“Look, this is getting us nowhere,” said Paul. “What do we do about this? Do we select another date and try again, possibly a few days earlier or later?”
“You’re saying you didn’t see anything?” Maeve asked. “No sign that an army had marched through that area? We put you right near the old Roman road.”
“Correct,” Paul confirmed. “The ground would have been rutted with the wheels of their carts and wagons. All accounts are that the Arabs were heavily burdened with their plunder. But the whole area seemed completely undisturbed. No horses, carts, tents, soldiers, campfires, banners, and no sound of fighting. Believe me, estimates are that there were upwards of 30,000 men on each side of this battle. You put 60,000 men into that location and I would have certainly seen something. And the Arabs brought wives, family, slaves, and personal possessions as well. It would have looked like Woodstock after the concert if they had been through that area at all.”
“Yes, if we shifted you in too late then you would have seen signs of the battle, not to mention dead bodies all over the place, even if it was fought as early as the 10th as one source suggested.”
“Right,” said Paul. “So we were early then. The battle had to be fought later. It’s the only thing that could account for the unblemished condition of the ground I saw—unless we’re entirely wrong about the location of this battle, and I think that is unlikely.”
“Then we’ll have to take a look at the following Saturday,” said Nordhausen. “Make it November 1st, Kelly.” He folded his arms. “I guess I’m up then,” he said with some anticipation. It was clear that he was eager to get a look at the situation first hand.
“Paul?” Kelly looked at the project team leader for confirmation.
“If that's the case both armies would still be on the field at that time.” Paul was obviously not happy, but there was nothing else they could do at this point. “I suppose we’ll just have to try again as Robert suggests,” he said dejectedly. “What other option do we have at this point?”
“Alright,” said Kelly. “This shouldn’t take long to program a small variation in the temporal coordinates like that—twenty minutes at the outside. I’ll set it up and get the Golems to verify the numbers ASAP…Which reminds me…”
He suddenly remembered those lost sheep in the Golem history variance module. A small segment of his installed user base did not respond to the command to join the network cloud. He assumed they must be from systems that came on line after his command was sent to the active units. While the others continued discussing the situation, he focused his attention on the alert system, trying to get a fix on how many sheep were still outside the pen. Something caught his eye at once, and he frowned.
“Hello?” he said aloud. “Now what’s this all about?”
Paul looked over his shoulder at him. “A problem?”
“Well I had a few Golems that didn’t join the Network,” said Kelly. “And they’ve been continuing to feed data to the alert module all this time.”
“Anything serious?” Paul came over and leaned in to have a look. They were looking at the 8th century, by decades, and the monitor still showed the obvious demarcation from green to lighter shades of avocado yellow right around the first three cells.
“Just for yucks, let’s zoom way in to the year itself and get a more fine tuned look at the data,” said Kelly. He keyed in 732 for the desired year, and now the screen put up the twelve individual months on the horizontal line. They immediately saw that something was wrong. The color had changed to amber as early as January!
“Hold on,” said Paul. “That was green when we looked at this earlier. We didn’t start seeing color variance until late in the year, right around the date of this battle.”
“Well now the whole year is grade 2 yellow,” said Kelly, “and this is grade 1 amber here.” He pointed to October on the line.
“Scroll back,” said Paul. “Show me the previous year.”
Kelly scrolled the chart and the yellow remained all through the months of 731. “This is really odd,” he said. “Let’s zoom back out to individual years now.” When he refreshed the screen they could clearly see that the alert had migrated to the left of 732. There was yellow all through the 720s, slowly fading from chartreuse, to pear, then avocado, apple and shades of olive green.
“Can you fine tune this even more?” Paul asked. “I mean, can we see numbers to give us a sense of how much variance we’re seeing in these color shifts?”
“No problem,” said Kelly. “Here’s the data in decimal readout.” They scrolled back.
“Hell, we’re seeing variations much earlier now. When did it fall out of nominal ranges?”
Kelly ran his finger back. “Here,” he said definitively. “The year 705. It was holding well above 99% on all prior years. Then it starts to show variation in that year and it just degrades from there.”
