“One day though, emissaries came out from the city to see him. Rome’s armies were in rout; their leaders had proven incompetent. Disaster seemed inevitable.
“The delegation approached Cincinnatus — they found him behind his plow — and they pleaded with him to take command of the last defense.”
“What did Cincinnatus tell the guys from Rome?”
“Oh, well,” Gordon yawned. “He agreed all right. Reluctantly. He rallied the Romans, beat the invaders, and drove them all the way back to their own city. It was a great victory.”
“I’ll bet they made him king or something,” Johnny suggested.
Gordon shook his head. “The army wanted to. The people, also… But Cincinnatus told them all they could go chase themselves. He returned to his farm, and never left it again.”
Johnny scratched his head. “But… why did he do that? I don’t get it.”
Gordon did though. He understood the story completely, now that he thought about it. He had had the reasons explained to him, not so very long ago, and he would never forget.
“Gordon?”
He did not answer. Instead he turned over at a faint sound from outside. Looking through the slats, he saw a party of men approaching up the trail from the river docks. A boat had just come ashore.
Johnny seemed not to have noticed yet. He persisted in his questions, as he had ever since they had recovered from their capture. Like Dena, the youth never seemed willing to lose any opportunity to try to improve his education.
“Rome was a long time before the American Revolution wasn’t it, Gordon? Well then, what was this—” He picked up the book again. “—this Order of Cincinnatus Holn talks about here?”
Gordon watched the procession approach the jail pen. Two serfs labored with a stretcher, guarded by khaki-clad survivalist soldiers.
“George Washington founded the Order of the Cincinnati after the Revolutionary War,” he said absently. “His former officers were the chief members—”
He stopped as their guard stepped over and unlocked the gate. They both watched as the serfs entered and laid their burden on the straw. They and their escorts turned and left without another word.
“He’s hurt pretty bad,” Johnny said when they hurried over to examine the injured man. “This compress hasn’t been changed in days.”
Gordon had seen plenty of wounded men in the years since his sophomore class had been drafted into the militia. He had learned a lot of bush diagnosis while serving with Lieutenant Van’s platoon. A glance told him that this fellow’s bullet wounds might have healed, eventually, with proper treatment. But the smell of death now hung over the still figure. It rose from limbs suppurated with marks of torture.
“I hope he lied to them,” Johnny muttered as he labored to make the dying prisoner comfortable. Gordon helped fit their blankets around him. He was puzzled over where the fellow had come from. He did not look like a Willametter. And unlike most Camas and Roseburg men, he had obviously been clean shaven until recently. In spite of his ill treatment, there was too much meat on his bones for him to have been a serf.
Gordon stopped suddenly, rocking back on his haunches. His eyes closed and opened. He stared. “Johnny, look here. Is this what I think it is?”
Johnny peered where he pointed, then pulled back the blankets for a better view. “Well I’ll be… Gordon, this looks like a uniform!”
Gordon nodded. A uniform… and clearly one of postwar making. It was colored and cut totally unlike anything the Holnists wore, or for that matter, anything either of them had ever seen in Oregon before.
On one shoulder, the dying man wore a patch embroidered with a symbol Gordon recognized from long ago… a brown grizzly bear striding upon a red stripe… all against a field of gold.
A while later word arrived that Gordon was wanted again. The usual escort came for him by torchlight. “That man in there is dying,” he told the head guard.
The taciturn, three-earring Holnist shrugged. “So? Woman’s comin’ to tend him. Now move. General’s waitin’.”
On their way up the moonlit path they encountered a figure coming down the other way. The slope-shouldered drudge stepped aside and waited for the men to pass, eyes downcast to the tray of rolled bandages and unguents she held. None of the aloof guards seemed to notice her at all.
At the last moment, however, she looked up at Gordon. He recognized the same small woman with gray-streaked brown hair, the one who had taken and repaired his uniform some days back. He tried to smile at her as they passed, but it only seemed to unnerve her. She ducked her head and scuttled back into the shadows.
Saddened, Gordon continued up the path with his escort. She had reminded him a little of Abby. One of his worries had to do with his friends back in Pine View. The Holnist scouts who discovered his journal had corne very close to the friendly little village. It wasn’t only the frail civilization in the Willamette that was in terrible danger.
Nobody anywhere was safe anymore, he knew — except, perhaps, George Powhatan, living safe atop Sugar-loaf Mountain, tending his bees and beer while the rest of what was left of the world burned.
“I’m getting tired of your stalling, Krantz,” General Macklin told him when the guards had left the book-lined former ranger station.
“You put me in a hard position, General. I’m studying the book Colonel Bezoar lent me, trying to understand—”
“Cut the crap, will you?” Macklin approached until his face was two feet from Gordon’s. Even looking upward, the Holnist’s strangely contorted visage was intimidating. “I know men, Krantz. You’re strong all right, and you’d make a good vassal. But you’re all mucked up with guilt and other ‘civilized’ poisons. So much so that I’m beginning to think maybe you’ll be useless, after all.”
The implication was direct. Gordon forced himself not to show the weakness in his knees.
“You can be the Baron of Corvallis, Krantz. A senior lord in our new empire. You can even hold onto some of your quaint, old-fashioned sentiments, if you want… and if you’re strong enough to enforce them. You want to be nice to your own vassals? You want post offices?
“We might even find a use for that ‘Restored United States’ of yours.” Macklin gave Gordon a toothy, odorous smile. “That’s why only Charlie and I know about that little black journal of yours, until we can check the idea out.
“It’s not because I like you, understand. It’s because we’d benefit a little if you cooperated. You might rule those techs in Corvallis better than any of my boys could. We might even decide to keep that Cyclops machine going, if it paid its keep.”
So the Holnists hadn’t yet pierced the legend of the great computer. Not that it mattered much. They never had really cared about technology, except what was necessary to make war. Science benefitted everyone too much, especially the weak.
Macklin picked up the fireplace poker and slapped it into his left palm. “The alternative, of course, is that we’ll take Corvallis anyway, this spring. Only if we have to do it our way, it’ll burn. And there won’t be no post offices anywhere, boy. No smart-ass machines.”
With the poker Macklin reached out and touched a sheet of paper on the desk. A pen and ink pot lay next to it. Gordon well knew what the man expected of him.
If all he had to do was agree to the scheme, Gordon would have done so at once. He would have played along until he had a chance to make a break for it.
But Macklin was too canny. He wanted Gordon to write to the Council in Corvallis, convincing them to surrender several key towns as an act of good faith before he would be released.