Heart of Teutonburg - 7. Chapter 7

Word came from his father, and arrived at breakfast with the same brisk finality his father brought to most decisions concerning his son. Ingomar would dine with them tonight, three days before Marcus was to leave for the frontier. Marcus said little in response beyond a nod, though he spent rather more of that morning than he meant to thinking about it.

"Arminius will not attend," his father said, going over the evening's shape at the tablinum table the way he might have reviewed accounts, ticking items off some list only he could see. "Business with Varus's stewards, apparently, though I suspect he means to leave the boy to manage an evening among Romans on his own merits. A test, perhaps, or simply courtesy. Either way, it falls to us to make him welcome." He glanced up, and something in his face, not quite a question, rested on Marcus a beat longer than the moment required. "You've spent some hours in his company already. I trust he is not difficult."

"He isn't difficult," Marcus said, and was careful to let the words come out even, ordinary, nothing in them that his father might have cause to weigh twice. "He asks a great many questions. He answers them honestly when you ask his own back."

"Good qualities in an ally. Middling ones in a guest, if he asks the wrong questions at the wrong table." His father returned to the tablet, satisfied, or satisfied enough. "Your mother has already spoken to the kitchen. Nothing too foreign to his taste, nothing too plain to embarrass the house. She has a gift for the middle ground I have never quite managed myself."

Marcus said nothing further, though the thought of Ingomar seated at his family's table, in the garden where the cithara had first found its way into these pages of his life, sat in his chest for the rest of the afternoon like a held breath he could not quite release.

He came at the appointed hour, a little before sunset, and Marcus, watching from the atrium's edge as the household slave led him in, found himself absurdly grateful that his father had not asked him to stand at the door and greet the man himself, some instinct warning him that his own face, in that first unguarded moment, might have said more than he wished it to. Ingomar had traded the borrowed tunic of the gymnasium for something of his own, dark wool worked at the hem with a narrow band of northern pattern, plain beside the villa's marble and fresco but worn with the same unhurried ease he wore everything, as though the question of whether he belonged in a room had simply never occurred to him as a question worth asking.

“So this is the young man my son speaks so highly of.” His father rose to meet him… “Ingomar. You honor my table.” He said this in the same measured cordiality he had shown Lucius on the morning of the wardship, a tone Marcus had learned, over eighteen years, to recognize as his father's particular instrument for men whose good opinion mattered to the house. "You honor my table."

"The honor is mine, domine." Ingomar's Latin had smoothed since the strategy session, Marcus thought, or perhaps he had simply grown more used to hearing it, each word still set down with care but with less of the tested-stone deliberateness of three nights before. "Your son has been a generous guide to your city. I thought it only right to see something of the house that raised him."

It was, Marcus recognized with a small private jolt, exactly the sort of thing calculated to please his father most, framed with just enough truth in it that it did not read as flattery, and he watched something in his father's face ease at the words, the particular loosening of a man confirming a private wager with himself that Marcus had seen Varus wear in the garden beneath the fig tree.

"Sit, sit. My wife will join us shortly, and my daughter, who I suspect has already found some excuse to observe you from the colonnade rather than wait to be properly introduced." His father's mouth twitched, dry rather than displeased. "She has strong opinions about most things. You'll forgive her for having formed several already, purely on the strength of my son's account of the gymnasium."

Ingomar's eyes found Marcus's, briefly, something warm and faintly amused passing between them before either could think better of it. "I would be glad to hear them. I have found the youngest members of a household are often its most honest critics."

"You have no idea," Marcus said, and the small laugh that followed, easy and unpremeditated, seemed to settle something in the room that had been holding itself carefully upright until then.

They took the meal in the garden as the light softened toward evening, the same bench where Marcus had once composed his secret lament now pressed into service as a dining couch, the fountain's low murmur underscoring a conversation that moved, by careful design, along the safest channels his father knew how to steer. A servant came first with a shallow dish of eggs dressed in fish sauce and chopped herbs, then with a platter of red mullet, simply grilled, the kind of fish Marcus knew his father paid dearly for and never once mentioned the cost of, and a soft, milky cheese Marcus’s mother favored, drizzled with oil pressed from their own trees and scattered with mint from the kitchen garden not ten paces from where they reclined.