“Why didn’t we see this earlier?”
“We’re lucky to see it at all,” said Kelly. “It looks like things have been changing all along. Tours was not the origin of the first major variance. At least according to my lost sheep,” said Kelly.
“How many? Is this based on one report or a stronger weight of opinion?”
“Let me see if I can call up some of the actual documents that no longer jive with our RAM Bank.”
“Maeve, Robert, you better come over here.” Paul waved at them where Maeve was fussing with Robert’s headdress across the room.
He explained what they had found, clearly concerned. “We have a problem,” he finished. “Apparently a few of Kelly’s stray Golems seem to think the variations begin here in this range now.” He pointed to the year 705 on the screen. “We don’t get a safe nominal green until August of that year. In September it begins shifting. The numbers confirm it.”
“Nothing really shifts out of yellow into the orange spectrum until the battle of Tours though,” said Kelly as he reviewed articles, “but we get precursor variations all through the years prior to the battle now…almost like foreshocks to the big one at Tours.”
“Robert?” Paul looked at the professor. “Could we have jumped the gun here and missed something? What was happening in the years before Tours?”
“Well…” Robert thought for a moment. “England is being converted to Christianity by St. Gregory the Great and the Benedictines as the century opens… The plague reaches Italy in 701… The Arabs cross at Gibraltar in 711, and they sack Constantinople some years later…There’s a lot of petty squabbling when Pippin the Fat dies a few years later—that’s Charles Martel’s father by Alpaida.”
“What kind of squabbling?”
“Eh? Charles was a bastard, you see, the illegitimate son of Pippin, who had been married to a wealthy woman named Plectrude, but later he took Alpaida as consort. It was Alpaida who gave birth to Charles, and upon Pippin’s death Plectrude and her clan claimed succession should remain with her bloodline, with Pippin’s grandson Theodwald. Pippin had two legitimate sons, but they were both dead, one killed the very year Pippin himself died, assassinated, if I may say—Grimwald, the father of this young Theo, also illegitimate.”
Paul raised an eyebrow at that. “Go on professor. This is starting to sound suspicious. Sounds like the succession was shaping up as a battle between two bastards!”
“Little Theo was just a boy, and uncle Charles was a young strapping man in his twenties when Pippin died… Alpaida’s family supported his succession, and he became the Mayor of the Palace and de facto ruler of the Franks soon after, his brother by Plectrude having been eliminated the very year Pippin died. This was in 714.”
“Anything significant in the year 705? Kelly? What do these lost sheep of yours find?”
“Well here’s a new card in the deck,” said Kelly. “Golems report that Pippin’s legitimate son, Grimwald took the throne after his death. He was already in office as Mayor of the Palace since the year 695.”
“He doesn’t die? That’s a big variation,” said
Maeve. “What does the RAM Bank say about Grimwald, Robert?”
“He was assassinated,” said the professor after keying in a search. “On his way to visit his ailing father and pay his respects to the shrine of St. Lambert in Liège, actually called the village of Leodium back then, an old Roman settlement, but the entire city eventually grew up around this shrine. He was planning to visit the tomb of St. Lambert there, in the year 714. From there he was going to call upon his dying father.”
“Pious fellow, was he?” Paul tapped his chin.
“He was killed by a man named Rantgar,” Robert added. “Not much else on him, I’m afraid.”
“No mention of him here either,” said Kelly.
“Come on, throw some keywords together, people,” Paul urged. “What’s the common thread linking all these events and people.”
Maeve was at a history terminal as well, and they were all typing furiously. Paul began pacing, his eye on the wall chronometer, his mind ever aware of the distant thrum of the Arch. They should be well into their final mission planning by now, and here they were off on another branch of the history, years before their planned breaching point.
