Ghost Warrior Read online

  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.

  Sister started shouting when she passed the hide-covered tipis and the brush-covered lodges and arbors of She Moves Like Water.

  “Shiwoyé. Grandmother.”

  Her grandmother put aside the cradleboard she was making. She stood and held out her arms. Sister ran into them. “You have come.” Grandmother’s voice broke with joy and grief.

  The boys standing watch had seen the procession approaching. They had told the old ones that the number of people returning was much smaller than those who had left. Grandmother had waited all day while anxiety pecked at her like magpies at a horse’s sore back.

  Others put their arms around the old ones who had stayed behind to look after the lodges. They held them close in a silent greeting. Smoke hung over the village for days as people set fire to the belongings of those who had died. They had to burn so many lodges that they moved the village. But even there, the women’s wails of gr
ief sounded from the forest each evening at sunset.

  MORNING STAR AND COUSIN RAN BAREFOOT IN A ROCKING lope behind the two horses they had stolen from the pickets of some Pale Eyes wagon drivers. Morning Star looked back over his shoulder at the cloud billowing up and outward from the desert floor. It disgorged a pair of men on horseback, their forms blurred by the dust. The fine powder had coated the horses. It had permeated the riders’ canvas trousers and cotton shirts, heavy boots and wide-brimmed felt hats. As they drew closer, they seemed to materialize from the cloud itself. Finally they solidified into flesh and bone, canvas, leather, felt, and a goatee.

  Morning Star and Cousin reached the thicket bordering the rock-strewn creek. They flapped their arms to send the ponies veering down a narrow track through the bushes to join those few that they had been able to steal on this raid. The herd boys, Talks A Lot, Ears So Big, He Steals Love, and Flies In His Stew, guarded them.

  A mother bear with a cub had made this raid harder for Cousin. He had been lying on his stomach drinking at a spring when the bear snagged his moccasin and tried to drag him away as though he were a fat trout. Cousin objected. In the tussle the bear tore the left side of his face before he drove the knife through her eye and into the brain. He made a necklace of the claws and teeth that had disfigured him.

  Blood still stained the teeth and claws. Cousin’s face was still swollen and raked with raw, red slashes. In the fight he had gained something more valuable than a necklace. Killing her had given him Bear Power. Bear Power was unpredictable, though, and those who had it were unpredictable, too. Bear power could make a person act insanely. Already people had begun to treat Cousin with a wary respect, and when he wasn’t around, they called him Loco, Crazy.

  The two men stood at ease in front of the snarl of stunted willows, cactus, and interlacing vines. Loco lifted his torn eyelid so he could see out of it.

  “Two white men are chasing us,” Morning Star told the thicket. “One of them is black.”

  “Black?” the thicket asked.

  “Maybe that one was left too long in the sun when he was a baby,” Loco added for the thicket’s edification. “He’s as black as that mule steak your wife let fall into the flames.”

  “If you don’t like my wife’s cooking, why do you show up whenever the meal’s ready?” the thicket retorted. “How far away are they?”

  “They’re coming into range now,” Morning Star said.

  The thicket quivered and rustled, and Broken Foot, Skinny, and the fifteen other men in the party stepped out of it. They brandished their lances and bows and commenced whooping.

  The pursuers reined to a stiff-legged halt that sent up a shower of dirt. The horses reared and plunged as the two men scrambled off. The black man’s foot caught in the stirrup, and he hopped around, trying to free it, while the horse circled and kicked. Both men tangled themselves and their weapons in the reins when they put their arms through them to keep their mounts from running away.

  “I think they mean to shoot each other,” Loco observed.

  “The white white man needs an extra mule to carry that big gun,” said Broken Foot.

  Morning Star chuckled. “They’re either brave or stupid.”

  “I would say stupid,” said Loco. “All Pale Eyes are stupid.”

  “I think their guns misfired.”

  Loco began to leap up and down and shout. “You Pale Eyes are such bunglers you can’t find your arse holes with your nose-picking fingers.”

  “I’ll bet you’ve shit into those trousers of yours,” shouted Skinny. He turned and lifted the tail of his breechclout, to give them a clear view of his bony rump.

  Loco, Broken Foot, Morning Star, and everyone else turned around too, presenting their attackers with a long row of bare, brown backsides. They beat a tattoo on them, and hooted and shouted insults.

  When the two men realized that their guns weren’t going to fire, they chased their horses in circles at the ends of the reins. The black man clambered aboard first and held the other’s big shotgun so he could vault into his, bypassing the stirrups. As the two rode off, clinging to their horses’ necks and with their own rear ends bouncing, Morning Star and the others let fly a shower of arrows gauged to fall just short.

  When the dust cloud had swallowed the two men again and whirled them off to a safer place, the Red Paint men trotted out to collect the arrows. Then they sauntered to the small horse herd that Morning Star and Loco had increased by two. Morning Star gestured to He Steals Love to bring his new pony.

