Heart of Teutonburg - 24. Chapter 24

Marcus woke to smoke and did not, for a long moment, know why he was still alive.

The tent above him was unfamiliar. Hide stretched over bent wood, not canvas. The light through its seams was grey, early, uncommitted to being morning yet. His skull throbbed in one clean line from crown to jaw, and when he lifted a hand to it he found blood matted into his hair, dry and dark, though not yet fully a day old by the feel of it.

He remembered the column breaking apart around him. He remembered Vitalis, and then did not let himself remember Vitalis further. He remembered a shape closing on him from behind, an arm, a pressure at his throat that had felt, for one confused instant, almost a gentle embrace. After that, nothing.

"You're awake."

Ingomar sat near the tent's entrance, knees drawn up, a whetstone forgotten in one hand. He did not move toward Marcus. He only watched him with an attention so complete it made Marcus feel, for a moment, like the only fixed point in a room that was otherwise still falling.

"Barely," Marcus said. His voice came out cracked. "Where."

"Cherusci ground. You're safe here. As safe as I can make you." Ingomar set the whetstone aside. "Lucius is dead."

He said it plainly, without softening, and Marcus understood that this was its own kind of mercy, that a gentler telling would only have asked him to brace twice instead of once.

"His family."

"Gone before I reached the wagons." Something moved through Ingomar's face and was put away again, fast, practiced. "I'm sorry. I wasn't fast enough."

Marcus closed his eyes. He thought of Decimus's small serious face bent over a harness buckle, Titus's hand ruffling his hair the way Marcus had once ruffled Titus's own. He thought of Lucilla's laugh, high and easy, carrying across the courtyard at Vetera on some ordinary afternoon that had not known yet it was one of the last.

He did not cry. He had the strange, hollowed sense that crying was a thing that happened later, once a person had somewhere safe to set the weight down first.

"Vitalis," he said, though he already knew.

"I don't know." It was the truth, offered without dressing. "I'm sorry I can't give you a better answer than that."

Marcus nodded, because there was nothing else to do with it, and made himself ask the last name before he lost the nerve for it. "Titus."

Something in Ingomar's face eased, just slightly, the first give in it since Marcus had woken. "Alive. Frightened, and stubborn about not showing it, but alive. I found him myself, at the tree line." He paused. "He's the one who carried your cithara out. Wouldn't set it down for anyone, not even me, until he'd seen you with his own eyes."

Marcus felt something in his chest loosen that he had not known was still held tight, a single thread of relief pulled clean through the middle of everything else. It did not undo any of the rest of it. It did not need to. He held onto it anyway, small and whole, the one thing the day had given back to him instead of taken.

"Where is he now."

"Close by. Sleeping, last I looked in on him." Ingomar's mouth moved toward something that was almost a smile and did not quite arrive. "You'll see him for yourself soon enough."

Marcus nodded again, and let the silence hold them both a while, lighter now for having that one bright thing set down inside it.

He did not leave the tent that first day, or much of the second. Ingomar came and went, always returning, always with some small offering: water, a strip of dried meat, once a folded cloth wrung out cold and pressed without comment to the worst of the bruising along Marcus's jaw. They spoke little. What there was to say sat too large for speaking, and Marcus found he did not have the strength yet to make it smaller than it was.

On the third evening Titus found him.

He came in loud, the way he came into every room he had ever entered, and then stopped short at the sight of Marcus's face, whatever cheerful thing he'd meant to say dying before it reached his mouth.

"You look terrible," he said instead, which was as close to gentleness as Titus's nature would allow.

"Thank you." Marcus managed something that was almost a smile. "I feel it."

Titus sat, close, the way he always sat, as though distance itself were a thing that could be closed by will alone. He talked. He talked about the camp, about a dog he'd befriended, about a boy his own age who'd taught him three words of a language Marcus didn't recognize in exchange for a trick with a coin, and Marcus let the small bright noise of him fill the tent like something poured into a cracked vessel, patient, unhurried, asking nothing back.

It was Titus, in the end, who told him Petronius had shoved a red-haired boy toward the tree line before the wagons went down, and did not know, himself, whether Petronius had followed after.

Marcus said nothing to that. He filed it away with everything else he could not yet look at directly, and was grateful, in a distant way, that someone had thought to give him even that much of an ending.

The fire that mattered came on the fourth night.

Marcus understood, walking out into it, that it was not simply a gathering. The camp had the pitch of something larger, more people than he'd yet seen in one place, voices already raised and overlapping before he was near enough to make out words. A victory fire, Ingomar told him, low, close to his ear, the closest thing to an apology his face could manage. Word had reached the camp that day of the scale of what had been done to the column, three legions, a governor, and the tribes were not going to let the night pass without marking it.

