Heart of Teutonburg - 8. Chapter 8

The morning of departure arrived grey and busy, the atrium filled with a disorder Marcus had never once seen it hold, baggage stacked in leather-strapped bundles along the walls, servants moving at a brisker pace than the household's usual measured rhythm, his mother's voice carrying from somewhere near the kitchens issuing instructions to a cook who did not appear to be listening. It did not feel, Marcus thought, like the departure for an evening's banquet, however grand. It felt like the house itself was being asked to hold its breath.

His father found him first, in the tablinum where Marcus had gone to collect a last few things, and stood a moment in the doorway before crossing to him, something unpracticed in the way he moved, as though the scene ahead of him had no established form he could simply perform. He set a hand briefly on Marcus's shoulder, gripping rather than embracing, the closest gesture the Valerii seemed to have inherited for a thing this large.

"Listen more than you speak," his father said, "and you'll do well enough. I told you that once already. I find I have little else to add to it, though I suspect a wiser man would." A pause, brief and unsteady in a way Marcus had not heard from him before, not even at the banquet, not even beneath Varus's assessing eye. "Write to your mother. She will read between the words better than I ever could, and I would rather hear the truth of how you fare from her than the polished version you'd think to send me."

"I will," Marcus said, and found, to his own surprise, that the formality of the morning had lodged something hard and aching in his throat.
His father's hand tightened once on his shoulder, and then he was gone, back toward the tablinum and whatever correspondence could be trusted to steady him, and Marcus understood, watching him go, that this was very likely the whole of what his father knew how to give, and that it had cost him more than the words themselves suggested.

His mother came to him in the garden, where he had gone to be alone with the fountain's low murmur for a moment before the household swept him up again, and she did not speak at first, only reached into the fold of her stola and drew out a small clay figure, weathered smooth with age, a household god no larger than his thumb.

"This traveled with me from my own mother's house, when I came to marry your father," she said, pressing it into his palm and closing his fingers over it with both her hands. "It has kept one household safe already. I think it can manage a second, if you'll let it." She studied his face a long moment, the particular quiet attention Marcus had felt from her his whole life, the sense of being read gently rather than assessed. "You carry more than most sons do, leaving this house. I have always known that about you, even when I did not know the whole shape of it." She did not ask him to explain what she meant, and something in her restraint told Marcus she already understood more than she was asking him to confirm. "Come back to us. However long it takes. However you find your way to it."

He could not answer that with words that would not break in his mouth, so he only nodded, and she kissed his forehead the way she had when he was small, and let him go.

Livia found him last, at the gate itself, where the litter already waited and Titus was making a great show of checking the baggage straps for the third time, muttering to himself about knots that did not need checking. She had dressed with unusual care that morning, her scarf actually worn correctly for once, and she stood before him with her chin lifted in the particular way that meant she had decided, in advance, not to cry.

"You promised me a story," she said, "and a trinket from somewhere far away. I expect both. Nothing about mud, unless the mud is interesting."

"I'll find you the most interesting mud in Germania," Marcus said, and was rewarded with the small, involuntary huff of laughter he'd been hoping for.

She reached into her sleeve then and pressed something into his hand before he could see what it was, a braided length of ribbon, plainly her own, clumsily knotted at one end. "So you don't forget what color your own house is," she said, entirely too fast, the chin still lifted, though her eyes had gone bright in a way that undid the effect considerably. Then she threw her arms around him, fierce and sudden, the way she had that first evening after the cithara, before any of this had begun, and said nothing further at all, only held on a moment longer than either of them could have called necessary.

Titus, when the moment came to help him into the litter, had gone uncharacteristically quiet, his chatter about baggage and knots and the household finally failing him at the one moment it might have served as a mercy, and Marcus caught, in the boy's face, an echo of the same held breath the whole house seemed to be taking that morning.
The litter pulled away, and Marcus looked back once, the way he had not quite let himself do on the ride to the banquet weeks before, and watched the villa recede behind him, its shaded colonnades and bright mosaics and the fountain he could no longer hear but could still, somehow, feel humming faintly beneath everything else.

This villa had been his whole world for sixteen years. He did not know, watching it go, when he would see it again, or in what shape he would be when he did.

