The Last Pilgrims (6 page)

This pig, though, would be tonight’s supper
for the Walls and all of their guests. The old cook Wally (she
called him ‘Walleye’) would roast it on a spit over an open flame.
Ruth’s mouth watered just thinking about it.

As they walked back to the house, Tim and
Ruth talked about hunting and the hot summer, as Louise trotted
back and forth, darting underneath the pig as if she wanted
everyone to know that she had been the one to find it.

Technically, according to the
ordnung
of the community, she and Timothy were never allowed to be alone
together. Tim was supposed to watch from afar and keep her safe.
But no one would say anything to him for helping her carry a heavy
pig back home. And she really did enjoy his company. Timothy was
nice.

Back at the house, Wally half-heartedly
scolded Ruth for bringing him another pig so late in the day. “This
is the third pig in five days, girl! And here we are only hours
from supper!”

Ruth knew that, in truth, Walleye was always
pleased when he could cook up a nice pig for supper. She would
tease back by telling him, “Ok, Walleye, sorry about that. I’ll
feed it to Louise and the rest of the dogs.” Then he’d say, “No,
no, no… it’s alright. I’ll cook it up anyway.”

Everyone was always happy with roast pork on
the plate. Ruth liked it slightly charred and glazed with honey,
served with onions and basil from the garden, accompanied by
pickled beans from the root cellar, and
nopal
cactus juice
sweetened with honey. No one ever complained if supper was a little
bit late when they knew that a pig was on the menu.

Ruth went into the stone springhouse to sit
down for a moment, relishing the cool air inside. The springhouse
actually wasn’t built on a spring, as most springhouses were. It
was built mostly below ground, about 20 feet from the large
icehouse. The stone walls of the structure were nearly two feet
thick. The ice-melt from the icehouse flowed down an underground
pipe through the thick wall and into the springhouse. Stone gutters
had been built around the inside walls of the icehouse, and the icy
water filled the eight-inch deep troughs. When the dripping water
had risen enough that it crested the dam on the trough in the south
wall, it flowed down into a deep cistern where it could be pumped
up via a hand-pump when it was needed. The icy cold water was the
perfect place to store perishables, such as cheese, butter,
leftover food etc., and the trough was nearly always full of jars
and crocks of goodies, along with sealed jars of beer.

Ruth would hang meat from hooks in the
ceiling rafters of the springhouse where it would stay cool until
Wally could come, usually in the early morning, and cook it for
breakfast, or process it for longer-term storage.

After she had cooled herself down a bit,
Ruth hung the skinned and gutted coon carcass from a hook. She then
walked down the stone pathway past the woodshop to the tannery
where she gave the coonskin to Ana, who dropped it into a bucket of
cool water she had recently pumped up from the springhouse cistern.
From her bag, she took out the brains of the hog that she had
wrapped in grass after gutting the beast, knowing that Ana would
find them useful in her tanning process. Tanning was still somewhat
of a mystery to Ruth.

Ana was a widow, about 45 years old,
dark-haired and beautiful. She was the official tanner of the Wall
ranch. Tanning was a full time job on the ranch and Ana was known
throughout the Vallensian territories as one of the best tanners
around. Ana’s skins, at least all those that were not used right
there on the ranch, were bundled and taken to Bethany where they
would be traded for salt and any other necessities that could not
be produced on the ranch. Ana, like all of the other workers on the
ranch, was well taken care of. Ruth’s father treated them all as if
they were part of the family.

Ana had come to live and work on the Wall’s
ranch many years before Ruth was born, and she told fantastic and
often frightening tales of life before the crash. Ruth sometimes
got into trouble with her father for repeating Ana’s tales. Father
said that Ana would have been a great fiction writer, and sometimes
even he would sit and listen, fascinated by the stories Ana could
tell. But, on those rare occasions when he would fall under Ana’s
spell, like clockwork, after about 20 minutes of listening, he
would shake his head and gruffly order everyone back to work.
“Distractions!” he would say.

