Heart of Teutonburg - 3. Chapter 3

Morning came grey and unhurried, the kind of soft light that made the villa's frescoes look faded rather than glorious, and Marcus woke with the strange, hollow feeling of a boy who had crossed some threshold in his sleep without quite noticing the crossing. He lay for a long moment listening to the birds in the olive tree outside his window, trying to remember if the previous night had truly happened, the vast hall, the thousand lamps, Varus's eyes moving over him like a man reading a scroll. It had. His shoulder still ached faintly where the cithara strap had pressed all evening, a small honest proof.

By the time he had washed and dressed in a simpler tunic, forgoing the formal toga now that the banquet's demands were behind him, he found his father already in the tablinum, a cup of watered wine untouched at his elbow, a wax tablet covered in his own cramped hand resting on the writing table before him. His father did not look up immediately, which Marcus had learned over eighteen years to read as a kind of warning.

"Sit," his father said finally, setting down his stylus. "Varus sent a messenger before dawn. He wishes to make his offer formal, and quickly, before the campaign season closes the roads. He would have you attached to his household as a ward for the duration of his governorship in Germania. Under proper guardianship, of course. A centurion of his choosing, someone steady, to see to your training and your safety both."

Marcus felt the words settle into his chest with the same mixture of honor and dread he had felt the night before, standing before Varus's assessing gaze. "So it is decided, then."

"It is an opportunity most fathers in Rome would trade half their fortune to secure for a son," his father said, and there was no unkindness in it, only the flat certainty of a man who had spent his life weighing exactly such trades. "You will not squander it by sulking over a cithara left behind."

"I did not say I would sulk." Marcus kept his voice even, though something in him wanted very much to sulk, or worse. "Only that it is decided. I had thought there might still be a question in it."

His father's expression softened by the smallest fraction, the way it sometimes did when he forgot, briefly, to be the head of the Valerii before he remembered to be Marcus's father. "There was never truly a question, Marcus. Not from the moment Varus looked at you the way he did. But I would not have you walk into it blind, or resentful. That helps no one, least of all you."

A servant appeared in the doorway before Marcus could answer, murmuring that a guest had arrived and was waiting in the atrium. His father rose at once, some of the morning's heaviness falling away from his shoulders like a cloak shrugged off, replaced by the brisk energy of a man greeting a useful acquaintance. "That will be the centurion. Varus recommended him personally. Come."

The man waiting in the atrium was not what Marcus had expected, though he could not afterward have said precisely what he had expected instead. Lucius Antonius Rufus was perhaps thirty-five, broad through the chest in the manner of a soldier who had spent two decades marching rather than reclining at banquets, his face weathered to the color and texture of old leather, a thin white scar tracing one eyebrow where, Marcus would later learn, a Cantabrian sling stone had nearly ended his career before it began. He stood with the particular stillness of a man accustomed to standing at attention for long hours, and when he inclined his head in greeting there was something careful in it, almost reluctant, as though he had already formed an opinion of the soft-handed noble boy he had been assigned to shepherd into manhood and was doing his best, out of professional courtesy, not to let it show on his face.

"Centurion Rufus," his father said warmly, clasping the man's forearm in the soldier's grip. "Varus speaks highly of you. Iberian campaigns, was it?"

"Cantabria, dominus, and after that the Rhine garrisons." Lucius's voice was clipped, economical, a voice used to being heard over wind and distance rather than across a dinner table. His eyes moved to Marcus and lingered there, assessing in a manner that felt entirely different from Varus's calculating interest the night before, less a merchant weighing a coin than a builder testing whether a beam would bear weight. "This is the boy."

"This is my son, Marcus." A note of correction entered his father's voice, gentle but unmistakable.

"Apologies. Marcus." Lucius said the name as though trying it for size, and did not look especially convinced it would fit. "I understand you play the cithara."

"I do." Marcus lifted his chin slightly, already bracing for whatever dismissal was coming, some version of the disdain he had felt radiating off half the guests at the banquet the night before.

