The Last Pilgrims (7 page)

He had returned home spiritually depressed,
morally confused, and with an intense desire for peace and
simplicity, hoping to—in some magical way—purify his
conscience.

At 25 years of age, he was back to being a
student. Farm life was just not working out for his generation,
what with the endless need for money and all the expensive rules,
laws and hindrances. Farming, though now attractive to him, seemed
an idyllic and unreasonable fantasy. Higher education promised a
more realistic answer to his overwhelming angst.

For his twenty-fifth birthday his parents
gave him an all-expenses paid trip to America. He had determined to
spend the bulk of the trip skiing in the Southern Rockies. He
hadn’t determined to pass through what had always been referred to
as ‘The End of The World as We Know It.’

His passage to America had been uneventful,
and without portent. The early stages of his trip were just as he
had imagined. Then THE DAY arrived.

On the morning of the collapse, he and two
American friends rode horses through the drifting snow to a remote
cabin owned by an artist they had met while exploring around in
Santa Fe. Why they had chosen that day to ride into the mountains,
he could not say.

This particular artist lived on a
mountainside just east of what was once known as Taos, New Mexico.
Taos was then well known as a haven for artists, beatniks,
leftists, environmentalists, and other assorted potheads and
hippies.

The artist, Goffrey Byrd, was about
stereotypical for the area, which made the day trip interesting, as
one of English’s American friends was a right-wing, special-forces,
mercenary type genius that he had met while serving in the
mountains of Afghanistan.

After a spectacularly insightful argument
between the artist, who happened to be a communist, and the
mercenary, who happened to hate communism, the group had decided to
work out their political differences with copious amounts of
alcohol and a good old-fashioned snowball fight.

The snowy battle was in full swing when
Goffrey received a call on his cell phone. He barely had a signal,
but he caught enough of the message to understand that things had
gone very, very wrong in the world.

Goffrey’s closest neighbor with a television
was higher up the mountain, several miles up a twisty snow-covered
road. The group rode silently and pensively, wondering what was
going on, and how it would affect them. The mercenary was full of
speculation and supposition, most of which turned out to be
correct.

Staring out at El Paso shimmering in the
summer heat, he shook his head. The rest of the memory blurred,
like the waves of heat rising above the city—the endless reports of
the economic crash, and then staring at the television while
society just unraveled in real time; the panicked actions of an
impotent government as the dominos cascaded outward from the crash;
riots in stores, in neighborhoods, and then in whole cities. Within
days (rather than weeks or months, as some had predicted) the world
had changed forever.

Within a week of the crash, all
communications and electrical power had been lost permanently.

The next few weeks the group spent learning
how to survive a winter in the mountains without power. He recalled
long, endless hours of guard duty; eating wild cats and hares
trapped from the forest; bottomless cups of pine needle tea;
shooting at looters and bandits, while simultaneously trying not to
waste ammunition.

After a period of five weeks passed with no
news at all from the outside world, the men had seen the mushroom
cloud, or at least the uppermost part of it, rising into the clear
blue sky to the south. They rightly guessed that the cloud had been
a nuclear device going off in Albuquerque. To this day he still did
not know who set off the nukes. In books, there were always
answers. In the real world… not so much.

His present way of life was entirely
different to what it used to be. The world was now monumentally
different. What he called ‘the world’ had grown to immense
proportions after the crash. England might as well be on the moon,
and he could just as well have gotten on a spaceship when he left
home twenty years ago.

He smiled as he watched the endless mule
carts being pulled through the open portcullis at the main gate of
the castle. He was on another planet now. He had gone back in time,
even if he was in the future.

The terror he had felt back in those first
few days, weeks, and months on that mountainside in New Mexico
seemed overwhelming to a young man accustomed to life’s luxuries.
Still, English knew now that he would trade everything he had
today, including his titles, his lands, and his prospects, to go
back to those days. Things had been clearer back then… and cooler.
Now, he was playing this deadly game, permanently soaking wet from
the sweat. How could he escape this infernal heat?

