The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  “Yeah. That was one of the smartest things we ever did. The Old Man knew that media people were essentially even more cowardly and attached to their wretched little lives than most middle Americans. Once they understood that they would be held personally responsible for the content of their reportage, then all of a sudden they got a hell of a lot more restrained. They would either see the Party’s point of view, or else they’d see me, and they bloody well didn’t want to see me. Our team used to specialize in hunting down talking heads from the Sunday morning cable shows who made a career of bad-mouthing the NVA and white people in general. That was interesting work. Took us all over the empire, New York and L. A. and Atlanta. After a few of those talking heads ended up with their genitalia stuffed in their mouths and a Prince of Wands on their schnozz, all of a sudden the Sunday morning cable discourse assumed a much more reasonable tone. We really threw a monkey wrench into the Zionist propaganda machine. Their media flacks were all too scared to do their job of spreading hatred and lies. I think it could honestly be said that Longview was made possible because we stopped those swine from keeping the pot stirred to fever heat. That allowed the peace movement to grow in the States and eventually gave Bush the Fourth enough slack so he could sign the Treaty. Anything else, Don?”

  “No,” said Don, “I guess I better get back in there and rescue

  Sarah from that horde of geriatric Lotharios before she gets pissed off

  at one of them and turns him into a toad.” From the main ballroom came the rousing final chorus:

  “The Lone Star State has lost a son of courage and of pride, For he fell beneath Montana’s sky, brave Forman by his side! They have gone to join that gallant band who held the Alamo,

  Undying fame surrounds his name! Jack Smith from San Antone!”

  IV.

  The Redmonds got home from the reunion at well past midnight. Baskerville was waiting for them outside and escorted them in, then without a woof turned and went back outside to resume his vigil. “I’m going to stay down and have a last smoke on one of your Dad’s fine cigars, if you don’t mind,” Don told his wife. “I want to cogitate on this Greiner thing a bit.”

  “Sure, hon,” she said. “Just don’t take too long.”

  “Just don’t be asleep when I get up there, okay?” he returned with a smile.

  “If I am, wake me up,” she commanded. “Will do. And don’t be clothed.”

  “Well, if I am, you’ll just have to do something about it, won’t you?” She entwined her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Is that a date?” whispered Don.

  “I’d say it’s a sure thing,” she laughed, low and guttural.

  Don went into his darkened library and sat down on the sofa in front of the low embers of the fire. He threw on another log, poked it desultorily, and stared moodily into the crackling sparks. He was by no means happy about opening this particular can of long-sealed

  revolutionary worms, and he wondered again whether John Morgan really meant for him to get at the truth, or find some way to bury it forever. Would he do so if it turned out that the price might be an innocent woman’s life? Don had the lifelong National Socialist’s iron sense of duty and dedication to the good of the Folk over all, but he had also perforce spent his life living in the real world. More than most, Don knew that sometimes one couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. But if Trudy Greiner was in fact innocent of treason, she had already suffered through more than thirty years of living hell. The Republic was almost unique in the world’s comity of nations for its complete lack of hypocrisy. It preached a stern and uncompromising truth and justice, and it practiced those things as well in a manner unknown since the early days of republican Rome. Adolf Hitler had always held civitas to be a paramount virtue, and although the Republic was by no means a National Socialist state, however Don and his comrades might wish it so, its moral and civic code was pure NS. NAR politics and policy were remarkable for their almost total lack of the kind of gray areas that abounded in other governments. Cicero had said that existence of many laws was the sign of a corrupt society. The Republic’s entire criminal code was contained in a single slim volume of two hundred and twenty pages, in fourteen-point type to boot, clear and easy to read in every sense. A lot of citizens thought even that was too long. Some of the more extreme Christian sectaries wanted nothing more than the Ten Commandments.

