Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

  “My men and I are also religious.” The warrior smiled. “We follow Allah.”

  Followers, then, of that false prophet, Muhammad. The warriors had probably come from Iberia, which the Mohammedan Arabs had conquered just two decades ago, even though these men had just approached from the north. Christian travelers returned from Iberia spoke highly of Mohammedan culture and manners. Their heathen religion had borrowed from earlier faiths. As a result, they were said to respect Christians and Jews as fellow “people of the Book.”

  Adelhard couldn’t reconcile these descriptions with the treatment of the prisoners. Of course, the supposedly Christian community he had renounced displayed its own warlike cruelty.

  Adelhard suddenly realized that the head warrior was staring at him impatiently. In his musing, he had apparently missed some comment of the Arab chieftain. “My pardon. Could you repeat that?”

  “I asked if your accent was Visigothic.”

  The question was natural, and the stranger was, in fact, correct. There was, somehow, a disagreeable undertone to the question. Trying to ignore a premonition, Adelhard answered, simply, “Yes.” His discomfort only grew as the warlord inexplicably broke into a predatory grin.

  METZ, 730

  The pooled assets on the beaten-earth floor seemed woefully inadequate: some twenty-first-century pocket change, a nail clipper, and a metal-barreled ballpoint pen. Arab terrorists in modern Metz had stolen everything else from the two friends. That was unfortunate—their Swiss Army knifes might otherwise have brought them a pretty silver denarus or two in trade.

  If wishes were horses then beggars could ride. Harry found the aphorism distastefully apropos. Never mind what might have been. What about selling the pen? No one in this era would believe how long it would last, and proving its lifetime would just squander the ink. Anyway, who in the here and now had enough paper to merit such a writing implement? The abbot had actual papyrus, though little of it, in his cell.

  Their clothes, especially their sturdy leather hiking boots, were undoubtedly the most valuable of their belongings. These being irreplaceable, Harry and Terrence had agreed to be parted from them under only the direst of circumstances.

  Harry prodded the pitiful pile with his boot tip. “It doesn’t seem we can hire an army, does it?”

  “We need information far more than an army at the moment.” Ambling began tucking their meager possessions into his pockets. “My grumbling stomach believes that we need food more than either. I guess I shall once again orate for our supper.”

  “You’re just a ham at heart.” Harry, for no good reason, grabbed back his pen.

  Terrence drew himself up to his full height in mock indignation. “I, sirrah, am an actor at heart. It’s a common affliction among the English. And until you discover a better method for putting food into our mouths, I shall expect forbearance with your insults.”

  “Ham” was, admittedly, too strong a term. Terrence was a born storyteller; in these entertainment-starved times that talent made him a natural moneymaker. At least he would have been a moneymaker if the locals had had cash to spare. They didn’t: Currency was hoarded for buying scarce trade goods from traveling merchants.

  Terrence was paid mostly in free meals and ale; Harry, by acting out scenes from Terrence’s stories—usually involving dying with great melodrama—earned his own scraps. On principle, they preferred earning their food to the unquestioned hospitality of the abbey.

  It helped that Terrence had been raised on stories that the Franks could never have heard: the tales of Scheherazade, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. That Terrence’s Frankish was accented and his vocabulary sometimes lacking only added to his audience appeal. Wandering minstrels were not expected to speak like natives.

  Harry and Terrence still lodged in the abbey’s pauper hostelry. They made their way by dim twilight across the monastery grounds to the guest quarters that served the well-to-do and high-ranking travelers. Thick smoke rising from the chimney—their rooms were unheated—led them to their destination.

  A cheer of welcome greeted the storytellers. Terrence scanned the crowd: three new travelers and their servants. Beds would be shared here tonight. “Harken to my words,” he began grandiloquently, “for I have a tale to tell this evening that will chill your bones despite this crackling fire.” The already besotted crowd roared its approval. Terrence stood still, smiling and silent, until one of the new arrivals motioned a servant forward with two cups of beer. Terrence downed his brew in one gulp (it was foul, watery stuff), then let out a great belch of satisfaction—local manners.

