had refused it, calling Sonny the new Raven. Sonny and Raven, the flip sides of the medallion, the light of the sun on one side, chaos of darkness on the other. Yin and yang brothers engaged in eternal battle, growing older and wiser, until the resolution of their struggle acquired cosmic proportions.
Sonny rubbed his forehead to clear his thoughts.
“You okay?” Lorenza asked.
“Sometimes I feel like getting rid of the medallion—”
“You can’t. The Zia sun symbol is the most life-affirming sign we have,” Lorenza said. “If you give up, Raven takes over.”
Yeah, Sonny knew. A responsibility had been given to him, and a lot depended on what he did.
He flipped through the pages until he found the date he was looking for. “Here it is. Fifteen ninety-eight, the year Oñate entered New México. Don Juan de Oñate, born 1552 in Zacatecas, México. Fought the Chichimecs, spent twenty years as a soldier, married Isabel Cortés Tolosa, a descendant of Hernán Cortés. She died in the 1580s. Some say he led the colonization to escape the sadness of her death.”
“Fifteen ninety-eight, date of origins …” She nodded.
Sonny trusted Lorenza implicitly; he respected her powers. She had taken him into his guardian world of spirits where he found his coyote spirit.
“Owl Woman, bathed in the river of the garden …”
“She keeps the Calendar of Dreams, the bowl. Could you recognize it if you saw it?”
“Yup. I held it in my hands, clear as daylight.”
“We know when we disrupt a person’s dream we cause psychological injury. But each person’s dream is connected to the collective dream, and so to kill one dreamer threatens us all. The dream is history—it is continuous. The dream contains the past and future. Raven knows he can cause incredible harm.”
“And he picked me.”
“You’re point man,” she replied softly.
Her voice was vibrant with a knowledge he would never find in the books before him.
“Some Pueblo legends say that even at the time of creation, a germ existed in the ear of corn. Some evil planted there by sorcerers. The corn that feeds us carries a germ—another way of saying we all come to earth with a positive and negative energy.”
“The same plus and minus that vibrate through the universe,” Sonny said. “Soul energy, don Eliseo says. One part seeks clarity, the other wants to return to chaos. Each one of us reflects the universe.”
“Time and space curve and come around, everything in the universe reappears somewhere, sometime. The dream curves. Raven, the sorcerer, plots the path. He can enter the dream and destroy the dreamer.”
“Bang, and I’m gone. What can the books tell us?” he asked, thumping the book in front of him.
“Names, a map of your past. Your genealogy.”
“I’m just part of everyone who ever came up the Río Grande. Puro mestizo.”
“Let’s see if Andres Vaca’s DNA is in you,” Lorenza said, and flipped the page.
“Okay.” Sonny took up a pen.
He wrote “Notes” across the top of the first notebook page. He read, then summarized:
—The Oñate expedition starts north for the interior province of New Mexico in early 1598. Six months on the trail. 200 soldiers and their families. Founded the first Spanish town near San Juan de los Caballeros, August 11, 1598. “Ciudad de Nuestro Padre San Francisco.” Called San Gabriel or San Juan Bautista. Completed the church by Sept. 7, 1598. Great rejoicing. The men played “Los Cristianos y los Moros,” a mock battle between the Catholic Spaniards and the Moors.
Sonny paused. “I haven’t taken notes since I was in college.” He laughed at his effort.
“We need the list of names of those soldiers. The muster roll,” Lorenza said. She stood and went to the shelf to browse through the titles.
Sonny continued making notes.
—1519, Hernán Cortez (or Cortés) calls the New World Nueva España. He destroys Mexico City, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.
—1528, Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked with the Narvaez expedition off the coast of Texas. Wanders lost through the region for 8 years.
Wonder if this Cabeza de Vaca is one of my long-ago relatives, Sonny mused. C de Vaca was a New Mexican family name he knew. In high school he had dated Tillie C de Baca. Cabeza de Vaca meant “Head of a Cow.” Cow man. Cowboy.
He took off his hat and placed it on the table. He hadn’t been riding since he sold his mare. He was no cowboy, but a drugstore cowboy. Puro pedo.
—1539, Fray Marcos de Niza and the black man Estevan enter Arizona and New Mexico.
—1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado leaves Compostela with 300 men, 5 Franciscan friars, and Indian allies in search of Niza’s Seven Cities of Cibola. A man called the Turk tells them stories of La Gran Quivira, so Coronado goes to Kansas. Destroys two pueblos.
—1546, gold found in Zacatecas.
—1581, Fray Agustín Rodríguez leads party into New Mexico. He and Fray López remain in the Tiguex Pueblo of Puaray.
—1582, Antonio de Espejo leads expedition into Arizona and New Mexico. Kills 16 Indians at Puaray.
