Heart of Teutonburg - 6. Chapter 6

The way to the temple climbed the Palatine’s western face, a broad paved road that grew steadily quieter as it rose, the noise of the lower city falling behind them by degrees until only the wind and the distant complaint of gulls wheeling over the Tiber remained.

Titus trailed a respectful few paces back now, subdued by the climb or by Ingomar’s earlier attention, Marcus could not tell which, though he suspected the boy was simply saving his questions for later, turning them over rather than spending them all at once.

Arminius had peeled away at the base of the hill, murmuring something about business with one of Varus’s household stewards that would keep him occupied until they returned, and Marcus found he did not mind the smaller company. It made the morning feel less like an arranged outing and more like something closer to a choice.

The temple came into view before the palace did, white columns catching the late morning sun so brightly that Marcus had to shade his eyes against it, the roof above worked in terracotta and gilt that threw off its own separate, softer light. It was only as they crested the final rise that the palace revealed itself beside it, close enough that the two buildings seemed to lean against one another, marble shoulder to marble shoulder, the god’s house and the emperor’s grown so near in the building that a man could not enter one without the other watching over his approach.

Ingomar slowed, and Marcus, glancing sideways, found him studying the pairing with an expression that had nothing of the wary calculation Marcus remembered from three nights ago, when he and Arminius had first been announced at Varus’s hall. This was something quieter. Wonder, plainly, unguarded in a way Marcus had not yet seen on him, the same unhurried attention he gave everything turned now on the strange sight of a god’s house grown into an emperor’s wall.

“I saw this hill the day I first came to Rome,” Ingomar said finally, half to himself. “The palace, at least. I did not know then what stood beside it.” He tilted his head, considering the two buildings joined at their columns. “In the north, when a man wishes to speak with the gods, he goes out from his hall, not deeper into it. The grove is never beside the fire. It is always some distance off, where the fire cannot reach and the smoke of cooking does not carry.” A pause, something private crossing his face and gone again before Marcus could name it. “Here your god and your emperor share a wall. I do not know if that is reverence, or something closer to keeping him where you can watch him.”

“My mother would say it’s reverence,” Marcus said. “That Augustus built it to honor Apollo for favor shown him in the wars. My father would say it’s simply good politics, to be seen standing so close to a god’s favor that the two become difficult to tell apart.”

“And you?”

Marcus considered the question longer than it perhaps required, watching light move along the temple’s high white columns. “I think I understand wanting to keep the thing you love close enough to reach without having to explain why.”

Something shifted in Ingomar’s face at that, quick and unguarded before the familiar careful stillness settled back over it, and for a moment he seemed on the edge of saying something further, some private thought Marcus could not read, before he let it go and said nothing at all. The silence that followed as they climbed the last of the steps together felt, to Marcus, like an answer all the same.

Titus, who had been trailing behind in dutiful silence for as long as his nature could reasonably be expected to allow, chose that moment to abandon it entirely. He had drifted toward a statue flanking the temple steps, Hercules caught mid-labor, the lion’s pelt slung over one massive shoulder, arm and chest carved into the kind of heroic bulk no thirteen-year-old boy built like a fence post had any business imitating. After a moment’s serious consideration, Titus planted his feet in careful mimicry anyway, chin lifted, one skinny arm flexed at the exact same heroic angle, cloak still bundled uselessly under the other.

“Titus.” Marcus did not bother keeping the laughter out of his voice. “I don’t think Hercules had quite so many freckles.”

“I’m only seeing how it feels,” Titus said, with great dignity, not moving from the pose, his thin arm trembling faintly with the effort of holding it. “Livia says I’ll never be a hero if I don’t practice looking like one first.”

“Livia,” Ingomar said gravely, “sounds like a formidable teacher.”

“She is.” Titus finally abandoned the stance, entirely unbothered, and fell back into step behind them as though nothing at all had happened. “She says I have the arm for it. Just not yet the muscle.”

A short, surprised laugh escaped Ingomar, low and unguarded, and Marcus felt something in his own chest ease at the sound of it, some of the day’s careful weight lifting for a moment before they passed on beneath the temple’s high columns and out onto the sunlit terrace beyond.

The terrace opened before them in a wide sweep of pale stone, the altar standing at its center in the full light of midday, its base carved with a procession of bronze cattle so finely worked, muscle and motion caught mid-stride, that for a moment Marcus almost expected them to shift and low. Above them the temple itself rose in white marble and warm terracotta, the frieze beneath its roofline worked in painted reliefs of a richness Marcus had passed a hundred times without truly seeing, gods and battles and the slow unfurling of myth rendered in ochre and blue and a red so deep it looked, in the strong light, almost like living color rather than paint on fired clay. The great doors of the cella stood open to the morning, their ivory facing catching the sun in a pale, cool gleam, and beyond them, past the shadowed threshold, something tall and gleaming stood half-lost in the temple’s inner dark.

