1632

'Who is that?' asked Rebecca. Her eyes widened. 'Is that the woman-?'

Happily, Melissa nodded. 'Yeah, that's her. You heard the story, I take it?'

Rebecca nodded. 'Michael told me. The woman who hid her sisters in a cesspool-and then stood there, straight up, waiting for-' She shuddered. 'I can hardly imagine such courage.'

Mike stared at Gretchen through the window for a moment longer, before adding: 'Jesus, what a Valkyrie.'

Melissa shook her head. 'No, Mike. You're very wrong.' She scowled. 'Valkyries!' The word was almost a curse. 'Leave it to the sick and twisted mind of Richard Wagner to glorify a Valkyrie.'

Again, she took her companions by the arm and began walking toward the door. 'A Valkyrie is just a vulture. A death-worshipper. 'Choosers of the slain,' they were called, as if that were something to be proud of.'

She stopped abruptly, almost yanking them up short. Her finger, extended, pointed to Gretchen.

'That young woman, on the other hand, is something truly grand and glorious. That woman is a chooser of the living.'

She sighed. 'I know what I can do, and what I can't. I know what we need, and what I can give. I can help. I can teach. I can guide, hopefully. But I can't do it.' A little shrug lifted her slender shoulders. 'Even if I wasn't too old, I couldn't do it. I don't come from that world, and even if I did-'

She twisted her head, looking to the north. Beyond the hills was a battlefield. Her next words came in a whisper. 'I never would have been tough enough, or had the courage. I'm not a coward, but-not a chance. I would have died myself, much less been able to save anyone else.'

Melissa smiled. The expression was one of unalloyed satisfaction-the smile of a person at peace with themselves. 'What this new world of ours needs is not a superannuated sixties radical. Except, maybe, as an adviser. We're back at the beginning, where it all started. The days of the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. Seneca Falls and the pioneer women.'

Her smile became a grin. 'Melissa Mailey will sure as hell lend a hand, but she's not what we really need. What we really need is a new Harriet Tubman.'

She beamed at the woman in the window. 'And I do believe I may have found her.'

Gretchen was glancing at Jeff again. He was no longer shying away from those glances. Oh no. He was staring back at her like a lamb. Begging to be slaughtered. 'Of course, first I've got to stop her from selling herself to another soldier in order to keep her kids alive. That'll hurt her image, starting off her new life as a camp whore. Again.'

Now Melissa was marching them to the door. Her bare feet struck the pavement like boots.

Mike chuckled. 'I can't wait to find out how you're planning to do that.'

'What is Seneca Falls?' asked Rebecca. 'And who was Harriet Tubman?'

By the time they reached the door, Melissa had begun her explanation. She only had time to broach the topic, before the meeting started. But her words were enough to get Mike chewing on the problem, and Rebecca. And that was enough. The two finest political minds of the day-which they were, though they did not realize it yet- would take that germ and transform it into something mighty and powerful.

***

So, in the time to come, Melissa Mailey would take great comfort in the memory of a pool of vomit. Out of that nausea would come something precious to her soul- and just as precious to the souls of thousands of others.

The Inquisition, of course, would feel otherwise. So would a multitude of barons and bishops, and every witch-hunter in Europe.

Chapter 24

Melissa's concerns for Gretchen's image proved to be moot. In the end, the solution to that quandary was provided by another.

It was only a partial solution, of course, as solutions usually are, and addressed only one specific problem, as solutions usually do. But, as was often also true, it opened the door-if only a crack-for the multitude of solutions to follow.

Melissa, in a way, played a role in that solution. Not directly, not immediately. But a genuine role nonetheless. The same role that teachers-good ones, anyway, and she was truly excellent-have always played. The same role, in a different way, that parents play. Parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents-even, when you get down to it, the guy at the corner grocery who, in an idle moment, tosses off his opinion of how the world oughta be to a youngster come in to buy a soda.

Good boys, like bad ones, are shaped. The process is not perfect, and goes astray often enough. The mold is crooked, often warped, cracked-but it's still a mold.

Grantville, West Virginia was the mold that produced Jeff Higgins. All things said and done, it was as good a mold as any and a better one than most.

***

Add to that the boy himself. Sitting alone, now, at the cafeteria table, staring at a window. There was nothing to see in the window. Night had fallen on the countryside beyond the glass.

