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
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…”