Heart of Teutonburg - 5. Chapter 5

The villa was quiet by the time Marcus slipped out to the garden, the household settled into the particular hush that came after the lamps had been trimmed low and the servants had finished their last rounds. He had meant only to sit for a while in the cool air, to let the strange fullness of the day empty out of him the way it usually did, but the cithara had found its way into his hands almost without his consent, and now he sat on the same marble bench he had occupied what felt like a lifetime ago, before the banquet, before Varus, before any of it, turning the instrument over rather than playing it.

He plucked a single string, let it die into silence, and did not follow it with another.
The gymnasium kept returning to him in pieces that refused to arrange themselves into any sensible order. The feel of Ingomar against his palm as he corrected the boy’s stance. The particular give of sand underfoot as they’d gone down together, Ingomar’s hand still closed around his own shoulder as though he’d forgotten to let go, or had never quite meant to. The low, startled sound of his own breath in that moment, which Marcus had told himself afterward was only the exertion of the match, though he had not entirely believed it then either.

And beneath that, worse somehow for being quieter, the baths. The stillness of Ingomar’s face in the steam, unguarded in a way Marcus suspected he rarely allowed himself to be, and his own body’s humiliating honesty in response to it, a betrayal he had spent the walk home trying very hard not to examine too closely.

He set the cithara down against the bench, more sharply than he meant to, and pressed the heels of his hands briefly against his eyes.

It meant nothing, he told himself, for perhaps the tenth time that evening. Or it meant only that he was sixteen and had spent too many months with nothing but a wax tablet and a music tutor for company, and any warmth directed his way, from anyone, might have struck him the same. Ingomar was a guest. An ally’s kinsman. A means by which Varus meant to bind Arminius’s loyalty a little tighter to Rome, nothing more, and Marcus had no business turning the memory over and over like a coin his hand could not stop checking was still in his pocket.

He almost believed himself. He had gotten quite good, over the years, at believing what was convenient to believe, about music being enough, about duty and desire fitting neatly into a single life the way his mother insisted they could. It was only that tonight the belief sat less easily than usual, thin as a coat of wax over wood that showed its grain through anyway.

“You’re doing the face again.”

Marcus startled, looking up to find Livia in the garden doorway, still in her sleeping tunic, her dark braid coming loose at the end the way it always did by evening. She padded across the grass toward him with the unbothered confidence of a girl who had never once considered that her brother might want to be alone.

“I don’t know what face you mean.”

“The one you make when you’re thinking too hard about something you don’t want to think about.” She dropped onto the bench beside him, tucking her feet up, entirely too pleased with her own perceptiveness. “You made it after the banquet too, when Father told you about Varus. And now you’re making it again, and you haven’t even said anything about the tour today. Was the gymnasium terrible? Did the barbarian embarrass you?”

“He is not a barbarian,” Marcus said, more quickly and more firmly than the moment required, and immediately regretted the speed of it when Livia’s eyebrows rose with unmistakable delight.

“I didn’t say I thought so,” she said. “I only wanted to see what you’d say.”

Marcus picked the cithara back up if only to have something to do with his hands, and did not dignify that with an answer, though the warmth climbing his neck did the work of an answer regardless, and he suspected, with weary certainty, that his sister had seen exactly what she’d come looking for.

She did not press further. She only leaned her head briefly against his shoulder, the way she had when she was smaller and thunderstorms frightened her, and after a moment said, more gently than her teasing usually allowed, “Whatever it is, you don’t have to tell me. But you don’t look unhappy, Marcus. You look like you don’t know if you’re allowed to be happy. Those aren’t the same thing.”

She left him with that before he could think of anything to say to it, her bare feet silent on the garden path, and Marcus sat alone again beneath a sky gone fully dark, the cithara warm and untouched in his lap, no closer to an answer than he had been an hour before, but aware, uncomfortably, that his sister had named something he had not yet let himself name at all.

