After some time, a woman's face appears in his field of view. She's tall, brown hair flecked with dirt and drying blood, unadorned surcoat daubed with more of the same. Not visibly wounded, like the way he is steadily becoming less of as the minutes pass. She stares at him.

"You should get up if you're not going to die," she says at length. (Her English is accented, not like the French or the Latin of the church, but some more distant land.) "They'll be piling the corpses soon. You don't want to be at the bottom."

Well that's.

Sure.

An occurrence.

That could happen.

Sure.

"Yeah," he says, a little bemusedly, peeling himself off the ground. "Right. 'Course."

His helmet is a lost cause; his armor is no longer worthy of the name; his spear is probably somewhere within a quarter mile, but god knows where more precisely than that. He's still here, though, so.

He shrugs, and stands up in his damp gambeson, and holds out a muddy hand in greeting. "Hob Gadling. Uh. M'lady?"

"Kassandra." She shakes his hand briefly. "Is this your first brush with death, Hob Gadling?"

"On reflection I must admit I am not entirely sure." He has, in the past twenty years, now that he's thinking about it, smacked his head on a remarkable number of things, recovered from a possibly improbable number of minor stabbings, etcetera. "But - the first time I've been sure of it - yeah." Handshake, fascinated headtilt. "It is my absolute pleasure to meet you, Kassandra. I don't suppose you, also, met a... mysterious faerie or something of the sort?"

She is very pretty. And also very armed. Hob has ... roughly zero experience with coping with this combination of facts and may be staring a little.

Kassandra does tend to provoke that reaction- arming sword on her left hip, rondel at her right, spearhead in its leather sheath crossing her back, knives in both boots and up her sleeves. A well-defined muscular body, hands that know how to kill a man in thirty-six distinct ways, legs that add a further sixteen, a face that is, entirely literally, a classical beauty.

She's used to it by now. Two hundred lifetimes of accumulated experience.

"A 'mysterious faerie'? Not recently, no. Have you made a bargain with such a creature?"

Evidently yes, but -

"Um. I don't... think... I agreed to anything?" Concerned pause. "When you say not recently -?"

Heh.

"Before you were born, if you are only as old as you seem, Hob Gadling."

Well, in for a penny. "I'm fifty-nine," he says, with a wry smile. Under the prodigious quantity of mud he looks like he might possibly have recently been politely introduced to thirty. "But much the same to you, sounds like."

"You could say that. If you were prone to understatement."

"Can't say that I am! More of a wild exaggerations person, really. Much more fun. Can't place your accent, you from uhhhh - " he rifles through his brain for his extremely limited knowledge of locations other than England and lands on "Castile or something?"

She laughs. "A valiant effort, but the wrong side of the Mediterranean. I am Greek."

He has... ever... seen a map that went that far south-east. Maybe once. From a distance.

"Oh wow. That's - wow. Greece." He says this with the sort of starry-eyed breathless fascination that a modern person might associate more with places like Antarctica or possibly Atlantis. "What brings you all the way here?"

"I've a mind to travel west. See the lands across the ocean."

Under the circumstances she clearly doesn't mean Ireland, which as far as Hob was aware up to this moment is the west-est you can go. He's learning all sorts of things today.

" ... across the - that sounds like a hell of an adventure!"

"Yeah. I heard some interesting stories last time I was in Constantinople."

"Oh? Love to hear a story or two, if you're not in a rush! Perhaps you would allow me -"

(he pats himself down and realizes with a sigh that someone took his coin purse while he was unconscious with his ribcage in bits)

" - alas, I cannot buy you a drink. Terrible start to a friendship, sorry about that."

"Perhaps I could buy you one instead. Although... did you have any other possessions besides your purse you might want to keep hold of?"

Hob is a peasant soldier. He does not, as a rule, have the ability to obtain many nonconsumable objects, nor to retain ownership of any he cannot carry on his person and defend with violence. This isn't none, but it's not a lot, either, and he would not have thought that anyone would bother to take anything other than the coins from his not-a-corpse. On reflection this was obviously stupid; he himself got several of the items of clothing he is wearing that way.

