Muster was at the sixth hour and Abster arrived thirty seconds late because the buckle on his left greave had snapped sometime in the night and he'd had to wire it shut with copper scavenged from the bottom of his kit bag, and the wire kept catching on the inside of his ankle, and he was going to have to find a smith before the end of the week or his leg would be raw meat by midday drill.
He slid into the third row, fourth position. Corvus was already pacing the line. He didn't look at Abster.
That was worse than if he had.
Abster looked forward and tried not to catalogue everything wrong with what he was looking at.
He failed. He always failed at this.
Eleven men carrying injuries — visible in the small compensations, weight shifted, shields held fractionally lower on the bad side. Old Davus three ranks ahead, deaf in one ear, moving with the deliberateness of a man whose knees had long since submitted formal complaints. Two men still gray-faced from whatever they'd caught in Nicomedia, one of them visibly sweating despite the cold — there was a smell coming from that direction, sour and medicinal, that Abster had been trying to identify all morning and had finally decided was someone's bowels losing an ongoing argument. Sextus favoring his right arm from a training accident he hadn't reported. The kit a mixed disaster: rectangular scutum on the senior men, oval on the recruits, no uniformity, which mattered considerably more than it sounded like it should.
Eighty-three men. He couldn't stop himself. A full-strength century was eighty. Three over in bodies, functionally fifteen short in capacity.
Stop, he told himself. You're standing in a muster formation. Stop.
"XII Fulminata!" Corvus had a carrying voice, the kind that had probably been loud even before thirty years of drilling it across parade grounds. "You are soldiers, not market animals. Stand like it. Davus — straight."
Davus straightened by approximately one degree.
Somewhere behind the formation a mule — one of the supply train's animals, permanently aggrieved about everything — began making a sound like a man being slowly murdered. A dog started barking in response. The dog had been in the camp for three weeks. Nobody knew who it belonged to. It had developed a specific hatred for the mule that appeared to be mutual and ongoing.
Abster shifted his weight and the wire scraped his ankle bone. He breathed through his nose and stared at the back of Macro's head.
After muster dissolved he found his contubernium at the fire, which smelled this morning of woodsmoke, old grease, and the latrine ditch in roughly equal proportions. The latrine ditch was upwind. It was upwind most mornings. The camp had been laid out by someone who had either given the latrine siting no thought, or had given it too much thought of the wrong kind.
Rufus was already talking. It was not clear he had ever stopped.
"—I'm just saying the number they're using is wrong. You said a hundred thousand —"
"At minimum," Tullus said, with the patience of a man who had been having variations of this conversation for four years.
"At minimum. Right. So say two hundred thousand."
"I don't know it's two hundred thousand."
"Then where does the hundred thousand come from."
"It comes from looking at the fires and making an estimate."
"An estimate implies a margin. What's your margin?"
"Rufus," said Drusus, without looking up from his bread. "Stop."
Rufus stopped. He was the only man in the contubernium, possibly in the entire XII, who could be reliably silenced by Drusus's flat imperative. Abster had observed this phenomenon many times without fully understanding its mechanism. Drusus was thirty-one, not large, not particularly fearsome. He had three children in Illyricum he hadn't seen in fourteen months and kept a small carved wooden figure in his kit that wasn't devotional — just present, the way you keep a stone in your pocket when you need something real to hold. He spoke infrequently. When he did, it landed.
Abster sat down and accepted the bread Glabrio passed him. It was yesterday's, as usual, hard enough to serve secondary purposes. He chewed and looked at the river.
The fires on the far bank were still going. More of them, maybe, or the same ones clearer in the morning cold. The sound that had been carrying across the water all of yesterday was continuing — that low, collective noise that his soldier's memory had no category for and his historian's memory knew exactly: the ambient sound of mass displacement, of hundreds of thousands of people who had nowhere to go except forward.
Pilo was staring at the far bank with the particular expression he got when confronted with things that fell outside his existing framework, which was fairly often. He was seventeen. The framework was still under construction.
