Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

  And then, somehow, the swirl of battle separated them. Harry found himself face-to-face with Gamal Abdul Salah-ad-Din himself. With Abdul Faisel.

  Faisel’s face was a mask of hatred. “You, again!”

  Harry thrust his scramasax at the villain’s heart.

  Faisel parried the blow easily. “You’ll have to do better than that,” he said, laughing, and then he pressed his own assault. With a flurry of blows, he drove Harry backward down the road until Bertchramm rode to his aid.

  The Arab broke off his attack and retreated a few paces to a less exposed position. He saluted Harry with his scimitar. “Congratulations. The old man has saved you.”

  Harry ignored the taunt. It had been in modern French; Bertchramm would not have understood. “Bertchramm, where is Terrence?”

  “One of my men grew up in these hills. Once Terrence heard that, he asked about caves nearby. Childeberht mentioned an abandoned tin mine, and Terrence became very excited. They were taking the wagon ahead, I believe to the mine, when we were ambushed.”

  That update was completed between blows, for Faisel and his men had renewed their attack. Harry once more found himself battling the man whose diabolical plot he had crossed the centuries to foil. Harry fought as never before, thanking Sigismund for those long-ago lessons and every educational whack with the side of his instructor’s blade. Thrust and parry. Feint and riposte. Thrust, lunge, thrust. Those painful lessons had kept him alive for this day.

  Would they get him through this day?

  Although blood ran from at least a dozen cuts, a few of them serious, Harry’s spirits had lifted. If Terrence got the bomb into a mine shaft, and if the shaft were deep enough, the blast need not be cataclysmic.

  He had to buy Terrence that time.

  By the light of a single torch, it was almost impossible to judge whether the twisting mine tunnel trended downward. Terrence relied on instinct—he felt that there was a slight downward grade. He hoped he was going deeper underground, not just following a contour of the surface. If not, he was wasting time that he did not have.

  Childeberht slogged on ahead of him. The young Frank must be bearing most of the weight, since the bomb seemed lighter than when they had taken it down from the wagon. Maybe they were heading in the right direction: down. At least it gave Terrence a reason for hope.

  In the rough-hewn subterranean passage, the blood-red flickering of the LED numerals seemed positively hellish—all the more so as the numbers raced ever closer to zero.

  With five minutes remaining Terrence called a halt. They gently set down the bomb on his signal. He took the torch that Childeberht had somehow clutched under an arm as he walked. “Run now like the Devil himself is chasing you.” If the explosive trigger failed to set off a nuclear reaction, distance might save the Frank.

  Terrence wedged the flaming brand into a nearby torch sconce. He settled down to the tunnel floor as flashing numbers moved him ever closer to immolation: 4:18, 4:17, 4:16 . . .

  With a shudder, he looked away from the hypnotic countdown. The timer ticked to 3:21. In an exhausted stupor, he had lost an irreplaceable minute.

  He unscrewed the cover plate of the electronics module with the tip of his dirk. By the flickering, smoky torchlight, the shadows of wires writhed like snakes. He spread out the wires as best he could and tried to trace the circuits. There was just enough light to tell that the wires were of different colors, but not enough to tell the hues apart. Subtle nuances of shade, of relative lightness and darkness, danced maddeningly just beyond his ken.

  1:08, 1:07, 1:06....

  He cursed at the tangled cables. There just wasn’t time! He couldn’t even decipher the main circuit, let alone identify booby traps. 0:37, 0:36, 0:35....

  With ten seconds remaining, he began sawing on a randomly chosen wire.

  Harry was again on the attack when the earth groaned.

  The ground rose and fell beneath him like a great wave, pitching him from his horse. He bounced into the air, oblivious to the screams of man and beast. Trees crashed down all around him. The horses bolted.

  The nuclear explosion vaporized a huge sphere of rock and soil. Tortured earth ruptured, venting vapors into the atmosphere and relieving the enormous pressure. With a shudder and a sickening moan, the ground collapsed into an unseen but monstrous cavity.

