Heart of Teutonburg - 4. Chapter 4

Word came the following morning, brisk and businesslike, the way all of Varus’s messages seemed to arrive regardless of what they contained. A boy from the governor’s household appeared at the villa’s gate before Marcus had finished his bread and honey, bearing instructions rather than an invitation: the gymnasium, at the fourth hour, weather permitting. Arminius and his cousin would meet them there.

Marcus read the note twice, though there was nothing in it that required a second reading, and found he could not entirely account for the way his pulse had picked up over so plain a summons.

“You’ll want your old tunic, not the good one,” Lucius said, not looking up from the strap he was adjusting on his own sandal. “Sand ruins good wool. And eat properly this morning. A man wrestles worse on an empty stomach, whatever the poets say about a lean and hungry looking noble.”

Marcus managed something that might have been a laugh. He did not confess the truth of his nerves, which had less to do with sand or wrestling than with the prospect of standing in a gymnasium full of Roman youths who had spent their boyhoods at drill while he had spent his at the cithara, and doing so, this time, in front of someone whose good opinion had begun, without his quite deciding to allow it, to matter.

They walked together as far as the gymnasium’s outer colonnade, Lucius pointing out nothing this time, uncharacteristically quiet, until they reached the entrance and found Arminius already waiting, alone.

“Ingomar is being fitted for a proper tunic,” Arminius said, by way of greeting, an edge of dry amusement in it. “He informs me his own is unsuitable for Roman eyes. I informed him that Roman eyes have seen a great deal worse than travel-worn wool, but he is stubborn in the way of all young men who think a first impression can be managed by effort alone.” He glanced at Lucius. “Centurion. Varus asked that I borrow you for the hour, if the boys can be trusted alone with a wrestling pit and their own good sense.”

Lucius’s eyes flicked to Marcus, some brief and unreadable calculation passing behind them, before he inclined his head. “They’ll manage.” Then, to Marcus, low enough that it might have been meant only for him, “be wary and choose your word judiciously.”

And then he was gone, drawn off with Arminius toward some quieter colonnade, and Marcus was left alone at the gymnasium’s threshold to wait.

Ingomar arrived a few minutes later, tugging without much enthusiasm at the unfamiliar drape of a borrowed tunic, and the sight of his obvious discomfort with it eased something in Marcus’s chest he had not realized was tight.

“They tell me this is proper,” Ingomar said, by way of greeting, plucking at the fabric with open suspicion. “I do not trust anything Rome calls proper before I have seen what it costs a man to wear it.”

“It costs nothing but looking slightly ridiculous for an hour,” Marcus said. “I promise it comes off easily enough once we’re inside.”

Something flickered across Ingomar’s face, there and gone, that might have been amusement. “Then lead on. I am told you know this place better than I know my own hall.”

The gymnasium opened before them in a wash of sound and heat and motion, sand-colored light falling through high openings onto a yard where a dozen small dramas of Roman manhood were being enacted at once. Wrestlers grappled in pairs near the center, grunting and shifting for purchase, sand clinging to oiled skin already darkening with effort. Along one wall, boys not much younger than Marcus traded blows with wooden practice swords under the bored eye of a trainer who corrected footwork with a stick more often than words. The air carried the mingled smell of oil and sweat and hot stone, underscored by the metallic tang of the strigils scraping grime from skin near the entrance, where older men stood in unhurried conversation while attendants worked over them.

Marcus felt the familiar tightening low in his stomach, the sense of walking into a room built entirely to measure him against a standard he had never quite managed to meet. He had trained here before, dutifully, unremarkably, competent enough not to shame his father and not nearly gifted enough to be noticed for it. Today the measuring felt sharper, though he could not have said whether that was Ingomar’s presence beside him or simply his own nerves finding a new excuse.

It had been Marcus’s idea, the loincloths. A small mercy, he had told himself, arranging it quietly with the attendant before Ingomar arrived, some modest accommodation for a guest unused to Roman custom. He had not examined too closely whether the mercy was meant for Ingomar or for himself.

His father would have called Roman nudity in a gymnasium a Greek indulgence, one more soft habit absorbed along with Athens’s philosophers and a taste for wine cut too sweet, the kind of thing proper Roman men had once done without and ought to still. Marcus did not entirely share the conviction, but he had grown up under its weight all the same, and arranging for the linen felt, in some small and unexamined way, like keeping faith with a household rule he had never once seen written down.

