Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Read online

  The line curved a bit as they approached the depot and Paul caught the dark shape of a man emerging from a small wood-framed guard house at the edge of the station. He squeezed himself low, hoping his body would remain concealed in the depression of the gutter on the roof. His heart beat faster as the train came to a gradual stop. The moment of truth was soon upon him when he heard the crunch of heavy boots on the gravel bed of the station. Several men were making their way towards the back of the train.

  The engine hissed and vented a billow of gray-white steam. Paul waited, breathless when he heard boots on the porch at the back of his car. Harsh shouts of alarm sounded and he heard someone jostling at the window just below his position. He closed his eyes, as if the darkness behind his eyelids would serve to hide him from the Turks. Another voice sounded, low and threatening, and Paul immediately recognized it as the Colonel. He had come back to his coach and was clearly not pleased to find his captive missing.

  Time seemed suspended and Paul gritted his teeth as he waited out what seemed like an interminable interval. Then the shouting began again as the Colonel was obviously chastising the guards who had been posted on the porch. He heard a hard slap, like the leather of a glove being raked across a man’s face. There were harsh words, and Paul’s temples pounded with the tension. This was the moment. What would the Colonel do next?

  The train was starting to move again, gliding slowly forward on squeaky wheels. Apparently this was just a brief stop, possibly to deliver a mailbag or some other goods to the depot. The Colonel used the interval to return to his coach, but he was still embroiled in a shouting fest with his guards as the train began to gather momentum. Paul heard the hard scrape of the window being shut below him, and he breathed a sigh of relief. His guess had been right. The Colonel had a schedule to keep and he knew it would be fruitless to launch a search for his missing prisoner. God help the guards, thought Paul. I hope Masaui was not one of those men. He closed his eyes again, imagining what the Colonel must be doing in the coach below.

  It would take him some time to compose himself, Paul thought. The poor guards were probably standing there under his withering stare. He would let them wait in the silence of his anger, their faces red and scared with the shame of his punishing blows, their eyes sullen and diverted to the soiled floor of the coach. Then Paul heard a sharp order and the sound of the guards hurrying back through the door to the outer porch.

  Paul knew that the Colonel would soon be settling in to his chair at the desk, mulling and brooding over the loss of his prisoner. The hard thump of a fist on the desk top was audible even through the roof and over the growing noise of the train. Paul smiled, knowing that the Colonel must have seen his note.

  Well, he thought, the man will certainly think he was right about me after reading that note. He said I was a spy, and I suppose I am—though not nearly so clever as the Colonel might suspect.

  “Enjoy the coffee,” Paul whispered to himself with a smile. The coffee and the cigarette lighter were the only consolation the Colonel would take from the incident. Paul hoped that he was not littering the time line by leaving them behind. The Colonel would undoubtedly drink the coffee in the hours ahead. What would he do with the lighter? Would he keep it as a reminder of his days in the desert? Would he pass it on to his son as an heirloom? Might it turn up in some pawn shop years hence?

  The cold wind increased, and a drift of rain began to fall as Paul huddled on the roof. The train moved quickly on, but any time it encountered an upward grade, it slowed noticeably. That was his one hope: Minifir was a hill and the train would labor on the grade and slow to a crawl. With any luck Paul hoped he could slip away unnoticed when it was safe to make a jump. It was all he could think of for the moment—that and the Colonel sulking in the train car below him. There was nothing he could do now but wait. The train rumbled on, and they were both still riding the rails of the same Meridian. But time was running out, and a moment of fate awaited them, not far ahead in the gray sallow dawn of November 10th, 1917.

  23

  Minifir - 10, November, 1917

  After a dreary night of painful marching, the Arabs led Nordhausen to the tumbled skirts of a low hill. They moved very quietly as they approached the place, and the professor wondered if they had reached Minifir at last. The land seemed empty around them, shrouded in misty rain, but dawn was not far off. Nordhausen was still worried that they would stumble on Lawrence’s men. What should he do in that event? If I let myself be taken, he thought, these two fellows will tell the raiders I’m seeking Lawrence and I’ll find myself on a collision course with a Prime Mover.

