Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “Does he not risk much by denouncing you so openly?” said Dodo. “Is Pippin not man enough to restrain him? He has slandered you, that is plain, and in so doing he sullies the honor of Pippin himself.”

  “He can do nothing while Plectrude enfolds him in her gown and whispers of Grimwald and warns of strong willed rivals who would seek his lands and titles. So does she poison his mind against my son Charles. She makes him to be a brigand! She has it said he is heedless and wanton, and that his hand is more often on the sword because he has no skill to govern, and so must he beat upon his rivals to achieve any purpose. It is all in one. Do you see it now? Plectrude and the Bishop Lambert conspire together!”

  Dodo took the dregs of his wine and put down his cup, wiping the last bitter-sharp taste from his lips with the back of his hand. His eyes hardened, steely dark under the grey-black hair. “There is no doubt that what you say is true,” he smoldered.

  “Yes,” said Alpaida, “first slander, now murder against our house, brother. What else must we endure? What can I do, a mere woman, if you remain silent and unmoved?”

  “No longer,” said Dodo. “The murder of Gallus and Rivaldus will be avenged—I swear it. Bishop or no, I will not be so aggrieved. Nor will I countenance his presence here in our ancestral holding, where he fattens himself at his villa. Yes, you speak it well, sister. He holds forth there so that he might better endear the peasantry by his smile and his soft blessings and his oh so pious preaching. Yet his real intent is to install himself in these lands as future warden and liege lord here. I see it plainly now, and I will not abide it!”

  Alpaida rushed to her brother, embracing him. “I knew you would defend our family. I knew I could count on you, dear Dodo, first above all others. My son Charles is away where he wars in Frisia, or else he would surely stand with you in this.”

  “Yet it is no small matter,” said Dodo. “It must be done quietly, away from Lambert’s devoted clan.”

  “Tonight!” Alpaida urged. “Lambert has returned to his villa. On the morrow he will journey south, and some say it is to Plectrude he is bound. She will undoubtedly move him to undertake even more outrageous slanders and affronts. He will denounce me formally, before God and in the presence of the Bishop Hubert of Maastricht as well. Plectrude has put this in his mind, and darkened his heart against us.”

  “Then I will run the man through,” said Dodo, “And I will silence this would be saint and usurper once and for all. Let him become a martyr first, if sainthood is his claim. I will take three retainers, that should be more than enough. We will ride south and come upon Lambert in his sleep, this very night, and he will not live to see the dawn and run off to Plectrude on the morrow. This I swear…”

  Dodo did not linger, and resolved to set himself upon the old Roman road at dusk and time his journey so as to come upon Lambert’s villa in the middle of the night. He had it said that he was bound for Echternach so that tongues would not wag. But as he mounted his horse and rode to the outskirts of the small settlement he noticed the beast was clearly hobbled with a bad hoof. His sergeant of arms noted a livery nearby, and he dismounted, leading his horse into the stall where a man hammered loudly, shaping metal at a crude iron anvil.

  “Good day, sir,” said the blacksmith when he saw Dodo. “Oh, my lord Dodo! Your pardon, sir. I was so intent with my hammer that I did not hear your approach. How may I serve you, my lord?”

  “My horse has come up lame, even as I must make my way now to Echternach. Will you have a look?”

  “Of course, my lord.” The Blacksmith was quick to set down his hammer and tongs, pulling off this leather gloves. He went to the horse where it was now tethered in the stall and immediately saw that the beast was favoring his right rear leg. He stilled the animal, feeding the horse an apple he took from a sturdy wood basket, then looked at the hoof, muttering to himself as much as the horse as he worked.

  “Why, he is unshod, Lord,” he said at last. “He must have thrown his shoe and then took a granite stone in his hoof to make matters worse. It is not serious. I can have it out in a minute or two and easily remedy the situation by fitting a new shoe.”

  “I am in some haste,” said Dodo. “How long will this take?”

