Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Corvus set up the joint patrol two days after Palladius left, direct about his reasoning: if a word in someone's notebook could call informal cooperation interesting without explaining itself, then the only thing they controlled was whether the next entry about it was informal and accidental or formal and deliberate.

"We can't undo months of patrols meeting by chance," he said. "We can make the next ones happen on purpose, written up properly, framed as exactly what they are — joint range patrols, sector security, standard practice for a foederati zone." He looked at Abster. "If it's good, let it be good on the record, not despite it."

The first patrol went out two mornings later. Tullus and Drusus from the XII; Vidimer and Faramund from the settlement. They rode east, toward the old line, further than the usual boundary work.

— ✦ —

They found him on the Almus road, four miles from where the old boundary ran, sitting on a stone with his head in his hands.

He was Gothic, by the clothes and the hair, and he was alone, which was unusual enough on this road that Tullus and Faramund both registered it at the same moment, hands moving before anything was decided. Then Vidimer said something in Gothic and the man looked up and said something back and Faramund's hands came down.

"His name is Chlodomer," Vidimer said. "He's from a settlement on the far side of the valley. He says—" He listened for a moment, then looked at Abster with an expression that was working out how to frame something. "He says his village isn't there anymore."

They gave him water. They gave him the bread from the saddlebag that Drusus always carried, not because he'd been told to but because Drusus had a family and a family man knew that people needed food in crisis without being asked. Chlodomer took it with the automatic gratitude of someone past the stage of feeling complicated about accepting things from strangers.

He spoke for a long time. Vidimer translated in pieces, Faramund adding where Vidimer's Gothic missed the regional accent. The shape of it assembled itself slowly, out of order, the way a man told things when he'd been holding them alone for too long and was now getting them out in whatever sequence they arrived rather than the sequence that made narrative sense.

Three nights ago. He had been away from the village — two days east, visiting a cousin with a sick child. Coming back on the second night, he'd smelled the smoke from a distance and had known, in the specific way that people on moving frontiers learned to know things, what smoke from that direction at that hour meant.

He hadn't gone in. He'd stayed in the tree line for the rest of the night and the next day, and what he'd seen, from the tree line, he described with the flat specificity of a man whose shock had already moved through its loudest stages and was now producing fact rather than feeling.

Horses, small and shaggy. Riders who sat them differently from anyone he'd seen. They hadn't come to raid — they'd come through, he said, moving west, and the village had been in the way, and they'd dealt with the thing in their way and kept moving. He said this without particular inflection, the way you said something that had already cost all the weight it was going to cost in the tree line that night and had none left.

"His wife," Vidimer said carefully, after a longer exchange. "Two daughters. He doesn't know. He didn't go in."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"How many riders," Tullus asked. Quietly, the professional question that needed asking and that Tullus was able to ask in the right register.

Chlodomer answered. Vidimer translated: "He says he counted twenty that he saw clearly. He thinks there were more he didn't. The dust moved ahead of them and the dust was more than twenty."

— ✦ —

They found the farmstead at midmorning, two miles past where Chlodomer had stopped walking. He hadn't told them about it specifically — there were several homesteads on this road, and the man sitting on the stone had been talking about his own village, further on, but this was the first thing they reached and so they stopped.

It had been a small place. A single building, a fenced yard, the kind of holding that existed where the land was still available to claim. The roof was gone — burned through to the rafters, the rafters themselves burned partway before the fire had run out. Recent. Drusus crouched at the threshold and put a hand near the char.

"Two days," he said. "Three at most."

The fence was still standing, mostly. Near the post where the gate would have been, a kitchen garden — the kind planted in the first weeks of May with the optimism that preceded knowing whether the summer would cooperate. Onions, by the look of the shoots. A row of something else, too young to be certain. The rows were neat, carefully spaced, the work of someone who'd done this before and had a system for it.

The shoots were still growing. Nobody had been there to tend them and they were still coming up, because that was what planted things did.

Abster looked at the rows for a moment longer than he needed to for any operational purpose. A year ago he would have moved past them and logged the farmstead and noted the date and the condition and moved on. He knew that about himself — that fourteen months ago he had been treating this frontier as a system to be understood, and somewhere in the middle of the understanding he had acquired a habit that was harder than the understanding, which was the habit of seeing the people inside the system rather than the system itself.

Someone had planted those rows. Someone had a system for spacing that was their own system, not general farm knowledge but specific to how this particular person had learned to garden over however many years they'd been doing it.