Ingomar had gone still beside him, his gaze fixed past the doors. “Is that him?”

Marcus followed his eyes and felt his breath catch, an old, familiar catch, though he had seen the statue perhaps a dozen times before and had never once felt it land quite the way it did now, watching Ingomar see it for the first time. Apollo stood within, carved in marble so fine it seemed to hold its own private light, one hand raised, the other curved around the shape of a lyre held close against his chest, strings rendered so delicately in stone that Marcus could almost imagine plucking one and hearing it answer.

“That’s him,” Marcus said, quieter than he’d meant to. “God of music. I told you that, in the baths.”

“You did not tell me he stood like that.” Ingomar’s voice had gone low, thoughtful. “I thought, when you spoke of him, that the lyre was only a story men told about him. A kindness added after, the way we soften the gods to make them bearable.” He studied the statue a moment longer, something almost reverent in his stillness. “But there he is. Carved holding it the same as he might hold a spear. As though Rome truly believed both belonged in the same hands.”

Marcus did not trust himself to answer that at once. He thought of his father’s voice cutting through the garden three days before, enough of that for now, and of his own hands aching that same evening from the weight of a cithara he’d carried into a hall full of men who measured worth in scars. He thought that he had never, in eighteen years of walking past this temple, considered that the god himself might have settled the argument long before Marcus was ever born to have it.

“I don’t know if Rome believes it,” Marcus said at last. “Only that someone, once, thought it worth carving in marble that would outlast all of them.”

Titus, catching only the shape of the moment and none of its weight, had drifted off toward the far end of the terrace, where an older woman was tying a ribbon to one of the altar’s carved horns, murmuring something too quiet to carry, and stood watching with the same wide, respectful curiosity he’d shown the whole morning, sensible enough this time to keep his distance and his silence both.

Marcus and Ingomar drifted the other way, past the altar and its small, private rituals, toward a colonnade running the length of the terrace’s far side. The air changed as they passed beneath it, the terrace’s bright heat giving way to a deep, mineral coolness, stone that had never quite let go of the night before. Somewhere beyond the columns came the papery whisper of unrolled scrolls, low voices trading argument in the unhurried cadence of men who had nowhere else they needed to be, the libraries Marcus had only ever heard of and never once entered.

Black marble figures stood between the columns at intervals, women caught mid-stride with water jars balanced against their hips, their father a grim shape at the colonnade’s head with a sword held loosely in one hand. Ingomar slowed before one of the nearer figures, tilting his head to study her downturned face, the jar tipped forever at her side as though she had been caught in the act of pouring and simply never allowed to finish.

“She looks as though the water troubles her more than the sword did,” Ingomar said. “Who is she?”

“The Danaids,” Marcus said. “Fifty sisters commanded by their father to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Most of them did. One did not.” He glanced at the statue nearest them, her face worn smooth by rain and years. “The old story says the forty-nine who obeyed are made to carry water forever afterward, into jars that can never hold it. Punished for what they were told to do, rather than for what they chose.”

Something shifted behind Ingomar’s eyes, unreadable for a moment. “And the one who refused?”

“Her line survived. Hers alone, out of all fifty.” Marcus looked up at the colonnade stretching ahead of them, shade and cool stone and the low, papery murmur of scrolls somewhere beyond the columns. “I’ve always thought it strange, that Augustus chose to put her sisters at the door of his own temple. A warning, maybe. Or a reminder that obedience isn’t always the thing that saves you.”

Ingomar was quiet for a long moment, studying the ranks of stone women with an attention that had gone somewhere private, somewhere Marcus could not follow. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its earlier lightness. “I saw you before this,” he said, without preamble, the words coming out plain and unhurried, as though he had been carrying them a while and had only now found the right shade to set them down in. “The day I first came to Rome. Near the palace gate, among a crowd of young Romans. I did not know your name then. Only that you did not look like the rest of them.”

Marcus went very still. “You never said.”

“There was nothing yet to say.” Ingomar’s eyes stayed on the Danaids rather than on Marcus, which Marcus understood, somehow, as its own kind of honesty, the easier direction to look while admitting a thing like this aloud. “I thought you graceful, and a little sad, and altogether too soft for the city that made you, though I did not yet know if that was a fault in you or in Rome.” A faint, self-deprecating breath, not quite a laugh. “I have had cause to reconsider which, since.”

“And which is it now?” Marcus asked, his voice not entirely steady.

Ingomar turned to look at him then, the pale grey-blue eyes open in a way Marcus had only glimpsed before, in the baths, in the brief unguarded moment on the temple steps. “I no longer think it a fault at all.”

Neither of them moved. The colonnade held its cool, unhurried quiet around them, the Danaids watching on with their eternal, unspent water, and somewhere beyond the columns Titus waited, patient and unaware, while something between the two of them settled into place that had been three days in the making and only now had found its name.