He blinks, and checks - it would otherwise not have occurred to him to do so for some hours - and his face falls.

" ... apparently yes. This is going to sound stupid probably but I had. Um. A rock?" 

"A unique rock?"

"Maybe? I think I could definitely tell it from a similar one? Sorta grey-reddish, about so big?" He gestures with a hand.

It's not an enormously valuable rock. It's a flattish, palm-sized raw chunk of common british jasper, worth at best a few coppers to a jewelrymaker. It would not be difficult to find a very similar one lying around in a field or forest. But it wouldn't really be the same one.

She hums thoughtfully, and her face goes a little blank. (Far overhead, a circling eagle screams out a hunting cry.)

"...I think I have it. Next to the priests' tent, where their assistants are dividing the spoils of the fallen."

................ oh. Okay.

Hob blinks rapidly as he attempts to assimilate this very cool and also terrifying occurrence into his rapidly disintegrating model of the world, and nods, shifting his trajectory thataway. It's still mostly dark, and he's quiet with his armor off, and covered in mud besides; he thinks he probably won't be noticed, or at least won't be recognized, if he's fast.

"Shan't ask how you'd know," it's not polite to accuse a witch of witchcraft to her face, is it, "but thank you."

"You are welcome, Hob Gadling. Do you wish for my assistance?"

"I think I've got it! Just gotta go look extremely uninteresting for a few moments here, and, you know, I can't really imagine you not being incredibly interesting?" Grin. "If I'm not back sharpish I expect I won't turn down a heroic rescue, though."

"As you say. I will watch and wait."

Out of some combination of deep emotional investment in the task and an ambient desire to impress the extremely cool immortal witch-knight, he's exactly as careful as he would have been without backup, or maybe even moreso. Hob pads softly between the tents in the dark, avoiding the wandering eyes of people who might think him a ghost, much like - well, like a ghost. (Soldiering as a profession only gets you so far, between wars. He has been a thief, too, in this first life.)

In a few minutes, as promised, he returns, looking very pleased with himself. He is holding the described rock lovingly to his chest with one hand, and spinning a dagger between the fingers of the other. 

"Have to track down your own things often, or just in the habit of doing very kind favors for new friends?" he wonders.

"Let us say the latter. What is passed around tends to return, in my experience."

What an incredible sort of person to be. Hob wants to be her when he is a thousand. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Now then. I believe you mentioned getting a drink?"

"I would be delighted." They shouldn't need to go terribly far to find one; where there are armies, there are opportunists selling alcohol. It might be rather harder, though, if she has anything resembling standards.

It's still the aftermath of a battle. Standards are negotiable for a while.

Excellent. Then drinks they shall have. 

Hob tucks away the knife as soon as he's sure all his fingers are working correctly, but keeps holding the rock. He almost lost it and now he's kind of nervous to let it out of his hand, much less his sight.

"Keepsake of someone?" Kassandra asks.

Wistful smile. "Yeah. My little sister. Used to love to bring me random stuff she found in the woods. Mostly frogs, actually, but those are a bit harder to keep in your pocket for decades." 

"Mm. I had a sister like that. She was more into snails, though. Liked to feed them to Ikaros."

"Aww," charmed giggle. Now delightedly imagining two small children in a pile of frogs and snails. Possibly throwing them at each other. "Ikaros is - was? - a ... dog?"

"My eagle."

Ah yes. Witch familiar. That's normal and fine.

"Oh! Goodness. What's it like having an eagle? I've seen hunting hawks," from a considerable distance, "but those're... smaller."

"You know, I'm not entirely sure how to answer that. I've never not had Ikaros. He watches my back, he scouts. He is my friend and companion."

"Huh. Sounds lovely, that."

"Makes the long years more bearable."

"Makes sense! Though I have every hope that I will not find them to require bearing at all, myself."

His broad grin says he absolutely knows he is tempting fate. It's worked out great for him so far, after all.

"I hope you can keep that attitude up."

"I'm sure going to try. Come say hi again next time you're in my neck of the woods and you can find out how I do at it, eh?"

"I shall look forward to it, Hob Gadling."

