Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

  Knowing what was to come, Terrence thought: Enjoy the good life now, your majesty.

  Theodoric reigned only at the suffrage of his “Duke.” Karl, as an Austrasian, needed a symbol of national unity so that he could wield power over the Romanized, rebellious Neustrians. The king was that symbol. When you die, Karl won’t bother to have a successor enthroned. With the Pope’s blessing, Karl’s son Pepin would eventually assume the crown and start a new dynasty. Karl’s yet-unborn grandson Karl—in Latin, Carolus Magnus; in time more commonly known as Charlemagne—would be crowned emperor by another pope.

  Terrence was deep into a tale of Crusoe outwitting the cannibals when a messenger arrived. Refugees were streaming northward into Francia from Aquitania.

  The war with the Saracens had begun.

  ON THE FRANCIA/AQUITAINIA BORDER, 732

  The shoe is on the other foot now, Harry thought, although here and now that expression was meaningless. He had the calluses on his toes to disprove the saying. Long centuries would pass before the introduction of distinct left and right shoes.

  Apt phrase or not, a turnaround of sorts had occurred. Bertchramm sat cockily on his horse, facing down a party of bedraggled Aquitainian warriors. The old Frank knew this Bernhardus, leader of the refugees—oh yes, he knew the man well.

  Harry knew the story; all Bertchramm’s friends did.

  Two years earlier, this bastard, then leading an Aquitainian border patrol, had denied the Franks leave to pursue those who had killed his brother and abducted his niece. The Frank recalled the man’s haughty words then, and twisted them to his own purpose, “The major domus guards his borders with care.”

  Bernhardus swallowed hard. He was in no position to take offense. “My lord Count Odo will arrive soon. He gives greeting to the major domus and bade me arrange sanctuary.”

  Which Karl would undoubtedly grant, while exacting a price. “Next time your master should send a more punctual messenger. If your heart did not beat so in terror, you would hear the sound of many horses approaching.”

  Indeed, a great party was nearing. Bertchramm signaled his own men to be ready to act: The newcomers might be Saracens instead of Aquitainians.

  An Aquitainian outrider burst from the trees, the worse for wear even than the emissaries. “We must move north,” he shouted. “The Saracens are not far behind.”

  The main party appeared hard on his heels. More men than not wore bloody bandages. The count in their midst was easy to identify: His calm and noble bearing stood out even more than did his glittering mail coat.

  Odo shouted for silence, then urged his chestnut stallion forward through the anxious mass of refugees. He halted beside his lieutenant. “Are we ready to proceed?”

  Bernhardus looked inquiringly at Bertchramm.

  Aquitainians far outnumbered the Franks, and they were not about to stay on their side of the border. The best Bertchramm could do was put a good light on it. “Friends of my lord Karl are welcome.”

  The count considered the phrasing, grim-faced. “Then I ask you to escort me to my friend, the major domus.

  “The Saracens have defiled our churches and burned our holy places. Their cavalry swoops from nowhere, unlike anything we have ever seen, shrieking weird war cries like creatures from the Pit, to despoil what they cannot steal. Our towns are sacked and our farmers lie dead in their fields. The largest part of my army now lies, food for crows, beside the river Garonne.

  “If befriending the Devil himself enabled me to continue the fight, I would embrace him, and name him brother.”

  REIMS, 732

  Frankish levies assembled in Reims, great masses of warriors pouring in from across Austrasia and Neustria. More surprising, perhaps, were the many volunteers from the Breton March, Burgundia, Alamannia—indeed, from all across the former Roman provinces. The cruel predations of Faisel/Salah-ad-Din had sown a deadly seed: a craving for bloody vengeance. Western Europe had not seen such a gathering of nobility since Roman times, would not see it again until the Crusades. Assuming Karl’s army won now . . . .

  Aquitainian survivors swelled the ranks further. Hundreds had accompanied Count Odo; stragglers followed daily, individually and in small groups. Still, the Christian forces seemed far too puny.