  His guides seemed tireless, but when they reached the lowlands of the hill, they stopped and indicated that it was time to rest. The toothless Hassan spied out a low overarching spur of rock that promised some break against the weather and began clearing away small stones and gravel beneath it. Hakeem, the thin, scraggly man, was searching about for any sign of wood that might still be dry enough to light a small fire. Nordhausen was only too glad for the rest, and he tugged at his boots, yanking them off to rub his sore feet. Hassan grinned at him, pointing for the amusement of his brother as the professor soothed his weary feet and reluctantly pulled the leather boots on again. The moisture had dampened them and they were slowly re-conforming to the shape of his feet, though still too tight for comfortable use.

  They settled into a small camp, and Nordhausen passed some anxiety as they began to light the fire. The damp wood was sure to smoke and draw attention. Then he realized, that if the entry coordinates had been accurate, they would now be on the opposite side of the hill from where Lawrence and his men were hiding. That thought gave him some comfort, and he edged as close to the small fire as he could, braving the gray-brown smoke for the chance of a little warmth. He was hoping the Arabs had something to eat, and was pleased to see that they produced a small tin pot from their haversacks and cooked up a serving of spiced rice.

  They ate in silence, but with great relish, taking turns dipping their fingers into the pan for clumps of thick, gummy rice. The simple meal was followed with another blessed serving of sweetened coffee. Nordhausen bowed graciously when they served him, thankful for the civility and simple hospitality of these two men. It’s a pity, he thought, that I shall have to repay this kindness by stealing away in the dark. He decided his planned course of action as they ate. The Arabs gave every indication that they intended to rest here for a time, and they were arranging their sleeping mats, or so Nordhausen thought.

  He later realized that these were prayer mats, and the men soon oriented themselves to the south, in the direction of Mecca, kneeling to chant a simple prayer. Nordhausen watched in solemn silence, realizing how appropriate it seemed that these men should prostrate themselves and acknowledge some higher power and authority over their lives. It would be natural for any man to reach for this grace at the end of a hard labor, particularly in a place as barren and empty as this one.

  He thought about his own life, littered with books and technology of the 21st century. When a student once asked him if could pick any time to live in, and any place, he remembered how he had answered, without hesitation—this time, and this place. He opened his arms expansively to his simple study at the edge of Berkeley in 21st Century America. He thought it a grand existence, full of knowledge, comfort and opportunity. But the student seemed almost surprised to hear such an answer from a professor of history. What about all the nonsense, the television advertisements, the marketing, the noise and pollution? He could still hear the young man’s arguments: It’s a world of cell phones and stock trades, and all the feeling has gone out of it. Better than the plague, Nordhausen had explained, and hordes of barbarians ravaging the countryside. Better than tyrannical dictators, disease, crushing poverty, deprivation and social inequity of the past.

  The student scratched his head, still not satisfied. Yes, he had argued, it was a comfortable life, but instead of God we had astronomy, and the voices of poets and
philosophers were drowned out by utter triviality like Jerry Springer, the WWF, Madonna and Britney Spears. Nordhausen had offered a knowing smile. There’s nothing Plato did that was any more significant than Jerry Springer, he said, tugging at the young man’s thinking. In the grand scheme of things, the sun did not care one way or another. It would burn in fiery indifference and then go nova to incinerate the whole—or collapse into a black hole and vanish. Nordhausen passed a brief moment recalling his startling foray to the edge of the Cretaceous and the demise of the dinosaurs. The world got on quite well without them, he thought, and it will get on quite well without us as well. From this perspective all things were trivial. The greater part of a man’s life was simply spent moving from one humdrum moment to another. At least his life in America offered him a comfortable chair, a warm bed, and all the food he could eat.