Marcus's stomach turned over once, hard, before he made himself set it aside. There was nothing to be done here except endure it, and he had already decided, somewhere back in the dark of the tent, that he would not give anyone reason to regret having spared him.

The fire itself was enormous, thrown high enough that it lit faces thirty deep around it. Someone had a flute carved from bone, shrieking rather than singing, driven hard and fast. Someone else had a strung thing, wood-bodied, deeper voiced than a lyre, and the broad-shouldered man playing it was not plucking so much as attacking it, thumb and knuckles both, each note landing like a blow and daring the next one to land harder. A ring of men had begun something between a dance and a fight near the flames, boots stamping the beat into the ground itself, and the whole clearing rang with a noise too loud and too fast to be anything but triumph.

He had known, since Ingomar's first telling of it, that the cithara had come through the wreckage in Titus's arms. He had not expected, until this moment, that anyone here would want to hear it, and in the noise and heat of the fire he had briefly forgotten it was close enough at hand to be asked for at all.

Titus found him anyway, breathless, pressing the case into his hands before Marcus could ask where he'd kept it hidden. "They asked for you," he said, eyes bright and a little frightened at the size of the fire. "Ingomar told them what you play. I think they want to hear a Roman answer them back."

He nearly refused. Every instinct in him recoiled at the thought of adding his own hand to a fire built on Lucius's death, on however many other deaths besides. But Ingomar's eyes found his across the flames, steady, not asking him to feel anything he didn't feel, only asking him to trust that there was a way through this that did not require pretending the night away, and Marcus, against every better judgment he owned, lifted the cithara from its case.

He played the fastest thing he knew. Something for a wedding, once, in a Roman garden that felt now like another life entirely, and he drove it harder than he'd ever dared drive it in that garden, matching the flute's shriek and the strung instrument's hammering, refusing to be drowned out by either. It was not conversation, not at first. It was closer to a fight, three instruments each insisting on being heard over the other two, the crowd's noise rising to meet them, and Marcus found something almost savage in himself answering it, some part of him that wanted, however briefly, to be as loud as his own grief.

It could not stay at that pitch forever. No fire could. By slow degrees, verse by verse, the flute's shriek softened into something plaintive, the strung instrument's hammering gentled into a low, steady pulse, and Marcus, following where the other two led rather than fighting them now, let his own playing soften to meet them.

Ingomar began to sing somewhere in that turning.

Marcus had never heard him do it before. His voice was low, rougher than his speaking voice, unpracticed in the way of a man who sang for himself and not for listeners, and it did not follow Marcus's melody so much as walk alongside it, a language Marcus didn't know wrapped around a tune he did. Something in Marcus's chest went tight and full at once, grief and something perilously close to tenderness arriving together and refusing to be separated.

He thought, not for the first time, of a marble god in a Roman temple, a lyre held loose in one carved hand, a bow slung easy over the other shoulder, and a boy of sixteen who had once wondered aloud what it meant to keep the thing you loved close enough to reach without having to explain why.

He thought he understood it a little better now, sitting in firelight two days' ride from anywhere Roman, the noise of a victory he could not celebrate settling by degrees into something quieter, watching Ingomar sing in a language not his own to a melody that was.

Once, in the middle of it, he caught a face across the fire that was not singing, not dancing, only watching, arms crossed, expression unreadable in the shifting light. The man looked away before Marcus could place him, and Marcus let it go, too tired and too full of everything else the night held to wonder long about one still face among so many moving ones.

When the music finally wound down, late, the great fire burned low to embers and the ring of dancers thinned toward their own fires and their own beds, no one moved to end it properly. It simply stopped needing to continue, the way some things did once they had said what they came to say, and the clearing emptied by slow degrees into smaller conversations and then into sleep.

Titus left two mornings later.

Ingomar had arranged it quietly, contacts along a trade route west that would see him safely to Gaul, to whatever family remained there, to a life that did not require him to survive a second Roman disaster on foreign ground. Marcus had expected tears. Titus surprised him by having very few, brisk instead, businesslike in a way that did not suit him and that Marcus understood, watching it, as its own kind of grief, the sort that a boy manages by refusing to look directly at it.

"You'll send word," Titus said, which was not a question. "You can write well enough for the both of us. I'll find someone in Gaul to read it to me, whatever it costs me to arrange it."

"I'll send word."

"And you'll ruffle your own hair sometimes. So you don't forget how it's done." He said it with the ghost of his old grin, and Marcus felt something in his chest crack a little further open.

"I promise nothing so undignified."

