Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

Ghost Warrior (9 page)

BOOK: Ghost Warrior

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SUN RUMBLES INSIDE IT

S
ince before Lozen was born she had heard her grandlike Grandmother. Her brother she could mother sounded like Grandmother. Lozen wished she could have known her mother for as long as her brother had. When the Hair Takers attacked her people at the Death Feast, Morning Star had grabbed Sister's cradleboard and run with it, but he had not been able to save their mother.

When Grandmother sang, Lozen closed her eyes and pretended the voice was her mother's. When she was younger, Lozen had wakened each morning to the sound of her Grandmother's song, a greeting to the day and to Yusen, Life Giver. Each morning she had reached out and felt the warmth of the blankets where her grandmother had lain beside her.

Lozen grew taller and Grandmother grew smaller with the years until now Lozen could look down and see the individual gray strands of hair growing from her grandmother's brown scalp. Grandmother laughed and said that the rain and the sun had shrunk her like the Mexicans' cotton cloth.

Time had eroded a crisscross pattern of wrinkles in her cheeks. The bones of her skull formed large hollows around her eyes, leaving her sparse gray eyebrows perched at the apex, and giving her the look of a startled owl. She had the biggest ears and the kindest eyes of anyone Lozen knew. Her eyes were framed by the heavy lids above them and the pouches of skin underneath. When she smiled, the folds and gullies of her face shifted into a look of impish joy. Around her wrinkled neck she wore thirty or forty necklaces of shiny seeds and glass beads. Blue stones dangled from earlobes that looked like a pair of tree fungi.

Grandmother was a
di-yin,
a shaman. Women with sadness in their eyes came to her fire to ask her to sing away an illness, or sing back a straying husband. Some came smiling, their palms caressing their swollen bellies, and asked her to sing a cradle into being and welcome a new baby into the world. Those were Grandmother's favorite sings.

This time She Moves Like Water had brought her the traditional four presents of tobacco, yellow pollen, a well-tanned buckskin, and a black-handled knife. She asked her to make a
tsoch,
a cradleboard for her three-day-old daughter. She Moves Like Water had held out her arm, and Grandmother had used a buckskin thong to measure from the crook of her elbow to her closed fist. She Moves Like Water could hold a cradle this wide comfortably when she nursed her daughter.

At dawn this morning, Lozen and Stands Alone went with Grandmother to collect the materials. Both of them knew that White Painted Woman had given the instructions for cradle-making back at the beginning of time, but Grandmother always explained them again.

“The materials must be gathered and assembled in one day,” she said. “Pine is easy to cut and shape for the frame, but it attracts lightning. Black locust will make the child grow straight and strong.”

Grandmother sang while she cut locust for the frame, a willow branch for the canopy hoop, cedar for the footrest. She sang while she gathered absorbent moss to pack around the baby and yucca stems for the back slats. While they were at it, the three of them cut strips of willow bark to grind into a powder that would soothe rashes. They collected cottonwood down to stuff the baby's pillow.

Stands Alone helped Lozen hoist the loaded basket onto her back, and they followed Grandmother back to their family's camp. Next to the arbor Grandmother stirred up the fire she would use to shape the locust and willow into the frame and canopy. Stands Alone laid out cowhides for Grandmother to sit on while she worked.

Lozen arranged the materials in the necessary pattern and
order. She went into the lodge and searched through Grandmother's storage pouches until she found the bags of bird bones, shiny pebbles, and bits of lightning-struck wood to hang from the canopy's rim as protection against lightning and illness.

Grandmother began by rolling tobacco into a dried leaf and smoking to the four directions. She asked Life Giver to send his power through her hands so the cradleboard would give health and long life to its tiny occupant. When Grandmother used the gifts the spirits had given her, she radiated a serene confidence.

Time, hard work, and old injuries had swelled Grandmother's knuckles and bent her fingers at rigid right angles to her hands, and she needed more assistance these days than in the past. With the knife She Moves Like Water had brought, Lozen helped Grandmother scrape the yucca stems smooth for the back slats. Grandmother fastened them so that everything fit together tightly to make a cradle that was strong and graceful. As she shaped the frame into an elongated oval, bent the willow into its graceful curve for the canopy, and lashed the back slats into place, she sang the most beautiful song of the hundreds she knew.

Good, like long life it moves back and forth.
By means of White Water under it, it is made.
By means of Rainbow curved over it, it is made.
Lightning dances alongside it, they say.
Good, like long life the cradle is made.
Sun rumbles inside it, they say.

When she wasn't singing one of the cradle-making songs, she repeated the refrain that would create a special bond with her great granddaughter. She had sung it while she made Lozen's cradle fourteen years ago and Lozen's mother's forty years before that.

“Look at her, this pretty little one. She calls me Granny. She calls me Granny. Look at her.” She had made so many
cradles that most of the children called her Granny, and so did their parents.

She let Lozen stain the buckskin with the sacred yellow pollen and taught her the words to sing while she did it. Lozen made a line of holes in it with her bone awl and held it in place while Grandmother laced it tightly around the canopy and frame. Then Lozen helped her attach the buckskin pieces that would lace in a zigzag, like lightning, up the front to wrap around Daughter and hold her in place. With fine stitches Grandmother sewed the buckskin sides on in two sets so that the top half could be left open in hot weather.

She worked more slowly than she had in the past. Lozen worried that she might not finish by dusk, but the sun was just setting when Grandmother attached the rawhide tumpline to the sides and cut the half moon in the leather covering of the canopy to signify that the occupant was a girl. She tucked a packet of sacred pollen and gray sage into an inner pocket for added protection against lightning. Into the other pocket she put a small, turtle-shaped bag with a piece of Daughter's umbilical cord and a slice of fragrant
osha
root to keep away colds and sore throat.