Not beginning to look good for those who don’t write history, Sonny thought. Owl Woman. Can her Calendar of Dreams make a difference? What had the Bringer of Curses done with the shiny black bowl that held the symbols?
—1590, de Sosa’s illegal expedition. The king of Spain doesn’t want adventurers screwing up the Indians.
—1593, ’94, de Bonilla’s illegal expedition.
Then Oñate came along. Sonny read Villagrá’s Canto XIV carefully. How el Río del Norte was discovered, and how the expedition stopped there in what is now El Paso to rest and take possession of the province of New Mexico. Oñate spoke to his assembled troops and to the Indians:
And because I wish to take possession of the land today, the day of the Ascension of our Lord, which is counted thirty days in the month of April of this present year of one thousand five hundred and ninety-eight, through the person of Juan Perez de Donís, Notary of his Majesty and Secretary of the journey …
Sonny skipped a few lines.
I say that in the voice and in the name of the most Christian King Don Felipe, our lord, only defender and protector of the Holy Mother Church and its true son, and for the crown of Castile and of the kings who of his glorious stock may reign in it, and for the aforesaid my government I take and seize: once, twice and three times; one, two and three times; one, two and three times, and all those which I can and ought, the Royal tenancy and possession, actual, civil, and criminal, at this aforesaid River of the North.…
And on it went. Taking possession of everything. The arrogance! O
ñate had pounded the ground with a staff and taken the land, mountains, desert, rivers. Everything! And the scribe wrote it down, thus creating history. History was a map the newcomer laid over the land.
Took everything “which are now founded in the said kingdoms and provinces of New Mexico, and those neighboring to them.…”
Took the whole present-day damn Southwest, all of northern México. Took the whole enchilada!
Just like that, he raised his staff and pounded the earth, and what awe must have filled the assembly. For they could look north and imagine the provinces of New Mexico, a rich land, theirs for the taking.
The Indians, too, must have been in awe, for if they understood the translator, they must have wondered at the gall and greed of this man, saying he could possess the earth by merely pounding on it.
No, the earth did not belong to one person or one tribe. The earth was the mother for all to have and use.
So the man who could write history could take the land, and Lordy, Lordy, Sonny thought, the Spaniards were consummate notetakers if they were anything. They documented everything. History belonged to those who wrote it.
Sonny drew back from reading and rubbed his eyes. Six prior expeditions and only Oñate’s made a go of it. But, Lord, how he punished the Indians at Acoma.
“Blood and violence,” he whispered.
“Raven’s work,” Lorenza said, and slipped a book in front of Sonny. “Bancroft’s book has a list of the names in the Oñate expedition. Under the Vs.”
There it was, the name of Andres Vaca! Listed as a single man and a soldier with five years’ experience, he owned his horse, “una legua que se llama Estrella,” a breastplate, and his own sword.
“I don’t believe it,” Sonny whispered. How could he have dreamed a man he knew nothing of? He had never read, or looked at, this book before.
“It’s there,” Lorenza whispered.
Sonny scanned the rest of the list. In the Cs he spotted Roberto Cantú, a family man and scholar from México. He dropped to the Os.
Teniente General Cristóbal de Oñate
Capitán General Don Juan de Oñate
Juan de Ortega
Ortiz
And below the Os, the Ps.
Segundo Paladín
Simón de Paz
Juan de Pedraza
Alférez Pereyra
Simón Perez
Capitán Pinero
Alférez Francisco de Posa y Peñalosa
Antonio Pájaro
Sonny drew a breath and looked up at Lorenza. “Antonio Pájaro. That’s one of Raven’s aliases. Damn!”
Anthony Pájaro was the name Raven had used in the summer to gather the anti-WIPP people around his cause. When that didn’t work, he tried to dynamite the WIPP truck. According to the manifest in the book, he had been with the Oñate expedition.
Raven, the Bringer of Curses, moved back and forth in time, sowing destruction. He was a sorcerer who had existed since the beginning of time, an evil brujo who could fly!
As the Bringer of Curses he had taken Owl Woman. He was destroying Sonny’s past. But why had he taken the Romeros’ daughter, Consuelo?
“He wrote his name in the history book! It’s not possible,” Sonny said. “Somebody’s playing games.”
“Raven likes games, remember,” Lorenza said.
“He can’t just go back and change history!” Sonny complained.
“He has,” Lorenza said, and pointed at the book. Bancroft. One of the premier historians of the West. If the historian’s list written years ago could be changed, anything was possible.
Buy Shaman Winter Now!
Shaman Winter
A Sonny Baca Novel
Rudolfo Anaya
To the ancestors,
who brought their dreams
to New Mexico.
CONTENTS
Preface
Part I: The Shaman Dreams
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part II: Solstice Time
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part III: The Shaman’s Guide
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
PREFACE
Dreams are an important ingredient in most of my stories. Many readers have expressed a deep interest in Antonio’s dreams in Bless Me, Ultima.
