Heart of Teutonburg - 27. Chapter 27

The net had a bad tear along its lower edge, and Ingomar had been meaning to mend it for three days.

He sat in the thin morning sun outside his mother's house with the whole ruined length of it across his knees, working the bone needle through wet cord with more attention than the task strictly required, because attention was, these days, a thing he had learned to spend deliberately rather than let wander where it wanted to go. Smoke rose from a dozen hearths around him in the thin, unhurried way it always did at this hour, and somewhere off toward the cattle enclosure a boy was singing badly to himself, and a dog worked its way between the houses looking for scraps with the settled confidence of an animal that had never once been disappointed in that hope.

It was, by every visible measure, an ordinary morning. Ingomar had gotten good, this past season, at holding a face that agreed with that.

"You'll wear a hole through the cord before you finish the tear," Berhta said, without looking up from the loom she was setting. She said it the way she said most things to him now, mild on the surface, with something underneath it she was choosing, for the moment, not to press.

"It's stubborn cord."

"It's a stubborn hand working it." She let the shuttle rest. "Reiko says the men are going out after the boar that's been at the low field. Three days, maybe four, if the tracking runs long."

"I heard."

"You'll go with them."

It was not quite a question, and Ingomar did not quite answer it as one. "The boar's been at the field twice now. Someone should see it dealt with before it costs us the winter stores."

Berhta looked at him a long moment, the particular look she had given him more than once since the season turned, patient and unhurried and entirely unfooled. "This will be the fourth time since the leaves changed that a boar or a strayed heifer or some other urgent business of the forest has needed your personal attention for the better part of a week."

"The forest has a great deal of urgent business."

"It does." She picked the shuttle back up. "I've stopped counting which excuse it wears."

He said nothing to that, because there was nothing he could have said that would not have given her more than he was ready to give, and she did not press further, which was its own kind of mercy, the same one she had shown him since the night he'd first told her the whole of it by the fire. Whatever she had made of it in the weeks since, she kept to herself, and he tried, in the small ways available to a son, to be worth whatever silence that was costing her.

Reiko found him an hour later, checking the fletching on a handful of arrows he did not much need, and said only, "Segestes's people were talking again, near the water yesterday," in the flat, unbothered way Reiko delivered most warnings, a man too old and too settled in his own standing to be much troubled by young men's talk.

"Let them talk."

"I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you they're talking." Reiko shrugged, an old warrior's economy of gesture. "Your cousin's name carries less weight in this country than it did a season ago, and some of what falls on him falls near enough to you to catch. That's all. You already know your own business better than I do."

"I do," Ingomar said, and meant it, and Reiko, satisfied or at least willing to leave it there, moved on to some other task and did not raise it again.

He left before midday, alone, which no one remarked on, since a man tracking boar through close forest was better served without a party crashing along behind him, and this excuse, like the others before it, held its shape well enough to survive being looked at directly.

The grove received him the way it always did now, the ordinary forest noise falling away at the same invisible line it had fallen away at every time before, and Ingomar felt the particular, familiar loosening in his chest that had nothing to do with the boar and had stopped, some visits back, feeling like something he needed to examine too closely. He knew this path without needing to watch his feet on it. He knew which root by the second stone caught a careless step, and which flat stone near the fire pit held heat longest into the night, and he had, without ever quite deciding to, built a small lean-to against the north wind out of deadfall and old hide some visits back, and came now to find it needing only a little repair, a corner sagged in from the last rain, easily set right.

He set it right. He gathered wood enough for several nights, out of old habit more than present need. He did not examine, closely, why a man tracking a boar for a day or two would trouble himself to lay in wood for several.

Late in the afternoon, with the light going long and gold through the canopy the way it did at this hour, he gathered what the ground offered, a double handful of acorns fallen fresh since his last visit, and carried them to the Irmin-Beam's roots.

He knelt where the two thick roots met the earth, his back to the path, and set them down.

It was not a large offering. It had never needed to be, here, where the grove's own logic ran on thanks rather than favors asked. He spoke the words low in his own tongue, the same words more or less he had spoken every time he'd come, and let himself, for a while, simply kneel there with his palms flat against the cold, packed earth and his mind, for once, not working at anything at all.

