Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Corvus had asked him to find out which unit, quietly, and Abster had not done it, and with Corvus a day out he no longer had the option of doing it later.

He went openly. Sneaking up on a Roman engineering camp was a worse idea than riding up to it — a Roman officer with a reasonable question was unremarkable; the same officer hiding in a treeline was a different kind of report waiting to be written. He took Sura, for the look of administrative business, and Tullus, because Tullus could read a camp's layout faster than anyone else in the century and wouldn't need to be told what to look at.

The road widening started two miles before the camp did — not dramatically, just a foot on each side where the old edge of the road had been cut back, the raw soil still pale against the darker ground around it, fresh enough that grass hadn't started coming back in yet. Abster noticed it the way he noticed things now, which was the way a man noticed things when he'd spent fourteen months learning that small details arrived before their explanations.

The camp itself had grown since the ridge view. What had been stakes was now ditch and rampart, properly dug, the kind of earthwork a unit built when it expected to be somewhere longer than a night. Inside: rows of tents, more than he'd estimated from a distance. Stacks of squared timber, taller than a man, drying under canvas. Dressed stone, newly cut, pale against the older grey of the original piers.

The bridge was half a construction site. The river had been narrowed on one side with a temporary timber coffer-dam, and inside it men were working the base of the central pier — chiseling old mortar, setting new stone, the patient unglamorous work of making something old able to carry something new. Abster watched them for a moment from the road. Two hundred men at least, probably closer to three. All of them at work, nobody resting, the particular rhythm of a project with a deadline.

Below the bridge, the river ran as it always ran, indifferent and fast.

— ✦ —

The officer who came to meet them was younger than Abster expected, harried in the specific way of men whose project was behind schedule and who had stopped being surprised by that.

"Optatus," he said, wiping his hands on a cloth that didn't help much. "You're the sector up the road?"

"XII Fulminata. We use this road for the Sucidava depot run — wanted to know if the work's going to close it, and for how long."

"Not closed. Slower." Optatus gestured at the coffer-dam. "Single file past the pier work for another three weeks, maybe four, depending on the stone deliveries, which depend on a quarry that depends on weather, which depends on whatever gods are annoyed with quarries this season." He said it without much heat, the complaint of a man who'd made this joke to several previous visitors and would make it to several more.

"That's a lot of pier for a provincial bridge," Tullus said. Not pointedly — the tone of a soldier making conversation with another soldier about a job.

"Tell me about it." Optatus glanced back at the coffer-dam. "Original piers were fine for what the bridge has carried for sixty years. Specifications came down for triple load capacity, and triple load capacity on sixty-year-old footings means you're not reinforcing — you're rebuilding. Don't ask me triple of what. Numbers came from the survey office in Marcianopolis." He shrugged. "I build to the numbers I'm given. Nobody tells engineers the why."

Triple.

Abster kept his face the way Corvus had taught him by example — nothing, while the thing underneath it completed its assessment. Triple capacity of a sixty-year-old provincial bridge that had carried local traffic and a depot run twice a month for six decades. The math of it arrived before he wanted it to and sat there without resolving into something smaller.

"One big crossing, you reinforce for the day and call it good," he heard himself say, in the even register of a man verifying a specification. "Or is this meant to support something ongoing."

Optatus looked at him with the faint surprise of a man hearing a better question than he'd expected from a sector optio. "If I had to guess — and I don't, officially — I'd say 'often' is the part that matters. The spec says load capacity as a standing number, not as a one-time allowance." He looked at the bridge. "A standing spec means someone expects to use it that way repeatedly." He said it matter-of-factly, the way he said everything, a man whose only job was to build what the numbers required without concerning himself with why the numbers were what they were.

— ✦ —

They walked the camp's edge on the way out — Optatus glad to talk to someone who wasn't asking him to explain delay to a superior. He pointed out the timber stocks, the stone, a section where wagons were being assembled from parts that had arrived separately — normal for transport logistics, he said, but the number of them, lined up, was more than three hundred engineers needed for their own supply by a factor that Abster was calculating in his head and not liking.

And near the camp's southern end, under canvas — grain sacks. Rows of them, more rows than the camp's own consumption would account for at any rate Optatus had described.

"Is that yours?" Abster asked. Casual.

"Some of it. Some is just staged here — depot space while the bridge work's on. Quartermasters love a flat patch near a road." Optatus shrugged. "We've got the flat patch."

Abster looked at the stacks. A year ago he would have taken it at face value — convenient storage, opportunistic, the kind of thing armies did with available ground. The thought arrived cleanly and then the other thought arrived behind it: that the year ago version of him had been operating from a picture that kept getting bigger around its edges, and that every time he'd taken something at face value in this past year, it had turned out to have another face behind the first one.

He didn't ask where the grain had come from, or where it was going next. He thanked Optatus for his time and rode back with Tullus and Sura in the late afternoon, the road wider than it had been a month ago, the pale cut earth on either side already drying into something that would look ordinary by winter.

— ✦ —

They rode in silence for a while. Tullus eventually said: "How much does triple capacity actually mean. In soldiers."

"Depends what they're moving," Sura said, from Abster's left. He had been tallying something on a wax tablet, an activity Abster had learned to leave alone until it resolved. "If it's infantry columns at marching pace, triple capacity of the existing bridge is roughly—" he did something with the stylus "—three cohorts across in the time one crossed before. If it's cavalry and supply wagons, the number's different. But in either case, the relevant question isn't how many cross per hour. It's how many cross per day, sustained." He looked up. "A standing spec for triple capacity suggests days of crossing, not hours."

The road was empty ahead of them. The river ran alongside it, the same river that ran past the Gothic encampment, past the settlement in the foothills, past the boundary markers where Ragnaris's men had started calling out in Latin first.

"Write it up tonight," Abster said. "Both — the capacity and the wagon frames. Sebastianus needs the numbers before Corvus arrives."

"Already drafting," Sura said, and went back to the tablet.

The Vellum419 days — less than fourteen months.

Optatus: triple load capacity, standing specification, not one-time. He doesn't know triple of what. Nobody tells engineers.

Forty wagon frames. Grain under canvas, more than camp consumption. "Quartermasters love a flat patch near a road." He said it like it was nothing. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe I have learned to see things that aren't there. Maybe I have learned to see things that are there and nobody else is looking at yet. I don't know which is worse.

Sura: days of crossing, not hours. Standing spec means repeated use.

I keep thinking about the river. It doesn't care what crosses it. It just keeps moving.