Here, in Sonny Baca’s third adventure, he is drawn into the dreamworld not only to understand his past but to become master of his dreams, a shaman. Writing this novel took me into the world of the shaman, those traditional healers who help shattered souls become whole again.
Most will say that we cannot order our dreams, but we can understand the characters and language of dreams. We all have this shamanic gift that sheds light on our dreams, and we can use the dream messages to provide harmony for that deep essence that is the soul.
Perhaps in a world ruled by empirical science, Sonny’s descent into the dreamworld will seem anachronistic. We do not live in the shaman’s world. That may be true, but we all dream. We live in our unconscious as much as in our consciousness. If we are to truly know ourselves we must know our dreams, that world which is called the underworld in world mythologies.
In the previous novel, Rio Grande Fall, Sonny is injured. I choose to have him in a wheelchair because the person who is physically handicapped has also been one of my themes. So often we think of “getting well” as only a physical challenge. But getting well also involves the psyche. Both body and soul seek a harmonious existence.
Traditional healing practices and modern medicine, both help. Exploring dreams and what they tell us also helps. Someday we may come to a more total and unified way of understanding ourselves. In the meantime we seek meaning not only in ordinary reality but also in dreams. The challenges of life require this unified approach.
I want to thank the University of New Mexico Press for reissuing the four Sonny Baca novels. The kind and professional efforts of UNM Press ensures that my work and that of many of our writers will remain in print.
—Rudolfo Anaya
PART I
THE SHAMAN DREAMS
1
Sonny awakened with a cry tearing from his throat. “Aaaowl W’oooman!”
He reached for her, feeling she was within his reach, just beyond the luminous light of the doorway, but the dream was already fading.
“Híjola,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and struggling to sit up. A dream, but it seemed so real.
He shivered. His bedroom was cold.
He looked around, half expecting to see the desert scene of the dream; instead, he was enveloped in the soft aura of a December dawn flooding through his window. He had startled Chica. She peered from the blankets where she lay snuggled, looking at him with an understanding expression.
“Qué pasa?” her seal-like eyes seemed to ask.
“It’s okay, Chica, just a dream,” he said, petted her, and lay back into his pillow.
Chica was the red dachshund that had appeared in the neighborhood. Don Eliseo, Sonny’s neighbor, took her in and fed her, but she insisted on making her home with Sonny.
“She’s lost,” the old man said. “I fed her, but she keeps coming to your door.”
“Let her stay,” Sonny said. Don Eliseo had set up a box for her to sleep in, but every night she jumped on the bed and burrowed beneath the blankets.
Sonny reached for the notebook on the bed stand. During the past few months his dreams had been very real, and don Eliseo had suggested that he record them. The old man was teaching Sonny how to construct his dreams.
“A person can a
ctually be in charge of their dreams,” the old man said.
Sonny doubted him at first. Dreams were supposed to be incoherent, random images that came out of nowhere. Symbols that needed to be interpreted. How could one order one’s dreams?
“When you enter the dream, you leave this world,” don Eliseo replied. “The two worlds are connected by a luminous door. You are the master of your life in this world, so you can be the master of your dreams.”
Sonny followed his instructions, and he had become adept at it. Dreams that used to come as jumbled images now came as stories that somehow Sonny began to manipulate even as he dreamed.
“Let’s see,” he whispered, wetting the tip of the pencil with his tongue, and then began to record the dream.
In the dream I was a Spanish soldier named Andres Vaca. I was with Oñate on the banks of the Río Grande just before he started his march into New Mexico in 1598 …
He paused and saw himself again, standing on the sandy banks of the river, staring across the slow-moving, muddy waters. To the north lay the unknown province, that huge expanse of land the earlier Spanish explorers referred to as La Nueva México.
Oñate’s expedition had come north from Mexico to the banks of the Río Bravo, as it was called on some of the early maps, near a place called El Paso del Norte. From the valley of San Bartolomé in Nueva Viscaya, they had traveled, journeying north to the promised land, la tierra adentro, the land of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and the other earlier Spanish explorers. Behind them lay the desert of Chihuahua.
Andres stood looking north, Sonny wrote, wearing a white shirt and black pantaloons and the helmet and breastplate of a soldier. For the soldiers and families who had come with don Juan, this was more than a new adventure, it was a chance for a new life. They realized there were many more dangers to be faced as they crossed the desert called la Jornada del Muerto, but the explorers were eager and expectant.
The vision of what La Nueva México promised was a constant inducement for the weary members of the expedition. For the men the possibility of finding gold meant they could be hidalgos, hijos de algo. They could acquire land and a proper title, something they could never hope for in Spain or México. Yes, the life of a landed gentleman was worth risking one’s life for. Even the adelantado Oñate dreamed of finding rich mines to rival those of Zacatecas.