He had spent a great deal to be a man who could kneel here honestly. His standing among his own people, thinned but not broken. Some part of his cousin's trust, spent on an argument he'd made once at the wreck of a column and had never fully explained since. Whatever ease he might once have expected to feel again around Berulf, or the men who listened when Berulf spoke. He did not regret any of it, sitting here. He had checked, more than once, for the regret, the way a man checks a wound to see if it's finally stopped troubling him, and had found, each time, only the plain fact that he would spend all of it again without hesitation, and did not know, some evenings, whether that was faith or simply the shape love had decided to take in him.

He was midway through the last of it, a private thing, not spoken aloud even in his own tongue, something closer to a final accounting than a prayer, when the voice came from behind him.

"The gods always lead us to our destination."

Ingomar did not move.

He knew the voice before his mind had finished catching up to what it meant, some older part of him recognizing it faster than thought could, and he held himself entirely still, kneeling at the roots with his back to the path, and made himself finish what he had started before he let himself have anything else.

Thank you, he thought, plainly, to the tree and whatever stood behind it, for more patience than I had any right to ask of you. I will not need to ask it again.

He set the last acorn down beside the others.

Then he stood, and reached for the bag at his feet where it had waited, wrapped in oilcloth, through every one of these visits, carried in and carried back out unused so many times that some worn, quiet part of him had begun to wonder whether he would ever have cause to unwrap it here at all.

He turned.

"I brought you something," he said.

Their eyes met for the first time since the garrison, across the small clearing, in the last long light of the day, and Ingomar felt whatever had been holding steady in his chest since Berhta's first question finally, entirely, let go.

Marcus stood in the gap between the stones with the reins still slack in one hand and his mouth open around a word he had not managed to produce, and he was, Ingomar saw all at once and in no particular order, thinner than the garrison had last shown him, brown as a fieldhand across the nose and forearms in a way that suited him better than any of Rome's careful pallor ever had, his hair cut short by somebody who had not cared much about the result and which he wore, somehow, as easily as he wore everything else. A long road sat on him plainly, dust in the creases of his clothes, dirt worked into his hands, and none of it diminished him in the slightest. If anything it had sharpened something that had always been there, some clean, hard line under the softness Rome had spent sixteen years teaching him to wear instead. His hands would not quite hold still, the unsteadiness of a man arriving, at last, at the end of something he'd spent a long while walking toward.

"It may need tuning," Ingomar said.

Marcus made a sound. It was not a word. He dropped the reins.

They met somewhere in the middle of the open ground and Ingomar took the whole weight of him, which was less weight than there should have been, and held on. Marcus's arms went around his ribs hard enough to hurt, and Ingomar let them, and turned his face into the dust and horse and long-unwashed smell of him, and did not say anything for a long time, because there was nothing that needed saying that was not already happening.

"You were here," Marcus said, into his shoulder. "You were already here. Waiting."

"Yes."

"How did you know today."

"I didn't." Ingomar found the back of his neck, held him there. "I've been coming for some while now. Today only happened to be the day it finally paid me back."

Marcus went very still against him. "For some while."

"Long enough that my mother has stopped asking which excuse I mean to use next." Ingomar felt him laugh, a single broken sound of it against his collarbone, half a sob riding underneath. "I would have kept coming. As many times as it took. I want you to know that, whatever else I tell you today."

Marcus pulled back just far enough to look at him, and there was something in his face, wet-eyed and unguarded and entirely undone, that Ingomar understood he would carry the memory of for the rest of his life.

"Come," Ingomar said, when the unsteadiness had eased in him a little, and rose, drawing Marcus up by the hand, and turned not toward the fire but toward the water, the way a man turns toward the thing that has always come next between them, without needing to decide it fresh.

Marcus let himself be led, and let himself be undressed, standing at the water's edge while Ingomar worked the stiff, travel-hardened knots of his clothing loose with more patience than haste, though his hands were not entirely steady doing it, and he did not pretend otherwise. The water met him warmer than the autumn air had led him to expect, some low, banked warmth of the summer just past still held in it, and he made a small sound of surprise rather than a shiver, and Ingomar steadied him with a hand at the small of his back and did not let him go under too far too fast.