It was a modest spread beside the palace's silver and crystal, deliberately so, Marcus suspected, his father's own quiet argument that a household need not compete with an emperor's table to keep its dignity. Ingomar ate without hesitation or performance, asking once, with open curiosity rather than distaste, what the sauce on the eggs was made from, and accepting the answer, fermented fish left to cure in the sun, with the same grave courtesy he gave everything else that evening. Ingomar spoke, when asked, of the Rhine and the forests beyond it, of a hall his father kept that was smaller than this garden but louder, he said, with more voices in it at once than Marcus's whole villa seemed to hold. He described it without apology and without performance, the plain recitation of a man laying out a fact rather than defending a homeland, and Marcus watched his father listen with the particular stillness he reserved for information he intended to remember.

"And you find Rome much as you expected?" his father asked, turning his cup the way Varus had, the way, Marcus thought, every man of consequence in this city seemed to turn a cup when he meant to weigh an answer rather than merely hear it.

"Less and more," Ingomar said, after a moment's consideration. "Less, because I had built a city in my mind from what men said of it on the frontier, and no city built from rumor survives its own gates for long. More, because I did not expect to find anything in it worth carrying home." He did not look at Marcus when he said this, which Marcus understood, by now, to be its own particular tell.

His father accepted this with a slow nod, the answer of a diplomat rather than a boy, and Marcus caught, beneath the surface of his father's evident approval, the faint calculating pleasure of a man cataloguing an asset. Whatever affection had begun to grow between his son and this Cherusci noble, his father saw first, and would likely always see first, the alliance value of it, the bridge it might build between Varus's ambitions and Arminius's usefulness. Marcus found the thought landed with less bitterness than he might have expected a week ago. It was simply the truth of the house he had been born into, the same truth that had sent him to a banquet to be looked over like a coin, and he had learned, if nothing else these past days, that a thing could be calculated and still, underneath the calculation, be real.

His mother arrived partway through the second course, her presence loosening the table's more careful edges the way it always did, and greeted Ingomar with a warmth that owed nothing to strategy and everything to her own plain nature. "You're the one who's been keeping my son company on his tours of the city," she said, settling beside her husband with the ease of a woman long used to arriving late to her own table and finding it none the worse for it. "He's said very little about it, which in my experience means there's a great deal worth saying."

"Mother." Marcus felt the heat climb his neck before he could stop it, and did not miss the quick, delighted flick of Ingomar's eyes toward him, quickly hidden again beneath the polite attention of a guest.

"I only observe," his mother said, entirely unrepentant, reaching for the bread. "A woman who has raised a son as private as this one learns to read the silences he leaves rather than the words he offers."

It was at this precise moment that Livia arrived, trailing a scarf she had clearly claimed for the occasion without quite managing to wear it correctly, and dropped onto the bench beside Marcus with the settled confidence of a girl who considered herself, whatever the household's formal arrangements suggested otherwise, an essential guest at any table where something interesting was happening.

"You're the barbarian," she said to Ingomar, without preamble, in the tone of a girl confirming a fact rather than asking a question.

"Livia." Their father's voice carried a warning, mild but unmistakable.

"I only meant it as Marcus's word, not mine," Livia said, entirely unbothered, and turned back to Ingomar with open, undisguised curiosity. "He wouldn't tell me anything about the gymnasium except that you weren't a barbarian, said very quickly and very red in the face, which is exactly the sort of thing my brother says when he means the opposite of what he's saying, or possibly something he hasn't figured out how to say at all."

"Livia." This time it was Marcus, low and mortified, and the sound that escaped Ingomar in response, a short, startled laugh he did not quite manage to smother, did nothing whatsoever to improve matters.

"She has the right of it more often than not," Ingomar said gravely, to Livia rather than to Marcus, the wry warmth Marcus had come to recognize settling over his face like an old, well-worn cloak. "I was not called a barbarian to my face, if that eases your curiosity. Only wrestled, badly, by one of your brother's friends.

"Did you win the wrestling?"

"I did."

Livia turned to Marcus with an expression of frank, delighted vindication. "You said he wrestled well. You didn't say he won."

