I’m glad you were able to take in Marcie and Heather. We all owe those two a debt. Corvallis would have been a shock. Pine View should offer a kinder readjustment.
Tell Abby I gave her letter to some old professors who have been talking about starting up classes again. There just may be a university of sorts here, in a year or so — assuming the war goes well.
Of course the latter’s not absolutely assured. Things have turned around, but we have a long, long way to go against a terrible enemy.
Your last question is a troubling one, Mrs. Thompson, and I don’t even know if I can answer. It doesn’t surprise me that the story of the Scouts’ Sacrifice reached you, up there in the mountains. But you should know that even down here we aren’t exactly clear about the details, yet.
All I can really tell you now is, yes, I knew Dena Spurgen well. And no, I don’t think I understood her at all. I honestly wonder if I ever will.
Gordon sat on a bench just outside the Corvallis Post Office. He rested his back against the rough wall, catching the rays of the morning sun, and thought about things he could not write of in his letter to Mrs. Thompson… things for which he could not find words.
Until they had recaptured the villages of Chesire and Franklin, all the people of the Willamette had to go on were rumors, for not one of the Scouts had ever come home again from that unauthorized, midwinter foray. After the first counterattacks, though, newly released slaves began relating parts of the story. Slowly, the pieces fell together,
One winter day — in fact only two days after Gordon had left Corvallis on his long trek south — the women Scouts started deserting from their army of farmers and townsmen. A few at a time, they slipped away south and west, and gave themselves up, unarmed, to the enemy.
A few were killed on the spot. Others were raped and tortured by laughing madmen who would not even hear their carefully rehearsed declarations.
Most, though, were taken in — as they had hoped — welcomed by the Holnists’ insatiable appetite for women.
Those who could pass it off believably explained that they were sick of living as fanners’ wives, and wanted the touch of “real men.” It was a tale the followers of Nathan Holn were disposed to accept, or so those who had dreamed up the plan imagined.
What followed must have been hard, perhaps beyond imagining. For the women had to pretend, and pretend believably, until the scheduled red night of knives — the night when they were supposed to save the frail remnant of civilization from the monsters who were bringing it down.
What exactly went wrong wasn’t yet clear, as the spring counteroffensive pushed through the first recaptured towns. Perhaps an invader grew suspicious and tortured some poor girl until she talked. Or maybe one of the women fell in love with her fierce barbarian, and spilled her heart in a betraying confession. Dena was correct that history told of such things occurring. It might have happened here.
Or perhaps some simply could not lie well enough, or hide the shivers when their new lords touched them.
Whatever went wrong, the scheduled night was red, indeed. Where the warning did not arrive in time, women stole kitchen knives, that midnight, and slipped from room to room, killing and killing again until they themselves went down struggling.
Elsewhere, they merely went down, cursing and spitting into their enemies’ eyes to the last.
Of course it was a failure. Anyone could have predicted it. Even where the plan “succeeded,” too few of the invaders died to make any real difference. The women soldiers’ sacrifice accomplished nothing at all in any military sense.
The gesture was a tragic fiasco.
Word spread though, across the lines and up the valleys. Men listened, dumbfounded, and shook their heads in disbelief. Women heard also, and spoke together urgently, privately. They argued, frowned, and thought.
Eventually, word arrived even far to the south. By now a legend, the story came at last to Sugarloaf Mountain.
And there, high above the confluence of the roaring Coquille, the Scouts finally won their victory.
All I can tell you is that I hope this thing doesn’t turn into a dogma, a religion. In my worst dreams I see women taking up a tradition of drowning their sons, if they show signs of becoming bullies. I envision them doing their duty, by passing on life and death before a male child becomes a threat to all around him.
Maybe a fraction of us males are “too mad to be allowed to live.” But taken to the extreme, this “solution” is something that terrifies me… as an ideology, it is something my mind cannot even grasp.
Of course, it’ll probably sort itself out. Women are too sensible to take this to extremes. That, perhaps, is in the end where our hope lies.
And now it’s time to mail this letter. I will try to write to you and Abby again from Coos Bay. Until then, I remain your devoted—
“Courier!”
Gordon hailed a passing youth, wearing the blue denim and leather of a postman. The young man hurried over and saluted. Gordon held out the envelope. “Would you drop this onto the regular eastbound sort stack for me?”
“Yessir. Right away, sir!”
“No rush,” Gordon smiled. “It’s just a personal—”
But the young man had already taken off at a dead run. Gordon sighed. The old days of close camaraderie, of knowing every person in the “postal service” were over. He was too high above these young couriers to share a lazy grin and perhaps a minute’s gossip.
Yes, it’s definitely time.
He stood up, and only winced slightly as he hefted his saddlebags.
“So you’re goin’ to skip the hoedown, after all?”
He turned. Eric Stevens stood at the post office’s side door, chewing on a blade of grass and regarding Gordon with folded arms.
Gordon shrugged. “It seems best just to go. I don’t want a party in my honor. All that fuss is just a waste of time.”
Stevens nodded, agreeing. His calm strength had been a blessing during Gordon’s recuperation — especially his derisive dismissal of any suggestion by Gordon that he was to blame for Johnny’s death. To Eric, his grandson had died as well as any man could hope to. The counteroffensive had been proof enough for him, and Gordon had decided not to argue about it.
The old man shaded his eyes and looked out across the nearby garden plots toward the south end of Highway 99.
“More southerners ridin’ in.”
Gordon turned and saw a column of mounted men riding slowly by on their way north, toward the main encampment.
“Sheesh,” Stevens snickered, “look at their eyes pop. You’d think they’d never seen a city before.”
Indeed, the tough, bearded men of Sutheriin and Roseburg, of Camas and Coos Bay, rode into town blinking in obvious amazement at strange sights — at windmill generators and humming electric lines, at busy machine shops, and at scores of clean, noisy children playing in the schoolyards.
Calling this a city may be stretching things, Gordon noted. But Eric had a point.
Old Glory flapped over a busy central post office. At intervals, uniformed couriers leaped onto ponies and sped off north, east, and south, saddlebags bulging.
From the House of Cyclops poured forth rich music from another time, and nearby a small, patchy-colored blimp bobbed within its scaffolding while white-coated workers argued in the ancient, arcane tongue of engineering.
On one flank of the tiny airship was painted an eagle, rising from a pyre. The other side bore the crest of the sovereign State of Oregon.