High Commander
Chapter three
Iheld on to the saddle with determination. I had survived getting onto the horse and was not going to let the rest of the journey undo that achievement.
The wind was cool and sharp and smelled like nothing I had a category for.
I had made a decision, somewhere between the field and the horse and the man currently taking up an inadvisable amount of my attention: I was going to operate on the assumption that this was real.
Everything I could observe suggested it was real.
The grass had been wet under my hands. The air smelled like something that had never shared space with a combustion engine. The morning sky had stars in it. The man behind me had blood on his armor that was not decorative.
More importantly, the alternative hypotheses were not operationally useful.
Suppose this was a hallucination.
Fine.
The correct response to a hallucination involving armed strangers, fortifications, and large predatory-looking mountains was not to begin experimenting with reality. The correct response was still to avoid danger, gather information, and refrain from doing anything catastrophically stupid.
Suppose I was dead.
In that case, the afterlife appeared to have a military frontier, a functioning chain of command, and a concerning number of references to the undead. The sensible course of action remained exactly the same.
Every path led to the same conclusion.
Act as though it was real.
In my study of military history, the commanders who survived almost never had perfect information. They accepted the uncertainty and decided anyway.
Freaking out would not alter the facts on the ground. It would only make me less capable of dealing with them.
Real.
Assume real.
Proceed accordingly.
I was committing.
I had arrived in another world.
***
The outpost had looked like a fortification from the field. Up close, it looked like something far more impressive than mere fortification.
It was not a castle. There were no towers built for aesthetics, no decorative stonework, no architectural flourishes that suggested the people who built it had been thinking about anything other than making it very difficult to get through those walls.
What it was, was substantial. Massive outer walls with the thickness of stone designed to absorb impact rather than deflect it.
Arrow slits positioned with the methodical regularity of someone who had calculated fields of fire instead of considering aesthetics.
Multiple interior walls created a layered defensive architecture I recognized immediately.
The same logic as a Roman military camp.
The same principle of forcing an attacker to fight for every inch rather than presenting a single point of failure.
Whoever had built this had been thinking about the problem correctly.
The walls themselves told the rest of the story. There were gaps in the crenellation where something had hit it.
Repeatedly.
The stonework bore the scars of sustained assault over what looked like years, and it had endured it all without apology.
Whoever was running this place had been defending it against serious force for a serious amount of time and had not been losing.
The knight called out as we approached, and the drawbridge began to lower. We crossed the moat too fast to study it properly, which made me try, anyway.
I looked.
Underwater, in the moat, lay the accumulated evidence of every assault that had failed to get past the walls above. Armor. Weapons. The scatter of things that had once belonged to people who had charged this position and failed.
And bones. A significant number of them, visible through the water.
I noticed, with immediate and deeply unwelcome recognition, that most of the skeletal remains appeared to be missing their heads.
I stared for a second, hoping additional observation would produce a less alarming conclusion. It did not.
There were skulls in the moat. The skulls were scattered across the bottom like they had landed there at speed. The rest of the skeletons were there too, but the skulls were nowhere near them.
I felt a small, involuntary tightening in my stomach.
It was one thing to study battlefields separated by two thousand years from my time, wrapped in cold academic language.
It was another thing entirely to look down and realize I was crossing over the physical evidence of people who had tried to get through these gates and had failed with extraordinary finality.
Whoever had attacked this place had died here.
And whoever defended it had developed a very specific solution to the problem.
The people holding this outpost were extremely good at what they did.
I decided, immediately and without reservation, that I intended to remain on their side of the walls.
***
I noticed that roughly a third of the soldiers within the fortress were women.
Not in support roles. Women were at the wall, in armor, carrying weapons, and moving with the same capability as the men beside them. A woman near the eastern forge was running two younger men through a weapons exercise. No one else questioned it either.
These were not the gender rules I would have expected from a civilization still utilizing swords and stone walls.
The work continued.
This was a garrison that had been on alert so long that alertness had become the baseline.
The interior smelled of horses and smoke. The stone underfoot was worn smooth along the high-traffic lines between the gate, the keep, and the eastern wall. A physical record of years of people moving between the same three points with purpose.
The outpost was alive with work. The roaring flames of a forge. The low exchange of soldiers rotating off the wall. The clank of armor being set down by someone who had been wearing it for hours and was not sorry to put it down.
Once we were through the gates, the knight dismounted from the horse. There was no wasted motion, no performance, just the action completed because it needed completing.
He turned to me, assessed the situation—me, on a horse, without an obvious means of descent—and reached up.
His hands found my waist, and he set me down, and what struck me wasn’t the gesture itself but the absence of strain.
He lifted me as if weight were irrelevant.
As if I belonged to the category of things that offer no resistance.
The ease of it was almost disorienting; I’d seen that same casual effortlessness in my own hands when I reached for something like a ketchup bottle.
Both hands spanned my waist, and then I was off the horse and on the ground. Practical, efficient, the problem resolved.
I had spent a long time thinking carefully about what I wanted from a man. I had done a thorough and honest inventory in the privacy of my own mind and arrived at conclusions.
One of those conclusions was that I wanted to be picked up like I weighed nothing by a man for whom I actually weighed nothing.
He had done it the way he probably did everything: without drama, without performance, because it was simply the most direct solution to the immediate problem.
He had already turned to give instructions to a soldier about the horse.
He began to remove his armor with the assistance of one of his men. The armor came off piece by piece, and what was underneath it was the body of a lifelong warrior.
He was tall, even by the standards of someone accustomed to conducting most conversations at an upward angle.
Dark hair, slightly disordered in the way of someone who had been wearing a helmet until recently and had not thought about what came after.
Dark eyes that landed on things with full attention.
Dark stubble shadowed his square jaw—the consequence of more important work while his face proceeded without him.
He was broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested the armor had been fitted to accommodate rather than create that width.
Muscle sat on him with quiet density, not exaggerated but undeniable, as if it had been built through repetition rather than intent.
It showed most when he moved: in the slow flex of his arms, the pull across his shoulders, and the power of a back shaped by work.
He wore it carelessly, as though he had no idea how good it looked.
Nothing about him looked ornamental. It was all function. Strength built for use.
He had a scar along his left forearm that had healed cleanly a long time ago, which told me he had been doing this long enough that his scars were no longer fresh.
The more I thought about his body, the more my mind turned to Conference Materials 2023.
Meanwhile, the man—my rescuer—was already across the yard giving orders. He turned and looked at me, and I realized no one had ever looked at me quite like that before.
He looked at me like he had stopped everything else to focus on me, like nothing else in the courtyard required his attention. His eyes moved over my face with an intensity he made no effort to conceal.
I had no framework for this. My entire academic career had been built in rooms that forgot I was there. I was not the woman men looked at like that. I was the woman men looked through on their way to looking at someone else.
I decided the most productive use of this moment was to ask his name.
“Scipio,” he said.
I stared at him in disbelief.
I had spent years studying Scipio Africanus. I had devoted my doctoral work to arguing that he was the most consequential military commander in Western history. And I had woken up in a field in another world and ridden to a military outpost on a horse with a man whose name was Scipio.
The universe had a sense of humor.
That said, there was no way I was going to call him Scipio.
“Skip,” I said.
I found the name faintly ridiculous attached to a man a foot taller than me who commanded a garrison on the edge of what looked like a very real war. I enjoyed that more than I should have.
He looked at me, perplexed.
“I’m going to call you Skip,” I said. “It suits you.”