"Liar." Titus hugged him, sudden and fierce, an embrace neither of them had ever quite risked before, always some smaller gesture standing in its place until now, and then he was climbing up onto a borrowed horse beside a guide Marcus didn't know, and then he was gone down the tree line, small and stubborn and already, Marcus suspected, planning some new small triumph to write home about.

Ingomar stood beside him a long while after the horses had gone from sight.

"He'll be well," Ingomar said. "I made certain of the men who'll see him there."

"I believe you." Marcus found he did. It was the first thing in four days he had believed without effort.

He had told Titus, plainly and without ceremony, before the boy climbed up onto the horse, that whatever papers said or didn't say, he went home a free man and not a runaway one, and that Marcus would sooner burn every scrap of ownership his family held than see anyone argue otherwise. Titus had only shrugged, as though the words changed less than Marcus imagined they might, and said he'd go on calling him Master Marcus anyway, out of habit more than anything, and Marcus had not had the heart to argue him out of it.

The word came the better part of three weeks after that.

It took that long, Marcus understood only in pieces, gathered from what Ingomar let slip and what he didn't. Word of the column's destruction had to reach Roman ears at all, first, across a Rhine both sides were suddenly wary of crossing. Then it had to reach Rome itself, and a family had to be found and told their son was neither confirmed dead nor safely returned, and a price had to be argued over by men on both sides who did not trust each other and had every fresh reason not to. Marcus tried, once or twice, to imagine his mother receiving that news, and made himself stop trying. It did no good to either of them, imagining it from this distance.

Marcus was summoned, not roughly, to where Arminius stood near the horse lines with two men Marcus didn't recognize, and was told, in Latin too fluent to have been learned recently, that his family in Rome had been reached, that a price had been named and accepted, that the handoff would take place within the week at a frontier garrison on the near bank of the Rhine, close enough to Roman ground that his own people would meet him without needing to cross it.

"Ingomar will take you," Arminius said, as though it were the smallest part of the arrangement rather than the whole of what mattered to Marcus. "He knows the roads, and your people trust his face better than they'd trust any of ours."

Marcus looked for Ingomar and found him a little apart, jaw set, eyes fixed on some middle distance that was not, Marcus thought, actually the horse lines at all.

He did not know, in that moment, whether to feel relief or something closer to grief. He suspected, from the stillness in Ingomar's shoulders, that Ingomar did not know either, and that neither of them would find the honest shape of it until the road was actually beneath them.

"When," Marcus asked.

"Two days," Arminius said. "Rest while you can. It's a longer ride than you'll want it to be." With that he turned and walked off toward the center of camp, the two men who'd stood with him falling in behind, the matter closed as far as he was concerned.

Ingomar did not move to follow him, and did not move toward Marcus either. He stood where he was, still watching that middle distance, until Berulf crossed to him from the edge of the horse lines and planted himself squarely in front of him, close enough that whatever came next was clearly meant for Ingomar alone.

"You'll ride out alone with a Roman, on your cousin's word alone." Berulf kept his voice low, pitched for Ingomar and no one else, though Marcus was near enough to catch every word. "I was at the fire two nights past. I heard three men from the eastern camp say Arminius won't hold this alliance past the spring thaw. Maybe they're wrong. But you're staking your neck on his word being good a month from now, and I've watched cousins' words come apart faster than that."

"Say what you mean, Berulf, or don't say it at all," Ingomar said.

"I've said it. You're riding out on his authority. I don't know that it'll still be standing when you ride back." Berulf held Ingomar's gaze, and whatever passed between them there was old and had nothing to do with Marcus at all. "I said before I'd let this stand on your account, not mine. I still will. I only want you to know what you're spending, so you don't tell me later I let you walk into it blind."

He did not wait for an answer. He turned and walked back toward the fires, leaving the two of them alone at the horse lines.

Ingomar watched him go, still for a long moment, and then crossed the last few feet to where Marcus stood, close enough now that his voice did not need to carry any further than the space between them.

"He's not wrong to worry, not entirely." Quiet, and careful, the words chosen with more restraint than his face quite matched. "But it's my worry to carry, not yours. You've enough of your own between here and the garrison."

"I trust you," Marcus said. "Not your cousin. Not the camp. You."

Something eased, fractionally, in Ingomar's shoulders, though the wariness in his eyes did not fully leave them. "Then I'll try to be worth it."

He said nothing further, and there was nothing further, in truth, to say. Marcus turned from the horse lines with Ingomar falling into step beside him, close but not touching, both of them carrying, without yet naming it aloud, the same unspoken weight: that the road ahead of them led, by the straightest measure, toward the very thing that should have felt like rescue, and that neither of them could yet make himself feel it as one.