Heart of Teutonburg - 11. Chapter 11

Word reached the camp, the way word always seemed to travel faster than the men it concerned. Marcus heard it from Vitalis first, in the training yard, delivered with the particular dryness Vitalis reserved for anything he found more interesting than he was willing to admit.

"Your Cherusci is coming in today. With the cousin, and half a dozen riders, if the gate watch is to be believed." He did not look up from the strap he was fixing on his own kit, though something in his voice suggested he'd been waiting for a reason to say it since before Marcus had arrived that morning. "Varus sent word ahead. Something about the ford, I'd guess, though nobody troubles to tell recruits the reasons for anything."

"He's not my Cherusci," Marcus said, out of habit more than conviction, and Vitalis's mouth twitched in the way that meant he'd heard the habit for exactly what it was and chosen, generously, not to remark on it.

Marcus told himself the rest of the morning's drill went no differently than any other, and mostly believed it, though he noticed himself watching the gate more than the yard required, and noticed, too, when Gnaeus's stick found him twice in as many hours for faults he suspected, on any ordinary day, might have earned only one correction.

They came in a little before midday, dust-pale from the road, Arminius at the front with the easy, unhurried authority he wore into every Roman space he entered, and behind him Ingomar, sitting his horse with the same unbothered stillness Marcus remembered from the strategy session weeks and a lifetime ago, though something in the set of his shoulders now read less like watchfulness and more like a man returning to ground he had already decided he could stand on.

Their eyes found each other across the width of the yard, briefly, before duty pulled each of them toward the business the moment actually demanded — Arminius toward the officers waiting near the gate, Ingomar toward the horses needing tending, Marcus back toward Gnaeus's drill, which had not paused for anyone's arrival and did not intend to. It was not much. A held look, gone almost before it had properly landed. But Marcus carried the warmth of it through the rest of the afternoon the way a man carries the memory of sun on his back long after he's stepped back into shade.

Drill ended before the riders had finished settling their horses at the picket line, and Marcus, crossing the yard toward his own tent, found himself slowing without quite deciding to when he saw Gnaeus had crossed there too, stick still in hand, planted in Ingomar's path with the particular stillness of a man who had been waiting for an excuse and had finally been handed one.

"So this is the one Varus can't stop talking about." Gnaeus said it to the air between them rather than to Ingomar directly, the way he addressed most things he intended as an insult, leaving room to claim afterward he'd meant nothing by it. "The scout who reads ground better than Roman men who've spent their whole lives on it. I confess I find that a hard thing to credit, from a man whose whole country is nothing but ground to read."

"It is easier to read a thing you have not spent your life trying to conquer instead of understand," Ingomar said, mild, continuing to loosen his horse's girth as though the remark had cost him no more attention than the buckle under his hands. "I would not think less of you for the difficulty. Rome has given you a great deal of ground and very little time to learn any single stretch of it well."

A ripple of something moved through the few soldiers near enough to have heard, quickly stilled, the kind of laughter that knew better than to declare itself in front of a centurion. Gnaeus's jaw worked once, the same small tell Marcus had learned to recognize from the training yard, though this time there was no drill to hide behind, no thirty watching recruits to make the correction look like discipline rather than what it plainly was.

"You'll forgive me if I don't rush to trust a Cherusci with the roads my men march on," Gnaeus said, lower now, the parade-ground carry gone out of his voice entirely. "I've buried men to tribes that smiled the same way yours does, right up until the smiling stopped being useful to them."

"Then we are agreed on one thing, at least." Ingomar straightened from the girth strap, and though nothing in his bearing had sharpened, something in the stillness itself seemed to gather weight, the way a held breath gathers weight before it's spent. "A smile that costs nothing is worth exactly what it costs. I have not asked you to trust mine. Only to let me do the work Varus has set me, the same as any other man under his command."

Gnaeus held the look a moment longer, some private calculation working behind his weathered face, before he turned it, deliberately, on Marcus instead, as though remembering a second grievance he'd nearly let pass. "Pulcher. I'd have thought you'd have better sense than to go soft over a barbarian's manners." He did not wait for an answer, already turning away toward the drill yard's far end, his stick finding the ground once, hard, before he was gone, the gesture of a man closing an account he had not, in fact, closed at all.

"He does not like me," Ingomar observed, once Gnaeus was well out of earshot, dry rather than wounded, though Marcus thought he caught something more careful underneath it.

