The Last Pilgrims (34 page)

Ana was still highly agitated. “So if you
didn’t drink the tea, then why were you squirming around on the
bed, doubled over as if you had been poisoned?” she asked.

“Well, in one sense I was poisoned… I did
take a drink of the tea, and was feeling some effects, but when
Rollo left I immediately spit it out. I was experiencing some mild
stomach cramps and numbness in my feet, which I expected, but the
dosage that I consumed was minimal.” He looked at her
apologetically. “I’m ashamed to say that, in the heat of the
moment, Ana… I… had a passing thought that maybe you might have
been in on it. So when you walked in I feigned sickness in order to
measure your reaction. As soon as you ran out like you did, I knew
that you weren’t involved, and I apologize for ever having
entertained that thought. I am truly sorry to have hurt you.”

“Oh, please don’t be sorry!” Ana said
excitedly. “I understand completely. Your suspicions saved your
life.”

“When you ran out the way you did, and I
realized that you were not involved, I immediately tried to run
after you. When I got into the front room here, I saw Rollo walk
past the far window with a pistol in his hand. Rushing to the
window over there, I saw David and Phillip ride up. I yelled to
them, but it was too late. When I heard the shots, I tried to run
after Rollo, but I was still suffering from symptoms of the
hemlock, and my feet would not respond as I would have wished… I
stumbled. When I did get outside, he was gone.”

“Oh, my, my, my!” Ana cried, beginning to
rock back and forth, “and now my beautiful David is dead!” She
began sobbing uncontrollably, and Gareth did what he could to
console her.

Phillip’s head was throbbing, and his side
was really starting to hurt. He sat up stiffly, and when Gareth and
Ana saw him, they ran to him shouting that he should lie back
down.

He refused them, and, sitting up in the cot,
he shook his head to try to clear it. The throbbing pain in his
side was familiar, and he knew he could handle the pain; the big
threat now would come from infection. He looked at Gareth and
clinched his jaw. “Give me a report, please, Prince.”

“David is dead,” Gareth replied, sadly.

“I saw that before I passed out.” He looked
to Ana and his face softened. “I am so, so sorry for your loss Ana.
If I could have done anything…,” he paused. “Please let us do
whatever we can do to help you with this.”

Ana looked up with tears streaming down her
face. “There is nothing anyone can do to bring David back.” She
looked down and twisted a handkerchief in her hand. “His father
needs to know.”

Phillip just nodded his head.
What can I
say?
No doubt Rollo was now on his way to meet up with the
posse so he could kill Jonathan.
What can I do?
There is no
way to catch a single, intelligent, trained militiaman alone on the
run. The Ghost militia were trained much too well for that.
Our
only hope is Piggy… or Rob Fosse. One of them will need to sniff
out Rollo before he can kill Jonathan.
As much as he liked Rob,
the only one he knew… absolutely knew… was better and smarter than
The Mountain was Piggy.
Lord, I pray to you right now to give
our brother Piggy wisdom and understanding. Let him know what to
do!

Phillip called for his inner circle, and
then struggled to his feet. He was dizzy for a moment, but after a
minute the dizziness passed.

Gareth looked at him and shook his head. “I
guess you were right when you said that you’d received ‘a dozen
such nicks’ and that you had never let them slow you down,” Gareth
said.

“No. I was wrong. What I said was, ‘they
never even made me sleepy,’ and as you can see, I just woke
up.”

“Maybe you should take it easy for a few
days.”

“I will, Prince. I need to give some orders,
and then I promise I’ll take it easy.”

“Something tells me that that promise is
nothing but an empty shell.”

“Let’s just say that it is an honest
reflection of my deepest intentions. Perhaps ‘promise’ was too firm
a word.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Within minutes, Pachuco Reyes, Longbow, Enos
Flynn, Tyrell of Terrell, and Gareth were all standing around him
as he stood by the table. Everyone was appropriately awed and
saddened by the death of David Wall, but as militiamen they were
all serious and ready for action. Death was an ever-present reality
in war.

