The Last Pilgrims (16 page)

Looking eastward down the street he could
see men with wagons and oxen moving up the Bethany road, as crews
continued work pulling Aztlani dead from among the boulders near
the base of the mesas in the gap.

When he looked back at Phillip, he said, “I
can’t imagine that it is safe for anyone to return. We don’t even
know if this was the main Aztlani force. We don’t know how they got
here as fast as they did, although I suspect your outriders will
learn that they used trucks to get across the badlands, at least as
far as San Angelo.”

Phillip shook his head, “Since the crash, no
army I know of has used trucks or burned precious fuel to get to
the battlefield.” He rubbed his beard and then scratched his head,
“Our men are searching south and west of there. We suspect that you
are probably right, though I don’t understand why they wouldn’t
have come all the way to Bethany if that were the case. I know the
roads are bad, but they are worse from El Paso to the
frontier.”

Gareth tried to put himself in the mind of
the Duke of El Paso, who would have planned the assault himself. “I
suppose,” he said, scanning the street as the work there
progressed, “that fuel was the final arbiter of how far they could
go. It would determine how much they could carry, and how much they
would need for the return trip. When your men find the trucks…
if
they find the trucks… we’ll know more. There should be a
fuel truck with them with enough fuel to get at least half of the
trucks back to El Paso. If there is no fuel truck, and if there is
clearly not enough fuel on board for the trucks to return home,
then all bets are off.”

David spoke up. “That would mean that it was
a suicide mission?”

“Could be,” he said, “or a test. Possibly
even a diversion. Perhaps it could mean that the Duke felt that the
initial force might be sufficient to take and burn the town, but if
that attack failed, we’d think that the war is over, when it is
not.”

“So there could be another assault coming?”
David asked.

“Oh, I can assure you that another assault
is coming. The question is whether this first battle was a colossal
failure on their part, or the first move in a broader
campaign.”

“I don’t know,” Phillip said, sighing
demonstrably. “Aztlan has proven to be just arrogant enough to
believe that this assault would accomplish their designs. I guess,
I really don’t know what to think yet. When the outriders get word
to us from San Angelo, we’ll know more. Until then, we’ll need to
prepare for another… another larger battle.”

“We’ve work to do, then,” Gareth said,
looking from Phillip to David.

“We do,” Phillip replied as he put his hand
on David’s shoulder, pausing for a moment before continuing.
“You’ve done a phenomenal job David. Every man and woman in the
area now owes you a debt of gratitude. I know that this action has
cost you a lot personally, and might have a… negative impact… on
your relationship with your father. But had you not acted when you
did, and in the way that you did, Bethany would have been lost, and
we would have been fighting uphill to try to stop Aztlan from
destroying all of the Vallenses.”

“I, like you, must obey my conscience,”
David said.

“Well, unhappily, you must now obey your
conscience
and me
—since you are now a militia soldier. I’m
going to ask you to handle the arrangements and the meeting with
your father. You know everything I know. I’d be glad to meet with
him if it is necessary, but there is nothing that I can tell him
that you cannot convey yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” David replied.

Gareth and Phillip began strolling back down
Main Street, walking slowly and silently for some time, as they
each considered what the future might hold.

At the Livery, horses moved about and
whinnied as men treated wounds on the battle-wearied mounts.
Between the Livery and the General Store, there was a small park
with wooden tables and some red mesquite chairs shaded by massive
pecan and oak trees.

“I continue to pray that your wife and
children are safe, Phillip,” Gareth said as they sat down on two
chairs, one on either side of a mesquite table.

“It won’t help to send anyone northward for
word of them,” Phillip replied almost, but not quite,
unemotionally. “We cannot make the messengers arrive any faster by
wasting more men to ride out to meet them. We’ll just have to
wait.”

“I’ll wait with you until we hear.”

“Thank you, Prince.”

“No more ‘Assassin’?”

“No more, Prince Gareth.”