"He doesn't like anyone who isn't already sure of him," Marcus said. "You'll have plenty of company in that."

Lucius caught them as they crossed away from the yard, Decimus already tugging impatiently at his father's hand. "My wife will have my hide if I let Varus's whole frontier parade past our door without stopping," he said, by way of explanation, the closest thing to an invitation his gruff economy generally allowed. "Come. Watered wine, at least, and Marcella keeps a better table than anything the mess will offer you tonight."

"We'd be glad of it," Marcus said, and then, catching Ingomar's eye with something between apology and invitation of his own, "give me a moment first. I left the cithara at my tent this morning, thinking I'd have no use for it in a training yard. I find I'd rather not be without it, if Lucilla's to be there."

It was a short detour, Ingomar falling into an easy, unhurried step beside him while Lucius and Decimus went ahead, and when Marcus emerged a few minutes later with the instrument slung across his back, he caught something in Ingomar's expression that might have been amusement, might have been something gentler, and did not ask which.

Their quarters lay near the officers' housing, plain and close, a soldier's practicality softened here and there by small domestic touches, a child's wooden toy left forgotten near the doorway, herbs drying in a bundle from the low rafters. Decimus was through the door and shouting the news of their arrival before either Marcus or Ingomar had properly crossed the threshold, and Marcella emerged from some inner room wiping flour from her hands, her quick, assessing look softening the moment she recognized her husband's company. Lucilla appeared a moment behind her, unhurried, already entirely certain of her welcome in a way that made announcing herself seem unnecessary.

"Is it true you fought off six men at the ford?" Decimus demanded of Ingomar without preamble, once the formalities of arrival had been dispensed with as briskly as Lucius's own manner generally required. "Father said three, but the grooms are saying six, and one of them says you didn't even use a sword."

"Your father's count is closer to honest," Ingomar said, crouching without hesitation to something nearer the boy's own height, the same unhurried attention Marcus remembered him giving Titus in Varus's atrium weeks before. "Three, and the ground did most of the work. I only knew where to stand and let it."

"That's not as good a story," Decimus said, visibly disappointed, and Lucius's mouth twitched in the way that meant he was fighting a smile and losing.

"No," Ingomar agreed gravely. "It is not. True things rarely are, when a better lie is available." He tilted his head, considering the boy with real attention rather than the polite indulgence a stranger might have offered. "Your father tells me you mean to be a centurion before you can grow a proper beard."

"I mean to be one whether I can grow a beard or not," Decimus said, with the flat certainty of a boy who had never once entertained the possibility of a world arranging itself otherwise, and beside him Lucilla, who had been waiting with visibly diminishing patience for her own turn at the conversation, tugged once at Ingomar's sleeve and announced, without any preamble at all, that she had a new song.

"Then I hope you'll allow me to hear it," Ingomar said, and meant it plainly enough that Lucilla, delighted, drew breath to begin at once, tuneless and enthusiastic in exactly the manner her father had promised weeks before, a voice that owed considerably more to conviction than to melody.

Marcus, watching from near the doorway with the cithara still slung across his back from the walk over, found himself reaching for it almost before he'd decided to, some old instinct from evenings spent coaxing Livia out of her own sulks with half-remembered tunes. "May I?" he asked, and did not wait long for Lucilla's enthusiastic nod before finding a simple line beneath her own, following rather than leading, letting the strings fill in the shape her voice was reaching for without quite finding on its own.

The change was immediate, and startling even to Marcus, who had not expected quite so much difference a few plain chords could make. Lucilla's voice did not improve, exactly, so much as it found somewhere to stand, the cithara's steady line beneath her own uncertain pitch giving her something to lean against, and what had been, by her father's own fond admission, the sound of a cat in a sack became, for the length of one short verse, something almost sweet, buoyed up by an accompaniment patient enough to follow wherever she wandered.

Marcella's hands stilled at whatever task she'd returned to, watching with an expression Marcus could not quite name, something between surprise and a deeper, quieter pleasure, and Lucius, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, wore the loose, unguarded pride of a man watching people he loved be genuinely delighted in rather than merely tolerated.

"Again," Lucilla demanded, the moment the verse ended, entirely unembarrassed by her own enthusiasm, and Marcus, glancing up to find Ingomar watching him with something warm and unguarded crossing his face, found he did not have it in him to refuse.