For a while it seemed to matter little. They stripped down together in the low stone antechamber, the linen wound and knotted about their hips, and Marcus felt almost steady, almost equal to the morning ahead. But the palaestra beyond was full of bare skin, oiled shoulders and bare thighs moving through the sand in wrestling holds and footwork drills, and it was not long before Marcus caught the glances, quick and assessing, the kind that catalogued a stranger’s modesty as thoroughly as his cousin’s had catalogued a boy’s worth at a banquet two nights before. Foreign, the glances said. Or worse, ashamed.

Ingomar noticed too, though nothing in his face suggested he minded it either way. He watched the room a moment, the way he seemed to watch every room, taking its measure before deciding what it deserved of him, and then, without ceremony, without so much as breaking off whatever he had been saying about the strange Roman custom of wrestling in sand rather than grass, he untied the linen at his hip and let it fall.

He did not look self-conscious doing it. That was the thing Marcus could not quite get past, turning it over even as he tried not to stare, tried not to seem to be staring. There was no bravado in the gesture, no point being made for the benefit of the watching Romans, nothing of the deliberate ease some men wore like a second skin precisely because it was not natural to them. Ingomar simply no longer had use for the thing, the way a man might set down a walking stick once the ground leveled out beneath him, and moved on to whatever came next without a backward glance at what he’d left behind.

Marcus stood a moment longer in his own linen, feeling it suddenly, absurdly heavier than it had any right to be. He told himself it changed nothing, that a scrap of cloth was no measure of a man’s worth in a room built for wrestling and drill and the display of Roman virtues he had never quite managed to embody. But some small, unhelpful part of him understood that Ingomar’s ease was not really the freedom to be envied. It was the proof, plain and unbothered, that Ingomar had never needed the armor Marcus was still quietly, uselessly, wearing.

He untied the linen himself a moment later, if only so the difference between them would stop announcing itself so loudly. It did not make him feel any less measured, weighed, and found wanting. But it was, at least, a wanting he had chosen for himself, rather than one the linen had chosen for him.

They had not gone far into the yard before a voice called out, bright with the particular carelessness of a young man who had never once doubted his welcome in a room.

“Pulcher! I wondered if Varus meant to keep you chained to a cithara forever.” Quintus Aemilius Bibulus detached himself from a knot of wrestlers near the sand pit, grinning in the easy, faintly proprietary way he had always had toward Marcus, the grin of a boy who had beaten him at every childhood game that mattered and never quite let him forget it. His eyes moved past Marcus to Ingomar, cataloguing him with open, unhurried curiosity. “And who’s this? Don’t tell me you’ve brought your own opponent, since none of us will do.”

“Ingomar,” Marcus said. “Cherusci. He’s here with Arminius, seeing something of the city.”

“Seeing something of the city,” Quintus repeated, as though the phrase amused him. “Well. There’s no better way to see a Roman than to grapple with one. Care to try your luck?” He said it lightly enough, but there was a testing edge beneath it, the kind of question that was never really a question among boys raised the way Quintus had been raised, and Marcus felt his stomach tighten on Ingomar’s behalf before he had any right to.

Ingomar considered him for a moment with the same unhurried attention he seemed to give everything, weighing the offer the way he might weigh an unfamiliar road before deciding whether it was worth walking. “I do not know your Roman holds,” he said at last. “Only my own. If that is an unfair trade, tell me now and save us both the sand in our teeth.”

Quintus laughed, delighted, already stepping toward the ring others were clearing for them. “Unfair trades are half the fun. Come on, then.”

Marcus found a place at the edge of the sand beside two other youths he knew only slightly, and told himself the tightness in his chest was concern for a guest thrown carelessly into an unfamiliar contest, nothing more complicated than that. It was not entirely convincing, even to him.

The match itself did not go the way the gathering crowd seemed to expect. Quintus was strong and well drilled, quick with the practiced grips Marcus had seen him use a hundred times to fold other boys neatly into the sand, but Ingomar moved in a register the Roman holds had no answer for, sliding beneath a grip rather than fighting it, using Quintus’s own momentum to tip him rather than meeting force with force. There was nothing showy in it. He did not seem to be performing for the ring of watching youths the way Quintus plainly was. He simply moved, economical and unhurried, the way Marcus imagined a stag might move through undergrowth too dense for a larger, clumsier animal to follow, and within a few exchanges Quintus was on his back in the sand, blinking up at the sky with an expression of genuine, almost boyish surprise.

