The Postman (38 page)

Sitting with clutched hands, the most powerful man
alive—sole relic of an age of near-gods—seemed to draw into himself like a small boy, exhausted, ashamed.

“You’re right,” he groaned. “It never ends. I’ve done my share, a thousand times over I have! … All I wanted was to be left to grow old in peace. Is that too much to ask? Is it?”

His eyes were bleak. “But it never, ever ends.”

Powhatan looked up, then, meeting and holding Gordon’s stare for the first time.

“It was the women,” he said softly, answering Gordon’s question at last. “Ever since your visit and those damned letters, they kept
talking
, asking questions.

“Then the story of that madness up north arrived, even in my valley. I tried … tried to tell them it was just craziness, what your Amazons did, but they—”

Powhatan’s voice caught. He shook his head. “Bokuto stormed out, to come down here all alone … and when that happened they kept
looking
at me.… They kept after me and after me and
after
me.…”

He moaned and covered his face with his hands.

“Sweet God in Heaven, forgive me. The
women
made me do it.”

Gordon blinked in amazement. Amidst the pelting raindrops, tears flowed down the last augment’s craggy, careworn face. George Powhatan shuddered and sobbed achingly aloud.

Gordon slumped down to the rough log next to him, a heaviness filling him like the nearby Coquille, swollen from winter’s snows. In another minute, his own lips were trembling.

Lightning flashed. The nearby river roared. And they wept together under the rain—mourning as men can only mourn themselves.

Fierce Winter lingers

      Until Ocean does her duty

              Chasing him—with Spring

A new legend swept Oregon, from Roseburg all the way north to the Columbia, from the mountains to the sea. It traveled by letter and by word of mouth, growing with each telling.

It was a sadder story than the two that had come before it—those speaking of a wise, benevolent machine and of a reborn nation. It was more disturbing than those. And yet this new fable had one important element its predecessors lacked.

It was true.

The story told of a band of forty women—crazy women, many contended—who had shared among themselves a secret vow: to do anything and everything to end a terrible war, and end it before all the good men died trying to save them.

They acted out of love, some explained. Others said that they did it for their country.

There was even a rumor that the women had looked on their odyssey to Hell as a form of
penance
, in order to make up for some past failing of womankind.

Interpretations varied, but the overall moral was always the same, whether spread by word of mouth or by U.S. Mail. From hamlet to village to farmstead, mothers and daughters and wives read the letters and listened to the words—and passed them on.

•  •  •

Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world.

Women, you must judge them.…

Never again can things be allowed to reach this pass, they said to one another as they thought of the sacrifice the Scouts had made.

Never again can we let the age-old fight go on between good and bad men alone.

Women, you must share responsibility … and bring your own talents into the struggle.…

And always remember, the moral concluded: Even the best men—the heroes—will sometimes neglect to do their jobs.

Women, you must remind them, from time to time.…

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 farmers’ 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.

•  •  •

“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 Sutherlin 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.

Finally, at the training grounds themselves, the newcomers would encounter small groups of clear-eyed
women
soldiers
—volunteers from up and down the valley—who were there to do a job, the same as everybody else.

It was all quite a lot for the gruff southerners to absorb at once. Gordon smiled as he watched the rough, bearded fighters gawk and slowly remember the way things once had been. The reinforcements arrived thinking of themselves as saviors of an effete, decadent north. But they would go home changed.

“So long, Gordon,” Eric Stevens said, concisely. Unlike some of the others, he had the good taste to know that good-byes should be brief. “Godspeed, and come back someday.”

“I will,” Gordon nodded. “If I can. So long, Eric.” He shouldered the saddlebag and started walking toward the stables, leaving the bustle of the post office behind him.

The old athletic fields were a sea of tents as he passed by. Horses whinnied and men marched. Across the grounds, Gordon saw the unmistakable figure of George Powhatan, introducing his new officers to old comrades in arms, reorganizing the frail Willamette Army into the new Defense League of the Oregon Commonwealth.

Briefly, as Gordon walked by, the tall, silver-haired man looked up and met his eyes. Gordon nodded, saying good-bye without words.

He had won after all—had brought the Squire down off his mountain—even though the price of that victory would go with both of them all of their lives.

Powhatan offered up a faint smile in return. They both knew, by now, what a man does with burdens such as those.

He carries them
, Gordon thought.

Perhaps some day the two of them might sit together again—in that peaceful mountain lodge, with children’s art hanging on the walls—and talk about horsebreeding and the subtle art of brewing beer. But that time would only come after the Big Things finally let them both go. Neither man planned to hold his breath until then.