He washed him the way he might have washed a wound he intended to keep, slow and thorough, his hands moving through Marcus's cropped hair, working the road dust free, down along his shoulders and arms and the new leanness of him, finding nothing there Ingomar had not already catalogued from across the clearing and needed, apparently, to catalogue again with his hands to fully believe. It was not, whatever else moved beneath it, a hurried thing, or a thing aimed anywhere beyond itself. But neither of them was unmoved by it. When his palm passed slow over Marcus's chest and stayed there a moment against the beat of his heart, Ingomar felt his own breath go uneven to match it, and when Marcus made a low, helpless sound at the drag of his thumb along his jaw, Ingomar had to still his own hand a moment before he trusted it to go on. Two young men, made of exactly what young men are made of, standing bare together after so long apart, neither one of them untouched by it. He let that be true too, without letting it hurry anything.

"You don't have to do this," Marcus said at last, quiet, eyes closed.

"I know." Ingomar drew the water down his back in slow, unhurried lines. "I want to."

When it was done Marcus stood clean and dripping and shivering lightly in the evening air, and Ingomar wrapped him in his own cloak and held him against his chest a while longer than the cold alone required, before finally leading him back toward the fire.

They sat together afterward, because Marcus's legs would not do anything more ambitious. Ingomar built the fire back up and put the last of his bread and a good deal of dried meat in front of him and watched him eat all of it without once looking up, which told its own story more plainly than anything Marcus said in the next hour.

He had gone as far as Puteoli, exactly as his father had arranged. He had spent one night at the estate near Pompeii so that the household there would remember seeing him. Then a name and a place, sent south through a trader in amber well before any of it happened, and a berth on a coaster running west along the coast, and after that Massilia, and after that the long river road north, moving in stages between men who did not know each other and did not need to.

"They never asked me anything," Marcus said. "Not one of them. A man would meet me, feed me, tell me where the next one would be, and that was all of it. I kept waiting for someone to want an explanation."

"They were paid not to want one." Ingomar fed a stick into the fire. "And some of them owe my mother's household more than money. That part I did not have to buy."

He had been ill for eight days at a river town whose name he never learned, and had spent a good part of his money on a horse worth about a third of what he'd paid. He had crossed the Rhine on a ferry with three cattle and a man who talked without pause the entire way about the price of hides. And on the eastern bank, working north with the water on his left, he had found the trail.

"You told me about it once," Marcus said. "On the way to the garrison, the morning after. Rough going, you said. Shorter, for anyone who ever had reason to use it. And I knew, even then, exactly what you were handing me, and why you'd chosen to say it so carefully instead of saying anything else. I told you it was good to know, and we rode on, and I never let myself forget it, all the way to Ostia and back, in case the day ever came that I needed it."

"I did not let myself hope you would remember it so exactly."

"I did more than remember it," Marcus said. "You couldn't say goodbye to me plainly. So you gave me the truest thing you had instead, and trusted me to carry it until I needed it."

"That was the whole of it," Ingomar said. "The smallest true thing I could find."

Marcus put his forehead down against Ingomar's shoulder and left it there, and the fire went on doing what fires do, and neither of them moved for some while.

"Titus is waiting for us in Gaul," Ingomar said.

Marcus lifted his head. "He's what?"

"Waiting for us. In Gaul." Ingomar let that be the whole of it, because it was the whole of it. "He has been for some time. He sent word to me, near the end, carried by a man who could repeat it back to me faithfully. He wanted me to tell you there is room enough beside the house for a garden."

Marcus went very still. "A garden."

Something moved through his face, unguarded, half a laugh and half something else entirely. "I said that. Months ago. A firelit conversation you'd have no reason to remember."

"I remember all of it." Ingomar found his own voice was not as steady as he meant it to be. "And there is more. The south wall gets sun the better part of the day, he says, which is right for keeping bees, if either of us ever learns how, which he does not expect but hopes for anyway."

Marcus looked at him, something sharpening in his face. "Bees."

