There was mud in his mouth.
He spat. Pushed himself onto his hands and knees and stayed there, head hanging, watching a thin string of saliva and grit drop to the ground. His arms were shaking — not fear, or not only that — just the specific shaking of a body that had been lying still too long in cold air. His left knee was soaked through. Something underneath him smelled foul and he decided not to investigate what.
He didn't stand yet. He looked at his hands.
They were wrong. Brown knuckles, wide palms, a white scar running from the base of the left thumb to the wrist. He turned them over and back. Pressed two fingers hard into the forearm muscle, almost testing it, as if the arm might give way and reveal something truer underneath.
It didn't.
He sat back on his heels and the second life split open inside him all at once, no warning, like a bag with a rotten seam.
The first: a rain-slicked road outside London. A library book open on the passenger seat — he'd been on page 312, he remembered it precisely, the legions on the Danube, overwhelmed and unprepared — and then white light and then nothing. The second life was already inside him, years deep, the way sediment is deep: he was twenty-three, he was a soldier, his name was Abster, just Abster, left at a garrison gate as an infant by someone who had not left a note.
He sat in the mud and tried to figure out which set of memories to believe.
Both were true. That was the problem that kept reasserting itself every time he thought he'd gotten past it. Both sat fully inside the same skull, equally weighted, equally detailed. He could remember the face of his section-mate Drausus — who snored and smelled of old fish and had pulled him out of a skirmish three years ago at considerable personal inconvenience — with the same specificity he could remember his own flat in London. The third step that squeaked. The name of the downstairs neighbor's cat. The particular smell of the history department on a Tuesday morning, dust and old paper and someone's lunch.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
You're in the past. The thought kept arriving and he kept sliding off it like a man trying to stand on ice. You're in 376. You know this year. You wrote about this year.
Except he also had five years of scars and calluses and muscle memory that suggested this was not something he had written about. This was just morning. Cold morning. The latrine ditch twenty feet to the left, downwind for once, though downwind still meant present.
He lowered his hands.
The far bank of the Danube was wrong.
He was almost certain it had been empty at midnight watch — some fragment of memory, standing in the dark, seeing nothing. Now it was full. Not an army. Something larger and slower than an army, something no clean military word covered. Cook fires in their hundreds stretching both directions into the gray. A low sound carrying across the water, not a roar and not a moan, the sound of mass human movement — carts and animals and children and the accumulated weight of people who had been pushed until there was nowhere left to go except across a river toward a civilization that had told them it was safe.
Abster looked at it and felt his stomach drop in a way that was entirely physical, entirely unwilled.
He knew this. Not from this life — the soldier had no context for migration at this scale. He knew it from the other one. Forty pages of secondary sources and a seminar room and one very patient professor who had caught him sleeping and told him that the Gothic crossing of 376 was the hinge on which the next century turned.
He'd written it in his notes. The hinge.
He was standing at the hinge, in the mud, with something unpleasant under his left knee, and his hands had started shaking again and this time it was clearly fear and not cold.
The thing he hadn't written in his notes — because it hadn't seemed relevant from a seminar room — was what the sound of it was like. He hadn't expected the sound.
"Abster."
He was on his feet before he'd processed the word, five years of conditioning moving his body without consulting him. Fist to chest. Centurion Corvus stopped a few paces away and looked at him the way he'd been looking at him for two years — like a man weighing a coin he suspects has been shaved but can't find the shaving.
"You were on the ground."
"Yes, Centurion."
"Sleeping?"
"No."
Corvus waited. He was short and wide, jaw like something quarried rather than grown, the kind of face that had stopped bothering to register surprise sometime around year fifteen of thirty years in the legions. He made Abster feel, most of the time, like an amateur who had wandered into a trade and was hoping nobody checked his credentials.
"Thinking," Abster said, when the silence became actively uncomfortable.
"About."
He nodded toward the river. Corvus turned.
He stood without speaking. Abster watched his back — the particular stillness of a man who is genuinely absorbing something, not performing absorption. One hand came up and rubbed the back of his neck. He hadn't shaved in three days, which was unusual. Something had been working at him.
"That wasn't there last night," Corvus said.
"No."
The sound from the far bank was clearer now. Pre-dawn, most of the camp still sleeping, the ambient noise reduced to the sentries' movement and the distant complaint of a mule that had been aggrieved about something for three weeks and showed no sign of resolving it. Beneath all of it, the river sound. And beneath the river sound, the other one.
