Feathers

CHAPTER TWO

It was early afternoon when the veterans returned home. It was still mid autumn, that 17th of Ámyrðria, on Freo-twā, or the second free-day of the middle of the month. The fields were still ripe with grain and the women and the children of Meryton and Jasper Valley were forsaking their day of rest to bring in more of the harvest. Many of the fields appeared to be fallow, as the women alone could not plow, sow or harvest by themselves all of the old fertile valley farmland. Still as the small band of returning men entered the quiet town their arrival was noted, and slowly the understanding that these hollow-eyed 'strangers' were their long lost kin-folk, returned as if from the dead, spread like wildfire through the town and throughout the surrounding valley.

Shock and astonishment eventually gave way to joyful welcome, and as we entered our local tavern, the old men of the town arose from their well-worn bar seats to clasp our hands and pat our backs. The ale began to flow as we took our rest, but the noise of our homecoming only became louder as old friends and family gradually arrived to greet us.

"How bad was it? The war, was it as terrible as the stories all say?" Everyone asked us, but none of us really had an answer. The truth was just too terrifying and unsettling and no one wanted to even remember it let alone speak of it.

"It was pretty bad." Colin eventually muttered on our behalf, and that mostly silenced that question... at least for today. Colin himself had been wounded at least three times that I could remember, including a bad wound to his left upper arm that would never heal entirely. His night terrors were nearly as bad as Pieter's, and like Ronald and myself, he had long ago taken refuge in an alepot, in order to sleep without unsettling dreams. Already, his blackjack full of good Meryton ale had been thrice drained and the refills were coming fast.

By tradition, and by Oswein law, women were forbidden inside of the taprooms of alehouses as customers, but since the men had all left town five years ago old Serge the tapmaster had ignored this custom, and now women drank there as freely as men and soon ever growing numbers of women arrived to greet and toast the returnees. Mothers, sisters, wives and old girlfriends now wished to make their own greetings and soon the tavern was quite crowded and merry. The happiness of the reunion was soon tempered by the knowledge that so very few of their men had returned. Tears of joy soon turned to weeping sadness as more and more of the women learned that their own menfolk had not, and would not, ever return.

Soon, the party turned into a mournful wake, for our four hundred and sixty four dead friends, companions, brothers, fathers, husbands and lovers.

The luck of survival had mostly favored the mature lads who had gone off to war while in their late teens or early twenties. They were stronger and much more fit than us schoolboys, or the older mature soldiers in their thirties and even forties, who were slower with age and with muscle turned mostly to fat. This group of veterans, now in their mid-late twenties, totaled fourteen of our number, and eleven already had either wives or sweethearts waiting for them. This made for a few very pleasant and happy reunions, including the chance to hold youngsters that had been born after their departure.

Not all of these reunions were entirely happy, as several babies and children younger than four indicated that a few of the soldiers' wives hadn't been entirely faithful during their husbands' absence. There weren't many men left in the Jasper Valley, but those fortunate souls had been very busy and hadn't lacked at all for female companionship.

Of the remaining four of us, one was mature man of just over fifty now that we called 'Pops', and he blithely returned home to his waiting wife and his daughters and grandchildren. He had lost both of his sons in the war, and two of his three daughters had lost their own husbands as well. His surviving son-in-law was a teamster whose home was just outside of the valley and he had not been gathered up for conscription, nor did he volunteer.

Us three remaining former school kids, now young men, nursed our ales and waited. While the younger women were especially happy to see and greet us, we had one thing still that we wanted and

needed

to do. For ourselves, and for Pieter, and so we waited... but we didn't have to wait long.

Melenna Carlson soon arrived at the tavern and acted as if she was still as much the queen bee of the hive as ever, she pushed her way in to greet us.

We in turn, had an entirely different sort of greeting prepared for her!