A ripple of laughter went through the watching youths, quickly swallowed, the kind of laughter that could turn on its object as easily as it had turned toward him. Quintus pushed himself up, spitting sand, his grin gone thinner and more effortful than before. “Beginner’s luck. Barbarian holds, no rules to them at all.”

“No rules,” Ingomar agreed, without any apparent offense, extending a hand to help him up, which Quintus, after a beat, accepted. “Only what works. I did not think Romans minded methods, only results.”

It was said without malice, almost mildly, but Marcus caught the way it landed anyway, a small precise blade wrapped in courtesy, and had to look down at his own feet to keep from smiling too openly.

Ingomar’s eyes found his a moment later, over the heads of the dispersing crowd, and there was something in the look, some private and specific warmth meant only for Marcus, that felt entirely different from the guarded curiosity he had shown the room a moment before. Marcus’s own pulse, already unsteady from the match, did not settle any faster for it.

“Your turn,” Ingomar said, low enough that it was almost only for him. “Unless you would rather keep both feet on solid ground a while longer.”

“I think,” Marcus said, “I would rather not humiliate myself in front of an audience twice in one morning.”

“A wise policy.” Something almost gentle crossed Ingomar’s face. “I would not think less of you for it. Teach me something instead,” Ingomar said, “since you will not fight me. You said I used only my own holds against your friend. Show me one of yours, if you think them worth knowing.”

It was not what Marcus had expected, and he felt the shape of the morning shift beneath him, the strange vertigo of being asked to be useful in a place that had never once made him feel that way. “I’m not much of a wrestler,” he warned. “You’ve already seen the best of what this yard has to offer, and he ended up on his back for it.”

“I did not ask for the best. I asked for what you know.”

There was no mockery in it, only a kind of plain expectation that Marcus found he could not disappoint. He stepped closer, closer than the morning had yet required of them, and found himself suddenly, acutely aware of the narrow distance between his own bare shoulder and Ingomar’s.

“Here,” Marcus said, and reached for Ingomar’s wrist to guide it into the proper grip, the ordinary mechanics of teaching abruptly complicated by the fact that his fingers were now closed around another man’s skin, warm and faintly damp with the morning’s heat, a pulse ticking steady beneath his thumb. “Rome doesn’t care for your grip low on the forearm. It gives too much leverage away. Higher, near the elbow, like this.” He adjusted the angle, aware of his own voice sounding steadier than he felt. “And your feet want to be wider than that, or the first man who knows what he’s doing will have you in the sand before you’ve finished thinking about it.”

Ingomar shifted his stance to match, his eyes on Marcus rather than on his own feet, which was not, strictly speaking, how the lesson was meant to go. “Like this?”

“Wider.” Marcus set a hand briefly at his inner thigh to correct the angle, an entirely practical touch that nonetheless seemed to take considerably longer than it needed to, and felt something in his own chest tighten at the ease with which Ingomar allowed the correction, no resistance in it at all, only a stillness that felt, absurdly, like trust. “Good. Now, when I move against you, don’t meet it straight on. Turn with it.”

He demonstrated slowly, a shallow, unhurried push against Ingomar’s shoulder that Ingomar turned into exactly as instructed, and for a moment they stood chest to chest in the loose, testing grip of the exercise, close enough that Marcus could feel the warmth coming off Ingomar’s skin, could see the fine scar on his forearm from this distance, pale and old against paler skin. Neither of them moved to step back.

“Again,” Ingomar said, low, and Marcus was fairly certain the word had very little to do with wrestling.

He pushed again, meaning it as instruction and finding it had become, somewhere in the last few exchanges, something closer to a game neither of them had agreed to name. Ingomar turned with it as before, but this time his hand came up to Marcus’s own shoulder in return, not quite the countermove the form called for, more an anchor than an attack, and for one unbalanced instant Marcus felt the whole weight of him, solid and near, before some old, half-forgotten instinct from a hundred childhood matches with Livia took over without his permission and he dropped his weight low and turned his hip, and Ingomar, caught between the correct response and whatever had actually been happening between them, went down into the sand.

