John Schettler
GOLEM 7
With gracious thanks to Richard, Mark, and Candace
For being the friends they are to me and
For inspiring my Kelly, Robert, and Maeve.
Synopsis
Meridian IV: Anvil of Fate
Paul Dorland refuses to believe Kelly Ramer has perished, and he secures the support of Professor Nordhausen for a mission aimed at bringing Kelly home. Marooned over 10,000 years in the past at the site of the hidden archive he was trying to destroy, Kelly has managed to carve his name into a slab of hieroglyphics that survive to be discovered behind a false door in the tomb of Mehu. His message signals his location at the exact hour of dawn, and Paul uses the information to program a successful retraction scheme.
Kelly is saved, yet even while this mission was underway, the Golems have been signaling an alert warning of a grave and massive transformation in the continuum. When Kelly reveals that the stela uncovered at Rosetta in Book III: Touchstone was actually a set of instructions to agents of the Assassin cult, Nordhausen translates the hieroglyphics as a series a cryptic phrases. Aided by the Golem alerts, the team is soon led to the source of the problem.
In the year 732 an army of Arabs, Moors, Berbers and heavy Saracen cavalry under the new Caliph of al Andalus (Hispania) crossed the eastern passes of the Pyrenees Mountains and invaded the Frankish province of Aquitaine. They were met and opposed by the Duke Odo of Aquitaine, who was badly defeated on the River Garonne near his principle city of Bordeaux. Odo escaped and fled north to the Austrian Franks, appealing to the Mayor of the Palace, Charles, for support. He managed to persuade Charles to leave off his campaigns in Frisia to the east and raise an army to oppose the Moors.
As Abdul Rahman ravaged north, Charles marched to the city of Tours to protect the renowned Abbey of St. Martin and all its cultural and religious artifacts. The two armies met along the old Roman road south of Tours near the hamlet of Cenon. The project team is shocked to discover that the Franks were decisively defeated at the battle of Tours!
Without that victory the Saracens would have gone on to lay siege to Poitiers as well, and quartered for the winter in that city and the nearby city of Tours. The following spring they would have been heavily reinforced from al Andalus. With the Franks defeated and in disarray, their black banners would press on, overrunning the remainder of Gaul and crossing the Rhine as well to overcome the Lombards, isolating the last holdouts of the West in Rome and Constantinople.
In time these cities would fall, and the Umayyad Empire would claim all of Europe in prize. There would be no “Reconquista,” no Enlightenment to end the dark ages, and no Reformation. The Pope would be captured and slain, and the Holy Catholic church itself would be expunged. Christianity would be harried into distant corners of the world where it would survive only as an insignificant bywater of belief. Islam would spread the world over, even into Asia where it rolled back the migration of Buddhism from India and infiltrated a much weakened China when the Tang dynasty came crashing down, beset with internal strife in the An Lu Shan rebellion in the year 757.
The ramifications of these events meant there would be no Columbus to sail west across the ocean to discover the New World of the modern day Americas. Instead the voyage was undertaken by a Moslem explorer, and it was not Britain, Spain and France that colonized the new world, but the Umayyads and Abbasids after them. There would be no migration from England, Spain and France to establish colonies; no “United States of America,” no city called “San Francisco” under the temperate California sun, and no place called “Lawrence Berkeley Labs.” The team realizes that their very existence is also now at stake.
Research reveals that the Assassin cult has operated to spare the lives of two men who were killed in the years before the battle, both strong opponents of Charles. In the real history the Bishop Lambert was assassinated at his villa near Heristal in the year 705, and a cult grew up around that site which eventually became the city of Liege.
Lambert had denounced the mother of Charles, Alpaida, who was consort to Charles’ father Pippin the Fat. But Pippin’s legitimate wife also bore him a son, Grimwald, and Lambert’s assassination was seen as part of a power struggle between the two women to assure the ascendency of their sons to the throne. Some years later, as Pippin lay dying in the year 714, his son Grimwald went to visit him, stopping at the shrine to Lambert as a symbolic political move, for he was certain that a power struggle would soon follow Pippin’s death. Yet his death came first when he, too, was assassinated while visiting Lambert’s shrine. By ironically preventing these two deaths the Assassin cult hoped to forestall Charles’ ascendency to power, and thus achieve a victory at Tours over Grimwald, a man with inferior military skill.
After identifying these two deaths as key levers on the outcome of the battle, the project team conducted a mission and Maeve Linford assured the death of Bishop Lambert. Grimwald’s death was assured in a second mission undertaken by Paul. Yet these two interventions were still not enough. Something more was needed.
Charles Martel, the “hammer” of Christendom and reputed hero of the battle had undoubtedly been a key factor in its outcome, but not the principle reason for the defeat of the Saracen army under Abdul Rahman. In a sudden epiphany, Nordhausen fingered another man, The Duke Odo of Aquitaine, as the primary lever on those events. It was he who had first opposed the Saracens and Moors, and he who rallied the factious clans of Neustria and Austrasia, the New Land and the East Land, that would eventually be forged into a unified Gaul under Charles and his successors. But first they had to stand as one with Aquitaine, where Odo held a remnant of his most trusted retainers as the sole light cavalry force opposing the vast legions of Abdul Rahman at the battle.
Tours was a victory in the end, and it marked the high water mark of Islamic incursion into Europe in the early eighth century. If the project team had not acted decisively to assure the Franks were victorious at Tours, the fate of Western Europe, Christendom, and their very lives were at stake on the Anvil of Fate.
In the third and final intervention, Professor Nordhausen manages to convince the Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Martin, who is an agent of the Order, that Odo of Aquitaine was the real Prime Mover on the outcome of that crucial battle.
Convincing Odo to act was the dilemma, but the situation was nudged gently by operatives of the Abbey, and Tours was saved. While Charles claimed the victory, taking upon himself the name “Martelus” the Hammer, Odo died three years later unsung, unheralded, and largely unknown to successive historians.
With fuel for their generators running out, and the quantum singularity driving the Arch wobbling into dissolution, the team must suspend operations and secure new fuel and resources to finish their last mission, the final reversal of the catastrophe caused by Palma. It is this mission which is the subject of Volume V in the series: Golem 7.
Part I
The Plan
“Before beginning, plan carefully.”