Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Hrodgar could not walk the full distance, and arranging around that without making it a subject took most of the morning.

In the end it was a cart — low-sided, the kind used for grain — with a folded blanket on the boards and his bad leg stretched out in front of him. Adalric drove. Abster walked beside it with Sura and Pilo. Tullus took the high ground above the road with a horn, the habit Corvus's habits had become.

Adalric had brought a fourth — a young warrior named Vidimer, nineteen or twenty, who rode the cart's tailboard with the loose-limbed restlessness of someone who'd been told to come and observe and was finding observation harder than it sounded. "He runs with Ragnaris," Adalric said, by way of introduction. "I'm teaching him the routes between communities. Someone should know them besides me." Vidimer grinned at this in a way that suggested he found the description both true and slightly embarrassing.

He and Pilo had already found each other by the time the cart reached the second bend — Pilo correcting Vidimer's attempt at a Latin curse word with the seriousness of a much older man, Vidimer repeating it back wrong on purpose, both of them finding this funnier than it had any right to be.

— ✦ —

They were halfway down when Tullus's horn sounded once. Not the alarm pattern — a single note, *movement, non-hostile, identify.*

"Three riders," Tullus called down. "East along the river road. Patrol pace."

They resolved quickly enough: a two-man patrol from the eastern garrison rotation, and between them a Gothic scout Abster recognized from the boundary — a quiet man named Eriulf, who ran independent routes between the settlement and the river and answered to no fire in particular.

Eriulf spoke to Adalric in Gothic, brief and low. Adalric's face changed.

"Hunnic outriders," he said. "A pair, spotted yesterday at the head of the Almus valley — forty miles east. Eriulf's cousin runs cattle through that ground. He turned back when he saw the horses." A pause. "Not raiders. Scouts. Watching roads, not herds."

The older Roman soldier — a ten-year man by his kit — looked east along the ridgeline with the expression of a man recalculating distance. "That far west?"

"More often, the last six months," Eriulf said, in rough Latin, deciding the conversation belonged to him now. "Usually they stop at the old line. This pair were a day's ride inside it."

Vidimer had gone still on the tailboard. "My uncle fought Huns," he said, to no one in particular. "Said you don't see them until the horses are already past you. Said the only warning you get is the ground." Nobody answered him. He didn't seem to expect anyone to.

The cart jolted over a rut. Hrodgar's jaw tightened and he put it away again.

"Keep moving," Abster said. "Tell Corvus when we're back." He looked up at the ridge. "Tullus — stay high until we're on the flat."

"Already was," Tullus said.

— ✦ —

Fortunatus was at the fence line when they arrived, finishing a section the way a man finished a section when he wasn't going to stop just because company arrived. He set his post, straightened, and looked at Hrodgar for a moment before walking over.

"That's him," Fortunatus said. Not to anyone specifically.

"Hrodgar," Adalric said. "Reiks of the families in the upper valley."

Fortunatus looked at the cart, then at Hrodgar's leg. "Knee," he said.

"Forty years of walking," Hrodgar said.

"Got a stick the right height for that. Took me a season to get the angle right on my own." He looked at Hrodgar a moment longer. "You can borrow it while you're here. Not giving it to you. I like that stick."

Adalric made a sound that might have been a laugh held very still.

Quintus was near the house — nose still yellow-green, moving through its stages — standing with the careful stillness of a sixteen-year-old told to be present who didn't entirely want to be. Vidimer, climbing down from the cart, caught sight of him and, after a moment's hesitation, lifted a hand in something between a wave and a salute — the gesture of one young man acknowledging another across a gap neither of them had chosen. Quintus, surprised, returned it.

— ✦ —

They didn't talk about Quintus for the first hour.

Fortunatus showed Hrodgar the farm. The olive tree first — he stood under it with a hand on the trunk. "Planted it the year my son was born. Olives take fifteen years to bear anything worth eating. He was eleven before it gave us oil." He looked up into the branches. "He's in the Twelfth now. Different cohort than yours," he said to Abster. "Writes when he remembers. The tree's still here either way."