  Mostly it was just the obvious stuff. No deliberate and premeditated murder with the exception of the extremely formalized code duello which governed legalized dueling as the ultimate sanction to preserve civility within society. (Dueling was legal in the Republic, but only between consenting male adults and only after a mandatory seven day waiting period for both parties to sober up and calm down, and only with advance notice to the Civil Guard and under the supervision of the National Honor Court. The whole thing was so ritualized that only one or two dueling fatalities occurred every year.) No robbing liquor stores. When one is in a position of fiduciary trust, one keeps one’s hand out of the till. Heroin, cocaine, LSD, and some particularly lethal American and Asian designer drugs were proscribed and the penalty of erasure was prescribed for possession of

  them, and death for selling them. Everything else was legal; the social stigma against addiction combined with the social safety net of guaranteed employment and a place in society for everyone kept drug and liquor problems peripheral. Don’t set fire to things. About a quarter of the Republic’s legal code was common sense trivia: sanitation regulations to make sure people didn’t dump toxic waste on the street or into public waterways, buried or cremated the dead instead of keeping them in the master bedroom like Miss Emily, and traffic law necessary to keep everyone driving on the right and make sure motorists stopped at red lights, required in order to make sure Seattle and Portland didn’t turn into Cairo. Driver’s licenses had been abolished because they constituted a form of national identification which was antithetical to liberty and privacy, but if you got drunk and killed or injured someone else on the highway, you were held to account the same as if you used a gun. The Republic’s social contract was based on individual responsibility and common sense social duty.

  One of the more truly revolutionary of those laws prohibited anyone from accepting any remuneration for the practice of law or legal counsel. Those who came before the courts could nominate one or more people to speak in their defense, and there were citizens of the Republic who, like Cicero, had gained fame with courtroom oratory that would have enthralled the Forum. The defendants just couldn’t pay such advocates anything. The NAR had taken Shakespeare’s advice to heart and killed all the lawyers. As a result, the law was held in more respect and society enjoyed a vibrant and vigorous health unknown anywhere else in world. Another law prohibited the acceptance of any pay or items of value for the practice of any religious or sacerdotal office. The removal of the attorney from society made sure that the law served as a shield and not a sword, and most certainly not a trough at which parasites in expensive suits slurped away their lives at the expense of others. The removal of the priest with his tax exemption from the pecking order had in turn removed the problem of organized religion from the social and economic equation, and reduced religion to the purely theological level, which helped in maintaining the delicate social balance between peoples of conflicting faiths. Priests and ministers who were required to work for a living and pay taxes like everyone else found remarkably little time for political agitation. Churches that were

  required to pay property taxes found very little money left over for funding dubious social and political causes that had nothing to do with God.

  More than anywhere else in many centuries, in the Northwest American Republic the law and morality were almost completely synonymous, since neither entailed a cash register. Never before had Don been given a single order by his superiors that he found morally objectionable or even dubious. But now, for the first time in his career, Don was confronted with the possibility
that he might have to commit a moral wrong, a sin as the Christians would say, in order to best serve his people and his country. For if Trudy Greiner’s claim of innocence was true, then an immense amount of history would have to be re-written, and Don was not at all sure that would be considered politically expedient, true or not. BOSS did not only deal with state security. When necessary, it dealt with political inexpediency. Such was the reality of statecraft since time immemorial. What if she really is innocent? wondered Don in agony. Whatever then?

  There was a soft knock on the door. “Dad?” asked Eva. She was in her nightdress, bathrobe and slippers. “You drunk?”

  “No,” chuckled Don. “Although I’d take it kindly if you and Cindy would do breakfast tomorrow and let your Mom sleep in, OK? She might have a bit of a bad head.”

  “You got it. Dad, can I talk to you about something? Something serious?”

  “Ah, one of our little private chats? Any time, Evie. You know that. Park it there, squirt.” She sat down beside him on the sofa. “Now tell me, what’s on your mind?”

  “Is Cindy El going to marry Mark Conway?” Eva asked.