  Harry clawed desperately at the steep slope on which he found himself. He climbed up out of the pit to lie gasping on the quivering ground. With only a moment’s pause to catch his breath, he reached back over the edge, extending an arm to Bertha.

  He couldn’t quite reach her. He staggered to a fallen tree and hacked off a branch with a discarded sword. He stumbled back to the gaping hole with the branch, and lowered an end to her. Choking on the thick dust, he dragged her from the abyss. He pushed her away roughly, for the precipice on which they crouched was rapidly crumbling.

  A scream rose from the inky depths. Harry peered cautiously over the edge.

  “Help!” Faisel shouted. His feet scrabbled uselessly at the ever-steepening slope as he clung to a tree root laid bare by the earth’s convulsions. His eyes were impossibly round. “Help me!”

  Harry might have been able to get him out. Might. Instead, he reached once more for the sword. “This is for Terrence.” With a vicious slash that almost sent him tumbling back into the pit, Harry severed the root. Faisel dropped into stygian darkness, shrieking.

  As earthen walls slammed shut around Faisel, Harry thought that he heard words. Or perhaps it was a single word.

  Leila.

  PART IV

  Life is the game that must be played:

  This truth at least, good friends, we know;

  So live and laugh, nor be dismayed

  As one by one the phantoms go.

  —Edwin Arlington Robinson

  WEST-CENTRAL FRANCE, 732

  Karl dismounted his steed with an agility that many a younger man could envy. One indiscreet aide did just that, and got a scathing look that rendered him instantly mute. Matters were too serious for such nonsense.

  The major domus studied the devastated landscape, especially the great bowl-shaped subsidence crater to which he could put no name, before speaking. When he did speak, he addressed his words to his longtime friend and vassal. Bertchramm and his niece had been crouched beside a prone Harry Bowen when the mounted troop had clattered up; now Bertchramm stood before his liege lord.

  “How is Harry? Where are your men?”

  Looking grim, the warlord answered the simpler question first. “Everyone else is dead, either from a Saracen ambush or the explosion.” He used the last word awkwardly, an unfamiliar utterance once learned from the man unconscious at his feet. “Terrence is surely dead. He took the bomb into a deep mine so that the earth itself could shelter us.

  “Perhaps one or two of our attackers survived and fled; there was such confusion in the explosion that I have no way of knowing. But one of the certain dead, slain by Harry himself, is that devil, Salah-ad-Din.”

  “And how is Harry?” Karl prodded gently.

  “Taken suddenly and mysteriously ill.”

  Harry wore several improvised bandages, none bloody enough to explain a loss of consciousness. His face was red and feverish. Vomit and diarrhea stained his clothing and lay in puddles all around; the stench was overpowering. As Karl watched, Harry’s body convulsed. A trickle of stomach juices trickled out of his mouth.

  Karl looked again, slowly and carefully, at the ruination all around him. Even two hours’ hard ride away, the shock of the explosion had been astonishing. What must it have been like here? What cataclysm would this evil magic have wrought in the very midst of his army, had Harry not somehow delayed it?

  Karl spoke sternly to his chief of guards. “Watch over that man as you would me. Francia has a debt to him that is beyond all reckoning.
/>
  “Pray that our friend lives long enough that we may attempt to repay him.”

  The poorly sprung wagon eventually jolted Harry awake. He was lying in a heap of itchy furs. His body reasserted itself in a chorus of inaudible screams: cuts, scrapes, bruises. More ominous were the internal aches.

  He felt like week-old road kill.

  Bertha sat at his feet; she had not yet noticed his awakening. He prodded her with a toe. “We can’t go on meeting this way. I think Bertchramm is getting suspicious.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” No more twenty-first-century humor, he thought. God, I’m going to miss Terrence. “Where are we?”

  “Almost back to Tours. Most of the army went on ahead, but we have plenty of guards. Karl’s orders.”

  Harry tried to sit up, groaning. Groaning worked, sitting did not. Bertha scooted over to help, lurching as the wagon hit yet another chuckhole in the crude dirt road. “Careful, Harry. You are not well.”