But Lucius only nodded, once, thoughtful rather than scornful. "My daughter sings. Six years old, thinks she has the voice of Orpheus himself, sounds more like a cat in a sack, but she means it with her whole heart, and I have never had it in me to tell her otherwise." Something almost like warmth crossed his weathered face, there and gone. "Music is not nothing, even on the frontier. Just don't expect the legion drill masters to share my opinion. You'll need thicker skin than that before we reach the Rhine."

It was not quite kindness, but it was not the contempt Marcus had feared either, and something in his chest loosened a fraction. He learned, in the practical conversation that followed between his father and the centurion, laid out over the wax tablet and a fresh cup of wine Lucius accepted but barely touched, that the man's wife, Marcella, had come from a trading family near Gades on the Hispanian coast, that they had a boy of nine named Decimus who already begged his father nightly for stories of the legions, and a daughter, the singing one, called Lucilla after her father in the old fashion. Lucius spoke of them only briefly, almost embarrassed to have mentioned them at all in a room devoted to business, but Marcus noticed the way his voice changed when he did, roughened at the edges in a way the discussion of marching orders and provincial politics had not managed to touch.

"You'll meet them properly before we march, if the household permits it," Lucius said, catching Marcus's attention on him. "My wife keeps a good table, better than the camp fare you'll be living on soon enough. Might as well enjoy real cooking while you still can."

Marcus found himself, unexpectedly, looking forward to it.

His father saw them to the door but did not follow. “Lucius will see you home after,” he said, already half-turned back toward the tablinum and whatever correspondence still awaited him there. “Varus’s table is no place for an old man to hover over his son. Go. Listen more than you speak, and you’ll do well enough.” It was, Marcus thought, as close to a blessing as his father knew how to give.

The walk to Varus’s private dining hall passed easily enough with Lucius at his side, the centurion pointing out landmarks with the brisk, unsentimental commentary of a man who had walked this city a hundred times and stopped finding it impressive somewhere around the fortieth. Marcus found he preferred this quieter company to the watchful formality of the night before, and said as much, earning a short, approving grunt that he was beginning to recognize as Lucius’s version of warm regard.

The strategy session that evening was a different animal entirely from the banquet's glittering formality, and Marcus understood the difference the moment he crossed the threshold into Varus's private dining hall. There were no crowds here, no thousand lamps, no careful geometry of purple stripes marking rank. This was a smaller room, close and warm, thick with the smell of wine and roasting meat and the sharper tang of oiled leather and iron, a dozen men reclining on couches drawn into a rough circle, maps unrolled across the low tables between them, weighted at the corners with cups and daggers alike. The conversation here was louder, rougher, punctuated by barked laughter and the occasional slap of a palm against a table to make a point about supply lines or river crossings.

No servants hovered here as they had at the banquet, or if they did, they moved so quietly along the walls that Marcus scarcely registered them, refilling cups and replacing platters of bread and dark, salted meat without breaking the flow of conversation. A brazier burned low in the corner, throwing long shadows across the maps, and the air had none of the perfumed sweetness of the palace, only woodsmoke and wine and the honest smell of men who had spent the day at drill rather than at leisure. Marcus found he preferred it, though he could not have said precisely why. Perhaps because no one here seemed to be watching him, weighing him, deciding in advance what he was worth. For once he was simply a boy on the edge of a circle of men doing serious work, and the anonymity felt, unexpectedly, like a kind of relief.

Lucius guided him toward a couch near the edge of the circle, close enough to observe, far enough to remain unobtrusive, and Marcus settled onto it gratefully, glad for once not to be the center of attention. Lucius took the couch beside him, already more at ease here than he had been in the villa's atrium, nodding to several of the other officers with the easy familiarity of shared campaigns.

It was perhaps an hour into the evening, the wine flowing freely and the maps growing steadily more annotated with wine-ring stains, when a stir near the entrance drew Marcus's eye. Two men entered, and the room's temperature seemed to shift subtly at their arrival, not hostile exactly, but watchful, the wariness of men greeting allies they had not yet decided how much to trust.