"I said no such thing," Marcus said, with as much dignity as he could summon, which was not a great deal, given that his mother had gone very still in the particular way she did when she was working hard not to laugh, and his father's mouth had developed a suspicious tightness at one corner that suggested the same battle being fought and only narrowly won.

"You implied it very strongly," Livia said, entirely satisfied with herself, and helped herself to a fig before turning her attention back to Ingomar with the single-minded interest of a girl who had decided, apparently on the spot, that this particular guest was worth the whole evening's investment. "Tell me something true about your home. Not a story made prettier for Roman ears. Marcus says you don't lie about things, even when it would be easier."

"Livia." Their mother's voice this time, though gentler, more amused than corrective.

"It's a fair question," Ingomar said, before their father could weigh in with a sterner version of the same. He considered it a moment, turning his cup, and Marcus watched something in his face settle toward the same quiet honesty Marcus had seen in the baths, in the colonnade among the Danaids, the register Ingomar seemed to reserve for things that mattered more than politeness required. "True, then. My mother keeps bees, and swears the honey is sweeter for the cold that precedes it, that nothing given easily is given as well as a thing the winter has made you work for." He paused. "I did not understand her, as a boy. I am beginning to."

The garden held a small, unexpected quiet after that, even Livia sobered by it, and Marcus found himself looking at Ingomar across the low table with an ache in his chest that had very little to do with the evening's wine and a great deal to do with the plain, unadorned honesty of a man who did not know how to offer anything less, even at a table where less might have served him better.

His father broke the silence first, clearing his throat in the manner of a man returning a room to business he better understood. "A fine sentiment. Your mother sounds a wise woman." He set down his cup with the small, decisive click that generally preceded a change of subject in his father's conversations. "You'll forgive me for asking what I must, given the season closing in on us. Arminius speaks well of the winter garrisons, of the alliances holding along the Rhine. I would hear it from you, if you're willing to speak plainly. Is the peace as settled as Varus believes it to be?"

Something shifted behind Ingomar's eyes, quick and carefully smoothed over, the same wariness Marcus had first seen in him at the strategy session, before the wine and the easy company had worn it down. "I am a guest at your table, dominus, not a counselor at Varus's. I would not want to speak beyond what a guest is owed to say."

"A diplomat's answer." His father's mouth curved, not unkindly, something like respect threading through it. "I'll not press further tonight. There will be time enough for plain talk once the season turns, and I suspect you'll find yourself asked the question a great many more times before it's done being useful to ask." He rose, signaling the meal's natural close with the same unhurried authority he brought to everything. "Walk with me a moment before you go. I would speak to you of my son, since you'll have more care of his welfare in the coming months than I will."

Marcus felt his stomach tighten at that, some instinct warning him the conversation his father intended was not one he was meant to overhear, and he watched the two of them move off toward the far end of the garden, his father's hand briefly at Ingomar's shoulder in a gesture of easy, practiced camaraderie, leaving Marcus alone at the table with his mother and his sister and the fountain's steady, indifferent murmur.

"He likes him," his mother said quietly, once they were out of easy earshot, watching the two figures recede into the garden's blue evening light. "Your father. I've seen him take the measure of a great many men at this table, and rarely with such evident satisfaction."

"He likes what he's useful for," Marcus said, and heard the small edge in his own voice before he could soften it.

"Perhaps." His mother did not argue the point, which was, in its own way, its own kind of honesty. "But your father has never once mistaken usefulness for the whole of a man's worth, whatever he lets the rest of Rome believe of him. If he did not see something worth liking beneath the usefulness, he would not have troubled himself to walk with him in the garden."

She reached over and touched Marcus's hand, brief and warm. "You've been careful all evening, watching your own face as though it might betray you. It has, a little, several times. I don't think it matters as much as you fear it does."

Marcus did not trust himself to answer that, and was grateful when Livia, apparently deciding the conversation had grown too serious for her taste, filled the silence herself. "I liked him," she announced, with the settled finality of a twelve-year-old delivering a verdict from which there was no appeal. "He didn't talk to me as though I were a child who couldn't follow a real conversation."

His father and Ingomar returned a short while later, his father's expression unreadable in the fading light, Ingomar's own face carefully composed in the particular way Marcus had learned to recognize as a man holding something private just beneath the surface of his features.

