Heart of Teutonburg - 21. Chapter 21

The last full day at Vetera did not feel like an ending. It felt like held breath.

Marcus woke to the sound of wheels being checked for the third time that week, iron tires rung with a mallet somewhere near the granaries, a slow patient testing of what would carry weight and what would not. Ingomar had gone before first light, called to the horse lines to see to the guides' own mounts, and the bed had gone cold on his side by the time Marcus rose to it. He dressed slowly. There was nothing left to pack that Titus had not already packed twice.

Lucius came for him himself, which was how Marcus knew before a word was said that the morning would not be an easy one.

"Varus wants the household present," Lucius said, the same flat phrase he always used, though something in his face today sat heavier than the words alone explained. "And there's a guest at the table you'll want to see for yourself, rather than hear about after."

The map room had not changed since the last time Marcus stood in it. The same inked rivers, the same pale unclaimed country to the east. What had changed was the man standing near its far wall, grey bearded, broad through the shoulder, dressed plainly for a man of his evident standing, his eyes moving once over the room's Roman faces with the unhurried thoroughness of someone taking an inventory rather than making an introduction.

Marcus knew him before anyone spoke his name, or thought he did, some old fragment of a conversation surfacing before he could place its source. Ingomar had described a man like this once, weeks ago, in the careful, unnamed way he described most things that cost him something to tell, a rival at home, grey and broad and patient, who had stood up in front of six hundred of his own people and called Arminius's loyalty into question without once raising his voice. Ingomar had never given him a name. Marcus understood, watching this stranger hold the room's attention without seeming to reach for it, that he had not needed to.

Varus received the man with the same composed cordiality he gave everyone, though Marcus had learned by now to watch the hands rather than the face, and Varus's hands, folded loosely before him on the table, did not move once through the whole of the greeting.

"Segestes." Varus said the name plainly, without ornament, a host confirming rather than discovering who stood in his room. "You've ridden a long way to tell me something you could have sent by messenger. I take that as a measure of how much you believe it matters."

"I have made this warning once before, to a different audience, and was heard and set aside." Segestes did not sit, though a chair had been offered him. "I did not care to make that mistake twice in one lifetime."

"Then say it plainly. I've little patience left this week for anything said sideways."

"Arminius speaks two tongues, and means neither of them fully." Segestes said it without heat, the way a man states a measurement rather than an accusation. "I said as much to my own people, at the Ringwall, before six hundred of them, and watched them choose to believe him anyway, because believing him cost them nothing that week and believing me would have cost them a great deal. I have come to tell you what it will cost you instead, since you are the one who will pay it."

"You accuse him of what, precisely."

"Of telling each man in this frontier exactly what that man wishes to hear from him, and of remembering, afterward, only the version that serves him best. Rome hears loyalty. My people hear patience. I do not think he has decided, even now, which of those two men he actually is." Segestes let the words settle a moment before he went on, and Marcus, watching him, thought of Ingomar's careful, unnamed telling of this same trouble, and felt something in his own chest go tight on his behalf, though Ingomar himself was nowhere near this room to feel it land. "A man who can be all things to all listeners is not being modest, governor. He is keeping his options open until the day one of them matters more than the others."

"That is a serious charge to bring against a man who has kept this frontier quiet for three summers with his own hands."

"It is the same charge I brought against him at home, word for word, and I was wrong about nothing in it except the timing." Segestes let that sit a moment. "You have more men to lose than my people did, governor. I would rather be tiresome to you today than silent, and proven right, after."

Varus was quiet a moment, turning his cup the way he did when he meant to weigh a thing rather than merely hear it, and Marcus allowed himself, for the length of that silence, something close to hope.

"I've had this frontier watched by better eyes than yours for longer than you'd credit me," Varus said at last, and the hope went out of the room as plainly as a lamp starved of oil. "Arminius rode out three days ago, ahead of the column, to coordinate safe passage with allied tribal leaders, exactly as he has done every season I have commanded here. If he meant to betray this march, he has chosen a curious way to begin it, by smoothing the road in front of it himself." He said it easily, the tone of a man closing an account rather than opening one, and something in his easiness frightened Marcus more than anger would have. "I do not doubt your sincerity, Segestes. I doubt only that a family quarrel, however old, ought to govern the movements of a Roman legion. We march as planned. Households travel with the column, as they have every season. I will hear no more of it."

Segestes studied him a long moment, and whatever he found in Varus's face seemed to cost him something to accept.

"Then I have said what I came to say, and can do no more than that." He inclined his head, not quite a bow. "Remember only that I said it before the fact, and not after, when it is easier for a man to claim he always suspected."

He left without being shown out, and no one in the room moved to stop him.