He didn't say this out loud. He moved on.

— ✦ —

A horse in the yard, dead. Steppe saddle — Vidimer confirmed it, the same short-backed high-cantle construction he'd identified before, not local work. Two arrows in the doorframe post, charred on the exposed half but the heads intact, the fletching not Roman, not Gothic, the angle of the barbs wrong for either army's standard equipment.

"Not ours," Faramund said. Quietly, not to anyone. "Not yours either."

Nobody said the word. It didn't need saying.

They worked the site methodically — Corvus's habits, all of them, even Vidimer and Faramund, who had been running patrols with Tullus and Drusus long enough to have absorbed the pattern without being told it was a pattern. No bodies. Drusus found a child's toy in what had been a corner of the main room — a small carved horse, rough-made, the kind made over several evenings by someone with time and affection but not skill. He picked it up and said nothing about why and put it in his pack.

They were moving to go — further east, to see how far the burn extended — when Vidimer, who had drifted to the yard's eastern fence, went still.

"Tullus," he said. Quiet. Not alarmed. The specific quiet of someone who had found exactly what they'd come to look for and didn't want to announce it louder than necessary.

Across the shallow valley — perhaps four hundred meters, close enough that detail was visible, far enough that nothing was immediately urgent — riders.

Four of them. Horses small and shaggy. Sitting them with the ease of people who had been on horseback more of their lives than off it. Watching. Completely still on the far ridge, looking back across the valley at five figures standing in the ruins of a burned-out farm.

Nobody moved for a long moment.

Both groups simply occupying the same moment — each aware of the other, neither deciding what the moment required. Abster felt his breath go shallow and made himself slow it down, because shallow breathing was the body preparing for something and the body preparing before the mind had decided was how people made mistakes in the wrong direction.

Then, without any visible signal, the four riders turned — unhurried, almost lazy, the turn of men who had nowhere urgent to be and no particular concern about being watched while they left — and rode back over the ridge.

Gone. Twenty seconds, start to finish.

— ✦ —

Nobody moved for another few seconds after the ridge emptied.

"That's them," Drusus said. Not a question. Looking at the place where the riders had been as though looking might bring them back and let him be wrong about what he'd seen.

Faramund hadn't moved. His expression was doing something none of the Romans' were — not surprise, not alarm, but something closer to recognition. The recognition of a thing finally matching a shape that had been described secondhand for months.

"They waited," he said. Mostly to Vidimer. "They waited until we found it. Then they let us see them seeing us find it." He looked at the burned doorframe, the arrows still in the post. "The arrows were left in the wood. They didn't have to leave the arrows." He looked across the valley at the empty ridge. "They wanted us to find it. And then they wanted us to see them."

"Why," Vidimer said.

Nobody answered.

They rode back — methodical, the same pace they'd come at, because changing your pace told people things. Chlodomer was where they'd left him, still on the stone, and Faramund rode alongside him for the return trip and said things Abster couldn't follow and didn't ask to be translated. The tone of it was what mattered. The tone said: you're not riding back alone.

Drusus still had the carved horse in his pack. At some point during the ride back, Abster noticed him take it out and hold it the way Wulfgar held the carved eagle — the way people held small things when there was nothing useful to do with their hands and the alternative was thinking too clearly about what they'd just seen.

The ridge stayed empty behind them all the way to the boundary. The empty ridge was worse than the riders had been. The riders had been a fact. The empty ridge was just absence, and absence didn't tell you anything except that what had been there once could be there again, anywhere, without warning, and you wouldn't know until you turned and it already was.

The Vellum413 days — four hundred and thirteen days, and I am writing that as words for the first time because the number has stopped being something I can abstract.

Chlodomer. His village is gone. He hid in the tree line rather than go in. He doesn't know about his wife and two daughters. He sat on a stone on the Almus road and we gave him bread and he told us things in pieces.

Twenty riders he counted clearly. Dust ahead of them for more.

Kitchen garden still growing. Onions, and something too young to name. Neat rows. Someone had a system for the spacing.

Faramund: they left the arrows in the wood on purpose. They waited for us to find it. Then they let us see them seeing us find it. They wanted us to know they're here.

Drusus has a carved horse in his pack. He didn't explain it. Nobody asked. Chlodomer rode back with us. Faramund talked to him the whole way.

The ridge was empty the whole way back. That was worse.