Heart of Teutonburg - 12. Chapter 12

The gates of Vetera fell behind them a little after dawn, the fortress's noise thinning by degrees into birdsong and the steady rhythm of hooves on packed earth, until Marcus, glancing back once at the wooden walls receding into the morning haze, found he could no longer distinguish the shouted orders of the training yard from the ordinary business of any distant, indifferent world.

"You look like a man leaving somewhere he's not certain he's allowed to leave," Ingomar observed, riding easily beside him, the loose competence he'd worn since his arrival now settled fully back into place now that Roman walls no longer framed it.

"I suppose I am," Marcus admitted. "Four days feels like a great deal of freedom to be granted all at once."

"Four days is nothing." Something dry in Ingomar's voice, though not unkind. "My people would think it strange to call a man free who must be back within a week."

Vitalis had caught Marcus at the gate before they'd properly ridden out, breathless from jogging the last stretch of the yard, offering nothing more than a rough clasp of the arm and an instruction to "come back with all your fingers, and preferably having learned to throw something besides a spear," which had done more to settle Marcus's nerves than any amount of Varus's careful strategic framing the evening before. Titus, for his part, had said very little at all, only pressed a small parcel of dried fruit into Marcus's saddlebag with the particular seriousness of a boy who considered provisioning an act of love, and Marcus had carried the memory of both send-offs with him through the gate and out into the widening quiet beyond it.

They reached the river before the morning was old, a ferry crossing manned by a handful of auxiliaries who plainly knew Ingomar by sight and waved the small party through with none of the questioning Marcus had half expected. The Rhine ran wide and grey-green beneath them, the current's steady indifferent pull tugging at the ferry's ropes, and Marcus, standing at the rail with the cithara's awkward weight still strange across his back, understood with a small, quiet jolt that he had watched this same water from Vetera's walls without ever quite believing he'd cross it.

He had seen it twice now and thought nothing of the seeing, once arriving at the fortress with the column, once riding out along its western bank toward a ford that had turned, before the day was through, into a fight for his life. Both times the river had stayed a boundary he watched rather than crossed, the edge of the map Rome was willing to let him stand on. This was different, and he felt the difference settle into him slowly, the way cold water finds its way past a first shock into something felt all through the body. Behind them, the fortress and its ordered rows dwindled to a pale smudge against the bluff, the last of the world Varus's household could account for. Ahead, the far bank rose to meet the tree line almost at the water's edge, no roads, no towns, nothing of Rome's careful geometry at all — only the forest, patient and unbroken, exactly as it had looked from the far side of a river Marcus had never expected to actually stand on the wrong side of.

"Welcome to my country," Ingomar said, quiet, as the ferry's hull scraped gravel on the eastern shore, and something in the plainness of it, no ceremony, no particular weight placed on the words, made the crossing feel larger to Marcus than any amount of ceremony could have managed. He stepped off the ferry and onto ground that belonged to no census, no garrison, no name Rome had troubled to give it, and felt something in his chest shift to make room for the fact of it.

The cithara rode awkwardly across his back, wrapped in oiled cloth against the damp, and by midmorning Marcus had begun to understand precisely how impractical an object it was for a two-day ride through open country.

"I confess I did not picture this," Ingomar said, glancing back at the instrument's shape beneath its wrapping with an expression that suggested he was working hard not to smile. "A boy riding to the frontier with a harp on his back, like some traveling poet Rome sent to entertain the trees."

"You told me to bring it. I distinctly remember the instruction."

"I did." Ingomar did not sound remotely apologetic. "I did not say it would be comfortable."

"You could have warned me it would rearrange itself against my spine every time the horse found a rut."

"I could have. I found I preferred to watch you discover it yourself." The corner of his mouth had given up all pretense of restraint now, and Marcus, despite the ache building steadily along his shoulder, found he did not much mind being the source of it.

They rode easily through the morning, the road narrowing by degrees from something Roman engineers might have recognized into something older, tracks worn by use rather than design, the forest closing in gradually on either side until the light came down in patched, moving coins rather than the open sky Marcus had grown used to at Vetera. He asked questions as they went, about the trees, the birds, the particular quiet Ingomar seemed to read the way Marcus read a line of music, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that Ingomar answered most of them without the careful economy he generally kept in Roman company, offering small unhurried observations that felt, in their plainness, more like gifts than information.

They made camp that first night in a hollow off the track, sheltered by a fold of ground and a stand of birch, a small fire built low and careful against the dark. Marcus had expected, vaguely, some version of the discomfort he remembered from the road north with the legion, hard ground and colder air, and found instead that discomfort mattered very little measured against the plain fact of being entirely alone with Ingomar for the first time since the villa's garden, no household, no legion, no watching eyes at all.

