Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Alatheus led the reconnaissance himself. The original plan had been for a joint patrol with Tullus as the Roman element. Alatheus appeared at the boundary the morning of the patrol and said, without preamble, that if someone was going to assess the defensive value of the eastern passes, he should be the one assessing them. The patrol's value as intelligence depended on the quality of the assessment and the quality depended on the assessor.

Corvus had said: "He's right. Let him lead."

Alatheus had said nothing about this and turned and went to prepare.

Tullus brought two scouts who knew the Roman survey maps. Sura came because records needed to be made. Vidimer and Faramund went with Alatheus, and three warriors whose names Abster was beginning to learn by face.

— ✦ —

The first pass's narrowest point: valley walls close enough that thirty men could hold the width. Alatheus stopped, looked at the walls and the approaches and the sight lines above the floor.

"Against cavalry on open ground — as long as you need. Against Roman infantry in formation? Two days with sixty good men, if the flanks above are held. Maybe three, with supply coming through the secondary approach." He pointed at a track cutting along the valley's eastern wall twenty meters above the floor. A goat path, barely visible. "That track reaches the second pass without descending. Supply and relief can move along it without entering the primary chokepoint."

Tullus looked at it. "We don't have that on any of our surveys."

"No," Alatheus said. "I know." He moved on.

He was wrong once, on the descent from the first pass to the second. He identified a section of the western wall as the better flanking position — higher ground, better angles. Tullus pulled out the survey sketch and showed him the drainage pattern; in rain, which came through this pass twice a month in summer, that section would be mud to the knee, impassable for anything except a man alone and moving carefully.

Alatheus looked at the sketch. Then at the wall. "I've seen it dry," he said. "I didn't think about the drainage." He paused, the pause of a man making the adjustment rather than defending the error. "Eastern wall, then. Lower, but stable." He moved on without returning to it.

Tullus, walking beside Abster, said nothing about this. His expression said enough: the relief of a man who had been watching someone be almost entirely correct and was glad to find the one place where the almost mattered.

— ✦ —

The fire site at the second pass was cold but recent. Tullus crouched over it. "Five days. Maybe six. After the last rain."

Faramund had been working the perimeter. He came back with a piece of wood — part of a tent peg, the angle of the cut not Roman, not Gothic. Alatheus looked at it, said nothing, put it in his belt.

The third pass was the one that stopped people.

An abandoned camp. Fire circles, four of them, but the circles were arranged in a pattern that Abster had no immediate explanation for — not the cluster pattern of a group sharing warmth, not the separated pattern of a camp with defined sections. The circles were positioned at angles to each other, and something about the angles was deliberate in a way that didn't resolve into a familiar category.

At the camp's eastern edge, hobble marks — many horses, positioned close. And beside the hobble area, a pile of bones. Abster's first read was butchered animals, a camp eating its kills. Then Faramund crouched beside the bones and said: "These aren't cut. They're split." He looked up. "Marrow. They split them for the marrow, not for the meat." He paused. "You do that when you've already eaten the meat. When you need the last thing available."

And at the fire circle nearest the eastern edge — partially buried, the way something got buried when a camp broke up in a hurry and the smaller things got covered by the movement — a child's shoe. Not Gothic make, not Roman. Small. The kind of size that belonged to a child perhaps four or five years old.

Nobody said anything for a moment. The shoe had been there for weeks, maybe more — the leather had gone stiff, the shape of the small foot still pressed into the sole from the last time someone had put it on.

"Not a scout force," Alatheus said. His voice was different from the voice he'd been using all morning — not quieter, different in register. "A family group. Women and children. Moving fast through the pass and camping here for — " he looked at the fire circles, the marrow bones " — for longer than they wanted to. They ran out of food. They split the bones." He looked at the shoe. "Someone lost this. Or left it." He paused. "A family group moving west through the Haemus passes means the people behind them aren't two days' ride east. They're close enough that women and children are running on foot."

Tullus said: "When."

"The fire circles are weathered. Three weeks, maybe four." He looked at the surrounding ground, the way the grass had grown back over the camp's edge. "Before Chlodomer's village. This was happening before Chlodomer's village."

The specific silence that followed was not the silence of people receiving new information. It was the silence of people having the shape of a picture shift into something they'd been standing inside of the whole time without seeing.

— ✦ —

On the descent, Alatheus walked alongside Abster. He talked the way he had organized his thoughts and was now delivering them in sequence.

"The goat track is the thing that matters most from today. More than the fire site, more than the camp." He walked. "A defending force in the first pass, supplied through the track, cannot be easily flanked from the valley floor. Sixty men could hold it. Forty if they're good. Thirty in the worst case." He glanced sideways. "The constraint: if the sixty in the Roman command arrangement are the wrong sixty, the passes are held by men whose first loyalty is to their Roman officer's order. If they're the right sixty, they're held by men who understand the terrain better than any Roman scout and have a reason to hold it that doesn't depend on the command's continued favor." He paused. "I'm not in the first muster. The men I trust most are not in the first muster. That's a planning constraint. Write it down with the track and the camp and the shoe."

"I will."

"Frame it accurately. If Ragnaris is right, the accuracy doesn't hurt the arrangement. If I'm right, the accuracy is the only thing that compensates before the constraint becomes a problem." He looked ahead at the settlement, smoke rising, the granary frame visible from here. "I was wrong about the drainage on the western wall. Note that too. Whoever uses this assessment needs to know where I was working from partial information."

Abster looked at him. The quality of a man who had identified his own error and included it in the deliverable without being asked.

"The shoe," Abster said. "Did you recognize the make."

A pause. "No. I've seen similar. Eastern steppe, maybe, or the communities further east that we haven't mapped." He looked at the descending path. "It belongs to someone. Wherever they are now." He walked. "That's the thing about the passes. The passes are strategic terrain to us. They're the route someone ran through with a child who lost a shoe, to someone else."

The Vellum377 days.

Goat track, first to second pass, not on Roman surveys. Alatheus knew it. We didn't.

Third pass camp: fire circles at deliberate angles I can't categorize. Marrow bones — they split them when the meat was gone. Child's shoe, leather stiff, three to four weeks old. A family group. Running west. Before Chlodomer's village.

Alatheus was wrong about the western wall drainage. He included it in the assessment without being asked. I noted it.

He said: the passes are strategic terrain to us. They're the route someone ran through with a child who lost a shoe, to someone else. I keep thinking about that sentence.