  He launched into a medievalized version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which they’d rehearsed that afternoon. Harry’s role consisted mostly of looking terrified. Their patrons for the evening laughed themselves sick at Harry’s nervous search for the source of the fearful beating. By dint of strategic pauses throughout the narration, they obtained a filling, if unsatisfying, meal before the tale’s end. With deep bows to acknowledge the crowd’s shouted approval, Harry and Terrence began circulating in search of conversation and more ale.

  The evening’s real work now began. Storytelling brought food, it was true, but other ways could be found to earn a living. If mere survival in these rough times were their only goal, then joining the monastery would provide as safe and secure a life as they were likely to find. Every night for over two weeks they’d met with any and all travelers in hope of a clue to Abdul Faisel’s whereabouts.

  None of the townsfolk knew of Faisel, whom the time travelers described as a fugitive from their own faraway country, or recognized his description. Recognition was, of course, a lot to expect after five years’ time. Still, absent some useful information soon, they had no plan beyond heading westward toward Tours, where they expected Faisel must surface in two years’ time. Setting out with so little information would be truly an act of desperation. If they could learn nothing here, so near to where Faisel must have arrived, how hopeless would it be to strike out on their own into the wilderness?

  “Faisel? That is not a name I remember,” answered Harry’s fifth target for the night, a young servant whose own name Harry had instantly forgotten. The Franks, rich and poor alike, were accustomed to drinking themselves into a stupor every evening. Most had a tolerance for alcohol far beyond Harry’s limits. “The shaking of the world I cannot forget.” The servant rattled on for a while about what he had been doing.

  The great quake five years ago was like 9/11 in his time. Everyone hereabouts remembered what they had been doing. They would tell you about it in excruciating detail at the drop of a hat. Fair enough, Harry thought. The aftershocks since his and Terrence’s arrival had been horrible enough.

  His new drinking buddy droned on about shattered trees and fleeing woodland beasts. He had been returning with several other servants from a hunt, from deep in the forest about three days west of town. Harry tried to guestimate the distance. Twenty miles? Fifty miles? He couldn’t begin to decide without having seen the terrain.

  Across the room someone launched into a rollicking, far more interesting, bit of old royal gossip. Harry strained to hear about King Chilperic and Queen Fredegund, and their long-ago burning of tax records. People roared their approval. The Franks believed taxation applied only to others: No wonder the remnants of postimperial Roman civilization had so quickly declared themselves Frankish. Harry caught Terrence’s eye over the heads of the crowd, and winked.

  To declare one’s self tax-exempt . . . the notion so tickled Harry’s fancy that he almost missed the servant’s sotto voce comment. Besides, while several nights of carousing had greatly improved his vocabulary in the Gallo-Roman near-French, Harry still misunderstood much of what he did hear. “A dead man in a cottage? The earthquake killed him?”

  “Yes, dead, that’s what I said, but not from the shaking. His body was still warm, days after the earth
calmed down, when we happened upon him.”

  What was the man trying to tell him? Harry leaned forward. “I couldn’t hear you over the noise.”

  “The coin.” His drinking companion glanced around before whispering confidentially, “The old man still worshipped the ancient gods; the signs of it were everywhere in his little hut. I started to place Charon’s obolus into his mouth.” Harry stared blankly. “The pagan’s fare to the boatman for passage across the river Styx to the other side.

  “I found a coin already in his mouth.”

  Something in the first narration had caught his subconscious’s interest. What? “A coin in his mouth,” Harry repeated mindlessly.

  “You asked about strange events. That coin—it was strange. I can’t read”—the servant laughed at the very notion—“but I know the shapes of letters. After all, they are all over the imperial ruins. There were peculiar markings on this coin, not Roman letters.”

  “Peculiar,” Harry echoed.

  “I remember them still.” The table was coated with grease and dust. The servant made a sign to ward off the evil eye—the corpse in the distant hut wasn’t the only pagan in the area—then began tracing arcane shapes in the slime. The finished product looked roughly like “L8b1.”

