Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

The arbitration meeting happened on a Thursday in the second week of May, in the open ground between the survey line and Fortunatus's eastern fence, which was neutral territory in the sense that nobody had yet determined whose it actually was.

Dionysius had arranged it. He had spent four days talking separately to both parties before bringing them to the same space, which was the patient, unglamorous work of a man who had been doing this kind of thing for twenty years and understood that people who had not spoken to each other directly were usually arguing with the version of each other they had invented, and that the invented version was almost always worse than the real one.

Abster was present as an observer — no formal role, a Roman officer standing at the edge of the proceedings with no authority to intervene and the specific discomfort of someone watching something important that they cannot control. He had asked Corvus whether this was appropriate and Corvus had said: "Go. Watch. Say nothing unless Dionysius asks you directly."

Fortunatus arrived first. He was a heavyset man in his mid-fifties, dressed practically — good boots, working clothes, not his best, the deliberate choice of a man who wanted to signal that he was treating this as a business matter rather than a ceremonial one. He brought two things: a leather folder containing twenty-three years of documentation — land surveys, grazing agreements, tax records, the complete paper history of a man who had been accumulating legal evidence his whole adult life without knowing he would need it in a situation like this — and his shepherd, a boy of about sixteen named Quintus who managed the sheep on the upper grazing and who had been present when Gothic families from the settlement had moved their animals onto land Fortunatus considered his.

Quintus was visibly frightened. He was trying not to show it and was not entirely succeeding. He was sixteen and had been a shepherd his whole conscious life and had never been part of an official proceeding of any kind and the Gothic people who had moved their animals onto the upper grazing had been — his account to Fortunatus had included the phrase tall and not afraid of anything — and this was not reassuring in the way the adults around him seemed to think it should be.

The Gothic representatives arrived seven minutes late, which Abster noted and did not know how to read — deliberate, or the settlement's relationship to Roman timekeeping, which was approximate. Three of them: a man named Witigis, the narrow-faced quick-eyed reiks from the preliminary council who had said Rome is here, the grass is behind us; a woman named Brunhild, Swanhild's sister, whose presence Abster had not expected and which meant either Hrodgar had sent her deliberately or she had come on her own authority and Hrodgar had not stopped her; and a translator, a young man whose name Abster didn't know, who had clearly been chosen for his fluency in both languages rather than any political role.

Dionysius opened the meeting with a statement of the legal situation that was precise and took seven minutes and that both sides listened to with the patience of people who had already heard the summary and were waiting for it to be over so the actual conversation could begin.

Then Fortunatus spoke.

He was not what Abster had expected. He had built an expectation of a man making a legal argument — marshaling his documentation, citing his tenure, presenting the case for his prior rights in the formal register of provincial legal proceedings. Fortunatus did none of this. He set the leather folder on the ground and left it there and looked at Witigis directly and said, in the voice of a man who had been thinking about what he wanted to say for three weeks: "My father came to this land when I was seven. I watched him break that soil." He gestured at the upper grazing. "He is buried in it. My mother is buried in it. I am going to be buried in it. I have twenty-three years of paper that says I have the right to be buried in it." He paused. "I want to know if your people knew that when they moved their animals onto my land."

A silence. The translator conveyed it. Witigis listened to the translation with his quick eyes moving — not toward Fortunatus, toward some middle distance where he was processing.

Then Brunhild said something in Gothic. Not to Fortunatus — to the translator, and through the translator to Dionysius. The translator's face changed slightly while she was speaking, the involuntary expression of someone hearing something they hadn't expected, and when he translated it Abster understood why.

"She says," the translator said carefully, "that her people knew there was someone farming below the ridge. They did not know about the graves. She says — she says that if the graves are there, the ground is claimed in a way that documents do not need to explain." He paused. "She says her people did not come to take graves."

Fortunatus looked at her. For the first time, directly at her rather than at Witigis, who had the formal authority in the delegation.

"Your husband," he said. "He was killed at the feast in Marcianopolis."

The translator hesitated. Then conveyed it. Brunhild's expression did not change in a way that was readable from the outside, but her hands, which had been still in her lap, moved. A small movement. Then were still again.

"Yes," she said. In Latin. Just that word. She had more Latin than she had been using.

Fortunatus was quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry," he said.

The arbitration continued for two more hours. It was not clean. Witigis's quick questions found two places where the boundary survey was ambiguous and pushed on both of them with the precision of someone who had been thinking about this longer than the meeting's agenda suggested. Fortunatus, who had been building toward the legal argument he had not opened with, eventually produced the leather folder and worked through the documentation with the methodical care of a man who had been preparing for exactly this proceeding. There were moments of impasse. There were moments where Dionysius's patient voice kept both sides from hardening into positions that would have required weeks to soften.

At the end of the two hours they had not resolved the eastern boundary entirely. They had agreed to a temporary grazing line pending the formal arbitration outcome. They had agreed that Fortunatus's graves were inside the boundary and would remain so regardless of the formal outcome. And Brunhild had said, through the translator, that the families from her settlement who had moved animals onto the upper grazing had done so because the land was empty and empty land was available land in the social understanding she had grown up with, not because they were unaware of ownership, but because ownership of land you were not currently using was a concept that the forty years of migration had eroded from their functional understanding.

Fortunatus had looked at her for a long time after this was translated. Then he had said: "That I can understand."

He had not said he agreed. He had said he could understand it. That was different and it was enough for the day.

— ✦ —

Walking back, Dionysius said to Abster: "That was better than I expected."

"Yes."

"Brunhild."

"I didn't know she'd be there."

"Neither did I." He looked at the road ahead. "She knew about his father and mother. Before the meeting. She found out somehow." He paused. "She came knowing about the graves."

Abster thought about this. Brunhild, who had lost Wulfric at the feast, who had been in the encampment on the Danube through the winter, who had watched Pilo learn Gothic words badly at the boundary and found it funny or not found it funny, who had been in the Gothic community through all the months of channel-building and grief and argument. She had come to the arbitration knowing about Fortunatus's graves.

"She didn't tell Witigis before the meeting," Abster said.

"No," Dionysius said. "I noticed that too."

Neither of them said anything else about it.

The Vellum453 days.

Fortunatus didn't open with the documents. He opened with his father's grave.

Brunhild knew about the graves before the meeting. She came knowing. She didn't tell Witigis. She said in Latin: yes. Just that. I keep thinking about what it cost her to sit in that room and say yes.

Fortunatus said: that I can understand. Not: I agree. That I can understand. It was enough for the day.

Quintus the shepherd was sixteen and terrified and trying not to show it. He is not in any document. He should be.