Ruth didn’t have time for tales today. She
thanked Ana and headed back to the house to clean up. Father would
be home soon, and she wanted to talk to him about her day. She
could not wait to tell him about her pig, and the perfect kill-shot
that had even impressed Timothy the ghostman. She also wanted to
sit at her father’s feet and hear him talk about whatever news he
had from Bethany.

In the olden days, Father told her, people
would sit around a glowing box and be entertained by strangers who
hated them and wanted to brainwash them and do them harm. That
didn’t make any sense to Ruth. What nonsense! People must have been
silly back then, or really stupid. How could watching devil’s plays
in a magic box be anywhere near as entertaining as hearing Ana’s
tales, or father’s news, or playing tag in the yard with the other
children, or hiding from work in the springhouse?

Ruth’s father arrived home from Bethany just
as everyone was sitting down to the table. Gareth, Phillip, and
Timothy all sat at Father’s table. It was the first time that
Gareth had been to the great room to eat. Everyone was a little
excited to see him, as it meant that he was getting better. He
smiled a lot, joking that it was the beer that had healed him.

To Ruth, Philip and Gareth seemed to be like
close friends, comfortable enough to argue incessantly and tease
each other something awful.

Ruth bowed her head as her father made a
speech and a prayer about the Walls being blessed to have such
honored guests. He reminded them all that, in such trying times, it
was good to have friends, even if they did not share the same views
on everything. Then he told everyone, like he usually did, that
Ruth had gotten the pig for the evening’s supper. Ruth always liked
that part, as everyone smiled at her, thanking her for the
delicious meal. Then Tim told everyone the story about how she shot
the pig. She protested that he had made it seem more dramatic and
heroic than it really was, but she still blushed and was happy
about the whole thing.

Then, suddenly, everything went horribly
wrong.

It started when three of the militia men
interrupted the supper to speak to Phillip privately. Ruth watched
as Phillip put his hand to his mouth and silently shook his head.
He spoke in hushed tones to the ghostmen, before returning to the
table. He didn’t sit down.

Phillip was ashen faced and his eyes had
closed to mere slits when he began to speak. Ruth felt her stomach
sink, and it seemed like all of the air in the room had been sucked
out of the back window. She closed her eyes. Whatever it was, it
was bad news.

Phillip said, “I apologize for interrupting
your meal. I’ve just been alerted that two of my men are dead. My
wife and two daughters are missing. They’ve been taken.”

Whether he liked it or not, Sir Nigel Kerr
was called ‘English’ or even ‘Sir English’ by everyone who knew
him. He no longer disliked it. It had become who he now was. He
reasoned that it could be worse—he could have been called
Sir
Kerr
. After all of these years in America, and three years now
in El Paso, he now preferred just this nickname. It was like being
a dog named dog. His being an Englishman called “English” was, in
fact, the only authentic thing about his place of work.

The ducal castle in El Paso, if one could
even call it a castle, could have been considered eclectic if that
word really meant ‘a dissonant mix of ugly and disconnected
styles’. Still, one thing could not be disputed—the ducal
headquarters were appropriately named. The castle was called La
Chimenea—
The Chimney
, and as the name would aptly suggest,
it was always hot—brutally and relentlessly hot.

La Chimenea had not been designed or
constructed to maximize or capitalize on any particular cooling
principles. Though the main structure appeared to be covered in
adobe, and slightly resembled what could only be called a
Southwestern desert version of a medieval castle, for some reason
the castle was bereft of any of the expected cooling benefits of
either adobe or medieval castles.

Through some flaw in design, construction,
or both, the castle more closely approximated a large earthen
oven—gathering the extreme heat throughout the day, and exuding it
throughout the night.

The obsession with castles, keeps, and siege
walls, and basically all things medieval, was a natural result of
necessity, combined with the mentality born of a return to
monarchy. Post-modern survivor instincts, shaped by hardship in
this new and often violent middle age, almost naturally resulted in
monstrosities like the ducal castle in El Paso. But, La Chimenea
reflected both the spirit of the city and the duchy it
sheltered.