************

During hundreds of discussions during our years of military service, we unhappy soldiers griped about our miserable lot in life; our poor erratic pay, terrible food and living conditions, and the horrific mortality that regularly continued to reduce our numbers. The 'volunteers' had no one to blame but themselves, we all decided. The 'conscripts', taken by the whip and the recruiters drum, we decided had the right to gripe, but the most anger was reserved for us 'white feather boys'.

"It was not right!" We grumbled, again and again, that some very stupid and excitable women got their smallclothes moist at the thought of sending every male they could lay eyes on, off to war. For us schoolboys, it was an act of near total murder. We were too young, too small, too innocent for this sort of slaughter, and many good men had died just trying to keep us young kids alive. In our anger and rage, we had found a more than suitable target... one Melenna Carlson.

We planned our revenge very carefully, and it most definitely included a use for all of the feathers that Pieter had gathered. Now, she came readily into our grasp.

First, the three of us grabbed her and roughly drug her out of the tavern, ignoring her cries and screams, until she was out in the middle of the main street, by the crossroads where everyone in the town could probably now see and hear her. Next, with two of our older soldier friends helping to hold her in place, we tore away at her clothes with our belt knives and fingers, ripping them away until she was exposed naked. Once she was stripped totally nude, we tied her up to a tall wooden post near the water well until she was secure and unable to move.

Then at long last came the big bucket of tar, which we had bought previously and had left it here to await our victim. It was cold and fairly thick, but with a little effort it coated her body, slowly and completely.

It goes without saying that we at last found a very suitable use for all of Pieter's feathers!

Now tarred and feathered, our victim cried and screamed for help, but none was forthcoming. As the entire town of women gathered into the street to observe, we noted very little if any sympathy. Melenna had been too public in her zeal to see every single man and boy in Meryton sent off to fight in the war, and now the vast majority of those men were all dead, lost forever at sea or buried in some distant battlefield. Her 'jingo' had gotten virtually every one of their men all killed, their brothers, fathers, husbands, friends and lovers, and now this terrible loss was finally made real to them. With a great wailing at the slaughter of all of their men-folk, they now joined us in venting their own awful rage.

More chicken, duck and goose feathers now found their way to adhere upon Melenna until she soon more resembled a great white bird herself than a tarred person. The hate and vitriol vented was enough to burn anyone's ears and more than once we had to stop the fury of the crowd from tossing burning torches onto the feathery tar, to consign her to flames right there in the town square.

When I thought that the orgy of hate was spent, and my own insane fury had now mostly quite subsided, I gave Melenna one last very special feather that I had carefully saved for five years.

"Melenna, this is the very same white feather that you gave to me five years ago in school, when you declared me to be a coward. Thus shamed, Pieter and I went to join the regiment and all of us young lads, many not even sixteen, fought and mostly all died for our duchy. There was no glory in this war and precious little honor to be earned. None of which was worth the deaths of over four hundred and sixty men and lads, our fathers, uncles and brothers, your family, friends and lovers. Nearly every single man and boy you once knew instead earned a few feet of hastily dug earth in places that few in this town even know the names to, or could even find on a map. Years later, we pitiful few remain... not nearly enough to comfort the hundreds of young women who shall now never consort, as all of their men have died and there are but few to take their place."

Melenna started to cry as I cut away the ropes that bound her.

"Go! Leave this town and its unhappy people, for none of us can look upon you now and not see death! May you be cursed to never find a man to accept and love you, so that you may spend your years instead mourning, alone, for the hundreds of men that you sent forth into ruin and slaughter!"

Melenna ran away from us then, but many of the women of the town chased her all the way to her home, throwing rocks and sticks at her with every step that she took. I'm told that it took her three days to remove the last of tar from her body, and that her long golden corn-silk hair had to be shaved away to the very skin in order remove the last of the thickly caked black adhesive. She left town a few days later under the cover of darkness and never once returned, nor did she ever later marry, according to village gossip.

No one ever criticized us for our punishment of her. As far as the town was concerned, it was justice neatly executed and well deserved.

**********

It would be comforting to say that all of us eighteen survivors quickly all readapted to the quiet peaceful life of Jaspar Valley, but that would just be well wishing.