  Still, there was something that tugged at him as he watched the two men bend themselves to prayer. The moment of quiet humility seemed to touch him in an unexpected way. Some men turned inward to find their sense of purpose and self, yet others were constantly reaching for meaning outside themselves—a notion or realization that would allow them to affirm that they were something more than animated dust. A quote from Andre Malraux came to mind: ‘The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.’

  Some men built castles and glittering skyscrapers of wealth that reached up through the neon aurora of glowing cities—other men knocked them down. Osama Bin Laden had been such a man, and after him Ra’id Husan al Din. Such men, scorned by the Western World, came to see themselves as agents of God. Surely the Islamic radicals may have taken this point of view to justify the war of terror they prosecuted against the West in the early years of the new millennium. Nordhausen realized that this was also the month before the Hadj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that would be making its way along this very rail line if not for the interference of the war. Back home at this time people would be contemplating the next big sale at the mall to get a start on their Christmas shopping.

  That was the difference, he thought. There was something about these people that would always be in opposition to Western ways, and Western domination. Their whole view of the world was radically different. The West preached that a man’s fate was his own; that he was free to speak his mind, claim his stake of land, and answer only to the inner voice of his own personal freedom. The Arabs, however, listened to another voice. Above and beyond the petty ambitions of men, the voice of Allah was the single overarching guide in the affairs of Muslim society. It was Allah who gave and denied, and his will permeated all things. The Muslim world was not driven by its own inner ‘manifest destiny,’ but rather by the sublime will of Allah, something external, beyond the reach of man, but ever beckoning. The West did not hear the voice of Allah and, to many Muslims, it was a Godless, materialistic society driven by greed. It was a land of marvels, of secret arts, of unbelievers and infidels.

  He passed a moment of rumination, recalling another quip, this time by Alexander Pope: ‘Tis with our judgment as our watches. None go just alike, yet each believes his own.’ The professor measured time by his own watch, and it had a distinctive Western meter. Its ticking was echoed in the sound of telegraphs thrumming in the wires that were strung across the desert on stark, weathered shards of long dead trees. Its first intrusive sound reverberated in the chugging and grinding of metal wheels on rails of steel, and the choking billow of black smoke and steam from the locomotives they carried. It would continue on, ticking louder and louder in the ears of the men who wore these Arabic robes in earnest, until it threatened to drown out their voices altogether, and the sound of the evening call to prayer was replaced by the yammering yodel of an auctioneer.

  I should be the one praying, he thought. What on earth am I doing here? I’ve been bounced from the Fifth Extinction to the First World War on a mission to save the Eastern Seaboard from utter destruction. It will be light soon and I have to slink off and try to find Paul’s little Pushpoint somewhere, to unravel all the long steeped plans hatched by the grandchildren of men like Hassan and Hakeem. I should be quaking in my tight leather boots here, but I feel absolutely fearless—as if nothing I do, or fail to do, will matter in the slightest.

  He shook his head, writing off these dark thoughts to his weariness and the general disorientation he must be struggling with after two time shifts. Perhaps it was a kind of post-temporal shift anxiety that was setting in, he mused. Perhaps he was just a nihilist at heart.

  The men finished their prayers and settled in under their damp robes to try and get some sleep. Nordhausen stood up to stretch, if only to see what kind of reaction he would get. He wandered off a bit and emptied his bladder, so as to set a template for his planned movements later. He came back and tried to sleep, but as the skies began to lighten to an early dawn he rose quietly and wandered away again, pausing to relieve himself, as before, in case one of the Arabs had taken notice. He hoped they would simply nod off again while he stretched with apparent indifference. Then he slunk away, picking a path that he hoped would bring him to the Hejaz Rail.