  Terrence had no more idea than Harry why the Moslems had attacked Faisel’s erstwhile ally. “It seems bloody stupid, really. Why not have Odo’s help in conquering us, or at least Odo’s neutrality, and then turn on him?” Terrence downed some ale—the never-ending sword practice was thirsty work. “I suppose we’ll never know.”

  “Does it matter?” Harry asked. “What most worries me is that, on the eve of battle, we still have no idea when or how Faisel plans to use his nuke.”

  Terrence considered the reports brought in by refugees, by skirmishers, and by Karl’s spies. He thought about the pitifully few survivors of rearguard actions fought to delay the Saracens while the larger army assembled, and while Karl himself hurried back from his campaign in Bavaria. He remembered the decimation of Odo’s once-powerful forces.

  The invaders numbered in the tens of thousands, maybe even the hundreds of thousands. These weren’t just garrison forces from Iberia: al-Ghafiqi had raised a whole new army in Northern Africa. They covered the land like a plague of locusts; like locusts, they left the land bare in their passage. Shrines and holy places seemed especial targets. And there rolled on, behind the advancing cavalry, an ever-growing wagon train of booty.

  Bertchramm had “questioned” his prisoners with the brutal methods of this era. They had been filled with tales of Frankish atrocities against Saracens. Such incidents were an affront to Allah, especially in this, the hundredth anniversary year of Muhammad’s death. All believed: The Crescent’s triumphant march around the Mediterranean would continue; the Cross would not stop it.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Faisel’s bomb,” Terrence said, thinking of all of these things. “At the rate the Saracens are going, they won’t even need it.”

  Franks and Saracens had skirmished across southwestern Francia for decades—but nothing like this. At word of the attack, brought by a weary courier on an even more exhausted horse, Karl put aside the lesson he had been teaching a rebellious vassal in Bavaria. al-Ghafiqi’s previous incursions, the most recent seven years earlier, had been difficult enough to repel. Then, the emir of Iberia had had only a fraction of the forces now engaged.

  Even without Harry Bowen’s dire warnings of a superweapon, this new invasion was the greatest threat yet to Karl’s rule.

  Karl hurried his army westward as quickly as the infantry could move. Once they crossed into Austrasia, Karl took a troop of cavalry and galloped ahead to coordinate the linkup with the levies now hastily assembling at Reims. That linkage could have occurred on the march, but he wanted to accept Odo’s oath of fealty in Reims, in front of the king and the bishop. That bastard Odo had been a thorn in his side for long enough.

  The ceremony was short: Karl spent no time for a feast in honor of the occasion. The Frankish troops around Reims foraged daily for supplies; they were almost as harmful to his farmers as the Saracens would have been. His troops acted thus because they needed to eat. The Saracens, who had begun their campaigns with great wagon trains of supplies, pillaged for the sheer pleasure of it. Karl guessed that the distinction mattered not to those whose harvests were daily plundered and trampled.

  With Odo’s ritual oath now given, Karl turned his attention southward.

  WEST-CENTRAL FRANCIA, 732

  Squinting into the rising sun, al-Ghafiqi studied the defenses hastily built around Poitiers. They were competent, no less than he would have expected from a warlike people. And yet—

  He had seen much more formidable barriers. These barbarians could not begin to construct anything like the fortifications of the cursed Byzantines.

  The Greeks ruled with an iron fist, and their subject
s hated them. Treachery, rather than assault, had time and again thrown open to Allah’s armies the gates of the Empire’s fortresses.

  al-Ghafiqi hoped never to face Frankish fury in battle in alliance with Greek engineering.

  “When do we attack?” Salah-ad-Din asked impatiently. His horse snorted in its own show of restlessness.

  His new ally had no finesse. al-Ghafiqi completed his unhurried examination of the city before answering. “It would cost too many lives to break through. We will leave men here to besiege the town, and continue north.

  “Tours is a far richer prize.”

  Since the rout of the Aquitainians on the river Garonne outside Bordeaux, the countryside had been ripe for plunder. Veteran officers tried to restrain the newly raised levies of Berbers and Moors. The army was here to rule, not raid.