"Do you think they'll really let them all cross?" he asked.
"Some," Tullus said. "Warrior class first, probably. The comes will want fighters for the auxilia."
"That's what I'd do," Pilo said, nodding, and Abster looked at him sideways, because Pilo saying that's what I'd do about Roman frontier policy with the quiet confidence of someone who had considered the matter was genuinely funny, and Pilo didn't know it was funny, which made it funnier.
He almost said something. Decided not to. Filed it away.
"The grain distribution is going to be the problem," Abster said instead, because apparently the thought had been accumulating pressure and needed somewhere to go.
Nobody had asked. He was aware.
Rufus looked at him. "You're doing the voice."
"What voice."
"The supply clerk voice. Slightly slower than normal. Like you're explaining something to someone you've decided is an idiot but you're being polite about it."
Abster opened his mouth.
"I'm not saying you're wrong," Rufus added. "I'm just noting the voice."
"The roads between Marcianopolis and the frontier," Abster said carefully, "are in poor condition. They haven't been adequately maintained in two years because the local levy funding was cut after the drought reduced tax yields. Which means grain convoys run slow in autumn mud. Which means shortfalls. Which means the comes charges the Goths for the shortfall rather than admit the infrastructure failed." He turned a stick in the fire. "Which means a warrior nation is hungry and angry and armed and they've been told Rome was safe."
Silence. The fire. The latrine. The mule had started up again somewhere across camp, a sound of pure existential complaint.
"How do you know about the roads," Tullus said.
"Supply clerk at Noviodunum, last winter."
"You actually talked to him."
"He had the grain ledgers for the last four years. It was interesting."
Rufus made a sound. It wasn't quite a laugh. It was more the sound a man makes when he has encountered something he doesn't have adequate language for.
"The roads are bad," Tullus confirmed, setting down his cup. "I've moved convoys on those roads. Two days in good conditions is four days in mud. Sometimes five."
"So the grain's slow," Glabrio said. "They still get it."
"Late grain in insufficient quantities to a group of people who already feel humiliated," Abster said, "is functionally the same as no grain."
Glabrio looked at him, looked at his bread, looked back. "You really think they'll revolt."
"I think the conditions that produce revolt are going to be present. Whether that produces revolt depends on—" He caught himself. He'd been about to say specific individuals, meaning Lupicinus, meaning a chain of events he knew from secondary sources written sixteen hundred years after the fact. He stopped. "On how the Roman officials manage it."
"Which they'll do badly," Drusus said. Not a question.
"Historically," Abster said, and then realized what he'd said, and added: "In my experience, yes."
Drusus nodded. That was all.
"We should be drilling harder," Abster said.
"Oh, here we go," said Glabrio.
"The wall broke three times at the last—"
"We were tired. It was the end of a four-hour—"
"People break walls in actual fights," Macro said.
Everyone looked at him. He was eating. He did not appear to consider this a notable observation.
"I've seen it twice," he said. "Both times everyone on the inside of the break died."
The fire crackled. A ember popped. Somewhere the mule had been joined by the dog again, the two of them generating a sustained duet of misery that carried across the whole camp.
Rufus, after a long moment: "Fine. We drill."
The thing Abster had not expected — and the thought arrived around midday, while he was watching Pilo go through a sword drill with the concentrated terror of someone who knew they were being observed and was trying to make their body do things it wasn't certain about yet — was how specific his caring had gotten.
He'd been in this body for less than two days. He'd been in this century, properly awake and present in it, for approximately thirty-six hours. And already the problem had stopped being abstract.
It wasn't the Gothic crossing is going to be mismanaged and produce Adrianople. It was: Pilo's form on the third combination was wrong, he kept dropping his elbow on the recovery, and if he dropped his elbow in an actual engagement someone was going to put a blade under his arm and that would be the end of Pilo and the drawing of the possibly-dog and the fourteen-year-old sister who had sent it.