"Tell me something you haven't told me," Marcus said, after they'd eaten, watching the fire rather than Ingomar directly, some old instinct suggesting the question would land more easily sideways than head-on.

Ingomar considered this a while, turning a stick slowly through the coals. "My father wanted a second son," he said finally. "There was one, born after me, who did not live past his first winter. I do not remember him. I have only ever known the shape of the wanting my father carried afterward, and the particular way he looked at me sometimes, as though counting what I hadn't managed to be instead of what I was."

Marcus said nothing for a moment, letting the weight of it settle rather than rushing to fill the space around it, a small discipline he had learned, he realized, from Ingomar himself. "My father wanted a son who wouldn't need Livia to explain his own feelings back to him," he offered eventually, matching honesty for honesty. "I don't think he's forgiven either of us for how thoroughly I've disappointed that particular hope."

"I don't think you've disappointed anything," Ingomar said, quiet, and something in the plainness of it landed harder than a more practiced compliment would have. "Rome simply asked you to be a smaller thing than you are, and called the asking a kindness."

Marcus looked up at that, caught by something in Ingomar's face the firelight made harder to read than usual, warmth and care sitting close beside something more careful still, held back with visible effort. Neither of them moved to close the small distance between them, though Marcus felt it as plainly as he'd have felt an actual hand extended, and understood, watching Ingomar's eyes drop first to the fire, that some restraint was being deliberately kept that night, for reasons neither of them said aloud. He did not press it. There was a comfort in the waiting itself he had not expected, a warmth banked rather than spent, and he fell asleep eventually with that warmth still settled in his chest, close enough to Ingomar's own fire-warmed shoulder to feel it, and no closer.

The second day's ride wore a different quality almost from its first hour, Ingomar's attention sharpening in the particular way Marcus had come to recognize from the ford, reading the ground for something beyond the road's obvious path. By midday he had left the track entirely, without explanation, guiding them along a route Marcus could not have retraced if his life had depended on it, deeper into trees that grew older and wider-spaced the further they went, the light falling through them in long, deliberate shafts rather than the patched coins of the previous day.

"Where are we going?" Marcus asked, not for the first time, and received, not for the first time, only a small, private smile in answer.

The trees opened, finally, onto a clearing that took the breath out of him more thoroughly than the ride itself had. The path there ran between two great shoulders of grey stone, weathered smooth by more winters than Marcus could easily imagine, their faces worn in places into shapes that might have been deliberate once — a curve too regular to be entirely the work of wind and water, a hollow at eye height that could have held an offering as easily as it held rainwater now — though no one living, Marcus suspected, could say for certain any longer which of it had been carved by hands and which by time alone. Beyond the stones, ancient oaks ringed a wide, still pool fed by some hidden spring, their canopies drawing back overhead just enough to let the afternoon light fall directly onto the water, gold and unbroken, dust and pollen turning slow circles in it like something suspended underwater rather than in air. The quiet here was different from the forest's ordinary quiet, deeper and more deliberate, the kind of silence that felt less like an absence of sound than a held breath.

"This is not Vetera," Marcus said, entirely unnecessarily, and Ingomar's low laugh carried more warmth in it than the joke strictly earned.

"No," he agreed. "It is not."

They washed the road's grime from themselves before either of them spoke of anything more, the pool's cold cutting through two days of dust and sweat with a shock that startled a genuine laugh out of Marcus, unguarded in a way he could not remember managing since long before Rome had ever asked anything careful of him. Ingomar swam with the same unhurried competence he brought to everything, and Marcus, less graceful but entirely undeterred, found himself laughing again at his own clumsiness rather than flinching from it, the particular freedom of being watched by someone who had never once made him feel measured for it.

There was no loincloth here, no attendant hovering with careful Roman modesty, no watching crowd to make a body into something to be judged or admired from a proper distance. Marcus was aware of that absence more sharply than he'd expected to be, and aware, too, in a way he could not entirely will himself to ignore, of how the water moved over Ingomar as he swam nearer, how the last of the afternoon light caught along his shoulders and the lean, unhurried line of him, northern-pale skin gone gold where the sun found it.

"You swim like a man convinced the water is judging him," Ingomar observed, treading easily nearby, close enough now that Marcus could feel the small displaced current of him in the water between them.

"The water has excellent reason to judge me. I very nearly drowned myself twice before I was ten, and my instructor never let me forget it."

"Then it seems we've both survived instructors determined to remind us of our failures." Something easier in Ingomar's face than Marcus had seen there even at the fire the night before, the last of some careful watchfulness finally loosening. He crossed the remaining distance without hurry, near enough now that Marcus could see the water beaded along his collarbone, catching the light the way the dust had caught it overhead, near enough that the space between them had stopped being a distance at all and become, instead, something both of them were choosing, moment by moment, not to close.

