Heart of Teutonburg - 13. Chapter 13

The gold had gone out of the light by the time either of them moved, sliding first to amber and then, by degrees too gradual to mark, to the deep blue-gray that meant the grove was closing itself for the night. Marcus felt it more than he saw it, a coolness settling into the air where the warmth had lain against his shoulder a moment before, and understood, with a small reluctance, that stillness could not be asked to last forever, however much he might have wished it.

"We should have a fire before it's fully dark," Ingomar said, rising in that unhurried way of his that made even practical things look like part of some larger, patient rhythm. He offered Marcus a hand up, and Marcus took it, aware, as he always seemed to be now, of exactly how it felt.

They made camp a little apart from the great oak, near enough to feel the grove's held quiet without pitching their bedding beneath it, which Ingomar said, without further explanation, was a matter of courtesy rather than necessity. Marcus did not ask what courtesy meant in this context. He was learning, slowly, that some of Ingomar's reverences did not need to be interrogated to be respected.

Marcus's contribution to the fire-building was, by his own frank admission, mostly moral support. He gathered what wood he could find near the camp's edge, dry enough not to smoke them out, and delivered it to Ingomar in small, apologetic armloads, watching with something between admiration and amusement as Ingomar built the thing with the same economical competence he brought to everything else, no wasted motion, no doubt in his hands.

"You could at least pretend this is difficult," Marcus said, settling onto the flattened grass beside the growing flame, "for my dignity's sake."

"I could." Ingomar did not look up from the fire, though something in his voice had gone warm with the effort of not smiling. "I find I would rather not lie to you."

"A terrible quality in a companion."

"So I've been told. Mostly by men I've beaten at dice."

The fire caught properly then, throwing its first real light across the small clearing, and Marcus, glancing toward his gear where it lay against a fallen log, found his eyes settling on the cithara's case, still lashed where he'd tied it that morning against two days of riding.

"You did bring it," Ingomar said, following his gaze. "I confess I thought you might have reconsidered somewhere around the ford."

"I considered it. Extensively. At length, in fact, while my arms burned." Marcus reached for the case anyway, working the ties loose with the easy familiarity of years. "But I told you once you could hear it properly, if the opportunity arose. I didn't think I'd get a truer opportunity than this."

He did not decide, exactly, what to play. He rarely did anymore, not since the villa, not since he had learned that deciding in advance only invited him to perform rather than to simply let the sound go where it wanted. But his hands found their way, unbidden, toward something new, something that had been gathering itself in him without his full notice across the last two days, the weight of the river crossing, the particular quality of light through the grove's canopy, the low unhurried cadence of Ingomar's voice at the Irmin-Beam's roots, all of it folding itself into a melody that belonged to no lament he had composed before, warmer than the villa piece, less afraid, though not without its own private ache.

He had told himself, once, that watching a listener's face only invited the music to bend toward what it saw there, and that a piece was truer for being played blind to its audience. He kept to that rule for the first verses, eyes on his own hands. But this piece had been written to bend toward Ingomar, every note of it aimed at him from the first, and partway through Marcus found he no longer wanted to pretend otherwise. He looked up. Ingomar was watching him already, still and rapt, and Marcus let the music go where his eyes had already gone, and did not look away again.

When the last note faded into the fire's low crackle, he found Ingomar watching him with a stillness that had nothing careful left in it at all, his eyes bright and unguarded in the firelight, the whole practiced economy of him laid open in a way Marcus had seen only glimpses of before now.

"That was not the villa's song," Ingomar said, quiet.

"No." Marcus set the cithara aside, his hands not quite steady. "It's new. I think I only finished it tonight."

"For me."

A question, plain as anything he'd ever asked. "Yes."

Something moved through Ingomar's face then, his eyes going wide and bright, his breath catching audibly, and before Marcus had finished reading it, Ingomar had already leaned in, close enough that Marcus could feel the warmth of him before the touch itself arrived. His hand came to rest against the side of Marcus's face, warm from the fire, and he kissed him.

It was quick and it was fierce, all the days of careful distance breaking at once: the water's edge, the campfire the night before, every glance held a beat too long since Rome, arriving together in the press of Ingomar's mouth against his own. Marcus's hand found the front of Ingomar's tunic and gripped it, pulling him closer, and for that moment they simply gave themselves over to it, hungry and certain.

Ingomar drew back at last, only far enough to rest his forehead against Marcus's, both of them breathing hard, both of them grinning like fools in the firelight.

"I have wanted to do that," he said, low, "since the ford."

"You might have mentioned it sooner." Marcus's voice came out unsteady, bright with wanting.

"I am not always quick to say what I want." A ghost of that same self-deprecating tilt from Rome, though gentler now, closer. "I am told it is a fault."

"I've heard worse faults."

He kissed him again, shorter this time, sure of himself now, and settled back with his hand still cupped against Marcus's jaw, thumb tracing his cheekbone, unhurried and plainly delighted with himself.

They sat a while longer at the fire after that, close enough now that the space between them had stopped pretending to be anything but chosen, trading low talk that circled without quite landing on what had just passed between them, easier ground, though not entirely safe ground either. Ingomar asked, without much preamble, what Marcus would want for himself if none of it existed. Rome. Varus. The wardship, the war, his father's careful accounting of usefulness.

Marcus considered it longer than the question strictly required. "I don't know that I've ever been asked to imagine that far outside of it."

"Try."

"A garden, I think. Somewhere quiet enough to hear myself think. Music that no one commissioned." He glanced sideways, and found Ingomar watching him with an attention that made the answer feel less hypothetical than he'd meant it. "You?"

"My mother's bees." Something soft entered his voice at that, the particular fondness Marcus had come to recognize whenever the subject arose. "A hive does not concern itself with what lies beyond the next flowering. I used to think that a small kind of wisdom. I think so still, some days." He turned a stray twig between his fingers rather than looking at Marcus directly, something quiet and unhurried in the pause that followed, the kind Marcus had learned not to fill.

"My people do not fight here," Ingomar said, the words arriving unprompted, watching the fire rather than him. "Whatever quarrel a man carries to the grove's edge, he sets it down before he passes beneath the trees. Even old blood-debts. Even kings." He turned the twig once more between his fingers before letting it fall. "It is the one ground in all our country where nothing can follow you in."

The fire had burned low by the time they settled the bedding, and neither of them spoke much of it, the choice to lie close together arriving without discussion, the way most of what passed between them now seemed to arrive, not decided so much as simply, quietly, allowed. Marcus lay facing him, near enough to feel the warmth radiating off him through the thin barrier of two tunics, near enough that when Ingomar's arm came to rest across him, careful and unhurried, it felt less like an advance than an answer to something Marcus had not known he'd been asking.

He did not sleep for a long while. He lay instead in the particular, wide-awake stillness of a body too full of the evening to let itself rest, listening to the fire settle into embers, to the grove's own held quiet breathing somewhere beyond the firelight, to Ingomar's slow, even breath against his hair, not quite sleeping himself, Marcus was fairly sure, though neither of them said so.

The kiss stayed with him, warm and plain and entirely his. He did not want to make it smaller than it had been.

Nothing can follow you in, Ingomar had said, and Marcus, lying awake in the dark with a warmth he was learning to simply accept, believed it fully, for the first time since Rome.

Ingomar's arm tightened, faintly, in his sleep or near enough to it, and Marcus, easing into the warmth of him, let the grove's darkness finally take him too.