In the three years since the King had sent
him to El Paso as Secretary to Duke Carlos Emmanuel, English had
complained about the heat incessantly. Even in the winter. He had
hoped that his endless vocal protestations of discomfort would
cause the Duke to send him back to New Rome, and to his home and
lands there. Alternatively, he could eventually have enough of my
moaning and decide to kill me, English thought, which would be
almost as good. He took out a handkerchief and wiped down his face.
Even the bloody breezes were hot here!

English had no love for the Aztlanis, no
real love for his King, and even less love for his current master
the Duke Carlos Emmanuel. In his own private correspondence, he
referred to the former drug dealer and current Duke of El Paso with
the acronym CEPIC which stood for
Cocaloco Everyman,
Pretender-In-Chief
. He laughed to himself, thinking that, if
the spies ever opened his mail, they would be forever trying to
figure out what CEPIC meant. He also referred to the Duchy of El
Paso as ‘The Duchy of Wastelandia’, but usually only under his
breath or into his cup.

Being an Aztlani Knight on paper didn’t
erase the reality that he was, for all intents and purposes, an
unwilling slave to the King, sent to the court of Carlos Emmanuel
as a spy pretending to be his ducal secretary. And that was only
the first play in the game.

English gathered the latest correspondence
and intelligence from his own secretary, a young man named Pano,
and exited his large office into the Great Hall that lead to the
office of the Duke. In his mind, he called this walk the
paseo
de la vergüenza
which meant ‘the walk of shame’. It was funnier
in his head and with his English accent.

The Duke was already waiting for him so he
approached the desk in his usual formal manner, and greeted His
Grace with a bow. “I have the latest communications and
intelligence to share with Your Grace.”

The Duke was a tiny joke of a man, a
clown-royal, known before the collapse as an extremely violent
middle-man who would do anything, betray any friend, violate any
trust, and murder anyone necessary to maintain his position and to
move up in the Juarez drug cartel.

Carlos was only a few inches taller than a
grade school boy, and he wore silly elevated shoes that, rather
than making him appear taller, only succeeded in making him look
completely ridiculous. He further attempted to augment or amend his
youthful looks with a cartoonish handlebar mustache that connected
and outlined his face via a very thin beard-line that bordered his
overly effeminate jaw. English always thought that Carlos was a
caricature of a miniature Mexican bandit with self-image
issues.

“No whining about the heat, then?” the Duke
said, glancing at his secretary out of the corner of his eye.

“Were they to heat the furnace in this
desert hell-hole seven times more than it was wont to be heated,
Your Grace, you should not hear a peep from me.”

“Don’t tempt me, English. I’ll hear your
report, but zhooo should know that the King is going to want to
hear news of the Crown Prince. I do hope zhooo are working on
something to tell him?”

The Duke tried so very hard to mask his
heavy Mexican accent, but he could not. No matter how hard he
tried, whenever he said the word ‘you’, it usually came out
sounding like ‘jew’. When he was especially successful, like today,
it came out more like ‘zhooo’.

English had prepared a response for this
very issue. He smiled reassuringly at the Duke. “I am writing to
the King personally today, Your Grace. The Crown Prince was sent
here to be trained and disciplined, so that he will be ready to
rule Aztlan one day. That is what the King has commanded, and that
is what we are doing—we are training the Crown Prince.”

He walked towards the full-length window
that looked down into the Duke’s private courtyard. The heat and
the topic made the sweat run profusely under his woolen officer’s
tunic. By rule, he only had to wear the official tunic when he was
in the presence of the Duke, or in royal company, but he had chosen
to wear it almost all of the time as a silent protest and to
emphasize his own personal suffering to himself. It was his version
of the ‘hair-shirt’ once worn by priests and others to cause
private discomfort and irritation. Its purpose was supposedly to
bring on humility and a disregard for the flesh, so that the
individual would become more spiritually aware. He needed every
victory he could get… and even private victories counted. His
constant wearing of the tunic, along with his unwillingness to have
it laundered in the castle laundry, had become a running joke among
many of the workers of the castle.