Somewhere in that mass of people, a child was crying. The sound carried strangely over water — thin and specific, more present than it should have been at this distance.
Corvus lowered his hand. "Hm." A pause. "Right."
That was all. Not Jupiter help us, not anything with the weight Abster had half-expected. Just the sound of a man filing something into the part of his mind kept for unpleasant things and moving on. Thirty years of practice at exactly that.
"Orders," Abster said.
"Hold the line. Wait for the comes." Corvus turned back. His expression had shifted slightly — not warmth, more like a recalibration, something being quietly reassessed. "Why."
"I wondered if there was a plan."
"The plan is we wait for the comes. Same as always." A pause. "Some senator comes out from Marcianopolis in ten days, decides who crosses, takes his cut, goes back. We stand here and look capable." Completely without bitterness. The flat tone of a man describing weather he has no opinion about because having an opinion wouldn't change it.
Abster opened his mouth.
"Don't," Corvus said.
"I haven't—"
"You've got the face." He scratched his jaw. "You're going to tell me the comes takes bribes and the Goths starve."
A beat.
"...Yes."
"I know."
"And if they—"
"I know, Abster." Not angry. Just tired in the specific way of someone who has known things for a long time without being in a position to do anything about them. He looked at the river again, at the fires, and for a moment the thirty years showed in a different way — not authority, just age. He was probably forty-five. In the legions that was very old. "The reading. Where do you get it."
"I trade. Drausus finds me things."
"Drausus can barely spell."
"He knows people who can."
Something moved in Corvus's face that might have been, in better light, adjacent to amusement. He was still looking at the far bank. The light was coming up — gray shifting to the cold blue of a river dawn — and the shapes across the water were becoming people: figures moving, the silhouette of a cart piled high, a man standing slightly apart from the mass looking back east, toward whatever he'd left behind and whether it still existed.
Corvus watched that for a moment. Then: "Get your kit sorted. Muster at the sixth hour." He started walking. "Eat something. You look like the river spat you out."
Abster watched him go — the easy authority of the man, the way he stopped briefly to speak to a sentry and the sentry stood straighter without being told to. Thirty years of exactly that.
I know, he'd said. As though knowing was the end of it.
Abster sat back down in the mud.
His legs had made the decision and he lacked the energy to contest it. He sat and looked at the river and tried to think clearly about what he actually had, which was: a body trained for violence, a mind full of events that hadn't happened yet, and no leverage whatsoever.
He knew this crisis. He'd written thirty pages about it. He knew the name of the comes who would arrive — Lupicinus — and he knew the shape of what Lupicinus would do, not because the man was exceptional but because he was perfectly ordinary. He knew about the grain that would arrive late and insufficient because the roads between Marcianopolis and the frontier were poorly maintained because the local levy funding had been cut after three years of drought reduced the tax yield. He knew about the children the Goths would sell into slavery to survive the winter. He knew about Adrianople and the burning farmhouse and the emperor who should not have been there.
He knew all of that. He had known it since a seminar room. He'd sat in a Costa coffee afterward and eaten a tuna sandwich and felt clever about his essay.
He looked at the fires across the water and tried to locate that feeling and found he couldn't.
The child was still crying. Someone was trying to quiet it — a voice too distant for words, the universal sound of comfort running out of conviction. Abster listened to it without meaning to. He had the sudden, specific thought that whoever that child was, they were going to have an extraordinarily bad two years, and there was nothing in his thirty pages of secondary sources that had felt like that. The sources didn't have sounds. The sources didn't have the smell of the latrine ditch and his wet knee and the way cold settled into the shoulders after too long on the ground.
He was going to die here. That was the thing he kept not quite looking at. In this body, in this time, in this camp above this river. Whatever had happened on the road outside London had ended one life and deposited him inside another, and this one ended here, eventually, in circumstances he did not know and could not predict, because history didn't record what happened to common soldiers named Abster who had no family name and no one looking for them.
He picked up his helmet from the ground. It was heavier than he always expected it to be, though he'd worn it hundreds of times. He turned it in his hands. There was a dent on the left side from a sparring incident two years ago that the smith had never quite hammered flat.
He put it on. The familiar weight settled.
Start somewhere, he thought, and then felt faintly ridiculous for thinking it because it wasn't insight, it was just the only option.
He stood up. His knee was soaked through and cold and whatever had been under it had transferred partially to his trousers. He chose not to look at this directly.
He went to find Drausus.