The elder of the two moved with an ease that seemed almost too fluid for the room, dressed in a mixture of Roman and native fashion, a fine woolen cloak pinned with a bronze brooch worked in patterns Marcus did not recognize, his Latin, when he greeted Varus, nearly flawless, touched only faintly with something foreign in the vowels. This, Marcus gathered quickly from the murmured introductions, was Arminius, a Cherusci noble, a Roman citizen of equestrian rank who had served with the auxiliary cavalry and won Varus's particular confidence, a bridge between two worlds that did not, by nature, wish to be bridged.

Beside him stood a younger man, and it was there that Marcus's attention snagged and held.

He was tall, taller than Arminius, but there was nothing of the practiced Roman wrestling-yard about him. He was built lean yet powerful, with a taut musculature that exuded raw energy and readiness for action, much like a young stag poised to charge into battle rather than submit to restraint. Beneath the simple tunic his shoulders and forearms showed clean lines of muscle, the strength of someone who had grown into his body through motion, not labor. His skin was pale, northern-pale, still holding the smoothness of youth, and a single thin scar traced the length of one forearm, silvery and old, more curiosity than history. His hair was fair, nearly gold in the lamplight, worn longer than any Roman would allow, loose past his jaw in a way that seemed, on him, simply a fact of his person rather than a statement. His eyes, when they swept the room, with undisguised curiosity, were a pale grey-blue, startling against the room’s warm firelight, the color of a winter sky Marcus had only ever seen described in poetry, never in life.

There was nothing courtly in the way he carried himself, no careful arrangement of limbs meant to communicate status without seeming to try. He simply stood, weight settled evenly, carrying himself with the easy, coiled confidence of a young stag in its prime, not on guard, exactly, but aware of its own strength, the kind of stillness that came from knowing it had nothing to prove in a room like this. And yet there was no crudeness in it, none of the coarse bearing the senators implied when they spoke of the frontier tribes in their wary, dismissive murmurs. If anything, Marcus thought, there was an unhurried grace in his stillness that some of the more polished men in the room, for all their pedigree, seemed to be working very hard to imitate.

"My cousin, Ingomar," Arminius said, and something in his tone suggested both pride and faint exasperation, the tone of a man introducing a relative he loved but could not entirely predict. "He does not yet trust Rome's wine, so be patient with him if he refuses yours."

A ripple of laughter moved through the room, and Ingomar's mouth curved, not quite a smile, into something wry and self-aware that transformed his face entirely, softening the watchfulness into something almost boyish. "Rome's wine, or Rome's promises. I have not decided which deserves less trust."

It was bold, said in careful, accented Latin, and for a moment Marcus thought the room might bristle at it, but Varus only laughed, a short, genuine bark of amusement, and waved the two newcomers toward empty couches with the air of a man who valued bluntness in his allies more than flattery. "Sit, sit. You'll find our wine more honest than our senators, at least."

It was as Ingomar settled onto the couch across the circle, his gaze moving idly over the assembled Romans with the same careful arithmetic as before, that his eyes found Marcus and stopped, a beat longer than the passing survey he had given everyone else in the room. Marcus felt it land somewhere just beneath his ribs, an odd little jolt he had no ready explanation for, and looked away first, down at his own cup, annoyed at himself for the sudden warmth climbing his neck. When he allowed himself to glance up again a moment later, Ingomar's attention had already moved on, fixed on something Arminius was saying, as though the look had never happened at all.

Marcus told himself it had not meant anything. Strangers looked at strangers. It was, he decided, no different from being assessed by Varus the night before, or by the guards at the palace gates, one more pair of eyes cataloguing him in a room full of men who made their livings by knowing exactly who was useful and who was not.