He did not go down hard. He went down almost gently, drawing Marcus with him by the shoulder he had never let go of, so that Marcus found himself above him, body to body, in the sand, breathing harder than a single exchange should have warranted, close enough to see the faint startled amusement breaking across Ingomar’s face, the pale grey-blue eyes bright with something that was not quite laughter and not quite anything Marcus had a name for.

“You said you were not much of a wrestler,” Ingomar said, a little breathless himself.

“I’m not.” Marcus was abruptly, sharply aware of every point where they were touching, and of how long he had let the moment stretch before pulling back, sitting up in the sand with more haste than dignity, brushing grit from his palms that did not need brushing. “You let me.”

“Perhaps.” Ingomar did not move to rise quite as quickly. “Or perhaps you are better than you think, and simply have no one at home willing to tell you so.”

Neither of them said anything further on the matter. They rose and made their way toward the strigil-bearers at the yard’s edge.

Behind them, low enough that it was not quite meant to carry but did anyway, one of the youths who had watched the match murmured something to a companion about barbarian tricks and Roman softness both, a comment aimed loosely enough that it might have belonged to either Ingomar or Marcus, or both at once. Marcus felt the old, familiar heat climb his neck, the sting of being weighed and found decorative rather than useful that he had carried out of the banquet hall two nights before. But beneath it, unexpectedly, ran something sharper and less familiar: an anger on Ingomar’s behalf that burned hotter than anything he had ever felt on his own.

He said nothing. There was nothing yet to be gained by saying it. But he filed the voice away all the same, and found, walking beside Ingomar toward the baths a short while later, that he was no longer entirely certain whose honor he had come to the gymnasium to defend.

The baths lay beyond a shaded colonnade, close enough that the walk between them took only a few minutes, and yet the change in Marcus’s chest was immediate, as though he had crossed some threshold more significant than a mere change of room. The noise of the gymnasium fell away behind them, the grunts and challenges and the particular restless energy of young men proving themselves to one another, replaced by something quieter, warmer, the soft echo of water against marble and the low, unhurried murmur of men who had already finished proving anything for the day.

Ingomar walked beside him in silence for a stretch, and Marcus, still turning over the strange, unresolved current of the wrestling yard, found he did not mind it. There was a kind of ease in silence shared rather than filled.

“You did not answer him,” Ingomar said finally, as they reached the entrance. “The one who spoke of barbarian tricks and Roman softness.”

Marcus felt his face warm. He had not realized Ingomar had caught the words at all, let alone marked that Marcus had heard them too. “There was nothing to answer. He wasn’t wrong to think it, even if he was ugly about saying it.”

“Wasn’t he?” Ingomar’s tone was mild, but there was something underneath it, testing the ground the way he tested everything. “You wrestled well enough, in the end. Better than you believed you would.”

“I meant the rest of it.” Marcus kept his eyes ahead, on the doorway, on anything that was not Ingomar’s face. “That I’m soft. That I don’t belong in a place like that, or where I’m bound for after.”

Ingomar was quiet a moment, long enough that Marcus glanced sideways despite himself, and found the pale eyes considering him with something that was not quite disagreement and not quite pity either.

“Among my people,” Ingomar said at last, “a man who can turn another man’s strength back against him, who can bend rather than break, is not called soft. He is called dangerous, in the way that matters more.” A faint, wry tilt of his mouth. “Your Rome measures men only by how hard they can strike. It is not the only measure there is. It is only the one this city has decided to worship.”

Marcus did not have an answer ready for that, and found, walking into the warm, echoing dim of the baths, that he was glad not to need one.

They passed first through the frigidarium, its cold plunge pool ringed with statuary, a discus thrower caught mid-turn, a youthful athlete binding a victor’s ribbon at his brow, pale figures watching the water with the same unhurried patience Marcus imagined the gods themselves might have, and did not linger there, both by unspoken agreement quickening their steps toward the warmer rooms beyond.

The chamber opened into steam and soft light, sun falling in long shafts through high vents onto water the color of pale jade, the marble underfoot slick and warm beneath bare feet.

A handful of other men moved through the far end of the pool, their voices reduced by distance and steam to a low, indistinct murmur, and for the first time since the gymnasium’s crowded yard, Marcus felt something in his shoulders loosen that he had not realized was drawn tight.

