Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Flavius Dionysius had been in the foothills for nineteen days before Abster went to see him.

He had not gone sooner because the XII's sector had required him — the watch rotation, the drill, Betto's complaint moving upward through the chain, the three conversations with Adalric that had tracked the council reconvening and its uncertain outcome. There had been reasons not to go every day for nineteen days, and all of them had been real, and on the twentieth day he admitted to himself that the real reason he hadn't gone was that he didn't know what he'd find and he'd been afraid of finding something that undermined what he'd been building toward.

Corvus said: "Go. I'll manage the sector."

He went. Sura packed the documentation he'd need for the administrative discussions with Dionysius. Rufus said, from the gate: "Try not to solve anything while you're there. Just look." He said it as a joke. He meant it as advice.

The road into the foothills had been cut by winter rains into something that was technically still a road. The horse managed it. The mule Abster had declined in favor of a horse for once, because the road had no patience for opinions. They climbed for three hours through country that was beautiful in the cold impersonal way of terrain that cared nothing for the people moving through it — old oak forest giving way to limestone ridges, the limestone to the scrubby grass of the upper hills, and in the valleys between the ridges, visible from the path at intervals, the smoke of the Gothic settlement's cooking fires.

There were more of them than he'd expected. He had been carrying a number in his head — three thousand people, Hrodgar's column — and the number had been abstract in the way that numbers were abstract. The smoke was not abstract. It was dozens of fires, spread across three valleys, the permanent smoke of communities that had been here long enough to build and not just camp.

— ✦ —

Dionysius met him at the administrative tent — a Roman army tent, issued to him with his clerks and his brief and a budget that was insufficient but better than nothing — and looked relieved in the specific way of a man who had been managing an impossible situation alone and was glad to see anyone from the world he understood.

He was forty, a provincial administrator from the Illyrian prefecture, which meant he had spent his career managing populations that Rome had absorbed and was trying to keep absorbed. He was competent in the way of people who had been given difficult jobs and had learned to do them through being given difficult jobs. Not brilliant. Steady, which was possibly more useful here.

"Walk with me," he said. "I want you to see before we talk."

They walked through the largest of the three valleys.

The settlement was not what Abster had built in his head from Hrodgar's description — not the organized community of a people who had arrived with a plan, but the improvised density of people who had come faster than their preparation. The shelters were mixed: some proper, timber-framed structures going up with the competence of people who knew how to build; some canvas and salvaged materials thrown together in the first days when the cold was the immediate problem and permanence could wait; some — the ones at the settlement's edges, where the families with less had ended up — that were somewhere between shelter and inadequacy, that kept out the worst of the wind but not the damp.

The mud was deep and specific, the mud of a community that had been in place long enough for the ground around its central path to have been churned completely. It had the smell of a place with too many animals and not enough drainage, the smell that Abster recognized from the Danubian encampment in its worst winter weeks.

Children were everywhere. This was the first thing. They were the most visible population simply because they moved when adults had stopped — running between shelters, carrying things, arguing over a piece of wood that one of them wanted for building and another for burning, the ordinary commerce of children making use of whatever was available. They were thin in the way of children who had been on short rations for weeks, the thinness that showed in the face before it showed in the body, but they were moving and loud and largely ignoring the Roman administrator walking through their settlement with a stranger.

The elderly were not moving.

This was the second thing, and Dionysius had walked him toward it deliberately — to the shelter cluster near the settlement's eastern end where the oldest members of the community had been concentrated, because concentrating them meant what heat there was could be pooled and the people who needed to be near them could be near them. There were perhaps thirty people in this cluster who were visibly unwell. Not dramatically — not the obvious illness of high fever or visible wound — but the quiet deterioration of people whose bodies had been under sustained pressure for too long: the cough that had settled in for the winter and hadn't left with it, the joints that couldn't manage the climb required to get water from the spring, the skin with the greyish quality of malnutrition that had been going on for months.

A woman who might have been sixty or might have been seventy — impossible to tell from the specific aging of a difficult life — was sitting outside her shelter in the cold because the shelter was occupied by someone sicker than she was and she had given up her place without being asked. She was wrapped in two cloaks, neither of them adequate, and she was watching Abster and Dionysius with the patient attention of someone who had seen Romans arrive in their communities before and had learned to wait to find out what kind of arrival this was.

Abster met her eyes. He didn't have the Gothic to say anything useful. He moved on.

"Grain," Dionysius said, when they had passed.

"How much."

"Eight days. Maybe ten if they reduce to emergency rations, which they've been on for three weeks so reducing further means children start showing the effects." He kept walking. "I've submitted three requisitions for supplemental supply to the field army command. The first was denied as outside my authorization. The second was approved for half the requested quantity and hasn't arrived. The third I haven't received a response to."

"Who denied the first."

"The authorization chain goes through the cohort commander's supply office." He looked at Abster. "Who is Betto."

Abster said nothing for a moment. Then: "What do you need."

"Seven hundred sacks of grain, ten days, minimum. Medical supplies — specifically willow bark and poppy preparation for the elderly with joint inflammation. And a formal response to my second land use report, which has been sitting in the field army command for twelve days and which contains the boundary survey that both populations need before anything can be planted this season." He paused. "If the boundary isn't defined before planting season, the Gothic families will plant where they think their land is, the Roman farmers below the ridge will claim it's theirs, and the first conflict will happen in a field over a line nobody officially drew."

"Who are the Roman farmers below the ridge."

"Three families. The largest is a man named Aemilius Fortunatus, been here twenty-three years, runs sheep on the upper grazing land that overlaps with the territory the grant describes." He looked at Abster. "He has documentation. It's legitimate. He doesn't know about the grant yet. When he finds out—"

"When he finds out it becomes the first real problem the grant creates." Abster looked at the valley, at the smoke and the mud and the children and the woman in two inadequate cloaks. "I'll write to Sebastianus about Betto's supply office. And about Fortunatus — the survey needs to happen before he's informed, so the line is drawn before the conflict forms around it."

Dionysius looked at him. "You're the optio."

"Yes."

"The one in Betto's complaint."

"Yes."

A pause. "Sebastianus told me you'd come. He said to show you everything." He looked at the settlement. "I've shown you everything."

"I've seen it," Abster said.

He stayed two more hours. He walked the whole settlement — all three valleys, all the shelter clusters, the spring that was the water source and which was already under pressure from the number of people using it. He watched a group of women rendering fat from what looked like the last of the settlement's butchered animals, producing tallow that would be used for lamp oil and waterproofing and medicinally in ways that had nothing to do with what fat was for in a community with adequate food. He watched a man repairing a cart wheel with materials that weren't quite right for the job but were what was available. He watched two young Gothic warriors arguing at the settlement's northern boundary — the argument had the quality of a disagreement that had been running for days, low-grade and continuous, and he couldn't catch enough Gothic to know what it was about.

He rode back to camp in the late afternoon with the valley's smell still in his coat and a list in his head of everything Sura needed to draft letters about.

The Vellum477 days.

Went to the foothills. Rufus said just look. He was right.

Eight days of grain. Elderly deteriorating. Thirty people concentrated in one cluster because they gave their places to the sicker ones. A woman in two inadequate cloaks who had learned to wait and see what kind of Romans these were.

Betto's supply office denied the first grain requisition. Dionysius is running out of time.

Aemilius Fortunatus. Twenty-three years. Sheep on the upper grazing. Doesn't know about the grant yet. The survey has to happen before he finds out or the first conflict forms around a line nobody drew.