Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Paul started.

  They told him what they had found and Kelly’s eyes lit up with sudden recognition. “Hamza and I just had a conversation about this period a few days ago! In fact, that was the segment of the history he had his men working on all week.”

  He told them how he would come to the chamber of records and play devil’s advocate as Hamza supervised the carving. “They were real busy,” he said. “Messengers were coming and going all the time. I know they must have had the history on computers in their day, but they were making damn sure this permanent record was being carved and preserved. These people are serious about this shit, Paul. In fact…” He held up a finger, remembering something Hamza had said.

  “Hamza and I disagreed on the recounting of this very battle. He seemed to think the Moors lost because of some other reason, not the military prowess of Charles. Paul, do you know anything more about it?”

  Paul had been a student of military history for over twenty-five years, and often passed the time designing conflict simulations of famous historical battles. “Richard Berg put out a design on this battle and I played that a few times,” said Paul. “Charles stole a march on old Abdul, who was advancing rather heedlessly after his crushing victory over Odo earlier that year. His men had split into several raiding columns and were plundering the countryside. His supply trains were also well behind him. Warned by Odo, Charles quickly assembled his army and marched south, avoiding the main roads so as to remain undiscovered. Then he chose the ground, there between those two rivers, I remember it now. He had a slight elevation advantage, and cover of a nearby woodland area. He drew his men up in a square, a tight Phalanx to defend against the enemy heavy cavalry, behind their shieldwall, and he stolidly blocked the road to Tours, and the Abbey of St. Martin.

  “When Abdul Rahman arrived he was surprised on two counts. First, he did not expect to meet any further organized resistance after defeating Odo, and second, his enemy had chosen the ground, and the time of battle, both obvious advantages. Abdul may have been brash, but he wasn’t stupid. He wisely decided to wait, refusing to attack while he bought time to gather his raiding columns and bring up the main body of his army. Attack too soon in this battle as the Moors and you really get hammered by the Franks.”

  “But he got hammered anyway,” said Kelly.

  “Well,” Paul thought deeply about it. “The professor here is going to have to do some digging on this in the RAM Bank but, if I’m not mistaken, it was a near run thing. No European infantry had ever really stood up to this kind of heavy cavalry when it was properly mobilized on attack. Odo prevailed ten years earlier because the cavalry was not used effectively and never got a chance to concentrate against him.”

  He ran his hand through his thick brown hair, recalling the history as best he could. “This time Abdul Rahman waited to assemble his scattered units, a full six days, and then sent his heavy horsemen against the Franks on the seventh day. Charles won the waiting game. He had prompted his enemy to attack him on ground of his own choosing, but that cavalry was a formidable force. At one point they broke through the ranks of the shieldwall, aiming to kill Charles, but his most loyal troops fought fanatically to save him, barely stopping the charge. The accounts of the battle are sketchy at this point, but in my simulations the Moors regroup and reassemble for another charge. They eventually best the Frankish infantry, putting them to route late on the first day of the battle. But that’s not what happened in the history we know.”

  “Right,” said Kelly, reading from the RAM Bank now. “All hell breaks loose. Abdul Rahman gets embroiled in the fighting and he is killed by the Franks. The Moors retreat in dismay and pull out under cover of darkness that night. Charles, the Hammer, has his victory and a new name.”

  Nordhausen was quick to a terminal, calling up references on the battle. ‘Then was he first called “Martel,” for as a hammer of iron, of steel, and of every other metal, even so he dashed; and smote in the battle all his enemies.’—That’s from the Chronicle of St. Denis.”

  The professor leaned back, thinking. “So this marks the high water mark of Islamic incursions into Europe,” he said. “A few dissent, though most historians agree that if Charles had been defeated decisively here, as Paul seems to think is possible, then there would have been no significant military opposition to the Muslim incursion into France. Some scholars argue that Abdul Rahman was never intending to push any farther, only to pillage the riches of the Abbey of Saint Martin of Tours, and state that this was merely a raid for plunder. The abbey was one of the most significant cultural and religious centers in Europe at this time. Its loss would have been broadly symbolic of what would likely have happened to the rest of Gaul. And this raid was already a thousand miles north of Gibraltar! A victory here would have probably seen the invaders winter in Tours or Poitiers and renew their advances in the spring, possibly reinforced from Spain. Unopposed, it’s my belief that they would have just kept on coming. And look at the damn screen, gentlemen.” He finished, folding his arms.

  “My God!” Kelly was scrolling forward, seeing the rapid color change from yellow to orange and then red. “Apparently they did keep on coming.” He moved to a nearby terminal to query the information retrieved by the Golems. “The name Charles Martel produces no search results after this. He was at the battle, but in the altered history he is killed in the fighting, so he never gets that moniker ‘Martel, the Hammer’ attached to his name….”

  “There you are,” said Nordhausen. “No Pippin II. No Charlemagne.”

  Kelly continued: “The Saracens sack the abbey, get a taste of central France, and then eventually sweep north, heavily reinforced by additional armies coming over the Pyrenees the following spring. Damn-it! Hamza was talking about this very battle. What was it he said? He was going to carve it faithfully so that the errors of Abdul Rahman might be corrected.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Nordhausen. “This is where they’re running an operation, and they’ve found one hell of a Pushpoint somewhere in the history.”

