Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

  At first light they resumed their course down from the mountains, carefully picking a path around rockslides and uprooted trees, twitching at every aftershock. None of these temblors could hold a candle to the previous day’s big quake.

  Emerging midmorning from the mountains, the two men stopped to reconnoiter from a bluff overlooking the town. The public baths and the temple in the settlement’s center seemed intact. The few stately residences had lost pieces of facade or endured cracks in their decorative columns, but seemed otherwise undamaged. These Roman buildings, by far the largest structures in sight, must have been too small to resonate with the main quake.

  Common houses had not fared as well. Most had been reduced to mounds of thatch and splintered boards collapsed about their support posts. Some debris might have covered mere underground storage pits, for the heaped wreckage often fell short of ground level. Weary-looking bucket brigades were dousing the piles; flames still licked greedily at several of them.

  The long center span of a graceful stone bridge had fallen into a river. Upon closer examination, the pieces from the wrecked bridge were green with algae or moss. The structure must have collapsed at an earlier time. The present residents of this onetime imperial outpost of Metz would have been incapable of repairing it.

  At least, Harry and Terrence thought to themselves, they were on the town side of the rushing waters. It was their first bit of good luck in days—or in over twelve hundred years, depending on one’s point of view.

  NEAR CHARTRES, FRANCIA, 730

  The scarred mastiff growled, tearing at the ground with his claws, impatient for the chase to resume. He stared down the left-hand side of the forking forest path with his one good eye. No doubt in his mind which way their quarry had fled.

  The Frankish war party waited silently on horseback for their dismounted leader to reach his own conclusion. They sat stoically: They had been schooled in hunting and war, if little else, since youth. The breath of man and beast alike hung in the cold air in white clouds.

  All the men wore tight-fitting linen shirts and knee-length pants. Bands of cloth wrapped their lower legs and disappeared into their leather boots. All wore the traditional blue cloaks; several had donned fur jerkins for added warmth. Scabbarded swords hung from their broad leather belts, along with an assortment of tools. Their shoulder-length hair was pulled forward, exposing their necks. Except for occasional thin moustaches, the men were clean-shaven.

  Bertchramm crouched beside his favorite hunting dog. The leader of the war party had a barrel-like chest; broad streaks of gray ran through his dark blond hair. At his side hung, not a modern sword, but a double-edged, short-handled throwing ax. The Franks had once attacked by hurling their massive iron axes en masse at an opposing force, shattering shields and heads alike. The old Romans—brave legionaries, not the pitiful postimperial remnants—had even named the deadly axes after their bearers: francisca.

  Bertchramm favored the old ways.

  “Quiet, Lupus.” Latin for wolf, the name had been a rare bit of whimsy from the mastiff’s dour master. The huge canine was a match for most wolves—although, in truth, one had claimed the now-unseeing eye. When his dog did not obey immediately, Bertchramm absentmindedly cuffed it. The dog whimpered once, then hunkered down.

  Bertchramm considered. Lupus seemed surer of the way now than at any time earlier in the chase. He, however, thought the trail as old as ever: the grasses scarcely bent, the ashes of the last campfire stone cold. The Saracen raiders, may they roast in the monks’ hell, were wily. Were they somehow fooling the dog?

  Bent grass on both paths suggested the impact of horse hooves. Lupus had hesitated briefly at the fork before choosing a path. Bertchramm stared at the ground. Animal spoor led predominantly along the right path, downhill. And did he not hear the trickle of running water from that direction? A stream? He thought what he would do if he were pursued.

  A leader must lead. “They sent a decoy group down the left path, perhaps with their wounded to leave a stronger odor.” Bertchramm gestured to his right. “Most went this way, to ride for a while along the stream and hide their scent.”

  The grizzled Frank remounted, keeping his doubts to himself.

  METZ, 730

  Harry stared at the destruction. “Let’s see how we can help. Julia was right—I am glad that I learned French. Hopefully, it hadn’t changed too much by our time.”