  “Yes. Okay, I think I see what’s coming.” He leaned forward and spoke to her gently. “Eva, arranged marriages have become a widespread custom in the Republic, an urgently necessary custom that has grown up because of our acute need to rebuild and reconstitute the Aryan family as the basic building block of society, and because there simply must be more of us! ZOG almost destroyed a three thousand year-old civilization by destroying the people who created it, and we have to grab back control of our destiny from them immediately, before the next generation. Marriage today is recognized as a civic duty for all our citizens, a vitally urgent matter of state. It is no longer

  a private matter, and hindsight tells us that it never should have been. The whole history of our race and our culture tells us that marriage is the natural state of men and women, and that when large numbers of people, especially women of child-bearing age, remain unmarried and babies aren’t being born, then that is a sign that something is gravely wrong. More than that, marriage is the union of two families, and that is something that concerns the entire community. Our ancestors recognized that fact, for millennia. Yes, I know that can be a pretty cold-blooded thing sometimes, if it is not done with compassion and humanity. But after some years we are recovering the ancient social skills necessary to make it work, and it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Evie. Mark and Cindy are two shining examples of how the system can work. But as for you…honey, it’s a custom, not a law. When you get your citizenship certificate and you are a grown woman in the eyes of the world, then it is your absolute legal right to make your own choice. And I will never, ever criticize or try to pressure you. Nor will your mother, although I think she’s already trying to line up…”

  “I go to Coven and I know who she’s trying to line up,” interrupted Eva with a small shy smile. “Let’s just say he’s a definite maybe, okay? But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. Dad, I want to ask you something, although I know it’s something you don’t want to talk about,” she went on tentatively.

  “Er…honey, if it’s what I think it is, it’s your mother’s job to give you the Little Talk,” said Don, suddenly nonplussed.

  “No, it’s not that,” said Eva with a giggle. “I know what men and women do with one other in bed, Dad.”

  “Do you indeed? And how do you know?”

  “I just know, OK? And not from personal experience, so please don’t go pistol-whipping any of the boys at school, will you? But that’s not it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Dad…what happened during the Cleanup?”

  Redmond sat in surprised silence for a moment. “Lord, honey, what brought this on all of a sudden?” he asked.

  “I was talking to…well, to a friend at school today. She says there’s a mass grave under the dump in Tumwater from the

  revolution, with hundreds of bodies of dead black people and

  Mexicans and Chinamen in it.”

  “Your friend is full of sheep dip! No, honey, I can tell you right off, that’s wrong,” said Redmond immediately.

  “How would you know?” demanded his daughter. “Is it because you know where the mass graves really are?

  “Because that wasn’t…well, because I happen to know something about it from being involved in political policing.”

  “Look, Dad, I’m old enough to know the truth. If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so. But if you do I want straight answers. If you’re not going to be honest, there’s no point in our taking this any further,” said Eva softly. She got up and walked to the door. “Good night, Dad.”

  “All right,” replied Redmond, somehow understanding that this was not something that could be evaded. All of a sudden he knew that his daughter’s future quite possibly hung on this discussion. “In point of fact, yes, there are still some bodies buried out in the woods in various remote places around the Republic, but they were put there during the War of Independence and they’re combat casualties. Ours and theirs, when the NVA had to inter the dead and then move out, fast. After the revolution we weren’t able to find them all and give them decent burial, although every effort was made. Sometimes the guys just plain didn’t remember. Every now and then we still find some of those dead, and when we do they are exhumed and buried with all reverence and respect, where possible with either a Tricolor or an American flag on the grave, if the identities can be determined. The Federal war cemeteries are the only places in the Republic where the American flag is allowed to be flown, as you may be aware. But there are no mass graves of the kind you’re talking about from the Cleanup. Not under the dump in Tumwater or anywhere else. The remains weren’t disposed of in that manner.”

