John Schettler - Touchstone

“Take those two French soldiers this morning. They were supposed to carry a message to the commander of the garrison at Aboukir Castle. Then I get word to put a watch on the road west of town. Incursion watch! That’s what we call it when someone initiates a breaching point on the continuum in the area. We look for the telltale signs—white haze, extreme cold, and that wonderful aurora that settles around you as you manifest. Well, as far as I could tell, the road was clear of traffic in the pre-dawn hours. Then I learned that this message was being sent, and so I found out who was going and claimed that I had lost track of some associates. I tagged along and, voilá! There you were. I handled the incident quite adroitly, wouldn’t you say? ”

“To be sure,” said Maeve. “You made your rendezvous with us and managed to send the two soldiers on their way to avoid any contamination.”

“Exactly!” LeGrand beamed with satisfaction. “The trick was in figuring how to prevent any interaction between the two of you and the soldiers. I had to find you before they did, and make sure your arrival did not deter them from their courier assignment in any way.”

“Well, you’ve made a fine resolution of that one, and here we are.” Maeve set down her teacup, a pensive expression on her face. “But I have a question,” she said. “Just who would be trying to damage the stone, in your opinion, and why?”

“Our enemies, of course.”

“Enemies? Who exactly are they?”

“Well,” said LeGrand, “that’s quite a long story. As to who, radical Islam has been most inconvenient for us over the last several decades. There have been a hundred nefarious groups that have sprung up over the years, but the heart of the nest is the Ismaili Cult of Assassins. As to why, I suppose you and professor Nordhausen have as much of a clue as I do. These people will simply not stop interfering. They won’t be satisfied until the whole of the world supplicates itself to the will of Allah. Their religion is infused with bad politics, and it’s becoming insufferable—nothing more than a thin veil of hypocrisy for their devious political aims. Do you know that Mohammed was the only major religious figure who was also a warrior?”

“I see,” said Maeve, somewhat unconvinced. “Religion is like that sometimes… the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Hundred Years War, Protestants and Catholics at each other’s throats, popes paying huge bribes to Venetian merchants to have crusading armies delivered to targets of opportunity. You know the routine well enough, I suppose—’Soldiers of Christ,’ out to secure lands and fortunes for the Vicar. When it comes to hypocrisy, there seems to be plenty left over for the Christians.”

“Yes, well at least we had the good sense to work most of that out during the Middle Ages,” said LeGrand.

“Quite so,” Maeve returned. “Now it’s politics and economics to keep things interesting. Take this little adventure by Napoleon…” She gestured broadly to the unseen world outside the walls of the roadside inn. “It’s politically motivated, to be sure, but I wonder what the reaction would be in Paris if thirty thousand Turks suddenly landed in Marseilles?”

“Oh, they’ve tried, but Charles Martel put an end to Moslem expansion in Europe at the battle of Tours in 732.”

“True,” said Maeve. “And ever since then it seems the West has been on the offensive. Recent history would argue that you’ve got it all wrong, Doctor. The West has been sticking its thumb in the Islamic pie for the last few centuries—not the other way around.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” LeGrand set down his cup, crossing his arms. “It really does come down to a clash of cultures when you get to the root of it all. The Islamic world is still centuries behind the West in terms of its social systems and politics.”

“And so your Order is helping them along?” Maeve had that look in her eye that Robert knew all too well. He gave LeGrand a sideward glance, wondering if he knew what he was in for, and smiling uncomfortably.

“Helping them is perhaps not the right way to think of it,” said LeGrand. “After Palma, the proverbial gloves have come off, Miss Lindford. Think of it like your 9/11 event in New York. That certainly catalyzed the American government. ”

“With disastrous consequences,” Maeve put in quickly. “Don’t you think all that trouble in Iraq had something to do with the plans made by this Husan al Din?”

“It probably spawned a hundred such plans, many you have yet to live through, I’m afraid. The worst was Palma, but we fixed that.”

“And it undoubtedly created a few more problems at the same time,” said Maeve.

LeGrand did not answer immediately, a troubled expression on his face. “If you must know, things have taken a turn for the worse in recent years. They’ve discovered how to travel in time as well.”

“Yes, we know, and now they have a mind to meddle in your affairs, just as you seem set on meddling in theirs.”

“That’s about the size of it. A bothersome lot, these Arabs. The Turks weren’t nearly so bad. Oh, I suppose it wouldn’t matter if they were all living in Africa or huddled on some island continent like Australia. But the simple fact of the matter is that the whole of the Islamic Crescent sits atop 90% of the world’s oil and gas.”

“How inconvenient,” said Maeve.

“To be sure, madam. The West needs that oil throughout the twenty-first century… until alternative energy sources can be properly developed.”

“Rubbish,” said Maeve. “We have the ability to develop and deploy hydrogen based fuel systems even in my day. The only reason we don’t is the enormous profit involved in the sale of a diminishing resource like oil.”

“True,” said LeGrand. “No argument here. Still, facts are facts. Whether the West needs the oil or not, the powers that be have decided they need it, and that makes for some particularly troublesome times in the storied conflict of Western nations with the Islamic world. It starts with freedom fighters in Afghanistan and becomes airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center, and worse…” He seemed to catch himself, realizing he might reveal the course of future events to these people, and somehow alter them. “Well we all know how it ends, don’t we? It ends with Palma. After that, we simply decided we had to put stop to it, once and for all.”

“Oh, that much is obvious,” said Maeve. “Let’s call it what it is Doctor, war.”

“They call it that.” LeGrand came back at her quickly. “I believe the word is Jihad.”

“Nonsense,” said Maeve, folding her arms abruptly—a very bad sign as far as Nordhausen was concerned. The conversation was becoming more and more heated, and he was considering what he might say to cool tempers down.

Maeve started in again: “It’s true that the Islamic world is far behind the West in terms of social equity and justice. But it is equally true that Western powers have never really had any noble interest in dealing with that. They’re motivated by political and economic reasons—like this expedition by Napoleon. He wanted to campaign through the Middle East to isolate Britain from her colony in India.”

“And he disarmed the peasant rabble,” LeGrand cut in. “He broke the back of the Mamluk hegemony, established new political systems, built hospitals to curb disease—”

“Carried in the plague,” Maeve raised her chin, unwilling to allow her host to serve these facts unchallenged. “He massacred hundreds of prisoners in Palestine, put down the Cairo insurrection with ritual beheadings, then tried to cart off virtually anything he could find of interest. Thankfully, he loses. The British win and so they decide set up shop in Egypt until well into the twentieth century. Got to keep a close eye on Suez, you see.”