  “Not long, my lord. An hour at best.”

  “That long? Have you no other horses stabled here? I would just as easily leave this beast and take another if it would speed me on my way. The weather looks foul and does not promise an easy ride if I linger here.”

  “Alas, lord, my livestock is mostly afield, bringing in harvest ahead of the rain you speak of. And my only other worthy mount was sold not an hour ago to a woman on the road, with two companions. You will not want that old plow horse. He gestured to the only beast in the stable.”

  “A woman? On a day like this?”

  “Yes lord, strange she was, yet amiable. Perhaps she was a nun. Spoke in the old Roman tongue, yet she paid well for the horse, so I gave it no further thought.”

  Dodo wondered who the woman was, most likely a baroness or wife of land holder returning from Maastricht with her retainers. Well enough.

  “Then shoe the horse, man, and be quick about it, will you!”

  “My lord,” the blacksmith proffered a respectful nod, and was quick to his stocks, selecting a shoe he judged the correct size for the horse, yet noting it needed just a little work before he could make the fit.

  He threw another log on his forge oven, the dark smoke billowing up into the graying sky. Soon the sound of his hammer fell hard on the heated shoe, ringing against the cold metal anvil beneath it with each heavy blow.

  Dodo chafed like a restless horse himself. He wanted to be well on his way by now, down the stone tiled Roman road that would lead him south to Bishop Lambert’s villa. The sound of the hammer seemed to deepen his mood with every blow, kindling a vague disquiet in his heart. It resounded in the enclose space of the livery, ringing sharply on the cold air of the early evening, and it seemed to mark him in some way. He began to feel that every eye was upon him, and every ear would heed that sound—that it would ring like a church bell, raising alarm and warning throughout the land.

  A feeling of guilt enshrouded him for a moment, causing him to look up and down the road, as if saints and legions were mustering at one end or another, yet the way was empty. The sun fell through darkening drifts of cloud to the west, tingeing their bottoms with blood red as the light faded. He breathed in the evening air, smelling mutton roasting for a late meal at a nearby farmstead.

  The hammer rose and fell, beating hard on the anvil, and then one last heavy blow sang out, and faded into silence. The Blacksmith had satisfied himself that the shoe would now be a perfect fit, and he cooled it in a bucket of cold water, the steam hissing up and strangely bothering Dodo again, as if the voice of some recriminating detractor had come to make accusation against him.

  Twenty minutes later it was cool to the touch and the smith had the shoe securely mounted on Dodo’s steed. “Well enough, sir,” he said.

  Dodo thanked the man as his sergeant handed the smith a coin in payment. Then the four men took to their mounts and trotted out into the gloaming light, the sound of their hooves falling darkly on the cold stone tiles as they rode.

  Dodo was in the van, and not a moment later he looked and spied two figures, standing close by a low tree stump at the edge of the road. It was an odd place for someone to be at this hour, and his mood soured when he looked closer and saw they wore the plain brown woolen cassocks of monks.

  “Damn clergy,” he said to himself. In Lambert’s keep, most certainly, he thought. Always about, like so many lice infecting the land now. He made for them, a disdainful look on his face as he pulled up short, stopping his party abruptly. He eyed them with a suspicious glance, adjusting the fit of his leather gloves as he spoke.

  “Dark night coming,” he said. “Are you not late for Matins, monks?”

  The two men gave him a sheepish look, obviously cowed by his sudden intere
st and commanding presence. “What? Have you nothing to say to me? Then get off this road, you slovenly piglets. Get off to some nice warm fire and say your prayers well this night. A storm is coming.”

  He smiled darkly at the two men, and then clucked, nudging his horse to ride on. The sergeant spat at them as they rode by and the four men cantered away, their riding capes fluttering out behind them on the cold air, four shadows darkening the night as they went.