Tomorrow, Arminius had said, there would be more to see. A temple, this time, and the promise of quieter company than the gymnasium’s crowded yard had allowed. Marcus told himself he was looking forward to it only for the temple’s sake, for the chance to walk again through Apollo’s colonnades, which he had always loved best of all the city’s sacred places.

He did not entirely believe that either. But the night was late, and belief, however thin, was enough to carry him to sleep.

Titus had not stopped talking since the household slave delivered the news at breakfast, some hurried arrangement passed along through his father that had Titus attending Marcus that morning as far as Varus’s own door.

“The governor’s house,” Titus said, for perhaps the third time, trailing Marcus through the atrium with an armful of things he insisted Marcus might need and almost certainly would not, a spare cloak, a folded cloth, a small clay flask of watered wine. “And then the temple after. I’ve never been past the outer gate of a house like that. Decimus is going to be sick with jealousy when I tell him, if I ever meet him, which Lucius says I might, when we’re all at the frontier together.” He paused only long enough to shift the cloak to his other arm. “Do you think the governor keeps a household as fine as ours? Finer, I’d wager. Everyone says his wife’s family—”

“Titus.” Marcus said it without much force, more fond than firm. “You may ask him yourself, if the opportunity arises. Though I’d advise against it.”

Titus grinned, entirely unchastened, and fell into step half a pace behind, the eager, bouncing energy of a boy who had been handed an adventure and did not intend to let a single detail of it pass unnoticed. Marcus, for his part, found the boy’s excitement a welcome counterweight to his own nerves, an easier thing to attend to than the coming conversation with Varus, and did not discourage it as thoroughly as he might have on a different morning.

Varus’s house stood on a quiet street near the Palatine’s lower slope, its face to the road modest enough — a plain door, unremarkable brickwork — that a stranger might have walked past it without a second look, which Marcus suspected was precisely the point. Men who had nothing left to prove did not always feel the need to announce it in stone.

Titus left him at the threshold with a brief, unreadable look and a murmured word about seeing to the horses, and then Marcus was alone, following a silent household slave through a colonnade toward a small private garden where Varus himself sat beneath the shade of a fig tree, a scroll unrolled across his knees that he did not appear, in fact, to be reading.

“Pulcher.” Varus set the scroll aside without hurrying, as though Marcus’s arrival were a mild and pleasant interruption rather than an appointment he had specifically arranged. “Sit. I find I would rather know the boy than the family, before I make him mine to look after.”

Marcus sat, choosing his words with more care than the garden’s easy quiet seemed to require. “I am grateful for the honor, dominus.”

“You are grateful for the opportunity. The honor you have not yet decided how to feel about.” Varus’s mouth curved, not unkindly. “Don’t trouble yourself denying it. A man who claims to feel nothing but gratitude toward the thing that is about to remake his entire life is either a fool or a liar, and your face at the banquet told me you were neither.”

It was said lightly enough, but Marcus felt the old, familiar sensation of being read, weighed, filed away, the same feeling Varus’s eyes had given him three nights before across the hall’s glittering distance. He said nothing, which seemed, on reflection, the wiser course.

“Good,” Varus said, as though Marcus had answered aloud. “A ward who agrees with everything I say will be no use to me on the frontier. I have soldiers enough for that.”

He gestured toward a servant hovering near the colonnade, who withdrew and returned a moment later with watered wine, setting it between them without a word.

“Tell me of the cithara. Not the polite version you gave my advisor. The true one.”

Marcus hesitated, unused to the question being asked so plainly, without the softening his father usually wrapped around it. “It’s the one thing I’ve ever been good at without being told to be good at it,” he said finally. “Everything else, the drilling, the Latin recitations, even the wrestling yard, I did because it was expected. The music I did because I wanted to.”

“And now you are meant to set it aside for a province full of forests and men who would as soon put a spear through you as listen to a verse.”

“I don’t intend to set it aside.” Marcus heard the edge in his own voice and did not entirely regret it. “Only to see if it fits alongside the rest of what I’m meant to become.”