They stayed longer than any of them had properly intended, Lucilla working her way through every fragment of song she could remember with Marcus following patiently beneath each one, Decimus interrupting periodically to demand more of the ford story in increasingly improbable versions, until Marcella finally shooed them all toward the door with the particular firm affection of a woman who had fed and delighted her guests in equal measure and considered the account settled.

Marcus watched the small scene fold itself closed behind them with a warmth that surprised him in its intensity, Ingomar walking beside him in the last of the afternoon light, unhurried and easy in a way Rome had never quite managed to draw out of either of them. It was, Marcus thought, a different kind of ease than anything the city had ever offered, unconcerned with rank or performance, and he found himself wishing, with a small ache he did not examine too closely, that more of the world could be made to hold still in exactly this shape.

The officers' mess that evening held more chairs than usual, extra places set for Arminius and Ingomar both, and Marcus found himself glancing toward the tent flap more often than the wine strictly excused, watching for the moment Ingomar would duck through it, dark wool traded for something plainer still, travel-worn in a way that made the polished couches and the cut wine look, for a moment, like exactly the strange excess Ingomar had once named them at the villa's table.

Titus found an excuse to linger near the serving line longer than his duties required, ostensibly refilling a jug that did not yet need refilling, and Marcus caught the boy's eyes brightening the moment Ingomar came through the entrance, some private calculation crossing his freckled face before he abandoned all pretense of subtlety and made straight for him.

"You remembered me," Titus said, delighted, before anyone had properly finished greeting anyone else, which earned him a look from the steward that he entirely failed to notice.

"I remember a boy who earned his vanity honestly," Ingomar said, gravely, and something in Titus's whole posture seemed to unclench at being recalled so precisely, as though he had spent the intervening weeks half-convinced the moment in Varus's atrium might not have counted for as much to Ingomar as it had to him. "Does the fibula still catch the light the way it should?"

"Better than ever." Titus produced it from some fold of his tunic with the speed of a boy who had clearly been waiting for someone to ask. "I've had more practice."

"Titus." Marcus said it without much force, fond rather than corrective, and the boy grinned, unrepentant, and retreated toward the serving line only after Ingomar had properly admired the polish, which took rather longer than the fibula's merits strictly warranted.

It was a small thing, and it eased something in Marcus's chest he had not fully registered was tight, the particular relief of watching two people he cared for extend easy warmth to each other without needing him to broker it.

Gaius Petronius Celer arrived a little later than the rest, as he generally did, claiming his customary seat with the same unhurried confidence he brought to everything, and Marcus felt the small, familiar tightening low in his stomach that had begun, these past weeks, to precede Petronius's arrival the way a held breath precedes a plunge into cold water.

"Our frontier guests." Petronius's greeting to Arminius was warm, easy, the practiced cordiality of a man who had learned to make every room believe it was the room he most wanted to be in. He turned that same warmth toward Ingomar a beat later, though something in it sat differently there, assessing beneath the courtesy in a way Marcus recognized because he had felt it turned on himself often enough to know its shape. "And the cousin Varus speaks so well of. I confess I'd begun to think you a story he told to make himself sound better acquainted with the frontier than the rest of us."

"I am told I make a poor story," Ingomar said, mild, "having very little talent for staying where men would prefer to imagine me."

Petronius laughed, genuine enough, and turned his cup between his fingers in the gesture Marcus had come to recognize from men who considered themselves the quiet arithmetic behind whatever room they occupied. His eyes moved, in the pause that followed, from Ingomar to Marcus and settled there a moment too long, some calculation passing behind them that Marcus could not read and did not entirely want to. "You two seem well acquainted, for a Roman ward and a Cherusci noble who've had, what, a handful of occasions to meet?"

"Rome is smaller than it looks from a distance," Ingomar said, before Marcus could decide how to answer, his voice carrying nothing but plain observation, though Marcus caught, beneath it, something deliberately placed there to close a door Petronius had been testing.

"Evidently." Petronius's smile did not falter, but something in his gaze, resting a moment longer on the two of them together, carried a weight the pleasantry didn't quite explain, and Marcus felt it land somewhere beneath his ribs, unwelcome and impossible to name aloud in a room full of watching men. The tribune said nothing further on the matter, turning his attention instead toward Arminius and the business of the roads, but Marcus caught him glancing back once more before the meal's end, brief and considering, and found he did not enjoy being considered by Petronius nearly as much when Ingomar sat close enough to be considered alongside him.