Whatever had passed between them at the garden's far end, his father did not linger over it. He murmured something about correspondence that could not wait for morning and withdrew toward the tablinum, and his mother, catching some signal Marcus did not see, rose a moment later and drew Livia off toward the house with an errand about tomorrow's packing that Marcus understood, with a small unnamed gratitude, she had invented on the spot.

The cithara was still where he had left it that morning, resting against the marble bench as though it had been waiting the whole evening for exactly this. Marcus looked at it, then at Ingomar, and felt the old, familiar pull of it settle over the usual argument he had with himself before he'd even finished having it.

"You never did hear it," he said. "In the baths, you asked. I never answered properly."

Something shifted in Ingomar's face, quick and careful, as though he were unwilling to want a thing too openly in case the wanting jinxed it. "I remember."

Marcus sat, drawing the instrument onto his knee with the ease of years of habit, and did not let himself think too long about what he meant to play, only that it was not the piece he had performed for Augustus, nothing built for a hall full of watching men. He played, instead, the melody he had been composing in secret the very afternoon this had all begun, the lament for a life shifting beneath him, though it had changed since then without his quite noticing, softer in places, less afraid.

He did not look up while he played. He had learned, over the years, that watching a listener's face while performing only invited him to shape the music toward their expectation rather than his own truth, and this, of all the times he had ever played, was not a night for performing. He let the notes go where they wanted, the melody drifting from its old melancholy into something warmer near the end, unplanned, the sound finding its own way toward whatever this had become.

When the last note faded he looked up and found Ingomar entirely still, in the particular way that Marcus was coming to understand was not distance but its opposite, a stillness that cost something to hold. His eyes were bright in the lamplight, fixed on Marcus with none of the careful wariness he wore for the rest of the world, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, the garden holding the silence the way it had once held Marcus's own private grief, now asked to hold this instead.

"I did not expect—" Ingomar stopped, seemed to reconsider the sentence entirely, and started again, quieter. "Among my people, a song like that would be kept. Not performed twice. You would not waste it on a hall full of strangers."

"I didn't play it for a hall full of strangers."

"No." Ingomar's voice had gone low, unsteady in a way Marcus had not yet heard from him. "You did not."

Marcus felt the space between them narrow without either of them moving, some current passing that neither had given a name to and both, for once, seemed unwilling to break by trying.

"Marcus!" Livia's voice cut across the garden, bright and entirely unaware of what it was interrupting, her sandals slapping against the path as she came around the colonnade at a run. "Father wants you before Ingomar leaves, something about the road passes, and Mother says if you're not both inside in a minute she's sending Titus to fetch you, and you know how long that takes once he starts asking questions."

The moment did not so much break as fold quietly back into itself, put away rather than lost, and Marcus rose with the cithara still warm against his palm, aware of Ingomar doing the same beside him, both of them a half-step slower than the summons strictly required.

"Coming," Marcus said, and did not trust his voice with anything further.

They walked the length of the colonnade in a silence that felt, after everything the evening had asked of them, like something closer to relief, the household's lamps throwing long gold shapes across the mosaic floor, the garden's fountain fading behind them into the villa's deeper quiet.

"Your father is a careful man," Ingomar said finally, as they reached the outer gate, the street beyond dark and cooling under a sky gone fully to stars. "He asked me, walking, whether I meant well by you."

Marcus felt something in his chest go very still. "What did you tell him?"

"The truth. That I did not entirely know what I meant, only that it was not nothing, and that a man who tells a father less than that does not deserve to be trusted with his son." Ingomar's mouth curved, faint and rueful in the lamplight. "He seemed satisfied enough with an honest uncertainty. More, I think, than he would have been with a confident lie."

"That sounds like him." Marcus found he could not quite look away from the pale eyes holding his, steady and open in a way the whole careful evening had not allowed until now.

"Three days," Ingomar said, "before the roads close for the season and we march for the Rhine." He did not finish the thought, and did not need to.

"Go carefully home," Marcus said at last, because it was the only safe thing left to say.

"And you," Ingomar said, "go carefully toward whatever comes after this gate."

He turned and walked off into the dark, unhurried as he was in everything, and Marcus stood at the gate a long while after the sound of his footsteps had faded, the cithara still warm against his palm, before he finally turned back toward the house.