“I’ve got something!” said Maeve. “I threw together a whole salad bowl: Charles, Grimwald, Pippin, Plectrude, Alpaida, Lambert, Tours, Rantgar. And I threw in the dates 705 and 714 to boot. Listen to this! The trouble doesn’t start in 714. It starts with St. Lambert…”
She began to read: “After seven years in exile at the new Abbey of Stavelot, Bishop Lambert returned, having the favor of Pippin for a time, until he, being inflamed by the zeal of religion, roundly condemned the affair of Pippin and Alpaida as scandalous.’ Coincidentally, this Bishop Lambert was somehow related to Plectrude, or at the very least enlisted by her to reprove Pippin’s infidelity.”
“Sounds like a nice family squabble,” said Paul.
“It gets better,” Maeve continued. “Reproved and disgraced by the prominent bishop, Alpaida appealed to her brother Dodo and, in the complicated political struggle that evolved, Dodo is said to have led the plot to murder Lambert out of revenge, on his estate, the Gallo-Roman villa that has since become the city Liège.”
“Looks like Lambert and Plectrude were hammer and tongs with Alpaida and her family,” said Paul.
“It appears so,” she continued. “Now here’s where it gets interesting. All this happened in the year 705.”
“That’s the demarcation cell now,” said Kelly. “We have good solid green through most of that year, but it starts to wane around September of 705.”
Maeve went on: “A cult quickly grew up around Lambert, seeing his death as martyrdom. It was largely pushed by his successor, the Bishop Hubert, who had his remains returned to the place where he was killed and enshrined there. This shrine soon became a chapel, and then eventually a cathedral that became the center of Liège. It was to this very chapel that Grimwald was bound when he was assassinated by an ‘impious wretch’ named Rantgar. Just as Robert said.”
“But the Golems say he lives and consolidates power in 714?” Paul’s eyes sharpened. “Then it looks like Plectrude’s side wins the battle of succession in the altered timeline, and the bastard Charles is thwarted. I agree, Maeve, this is important. It’s critical. How did we miss it earlier?”
“The Battle of Tours still took place,” Nordhausen put in. “Didn’t you say Charles was there earlier, Kelly?”
“Yes, he was there, but seems to drop out of the history after that.”
“We assumed he was killed, then,” said Paul “but we didn’t read much of that altered history in the Golem reports. We just fixated on the battle.”
“The Kelly chimed in with this story about the scribe carving that period of the history,” said Robert. “He’s the one who insisted the stela they found at Rosetta was a reference to the Battle of Tours, and it certainly seems that way after translating it.”
“Damn,” said Paul. “We just assumed Charles was in charge all along. Isn’t that what you said, Robert? You told us that after the Moors defeated Odo he went to Charles for aid and support.”
“Well he did!” Nordhausen complained. “In our history.”
“Not in the Golem reports,” said Kelly. “He beseeches Grimwald for aid, and is made to pledge his fealty in return.”
“Good Lord,” said Paul. “Did we miss this or has something changed? Kelly, do you have a log showing what this data looked like a couple hours back.”
“Sure, he said. It’s a layered database. I can call up a time stamped report for you.” He looked at the clock. “I’ll make it two hours back.”
They examined the year 705 in that data and found it solid green. Nothing had changed until late in the year 732, and it seemed to confirm Paul’s worst suspicions.
“Then we’re at war, my friends. Time war. Our adversaries must still be operating even as we speak. It’s clear that they initiated yet another operation aimed at the year 705.”
“Or perhaps that was their target year all along,” said Kelly. “There’s a bit of a lag while the Golems search and sift available data. But it’s clear that we’ve been barking up the proverbial wrong tree here.”
“We just assumed Charles was a Prime and couldn’t be meddled with, and that he was leading the army that met Abdul Rahman at Tours. But this is indicating that he never took office as Mayor of the Palace when his father Pippin died. His brother Grimwald was in charge! He would have led the army at Tours. We jumped to conclusions too quickly, assuming Tours was the critical point on the Meridian. But it’s obvious that they found some other way to influence the outcome of the battle, much earlier in the time line.”
They all looked at one another, and Paul discerned a mix of frustration, embarrassment and anxiety in their eyes. History was a labyrinth of possibility, and they all seemed like so many blind mice trying to find their way through the maze, blunting their noses on every obstacle and corner they found.