He pointed at Phillip. “I’ve been meaning to
ask you. When did you figure out that I was the Prince? Thinking
back, it seems you had known for awhile.”

“I suspected it almost immediately from
conversations and letters I have received from English over the
years. Sir Nigel Kerr is very fond of you, and often spoke highly
of you. I did not know for certain until the other night when we
were talking in the darkness at camp up north, just before Rob
Fosse and Sir Gerold showed up to confirm my suspicions. You said
something that was curious to me. You said,
‘God sees through
barn roofs just as well as castles’
, and I think it was at that
moment that I absolutely knew that I was speaking to the Crown
Prince of Aztlan.”

Gareth laughed. “Yes, I suspected as much.
Not a minute later you said,
‘Monarchs rule by right of
blood—each son ruling in the place of his dead father’
. I think
that was when I realized that you knew. I’m just grateful that you
figured it out. Your men would have killed me right then.”

“Yes,” Phillip said, smiling, “they would
have. In fact some of them still would like to go ahead and kill
you just to be safe.”

“Perhaps, in time, they will grow to like
me.”

“Fat chance! Still, I do think that they
respect you for your integrity, and for your courage and bravery in
the battle.”

“I don’t think I was very Princely.”

“Probably not, but it was your first
engagement. You did well enough.”

They were silent for a moment as they
reflected back on the battle.

“We’ve lost twelve men,” he said, as he
scanned Phillip’s countenance for some clue as to what that meant
to him.

Phillip nodded. “Twelve good men. Twelve
friends. I have known, trained and fought with most of them since
they were just boys.”

“Do you ever grieve?”

“I never stop grieving,” Phillip replied as
he looked to the top of the mesa. His eyes were clear and blue. The
afternoon had grown hot, and the mesas blocked the southerly wind,
which was one negative in the placement of the town of Bethany.

“Will you stop riding… stop fighting, if
there is peace with Aztlan?”

“There will never be peace with Aztlan until
they are defeated.”

“What then? When they are defeated; when
Aztlan is humbled; what becomes of the Ghost?”

A wagon piled high with corpses to be buried
rumbled by. “I suppose that I’ll end my days like those men, but if
I don’t… If I don’t… I’d like to stand on the top of that mesa with
my wife and look out over a free and independent Texas. Maybe that
vision is God’s will, or perhaps it is just what my flesh wants.
All I can do is fight until I know the difference.”

“Do you fear God’s wrath, Phillip?”

“I know that, if we let these people be
slaughtered by Aztlan, I’d have every reason to fear it.”

“Will the Vallenses fight now?”

Phillip shook his head. “No.”

As they sat in silence pondering the wrath
of God, an outrider came riding hard from the direction of the
thicket. Phillip jumped up from his chair, and met the rider in the
street.

“Is it my wife and children? Are they
safe?”

The rider dismounted, nodding a salute to
Phillip. “I come from the south, sir. We’ve found the trucks. There
are ten of them, hidden in a caliche pit about ten miles northeast
of San Angelo.”

“Was there a fuel truck? Or any means of
refueling for the trip home?”

“Not that we found, sir. The trucks were
disabled and burned. A complete loss, sir. They were just blackened
shells. It seems the Aztlani men were never intended to make it
back home.”

Her hands moved swiftly and expertly as she
gathered the wheat into her left hand and cleanly cut the stalks
off near the ground with her sickle. When the sheaf in her hand
became difficult to carry easily, she tied it off with a few
strands of wheat straw and then stacked it, grain heads up, with
the other sheaves on the ground, creating a pile known as a ‘shock’
or a ‘stook’ of wheat.

In a few days, provided it did not rain and
the wheat had dried sufficiently, other workers would come by with
a large flatbed wagon pulled by two draft horses and they would
grab the dried stooks with large hayforks and bring in the sheaves
to the threshing barn to be threshed and winnowed.

