Heart of Teutonburg - 23. Chapter 23

He reached the wagons too late to matter, and knew it before he was close enough to see clearly, some old instinct reading the shape of the wreckage before his eyes had properly sorted it into meaning.

The canvas was down, torn and burning in patches, and the household he had eaten at, argued gently with over a boy's sword-grip, watched grow easy and unguarded around him over the better part of a year, lay scattered across the trampled ground in a stillness no chaos this loud should have been able to produce. He did not let himself stop moving. He told himself, afterward, that this had been mercy rather than cowardice, that there had been nothing left here his hands could do anything about, only things his eyes could carry that he would rather not have carried. He did not fully believe it even as he told it to himself.

Marcella. Decimus, who had wanted, more than anything a boy his age ought to want, to be a centurion. Lucilla, who sang badly and without shame and would, Ingomar understood with a violence that had nothing to do with the blade still slack in his own hand, never sing again in this world or any other.

He had broken from his own party to reach them. He understood, standing there with the noise of the battle still rolling unbroken on every side of him, that the breaking had cost him something he had not yet finished paying for, and that he had failed regardless, and that both of those facts were true at once and would go on being true regardless of how he chose to carry them.

There was no time to grieve it properly. He understood that, and could not make himself move regardless, his own breath coming wrong, too fast, too shallow, some animal part of him still standing in front of what his eyes had just handed him.

Then, all at once, a single thought arrived with enough force to break the paralysis clean through.

Marcus.

He had left him. He had broken away, back near the wagons' head, chasing his own failed rescue instead of staying close, and he did not know, standing here with three more bodies at his feet than he had come to save, whether that same failure had already repeated itself somewhere behind him in the chaos while he wasn't looking. The thought moved through him like cold water, worse than grief, sharper, and it was that, more than anything he could have told himself about mercy or duty, that finally got his legs moving.

He turned from what was left of Lucius's household, the only mercy left to give it, and ran.

He found Marcus not far from where the wagons had stood, closer than he'd feared, and not alone.

Berulf had him cornered against a fallen cart, blade already drawn back for a stroke that would not need a second one, and Marcus stood swaying in front of it with his own sword raised too late and too low, still fighting the way a man fights when the part of him that knows how has separated from the part of him that knows why. Blood ran from somewhere above his ear, dark in his hair, and his eyes tracked nothing, found nothing, settled on nothing long enough to mean recognition. Ingomar understood, closing the distance at a dead run, that he was watching someone already lost inside his own skull, still moving only because his body had not yet been told to stop, and that Berulf, who knew none of that and had no reason to care, was a heartbeat from ending it.

"Berulf. Hold." He got the words out before he'd fully arrived, before he'd decided what would come after them, some older instinct choosing the argument before his own mind had caught up to needing one. "He's worth more to us breathing than dead. His family has means enough to make this worth managing rather than finishing. Kill him now and you've bought us nothing but a body and a grievance neither side can afford."

Berulf's blade did not drop. His eyes moved from Marcus to Ingomar and held there, weighing something that had little to do with ransom.

"He's Roman," Berulf said, flat, as though the word alone settled it. "We've killed enough Romans today that one more costs nothing."

"This one costs plenty, if his father learns he died on a blade instead of in a ransom letter." Ingomar kept his voice level, though nothing in him felt level standing that close to it. He was aware, even as he said it, of the order it belonged to, an argument built inside what his people already valued, not a demand set against it, and some part of him understood that this was the only kind of asking he had any right to make of Berulf, whatever else he might have been willing to do if the answer had been no. "Ask Arminius yourself, if you doubt me. I mean to."

Berulf held the stance a moment longer than Ingomar liked, blade still raised, some old grievance of his own working behind his eyes that had nothing to do with Marcus at all. Then, slowly, and without anything that could honestly be called agreement in it, he lowered the sword.

"On your account, then." He spat once, to the side, and stepped back. "Not mine."

It was enough. It would have to be enough, and Ingomar did not wait to see whether Berulf's mind might change again before he turned his own back on him.

Marcus's blade came up half a beat toward him instead, some deeper, truer instinct staying the swing before it landed, recognition too far beneath thought to reach the surface but near enough to save them both a worse ending than the one they were already living.

"Marcus." He said the name and got no answer that acknowledged him as anything more than another shape in a field of shapes.

There was no time to explain what came next, and no way to make it gentle even if there had been.

Ingomar came in low and fast, inside the reach of the blade rather than against it, one arm hooking around Marcus's throat from behind before Marcus's ruined attention could properly register the shape closing on him. He held on through the brief, dreadful struggle that followed, Marcus's hands clawing uselessly at his forearm, his body still trying, out of pure animal refusal, to keep fighting a battle it no longer had the clarity to fight well, and Ingomar held the hold exactly as long as it needed holding and not a heartbeat longer, feeling the precise moment the weight in his arms went from resistance to nothing, Marcus's whole body giving itself over to him all at once, terrible and total and far too much like trust for what it actually was.

He eased him down rather than letting him fall. There was time enough, at least, for that.

"Forgive me," he said, to a boy who could not hear him, and meant it more fully than he had meant almost anything else that day.