"Likewise."

And in the meantime he's happy to hold her attention before she goes as long as is reasonable. Or slightly unreasonable, really, they're immortal and have all the time in the world. If she has any stories she'd care to tell of Constantinople or suchlike he will be the world's most interested and attentive active listener.

(Plausibly deniable admiring gazing aside, he is determinedly not flirting, though. In his available cultural vocabulary, to do so would be to imply insulting things about her class and/or gender that he absolutely does not believe or care to imply.)

She has a great many stories, of palaces and walls and monuments, ships and merchant caravans, trackless deserts, lush valleys, forbidding mountains, vast steppes, icy wastelands. Emperors and queens and herders and farmers and blacksmiths and potters and mercenaries and guardsmen. Rivers she's swum in and cliffs she's climbed, fortresses she's assaulted and damsels she's rescued. Enough stories to carry the night through into the next day, if he can stay awake so long.

He is enthralled, and will with grest enthusiasm stay up, occasionally shaking himself, literally until he loses consciousness against his will.

Unfortunately, thanks to the war and the nearly dying this morning and all that, he last slept properly about two weeks ago - for that matter he slept at all more than forty hours ago - and he will, in fact, lose consciousness against his will around midnight, mumbling something vaguely apologetic on his way to faceplanting on the table.

Fair enough. (Wonder if he'll ever get the trick of staying awake for arbitrary periods, or if that's just a her thing.)

Kassandra will cart him over to her tent and dump him on the cot to sleep. No reason to let the fellow be rolled again.

When Hob awakens, she'll be sitting on the ground out front, sharing a few strips of jerky with the large golden-brown eagle perched on her shoulder.

Zzzzz coze warm zzzzzz wait what the fuck.

Hob hasn't slept in anything even loosely resembling a bed for months, and was fully expecting to wake up having been tossed unceremoniously into a muddy corner and/or ditch by the barkeep after Kassandra left. This would not be an uncommon experience and he has survived it just fine before. (... wait, has he? ...yeah, that happened to him like twice a week in his early twenties, well before any meetings with mysterious dark strangers, he probably survived it in a nonmagical way.) 

... wow is this Kassandra's tent. Did she carry him here. He is admittedly not a particularly large guy but an entire unconscious human person is not trivial to sling over your shoulder. She is so cool. 

(He is going to get to be that cool someday, he thinks, gleefully. Life is grand. Time to go live more of it.)

"Good morning!" he chirps, plopping down next to Kassandra. "This must be Ikaros?"

"It is, yes. Say hello, Ikaros."

Ikaros turns a gimlet stare on Hob, but doesn't immediately attempt to peck his eyes out or eviscerate him, so that probably counts as a hello.

Oh wow what a Creature. He wants to fight it and inevitably lose horribly and find out whether talons feel different from knives. ... Right, that was actually insane, get your shit together, Gadling.

"Hello! You are magnificent!" he says to Ikaros, instead of any of that.

Hmmm. Ikaros tilts his head this way and that, examining Hob. Then, deciding he's not a threat and is sufficiently impressed, the eagle goes back to ignoring him.

Fair. He in turn returns his attention to Kassandra.

"Thanks for hauling me off the table last night apparently. I promise that last story was just as interesting as all the others, I've just had a really long week."

"You looked like you could use better sleep than the tabletop could offer. Or a ditch."

"Might'a slept just as long in a ditch, tired as all that, but not half so well, yeah."

"Take it where you can get it. But don't settle, if you don't have to."

"Seems like wise advice, I'll bear it in mind."

"You do that. Are you returning to England from here?"

Huh. He... could go somewhere else, couldn't he. Seventy-four years is plenty of time to get back to London from anywhere in the world, probably, even if he's clearly been envisioning the world smaller than it really is. But in the even shorter term than that -

"Think so, yeah. At home I know how to find a good merchant caravan to sign on with and all that sort of thing." 

"Would you like to travel together? At least that far."

Ooh. That sounds like it would involve, like, a solid 97% less likelihood of somehow ending up at the bottom of the Channel on his way back.

"I would be honored and delighted."