“I pray that that was the end of us having
spies at the round table?” Phillip asked rhetorically, with just a
hint of a smile. “We need to get back to work, because Aztlan is
not sleeping. In fact, the beast is stirring. We have a slight
advantage for now, because they will think that Gareth and I are
both dead. That will embolden them. We’ll be a surprise to them
when they see us again in battle. Hopefully it will be like when
the dead Cid, strapped to his warhorse
Babieca
, led his men
against the Almoravids in Spain. Who knows, maybe Aztlan might even
drop their weapons and run.”

“Maybe,” replied Tyrell, “after all, you are
the Ghost. And I always wondered why you named your horse Babieca.
It seemed to be such a strange name.”

“I need you men to carefully and
respectfully prepare David’s body for burial. We will go ahead and
seal his body in a coffin, but place it in the springhouse for now.
It will do for a few days. We will all pray that his father returns
in time to see him buried. If he doesn’t, we will have the burial
in three days’ time.”

“Yes, sir,” Pachuco Reyes replied, “we will
see that it is all done properly and that everything is ready.” The
militiaman paused for a moment in reflection, before continuing.
“Most of the Vallenses who had fled north have now returned.”
Pachuco hesitated for a moment. “I must say, Maestro, that it is…
necessary… that David’s sister Elizabeth be informed of what has
happened. She and her husband are camped in the main Vallensian
camp at the front of the ranch.”

Phillip pondered for a moment, looking down
at the table. “Prince Gareth, I would like you to take Ana… when
she is ready… and go do this thing.”

“I will, Phillip,” Gareth replied.

Phillip stood up straight, unconsciously
stretching the muscle in his side that had been pierced by the
bullet. “There is no doubt in my mind, that this attack was a
precursor to a larger campaign. I expect that the remainder of the
Duke’s army is heading this way even now. I doubt they will use
trucks as they did before—but they certainly could. We have some
time to prepare, but it may not be much.” He rapped his knuckles
hard against the table, and frowned. “They think we’re finished.
They think that Prince Gareth and I are dead, and we’ll let them
keep thinking that. They think that they have ‘cut off the head’
and that the body will wither up and die. They will find out that
they have been horribly wrong!”

“Where will we fight, sir?” Longbow
asked.

“Aztlan cannot come from the east as they
did in the battle of the Penateka Dam. They will have to come at us
directly, from the west and south. They will expect us to do what
we have done, which is to try to force them through the Bethany
Pass,” he looked down at the table, tracking his finger across the
worn oak as if a map were there. “Not this time,” he said, looking
up into the faces of his men. “Not this time.”

Phillip walked stiffly over to the window
and looked out onto the drive where his own blood had mingled with
that of David Wall. The stain was still evident on the ground. Then
he turned back to his men, and raised his hand, pointing to the
west. “This time we will hit them when and where they will least
expect it... as they move across the badlands. We will hit them
with everything we have.”

“But, sir!” Enos Flynn said, with a shocked
and confused look on his face. “They will likely have more than
5,000 men! Maybe
many
more! We’ve never engaged in
traditional attacks against larger armies in the open field…
never!”

“First, that is why they won’t expect it.
Second,” he said, looking from man to man, “it won’t exactly be in
the ‘open field’. Third… the term ‘traditional’ has become
difficult to define in this age—especially after the collapse.
Let’s just say that, as far as the Ghost militia is concerned, this
engagement will be far from traditional.”

After several hours rest, and some more
treatment for his wounds, he was back at work at the table in the
Great Room, sending messengers to outlying units, and writing notes
on cotton paper with a quill pen.

His wound was feeling much better now, and
the throbbing had died down after the latest round of treatment. A
poultice of antibacterial herbs, spices, and garlic had been
applied tightly to both the entry and the exit wound. The bullet
had traveled through the fleshy muscle and had missed perforating
his abdomen and therefore hadn’t hit any organs. The whole poultice
had been drenched in what he was told was a tincture made of grain
alcohol and the tiny fruit of an indigenous plant the Vallenses
called “tickle tongue” or “the toothache tree.” The whole mess
smelled of limes and garlic, but he had to admit that the pain had
been reduced quite a bit. He was experienced with these types of
wounds—if not with the Vallensian treatment for them.

Every hour and a half he was made to drink a
glass of Vallensian beer. Wally the cook told him that the body can
process and eliminate the alcohol from one glass of beer an hour,
and at his weight and height he should be able to handle the beer
without losing any sharpness in his mind. He liked the beer, but he
would be glad when this treatment was over. He was anxious to be
back in the field, making preparations.