"My mother's bees," Ingomar said, quiet. "I told you once that a hive doesn't concern itself with what lies beyond the next flowering. I meant it as a small kind of wisdom. I think so still."

Marcus was quiet a moment, something working in his throat. "He's never kept a bee in his life."

"Neither have I. He seemed to feel this was a problem we could solve together, given time."

Marcus pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes, and when he lowered it he was smiling in a way that had nothing careful left in it at all. "A garden and a beehive."

"A garden and a beehive. And a roof, eventually, with luck." Ingomar allowed himself, finally, to smile back. "He has plans for all of it. He would want you to know that."

The light went long and gold through the canopy. Ingomar unwrapped the cithara fully and set it across Marcus's knees, and watched him put his hands on it for the first time since a padded cart on a road neither of them would ever ride again.

It had been cared for in his absence more carefully than Marcus could have managed himself. Two of the strings were new and did not quite match the others, and the leather at the crossbar had been replaced with a piece of harness strap that a Roman would have called an insult.

"You restrung it," Marcus said.

"Badly, I'm told, by anyone who actually knows strings. I did what I could reach."

"You restrung it." He ran a thumb along the new leather at the crossbar, turning it over. "This is harness leather."

"It is very good harness leather."

Marcus laughed again and bent his head over the instrument and began, slowly, with hands not fully steady yet, to tune it.

Ingomar sat back and let him work, and did not offer to help, because there was nothing here he could have helped with. The first notes came sour and were corrected. The second came closer. The grove took the sound and held it a little longer than the air alone should have allowed, and the canopy stirred once above them without any wind that Ingomar could feel on his skin. He did not mention it. Some things in this place were better left unquestioned.

Marcus found the tuning at last and let his hands settle, and then, without any announcement, began to play the piece he had written here.

It was not the same. He played it slower, and left more silence in it than it had been built to hold, and somewhere in the middle his fingers failed him on a run he had never once failed before, and he simply carried on through it, unhurried, letting the mistake stand as part of the thing. Ingomar understood that he was listening to a piece written by a boy, played now by whoever that boy had turned into.

Marcus looked up at him partway through, deliberately, breaking his own old rule about never watching a listener's face.

Ingomar let himself be looked at.

When it ended, neither of them said anything for a while. The fire settled. Somewhere out past the stones the ordinary forest went on with its ordinary evening, and none of it came in.

"How long can we stay?" Marcus asked.

"Three days. Perhaps four." Ingomar had thought about this a great deal, on every one of the visits before this one. "Longer, and the weather turns against us on the western road, and I would rather not spend my first winter with you explaining to Titus why we froze in a pass."

"Three days." Marcus turned that over. He did not sound disappointed. He sounded like a man setting a weight down. "And then Gaul."

"And then Gaul."

"And this place?"

"Stays here," Ingomar said. "It was never ours to carry off. It will still be ours, whenever we come back to it."

Marcus smiled at that, slow, recognizing it, and lay back in the leaves with the cithara resting on his chest and one arm behind his head, looking up through the branches at the last of the light coming apart into pieces above them.

Ingomar looked at him.

Thin, sunburnt, his hair still growing out from whatever knife had last found it, a colorless thread still knotted at his wrist because a girl in Rome had pressed it into his hand at a gate and he had tied it on himself, clumsily, and never once taken it off. Every mile of road behind him chosen. Nobody had sent him here. No father, no governor, no ransom, no legion. He had come up the eastern bank of a river on a bad horse because he had decided to, and that, more than any of the rest of it, was the thing Ingomar could not stop looking at.

"You're staring," Marcus said, without opening his eyes.

"Yes."

"Why."

Ingomar thought about it honestly. "Because I knelt at that tree more times than I ever let myself count, telling myself the gods were under no obligation to be quick about it. And now here you are."

Marcus opened his eyes. "And?"

"Late. Roadworn. Entirely your own man."

He lay down beside him in the leaves, close, the cithara set carefully to one side, and pulled the cloak over them both against the cold that was coming, and above them the old branches moved and went on moving, and the grove held them the way it had always held them, and nothing followed them in.

The End

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