  Chapter 14

  Arch Complex, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Saturday, 8:35 A.M

  Kelly cleared his throat and spoke next. “Dodo’s plot fails,” he said flatly. “Or at least the way it looks to be shaping up now. In this history Lambert hounds Alpaida and condemns the infidelity of Pippin, but he isn’t killed at his villa by Alpaida’s brother Dodo in 705. The plot fails when Dodo meets with a mishap on the road. Lambert, alerted to the danger, mitigates his censure somewhat, but goes on to be an influential bishop, strongly supporting Plectrude and her son Grimwald when he takes the throne in 714. You see, he isn’t assassinated that year either, because Lambert lives. The bishop never becomes a martyr.”

  “Hence there is no shrine and no chapel for him to visit on the way to his father’s bedside,” said Maeve.

  “And no place to be piously at prayer when a javelin goes through your heart.” Nordhausen put a fine point on the issue. “The place where Grimwald was to have had his rendezvous with death never existed!”

  “And the foiled plot against Lambert must have galvanized Plectrude’s clan, and put them on guard,” said Kelly.

  “The soup is thickening,” said Paul. “It seems our adversaries, the Assassins as we call them, had to prevent these two murders in order to forestall the ascendency of Charles. How ironic.”

  “Right,” said Kelly. “So in the altered history old Odo gets his ass kicked by Abdul Rahman and instead of appealing to Charles, he has to go to Grimwald.”

  “The fate of all Western history is now in the hands of Grimwald, and not Charles,” Nordhausen said in a low voice.

  “The battle of Tours is fought under his command,” Kelly continued. “He fails to choose his ground well, as Charles did. The Moorish columns are still scattered, some as far north as the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours. Instead of ignoring the city and marching south to confront the Moors main body closer to Poitiers, as Charles did, Grimwald tries to come to the aid of Tours. That’s why there was nothing going on at the site where you manifested, Paul. The battle was fought somewhere else. He takes the bait, as it were, and is engaged with one of the Arab light raiding columns near the abbey when Abdul Rahman shows up with his main body.”

  “And all the heavy cavalry,” said Paul. “What’s the date?”

  “It just says Ramadan, the year 114. They hit the Franks on their exposed flank and rout them. The infantry weren’t in prepared positions as Charles had them arrayed in our Meridian.”

  “No Phalanx, no shieldwall,” said Paul.

  “No victory to end the Saracen invasion of Gaul,” said Robert. “It’s insidious! In order to crush Christendom and the West, a Catholic Bishop has to be spared a martyr’s death and subsequent sainthood.”

  “But how?” said Paul. “We haven’t found the Pushpoint yet. And we have another, even bigger problem as well…”

  Paul’s face was darkly troubled. “I landed spot on, right in the middle of the Battle of Tours. There was nothing wrong with Kelly’s numbers, and the field was abandoned, empty, unblemished. If Kelly’s historical account is the answer to that riddle then the Heisenberg Wave has been generated, because I must have been seeing the altered time line! It’s already altered events in October of 732. That’s 27 years after Lambert was to have been martyred.”

  “How is that possible?” Robert asked.

  “Time appears to be coming to some conclusion concerning these events,” said Paul. “Unless we were completely wrong about the location of the battlefield, then I should have seen our history there when I manifested. But I didn’t. I saw an altered Meridian. Only a Heisenberg Wave can work such a transformation. So the wave is either active now as we speak, or in the process of generating itself. The implications are so radical in this intervention that the wave builds up, gathering strength and power before it explodes across the continuum and completes the change. It’s like a great tsunami, rearing up over the landscape of Time and overshadowing the closest events to the point of intervention. That shadow has already influenced events after the year 705. It altered Grimwald’s death in 714, and it certainly altered the events surrounding the Battle of Tours. That was probably the major fulcrum, and now things may still be changing, ever more rapidly, even as we speak here. We have to act quickly. Who knows how long it will take for the wave to reach our time?”

  The lights fluttered ominously even as he spoke these words, dimming slightly and then brightening before fading again.

