The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  Yet there was one more sentinel Don had to pass before he reached his destination. As he opened the door to the library, Don was confronted by a small, spry little man with a grizzled rat’s-whisker moustache, gray in every sense of the word, gnarled and grim and glaring at him. The old man’s hand was on the pistol at his hip. “Good morning, starshine! The earth says hello!” Redmond greeted him cheerfully. Corey Nash grunted at him, looked him up and down, and then grudgingly stood aside to let Redmond in with a jerk of his head. The President’s long-time sidekick was an even more reliable security feature than the dogs. So far as Don could recollect, not only had not a single living person ever seen the old man smile, but nor had anyone had ever seen him asleep any time in the past four decades. “You still owe me twenty-two dollars and fifty cents for a month’s paper delivery,” said Don.

  “It was only eighteen dollars and you know it! Why do you keep bringing that crap up? You still trying to cheat the man out of four dollars and fifty cents after all this time? Don’t you think that’s pretty low?” hissed the old man.

  “It is my life’s ambition. I dream at night about how I will some day get that money from our illustrious head of state, even though nobody takes American dollars here anymore. Aside from that, how are you today, Mr. Nash? As always, wee cherub, you are an ebullient breath of good cheer on this fine autumn morning.”

  “Don’t be a cheeky bugger, you young lout!” growled the codger. Don was well within shouting distance of fifty and his head had hairs as gray as those on the mottled skull of Corey Nash, whom he had known since he was twelve. Nash had not approved of Sarah’s boyfriend then and did not approve of Don now, but that was not unusual. Corey Nash was a total misanthrope who approved of no one, including the members of the Morgan family whom he had served with every fiber of his being for decades. Nor did Don hold it against him. Nash had been born in Rhodesia, and his parents had been stupid enough to stay after it became Zimbabwe. One day young Nash had come in from the tobacco fields outside Gwelo and found his entire family murdered and partially eaten by the cannibal Leopard Men, as well as a number of their body parts removed to make muti, Bantu magic. This had understandably skewed Mr. Nash’s view of the human condition.

  “Me? Whose cheeks do I supposedly bugger?” asked Don.

  “He told the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights the same thing the other day,” called a deep voice from within the room. “I’m scairt he’s going to kill that GELF dog out in the vestibule and make a winter hat out of him. Dammit, Corey, get your senile ass out of the door and let Don in! I know you’ve never forgiven him for dragging Miss Sarah over the threshold into unholy wedlock, but I need to talk to him.”

  “Senile my dangling Rhodesian chilogo! You’re older that I am! Damned peckerwood fool!” back-snapped Nash. The coot shuffled out of the way with a snarl in his body, admitting Don with obvious reluctance, and slammed the door after him.

  “Just out of curiosity, when was the last time Corey uttered a civil word to anybody except Sarah and my kids?” asked Redmond.

  “Well, to be fair to the man, he did apologize to Hillary Clinton for making such a mess of her dress when he cut off her other ear,” replied the man in the library. “How many years ago was that? Never mind.” John Corbett Morgan, State President of the Northwest American Republic, rose from behind his desk and shook hands warmly with his son-in-law. He was a tall and heavy man in his early seventies, attired in a dark suit of Italian cut that seemed to hang on his still powerful body like armor. It was incongruous. Anything Morgan wore somehow seemed to look like denim working clothes. His face was seamed and scarred above a patriarchal white beard, and a white mane done up in a single ponytail hung down his back. His grip was strong, and his blue eyes were cold and clear and sharp as steel. “Morning, Don!” he boomed. “How’s Sarah and all them young ‘uns of ours?” Corby Morgan was an early settler who had made the Northwest migration when he was nineteen, during the Butler era. Yet even after more than half a century, his voice and his diction still retained the accent of his native Kentucky mountains, where his family had mined coal and made moonshine for generations. He had been a hard kid growing up in the bleak coal country, a hard man in his youth, a hard man in his middle age, and he had aged hard like an ancient oak. It was almost as if Morgan was defying history itself by continuing to speak with the voice of his ancestors who had gotten their English from the time of Shakespeare, via Jamestown. In his words one heard the voice of a people now extinct. Several years before the official language of the court system in Harlan County, Kentucky, always the last holdout in the United States on just about everything, had finally been changed to Spanglish, along with the termination of the last English language instruction in what passed for the public schools. In Morgan, the real Harlan County lived on.

  “They’re all fine, sir,” Redmond assured him. In official business settings Redmond always addressed his father-in-law with formal correctness. “The family got a long com last night from Allan at Landfall Station, although twelve minute time lag made conversation a bit stilted. Fortunately the Mars orbit is really close to Earth right now. He’s looking great. He says that Martian gravity feels fantastic when he’s working or resting inside the station. He can take off all his gear and his pressure suit and he only weighs about fifty pounds, but he misses seeing trees everywhere, and he’s looking forward to coming home next year. He took a comcam with him while he went outside the dome and diddled with some electronic gear he had to adjust, so we got to see some of the Martian landscape, such as it is. It’s kind of like Wyoming.”