He was not supposed to be here making it personal. This was a strategic problem. He had strategic knowledge. The task was to leverage that knowledge into structural change before the structural change became impossible.
He knew this. He believed this. He also spent forty minutes correcting Pilo's elbow.
What he'd gotten wrong about Drusus — and he didn't realize it until evening mess, sitting with his bowl of something that might have once had an opinion about being wheat — was the assumption that more at stake meant more cautious.
He'd spent two days observing Drusus as a kind of ballast: steady, quiet, the wooden figure of the wife, the mass of a man with reasons. He'd read him as someone who would need careful management, who would want reasons before he committed to anything. Safe. Predictable.
After mess Drusus found him at the river wall, which was apparently where Abster went now, a habit forming faster than he'd intended.
"Tullus talked to some of the Pannonian scouts," Drusus said, without preamble. He stood next to Abster and looked at the far bank. "One of them has family across. Told Tullus the Goths have been moving for six months. Not just the Tervingi. Greuthungi too, further east. Whole nations." A pause. "The Huns hit them hard. Really hard. There are stories."
"I know," Abster said.
"The point I'm making," Drusus said, "is that I have three children in Illyricum. If the Goths cross in the numbers Tullus is describing, and the settlement fails the way you're describing, and they rise — the line between here and Illyricum is not long."
Abster looked at him.
"So," Drusus said. "What do you actually need."
It was the question Abster hadn't known to prepare for, because he'd been thinking about Drusus as a man who would take convincing. He hadn't been thinking about him as someone who had already done the arithmetic and arrived before him.
He had been wrong about that. Specifically, concretely wrong, in a way that could have mattered.
"I need to get promoted," Abster said, after a moment. "Optio at minimum. Centurion eventually. I need rank or none of the rest is possible."
"That takes time."
"I know."
"Unless something happens that makes it go faster." Drusus said this flatly, not as a suggestion. As a statement of existing fact. "Things that make promotion go faster in the legions are usually things nobody wants to happen."
"I know that too."
Drusus looked at the far bank for a moment. At the fires. The slow shapes of people moving against the light. Then he picked up the cup he'd brought with him, drained it, and set it down on the wall.
"The pilum timing you mentioned this morning," he said. "How slow are we, actually."
"Two seconds on release. Maybe two and a half."
"Show me the calculation."
Abster showed him. Drusus listened without interrupting, which was how Drusus did most things. When Abster finished, Drusus nodded once.
"Dawn drill," he said. "I'll get Macro. He'll get Tullus."
"Corvus already—"
"I know. I'm saying I'll make sure they actually show up." A pause. "Macro will come if I ask him. He won't come for you yet. You haven't earned it with him."
Abster opened his mouth and closed it.
It was true. He knew it was true the moment Drusus said it — the specific embarrassment of a blind spot being named. He'd been thinking about Macro as an asset to be deployed, a piece of military capacity to be organized. He hadn't thought about whether Macro had any particular reason to follow someone he'd known for two years as a quiet, middle-ranking nobody who had suddenly started talking like a strategist.
"Thank you," he said.
Drusus made a sound that wasn't quite acknowledgment, collected his cup, and went back to the tent.
Abster stayed at the wall.
The river sound. The fires. His ankle had been bleeding since midday where the wire had finally worked through. He'd wrapped it with a strip of cloth and mostly not thought about it, which was maybe a metaphor for something but he was too tired to work out what.
He needed to be more careful about what he assumed he understood. He knew outcomes. He did not know people. These were not the same category of knowledge and he'd been treating them as if they were, and Drusus — with three children in Illyricum and a carved wooden figure and apparently a fully operational strategic mind that Abster had filed under steady and predictable — had just demonstrated the difference.
He'd been right about the roads. He'd been right about the grain. He'd been right about the wall timing and the pilum release.
But he'd been wrong about who was already ahead of him.
That was worth remembering.