  “Right,” said Kelly. “Charles gets his ass kicked here, and the invaders sweep all Christendom before them, essentially doing a right hook into the Balkans and outflanking the Byzantines as well. Isolated and besieged from two sides, the Byzantine empire falls twenty years later. The Umayyad Dynasty is now the preeminent power on earth, unchallenged.”

  “What about China and India?” asked Paul.

  “There are already Islamic campaigns underway in India by this time,” said Nordhausen. “As for China, the Tang Dynasty was nearing its end. In another twenty years it takes a death blow from a dissident general, An Lu Shan, who marches into the capitol at Chang’an, and ushers in a period of great confusion in China. Their old regional enemy, Tibet, comes over the mountain passes into the Tarim basin and chokes off the Silk Road trade routes. China is in no condition to resist anyone at this stage. If the Islamic armies push into Central Asia, and I’ll bet they do in those Golem reports, then Tibet may have held out, but the population of China was reduced by nearly 80% during this period. There’s nothing they could have done to effectively oppose the growing Muslim dominance.”

  “So this makes the battle here at Tours an even more significant event,” said Paul, “coming as it does on the eve of the fall of the Tang Dynasty. What about the Mongols? Genghis Khan?”

  “Much later,” said Nordhausen, “That’s in the thirteenth century, and we haven’t time to read that period now. We’ve found our crisis point. It’s here! They lose it all! There’s no Enlightenment, no Reformation, no Renaissance. The Assassins, or whoever they are, have found a way to win the Battle of Tours, and the results make the damage caused by Palma look pale by comparison. In fact, they probably have no reason to initiate an operation against Palma after this. Didn’t you say Columbus never discovers America a moment ago?”

  “Let me check it,” said Kelly. “Here…It’s discovered by Shams ad-Din, the gr
eat Moroccan Berber explorer, and he finds it nearly a century before Columbus does in the history we know. The Americas…well, they wouldn’t be called that in this altered time line. But the new world gets colonized by the Muslims, not the Europeans, who are completely assimilated into Muslim-Islamic culture by that time.”

  “So there’s no Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, and no Declaration of Independence, and no United States of America?” Paul was really shocked now.

  “Kaput,” said Kelly, still typing very fast and reading Golem search links. “No references to those keywords at all in this altered historical data stream.”

  “Now we know what we were perceiving on the observation deck just after we pulled Robert and Maeve back from the Rosetta Stone mission,” said Paul. “You’re right, Robert. Palma means nothing now, because if this happens they have no reason to try and strike at American power with an operation like that. They already control the whole continent! So they’ve run an even bigger intervention and found something really terrible in the events surrounding this battle. It changes everything, a truly Grand Transformation. This is the most significant alteration of the continuum we have ever seen. It’s utterly catastrophic, at least insofar as Western culture is concerned.”

  “Then we’d bloody well better get a handle on what happened at that battle,” said Nordhausen, pointing at the screen. “Forget the Golem reports, Kelly. It’s the RAM Bank we need now. That’s our only record of the history as we know it. We’ve got to find out how Charles gets his hammer and prevails at Tours.”

  “I can tell you that right now,” came a voice, and they all spun around to see Maeve standing behind them. Her eyes were red with recent tears and she looked this way and that as she walked slowly into the room, treading lightly, with a soft, halting gait. The look on Kelly’s face was one of agony and deep love as he watched her coming slowly towards them, talking as she came.

  “Charles knew he was outnumbered, and that his infantry would be hard pressed against the Muslim cavalry… He was very nearly captured in the first grand charge of the heavy units, but the previous night he had observed the enemy’s preoccupation with the booty they had pillaged…” She was closer now, eyes still strangely distracted. “So he sent out scouts…” Her voice was breaking. “He sent scouts to stir up trouble in the camp. They were worried about the baggage and supply trains, and all… and…”

  At that moment she reached Kelly, who stood up as she lunged forward, throwing her arms around him, in tears.

  Paul and Robert watched in silence, their own emotions wrenched by the scene. Kelly held her, whispering something in her ear. “A hundred years,” he said softly, reassuring. “Don’t worry Maeve… Don’t worry, I’m home…”

  Part III

  Hammer Of God

  “You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose,

  suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.”

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Chapter 7

  Arch Complex, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Saturday, 2:55 A.M.

  Long moments passed and Kelly and Maeve seemed inseparable, one person melded together there in the lab, Maeve reached into her pocket, and Paul was able to see that she held a small stone that caught the light and gleamed in the shadows between them.

  “Heart of gold,” she said as Kelly looked at the nugget in the palm of her hand.

  “Heart of gold,” he echoed. Then the two of them turned to the others, all smiles and tears. Maeve was the first to speak.

  “Alright,” she said to Paul and Robert. “You get a pass on the operation to bring Kelly home, but God almighty, look what we have on our hands now!” She seemed to grow pale for a moment, swaying a bit and reaching out to Kelly for support.