  The horse was a compact little stallion, the yellow dun color of a smoked hide. He had big restless ears, sly eyes, long legs, and a short body. Morning Star decided to call him Coyote.

  Morning Star mounted and rode laughing after his friends. He Steals Love and the other herd boys trotted behind him.

  Chapter 4

  PANDORA IN A BOX

  Rafe hooked a leg over the pommel of the Mexican saddle on his big roan gelding, cocked his old Hall rifle, laid it across his thigh, and watched the pack of men approach. They were heading south, toward the border most likely. God help any poor Mexicans they found. Any Indians they found would have to help themselves.

  Rafe glanced to heaven, where a raiding band of Comanches in west Texas had sent his own mother and father when he was fifteen. He thanked God for constructing him with yellow hair. Comanches preferred scalps with yellow hair attached, but not these men. He curled his finger around the trigger, reassured by the hard, smooth curve of it.

  The bounty hunters carried enough weapons to outfit a group containing twice their numbers. Bundles of scalps, salted and stretched on hoops, dangled from the lead rider’s saddle. The horse’s bridle looked as though it were made of braided black horsehair, but Rafe had seen it up close before. The human teeth dangling from it as decoration reinforced his belief that the hair hadn’t come from horses.

  Rafe was acquainted with the tightly strung, greasy-haired, undersize individual who occupied the saddle on the lead horse. He had crossed paths with John Joel Glanton and his rabble of bounty killers before. He knew, for instance, that Glanton had once been a preacher, and that he referred to the scalps as “golden fleeces.”

  Attrition ran high in Glanton’s crowd. They’d been known to scalp injured members of their own company on the principle of “Waste not, want not,” but today the gang consisted of a familiar bunch of cutthroats. Rafe recognized two former Texas Rangers, a runaway Negro slave, an Irishman, a French Canadian, a Comanche, two Mexicans, and a Delaware Indian. A few of the men were strangers to Rafe, and they didn’t look completely at ease in the company they were keeping. They were probably gold rushers who thought to earn some quick cash in the scalp trade.

  Instead of their usual leather britches and hunting shirts lacquered black with grease and blood and dirt, they wore breechclouts and moccasins. A few of them carried bows and quivers slung across their backs, which meant the rumors were true. Glanton had killed so many Indians that his quarry had become wary and difficult to find. Dressed as Apaches, he and his men were now attacking Mexican villages.

  The rumor was that after they murdered the inhabitants—men, women, and children—they filled the cattle with arrows to make it look like an Indian raid. Rafe knew that Apaches didn’t scalp their enemies, but most Mexicans—Americans, too—believed they did. Glanton’s crowd collected on the Mexican scalps in the governors’ offices of Chihuahua and Sonora. Glanton was a pragmatic man, and black hair was black hair. The authorities wouldn’t know the difference.

  When they got close enough for Rafe to smell them, which was well beyond rifle range, Rafe raised a hand that was more a warning that they advance no farther than a greeting.

  “Good day to you, John,” he said.

  “Rafe.” Glanton reached two fingers up to the place where a brim would be if he were wearing a hat. “Seen any ’Patch around here?” He spoke with a cultured North Carolina accent.

  “Can’t say as I have.”
/>   “Well, keep your hair under your hat.”

  “I will endeavor to do that.” Rafe watched until they had ridden out of sight around a bend in the river before he kicked his mule into motion.

  When he reached his camp, he wanted to strip naked, wade into the muddy water of the river, and wash the stench of Glanton’s rabble off his skin. Instead, he stood with arms folded across his chest and listened to the report of his three Mexican drovers. Apaches had stolen two of the horses from the picket line, and Señor Absalom and his big Negro had gone after them. Rafe was about to set out to find Absalom and Caesar when they saved him the trouble. Their horses were lathered and blowing.

  When the two men dismounted, they walked with a distinct wobble. Caesar led the horses off to rub them down and feed them.

  “I see you didn’t recover the ponies or take the scalps you bought that blunderbuss to hunt.” Rafe nodded at Absalom’s big shotgun. Absalom had had one barrel rifled in order to bring down much bigger game than quail.

  “We were fortunate to escape with our lives.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Absalom started to give details, but the arrival of a few wagons interrupted him. All of them were loaded, but the lead one rode lower on its front springs than the others.

  “Damnation,” Rafe muttered.

  “Someone you know?”

  “General Armijo.”

  John Glanton, Apache horse thieves, and Manuel Armijo all on the same day, Rafe thought. The devil must be in a particularly meddlesome mood.

  Armijo pulled up, axles shrieking. The color was flaking off the Virgin Mary and her mob of cherubim painted on the wagon’s side. They looked as though leprosy had been added to their afflictions of jaundice and constipation. Three Apache women and a teenaged boy, their wrists tied behind their backs, walked behind. The ropes around their necks tethered them to the wagon’s tailgate. They glared from behind the dark bangs that fell in front of their eyes.