Heart of Teutonburg - 26. Chapter 26

The villa gates stood open before Marcus's horse had fully stopped, and then his mother was crossing the courtyard faster than he had ever seen her move, faster than dignity strictly allowed, and none of that mattered at all once her arms were around him.

"You're thin," she said into his shoulder, which was not what he had expected her to say first, after everything, and it undid him more than any grander words could have. "You're thin, and you're home, and I don't care in what order those things arrived."

Livia reached him next, shrieking his name across the courtyard in a way that would have mortified her a year ago and did not seem to trouble her now at all, and she threw herself at him with the same reckless, unguarded joy she'd had as a much younger girl, before she'd learned to measure her enthusiasms for company.

"I told everyone you'd come back," she said, fierce, muffled against his chest. "I told them. Nobody believed me, but I told them."

"I believe you now," Marcus said, and meant it more than the lightness of his own voice let on, and held her a while longer than either of them needed to explain.

His father came last, unhurried, the way he came to everything, but there was nothing cool in the hand that gripped Marcus's shoulder or the long moment he spent simply looking at his son's face before speaking.

"Welcome home," he said, low, and for once offered nothing further than that, no speech, no immediate turn toward practical matters, only the plain fact of it, allowed to stand on its own.

Grief found him unevenly, in the days that followed, arriving without warning and leaving the same way. He would be perfectly composed through an entire meal, answering his father's careful questions about the frontier with something almost like ease, and then some small thing, the particular way a servant laughed at something Livia said, a boy's voice carrying from the street outside, would open the ground beneath him without any notice at all, and he would find himself gripping the edge of a table, or excusing himself too quickly, throat too tight for further conversation.

He thought of Lucius more than he let anyone see. He thought of Decimus's small serious face, and Lucilla's laugh in the courtyard at Vetera, and could not, most days, hold either memory long enough to grieve it properly before some other duty pulled him back to the surface. He thought of Vitalis less often but no less sharply when he did, a boy his own age simply gone, no body recovered, no grave to stand beside, only a gap where a friend had been.

It was real. He did not have to manufacture any of it, and that, he came to understand within the first week home, was itself a kind of mercy, however strange a shape for mercy to take. Nobody who watched him work through his grief plainly, visibly, at the dinner table or in the quiet of the garden, had any reason to look past it for anything else he might be carrying underneath.

Livia found him alone in the garden one warm afternoon, curled into the bench beside the fountain with a scroll she wasn't reading, and settled next to him with the particular seriousness of a girl who had been waiting for the right moment to raise something.

"Father's been letting Gaius Nerva's son call on me," she said, not quite looking at him, working very hard at sounding indifferent about it. "Properly. With Mother in the room the whole time, and everything correct, but he's been let call."

Marcus turned to look at her properly. "Has he." He kept his voice carefully neutral, which was, he knew from long practice, the surest way to draw the rest of the story out of her.

"He's terribly awkward about it. He brought Mother flowers instead of me the first time, because he panicked and forgot which of us he'd actually come to see." Livia's mouth twitched, fighting a smile she clearly didn't want him to notice yet. "It was the single most ridiculous thing I have ever watched happen to another human being."

"And?"

"And nothing." She said it too quickly, which told him everything. "He's perfectly ordinary. I have no particular opinion of him."

"Livia."

"He has nice hands," she admitted, all in a rush, going faintly pink, "and he remembered I don't like the sweet wine after I mentioned it exactly once, and brought the dry instead the second time, without anyone telling him. That's all. That's the whole of it. Don't look at me like that."

Marcus was, he realized, grinning properly for the first time in longer than he could easily place. "I'm not looking at you like anything."

"You are. You have your insufferable older-brother face on." But she was laughing now too, unable to hold the mock severity, and leaned her head briefly against his shoulder, the argument abandoned as quickly as it had started. "It's not going to become anything serious for years yet, Father's made that perfectly clear. I just wanted someone to tell, and you weren't here to tell before, so you're getting all of it at once, whether you want it or not."

"I want it," Marcus said, and found, to his own surprise, that he meant it entirely, glad of something in this house that was simple and good and entirely uncomplicated by anything he was carrying. "Tell me his name again. I want to know exactly whose hands I'm meant to be suspicious of."

Livia obliged, at length, and it was only once the subject had properly exhausted itself that she tilted her head and added, almost as an afterthought, "Do you remember the man who dined with us, that once, before you left? The Cherusci. He brought Mother flowers too, that first evening, only he had better sense than to bring the wrong kind." She said it lightly, fondly, entirely without weight. "I always wondered what became of him. I liked him rather a lot, for the little time I got with him before Father dragged you both off."

Marcus felt the garden go very still around him, though nothing in it had actually moved. "I don't know," he said, and was proud, distantly, of how level it came out.

Livia, misreading it exactly as anyone would, winced and touched his arm. "I'm sorry. That was thoughtless of me. It's all still so close, isn't it." She did not press further, folding the moment away with the same easy tact she'd shown him all afternoon, and turned the conversation gently back toward Gaius Nerva's son, and Marcus let her, grateful past words for a sister who had no idea what she'd just asked, or what it had cost him to answer.

His mother had been within earshot for the last of it, seated with her needlework near enough to the fountain that Marcus understood, once he thought back on it, she had likely heard every word. She said nothing that evening. It was two nights later, in the garden after the household had gone to bed, that she found him alone and sat beside him without asking permission first.

"You don't have to tell me anything," she said, watching the dark hedges rather than him. "I know grief when I see it sitting on someone, and I know better than to go poking at it before it's ready to be looked at. I only wanted you to know I've noticed, so you don't feel you have to hide the whole of it from me."

"There's a great deal to grieve," Marcus said, which was entirely true, and easier to say than anything else underneath it.