  “A bit light headed,” she said. “I’ll be OK in a minute.”

  “It’s the dissonance you experienced when we established the Nexus Point here,” said Paul. “In fact… Where were you when Kelly called? Were you at home? Did you just drive here?” He had no idea what the world outside the Nexus still looked like just now, given the transformation they had just discovered in the Meridian. He was fishing for something.

  “An hour ago,” said Maeve. “The Golem alert hit my cell phone and…well, I just couldn’t sit at home any longer. I had to do something. I tried calling both you and Robert, but no one answered. So I got in my car and drove over to see what the problem was. I was down in the RAM Bank checking the reserve power situation there on the lower floors when you and Robert arrived.”

  “You were here? Why didn’t you come up when you heard the Arch system go on-line?”

  “I thought it was part of the alarm system. You know…Golems find a variation, raise the alarm and the Arch spins up automatically to create a Nexus Point here. I just assumed you both were responding to the alarm as well, so I continued with what I was doing. I had no idea what you were up to, and frankly I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to know after what happened to Kelly…I wasn’t quite sure of anything. Then Kelly called me.”

  “You were just down stairs?” said Kelly, quite surprised. “I thought you were at the apartment in Walnut Creek. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Look, it was all I could do to compose myself enough to walk up here!” she said. “You surprised me with your call, so I thought I’d come up and return the favor.”

  “I understand,” said Paul. “But I wonder why the Arch failed to start an hour ago when the first alert calls came in.” He had a feeling of vague disquiet, but quickly moved on. “Well, you may as well know the worst.” He told her what they had found in the Golem reports. “This is radical! It’s mind blowing. No Holy Roman Church. No United States of America! Maeve… when did you get your Golem alert call?”

  “A a few minutes past one. I called the two of you, then left right away. Probably got here by 1:30 or so.”

  “So that was you on the phone? We were just leaving USF when you called. My cell phone rang twice, but it was in the briefcase in the trunk of the car, and we were in a hurry. The first call was probably the Golem alert, which means we’ve already lost an hour.”

  “No United States?” said Nordhausen. “What the hell does the world look like out there now?”

  “Good question,” said Paul. “Well, we’re obviously getting power from somewhere, so there must still be a city out there.”

  “How is that possible?” said Nordhausen? “We can clearly see the whole damn Meridian is completely shattered on the monitors. How can there be a San Francisco if the new world was colonized by the Muslims?”

  Paul was silent for a moment.

  “Come on, man. This is your theory. What’s going on out there?”

  Paul reasoned it out. ”The Heisenberg Wave has obviously not been emitted yet,” he said, with some surprise, then hope growing in his eyes. “We aren’t seeing what has happened here on the monitors... We’re seeing what will happen.”

  “But the monitors are reading blood red for this time period,” said Robert, “and that assessment is based on data the Golems are supposed to be retrieving from the Internet. If there is still an Internet. But how could there even be any Golems at all out there if this was such a radical transformation. This is maddening!”

  “We’re in a Nexus Point, Robert. And a very deep one at that. A Nexus is an intersection of all possible Meridians, all possible outcomes. Everything overlaps in a grand synthesis here. Yes, there would be no Golems in the changed Meridian, but they exist in this one, and this time line is being preserved here in the Nexus with all the others. At first I thought the Golems would only be aware of actual changed facts, but somehow they are picking up other data, an awareness of information that may be coming from other Meridians passing through this Nexus Point. I can’t say exactly how it works, but it does work. I guess we’ll have to make a another new entry in the lexicon and call it ‘resonance.’ A Nexus point is the heart of infinity itself. In here, we can apparently see and know what every other Meridian in th
e Nexus knows—what Time itself knows. This event must resolve to some outcome, right Maeve?”

  He looked to her for confirmation, and got no objection. “And the resonance here is telling us what the most likely outcome of this intervention will be in the history up until our time. That’s what the Golems are picking up as they become aware of the weight of opinion of all others time lines out there. The monitors are showing us what the changed Meridian is most likely to become after the Heisenberg Wave generates, and pointing out the variations from our own history in the RAM Bank.”

  “Then it hasn’t changed yet? There’s still a Holy Catholic Church? Columbus discovered America?”

  “Apparently not, because we’re all still alive and well. And we can’t be alive if this transformation takes effect. In fact, we may be the very reason the Heisenberg Wave cannot fully manifest now. Our presence in a protected Nexus Point is causing a real problem for Mother Time, She has to wait on what we do here. But keep a close eye on the power. If we lose our Nexus field all bets are off.”

  “Well, let’s use the Golems to look up what happens in the future then, if this resonance allows access to the all the data then we could find out what they did from their own damn history files!”

  “I don’t think that will work, but you could try it.”

  “I did try it,” Kelly intervened. “All you get is crap people entered into Wikipedia, Sci-fi stuff, corny YouTube videos and other speculative data. No real information. The Golems are blind to the future because they see only information that was written about the past, about the history. Try Googling stock market quotes for a week from today. You get nonsense, no real data, because, it hasn’t happened yet. So forget it, Robert.”

  “You’re telling me nothing will be written about it in the future?” The Professor was adamant.