Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Macro ran the muster at the regular hour, which Abster understood, watching it happen, was Macro's answer to the question of how you drilled a mixed century in front of an emperor: you didn't change anything. You ran it exactly as you would have run it on any other Tuesday, because the moment you adjusted the drill for an audience, the drill stopped being evidence of anything.

Valens watched from the fence line with his hands clasped behind him, saying nothing for the first twenty minutes. He watched Ansila hold a corrected grip through a full contact sequence without needing to be told twice — the lesson from three weeks ago apparently settled now into the kind of habit that didn't require thinking. He watched Castor and Friuulf run the shield drill in the position they'd found together on the fourth try weeks ago, clean every time now, two men moving as though they'd trained together for years rather than one season.

"That one," Valens said, nodding at Faramund, who held the formation's anchor position with the unhurried economy that had made Macro place him there in the first hour of the first day. "He hasn't moved from that spot since you started."

"He's the anchor," Macro said, who had walked over without being summoned, the way Macro inserted himself wherever a direct technical question was being asked. "Formation holds or breaks from that point. He doesn't waste motion. Good instinct for it — better than some men I've trained for years."

"Whose man is he."

"Alatheus's," Abster said. "He's not part of the formal muster. He drills with us informally — has been for two months, before the first sixty ever arrived."

Valens looked at Faramund for a moment longer. "A man who isn't part of the arrangement, training as though he is."

"He says the ground doesn't care what side of an argument you're on," Abster said. "I think that's closer to his actual reason than any political one."

Valens said nothing else about it, but Abster saw him note something — a small motion, the kind of mental filing he was coming to recognize in men who carried this much authority and had learned not to let their faces do the recording for them.

— ✦ —

They walked the settlement after, the same path Sebastos had walked weeks before, though Valens moved through it differently — slower at the human stops, faster across the empty ground between them, as though the value he was extracting lived specifically in the places where people were.

Ingrid had her workspace set up on the central path as always, and when Valens stopped to look at the array of blades waiting their turn at her whetstone, she didn't pause her work to acknowledge who was standing there.

"You're not the smith," Valens said. He had clearly been told this somewhere in his briefing, or had simply observed there was no forge.

"No." She kept working. "Settlement doesn't have one yet. Someone has to keep edges sharp in the meantime, so I do it. Everyone calls me the smith because it's shorter than explaining what I actually am, and I've stopped correcting them because the correction takes longer than the work."

"What are you, then."

She looked up at him for the first time. "Whatever's needed that morning," she said, and went back to the blade in her hands.

Valens looked at her for a moment with an expression Abster couldn't fully read, and then moved on, and Abster thought he saw, at the corner of it, something that might have been the beginning of amusement that the emperor had decided not to let finish forming on his face.

— ✦ —

Gailswintha met them at the storage building without being summoned, the way she met everything that concerned her domain.

"The seed reserve," she said, before Valens asked. "For next year. We keep it separate from the consumption grain — different building, different keeper, because a bad winter makes people desperate enough to eat what they shouldn't, and the only way to stop that is to make the seed hard to reach without deciding to."

"Who decides who contributes."

"Each family decides for itself. I asked for more than anyone needed to give, and gave more than I needed to, so the families who weren't certain yet had something to measure their own contribution against." She looked at him directly. "Not everyone gave. The ones who didn't aren't wrong to have held back. They're protecting their own families against the possibility that this fails. I can't fault a calculation I might have made myself in a worse year."

"And if it doesn't fail."

"Then next spring they'll give, because the calculation will have changed." She said it without any particular warmth toward him, the flat statement of a woman who managed grain and trust with the same unsentimental arithmetic. "I'm not here to tell you what you want to hear, Augustus. I'm here because you're standing in front of my seed store."

Valens looked at her for a long moment. Then: "Sebastos mentioned you."

"I'm sure he did," Gailswintha said, and did not ask what he'd said, which Abster understood was itself the most pointed thing she could have done.

— ✦ —

Near the granary, a child intercepted them — one of the smaller ones, no more than six, who had clearly been told to stay back and had decided that the instruction applied to everyone except herself specifically.

She looked up at Valens with the total absence of deference that only the very young managed convincingly. "Are you the one everyone's scared of?"

Adalric, nearby, went very still. Abster felt his own breath catch slightly.