She stood it against the arbor's corner pole, and she and Lozen sat back on their heels to look at it. Its lines were graceful and practical. The yellow pollen gave it a cheerful look, like solid sunshine. Lozen thought of the last two lines of Grandmother's song. “Good, like long life the cradle is made. / Sun rumbles inside it, they say.”

With the tips of her fingers, Lozen set the dangling bird bones and pebbles to swaying and clicking together softly as though having a private conversation. She opened the front flaps and felt the soft padding of leather. She smiled up at Grandmother. Sensing enemies at a distance was good magic to have, but Grandmother's gifts were better.

SINCE HE MARRIED SHE MOVES LIKE WATER, MORNING Star had come to understand why the old men cheerfully turned their responsibilities as leaders over to the younger
ones. He understood why they seemed content to stay home by their fires while their grandchildren crawled over them like puppies and younger men rode away to steal ponies, captives, and glory. Sometimes he thought he would be happy to spend most of his days watching his woman move about her camp as slender and supple as a willow withe, as graceful as a hawk in flight.

Now he watched her take her best doeskin skirt and tunic top from their parfleche and shake the creases out to the music of the tin cones that formed a thick fringe all over them. It was the same costume she had worn at her ceremony of White Painted Woman. Morning Star had come to Warm Springs to attend the feast and to visit Cousin before he became known as Loco. He had seen She Moves Like Water often when he visited here, but she had been a child then.

He had fallen in love with her when he saw her emerge from the tall tipi of oak saplings. After she had run four times to show her strength and agility, he had joined the line of people waiting for her blessing. When he kneeled and felt the butterfly brush of her fingers making a cross of pollen on his forehead, he had felt as though he were tumbling head over heels down a steep, grassy slope.

He had summoned the courage to approach her when the dancing began. He remembered the gentle pressure of her head on his shoulder and the warmth of her breath on his neck during that first dance. He remembered moving in time with her, circling to the rhythm of the drums, like their own hearts beating. He remembered feeling light-headed with joy and longing and surprise.

Most of the unmarried men of the Warm Springs band had courted her, but none as single-mindedly as he did. He had helped her cultivate the cornfield, and he had cut firewood for baking the mescal she and the other women harvested. He had waited by the trail for her to pass, and she had spoken shyly with him, always observing propriety by having a friend nearby and keeping bushes between her and him.

When she kept the haunch of venison and the tanned hide he left at the door of her lodge, he knew she would marry
him. His sister and grandmother had packed the family's belongings onto a few mules, and the three of them left their home in the Mogollon Mountains to the west. She Moves Like Water and her mother and younger sister raised a tipi of hides for the couple near their encampment and built a domed lodge for Sister and Grandmother. Morning Star's family had always had relatives among the Red Paints of the Warm Springs band, and they had visited often. Lozen already knew the children here and, he remembered with a wry smile, had fought with most of the boys at one time or another.

As night approached, Morning Star dressed for the dancing. She Moves Like Water had laid out his best breechclout and moccasins, his war cap decorated with eagle and turkey feathers, and the cartridge belt Lozen had taken from the drunken Pale Eyes and given to him. The belt's original owner would not have recognized it. Lozen had rubbed it with pollen, giving a golden burnish to the leather. She had beaded the edges and decorated them with a fringe of metal cones. She had added cowrie shells and pieces of the Pale Eyes' green glass.

She Moves Like Water set out the fringed and beaded parfleche, but she didn't open it. Inside it Morning Star kept his bags of pollen, his war amulets, and his
izze-kloth,
the medicine cord.

Medicine cords were worn on the war trail and during the Fierce Dance, like the one they would hold tonight. Only a shaman with great influence could make a cord that had Enemies-Against power. Broken Foot had assembled this one of four twisted rawhide thongs that he had painted, each a different colorâred, yellow, black, and white. He had woven eagle down, beads, shells, petrified wood, an eaglet's claw, bits of lightning-struck wood and the sacred blue stone into them.

Each item carried its own special power. The blue stone would make his bow and his pistol shoot accurately. The wood protected him from lightning. Other items would ensure that no bullet could harm him and would keep him from
getting lost. Morning Star lifted it reverently, said a prayer, and put it over his head. He settled it across his chest from his right shoulder to his left hip and fastened his bags of pollen to it.

He sat cross-legged on the hides spread across the lodge's floor. She Moves Like Water knelt behind him and combed the snarls from his hair. His hair was so long that she had to comb it in sections, starting with the ends.

“Maybe you will find a woman in Mexico,” she murmured. “One who will satisfy you and will work hard.”

The touch of her hands in his hair and on his neck sent thrills through him. They had not coupled since the baby began to make her presence known by a bulge under She Moves Like Water's skirt. Nor would they be able to for several more years, until Daughter stopped nursing.

Coupling led to pregnancy, and pregnancy interrupted the flow of milk to the first baby. Besides that, caring for two small ones while cooking, tanning hides, sewing, harvesting, preparing food for winter, hauling wood and water, and making baskets and water jugs imposed an unreasonable burden on their mother. People scorned a man who got his woman with child too soon, but no one condemned him if he took a second wife or slept with a Mexican slave.

“I would go with you if I could,” she said.

The deepening darkness seemed to separate them from the rest of the world. They had not slept apart for more than seven or eight days, and this was the first war raid since then. She Moves Like Water would never admit to being afraid for him, but she was. He was stronger and handsomer than any man she knew, but he was more than that. He had magic of his own. It drew people to him and made them like him and trust him. He had the power to make She Moves Like Water love him more than life itself.

Morning Star picked Daughter up from her nest of rabbit skins.

“I've talked to my sister,” he said. “She knows she must help you and do whatever you tell her.”

BOOK: Ghost Warrior

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