"Then I'll pack up the tent, if you want to try to scrounge up some breakfast for yourself."

"Sure, can do."

Finding food in a sprawling army camp is in some ways easier and in other ways harder than in a town: the locals are gone and the fields are muddy and scorched, but the people in charge of this whole mess are devoting a lot of work, on purpose, to supply chain logistics, because if you don't do that you do not have an army. So hunting (unless, presumably, you are equipped with a two-thousand-year-old magic hunting eagle; Kassandra can probably extract edible creatures from even this environment) is probably out of the question, but in the wake of heroically winning the battle no one is being enormously stingy about rations. 

He comes back quite encaloried and reasonably hydrated, chewing cheerfully on the salty tail end of a dried fish. He has no way to transport liquids but he's now at least got some dry food squirreled into his pockets.

Is the tent also magic, like the eagle, or does it seem to have been folded up in a basically normal way?

It's perfectly ordinary canvas, compressed for transport in the normal fashion.

"No objections to leaving in advance of the army?"

Weirdly reassuring of it.

"I don't think so, should I?"

"Probably not. Any charges of technically-desertion would also be complicated by your technical-death."

"Heh. Too right they would."

North it is then, to Calais and a ship across the Channel.

It's a couple of days' walk to Calais, during which Hob chatters incessantly and enthusiastically about the weather, his family, the wildlife, the soldier friends who think he's dead now, exciting new technologies he's heard about (many of which Kassandra may recognize as things that were invented centuries ago but the English only just somewhat recently started using, such as the compass), cool plants he spots randomly that he hasn't seen before, etc., etc., unless specifically instructed to stop.

Stories for stories. Can't get a fairer trade than that.

... and Westminster Abbey, which has been in progress since before he was born and maybe if he lives long enough he'll get to see it done, and gosh what a neat sparrow he's never seen one quite that shade, and the elaborate romantic drama of the teenagers from his old village who all died shortly after experiencing it but it was really cute while it lasted, and ... 

... ooooh, boats.

"Are they going to be weird at you about women on boats being bad luck, do you suppose, or do you usually find that being objectively terrifying solves this problem?"

"Being objectively terrifying solves a great many problems, and money solves most that remain. And if it comes down to it, the Channel is not so wide and rafts are not hard to build."

It's not... so....

Hob sort of stands there for a minute, staring out across the water. It was raining, when they came across the other way.

"...Huh. You sure can see Dover from here."

"The world is both larger and smaller than we think it is, sometimes."

Overhead, Ikaros screams a hunting cry.

Nod, nod.

Hob looks up, at the sound. "Does that mean he sees something or just that he's having a nice time flying?"

"Looking for a fish, I'd guess. It's been a while since we've seen the sea."

"Oh. Well then I am very happy for him and I hope he finds a fish."

"Indeed." Kassandra glances around the harbor, eyes lighting on a crane. "We should give him time to hunt before we find a ship, I think... Tell me, Hob Gadling, would you enjoy seeing the world as a bird does?"

"I enjoy most things, so probably? ... I am fascinated by the sense that this is not a hypothetical question."

"Follow me." She leads the way over to the base of the crane and after a quick check to make sure her weapons are secure, jumps up to secure a hand- and foothold between the wooden slats on the side and starts climbing.

Is that. Possible for him to do.

... Eh, fuck it, if he falls he'll be fine. Allons-y, as the French say.

It's not like this is freeclimbing up a hundred-foot cliff face in the dead of night to storm an enemy fortress. All he needs to do is put his limbs where Kassandra does, until they can scramble up on top of the boom arm and walk out to the end of it.

He can indeed manage not to fall using this strategy! 

" - oh," Hob murmurs, struck quieter than Kassandra has seen him yet, when he's standing where he's been pointed, and looking out on the channel, at the bustle of the port below. The sky and the sea and the people, just large enough to be distinguishable, small enough to be more numerous than you can usually see all at once. Going about their lives, fishing and smithing and shipping, the infinite work of humanity. A thousand different ways to be that he hasn't tried yet but will, someday, because he has all the time in the world.

It's beautiful. 

"Perspective, Hob Gadling. How do you like this view?"