Varus let the silence hold a moment longer than it needed to, and then, as though setting down a weight he had already decided not to carry further, turned the whole shape of himself toward lighter business, supply lines, a dispute over wagon allotments. The quartermaster's boy read out the order of march in the same brisk, uninterested voice he might have used for a grocer's list: mounted officers and their attendants near the column's head, close by their masters' gear, households and dependents further back with the baggage train proper, since a family wagon was baggage first and a home only after. No one in the room thought it worth remarking on. It was how the column had always moved. Marcus stood through the rest of it half hearing, Segestes's flat, unhurried voice still moving somewhere behind his own thoughts, and did not fully surface again until Varus's attention, unhurried as everything else about him, settled on Marcus directly.

"Pulcher. A small matter, before you go." Varus's tone had gone almost warm, a different man entirely from the one who had just dismissed a warning. "Bring the cithara on the march."

Marcus felt the request land strangely, sideways, nothing like the rest of the morning. "Governor?"

"A column marches better for a little music in the evenings, and this one will need every good thing it can carry with it, given the mood some men insist on bringing to it instead." Varus's mouth curved, faint, almost fond. "You've kept it locked away in your quarters since we arrived, as though ashamed of it. I'd rather Rome's officers remember, on the hard nights of this march, that they serve something worth playing music for. Bring it. That is all."

"As you wish." It was the only answer the room allowed him, and Marcus gave it, and felt something small and unplaceable settle wrong in his chest as he did, though he could not, standing there, have said exactly what.

He passed Titus on the way, already settled near the head of the column with the rest of the officers' attendants and their masters' gear, the cithara's wrapped shape resting conspicuous among the saddlebags at his feet. The boy waved, cheerful and entirely unbothered, already deep in some argument with a groom over whether a knot would hold. Marcus lifted a hand in answer and walked on, and thought nothing further of it, only that it was one small mercy among the day's larger uncertainties, that Titus at least would ride near enough to be looked after.

He found Ingomar again near the wagons in the late afternoon, the yard gone loud with the last of the loading, and did not immediately go to him, held back by something in the set of Ingomar's shoulders that Marcus had learned, by now, meant a private conversation rather than an interruptible one.

Ingomar stood with Lucius well back in the baggage train, deep among the household wagons where Lucius's own had been set that morning, close enough that Marcus caught only the shape of it and not the words, Ingomar's voice pitched low, his hand resting once, briefly, on the frame of the cart nearest Lucius's family's wagon, as though the gesture itself were the point and the words only its excuse. Lucius listened with his arms folded, his face unreadable in the low gold light, and when Ingomar finished speaking he was quiet a moment, and then shook his head, not unkindly, the particular small shake of a man declining an offer he had not fully understood was being made.

"I've moved my household in this order every season for three years," Marcus heard him say, as he came within earshot at last. "I'll not go asking Varus's quartermaster to shuffle the column for a feeling I can't put a name to, Ingomar, however well meant. There's men behind me in this line who'd take it as an insult, and I've enough of those already without inventing more." He said it plainly, without much heat, a man reciting a fact he had long since stopped arguing with. "And it would buy them little enough regardless. I'll be up with my century whichever order the wagons ride in. A few places closer or further back in that line doesn't put me any nearer them than I already am, most days we march."

"It was only a thought," Ingomar said, and something in his voice, careful, already retreating from the offer before it could be pressed further, told Marcus this was not a thing Ingomar meant to say twice. "Forget I raised it."

"I won't hold it against you for trying." Lucius clapped him once on the shoulder, easy, unweighted, already turning back toward the cart's lashings. "Go on. You've your own gear to see to, and Decimus has been asking after you since noon, something about a knot he can't get right."

Ingomar watched him go a moment longer than the conversation required, and Marcus, coming up beside him at last, found his face settled back into its usual careful stillness before either of them needed to explain the silence between them.

"What was that," Marcus asked, though something in him already suspected he would not be given the whole of it.

"Nothing that came to anything." Ingomar's eyes stayed on the wagons a moment, on the ordinary, unremarkable business of a household readying itself for a road it had traveled a dozen times before. "A guess I couldn't prove, and Lucius was right not to move his family on the strength of it alone. I would have done the same, in his place."

It was not quite an answer, and Marcus, tired in a way that had little to do with the hour, let it stand as one anyway, some old instinct warning him that the day had already asked enough of both of them without his pressing for the rest of it now.

The camp burned late that night, more fires lit than usual, more men awake past the hour they usually slept, the whole fort humming with the particular restless energy of something large about to set itself in motion. Marcus lay a long while listening to it before sleep finally took him, Ingomar's breathing steady beside him in the dark, and did not think, falling asleep at last, to wonder how strange a thing it was, that the cithara should be leaving Vetera's walls at all.