War had come to Central Texas and to the
Vallenses and now there were thousands of mouths to feed in and
around the Wall family ranch. Every hand was needed to help bring
in the harvest. Each family that needed help with sustenance would
be getting a weekly ration of wheat, so long as they were unable to
return to their homes. The harvest teams were also traveling to
nearby farms to harvest those crops, knowing that every kernel
would be precious if the war was to last very long.

Ana didn’t mind helping with the harvest; in
fact, even if the war had not come, she would have been out here.
She always pitched in during the wheat harvest, even if her
position at the ranch did not mandate it. She liked it, even on the
hottest days. Harvesting reminded her of all the parables of the
Bible regarding wheat, threshing, and winnowing. Seeing the grain
processed from the beginning to the final product as bread or
cereal grains impressed and amazed her.

Almost automatically, her hands worked the
wheat and she continued rhythmically up the row. Her thoughts
detoured from the parables of God, and retreated to the path of her
old life and what it had been like once upon a time. She constantly
told herself not to dwell on the past, but the flesh is
weak—especially when you are alone with your thoughts.

Before he died, her husband wanted to
avoid—at all costs—the agrarian life she now prized. Five years
before the crash, she was compelled to start studying and looking
into a simpler and more sustainable way of life. The world had
become a frightening place to her, and the trite answers of the
mainstream religious authorities, as well as the prophetical
inferences that had once enamored her, had become wholly
insufficient to offer her any comfort at all.

Her studies led her to Jonathan Wall’s books
on biblical worldviews, simple living, and Agrarianism. Her husband
Hamish vehemently rejected everything she had started to believe
was the truth. He told her that God had given men advanced and
curious minds, and that using their minds to make their own lives
easier and more comfortable was the fulfillment of God’s
wishes.

His utilitarian religion wholly embraced and
encouraged his utilitarian thinking. Expediency was his only rule
and law. In fact, Ana had learned that utilitarianism had become
the religion of the entire world, no matter what name or title was
put on it. There were many religions and denominations, but almost
all had joined the one-world cult of
efficiency
, which did
not allow for any doubting or questioning of technology, modernity,
or the ways of the world. The cult of modern religion promoted the
view that whatever coddled the flesh or made life easier and more
comfortable, was a blessing from God and ought to be wholeheartedly
received—no matter what the real effects were to the individual,
the society, or the culture.

She tried gently and lovingly to help her
husband understand that the Bible taught otherwise, and that the
immoderate creature comforts of modern life were actually what had
caused modern religion to apostatize, but he would have nothing of
it.

Her husband had received the seed of his
faith among the thorns. He heard the word, but the cares of this
world and the deceitfulness of riches had choked it out.
Consequently, he banned her from reading anything Jonathan Wall
wrote and forced her to continue in, and increase her dependence
on, a modern world rocketing towards collapse. The more the world
stumbled and reeled from gluttony, greed, and consumption, the more
Hamish insisted that everything was just fine, and the angrier he
became with anyone who even hinted at abandoning the sinking
ship.

The fact that she was still alive had
nothing to do with preparedness, survival training, or anything of
the sort. She had survived—she believed—by the grace of God
alone.

When the crash came, Ana and Hamish were two
of the very, very few people who made it out of Fort Worth. How
many coincidences could there be? They just happened to have a
half-tank of gas; and they just happened to choose a route out of
town that hadn’t already been closed off by the police, burning
cars, rioters, or looters, or all of the above. They managed to
make it two hours west of the city before the worst of the violence
and mayhem consumed most of those who were left behind.

They ran out of gas outside of the small
town of Albany, Texas. As they walked on the service road,
terrified at everything that was happening around them, her silent
prayers were answered when they were picked up and taken in by an
older retired couple, the Haltoms.

Ana paused for a moment in her harvesting
and took a whetstone out of the horn sheath that she kept tied
around her waist with a section of rope. As she reflected on the
aftermath of the collapse, she drew the whetstone along the edge of
the blade.
It is amazing, sometimes, to consider what events are
necessary to sharpen us and to hone us to make us of any use
,
she thought.