It was Varus himself who raised the matter that mattered, once the second course had been cleared and the wine had loosened the room into something closer to its ordinary evening register.

"Your work at the ford has not gone unnoticed," Varus said to Ingomar, without preamble, the easy directness Marcus had come to associate with the man's private garden rather than his public hall. "Lucius speaks well of your eye for ground. Arminius tells me you undersell it, out of some native modesty I confess I find more useful in a soldier than a diplomat." He turned his cup slowly, the gesture Marcus had watched him make once before beneath a fig tree, weighing an answer rather than merely waiting for one. "I mean to send a patrol further into the country beyond the river. Not a raid, not a show of force. Goodwill, and eyes on ground we'll need to know come the campaign season. Four days, perhaps five. I'd have you lead it."

"An honor, domine." Ingomar's voice gave away nothing, though Marcus, watching him from across the low table, thought he saw something shift briefly behind the careful stillness, weighing the offer the way he weighed most things Rome handed him, honestly and without haste.

"I'd have young Pulcher accompany you." Varus said this lightly, almost as an afterthought, though Marcus understood, with the particular clarity that had come to attend most of Varus's offhand remarks, that nothing the man said in this room was truly offhand. "His frontier education wants rounding out. He's seen a skirmish now. He should see something of the country that isn't trying to kill him, so he understands the difference." A faint, dry curve touched his mouth. "And it does us no harm for the men who'll one day speak of this alliance to have ridden it together, rather than merely dined across from one another."

Marcus felt his pulse quicken in a way that had nothing to do with the wine, and was careful, with some effort, to let his face show only the measured gratitude the moment required rather than the fuller weight of what four days in that particular company might mean. "I'd be glad of it, domine."

"Good." Varus's attention had already begun drifting toward Arminius and the matter of supply routes, the decision made and set aside with the brisk economy of a man who rarely revisited his own conclusions, and Marcus caught, across the table, the briefest flicker of Ingomar's eyes finding his, warm and careful and quickly banked before anyone else could read what passed in it.

He was aware, without needing to look, of Petronius watching the exchange with an attention that had gone very still.

The meal wound toward its close not long after, the lamps burning lower, Arminius drawn into a longer conversation with two of Varus's staff over routes and river crossings that showed no sign of ending soon. Marcus excused himself before it could, murmuring something about the early hour of tomorrow's drill that was not entirely a lie, and found, stepping out into the cool dark beyond the tent, that Ingomar had done the same only a few moments before him.

They stood a little apart from the tent's spill of lamplight, close enough to speak, far enough that the words would not easily carry back inside.

"Four days," Ingomar said, low, testing the shape of it the way he tested most things before trusting his full weight to them.

"Four days," Marcus agreed, and found he could not entirely keep the warmth out of his voice, though he tried, briefly, out of some old habit that no longer seemed to serve much purpose between them.

"I did not ask for you to be sent." Something careful in Ingomar's tone, though whether the care was for Marcus's benefit or his own, Marcus could not immediately tell. "I would not want you to think I'd arranged it."

"I didn't think that." Marcus considered him a moment in the low light, the dust of the road still faintly visible at his collar, the particular stillness that had settled over him at dinner now easing, by degrees, into something closer to the man Marcus remembered from the baths, the temple, the garden. "Would it trouble you if you had?"

Ingomar's mouth curved, faint and unhurried, the answer arriving before the words did. "No," he admitted. "Though I am relieved not to have to account for the wanting."

Neither of them said anything further. There was a warmth in the silence that did not require it, the same current Marcus had learned to recognize weeks ago in a garden he could no longer quite believe belonged to the same life as this one, and he might have stood there a good while longer, the camp's ordinary evening noise settling around them, had a shadow not fallen briefly across the tent's lamplight behind him.

He turned in time to see Petronius pause at the entrance, cup still in hand, his gaze moving from Marcus to Ingomar and back again with an attention that had shed, for just a moment, the easy warmth it wore for company. It was gone almost as soon as Marcus registered it, smoothed back beneath the tribune's familiar, unbothered smile, a brief nod offered to them both before he continued on toward wherever the evening was taking him. But Marcus felt the chill of it linger a moment after the man himself had gone, an unwelcome echo beneath the warmth of everything that had passed only a moment before, and found, walking back toward his own tent a little later, that he could not entirely decide which feeling he meant to carry with him into sleep.