  A chill came over Harry as he mentally flipped the characters. No wonder this Frank had found the characters on the coin unfamiliar: They were Arabic numerals. There was nothing demonic about them.

  The coin was simply dated 1987.

  NEAR ORLEANS, 730

  Clicking a string of worry beads, the Arab sheik studied the hermit. Gamal’s overriding impression of the recluse, dressed in tatters and rags, his hair a greasy tangle, was filth. The Christian dogs had yet to discover the virtues of cleanliness. Still, squalor alone did not suit the warrior’s purposes. Adelhard’s speech might. Gamal impatiently repeated an earlier question. “I asked if your accent was Visigothic.”

  “Yes.” Adelhard’s eyes narrowed slightly, as though in premonition.

  Let the hermit fear him; Gamal found himself grinning in anticipation. “In Iberia I have met many of your people. I find them most interesting.” Adelhard bowed his head briefly in acknowledgment. “Your priests are very intriguing to speak with.” That earned him a cautious nod. The recluse’s circumspection added zest to the game; it would not, in the end, help him. “I found most refreshing their view of the nature of Christ.”

  “Ah,” the hermit said, scanning the faces of the silently attentive Frankish prisoners. He licked his lips nervously.

  Gamal’s smile broadened. Things were as he expected. “Did you know that my people claim Christ as a prophet?”

  “I would not have expected another people to so honor Jesus Christ.” Adelhard faced the warrior chief as he spoke, but he raised his voice so the Franks could more clearly hear his carefully chosen words.

  “Allah has no son,” Gamal answered sincerely. He, too, pitched his voice so that the Franks would hear. “That is why I find your beliefs so refreshing. The imams of Islam, just like your Arian priests, know Christ to be a man made by God. A very wise man, of course, an inspired man, but still—only a man.”

  Prisoners muttered softly at the mention of Arianism. The Franks were Catholics; they had been such since King Clovis’s famous battlefield conversion centuries earlier. The Church had outlawed the Arian heresy long before even Clovis’s time.

  The priests taught well their apostasies, if nothing else.

  The murmuring was as music to Gamal’s ears. He turned his horse so that he faced the prisoners. “You do not honor this hermit’s beliefs?”

  They looked uncertainly to one of their number, their erstwhile leader. At his nod, they shouted their denunciation. They renounced Adelhard as a heretic and an enemy of the Church.

  “You do not consider him a true follower of your Christ?”

  Here, after days of beatings and exhaustion, was an enemy at whom they could safely rail. The prisoners roared out their contempt.

  “No? Then why should I?” In one fluid motion, Gamal swept his fine Toledo scimitar from its scabbard and plunged it up to its hilt in the hermit’s stomach. Adelhard’s eyes opened impossibly wide, and blood burst from his mouth. Gamal freed his sword with a twist that stirred the dying man’s guts. Gore dripped from the blade as he wheeled toward his shocked-to-silence prisoners.

  “And you who would condemn the stranger who just fed you? You call yourselves Christians? You sicken me.” At his signal, Gamal’s band of warriors unsheathed their weapons.

  The crossroads was thickly coated in red before the raiders laid down their arms.

  METZ, 730

  “I wish you would reconsider.”

  Terrence and Harry exchanged a glance. How could they explain to the gentle abbot, their only real friend in this violent century, that they must leave? Terrence sighed. “I can only say that our purpose is urgent.”

  “This man whom you follow. If he came here, if he is still alive, has left nothing after five years but a coin as a sign of his passing. How can you hope to find him?”

  At least Gregory’s wording provided Terrence with an irrefutable answer. “By the grace of our Lord, there is always hope.”

  The abbot arched an eyebrow in recognition of his own words but said nothing.

  Harry broke the awkward silence. “We earned a little money at storytelling, enough for supplies and swords.”

  “I’ve seen you practice at swords. I was a Frank long before I became a priest, so believe what I tell you. You should stay.”