Colin joined his old friend Ronald in death about six weeks after we returned. He had also been drinking especially heavy from the time he returned home and his night terrors had been growing even worse. The quiet was too much for him, he said in a short note of apology that he wrote before he hanged himself. His death scared a few of us to become a bit more sober, as we all found the relative silence of the valley to be quite frightening and more than bit soul disturbing.

The four older men that had returned home to unfaithful wives, and young bastard children, disavowed the lot of them, and began to service nearly by themselves the nearly five hundred or so young and not so young women that were without lovers or consorts. Eventually, three of them tired of this sport and they eventually left the valley entirely, leaving at least a dozen or two bastards behind in their wake. There were rumors that they went to either reenlist or that they joined one of the growing number of mercenary companies. In any case, none of the three ever returned back home again. We all hoped that they found their happiness somewhere else.

Another four also just quietly left us sometime during that next winter, mostly without saying goodbye at the tavern or leaving a note. Back into military service, we assumed, one way or another. Survivor's guilt was eating into each of us like a huge ulcer and a few of the last ten of us remaining weren't handling it too well, especially me.

*********

With about five hundred available women without husbands in the Jasper Valley area, there was a great deal of picking and choosing going on, and to our growing amusement it was the women who were now acting like bantam cocks, strutting to attract a mate... and viciously fighting anyone they perceived as a rival. There were assaults, poisonings, stabbings, and even a suspected murder or two, as slowly the surviving men selected wives, or at least a concubine... or three, or four... or more!

While polygamy wasn't technically illegal in rather conservative Oswein, it had never been flouted or encouraged. Now, even our rather staid local priest of

Yweorfan

, the God of Cultivation, was pointedly urging us young men to 'do our part!' and take a goodly number of the unfortunate women to wife, or at least to bed.

Hancy certainly did his part! The youngest of us survivors, being barely fourteen when he marched off to war, my school friend was now a tall, handsome and rather virile young man of not quite twenty, and he took to consort eight young and very willing women, each determined to at least be able to share in some happiness and be able to bear children. Tirol and Gaston did nearly as well, each taking six young women to their homes. The rest of us weren't quite as eager to settle down to life on a stud farm.

The other six men eventually did select their collection of bedmates and that just left me as the last one to be alone and single. Quite a few of the old men who had not gone to war, now in turn collected a few of the older widows and began to build a few harems of their own. Most of the unselected women, at least two hundred of them, slowly moved away from Jasper Valley, to other towns and villages that had not suffered as many severe casualties as our local regiment had. Still, pickings were acknowledged to be very slim everywhere. That eventually left about a last one hundred or so desperate young women, still hoping somehow to find or share a mate in Meryton, each trying their best to somehow attract my attention... and all failing.

Why had I not selected a young pretty woman? Or a dozen? I had no idea. Many of the unmarried women were rather pretty, several even would have been considered the top beauties of the valley, but none of them could pierce through my armor of anger and resentment.

The polite consensus of my physical and mental condition that first winter was that I was a 'complete mess'. I was still angry at my father, and the women who had forced me into becoming a soldier against my will, and I let everyone know it at the slightest provocation.

I was living alone at my father's farm and drinking far more than was either good or healthy for me, and I would still wake up screaming every single night imagining that there was a Caestor legionnaire there in my bedroom that was just inches away from cutting my throat. My night terrors were getting worse rather than better, and I had just enough sense left to know that if I had a woman sharing my bed, the odds were that I'd stab her in my delirium with the dagger that I kept under my pillow every night.

The idea of sleeping without my dagger to protect me from the ghostly Caestorian scout was

inconceivable

; I chose to sleep alone instead.

**********

When spring came, I forced myself to cut down the drinking a little bit so that I could start the plowing of the farm fields. I didn't have much money of my own and my father now quite despaired of my ever returning to reason, but he wouldn't subsidize my attempt to drink myself to death. I would have to make the farm productive, or at least enough so to grow enough for my needs. The idea of completing my school education and entering my apprenticeship under my father, as we had planned before the war, was now laughable, particularly as my hands now shook too much to even hold a quill, let alone write with it, even when stone cold sober.