  No shit, Sherlock. “You seem all right, I’m glad to see. What about everyone else?”

  “Bertchramm is well. There is no one else. The earth swallowed everyone that the Saracens had not already killed.”

  “And the army?”

  “Almost untouched.” She braced herself against the wild swaying. “Count Odo’s horse bolted. He was thrown from his horse and broke his neck. The warriors take it as a sign of the Lord’s displeasure. The new count has sworn fealty to Karl.”

  Another jolt. Harry clenched his jaws to keep from crying out. “Was I knocked out by an . . . ?” He paused; if Frankish had a word for aftershock, he didn’t know it. “I mean, did the earth shake again?”

  Bertha averted her eyes. “No. You just crumpled, very suddenly. You shook uncontrollably, threw up, lost control of your bowels, and turned feverish. Yet Bertchramm and I are fine. I do not understand.”

  Harry did. It sounded like ionizing radiation injury, otherwise known—in more enlightened, if possibly less fortunate, times—as radiation sickness. Not all the fallout had been trapped underground; some had clearly vented. He could not know the level to which he had been exposed. He might already be on the mend—

  Or terrible things might lie in store.

  Radiation most affected the tissues that normally underwent fast replacement: bone marrow, intestines, skin, parts of the nervous system. As those tissues died, the victim became increasingly infection-prone. Red-blood-cell count plummeted. Arteries and veins weakened and hemorrhaged. Toxins from tissue dissolution slowly poisoned the body.

  He might develop tumors and body ulcers. Wounds, if he suffered any more, would be ever slower to clot. With a shiver, Harry remembered how his long-ago radiation biology textbook had euphemistically identified the major symptom: shortened life span.

  Why were Bertha and Bertchramm unaffected?

  Harry ran his fingers through his hair as he pondered. Clumps caught loosely between his spread fingers came out. Think. His mind’s eye visualized as tiny bullets the subatomic debris of decaying nuclei. They whizzed, invisibly small, through air and flesh alike. Occasionally one smacked into a more solid, more critical part of a cell’s delicate internal mechanisms. One imagined cell after another was maimed and mutated.

  Aha. This was the first exposure for Bertchramm and Bertha.

  He wasn’t so fortunate. Terrence had mentioned low-level radiation in Faisel’s lab. Harry guessed at another exposure, a side effect of the trip to this century. The near-instantaneous release of vast energies from Rothschild’s superconducting storage ring might have drenched him in gamma rays.

  It all added up. The accumulated damage from three exposures had taken him down. Harry guessed it was going to kill him.

  Bertha misunderstood his sudden silence. “Do you need to sleep?”

  To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub . . .

  Harry shivered again. “No, I’d rather not. Will you talk with me?”

  REIMS, 732

  The long and narrow stone hall was cold and drafty, noisy and packed. Wall hangings and a roaring fire ameliorated the first two conditions, however minimally. Nothing could alleviate the cacophony and overcrowding. Drunken feasters bellowed and quarreled. Serving wenches squealed at pinches and gropes. Dogs fought over scraps of meat. Jongleurs capered and danced for beer and flung coins, storytelling being impractical amid the tumult.

  The outlander sat quietly amid the chaos. Karl wondered: Did Harry’s silence come of lingering illness, sadness at the death of his foreign companion, or simple uneasiness at his surroundings? Despite a long sojourn in Francia, the man had never taken on Frankish ways. Take Harry’s persistent search for the rules of speech, whatever those might be, or his fastidious picking at food as though there should be implements other than fingers and knives.

  No matter. Harry was guest of honor now, while Karl still had the chance.

  After days of rest, Harry remained weak. His pallor and the mysterious loss of his hair only emphasized his frailty. He had aged years within days.

  Karl swigged his beer, then hurled the empty golden chalice—booty from the Saracen wagon train—against the wall. Metal clanging on stone went largely unnoticed in the general clamor, the bawling of bawdy songs, and the crackling fire.

  Bertchramm heard the clatter, and that was enough. The old warlord hollered until the crowd quieted.