Hrodgar looked at the tree for a long moment. "My grandmother was a baker. She judged barley by the weight of it in her hand. I haven't held barley that felt right since I was nine." He looked at Fortunatus. "There is barley on my slope now. I don't know yet if it will feel the same."

"Won't," Fortunatus said. Not unkindly. "Different ground, different rain. It'll feel like something. Different and good aren't opposites." He started toward the upper field.

They walked it together. Fortunatus turned a clod with his boot, broke it with his fingers. "This drains wrong after a hard rain. Pools here — takes two days to clear. If your people put anything in this section, dig a channel along there before you plant. Angle it toward the lower rocks, not my fence, or we'll be arguing about water instead of grass." He said it as fact, not negotiation.

Sura, who'd brought a wax tablet without being asked, wrote it down. Fortunatus glanced at him.

"Writing that down."

"If it's useful, it should exist somewhere that isn't just memory," Sura said.

Fortunatus looked at the tablet — careful Latin, recording a Roman farmer's drainage advice for a Gothic settlement's first planting. Something in his face shifted. "Huh," he said, and kept talking.

Four more notes by the time they'd walked the boundary — the spring feeding the lower pasture, the direction of the worst winter wind, a windbreak his father planted forty years ago that now sat almost exactly on the new line, sheltering whichever side needed it.

— ✦ —

Near the end, walking back, Hrodgar stopped.

"The men who hurt your shepherd are not mine to answer for," he said. "I don't lead them. I can't make them answer for it in any way that would mean something to you." He looked at Quintus, who'd drifted close enough to hear, going faintly red. "But he was hurt on ground my people are trying to share with you, and I came to see him standing."

Fortunatus looked at Quintus, then at Hrodgar.

"He's standing," he said. "Nose'll set crooked. He'll tell the story for thirty years — got hit by a Goth at sixteen, lived to talk about it. Better story than most of what happens to shepherds." He paused. "I'm not going to tell you it's fine. It's not fine. But it's a broken nose, not a grave, and I know the difference because I've got two of the other kind right there." He nodded toward the low stones near the tree line. "You came down a bad road on a bad knee to look at a boy's face. That's not nothing either."

Neither said anything else about it. Hrodgar nodded once. Not resolved, not forgiven in any word either used — but said, which was sometimes the only available thing.

— ✦ —

The road back climbed a low rise that the road out had skirted, and from the top of it Vidimer stopped walking.

"That's not road work," he said.

Below, where the river road forked, a detachment was at work — perhaps a century's worth of men, more than the road's condition seemed to call for. A line of stakes ran out from the fork at angles Abster recognized after a moment as not random — the ditch-and-rampart pattern of a marching camp, measured out and flagged but not yet dug. An officer in a different cohort's kit stood with two men holding cords, sighting along a line toward the river.

"How do you know," Abster said.

"Saw Roman camps marked out during the revolt. From a distance, mostly." Vidimer didn't take his eyes off it. "They mark the corners first. Like that." He pointed. "Road crew doesn't mark corners."

They were too far to be challenged and too visible to pretend they hadn't seen. The officer below glanced up once, registered a cart and a small group on the ridge road, and went back to his sighting line without further interest — a centurion with a survey to finish before dark, for whom a Gothic cart on a public road was not his problem.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Adalric looked at the stakes, then at Hrodgar, who was looking at them too, with an expression Abster couldn't read and didn't try to.

"Tell Corvus," Adalric said quietly. "Not just the Huns. This too."

"I will."

They went on. Hrodgar said something to Adalric near the top of the rise, short and quiet, before the camp fell out of view behind them. Abster caught none of it.

The Vellum433 days.

Fortunatus showed Hrodgar the farm before either mentioned Quintus. The olive tree. Fifteen years to bear oil. His son was eleven.

Sura wrote down the drainage advice unasked. Four notes by the end. Fortunatus said "huh" and kept talking.

Eriulf: Hunnic scouts, forty miles east, a day inside the old line.

Vidimer saw the camp stakes before I did. Corners marked. Not road crew.

Two things to tell Corvus when he's back. I keep arranging them in order and the order keeps changing.