They eased into the water without much ceremony, the heat of it a welcome ache against muscles that had spent the morning in unfamiliar use, and for a while neither of them spoke, content to let the water and the quiet do their slow work. Marcus watched steam curl and dissolve against the vaulted ceiling, aware of Ingomar a short distance away, near enough that the silence between them felt companionable rather than empty.

“Tell me of your gods,” Ingomar said eventually, startling him a little with the directness of it. He nodded toward the far wall, where one of the mural showed a figure with a bow in one hand and something like a lyre in the other, half lost in steam and shifting light. “That one. Arminius says he matters to you Romans, but he did not say why.”

“Apollo.” Marcus found himself glad for the question, glad for something to say that was not about wrestling yards or watching eyes. “God of music, and prophecy, and the sun. My mother says he values the lyre as much as the bow. That the two aren’t opposites, whatever my father believes some days.” He hesitated, then added, quieter,

“I’ve always liked that about him more than the rest of it. That he doesn’t have to choose.”

“And you do,” Ingomar said. Not quite a question.

“I don’t know anymore.” Marcus trailed his fingers through the water, watching the small ripples spread and fade. “I used to think I did. Now I’m meant to go to the frontier and be a soldier’s ward, and somewhere in all that, still be whatever it is that made the cithara worth playing in the first place. I don’t know if both things fit in one life.”

“They can.” Ingomar’s voice had gone lower, more careful, the tone he used, Marcus was beginning to learn, when he meant to say something true rather than merely polite. “We have men among my people who are warriors and something else besides. Poets. Singers. Men who speak with the gods in the sacred groves and are no less trusted with a spear for it. Rome likes to believe such things are contradictions. They are not, where I come from. They are only a man, being the whole of what he is.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“It is not simple. It is only true.” Ingomar’s mouth curved, faint and unhurried. “Simple and true are not the same thing, whatever your senators like to pretend.”

Marcus laughed, surprised into it, and something in the sound seemed to ease whatever careful distance had held between them since the wrestling yard. He glanced over, meaning to say something further, and found Ingomar already watching him, the pale grey-blue eyes unguarded in a way Marcus had not yet seen them, stripped of the wariness he wore in crowded rooms, stripped of everything but a quiet, open attention that Marcus had no ready defense against.

He was abruptly, uncomfortably aware of the water, of how little of him it concealed, of how close they had drifted without either of them quite deciding to drift there. His pulse, already unsteady from the whole strange morning, picked up further, and to his own mortification he felt his body respond to the nearness and the look and the low, unhurried timbre of Ingomar’s voice with a heat that had nothing to do with the bath itself.

He turned, quickly, putting a little more water between them, angling himself so that the shift looked, he hoped, like nothing more than a boy settling more comfortably against the marble ledge. His face had gone warm in a way the steam alone could not account for.

“Marcus.” Ingomar’s voice, when it came, was quieter still, and Marcus could not tell if it held amusement or something gentler. “You’ve gone the color of a Roman sunset.”

“It’s the heat,” Marcus said, to the water, to the far wall, to anything that was not Ingomar’s face. “The baths run warmer than I remembered.”

“Do they.” Ingomar did not press further, though Marcus suspected, with a fresh wave of mortification, that he understood precisely what had happened and had simply decided, with more grace than Marcus had any right to expect, to let him keep the small dignity of the excuse. There was a pause, comfortable rather than cruel, before Ingomar added, quieter, “I am not troubled by it, if that eases anything.”

Marcus did not trust himself to look over. “That isn’t exactly reassuring.”

“No,” Ingomar agreed, and there was something almost soft in it now. “I did not know if it would.”

They did not speak of it further, though the silence that followed carried a different weight than the one before it, charged and unresolved in a way that neither of them seemed inclined to hurry past. Marcus kept his eyes on the water, on the slow drift of steam, on anything that let him breathe evenly again, and was grateful, in a confused and complicated way, that Ingomar made no further move to close the distance Marcus had so carefully put between them.

By the time they rose from the water and dressed in silence, the sun outside had shifted, the shadows in the colonnade grown long and gold, and Marcus understood, walking back out into the ordinary noise of the street, that something had settled between them in that warm, quiet room that he did not yet have the words to name, and was not entirely certain he wanted to.