  “Now you know I don’t like Wyoming jokes,” chuckled Morgan.

  “Then why are you laughing? No, it really does look like Wyoming. All empty and red, with a blue sky above, just asking for us to come along and make it livable.”

  “We’ll make Mars green with our own Douglas firs one day, Don. The science boys tell me it can be done, once we get an oxygen atmosphere and maybe diddle with the trees’ genetics a bit. The Martian rock can be powdered into soil and enough water and oxygen can be extracted to give the planet a breathable atmosphere. We can even manufacture water and carbon dioxide through the new cold fusion process. It will be cold as hell at first, until we can warm it up with superheated air from a nuclear reactor and thicken it enough to create an atmospheric heat trap, but we can live there, like we live in Alaska in the winter. Sheol, man, we’re a cold weather race, remember? Ice Man Heritage and all that lefty-liberal crap?”

  “There’s actually a good deal of truth in that, you know,” commented Redmond. “Having to survive through the long winters of the northern lands, and the natural selection that resulted, was what initially gave us our genetic edge over the other species of humanity.” “An edge we intend to keep,” said Morgan. “Mars is where we will finally show history just what white people can do on our own. We will give that dead world life, plants and animals from this one. We will breed our people up bigger and better and stronger than ever we were here, because we’re starting fresh. Nobody on our back, riding free and leeching off us. No blacks, no Jews, no mud people. And by the Eternal, not one of them will ever set foot on Mars! The stars are ours, Don, and they will remain ours forever!”

  “And if the Ministry of Culture have their way, one day we’ll be walking over Mars in tricorne hats, periwigs, and shoes with silver buckles!” jibed Redmond. “And lace handkerchiefs and slim little canes with silver heads, and perhaps small and exquisitely wrought snuff boxes. Not to mention the elderly folk with their big moustaches and top hats. And the cravats.”

  “Why the hell not?” chuckled the president. “The Lord commanded His people to go forth and multiply. He said nothing about how we were supposed to dress. I’m proud as hell of that astronaut grandson of mine, and I know you are too. Keep this confidential, but he’ll have some company up there soon. We’re sending out two hundred more personnel to Landfall, both scientific and military. They left Orbital Station T
hree on the Andromeda almost two months ago, and they’re on course. They’ll reach Deimos in three more months, transfer themselves and their cargo to the landing craft, and once they’re down they’ll settle in for a long stay on the surface. Their mission is to begin the terraforming of the planet, to build the atomic smelting plants that will break down the ferrous oxide and the underground ice and start building up an atmosphere. We’re shooting for breathable air on Mars within ten years, and the beginning of serious colonization in twenty. If we can hold the bastards off down here for another generation, then the survival of our race will be assured, because we will exist on two worlds and not just this one. The goddamned kikes will never be able to kill us all off! Best thing is, Allan will be able to catch one of those landing craft back to Deimos and from there to Earth. He’ll be home in time for Christmas after next. Let’s you and me make a date to go up to the mountains with a couple of shotguns about December 22nd next year and bag him a wild turkey for Christmas dinner.”

  “We can do that now that Game and Wildlife has stocked them throughout the Republic,” agreed Don. “Along with the wild boar, the eagles and condors, and the genetically recovered passenger pigeons and Tasmanian thylacines. Look, John Corbett, I know it’s a classified matter having nothing to do with the Bureau of State Security, but what’s all this scuttlebutt I keep hearing about mammoths?”

  “In about five or six years, yup,” answered Morgan with pride. “Gotta have something for our growing wolf and mountain lion population to eat.”

  “Not to mention our new population of Siberian tigers. Isn’t it odd that ZOG accuses us of extermination?” said Redmond with a wry smile. “We’ve brought how many species back from the brink of extinction, now? In some cases like the thylacine, quite literally back from the grave, cloning their DNA?”

  “Yeah, well, I just wish we’d had some of them turkeys up in the Olympic mountains back in the old days of the Port Townsend Column. In them days half the rabbits and squirrels and deer we shot weren’t fit to eat because of all the toxic waste that ZOG dumped into the air and the water.”

  “That’s great news about the expanding Mars colony, sir, although hell’s bells, we still haven’t settled our own Homeland fully yet! I still find it hard to believe that a small and relatively poor country of forty million people like us can afford a space program.”

  “When those forty million are all productive, creative, and hard working people who each and every one contributes something to society rather than leeches off the state or lives off usury, then it’s amazing what a country can afford,” said Morgan. “When that country doesn’t have to pay for massive drug addiction, Third World diseases, rampant crime, billions in foreign aid to puppet governments around the world, and maintaining armies of occupation over sullen Third World conquered nations, then there’s money for little extras like a space program. When that country doesn’t have gargantuan multi-national corporations gorging themselves on the national treasury, then it’s astounding what a chunk of change becomes available for other things. Forty million people all working in synch in a land of peace and freedom from materialism can perform miracles they never dreamed of in the last century when big business ruled, son. When you don’t have to maintain millions of people in prisons and forced labor camps, when you have stability and unity in a racially homogenous society, when you’ve got real free enterprise as opposed to monopoly finance capitalism, when the government is only as big as it needs to be to maintain the state, and above all when you have no goddamned lawyers to suck everything dry, you’d be damned amazed what a small country like ours can accomplish. You want to know the greatest testament to the success of the revolution? Let me ask you something. How many BOSS agents are there all told, and where are they?”