Marcus's breath had gone shallow in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. He was aware of his own pulse in a manner he rarely let himself be, aware of Ingomar's eyes moving over him with something that was not quite the careful, unhurried attention of the fire the night before — something with more heat gathered behind its stillness, held there with visible effort, the same restraint Marcus had felt banked and unspent beside the campfire, only closer now, and harder, he suspected, for either of them to keep banked much longer. Neither of them moved to close the last of it. Ingomar's hand rose once, as if to touch the water-slick line of Marcus's shoulder, and stopped short, hovering a moment in the charged space between them before he let it fall back to his own side, a small, deliberate act of restraint that cost him something visible in the set of his jaw.

Marcus understood it for what it was, and was surprised to find himself grateful for it even as some other, less patient part of him ached at the waiting. Not a refusal. Only a line drawn carefully, and held.

They stayed in the water a long while after that, unhurried on the surface of it, the sun sliding by slow degrees toward the trees' western edge, though something had shifted beneath the ease now that neither of them named aloud, a current running under the water's stillness the way the spring itself ran unseen beneath the pool. Marcus thought, treading there beside him with the whole strange, private world of the grove holding still around them, that he had not felt this weightless, or this entirely undone, since long before the column had ever passed beneath Rome's northern gate.

They dressed afterward in comfortable, unhurried silence, and it was only once they stood at the pool's edge, skin still cool from the water, that Ingomar's manner shifted into something more deliberate, a stillness Marcus recognized now as the same one he'd worn at the ford, reading the ground in the last calm instant before the fighting began, though gentler here in its particular weight.

He led Marcus not to the water's edge but past it, to where the largest of the oaks stood apart from the rest, its trunk so vast it would have taken four or five men, arms linked hand to hand, to close a ring around it, its bark scarred in places by old lightning strikes long since healed over into pale, ridged scars the width of a man's leg. Something in the air beneath its canopy felt different from the grove around it, a hush within the hush, as though the tree itself were listening.

"This is the Irmin-Beam," Ingomar said, quiet, laying one hand flat against the bark the way he might have greeted an old and formidable relative. "A pillar of the sky, my mother would say, older than the naming of any single god over it — though Donar has claimed it for his own besides, and struck it more than once with his fire to make the claim stick, though it has never once fallen for the proving. My people are named for Irmin, so I am told, or he for us, or both for something older than either name remembers clearly. There are other such trees, further south, among the Chatti, that men travel further to visit and think more famous for the visiting. My mother always said this one needed no one's pilgrimage to be what it is." Something wry and fond in that, an old family argument worn smooth with retelling. "Older than my father's father's father, all the same." He crouched at the tree's roots and drew something small from the pouch at his belt, a twist of dried herb, a little honey wrapped in leaf, setting it carefully into a hollow worn smooth by what must have been generations of the same offering, laid there before Marcus's grandfather's grandfather had ever been born. "We do not ask favors here. Only give thanks for what has already been given, and let the place hear that we noticed."

"May I watch?"

"You are already watching." Something warm in the observation, not quite a rebuke. "I would rather you understood, than only watched. Sit, if you like. The grove does not mind company, provided the company means it well."

Marcus sat at the tree's roots and watched Ingomar speak something low in his own tongue, unhurried, the words themselves unfamiliar but their shape unmistakably reverent, a private conversation conducted with an audience Marcus could not see and did not need to. Overhead, the oak's leaves stirred once, though no wind reached them that Marcus could feel against his own skin, and somewhere behind him, in the stones that framed the path they'd come by, something shifted and settled with a small, dry sound that might have been a bird, and might, just as easily, have been something else entirely content to remain unnamed. He thought of a warm afternoon on a temple's marble steps, trying to explain Apollo to a boy who'd had every reason to find the god's carved face as strange as this grove might have seemed to a Roman visitor, and understood, watching Ingomar's quiet, unhurried devotion, that he was being given something in return now, a small, deliberate trust extended exactly the way his own had once been.

"Thank you," he said, once Ingomar had finished and settled beside him at the water's edge, "for bringing me here."

"I did not decide it lightly." Ingomar's eyes stayed on the water, though something in his voice carried more weight than the words alone accounted for. "There are very few people I would bring to this place at all."

The light had begun, by slow degrees, to shift toward the gold-and-amber quality of late afternoon, the grove's held silence deepening rather than breaking as the day wore on, and Marcus, sitting close enough to feel the warmth of Ingomar's shoulder without quite touching it, found he was in no particular hurry for the stillness to end.