“Damn!” Paul swore. “OK… Robert, you get on the RAM Bank history console. Kelly, you stay with the Golem variation data. We’ve got to find out what happened here—and fast!”
Part V
Martyrdom
“Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.”
— Samuel Johnson
Chapter 13
The Citadel at Heristal, September 16, 705
Dodo took a long draught from his chalice, swirling the deep purple wine about in his cup when he had finished. “A pox on Lambert,” he said. “And all his family.” He was dining in the citadel at Heristal, where his sister Alpaida had begged him to come and hear her complaints.
“You see this now, brother, as I have said it all along,” said Alpaida. “Is it not enough that he commissioned the death of your domestics, trumping up false charges to cover his fell deed? He had it said they pilfered church property! He made them out as common thieves—an insult to our family, even as he slanders me at every turn as well. I am made out to be a harlot and whelp of Satan in his eyes, and he is keen to say it to any who will listen.”
She was a young woman, her hair falling in two long gold braids that framed her high red cheeks beneath sharp blue eyes. Well shaped, hardy and strong in limb, it was no mystery how she had soon drawn Pippin’s eye at court, and come to find herself in his bedchamber shortly thereafter. But her virtues went beyond the shape of her rump or bosom, resting also on the fact that her family held extensive holdings in the provinces to the east. These rich lands, and the profits they generated, were well received by Pippin when he formally took her as consort, promising much more in a marriage that would be arranged in due course.
But such arrangements were often complex and bitter affairs, particularly while Pippin still remained wed to Plectrude. The dark haired woman was aging now, supplanted by the youth and fire of Alpaida in the bedroom chamber, but nonetheless a prominent figure at court and one full ready to challenge any
pretension to the heritage she envisioned for her two sons by Pippin.
Her first had passed an untimely death, stricken down by illness, and Alpaida knew that Plectrude now placed all her hopes on her second son, Grimwald. And why not? He was fully grown, a swarthy dark haired man at arms, and the natural and legitimate heir to Pippin’s seat as Mayor of the Palace. Plectrude had every right to assert his ascendancy to the seat of Mayor, though she had embittered the airs of court with willful and direct attacks against any and all who she perceived to be threats to Grimwald and her family lineage.
The unwed consort, Alpaida, had been first and foremost on her list in this vile effort, and she spared no effort to shame her, diminish her, and make her out to be a common harlot. In this Plectrude had lately enlisted the support of the church itself!
“Do you not see it, brother?” Alpaida said sullenly. “She has now poisoned the ear of the Bishop himself. Why else would he be so quick to denounce me, and shame me as he does?”
“He fancies himself a saint in the making,” said Dodo. “This is obvious to see. He labors up and down the river, from Heristal to Maastricht, preaching his gospel, showing his face in every farm and hamlet, dropping off monks and churchmen like turds in his wake, the better to fertilize the ground he thinks to sanctify with the tread of his foot.”
“Yet he was quick to take up residence at the Roman villa, like all churchmen, lining his pockets with gold as much as piety.”
“Indeed,” Dodo agreed. “Yet what can be done about him, sister? Can you not gain the favor of Pippin himself in this matter?”
“I have argued it endlessly with him, but even as I bend one ear, Plectrude bends the other. He is pulled this way and that, and can come to no mind of his own in the matter. Yet Plectrude is certainly of one mind on the subject, the sultry scheming witch that she is! The Bishop Lambert is a kinsman to her family. We should have foreseen this! It is only the beginning, brother. Do you think Lambert seated his pious rump at that villa simply for his comfort there? No! In doing so he has set himself squarely in the midst of our own family lands. No doubt he will soon covet these as well. The charges brought against your cousins Gallus and Rivaldus were false. Their murder was but a ploy, an excuse to further entrench himself in our province, and lay claim to these lands as well. So does he diminish our holdings as a means of hobbling us and silencing our voice at court. It is plain to see! Plectrude fears my son Charles, and so she stops at nothing now to dishonor me. Lambert is her tool in this.”
Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series) Page 11