"I know." She was quiet a moment, and when she spoke again, something in her voice had shifted very slightly, not suspicion exactly, something closer to a mother's old habit of reading a child's face for more than the child intended to show. "I remember a dinner, before you left for the frontier. I remember thinking, watching the two of you, that there was something there worth watching more closely, though I never said so to your father, and he never said so to me, though I suspect we both saw it plainly enough." She let that sit a moment, unhurried. "I'm not asking you to confirm or deny an old mother's fancy. I only want you to hear me say this once, clearly, and then I'll leave it alone. Whatever that man was to you, however briefly, guard his name carefully in this city. His cousin has made himself the most hated man in Rome. Even old affection, spoken carelessly in the wrong company, could cost this family more than grief ever could."

Marcus said nothing, careful not to let his face answer what he wasn't ready to say aloud.

His mother let the silence hold a moment longer, then rose, resting one hand briefly against his cheek before she went in. "That's all I'll say of it," she said. "I trust you to know your own heart better than I do, and to know, better than I could tell you, what's safe to carry openly and what isn't. I only want you to come back to me whole, in whatever shape that ends up taking."

She left him alone with that, and Marcus sat a long while after in the dark, grateful and unsettled in equal measure, uncertain how much she had truly seen and how much was only a mother's old instinct, sharpened now by fear for her whole household rather than curiosity about her son.

His father raised Pompeii nearly two weeks later, over wine, once Livia and his mother had gone in for the evening.

"You've heard, I imagine, some of what's being said around the city." He did not make it a question. "About the column. About who came back and who didn't, and what people choose to make of a young man ransomed home while others weren't so fortunate."

Marcus had heard fragments of it, enough to know the shape without needing the details spelled out, the particular cruelty of a city that could not decide whether to call him lucky or suspect.

"I've had word, through men I do business with, that it would ease considerably if you weren't in Rome to be talked about while it settles." His father turned the wine cup slowly in his hand, not quite meeting Marcus's eyes, a rare enough thing that Marcus understood how much care had gone into choosing his words before he'd sat down.

"The estate near Pompeii sits idle most of the year. Good air, good quiet, no one there with any reason to ask you questions you don't want to answer. A season there, perhaps two, until Rome finds some newer scandal to chew on instead."

"You want me to leave again," Marcus said, and heard, even as he said it, that it came out flatter than he meant.

"I want you left in peace." His father set the cup down, and for once let something unguarded show through the careful phrasing. "I couldn't protect you from what happened to that column. I can at least protect you from what Rome intends to make of your having survived it."

Marcus looked at him a long moment, and found, beneath the practical, managing tone, something that was unmistakably love, offered in the only shape his father had ever quite known how to give it.

"Pompeii, then," Marcus said.

The weeks that followed passed in a strange, suspended quiet. The grief did not lessen so much as settle into something Marcus could carry without it constantly showing, and beneath its steady weight, unremarked even by himself most days, sat the other thing he was carrying, quieter still, waiting for a day he could not yet name before he let himself think too closely on it.

He walked the gardens. He sat with Livia while she practiced her letters, correcting her with a patience that surprised even him, and endured, more than once, her gleeful reminder that Gaius Nerva's son had asked after him by name, which she delivered purely to watch him make a face about it. He let his mother watch him, and let himself be watched, and neither of them spoke again of what she had said that night in the garden.

They rode out to Ostia together on a bright, salt-scented morning, the whole family in the carriage, Livia pressed against the window the entire way to watch the coastline appear.

The port opened out ahead of them in a scale Marcus had not fully braced for, forests of masts crowding the harbor basin, gulls wheeling and screaming over the fish markets along the quay, the whole waterfront a controlled chaos of shouted orders, rolling amphorae, dockhands moving cargo in unbroken chains from ship to warehouse. The air carried tar and brine and the sharper, sweeter rot of fish left too long in the sun, undercut by the resin smell of new-caulked hulls.

His ship sat at anchor a little apart from the grain freighters, smaller, trim, built for passengers rather than bulk cargo, its hull painted a deep sea-green, a carved swan's neck curling up from the prow. Sailors moved along its deck with the unhurried competence of men who had made this exact coastal run more times than they could count, securing lines, checking rigging, one calling something down to a boy on the dock who laughed and called something back.

"A fair ship," his father said, studying it with the appraising eye of a man who judged most things by their construction. "You'll be comfortable enough. Two, perhaps three days, with good wind, before you raise Puteoli."

Livia clung to him at the gangway longer than dignity allowed, exactly as she had at the courtyard gate, and did not seem to care who saw. "You'd better write," she said, fierce again, muffled against his chest the same way. "Properly this time. Not the short letters you send when you think no one will mind. And you're not to breathe a word to Gaius Nerva's son if you happen to cross paths with him somewhere absurd, I'll never hear the end of it."

"I make no promises," Marcus said, and kissed the top of her head, and let her go only when she loosened her own grip first.

His father's farewell was brief, a firm clasp of the forearm, a few words about safe travel and good sense, nothing more, and Marcus understood it for what it was, everything his father meant and did not know how to say further, folded into the plainness of it.

His mother came last. She did not embrace him at first, only looked at him a long moment, the same cataloguing attention from the garden, searching his face for whatever she had been looking for these past weeks. Whatever she found there, she kept to herself.

"Go gently with yourself," she said, quiet, only for him. "Grief doesn't finish on any particular schedule. Let it take the time it needs." She kissed his cheek before he could answer, and held him a moment longer than the words alone would have required, before stepping back.

He climbed the gangway without looking back more than once, and found a place at the rail as the crew cast off the lines, the gap between hull and dock widening by slow degrees, his family shrinking on the quay behind him, waving, until the harbor's crowded masts closed around them and Ostia itself began to fall away into the bright, indifferent distance of the morning.