Heart of Teutonburg - 22. Chapter 22

They mustered at first light on the plain below Vetera's walls, and Marcus, riding out with Varus's household to join them, understood for the first time in his life what it meant to see the full weight of Rome gathered in one place.

He had grown up around soldiers the way other boys grew up around horses or hounds, familiar with the shape of them without ever quite being struck by what the shape amounted to when multiplied past counting. He was struck by it now. Three legions stood assembled across the plain in their cohorts, the Seventeenth closest to the road, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth arrayed beyond it in blocks so precise from this distance that the eye read them almost as pattern rather than men, thousands upon thousands of them, mail catching the low sun in a long unbroken shimmer that seemed to breathe faintly as the ranks shifted and settled. Above each legion its eagle rose on a shaft taller than any man beneath it, gold worked into wings and thunderbolt, and the aquiliferi who bore them wore wolf-skins and lion-skins over their armor, the beasts' hollow eyes fixed forward above their own, so that it seemed, for a strange unguarded moment, as though something older and wilder than Rome itself had agreed to march inside her order for the length of this one campaign.

Behind the eagles came the cohort standards in their long files, silver discs and honor-wreaths and the small carved hands that meant fidelity, each one telling its own history to anyone who knew how to read it, and behind those the cavalry wings drawn up in blocks along the plain's far edge, banners hanging still in the windless morning, horses stamping and blowing in the cold. Cornicens sounded the assembly in overlapping calls that rolled the length of the plain like something weather-made, deep curved horns answered by higher ones further off, until the whole morning seemed built from sound as much as from men, and beneath every horn call ran the low, continuous rumble of thousands of feet and hooves and wheels settling by degrees into column, a sound Marcus felt through the ground and up through his horse's legs before his ears had properly untangled it.

"There," Varus said, drawing his horse alongside Marcus's own, and something in his voice had gone almost boyish, a man showing off a thing he had built with his own two hands and never quite tired of showing. "Three legions, Pulcher. Auxiliaries besides. I have marched with fewer men than this and thought myself well provided for. Look at it. Tell me Rome has ever built anything greater than what stands on this plain this morning."

Marcus looked, and found he had no answer that wasn't simply agreement, the eagles blazing gold above the ranks, the standards, the ordered, breathing mass of it, and felt something in his chest tighten with a pride he hadn't expected and didn't entirely trust himself to hold onto. He thought, unbidden, of Segestes's flat unhurried voice in the map room three days past, and of Varus's own easy dismissal of it, and told himself, watching the eagles catch the light, that a man who could raise something like this out of a wilderness of forest and river surely knew his own frontier better than a bitter old rival's warning allowed for. It was easier, that morning, with the whole visible weight of Rome arrayed in front of him, to believe it than not to.

Titus found him in the crowd before the column moved, breathless and grinning, having run the length of three cohorts to reach him. "I've got everything stowed, master Marcus, the whole of it, even your good cloak, the one you said didn't matter and I packed anyway." He fell into step beside Marcus's horse, entirely unbothered by the noise and scale around him in the particular way of the very young, for whom even Rome's grandest spectacle was still, at bottom, only a very large version of an ordinary day's work. "There's a cart going up with the officers' gear, near the front where you'll be, so it won't get knocked about with the rest of the baggage. I saw to it myself."

"And the cithara?" Marcus asked, half his attention still on the ranks ahead.

"Wrapped and padded and riding soft as an egg," Titus said, with the particular pride of a boy who had solved a problem entirely to his own satisfaction. "I told the driver himself I'd have his ears if it came out with so much as a scratch on it." He grinned once more, sunlight catching the red of his hair, and then peeled off toward the cart with a last cheerful wave, already absorbed again in the day's small practical business, and Marcus, watching him go, felt some of the morning's strange, swollen grandeur settle back down into something more ordinary and more bearable.

Ingomar found him not long after, on foot, leading his own horse through the crowd with the easy patience of a man who had learned young not to hurry a large animal through a larger noise. He said nothing for a moment, only looked out over the assembled column with an expression Marcus couldn't quite place, something too careful to be simple awe.

"You've seen musters before," Marcus said.