  “And we’re running out of fuel for the generators as well,” said Kelly. “I’ll have to bring in a reliever from the Bullpen, Paul. The number one backup generator just ran dry.”

  He toggled a switch and the low vibration was at least reassuring. The number two backup came on line, pre-charged with residual power from number one, and the lights held steady. “No loss of integrity on the Arch field,” said Kelly. “Don’t worry, we still have a Nexus, but Paul is correct, we won’t have one for very much longer.”

  “So where do we focus our attention?” Paul pushed them to the next question. “It sounds like we should be looking at Lambert’s death, not that of Grimwald.”

  “Lambert, without question,” said Maeve. “Not only does it precede the elimination of Grimwald on the Meridian, but it also provides the place of his death.”

  There was no disagreement on this point. “Then how is Lambert’s assassination prevented?” Paul’s next question was more difficult to answer, but Nordhausen suddenly remembered something Kelly had said.

  “You read it a moment ago, Kelly. Some mishap on the road?”

  “Let me see if I can find it again,” said Kelly. He searched the text, calling up a few supporting articles. “OK, here it is. In the altered Meridian Dodo took four men, two servants and a member of his house guard. Apparently Dodo had a lame horse. He had it worked on but later helped himself to a horse they found where he stopped on the road the night before. He needed a fresh mount, and was riding what the Chronicle describes as…’a willful beast.’ Their mission was foiled when he was thrown from his steed and injured.”

  He began to read: “the willful beast would not bear him, and then did he fall. The servants take this as a bad omen and flee, leaving Dodo and his sergeant alone. He subsequently decides to seek aid for his injury, and calls off the attack on Lambert. This is an Arabic source, and it casts the whole thing is an almost mythical light. The steed taken from the farm ends up foiling the mission, according to the writer, and he is revered as an ancestor of one of the five, whatever that means. Here’s the text… ‘and you shall know him by his eye, and the fire of his hoof, he that felled heathen.’”

  “The five refers to the five horses that returned to Mohammed in the desert and became the sires of all Arabian steeds,” said Maeve matter of factly. Remember Kuhaylan? That was one of the five, and this breed is often found to have a circle around the eye.”

  Nordhausen was suddenly energized. “The hieroglyphics!” he said excitedly. “Here, here, here…. Where is that damn image of the stela again?” He called up the file. “There’s the cartouche with the name Kuhaylan… and here is the text: “The weave undone… A loose twine… where horses were brought to gather…”

  “I thought that was an admonition to the Moors not to heed the stampede of the horses they had captured in their camp,” said Paul.

  “What camp!” Robert exclaimed. “The battle wasn’t even to be fought there in the altered Meridian. And look here, I failed to notice this before, but these various sections of the stela are all separated by solid lines. They’re sepa
rate stories,” he said definitively. “Why didn’t I see that before? This bit about the weave is separated from the narrative of the battle above it, and this wavy line here was often used to indicate a journey of the soul through transformation in the afterlife.”

  “Then the stela is recording information derived from the original Meridian, as well as the altered one,” said Paul. “The story of the battle comes before the wave, and this other text comes later, after the wave that transforms the soul,” he said.

  “The Heisenberg Wave,” said Kelly.

  “And look here,” said Nordhausen. Remember this line? ‘Plunder taken… the road becomes the path of Martyrs. For he who would be slain must live…” The whole thing has a double meaning. That line could apply to events in either Meridian. I thought that referred to the death of Abdul Rahman before, but now that we have this new perspective, it could be talking about Lambert! This road leads to his martyrdom, and it’s saying that he must live.”

  “It’s the damn horses again,” said Kelly. “They are the Pushpoint in both Meridians.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “In our time they could be connected to the commotion in the enemy camp at the battle of Tours causing such confusion that the Saracens break off their attack, and when Abdul Rahman tries to rally his men he is killed. Now, here in the altered Meridian, Dodo is thrown from his saddle by a willful beast and the plot to kill Lambert is foiled.”