  “Mmm, about a hundred, I think,” said Redmond. “All of them are based across the street there, except when they’re out on assignment.”

  “Exactly!” crowed Morgan. “That’s what, one single government agency and one political policeman for every four hundred thousand people in the Republic? Counting all their various agencies, FBI and ONR and Department of Homeland Security, Internal CIA, and the state and local security organs, the ratio of political police to population in the United States is one in 217, working out of over three thousand heavily fortified facilities, offices, prisons and bases. The BOSS allocation is .0012 percent of our national budget. The Civil Guard is two percent of the budget for normal criminal policing, and we have no prisons beyond county jails and holding facilities at Guard and military barracks. No slave labor camps here like in the States. Someone shows his butt in the Republic, we either kill ‘em, flog ‘em, erase ‘em, or fine ‘em, and then we turn ‘em loose. The total budget for all police and prison agencies in the United States is 18% of their gross national product. What does that tell you about how our way works versus theirs? Oh, before I forget, on completely different topic, I got something for you. The Irish ambassador smuggled them in by diplomatic pouch.”

  Morgan pulled out a wooden box and flipped it open, and there, by heaven, they lay!

  “Hot damn, rolled Havanas!” gasped Don.

  “Now, far be it from me to bad-mouth our own hydroponic tobacco industry, especially in view of all that lovely excise tax money it earns for the Republic. Saves us from needing an income tax. But the fact is that rank does have its occasional privileges. Take a handful before you go.” Both men lit cigars and sat down on the sofa. The door opened and Corey Nash shuffled in bearing a tray with a large metal percolator pot of hot coffee and two large mugs. “Now, Corey, did I ask for coffee?” asked Morgan.

  “No, but you got it anyway,” the old man snarled. “Real coffee, Mr. Nash?” asked Don with a smile.

  “Acorn and chicory was good enough for everybody in this country for twenty years, and it’s bloody good enough for you now!” snapped Nash. He set the tray down on the table in front of the sofa and shambled out, muttering to himself. Don poured them both a cup of the traditional Northwest hot tipple, black and foul-smelling and the very nectar of the gods to those who had lived through the swingeing economic sanctions of the early days. Acorn coffee had become a proud national symbol for the Northwesters, and to this day it still outsold the real bean in the private shops and state co-op stores. “You wanted to see me about something, sir?” he finally got around to asking.

  “Yes. I’ve got a hot one for you, Don,” said President Morgan. “A hot one and a weird one. Something’s come up, something really odd. A blast from the past, you might say. But before we get into that I’d like to hear anything you can add about that Andrews case you just wrapped up. That worries me, Don. I’ve read the official reports, of course, and I understand that the affair is sub judice now, but you were the lead investigator and you can fill in some gaps for me. Were these fruitcakes really planning on assassinating a leading Christian Identity Member of Parliament, or was it all just beer talk?”

  “It had reached the serious planning stage, all right,” said Redmond. “I think they would have tried it. Maybe succeeded, and then there’d be holy hell to pay, if you’ll pardon the expression. We were tipped off when a girl from the Labor Service who was waitressing at the restaurant in the OBA club in Seattle overheard some things she didn’t like and she contacted BOSS. Significantly, our witness is a Wiccan practitioner herself, but she has sense enough to know that murdering Bible boys is a non-starter in a country where eighty percent of the population are Christians of one sort or another. Not all Old Believers are as wigged out as the suspects in this case are.”

  “You must have been elsewhere when we signed the Republic’s concordat with the Vatican,” said Morgan sourly. “I had ‘em dancing around Parliament in their bear skins and horned helmets waving their damned hammers like loons. Them and the Paisley Presbyterians screaming about the Whore of Babylon. Along with the shoutin’ Baptists, the Pentecostals, and those nuts who think the Pope is a space alien from Alpha Centauri.”

  R
edmond shook his head in bemusement. “We slapped full electronic surveillance on their dumb asses and we have video and audio from their meetings in Andrews’ garage, on the monorail and in the beach house up in Anacortes. It will convince a jury of twelve male citizens upright and true that they were serious about killing Pastor Briggs. Plus female citizens as well, if Mrs. Parker demands women on her jury, which of course she has the legal right to do. Andrews and the three other men will most likely be flogged and have their citizenship suspended for a number of years, which may sound rough for nothing but talk, but you know how vital it is that we keep a tight grip on the religious situation in this country. I believe the events can be presented in such a way that the Parkers will be shown as the instigators, and that their case needs to be referred to a security court. Since Briggs wasn’t actually killed they’ll escape the gallows, in which case I hope the judge will order them both to be erased.”