"Not one this size." Ingomar's eyes moved slowly along the ranks, the eagles, the long silver rivers of the standards. "My people count strength in men we know by name. Sons, cousins, the boy who herds your neighbor's goats. This is a different kind of counting." He was quiet a moment longer. "I don't know yet whether it frightens me or reassures me. Perhaps both, depending on which side of it I imagine standing on."

Lucius passed them at a trot, already mounted, already moving toward his century's place in the line, and paused only long enough to clap a hand once against Marcus's shoulder. "Stay near the household today," he said, brisk, already half turned away. "It's a long road, and a longer one to keep track of a boy who wanders." And then he was gone, folded back into the column's forming ranks, and Marcus watched him go with an unease he couldn't yet name, some small cold thread beneath the morning's gold.

They rode out before the sun had fully cleared the tree line, the column stretching back further than Marcus could see even from the rise near the gate, eagles at its head catching the light like small captive suns, and Vetera fell away behind them smaller and smaller until it was only a shape against the grey-green country, and then not even that.

By midday the grandeur had thinned into ordinary tedium, the way it always did. The road narrowed as the country closed in around it, forest pressing close on both sides, and the column, forced into a longer, looser line than the plain had allowed, took most of the morning to pass any single point twice over. Marcus rode near the head with the household, Titus and the officers' gear cart somewhere behind him in the same stretch of column, and found himself, more than once, glancing back along the line without quite knowing what he was looking for.

The woods stayed quiet in a way that meant nothing to him and everything, he understood later, to men who knew better how to listen.

The attack came without a sound he could afterward properly place, no war-cry, no horn, only a sudden wrongness in the air ahead of any noise arriving to explain it, and then noise arriving all at once, from every direction at once, until direction itself stopped meaning anything at all.

Marcus's horse reared before he understood why. Men were shouting orders he couldn't follow, half of them cut off before they finished, and the column that had moved with such precision that morning came apart in the space of a few heartbeats into something with no shape he recognized, riders wheeling, foot soldiers shoving past each other toward the trees, the whole disciplined length of it folding in on itself like cloth pulled from both ends at once.

He was on the ground before he registered falling, his horse gone, and Vitalis was beside him, sword already out, shouting something Marcus didn't catch over the noise, and then Vitalis wasn't beside him anymore. It happened too fast to hold any shape in memory afterward beyond the fact of it, a blur of movement Marcus's eyes couldn't properly follow and then Vitalis on the ground and not moving, and Marcus's own mouth open on a name he didn't remember choosing to say.

There wasn't time to kneel beside him. There wasn't time for anything.

He caught, in the corner of his eye, a shape that might have been Petronius, might have been anyone, shoving someone smaller toward the tree line with the flat of his hand, a flash of red hair, gone before Marcus could turn his head fully toward it, swallowed back into the chaos before he could be certain of what he'd seen at all.

He did not think, in that moment, to wonder what it had cost.

"Ingomar." He heard his own voice break on the name, raw, and didn't know if it carried past his own throat.

He caught sight of him once, further down the line, already moving hard and fast against the direction everyone around him was moving, cutting toward the baggage train where the household wagons had been set that morning, and Marcus called out again and either wasn't heard or wasn't answered, and then Ingomar was gone from view too, swallowed into the same churning mass of men and smoke and falling standards that had already taken Vitalis, taken Titus, taken every certainty the morning had handed him.

Marcus went after him. He would not, later, be able to explain the decision as anything other than the plain fact of Vitalis's body on the ground behind him and some raw, ungoverned refusal to let the day take one more thing from him without a fight.

He didn't reach the baggage train. He saw it instead from a distance that kept shifting closer and further by turns, the household wagons overrun, canvas torn and burning in patches, and somewhere in the middle of it a shape he thought, for one unbearable moment, might be Lucius, fighting his way back down the column's collapsed length from wherever his century had stood that morning, cutting through men both friend and enemy with the single-minded fury of someone who had already understood, faster than Marcus had, exactly what the day was going to cost him.

Marcus didn't see how it ended. He would spend a long while afterward not knowing, and longer still wishing he'd been close enough to know for certain either way.

The blow came from a direction he never saw, and the last thing Marcus was aware of, before the world folded down into a small bright point and then nothing at all, was the golden shape of an eagle standard, still upright somewhere above the chaos, catching what light remained of the day.