  Terrence shook his head. “Your linguistic diligence is most commendable, Harry, especially in a Yank. Consider yourself lucky that we wound up where we did: just barely within Neustria. A few kilometers east of here, in Austrasia, the Franks are pretty exclusively speaking a form of German. Together, the two regions make up Francia.”

  “The Franks don’t speak French?”

  “Metz was a Roman colony. Here inside the border of the old empire, many Franks have picked up some Latin from the Gallo-Romans. Don’t expect much in the way of grammar, though. In time it will become French—but it’ll be another three centuries before France has a king who doesn’t speak at least some German.”

  Harry started downhill. “No matter. They need strong backs now, not conversation.”

  They loped down the final slope into the outskirts of Metz. Both towered a head or more over everyone in sight. People fell silent as they approached, as though struck by their height or outlandish garments, then returned to the more urgent matter of rescuing those still buried in the ruins. Perhaps it allayed suspicions that they came unarmed.

  Harry looked around. Organized groups labored purposefully over the largest collapsed buildings—rank always has its privileges. He and Terrence could add little to those efforts. They went farther into the town.

  The piles became shorter and more compact. Harry guessed these “homes” were only thatch-covered holes in the ground. A curly-haired hunchback knelt nearby, scraping ineffectually at heaped rubble. Dirt and soot streaked the man’s broad, homely face; sweat dripped from his hair and soaked his shirt. His clothes were crudely woven from coarse yarn.

  A wooden roof beam entangled in the wreckage had him stymied. Harry grabbed on and tugged; the board refused to budge. “Terrence, give me a hand.”

  Something snapped inside the rubble; the beam shifted. With a final yank, all eight feet of it slid free. Suddenly a three-man team, they dug with renewed energy. The hunchback called something unintelligible but clearly interrogatory over his hump.

  “German, sort of, but not quite,” Ambling finally said. He tapped himself on the chest. “Ich bin Terrence. Mein freund ist Harry.”

  The hunchback, without slowing in his efforts, let fly a torrent of words. Maybe one word in three sounded familiar to Harry, and the occasional phrase. There was a Wolfgang in there, perhaps his name.

  Terrence kept trying to respond, mostly repeating things. The hunchback patiently corrected Terrence’s repetitions. A pattern emerged: Terrence was apparently mispronouncing a handful of letters. P, t, and k were the worst.

  Terrence smacked his forehead with his palm in seeming exasperation. Enunciating carefully, he said something Harry didn’t get.

  The hunchback nodded, as though this time he understood, and answered back.

  “What’s going on?” Harry asked.

  “I’m communicating,” Terrence snapped.

  “How? A moment ago he didn’t understand you.”

  With a grunt, Terrence lifted and threw aside a slab of masonry. It must have bounced here; it might even have been what collapsed this hovel. Breathing heavily, he said, “Languages change over time. The European languages we know derive from Indo-European. Around 500 B.C., for unknown reasons, Germanic split off as a separate tongue. We’ve arrived in the middle of the second sound shift, a separation into Low and High German.

  “Which are?”

  “Basically a north-south split, Harry. Franks and Bavarians speak what will become Hi
gh German. Low German will eventually produce, among other things, Anglo-Saxon and Dutch.

  The hunchback interrupted. Terrence translated, “He wants us to get back to work.”

  Harry mopped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Mein Deutsch will get me through most World War II movies. Period. You’ll be translating for a while.”

  Then everyone fell silent: Their digging had yielded the broken body of a young girl. Damn! She looked about four years old—

  Melissa’s age. Harry dropped to the ground, stunned. He’d never see Melissa again. Nor her brother Johnny. Nor Julia.

  The truth hurt. He was trapped in his own past. In his loved ones’ present, he was no more than centuries-old dust. Dust which, at that, lay across an ocean from home. Knowing that his arrival had killed this innocent child . . .

  The backbreaking labor seemed less than adequate penance.