The column proper gathered beyond the city's northern gate, and Marcus's first sight of it drove the ache of the morning briefly from his mind, replaced by something closer to plain astonishment. He had imagined, vaguely, some grander version of his own household's baggage train, a handful of carts and servants attending Varus's dignity on the road. What he found instead was a small moving world, carts and mules and marching men strung out along the road further than he could see its end, the ordinary tedious machinery of empire in motion, dust already rising in a low haze over the whole slow column before they had gone a mile.

Lucius found him within the hour, moving through the column with the unhurried, purposeful stride of a man returned entirely to his own element, none of the careful stillness he had worn in the villa's atrium weeks before. Here he was simply competent, and something in Marcus eased at the sight of it, the sense of a man no longer performing for a household he did not quite belong to.

"You'll ride, not walk, while the roads hold decent," Lucius said, by way of greeting, already assessing Marcus's seat on the horse with a critical eye. "Once we're past the last proper garrison towns you'll be glad of the practice. Sit up. You're slumping like a man twice your age."

Marcus straightened, and found, oddly, that he did not mind the correction the way he might once have minded his father's.

The road out of Rome had been easy company at first, well-paved and busy with traffic even a hundred miles out, farms and villas strung along it like beads on a cord, the countryside still recognizably the empire's own, tended and measured and known. Marcus watched it from horseback those first days with the mild, half-attentive interest of a boy who had never had reason to wonder whether the land itself might end.

It was only somewhere past the tenth day, the column pushing steadily north through Gaul, that he began to notice what was going, rather than what remained. The villas grew sparser, then stopped altogether. The neat geometry of cultivated fields gave way, mile by mile, to longer stretches of standing timber, oak and beech crowding closer to the road's edge than they had any right to, Roman order clearly imposed upon the land here rather than grown up naturally from it, a road cut through wood that plainly wanted to close over it again the moment the legions stopped maintaining the cut.

The garrison towns, when they passed through them, felt thinner too, their walls plainer, their forums smaller and more purely functional, nothing of the marble and colonnaded leisure Marcus had grown up believing was simply what a town was. He understood, watching a muddy square in some northern settlement whose name he had already forgotten, that he had been living his whole life inside a very particular idea of Rome, the idea Rome told about itself in its capital, and that the empire's actual edges looked considerably less certain of themselves.

By the time they reached the country nearer the river, the forest had stopped being scenery and become something closer to a presence, dense and unbroken on either side of the road, the canopy thick enough in places to dim the daylight to a kind of perpetual dusk beneath it. The birds sounded different here, or perhaps there were simply more of them, unseen and constant, a chorus that never quite resolved into anything Marcus could name. Lucius, riding beside him one grey afternoon as the trees pressed closer, caught him staring into the tree line and said, without much ceremony, "Hercynian Forest, this edge of it. Caesar wrote that a man could walk two months and not clear it. I don't know if that's true. I've never had cause to test it, and I don't intend to start now."

Marcus said nothing, only looked, and felt something in his chest tighten that had little to do with cold.

It was at the first waypoint, a garrison town with a name Marcus forgot as soon as he heard it, that he met Lucius's family properly for the first time, gathered near a cart at the column's edge. Marcella was dark-haired and sun-browned in the manner of the Hispanian coast, with a quick, assessing look that reminded Marcus, not unkindly, of her husband's. Decimus, nine years old and solemn with the importance of the occasion, informed Marcus within the first minute of their acquaintance that he intended to be a centurion by the time he was old enough to grow a proper beard, and pressed Marcus for stories of the legions with a directness that left no room for evasion. Lucilla, six and entirely unbothered by her own limitations, sang him a fragment of some marching song in a voice that did indeed resemble, as her father had promised, a cat in a sack, and beamed at his applause as though he had praised the finest voice in Rome.

Marcus watched them a while as the column resumed its slow progress, Decimus trotting alongside his father's horse asking questions Lucius answered with more patience than Marcus had yet seen him spend on anyone, Lucilla singing to herself in the cart, entirely content. There was a looseness to them, an ease, that Marcus's own family, for all its genuine affection, had never quite managed, some difference between a house built to project dignity and one built simply to hold the people inside it. He found himself, somewhat to his own surprise, glad of their company on the long road, and a little envious of whatever it was that let a boy of nine ask his father anything at all without first weighing the cost of the question.

He missed his family with a steady, familiar ache that had settled into something almost bearable by the tenth day. The other ache, the one that rose unbidden whenever the forest thickened at the roadside or the light went the particular grey-gold of late afternoon, was less familiar, and considerably less bearable. Marcus found himself thinking, more than once, of Ingomar's words at the villa gate, go carefully toward whatever comes after this gate, and wondered whether Ingomar's own column, marching these same roads on nearly the same timeline, had crossed these same rivers, passed beneath these same darkening trees only days ahead of his own. He had not yet decided what to do with that particular ache beyond simply letting it sit where it was.