I knew I was sick, and not at all right in my head, and I wanted to keep myself as far away from people as I could.

Actually I had little trouble getting up before dawn. My nightly nightmare about getting nearly murdered in my sleep usually woke me up well before sunrise, after which any return to sleep was impossible for me anyway. I'd drink a few mugs of ale for breakfast and have the horses in their harness ready to go by the first crack of dawn. Even plowing from dawn until dusk, my father's fields were so large and numerous that I couldn't hope to cover even a third of them and get them all planted. To work this farm before the war, my father had at least a dozen field hands to handle those twenty individual fields, but now I was working all alone. All had left with me to war and none had even survived to see the end of the battle of Lacestone.

By the time the spring rains were over, I considered myself lucky to get even six of the twenty fields plowed and seeded. All had been fallow since the start of the war and some livestock took turns grazing on the unused fields, further ripening them with their manure. Someday they would be very fertile, when there were again enough lads and men to work the fields.

Working the farm alone was exhausting and nearly backbreaking, but it was also soothing emotionally and slowly but gradually my nerves began to settle down and I once again began to rejoin humanity.

**********

The real beginning of my 'cure' was a quiet Freo 'free day' afternoon during the next winter, at the town tavern. Of habit, we remaining survivors met there every Freo afternoon to hoist a few blackjacks in remembrance of our lost friends and companions. Sometimes the townswomen, new lovers or old family kin, would sit nearby quietly, hoping for us to tell a tale of our adventures, but we rarely ever spoke of the bad old days, and never of our ordeal at Lacestone. We all wanted very badly to forget and no one was happy about remembering or reliving old terrors. My nerves were slowly getting better and I could hold my blackjack mostly steady now without spilling half of it on myself or the serving table... until she entered the taproom.

In my usual corner of our long table, I hadn't seen her ride into town, alone upon a great brown and white horse. It was a black rainy miserable day and it only became more miserable when the visiting traveling

gléaman

cheerfully reminded us that tomorrow would be the seventh anniversary of the battle of Lacestone. To make things worse, he started playing and singing some god-awful epic poem about the heroic Rowan and Gwenda, and the seven years of past history fell away from us like leaves blown off of a stone road in a strong wind. Like it was only yesterday, we found ourselves once again back in that battle-line, facing impossible odds and watching our friends and companions falling like scythed wheat everywhere on all sides around us. Lost in our memories, the

gléaman

sang his heroic but still sad song to the very end, until he took a break to slake his own extreme thirst. My own thirst at this moment was near unquenchable too, and my hands once again shook so heavily that one of my friends, Aeldon. had to help firmly grasp and hold my wrist so that I could drink.

"Why did the left flank break? Were the Broadmore soldiers craven and did they turn and run?" One older woman, a widow with little hope of ever again re-consorting asked. To my surprise, the strange young woman now seated at the bar counter answered her.

"The soldiers of Broadmore were extremely brave and they only retreated when they had lost about half of their total numbers and their line had been broken in at least two places. They fell back in good calm order to regroup, and when the Duchess sent in her only reserves to help them firm up the flack, they fought even more bravely and they not only held, but they began to advance. This I know, for I was there with Lord Loren's light cavalry, there at his extreme edge and I rode beside their ranks as we circled and cut off this wing of the Boar-Man horde and we slowly carved it into pieces. From what I saw, every man, woman and youth did their duty, and more."

We veterans silently nodded, and again we raised our leather blackjacks of ale in toast to our old missing companions.

"Where was the Oswein army in the line?" The traveler gently asked us, with a slight cock of her pretty head and subtle toss of her long brunette ponytail to rest again against her back, ontop her. She was about my age, not yet quite in her mid-twenties, and even in her stained and well-seasoned traveling leathers, she was clearly had a very striking beauty. "You must have been on the right flank, with the Draklanders."