  Harry squirmed on his hard wooden stool, then answered as gently as he could. “We must go. I can’t expect you to understand this, but the world depends on it.”

  Gregory laid his hand on Harry’s arm. “Perhaps I do understand. You cry out into the night sometimes, in your sleep. I believe that this Julia means the world to you.” A tear glistened in the corner of Harry’s eye. “She must be very special.”

  Terrence changed the subject. “We plan to leave in the morning. We’ll follow the old Roman road west. Brother Bernhard says it’s still open as far as Reims. That’s farther than we’ll be going.”

  “It is passable much farther than that, at least as far as Tours. I’ve been there, you know.”

  Terrence knew—Gregory was a bit of a bore on the subject of his famous relative, the former bishop at Tours. “Our immediate plans don’t go that far. Maybe someday.”

  “Miracles are said to occur there, at the tomb of Saint Martin. Did not Clovis himself become Catholic after beholding miracles at the tomb? My very kinsman, the bishop, reportedly was cured of disease by drinking water mixed with dust from the tomb.”

  That concoction might have cured the good bishop; the thought of it made Terrence want to gag.

  The abbot didn’t notice, or chose to ignore, Terrence’s expression. Gregory looked sadly at Harry. “Perhaps a pilgrimage would cure our friend.”

  If only it could help Harry, Terrence thought. “Sometime, I’m sure, we’ll see Tours. For now, Father, we must continue our search.”

  “Will you consider one more idea from an old man?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wait for a few days. The merchants who arrived here this morning from Augusta Treverorum will continue on soon to Parisii (Paris), farther down the road that you mean to take. There are five of them, plus their guards and servants. You would be much safer in their company. I will introduce you.”

  “Would they take us?”

  “Promise them a story every night. How could they refuse you?” Gregory had to laugh, just thinking of Terrence’s tales. “Do you know my favorite?”

  Terrence shook his head. “No, which?”

  Gregory smiled. “The one where the sailor washes ashore in the land of the hand-sized people. Gulliver? Tell the merchants the start of that story when you meet
. I promise that they will not say no.”

  It made sense. Terrence said, “You have a deal.”

  The good-natured bellowing at the guesthouse was louder than usual tonight; the crowd was only casually attentive to the evening’s installment of Treasure Island. Harry took his first opportunity to sidle, cup in hand, to the raucous group in a far corner of the hall. The focus of their attention turned out to be what looked like a checkerboard. This was apparently the new game, alluded to by Father Gregory, which the Franks used to teach war strategy.

  After almost every move some of the onlookers groaned while others clinked coins and offered new wagers. Brother Wolfgang unhappily held the bets.

  Harry knew quickly that this game wasn’t checkers. It seemed more like an early version of chess, although the crudely carved tokens bore little physical resemblance to the game pieces he knew. He observed the unfolding duel with deep interest, whispering questions to Father Gregory. The abbot whispered back the names of the pieces and their moves: He had played the game often before joining the priesthood. The vying warriors both employed a slogging style of play, grimly exchanging pieces through a brutal and uninspired middle game.

  Romulfus, the warrior playing the Black pieces, crowed in triumph. He slid a Bishop two squares diagonally—its limit, in this early version of the game—to capture White’s Minister. In this male-dominated age, that dominant piece that had not yet been transformed into the Queen. White’s backers grumbled in disappointment. Sensing victory, Black’s cronies clamored for new bets.

  Sigismund, playing White, frowned at the board. His King stood midboard amid a cluster of pawns, but he had no pieces left. Black still had a Minister and a Bishop with which to attack those remaining pawns. Shrugging in resignation, Sigismund stood to concede. A round of ale for his backers quieted their complaints.

  Harry kept studying the board as Romulfus’s followers shouted for payment. Brother Wolfgang doggedly counted out the coins. Harry’s mind clicked through the possibilities: push a pawn here; guard a pawn with the King there; stay off the black squares where possible to reduce the usefulness of the Bishop . . . He had another whispered exchange with Father Gregory about the local rules of play. “Wait!”