Something shifted in Varus’s expression, faint and difficult to name, approval perhaps, or simply the satisfaction of a man confirming a private wager with himself. “Good answer. Better than the one I expected, if I am honest. Most boys your age would have told me what they thought I wanted to hear.” He turned his cup slowly between his fingers, the gesture so like the one Ingomar had made three nights before, turning his own wine with the same unhurried consideration, that Marcus felt an odd, unbidden pang at the resemblance. “I did not rise to where I sit by surrounding myself with men who tell me what I want to hear, Marcus. I would not have a ward who did either. Rome has enough of those already, and look how well it serves her.”

There was something almost dangerous in the offhandedness of that last remark, a crack of honesty Marcus suspected Varus did not often let show, and he was not entirely sure what to do with it, so he did nothing, only inclined his head and let the silence hold.

Varus studied him a moment longer, then seemed to decide the assessment, whatever it had been, was concluded. “You’ll do,” he said, in the tone of a man closing an account. “Germania will either sharpen you or break you. I find I am curious which.” He rose, the scroll forgotten on the bench beside him, and the warmth in his manner shifted back toward the easy, public register Marcus recognized from the banquet, the mask sliding back into place as naturally as breathing. “Come. I understand you’re wanted at the temple this morning, you and the young Cherusci both. Arminius tells me his cousin has taken an interest in Roman gods that borders on genuine curiosity, which is more than most of my own officers manage.”

As if summoned by the words themselves, voices carried from the direction of the atrium, Arminius’s easy Latin threading through something lower and more careful in response, and Marcus felt his chest loosen in a way it had not since he’d first sat down beneath the fig tree, some tension he had not fully registered easing at the mere sound of it.

Varus caught the shift in him, of course he did, his sharp eyes missing very little, and something almost like amusement flickered across his face before he turned toward the atrium himself. “Go on, then. I have kept you from more interesting company long enough.”

As if summoned by the words themselves, voices carried from the direction of the atrium, Arminius’s easy Latin threading through something lower and more careful in response, and beneath both, unmistakably, Titus’s voice, bright with the particular delight of a boy who has found someone new willing to indulge his questions.
Varus’s mouth twitched, some private amusement he did not trouble to explain, and led the way himself.

They found Titus perched on the edge of a bench in the outer room, the spare cloak entirely forgotten in his lap, deep in what appeared to be a serious accounting of Marcus’s virtues as a master, delivered to an audience of two. Arminius wore the patient, faintly entertained expression of a man well practiced at letting children talk themselves out, but it was Ingomar who held Marcus’s attention, crouched near enough to Titus’s height to meet his eyes properly, listening with an unhurried attention that Marcus had rarely seen a Roman of any rank spare for a household slave, let alone a boy of thirteen with copper hair and too many words.

“—and he lets me keep the good fibula polished for feast days, even though Livia says I only do it so I can see my own face in it,” Titus was saying, entirely undeterred by the arrival of his audience, “which isn’t true, or not only true—”

“A fair vanity,” Ingomar said gravely, as though the matter deserved genuine consideration. “Among my people a man is permitted to admire fine work, so long as he did not make it himself to be admired. Did you polish it, or only inherit the polishing?”

“I did the polishing.” Titus sat up straighter, visibly pleased to have the distinction noticed and respected.

“Then you’ve earned the vanity honestly.” Ingomar’s mouth curved, the same faint, wry warmth Marcus had seen turned on him more than once now, and something in Marcus’s chest eased to see it offered so readily to Titus as well, unearned by rank or blood, given simply because Titus had asked an honest question and answered it well.

Titus caught sight of Marcus in the doorway and scrambled up at once, cloak and cloth and flask spilling half-forgotten onto the bench behind him. “Master Marcus. I was only—he asked about the fibula, I didn’t mean to—”

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Marcus said, and meant it, aware of Ingomar’s eyes finding his own over the boy’s head, something warm and a little amused passing between them that had nothing to do with fibulae or polishing at all. “Gather your things. We’re for the temple now.”