Valens crouched down to the child's level, which was not a motion Abster had seen him make for anyone else all day. "Some people are," he said. "Are you?"

She considered this with great seriousness. "No," she said. "You're not very tall."

"No," Valens agreed. "I'm not." He looked at her for a moment. "What's frightening you, if it isn't me?"

The question seemed to surprise her more than his answer had — an adult, asking what she was actually afraid of, instead of correcting her for asking the question in the first place. She thought about it. "The smoke on the far hills sometimes," she said. "Mama checks for it now. She didn't used to."

Valens was quiet for a moment. "That's a reasonable thing to be frightened of," he said. "I'd rather you tell your mother when you see it than not."

"I do."

"Good." He stood. The child, having gotten what she'd apparently come for, ran off toward the granary without further ceremony.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Abster filed it without being able to immediately say what he was filing — an emperor crouching in the dirt to answer a six-year-old honestly, in a year when honesty toward children was not a quality anyone had attributed to him in any account Abster had ever read or imagined.

— ✦ —

The exchange with Alatheus happened at the eastern boundary, where Alatheus had been standing when the inspection reached that edge of the settlement, apparently by design rather than accident.

"Sebastos tells me you assessed the passes for defense," Valens said. "Independent of the foederati arrangement."

"I did."

"You're not part of the arrangement."

"I'm not."

"Why do the work, then."

Alatheus looked at him with the same flat directness he gave everyone, emperor or otherwise. "Because someone needed to know what the ground could do, regardless of who ends up standing on it. If I only worked on the things I'd agreed to, the work that mattered most would depend on agreement, and agreement is the least reliable thing I know."

"You think the arrangement will fail."

"I think it might. I think Ragnaris might be entirely right and I might be entirely wrong, and I'm not willing to bet the passes on which of us turns out to be correct." He held Valens's gaze without deference and without hostility, which Abster understood was its own kind of skill. "I'd rather have the analysis exist and be unnecessary than need it and not have it."

Valens studied him for a long moment. "Most men in your position would have withheld the work to make a point."

"Most men in my position haven't watched what happens when the wrong analysis reaches the right moment too late." Alatheus said it without elaborating, and Valens, to his credit, didn't ask him to.

"I'd like to see the assessment in writing," Valens said.

"It's in the sector record. The optio has it." Alatheus glanced at Abster. "I made sure of that."

Valens nodded slowly, and something passed across his face that Abster recognized from earlier in the day with Ingrid — the deliberate suppression of a reaction he'd decided not to let finish forming. He moved on. Marcianus, walking near the back of the group, caught Abster's eye for a brief moment and said nothing, but Abster thought he saw, for the first time since the tribune had arrived, something that wasn't quite neutral anymore.

— ✦ —

Near the southern fire, where two of the settlement's families had their shelters close together, Abster passed close enough to catch a fragment of conversation he wasn't meant to hear — two women, working at something with their hands while they talked, their voices pitched low in the particular register people used for things they discussed often enough to have stopped being dramatic about them.

"—if he decides it isn't worth the trouble," one was saying. "Rome's decided things before. Decided, then decided differently."

"Hrodgar says the granary's not built for one decision," the other answered. "Built for however many decisions it takes."

"Granary doesn't fight Huns."

"No," the first agreed. "Nothing built out of wood does."

They saw Abster and the conversation didn't stop exactly, but it shifted register, the way conversations did when an officer was within earshot — not concealment, just the natural adjustment of people who understood that some things were said among themselves and other things were said where they might be recorded. He didn't ask them to continue. He had heard enough.

The Vellum374 days.

A child asked him if he was the one everyone's scared of. He crouched down and asked her what frightened her instead. She said the smoke on the far hills. He said tell your mother. That's the whole exchange and I don't know what to do with how much it unsettled me.

Gailswintha: I'm not here to tell you what you want to hear, I'm standing in front of my seed store. Valens said nothing for a long moment after.

Alatheus: most men in my position haven't watched what happens when the wrong analysis reaches the right moment too late. Valens didn't ask him to elaborate. I think he understood without asking.

Two women at the southern fire: granary's not built for one decision. Granary doesn't fight Huns. No. Nothing built out of wood does.

Ragnaris is due back tomorrow, or the day after. The emperor is still here.