"Never seen anything quite like it, I think. Is it still this beautiful when you've seen a thousand thousand more things?"

"Each time, it is unique."

"... yeah?"

He was honestly kind of expecting to hear 'no, you're going to have to try harder than that to enjoy immortality, dumbass.'

"I look forward to seeing it many times, then." 

"People are always changing. The same things are done, the same dramas enacted, but by new hands and with new feelings."

Someday maybe he is going to be that good at saying lovely true things poetically?

"...yeah."

It's something you pick up over time.

"Take all the time you need. Let me know when you're ready to return to the ground.

It'll be a little bit, but not a long bit. There's more wonders to see.

The easiest way down is, of course, to jump.

And if he does it right, he can even avoid breaking any bones.

Wheeeeeeeeeee-

ow.

He does know how to fall properly, in principle, but has never done it from this height, is not a perfect mimic, and accordingly has broken his wrist.

"... and now I know how not to do that."

"Try aiming for soft things," she advises. "Like haystacks. Do you want help splinting that?"

"Wouldn't turn it down."

Kassandra does have a good bit of first aid practice, fortunately.

Having friends is very good.

When one can manage it.

Next: boat?

Boat. Unless he's decided he'd rather swim.

Tempting but no.

Then Kassandra will hire them a captain. She's not shy about spending money freely- one can always earn more.

Kassandra is a delight with good and correct money opinions.

Taking the long perspective is immortality's advantage.

It has many advantages and this is certainly one.

Boat!

It's tempting, briefly, to spend the whole short trip admiring the scenery, but in fact as soon as the ship weighs anchor he is promptly distracted by the novel opportunity (thanks to not being stuck shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other soldiers packed into rows in the rain) to instead go running around the deck in the sunshine attempting to befriend everything that moves.

He does not know anything about any boat-specific tasks, which may slightly interfere with this strategy, but he is competent to perform the task Lift Heavy Object and he will gleefully volunteer to do so if it will encourage people to tell him about their lives, their families, their favorite songs, cool stuff that happened to them while sailing, etcetera.

It being a fine, clear day and the crossing a simple one, the captain does not object too strenuously. The crew are mostly... bemused, in a observing-puppy sort of way.

Eh, works for him. Being treated as some sort of small dumb Creature is pretty much just the basic peasant experience. 

Soon enough, they're back to Merrie Olde England. Kassandra hands over the balance of the passage fee, and they can be off.

Ah, England, his beloved home. Less Olde and more Merrie by the day, if Hob gets his way. 

Next item on the agenda, getting from Dover to London, where one can find passage in all sorts of directions. It's a long trip, especially if you can't afford to either buy or keep a horse. 

"If it were just me I'd find somebody to be a caravan guard for, that work for you?" 

"Entirely acceptable. Though I'm fairly sure we'll have to settle for less than our market value."

"Our... what, sorry?" 

In his (admittedly fairly limited) experience, prices for things are set by whoever is in charge deciding that that is how much they will pay, which is sometimes related to how much they can get away with but not really related to anything to do with the thing having an objective value. When he was a small child people in his village went to jail for trying to demand higher wages. 

"The amount of money that, theoretically, someone would be willing to pay to ensure we were on the side of guarding the goods rather than stealing them."

Puzzled blink. "Like if you threatened them?" People do often give you more money if you threaten them but this also frequently causes you to get arrested if you are not Kassandra. 

"It's more of a metaphorical threat."

He's not... one hundred percent sure what a metaphor is either... but he'll take her word for it.

"Huh. All right. Well, it'll be enough to be getting on with either way, I imagine."

"Yes, I don't think it will be a problem."

Then off to find such a caravan!

Does Hob want to do the negotiating or shall Kassandra?

He will do this one! He is familiar with the process and is reasonably up to date about what's considered a reasonable wage for caravan guards versus a ripoff.

And also it would be nice to feel useful, Kassandra is so cool that he's starting to feel a little selfconscious.

Fair enough. She will defer to his expertise here.

Then he can acquire them a couple guard spots on a merchant caravan that's leaving in two days, bound for London.