  NEAR ORLEANS, FRANCIA, 730

  Men and women alike whimpered as they ran through the trees. They did their best to keep their hurts inside. It was not only that they had little breath to spare; their captors had already slain one of their number whose words had angered them.

  The Frankish prisoners had thought the trek brutal when they had first set out. Now it was worse. Not long ago, some of the raiders had split off. Unencumbered by wounded, their keepers had managed to quicken the pace.

  Branches tore their already tattered clothes, whipped their bleeding and weary bodies. Stones and tree roots battered their feet. Their guards laughed when they stumbled, beat them cruelly with the flats of curved swords when they fell. To refuse or be unable to rise, all knew, meant instant death. To survive the trip, to no one knew where, offered at least the possibility of a life—if only the bitter life of a slave.

  The raiders on their great steeds had no trouble maintaining the pace. In their flowing white robes, the warriors seemed ghostlike as they sped through the forest.

  It was not a comforting comparison.

  METZ, 730

  The three men dug as a team for hours. Finally, just before sunset, the rescue efforts all around them petered out. The ruins had been sifted, if not cleared, at every location. The hunchback seemed pleasantly surprised at the quake’s toll: five dead and twelve seriously injured. To the guilt-racked time travelers, the casualties seemed monstrously high.

  Terrence vaguely remembered downing a chunk of coarse-grained bread while they worked, and taking a swig from a passed wineskin. After almost two days without food, one at hard labor, he was woozy. He was pleased to see, as the rescue operations finally stopped, that a few of the women had prepared a simple meal.

  Exhausted men and women gathered around a communal fire lit in a cleared spot in the town center. He and Harry gratefully accepted bowls of bland soup—little more than broth with chunks of boiled beef, a loaf apiece of tough bread, and goblets of thin beer. Terrence sighed in relief. Offering them a meal meant acceptance. To harm them now would be an outrageous breach of Frankish hospitality; indeed, a serious crime punishable by a considerable fine.

  Most of the townsfolk were weary beyond curiosity. A few stared at his unfamiliar denim trousers and plaid flannel shirt, but no one bothered to ask. The simple meal quickly downed, the last drop of broth absorbed with a scrap of bread, Terrence and Harry followed their hunchbacked friend to a bed of straw in a rude shed behind a large stone structure. They were asleep before their host left the stable.

  Father Gregory examined his guests carefully. The two strangers brought to the abbey by Brother Wolfgang were a puzzle. Both were exceptionally tall. They seemed, although weary, in the pink of health. And their garments—the priest had never seen cloth of such a fine and uniform weave. But if their raiment bespoke wealth, they showed no other signs of it. Clean-shaven as Franks though his guests were, it seemed unlikely that they were Franks. They carried no weapons, wore no jewelry. No, that was not quite accurate. The black-haired one wore a single gold band on his left hand.

  The burly Frankish abbot was indirectly related to the Gregory: St. Gregory of Tours, the confidant and biographer of kings. The abbot was a highly educated man for these troubled times, at once proud of his learning and mortified that after so many years in the Church he could still feel pride.

  Gregory pulled his cloak tight against a draft and considered the evidence. Unarmed but noble of bearing. He had heard of far parts of the world where, unlike Francia, a man’s estate was not split evenly between his sons. Perhaps the strangers were younger sons from such a country, driven to seek the priesthood by their disinheritance.

  Enough idle speculation. Gregory addressed his guests. “Welcome to Metz and to our abbey. I am Father Gregory, the abbot. Brother Wolfgang”—he gestured at the hunchback—“tells me that you speak our tongue. Good. I would enjoy hearing a little about your travels.”

  The shorter of the near-giants smiled back. “Your grace, I am Terrence. My friend Harry and I are very grateful for your hospitality. I did once chance to learn a little of your language, but do not know it well. My friend does not speak it at all.”

  The taller stranger spoke briefly in another language, presumably also in welcome. Gregory frowned in concentration. He had gotten his Latin many years ago from the learned bishop in Augusta Treverorum (Trier). Was there not some similarity between Harry’s words and the vernacular there? Gregory tried to recall the sounds from his long-ago student days; the words felt odd on his tongue. “Some of your words resemble the corrupted Latin in old Gaul.”