  Karl climbed unsteadily to his feet. It was time to recount Harry’s exploits, to render a saga such as the man so richly deserved. Yet at his side, merely sitting and picking at a hunk of bread, Harry was ready to collapse. He would not last through a proper retelling.

  The story was unnecessary. The men in this hall had been there; most had felt, from a relatively safe distance, the fury of this bomb. Words were not necessary. Reward was.

  Karl said, “The nobility of Francia is gathered to honor Harry and Terrence. All here know of their deeds. Amid celebration, we are nonetheless sad that Terrence has left us. Harry, have you given thought to how we can thank you?”

  The outlander did not hesitate. “There is an abbey in Metz . . . .”

  Karl nodded. This was proper Frankish behavior. Each man in this room but Harry was a sworn vassal of the major domus, bound to him by a precarium, a lifetime grant of property.

  Most of this land Karl had taken from the Church. The far-off Pope knew not to quarrel: Karl’s service against the Saracens far outweighed the nuisance of his land seizures. The Churchmen also valued Karl’s actions against Christian heretics—while Karl took note that the heretic Lombards held territories that bordered his own.

  So Harry meant to join his truste (retinue), and to receive the corresponding reward. Good for him. Property and comfort were the least that Harry deserved. “Done. It is yours.”

  Then Harry did surprise him. “No, my lord, I do not wish to own the abbey. I wish to retire there.”

  “Are you sure, Harry? You have earned the respect of the kingdom.” Karl’s vassals shouted their assent, none louder than Bertchramm.

  “Quite sure.” Harry boldly looked Karl straight in the eye. “But there is one boon that I would ask of you.”

  Flatly: “Consider it done.”

  Then Harry named it, and all Karl’s truste shouted out in amazement. It was unthinkable. They waited for the major domus to strike this outlander dead for his temerity.

  Karl stood stock-still for a moment. Then, with a grin, he relaxed. “If not for you, Harry, what use would it be to me now?

  “What you ask is yours, with my blessing.”

  CENTRAL FRANCIA, 732

  The rhythmic lope of his horse lulled Harry into a dreamlike trance. He was finally, it seemed, a soldier: He could sleep anywhere. Trusting his escorts to keep an eye on him, he dozed in the saddle. Every step brought him that much closer to his destination. To distant Metz . . .

&nb
sp; After long weeks of recuperation he had almost felt fit enough for this journey. Bertha had fussed at him—as she would have done, as she pined to do, for Terrence; he understood that—arguing that he was not yet ready. Gently, he had insisted on leaving, and a stern glance from her uncle had ended the discussion. Harry’s bone-deep weariness now only proved her correct. No matter—he could rest at the abbey.

  After his work was done.

  The clop-clop of hooves was hypnotic. He swayed as he rode, his body balancing for him. Warriors murmured all around, uncharacteristically softly. He wondered what threats Karl had made to assure his safe, speedy, and, considering the circumstances, comfortable trip.

  Gradually, barely perceptibly, the ground beneath them sloped upward. His horse adjusted its gait, and on they rode. In Harry’s dreamlike state, the ascent became a romantic hike with Julia through the hills of eastern France. The whispered conversations around him transmuted into the chirping of birds, cold gusts became warm breezes. He smiled in his sleep.

  Harry jerked awake, unsure what had returned him to consciousness. A misstep by his horse on the uneven ground seemed the most likely cause. He must have been asleep for quite a while—the shadow that stretched out before him was far longer than what he last remembered.

  A shaft of sunlight broke through the slate-gray sky, just as one had at the mass after the victory near Tours. Harry followed the golden rays to their termination in the taller hills just ahead—and gasped. Amid ancient forest, the sunbeam illuminated a great Roman temple of pristine white marble. Some trick of light cast a pale green glow over the edifice, evergreen reflections enfolding the gleaming stone. Evening mist suffused the rays; the path to the sun seemed almost palpable.

  Harry’s spirits leapt at the vision, at the unexpected loveliness. His uplifted mind conjured up the Emerald City of Oz, and a shining city on a hill. At that moment, everything seemed possible. Everything. Yes, he could do it.