The others were all gone. Melissa had ushered Gretchen and her family into the classroom which was being used, temporarily, as a refugee quarter. The floor was covered with mattresses and blankets donated by the town's inhabitants. She had shown Gretchen how to operate the toilets nearby, and then hurried to the council meeting.

Jeff's friends were gone too. They were not far away-not more than a few yards. They were in the school's library. The library, like much of the school, was open twenty-fours a day now. Such a valuable resource could not be kept out of circulation for a moment. They were in there, heads hunched together, studying one of the school's few copies of a German language textbook. They also had the school's only copy of a German-English dictionary.

Under any other circumstances, Jeff would have been there also. But tonight he had a much more pressing problem to deal with. A German herself, not the language. A decision was before him, and he knew that it had to be made quickly. Gretchen would wait, for a bit, to hear his decision. She would not wait long. She had people to care for, and nothing to care for them with. She did not have the luxury of waiting. So, at least, it would seem to her. In truth, she had entered a world in which old courses of action were not necessary-but Jeff knew that she would not believe it. Not yet. Not soon enough.

Jeff Higgins was very far from stupid. He was innocent, more or less, but not really naive. Certainly not that naive.

Like all teenage boys, he had his fantasies. Some of those he exorcised playing D D, others with war games, others on computer screens, others living a vicarious life in books, others on his dirt bike. Still others-especially those involving the female sex-mostly in his mind. And a rich and sometimes feverish mind it was, too. Wildly imaginative, and ready at an instant to take flight from reality.

But he could still, quite easily, separate truth from fiction. For all the fantasies about Gretchen which had raged through his hormone-saturated brain in the few short hours since he first met her-today-he understood the reality.

Jeff was not a virgin. But his two brief encounters had not given him delusions of being irresistible. He knew perfectly well that no beautiful young woman was going to fall head over heels in love with him in an instant. If ever. True-here his fantasies tried to rise in rebellion-he had met her in quite a dramatic manner. Rescuing her, almost single-handedly, from the proverbial 'fate worse than death.' A classic from fairy tales!

But He knew Gretchen. Well enough, at least. For her, that fate was not worse than death. She had already suffered it, and survived. And kept her family alive. He thought she appreciated-sincerely-what he had done. But he understand also that the woman he had watched murder a wounded man in cold blood in order to protect her sister-her, not her 'virtue,' which would soon be gone anyway-was not going to be bowled over by another brave soldier.

He paused over that, in his thinking. He had been brave, he realized. If he looked at it from the right angle, he could even say he had been heroic. He paused, there, and took deep satisfaction in the knowing.

For himself, however, not for Gretchen-or what she thought of him. It was good to know that courage lay within him. Very good. Courage, in this new world even more than in the old, was something he was going to need.

But he knew, without knowing any of the details, that the man who had formerly 'possessed' her was brave as well, whatever his other characteristics had been. Jeff was not one of those foolish sentimentalists who thinks that courage is a monopoly of the virtuous. Like many boys his age, he was an aficionado of military history. The Waffen SS had compiled a criminal record almost unparalleled in modern history. Yet no one in their right mind had ever called them cowards. Certainly not more than once.

Gretchen did not care about his courage on the battlefield. He knew that for a certainty. She was no fairy-tale maiden, to swoon over her rescuer. She was what many people would call a camp whore, who had done whatever she found necessary to keep herself and her family alive. And, he knew, was doing it still. His fantasies could rage and bellow at every glimpse of her flashing eyes, gleaming promise at him. His hormones could rush like Niagara, knowing that her luscious body was his for the taking. But it was all a lie.

Jeff knew the truth. As much as the sight of her exposed breast had fired his imagination, his reason had seen what was real. The breast was real enough, of course. Far more real had been the baby suckling at it. A camp whore's bastard, that the whore would trade her body to keep alive, just as she had butchered a man to do the same for her sister.

He faced the truth, squarely, and came to his decision. Peace poured through his soul.

***

He was surprised, at first, to see that the decision had already been made. Surprised, and then, obscurely pleased.

He had been pondering nothing, he realized. Simply rationalizing an argument that could not be argued at all. It was not rational in the first place. He was quite certain that everyone he knew would be explaining that to him within the next few hours.

He did not care. It was the only decision, under the circumstances, that he could make. Others could think what they wanted, say what they would. He was who he was. Accidentally, in that moment, without knowing he had even done so, Jeff adopted for his own an ancient motto. Here I stand. I can do no other.