  Harry spoke a few more strangely accented words. The abbot thought that he understood them: “Then there is hope.” A melancholy expression belied this utterance.

  In these troubled times, it was the abbot’s duty and his satisfaction to give comfort. Smiling, Gregory answered his guests in the vernacular. “By the grace of our Lord, there is always hope.”

  NEAR ORLEANS, 730

  Dawn arrived, as it did every autumn day, in a sea of thick white fog. The sun that peered at Adelhard through the dense haze seemed to cast no more light than a full moon on an overcast night. The swirling vapors made the solar disk appear blotchy, again reminiscent of a full moon. Still, the hermit knew, this morning mist would soon burn off.

  His water passed, Adelhard stepped back from the chill into the dubious shelter of his tiny cottage. The chipped pottery ewer was one of the few possessions in the hut, which contained no furniture. He splashed icy water from the vessel onto his face, which he then wiped dry with a relatively clean corner of his rough brown robe. He ignored the stale crust of bread that would be his breakfast, for prayers and meditation preceded all food.

  The hermit went outside again into the mist. Tall trees surrounded him: Despite centuries of settlement, most of Francia remained forested. Many of his countrymen still worshipped the forces of nature, the spirits that supposedly slipped silently through these trees.

  He suspected that the previous dweller at this isolated crossroads in the woods had been a pagan—many a morning Adelhard had discovered profane offerings silently left in front of the hut during the night. Once he had even found a baby left in an earthen tunnel dug under the very crossroads, its entrances loosely blocked by bundles of thorns. Contact with Mother Earth was supposed by the vulgar to magically imitate the maternal breast, he knew, and so was thought to have curative powers. The pagan belief had done that poor child no good—she was dead when he found her. Adelhard sometimes imagined his pagan predecessor at this spot, sitting on the fresh hide of a bull, its bloody side facing up to draw the evil spirits from the ground.

  Perhaps it was these thoughts of vile phantoms that made Adelhard start at the sudden appearance of shapes in the fog. He smiled at his foolishness: Surely the arrival of travelers at a crossroads required no supernatural explanation.

  The first strangers, all warriors, came on horseback. They warily inspected the crossroads and nearby woods; one of their number d
ismounted to peek into his cottage. The man whom Adelhard took to be their leader whistled what must have been a signal, for the small troop was soon joined by a ragged group of men and women. The hermit’s breath caught at their piteous state. More warriors, clearly impatient with their prisoners—for such those who walked obviously were—brought up the rear. From their garb and whispered speech, Adelhard knew the prisoners were Franks.

  The captives stood cowering, resigned to their fates. At a wave from the warrior band’s leader, they settled quickly to the ground, not a few groaning from who knew what injuries. Adelhard shook himself from his unhelpful observations, turning to fetch water and his meager supply of bread. These poor unfortunates needed the food more than he.

  “Stop.”

  The hermit froze at the guttural command. He turned slowly toward the speaker. The order had come, as he’d suspected, from the one he had first guessed to be the leader. “I was getting bread for your prisoners.” Adelhard studied the man while awaiting an answer. The white robe and flowing head covering were unfamiliar. A close-cropped black beard and chilling brown eyes dominated the warrior’s face.

  “Then be quick. We rest here only briefly.”

  Adelhard retrieved his crust and distributed it, broken into tiny pieces, among the gasping captives. They gnawed at his humble offering while he made the round again, this time with his water ewer. The men on horseback took food from their saddlebags. “Are you a magician, then, to live here alone in the forest at the crossroads?”

  “Indeed, not!” Adelhard took such offense at the question that he did not wonder at the stranger’s excellent grasp of Frankish. “I am a good Christian. Years ago I stopped at this spot to fast and meditate, and here did I have a vision. I have lived here ever since. I am called Adelhard.”