  The first few minutes were somewhat anxious. Would they discover his ploy and come after him? He tried to move as carefully as he could, avoiding rough ground where his boots might crunch on the flinty rock. On occasion he ventured up onto a flat shelf of stone, moving quietly so as to mask his trail. He doubted if he could really elude experienced Arab trackers in their own back yard for long. If these men wanted to find him again, they probably would. He had only to work his mischief before he was discovered.

  That thought plagued him as ever. What was he to do? The dull glint of the morning on a dark streak across the lighter drifts of sand ahead told him he had reached the rail line. He found a large rock to hide behind and studied the ground for a moment. Oddly, the sun was rising behind him, so he had actually come out of the east, and not the west as he first thought. Kelly botched his numbers again—no wonder he couldn’t find Paul! He focused his thoughts on the narrative he had crammed into his head before they started the mission.

  Lawrence and his men were here the previous night. He worked himself closer, trying to get a good view of the ground above him. The ridge was a saddle shaped formation, with higher ground forming two distinctive humps. He knew that there would soon be lookouts posted at a water cairn on the south hump, and more men watching from a cluster of ruins on the northern hill. Lawrence was in the center, where a watercourse ran down from the cleavage of the hills towards the rail line. It would dig out a shallow culvert, and his charge would be laid under a wooden tie on the arch of a low rail support.

  A distant thrum broke the morning stillness and he looked to see a short train hustling along at full speed to the south. The first train! It was the one that had taken all the Arabs by surprise that morning. They were scrambling to hide themselves, and he now knew exactly where Lawrence was. If his narrative was accurate, he would be huddling under the arch below the rail line. Once the first train gets clear he’ll finish burying the wires and spend a good deal of time going over the ground to hide any traces of the ambush. Then he would work his way up the watercourse, as far as his wire would allow, to a low bush. It was a dangerously exposed position and Nordhausen passed a moment of admiration that Lawrence would risk himself, setting off the detonation not more than fifty yards from the rail line. His Arab raiders were hiding in the hills above, waiting to attack when the train derailed.

  This was the time to move, he thought. Lawrence posted lookouts in response to the surprise and disappointment of missing of the first train. They won’t be watching from the high ground yet, and the dismal weather might provide enough cover to mask my approach.

  He started forward, running over the narrative again and again in his mind. Lawrence would bury his wires and then they would all huddle u
nder their cloaks for long dull hours while they waited for the second train. It was probably somewhere north of Amman by now, and heading this way. He moved with as much stealth as he could, mind racing and feet aching with every step. He was soon quite winded and light headed, and he paused to catch his breath. A dizzy nausea seemed to wash over him, or perhaps it was only the nagging early morning hunger he was prone to.

  After some time he had gained a good position, very close to the watercourse between the two hills. He rested, tired and sweaty in spite of the cold. He was not used to this kind of physical exertion. The elements and the fatigue and stress of these last hours were wearing on him heavily. He squinted at the ground ahead, suddenly elated to see a scraggly bush, just where Lawrence said it would be! He knew that the wires would end there. It was a single known point where this errant thread of history would poke near the surface and be exposed enough for him to find it. Then what would he do? The only thing he could think of was to work back a bit on the line and make a subtle cut in the wire.

  Even as he considered this the motion of a man in Arabic robes caught his attention. He was making his way up from the rail line with a quick gait. He was a short fellow, yet his movements were studied and sure. As Nordhausen watched, it seemed to him that he could almost see an amber glow radiating from the man and surrounding him with an aura of purpose. He knew at once who this was. He gaped in awe, all thought of caution abandoning him, as he watched the man go straight to the low bush and fuss about at the base of the plant for a time. Then the figure stood up, surveying the ground around him with an almost regal regard. Nordhausen froze when it seemed that the man was looking right at him, sensing the presence of something out of place in the landscape. Time passed in utter stillness, then a drift of cold, gray mist shrouded the man from his view and, when it cleared, he saw that the stranger was making his way slowly up the side of the hill along the narrowing path of the watercourse.