The 400-year-old city of El Paso, ‘The Pass
of the North’, along with the Mexican sister city of Ciudad Juarez
across the Rio Grande river, had once claimed a population of over
two million souls. Though the metropolitan area itself was one of
very few densely populated areas not completely destroyed by riots,
bombs and fire, the population had diminished steadily from the
nearly two million at the time of the collapse, to around 50,000
people only twenty years later. This number did not take into
account the ducal army that was usually quartered outside of the
city, which numbered around 8,000 men.

The urban area had been reduced in size to a
few square miles, around which had been constructed a 30-foot high
concrete and steel wall, mostly built out of abandoned materials
and debris—remnants of what used to be a highly populated city.
Unlike other areas, El Paso had not been reduced by bombs and fire,
but rather by the inevitable deconstruction that usually
accompanies the death of an empire.

Once the Duke had accomplished the task of
enforcing some stability and peace on the city (along with the
state religion of New Rome), he had cordoned off several blocks of
the downtown area, including the old Camino Real Hotel. From the
hodgepodge of late 19
^th
and early 20
^th
century buildings, he had proceeded to fashion what he thought was
an acceptable version of a medieval castle. A late 20
^th
century addition to the hotel, a 17-story tower, was what had
earned the castle the
Chimenea
moniker.

Soon, workers had been summoned to remove
most of the vestiges of the radically contrasting and contradictory
architectural styles and facades. Battlements, bastions and
parapets had been added, and in order to somehow homogenize the
gruesome beast, most of the visible surfaces had been coated in
some kind of adobe mixture. The outcome was rather dreadful.

A more practical result of the Duke’s
projects was a city and castle that were legitimately defensible
against a moderately sized army using mostly medieval style
weaponry. Still, there was no denying that La Chimenea was an ugly
stain on Texas, and on the Rio Grande valley. Moreover, English
found it an almost impossible environment in which to work.

Every so often, he would make a mental note
to ask the Duke to have the chief architect and builder of the
castle drawn and quartered, or hanged for incompetence. Executing
the perpetrator of this heinous abortion of a structure was not
likely to ever happen, since the Duke himself had been the designer
and chief contractor of the castle; but the joke always made
English feel better and always irritated the Duke.

El Paso’s heat usually made him think about
the cool air of the northern mountains of Aztlan, which inevitably
channeled his thoughts into a rut wherein he re-examined again all
of the circumstances that had so radically changed the trajectory
and reality of his life.

He had no time for that just now, as he had
a stack of correspondence and intelligence to go over with the
Duke. But, even as he willed himself to do his duty and give his
report and get it over with, the warm air and the view from the
castle window dragged his thoughts into that rut of reflection.

El Paso was still foreign to him. This place
could not be any more different from either of the two other places
he had once called home.

It seemed a hundred years ago that Nigel
Kerr was a 25-year-old foreign visitor on holiday, skiing with
friends in the high mountains of New Mexico. That was when the
collapse happened and everything in his young life changed.

He never imagined that his fun-filled
adventure to America was going to be permanent. He could still
vividly remember his parents’ home in the English countryside, even
though he had not seen it in over 20 years. He could remember the
day of his departure. He was saying goodbye to his parents, telling
them that he would be home in a month or two. He made a promise
that, when he returned rested and refreshed from his skiing trip,
he would buckle down and take life more seriously.

English had been raised on his parents’ farm
where he had slopped pigs, shepherded sheep and milked cows. As a
boy, all he had wanted was to get away, see the world and have
adventures. Now he knew that the ignorant dreams of children often
determined the way of old fools.

At the age of 18, he had joined the
military. As a soldier, in only a few years, he had indeed traveled
the world and met exotic people. He had killed them because his
government wanted him to, not because of any wrong they had done
him. Various socio-political and economic reasons were routinely
offered as an excuse for state-sponsored violence, but those
reasons only salve the consciences of those who are already
suffering from internal corruption and denial.