The evening went on much as it had before the newcomers arrived. Varus and Arminius fell into a long, technical exchange over the placement of winter garrisons along the Rhine, tracing routes across the map with a wine-stained finger while Lucius and two other officers argued, amiably enough, over whether the current supply lines could bear the weight of another cohort. Marcus listened more than he spoke, content to let the unfamiliar names and river crossings wash over him, and found, to his mild surprise, that he did not mind being ignored for a while. It gave him leave to watch the room without being watched in turn, or so he told himself, though his eyes kept drifting, unbidden, back across the circle to where Ingomar sat listening to his cousin with an expression of careful, guarded attention, offering the occasional low comment in a language Marcus did not know, its consonants soft and rolling in a way Latin never managed.

Once or twice their eyes caught again, briefly, and each time Marcus looked away with what he hoped was convincing indifference, only to wonder, a moment later, whether Ingomar had done precisely the same.

It was well past the point where the wine had done its quiet work on the room, cups refilled more often than anyone was troubling to count, the maps abandoned in favor of louder argument and looser laughter, when the couches nearest the center shifted to make room for a platter of roasted fowl, and Marcus found himself, by simple accident of rearrangement, seated only a couch's width from Ingomar for the first time that evening.

"Your centurion tells me you play the cithara," Ingomar said, without preamble, tipping his cup slightly toward Lucius, who had indeed been holding forth a few moments earlier on the subject to anyone who would listen. His Latin was careful, deliberate, each word set down like a stone tested for its footing before he trusted his weight to it. "He seemed almost proud of it, for a soldier."

"He has a daughter who sings," Marcus said. "I think it makes him more forgiving of the habit than most of his fellow officers."

"A wise man, then, whatever Rome pays him." Ingomar considered this, turning his cup slowly between his fingers. "We have music too, where I come from. Not the kind you'd hear in a hall like this. Older. Rougher, perhaps, to Roman ears." A faint, self-deprecating tilt of his head. "I would not know how yours compares. I have never heard it."

"You could," Marcus said, and was faintly startled by his own boldness, the words out before he had quite decided to offer them. "If the opportunity arose."

Something in Ingomar's expression shifted, not quite a smile, but close to one, the wary stillness easing by a fraction. "Perhaps it will."

Before either of them could say more, Varus's voice rose above the general murmur, addressing the room at large with the easy authority of a man accustomed to being heard the moment he chose to speak. "Arminius and I have been discussing something these young men might find useful, beyond wine and maps." He gestured loosely toward Marcus and Ingomar with his cup, a gesture that felt, to Marcus, entirely too casual for the sudden weight it carried. "Understanding, gentlemen, works both directions. Young Pulcher here has seen a great deal of Rome's councils and none of her training grounds. And young Ingomar, for all Arminius's efforts, has seen more of our maps than our streets. I think a tour is in order. The gymnasium, perhaps. The baths. Let him see how Roman men are made, and let our own see that Germania sends us more than spears."

Arminius inclined his head in ready agreement, the faint, knowing curve of his mouth suggesting the idea had not been quite so spontaneous as Varus made it sound. "A sound notion. Ingomar could stand to see something of this city besides council chambers and wine cups."

Ingomar said nothing to this directly, but when Marcus glanced sideways at him, he found the pale grey-blue eyes already resting on him again, this time without any pretense of looking away.

"I am told the gymnasium is worth seeing," Ingomar said, and there was something careful in his voice, an evenness that did not entirely match the look that had prompted it. "Perhaps you would be willing to show me, since you already know the way."

"I would," Marcus said, and found, once the words were out, that he meant them rather more than the occasion strictly required.

Across the circle, Lucius had already returned to some discussion of provisioning, entirely unaware, or else entirely too tactful to remark, that something small and unnamed had just passed between the two youths at the table's edge. Marcus sat with his cup cooling untouched in his hand, aware of a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with the wine, and told himself, without much conviction, that it was only the natural relief of having found, on the eve of a long and uncertain journey, someone who did not look at him the way the rest of Rome did.

He did not entirely believe it. But it would do, for tonight, as an explanation he could carry home.