Winter was coming early that year. Frost already rimed the grass at dawn, and the breath of men and horses hung white in the air like smoke from dying fires. The tribe had moved twice in the past month—always uphill, always to ground with better sight lines and fewer blind approaches. Seigmer had insisted on it in quiet conversations with his father. Reik Hans had grumbled, called it "old-woman caution," but he had moved the camp anyway. The boy who spoke like a Roman legate was no longer ignored.
Seigmer's body had hardened in the intervening weeks. The scrawny fourteen-year-old frame now carried lean muscle under the skin—shoulders broader from endless pull-ups, forearms corded from gripping branches and stones, legs thick from running forest trails until his lungs burned. He still looked young, but no one called him "boy" to his face anymore.
He had also become… strange in smaller ways.
Every morning, without fail, he knelt by the stream with a small bundle of frayed yew twigs he had split and chewed into fibrous brushes. He scrubbed his teeth until they gleamed, spat, then rinsed with water he had boiled the night before over his own small fire. The camp watched at first in open confusion.
"Why do you chew sticks like a beaver?" one of the younger warriors—Wulfric—called out one dawn.
Seigmer didn't look up. "Because rotting teeth kill more men than arrows. I've seen it."
He bathed daily now, even when the water was near freezing. Stripped to the waist, he scrubbed himself with handfuls of sand and pine needles until his skin reddened, then washed his hands before every meal. He refused to eat with unwashed fingers. When the women offered him bread, he made them wash first too. Griselda—his mother—started doing it without argument after the third day. The others followed slowly.
"Wodan's touch has made him clean-mad," Gundar muttered around the fire one night. "Next he'll want us to wipe our arses with leaves instead of moss."
But no one laughed too loudly. Not after they saw how the boy never sickened. No flux, no festering cuts, no fever that laid him low while others coughed blood through the cold nights. The whispers shifted from mockery to wary respect.
"Perhaps the gods favor the clean," an old spear-wife said. "My grandmother said the same."
Seigmer ignored the talk. Hygiene was SOP—standard operating procedure. Preventative maintenance. In his first life he had seen entire platoons crippled by dysentery because someone didn't wash hands after latrine duty. He would not lose men to preventable rot.
But the real test came on the day he unveiled the new weapon.
He had spent three weeks in secret, working in a small lean-to at the edge of camp. He used yew for the prod—strong, flexible, cut from a sapling he had selected himself. The stock was ash, shaped with an axe and finished with a drawknife. The trigger was the hardest part: a simple lever mechanism carved from horn, pinned with bone, connected to a revolving nut that held and released the string under tension. He had no steel springs, so he made do with twisted sinew ropes for the draw. Crude by 21st-century standards. Lethal by 4th-century ones.
He called it the "arcuballista minor"—a small crossbow. In his mind he still thought of it as a medieval arbalest prototype, scaled down for rapid production with tribal tools.
Testing day arrived on a gray morning when the wind cut like knives.
Seigmer carried the weapon openly now, wrapped in oiled hide. Fifty or sixty warriors gathered in a loose semicircle on a flat clearing half a mile from camp. Reik Hans stood at the center, arms folded, expression unreadable. Gundar and Wulfric flanked him. Women and older children watched from the trees.
Seigmer set up three targets at fifty paces—straw-stuffed Romans made from looted tunics and helmets on wooden frames. The paint was still fresh: red crests, white shields with black lightning bolts. Mockery in effigy.
He knelt, placed the crossbow on the ground, and demonstrated the loading sequence with deliberate slowness.
"First: place the bolt in the groove." He fitted a short, heavy quarrel—fletched with goose feathers, tipped with scavenged Roman iron.
"Second: hook the string." He set the stirrup at the front against the ground, placed one foot inside, and pulled upward with both hands and his back. The prod bent with a deep creak. Sinew groaned. The nut caught the string with an audible click.
"Third: aim. Fire."
He shouldered the stock, sighted down the crude groove, exhaled half his breath—and squeezed the trigger lever.
Thwack.
The bolt vanished in a blur. It punched through the first straw man's chest, exited the back, and buried itself halfway up the shaft in the tree behind. Splinters flew. Straw exploded outward.
A low murmur rippled through the watchers.
Seigmer reloaded—faster this time. Another bolt. Another squeeze.
Thwack.
This one took the second target in the throat. The head snapped back; the helmet flew off and rolled in the dirt.
The third shot he aimed lower—through both legs of the third effigy. The straw man buckled at the knees and toppled forward.
Silence for three heartbeats.
Then Wulfric let out a long, appreciative whistle.
"By the All-Father… that thing bites like a viper. No draw needed once it's spanned. A boy could kill a man at a hundred paces."
Gundar stepped forward, eyes narrowed. "How many can you make?"
Seigmer lowered the crossbow. "With enough yew and sinew? Ten by the next full moon. Fifty by spring—if we dedicate woodworkers and fletchers. The quarrels are simple. Iron tips we already have."
Reik Hans had not moved. His gaze stayed fixed on the three ruined straw Romans.
"You say this changes everything," he rumbled at last.
"It does," Seigmer answered. "A man with one of these can kill from cover. From horseback if we make lighter versions later. A line of fifty can put five hundred bolts in the air before the Romans close. They'll bleed before they ever reach our shields."
A ripple of excitement now—grins, low laughs, men slapping each other's shoulders.
But Hans raised one massive hand. Quiet fell instantly.
"You speak well, son. The weapon is clever. Deadly." He stepped closer until he towered over the boy. "But weapons are nothing without men who follow. And men follow strength… and trust."
He looked around at the faces—eager, doubtful, hungry.
"You want to lead them?"
Seigmer met his father's eyes without flinching. "I want fifty men. My own command. Not to raid for cattle or glory. To train. To drill. To prepare for what's coming. Give them to me, and in three months you'll have a war-band the Romans will curse by name."
Hans studied him for a long moment—the clean-shaven jaw (Seigmer had started scraping his face with a looted razor), the steady gaze, the crossbow still in his hands like an extension of his arm.
Then the Reik turned to the gathered warriors.
"Who will follow my son? Who will take his orders, run his drills, carry his new weapons?"
A beat of silence.
Then Gundar stepped forward. "I will."
Wulfric followed. "Me too."
One by one, then in small groups—younger men mostly, the restless ones, the ones who had seen the bolts punch through straw like it was flesh. Thirty… forty… forty-seven.
Hans raised a hand again.
"Enough. Fifty it is." He looked back at Seigmer. "They are yours. Fail them, and you fail me. Fail me, and you answer to my fist."
Seigmer nodded once. "I won't fail."
Hans grunted—almost a laugh. "See that you don't. Now go. Train your fifty. Make them killers."
As the crowd dispersed, Seigmer felt the weight settle on his shoulders. Not heavy. Familiar.
Command.
Responsibility.
The same burden he had carried in deserts and mountains half a world and sixteen centuries away.
He looked down at the crossbow in his hands.
Then up at the gray sky where the first snowflakes were beginning to drift.
Three months, he thought.
Three months to turn fifty barbarians into something Rome has never faced.