He got Marcus up over his shoulder, the dead unhelpful weight of him worse than any weight he'd carried in training, and began moving forward, away from the wagons, away from the worst of the noise, toward the column's head and whatever thin chance of safety still existed in that direction. Marcus stirred against him twice before they'd gone far, groaning, saying something too slurred to carry any shape, and Ingomar understood that unconsciousness bought like that did not stay bought for long, and pushed forward faster.

He found Titus at the tree line, where the fighting had thinned enough that a boy might be left standing rather than trampled, clutching the cithara's wrapped shape to his chest with both arms as though it were the only solid thing left in a world that had stopped making sense. His face was white beneath the freckles, his breathing too fast, and when he saw Ingomar he made a sound that was not quite a word and started forward before catching himself.

"I have to go back," Titus said, already half turning, already talking too fast, the words tumbling over each other in a way Ingomar recognized as shock wearing the mask of usefulness. "His good cloak, I never got his good cloak off the cart, he'll want it, I told the driver I'd have his ears if anything happened to it and I never even got the chance."

"Titus." Ingomar said it as gently as the moment allowed, which was not very gently at all, breath still ragged from the run. "Look at me."

Titus looked, and something in his face went from frantic to simply frightened, which was at least an improvement Ingomar could work with.

"He's alive," Ingomar said, before the boy's eyes could fall on the slack weight across his shoulder and imagine worse. "Do you understand me? He's alive. I need you to stay beside me and stop thinking about the cloak."

Titus's chin trembled once, and held. He fell into step without further argument, still clutching the cithara, and Ingomar did not have the heart, in that moment, to tell him to let it go, only reached out and closed a hand briefly over the boy's shoulder, steadying him the way he might have steadied a spooked animal, and kept moving.

He found Arminius near what remained of the column's head, and understood, before he was close enough to hear a single order given, that his cousin was not merely directing his own Cherusci contingent here. Men of tribes Ingomar didn't recognize by their marks moved at his word alongside men who did, the whole ragged machinery of the day's violence answering to him with an ease that belonged to something planned rather than seized in the moment. Ingomar felt the thought arrive and did not let himself finish it. There was no room today for wondering how long a thing like this took to build, or how much of it his cousin had known before the first blade was ever drawn. He needed Arminius as he was standing in front of him now, not as a question Ingomar wasn't ready to ask.

Arminius's eyes went first to Marcus, then to the blood in his hair, then to Ingomar's face, and whatever calculation passed behind his own composed expression resolved itself faster than Ingomar had dared hope for.

"He's worth more to us breathing than dead." Ingomar said it plainly, the same argument he had already spent once on Berulf, worn smoother now from the saying of it, and did not repeat the rest. Arminius knew well enough who Marcus was, and what his family was worth, without needing to be told twice. "Let this be a ransom. Let it be seen as one."

Arminius studied him a long moment, and Ingomar made himself hold still under it, understanding that his cousin was reading a great deal more in his face than the argument he had actually spoken aloud.

"That is a sound enough case," Arminius said finally, mild, almost gentle, "even before I consider who is making it." Something moved behind his eyes, not quite a smile, too tired and too complicated to earn that name. "I will not ask you to say more than you already have. A ransom, then. Quietly managed, so no one further along this business has reason to look at it too closely." He glanced once more at Marcus, and at Titus beside him, and something in the glance carried a weight Ingomar could not fully read, kinship or pity or some private reckoning of his own that had nothing to do with either of them. "Get him somewhere safe before he wakes and does something that makes this harder to argue than it already is."

"Thank you." It was not enough, for what he was asking, but it was what he had.

"Don't thank me yet." Arminius turned back to the men waiting on him, already folding this small mercy back into the larger machinery of the day. "Thank me once it's actually held."

He found a quiet place at last, well back from the worst of the noise, and laid Marcus down against the roots of an old beech with more care than the ground itself deserved, Titus settling close beside them both without being asked, the cithara still held against his chest like something that might, if he only kept holding it tightly enough, make the rest of the day make sense again.

Marcus's breathing had steadied, at least, even if nothing else about him had. Ingomar knelt beside him a long while, watching the slow rise and fall of it, and let himself, for the first time since the wagons, feel the full weight of everything the day had already cost and everything it might yet still ask for.

Lucius's family, gone. Vitalis, by whatever report eventually reached him, likely gone as well. A debt to Arminius he did not yet know how he would repay, and had not, in the moment of asking, let himself consider the cost of. A line crossed with Berulf that would not be forgotten simply because it had, this once, been forgiven. And Marcus, alive beneath his hand, breathing, unbroken in the ways that could be seen, and utterly unaware of how completely Ingomar had already decided, somewhere in the space between the wagons and this quiet ground, that there was no price he would not have paid to keep it so, and no argument he would not have made to his own people first, before ever setting himself against them.

He did not examine that thought closely. There would be time enough for that later, and none of it would be kind.

He kept watch instead, through the last of the light and into the dark that followed, Titus asleep at last against his side and the cithara silent between them, and did not let himself close his own eyes until the sky had gone fully black and the sounds of the day's ruin had thinned, at last, into something almost like quiet.