  Salah-ad-Din gave no such orders. His thieves and cutthroats paraded about evening encampments, swaggering and boasting and showing their booty. And this, they said, was mere crumbs from a feast. Far more treasure was stored in the wagon train.

  al-Ghafiqi’s officers eased their discipline rather than face mutiny. The great host of invaders now raped and looted and pillaged its way northward.

  And so it was that a horde of panic-spreading refugees took shelter in Tours, barely ahead of the Saracens. Grim-faced, the garrison prepared to defend the city.

  * * * *

  Hidden from hostile eyes, they hoped, by a small but aggressive screen of cavalry, Karl and Odo drove their combined armies westward. Having already crossed to the south bank of the river Loire, there were no serious obstacles between them and the invaders.

  And al-Ghafiqi, inexplicably, had split his forces. The northern force of Saracens was exposed to attack . . . .

  “Your report, Youssef.”

  The swarthy Moorish scout swallowed. “Emir, I rode around the Firanji cavalry. Not far to their rear was a great cloud of dust, as from a large army. Perhaps as large as our own.” He cringed, perhaps fearing the traditional reward for bearers of bad tidings. “I went as close as I dared and saw only part of their force. I have never seen so many barbarians.”

  That many? Reported by a veteran of so many campaigns, al-Ghafiqi took the claim seriously. When he finally spoke, he addressed Salah-ad-Din rather than the scout. “It seems, Gamal, that you were correct. My compliments.”

  He turned to an aide. “Gather my senior officers.”

  The scout spoke softly. “Emir, will we lift the siege of Tours and rejoin the rest of the army?”

  Salah-ad-Din brayed in laughter. “I think not, Youssef, at least not yet. There is much wealth in that city, and in the abbey of St. Martin, that I would gather.”

  The Frankish scouts lay prone, just below the crest of the hill. Harry wished his eyesight were as acute as that of his companions. “What do you see?” he whispered to Terrence.

  Bertchramm punched Harry hard to be quiet. Harry rubbed his shoulder and waited for the signal to move back down the slope.

  “A large force,” Bertchramm grunted. “Very dangerous.” His warriors nodded assent.

  That much even Harry could tell. “But what are they doing?”

  When Bertchramm spoke, it was with the answer Harry most feared. “They are massing to storm the city. We cannot get enough men here quickly enough to stop them.”

  And so, except for two warriors sent racing back to Karl with the news, the scouting party watched in helpless fury as the Saracens, in irresistible numbers, broke through Tours’s defenses.

  They listened through the night to the screams . . . .

  Creaking and groaning beneath the weight of so much plunder, hundreds of wagons crept forward. Horses strained against their harnesses. With much whipping and cursing, the wagoners got the long train moving.

  Those who had violated Tours gathered, in a great moving arc to the north and east of the train, to protect their booty on its slow way southward to Poitiers.

  The Firanji were coming.

  The crisp October day reminded Harry, incongruously, of high-school football games. His mind’s eye found cheerleaders’ skirts and pom-poms in the colors of autumn leaves; his mind’s ear turned the muttering of men at arms into the inarticulate roar of a youthful crowd.

  He drove the foolishness from his thoughts. This contest was infinitely more serious.

  He and Terrence had been admitted, to the disgust of Karl’s chief vassals, to the Frankish war councils. The Franks had overtaken the Saracen force, now moving at the snail’s pace of their wagon train. Karl planned a series of probing cavalry attacks at scattered spots across the front. Some parts of the enemy army would surely be weaker, less disciplined, than others; Karl wanted to know where a full-scale attack would be most likely to break through.

  And so, while dozens would surely fall today, the ultimate slaughter was not quite ready to begin.

  That final horror was now scant days away, and Harry knew no more than on the day of his arrival in this rough era how Faisel meant to use his nuke.

  With growing admiration, al-Ghafiqi watched his army carry out the withdrawal from Tours. Held to the painfully slow pace of the wagon train, under relentless Firanji pressure, they beat off every attack. Finally, they were safely across the river Vienne, near the well-looted town of Cenon (Chinon). No major obstacle separated them from the rest of his army at Poitiers.