  “How were they disposed of?” cried Evie, frightened and

  upset.

  “That I will not discuss with you,” said Redmond. “Why not?” she demanded.

  “Because it’s not important. Because those wretched people

  aren’t important. Because what was done was done so that we who kept faith with our blood and with common decency would never

  again even have to acknowledge that they ever existed. Evie, you asked me a question. In a way I suppose it’s a question that all of us who lived through that time always dread hearing from our children, but you’re right, you’re old enough. You say you know how babies are born, so you have a right to know how your country was born. I’ll do my best to give you an answer. But I can’t give you a simple answer, because there isn’t one. When nations come into being, especially when they come into being through revolution and turmoil, very little is ever cut and dried and there are always a dozen versions of every story. I’ll do my best to tell you about the Cleanup, but you must come back here, sit down, and let me do it in my own way. It’s going to take me a while, so bear with me.” Evie walked back to the fireplace and sat down at the end of the sofa. “I said I can’t give you a simple answer, but I can give you a short one. Do you want that or the long version?”

  “I want both,” said his daughter.

  “All right. The short answer is this. There are times when certain things simply have to be done. You don’t try to justify them, because they can’t be justified. You simply do these things, and you never talk about it afterwards. We did what we had to do. That’s it.”

  “Okay, now for the long answer. You have to talk about it, Dad,” said Evie. “You have given me this great life and this great family and this great home, and don’t think I’ll ever forget it. You’ve also been my best friend, ever since I was little. If you’re worried about losing my love or my respect, don’t be. That’s never going to happen. But you have to tell me how my world came to be. All of it.”

  “Jesus, you sure you’re only fifteen, girl?” asked Don in bemusement. He sighed and lit one of President Morgan’s Havana cigars. “Right from the start, let’s get some things clear. Your grandfather was invo
lved in the Cleanup, very much so, because it was his duty. To a lesser extent, so was your Aunt Tori, and so was old Mr. Nash, your grandfather’s butler.”

  “Corey Crotchety?” laughed Evie, unbelieving. “He’s just a grumpy old man! He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

  “That shows how little you know,” her father told her gently. “Mr. Nash was your grandfather’s…well, never mind. Let’s just say that back in those days he did a good deal of what was called wet work.”

  “Mr. Nash?” exclaimed Evie incredulously, with a light little laugh. “He used to play dollies with me when I was little!”

  “Yes. Mr. Nash. I would appreciate it if you would accept what I tell you tonight, at least for the time being, and that you not ask any of them about that part of their lives. At least not now. Nash would simply refuse to talk about it, but John C. and Tori would feel compelled to try and explain, and it would be very painful for them. Later, when you’re older, if you feel you have to…”

  “Okay,” agreed Eva. “I won’t say anything to Papa John or Aunt Tori, and I still don’t believe you about poor old Mr. Nash. But Tori told me once that she killed a man when she was nineteen. An FBI agent.”

  “Yes. She was defending the life of Bill Vitale, who was only an infant at the time. But that’s another story. You want to know about the Cleanup. Both of them made damned sure that your mother and I were not involved in any way, and that was absolutely the right thing to do. It was a terrible time, and John Corbett kept us both away from it. In any case we were both too young, younger than you are now, despite the fact that we were Volunteers during the War of Independence. There had been work for kids of our age during the revolution. There was none for us during the Cleanup. That was for men only, a certain kind of man. Men like Tiny Knowlton and Liver-Eating Thomson, men like that maniac O. C. Oglevy, men like Bloody Dave Leach, who as it happens I will be meeting very soon in connection with a case I am working on. That year I started with the first class of the NDF Military Academy in Sandpoint, and your mother had to take over the Morgan household when John Corbett finally came out of the mountains and was able to set one up. We were both of us otherwise occupied during that period of this country’s history, may thanks be unto God. I was on my way to becoming a man, and your mother was on her way to becoming a woman.”