They reached Vetera on a bright, hard afternoon, the fortress rising ahead of them on its bluff above the river, walls and towers and the ordered rows of a permanent camp stretching further than Marcus's eye could easily hold, and beyond it, wide and grey-green and moving with a steady, indifferent current, the Rhine itself. On the far bank, the forest began again almost at the water's edge, dark and unbroken as far as Marcus could see in either direction, no roads visible from here, no towns, nothing of the empire's careful geometry at all.

He sat his horse a moment at the crest of the approach, taking in the whole of it, the fortress solid and familiar-shaped behind him, the wild dark country waiting across the water ahead, and understood, with a clarity that settled somewhere low in his chest, that he had reached the last edge of the world he knew how to read.

Marcus's first sight of the camp itself, once they passed within its gates, emptied his mind of everything else entirely. It spread before them in ordered rows of leather tents stretching further than he could easily measure, streets laid out with a geometric precision that put even Rome's grander avenues to shame, smoke rising from a hundred cook-fires into a sky gone hard and pale with the season's turning. The sheer scale of it, the sound of it, drilling commands and hammering and the low constant murmur of thousands of men going about the ordinary business of soldiering, struck him with something closer to awe than anything the palace had managed on the night of the banquet.

"Three legions," Lucius said, following his gaze, something almost fond in his voice at Marcus's evident astonishment. "You're looking at more men under arms than most provinces see in a lifetime. Rome doesn't keep so very many legions as men like to imagine, all told. Lose three of them in a single bad season and she'd feel it for a generation."

Marcus said nothing, only looked, and felt the number settle into him with a weight he did not yet have the context to properly understand.

They passed a training yard on the way to the officers' quarters, recruits drilling under a centurion's barked corrections, and it was there that a voice, pitched not quite low enough to pass for private conversation, carried across the yard as they rode by.

"Varus is collecting pretty birds now, is he, instead of soldiers. Ought to give the boy a lyre instead of a shield and let him sing the Germans into surrender."

A ripple of laughter went through the nearest recruits, quickly stifled when the centurion's eye found them again. Marcus felt the old, familiar heat climb his neck, the exact shape of the sting he'd carried out of the gymnasium weeks before, and said nothing, because there was nothing yet to say that would not make it worse.

Lucius did not break stride, but his reply carried easily enough to reach the yard's far edge. "Better a pretty bird than a stale rooster, Gnaeus, who's spent so long crowing at recruits he's forgotten how to march himself." A few of the nearest soldiers laughed before they could catch themselves, and the centurion's jaw worked once, visibly, before he turned back to his drill without another word.

"Ignore him," Lucius said, once they were past, in the tone of a man closing an account rather than opening a discussion. "Gnaeus has been telling that particular joke about every soft-handed noble Varus has ever sent north. He'll find a new one to tell it about eventually. In the meantime you'll do well to learn a proper grip on a pilum before the season's out, if only so the joke has less to stand on."

Marcus said he would, and meant it, though the sting of it followed him a while longer than he let show on his face.

His own quarters, when he finally reached them that evening, were narrow and plain, a soldier's cot and a single trunk for all he'd brought from Rome, nothing of the villa's marble or fresco anywhere in it, and Marcus found, sitting on the edge of the cot with the noise of the camp settling into its evening rhythm outside, that he did not mind the plainness of it nearly as much as he might have expected to a month before.

He drew the cithara from its wrappings, the same instrument that had sat warm against his palm in the garden three nights before this journey began, and did not play it, only held it a while, running his thumb along the familiar curve of the wood. He thought of his mother's small clay god, tucked now into the trunk beside him. He thought of Livia's ribbon, still knotted around his wrist where he'd tied it that morning without quite deciding to. He thought, last and longest, of pale grey-blue eyes in lamplight, and a voice saying go carefully toward whatever comes after this gate, and wondered, not for the first time since the road had begun, how far north he would have to travel before that particular ache found its answer.

Outside, the camp's thousand small sounds settled slowly toward quiet, and Marcus sat a long while in the dark with the cithara silent in his lap, further from home than he had ever been, and closer, though he did not yet know it, than he understood.