  For six long days now, often several times a day, cavalry had skirmished up and down the front. The fighting was unremitting, if inconclusive. The last two days passed without sighting any of the columns of dust that marked fresh Firanji troops streaming to Karl’s banner.

  al-Ghafiqi held a final consultation with Salah-ad-Din.

  The time had come to attack.

  The nobility of Francia and its feudal dependencies gathered about a roaring campfire, while Karl’s most trusted warriors kept the curious—and possible spies—at a distance. The Saracens had halted their march at midday; a pitched battle was imminent.

  Terrence wasn’t surprised when the brash Count Odo stepped forward. Scramasax in hand, the Aquitainian scratched a crude map into the dirt. “Here is their main line; here is ours. My men and I will ride around so”—he drew a great arc—“and attack from the rear. We will crush them between our forces like wheat between two millstones.”

  The Franks grumbled, loath to concede the honor of the flanking movement to a new and distrusted ally. Their proposals, like Odo’s plan, all involved cavalry charges.

  This was no era of chivalry, not an age of knights in shining armor, but after the fall of Rome and its once-vaunted marching legions, the preferred military arm was the cavalry. Francia was not rich enough to field a fully mounted army; none of the nobility meant to stay with the foot soldiers who comprised almost half their force.

  “Enough!” Karl’s command squelched the grumbling. The major domus dragged a boot across the scratch in the dirt that represented his main line. “Weakened to support your proposed attack, how will the rest of us withstand a frontal assault?”

  Odo smiled. “Before they can launch a serious assault, we will take them in the rear.”

  “And what if you are delayed?” Karl cut off the count’s heated response. “Upon your oath to me, you shall not split my forces.” He glared at his unruly vassal. “On God’s wounds, you will swear it.”

  Odo looked among the nobles for support. He found none. “I swear,” he responded softly. In a more normal tone, he asked, “Then what is the plan?”

  The major domus laid his right hand on the hilt of his sword. Terrence guessed something very unorthodox was coming.

  Terrence was right.

  Allah’s army waited in silence.

  It was a great force of Berbers, Moors, and Arabs. al-Ghafiqi rode from one end of the host to the other, then returned at a canter to a small rise near the center of the line
. The whole while, no one spoke. Nowhere in the world, he thought, is there an army as disciplined, as fierce, as fleet in battle, as deadly, as this. Pride in these men welled up, an overpowering emotion equaled only by his misgivings about what he was about to do to them.

  For all the multitude, there was no sound to be heard but the occasional neigh of a horse or snap of a robe in the breeze. He slipped his scimitar from its sheath and raised it in salute. The men—his men—let out a mighty roar.

  They hushed just as quickly when he lowered his sword. “Soldiers of Islam,” he began. He got no further, for another great shout went up. He waited them out. “Soldiers of Islam, you have all submitted to Allah’s will.” He did no more than point out the very meaning, submission, of the word Islam. “Now, for the glory of Allah, you are about to fight a great battle about which poets will write for a thousand years. What shall they write?”

  There was a moment of stillness as his warriors pondered the question, until one cried out the very first verse of the fourfold-repeated daily prayer: “Allah akbar.” The whole vast multitude picked up the shout. “Allah akbar.” On the third count, he repeated it with them. “Allah akbar.” The air seemed to vibrate with power. On the fourth repetition, al-Ghafiqi pointed his scimitar toward the distant foe. “Allah akbar.”

  With a mighty thunder of hooves and the deafening ululation of war cries, the first echelon of his men, in their tens of thousands, charged toward the waiting Firanji.

  Cavalry beyond counting swept across the plains toward the Franks.

  Frankish nobles rode up and down their segments of the line, urging their warriors to stand fast. Karl stood among the infantry, calling loudly that the men with him would teach the Saracens a valuable lesson. Behind their shield wall, they nervously smiled their appreciation.

  A few nobles still grumbled their disapproval—but not within earshot of Karl. His tactics remained troubling to them.