Wally was going around the room lighting the
fat lamps when Gareth and the rest of his inner circle
returned.

“We have informed Betsy Miller of the death
of her brother,” Gareth reported. “She took it quite well,
considering. Something tells me that she wasn’t that surprised. She
said that David had chosen life in the militia, and that, although
she was glad that he had obeyed his conscience, her father had
taught all of the Wall children that ‘those who live by the sword,
are likely to die by the sword’.”

“Ok,” Phillip replied, sadly. “I don’t
pretend to understand these Vallenses, but I’m glad she handled it
well. I hope her father and Ruth are able to handle it just as
well.”

“We have more bad news, Phillip,” Pachuco
Reyes said, looking intently at the militia leader.

“You might as well let me have it while I’m
loaded up with this beer, Pachuco.”

“Refugees are arriving from East Texas—from
the Piney Woods. They say a large army is moving this way from
Louisiana.”

His head dropped to his chest.
I should
have expected this
. He had almost stopped counting all of his
failures in this war. “That has to be the Duke of Louisiana’s army.
Prince Gareth told me I should be expecting this. I just had no
idea… I had no idea this would all happen so soon.”

Gareth looked at him and smiled a quirky
smile. “Look on the bright side, Phillip. This way the blows will
stop falling like sprinkles. Now it looks as if we’ll get the brunt
of the storm.”

“I’m not sure if that is the bright side,
Prince, but it does look like we are to be squeezed in that vice
you mentioned to me.”

“Perhaps,” Gareth replied as he walked up to
the table and pulled out a chair, “this would be the time to…
impolitely and maybe callously… mention that with David Wall dead,
and Jonathan gone, we might be able to encourage the Vallensian
elders to let their people fight.”

As Gareth sat down, Phillip stood up. “I
cannot believe that, even under these circumstances, the Vallenses
will fight.” He stood for a moment but began to feel a little
light-headed, so he sat down again.

“I will speak to them, Phillip. And, I hope
you will accept my apologies for already doing so without your
permission. I took the liberty of sending messengers to gather the
Elders together tomorrow.”

Phillip looked at the Prince, and after a
few moments, he nodded his head. “So, do we have any word from the
new refugees how large the Louisianan army might be?”

“All they said was ‘thousands’.”

“Thousands?”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat back in his seat and put both hands
up behind his head. “Longbow!” he shouted.

The militia soldier snapped to attention.
“Yes, sir!”

“Let the Vallenses know that they are all
going to be moving again.”

“Moving, sir?”

“Yes. We’re all going to Harmony. You and
Tyrell are going to stay here and make sure all of the Vallenses
pack up and start moving westward.”

Prince Gareth looked at him quizzically.
“Harmony? What’s a Harmony?”

“You’ll see soon enough, Crown Prince,” he
said as he started to gather up his papers and stuff them into a
satchel. “We’ll all see soon enough, because Harmony might just be
where the Vallenses and the Ghost militia make their last
stand.”

“Maybe we should have called it Masada,”
Pachuco said, sighing deeply.

“Well, there won’t be any suicides, but one
way or another a whole lot of people are going to die.”

Going back through the tunnel followed by
500 Mexican troops wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned when he
first escaped with Pano.
Good thing we brought better
ladders
, he thought as they approached the north end of the
tunnel, and the inevitable climb back up into La Chimenea
castle.

The attack on the castle by the forces of
the King of Mexico was a carefully timed affair. Above ground,
1,500 men had launched their siege on the castle the night before.
The seige was designed to get the small force within the castle
into defensive battle array for the protection of the castle and
the Duke. Today, at precisely noon, the siege forces advancing on
La Chimenea were to attempt to breach the castle walls, and at
exactly that moment the tunnel force would emerge within the castle
and fight their way to the Duke’s private office and quarters.
General Loya’s hope was to take the castle with a minimum of actual
fighting or loss of life. As a natural pessimist, English was not
as optimistic.
No battle plan survives contact with the
enemy
, they say. English didn’t know exactly what to expect,
but he figured it would go down somewhat differently than how it
had been planned by General Loya.