“I think, perhaps, the King may want more
detail than that. For example…. His Highness may want to know where
the Crown Prince is
right now
.”

“I will prepare a wonderful answer for the
King, detailing the glorious exploits of his eldest son, under the
tutelage and training of those appointed personally by His Grace
the Duke of El Paso,” English replied, bowing curtly.

“That sounds great, Sir English, but
sometime we gonna have to tell the King the actual location of his
son, since he is not really training under me.”

“Military training, Your Grace, requires
discipline, practice and—above all—secrecy,” English said, clasping
his hands behind his back. “You are preparing for a military
invasion of the badlands, with an incursion at least as far as San
Angelo and maybe farther. This has not been done before, at least
not with a force this size. I am certain the King would love to
have his son and heir among the host, fighting against his enemies.
However, Your Grace, we cannot risk letting the enemy know the
whereabouts of the Crown Prince of Aztlan. The letters to the King
could fall into the wrong hands. Surely both Your Grace and His
Highness must understand that.”

“So zhooo will craft this response to the
King? In the way you have relayed it to me?”

“I will, Your Grace.”

“If something happens to the Crown Prince,
Sir English, I assure zhooo that 100% of the fault will be laid at
your own door. I know nothing of the training or mission of the
young Prince. I will deny everything.”

“I understand, Your Grace.”

“And, should the young Prince meet such
misfortune, I will send the notice of the Prince’s death in a note
placed in the box with your head.” The Duke nodded at English with
satisfaction at his own creativity. “What else do zhooo have for
me?”

English rifled through the papers, scanning
them as if he were looking for something, though he had the
contents memorized. “Let’s see… as you know, the attempt to kill
the post rider sent from Jonathan Wall to the King of the South
States failed. We have no word from the assassin we sent, but we
are assuming that he is dead.”

“I see,” the Duke noted, obviously unhappy
with the news.

“There is more bad news, Your Grace, but the
day’s correspondence will end on a positive note, I assure
you.”

“Go ahead with it then,” the Duke
sighed.

“The failure of the assassin led to some of
our other assets being compromised. The Ghost militia went on a spy
hunt and uncovered several other agents we had strategically placed
within communities in or near Bethany.”

“What does this mean?” the Duke asked
impatiently, “We have no spies among the Vallenses anymore? And we
are so soon to launch our attack?”

“Yes, we do, but most of them have been
exposed, or, having been exposed, have subsequently fled.”

“But we still have men there? We still have
means of finding out what they are planning?”

“We do, I can assure you, Your Grace. But
there is no doubt that our intelligence gathering among the
Vallenses has recently suffered a great setback, Your Grace,”
English said.

“I assume that the Ghost militia and the
Vallenses know that we are going to attack?” asked the Duke,
shaking his head.

“We have to assume that they are aware that
we are coming, Your Grace. However, I fail to see what they can do
about it. The Vallenses will not fight. Every piece of intelligence
we have indicates that Jonathan Wall will not join forces with the
rebels. The Ghost militia themselves can pester us, but we believe
they cannot field more than 100 men at one time and place without
risking everything. In any conflict, we will outnumber them ten to
one.”

“Ok. And zhooo say zhooo have good
news?”

“News
you
might enjoy, Your Grace,”
English said, doing his best to hide his own disgust.

“Well… tell it to me, don’t keep me
waiting!”

“A little over a week ago, five of our
spies, knowing that they had been compromised, took a wild shot in
the dark. They had heard from a fisherman that some militiamen were
guarding a shack down on the Colorado River. They did not know what
they would find there, but they had hoped that, whatever it was,
would be valuable to Aztlan. They disguised themselves as
Vallensian farmers before approaching the militia guards, and were
thus able to catch the men unawares. The freemen guards were under
the command of the terrorist known as Phillip, and it turns out
that they were guarding Phillip’s own wife and daughters. Our spies
were successful in overpowering the guards and taking Philip’s
family into custody.”