Harry Turtledove - Give me back my Legions!

“I think so,” Masua said.

“I told you - you are no blockhead. And we have a lot to learn from the Romans, too. This whole business of writing ...” Segestes regretfully spread his hands. “I wish I would have come to it when I was young enough to learn it. It seems to me a very large idea.”

“It could be,” said Masua, who had no interest whatever in writing. “But I will tell you something else.” Segestes made a questioning noise. His retainer explained: “That Varus, he has a lot to learn from us.”

Serving as an officer in the Roman auxiliaries made Arminius a sophisticated man in Germany. Command meant more among the Romans than it did with his own folk. In Germany, a chieftain had to persuade to lead. If his retainers didn’t like what he was doing, they wouldn’t follow him.

A Roman officer who gave an order expected to be obeyed because of his rank. If the men under him said no, the Romans made them pay. Having authority like that made Arminius more persuasive, even if he couldn’t use it all. If you tried to give a German an order he didn’t fancy, he would up and tell you no. Either that or he would walk away and ignore you from then on. Arminius the German chieftain didn’t have the coercive tools Arminius the officer of auxiliaries had enjoyed.

But he still spoke as if he expected to be obeyed. Because he did, he got more Germans to follow him than he would have if he’d begged for support the way a lot of would-be leaders did.

“You sound like a man who knows what he wants to do,” was something he heard again and again.

“I am a man who knows what he wants to do,” he would say whenever he heard that. “I want to throw the Romans out of our country. The more men who follow me, the better. But if I have to fight them by myself, I will.”

He would do no such thing. Fighting the legions singlehanded was exactly the same as falling on his sword. It sounded bold, though. It sounded better than bold: it sounded heroic. And the more he said it, the more he repeated it, the less likely it became that he would have to follow through on it.

The Romans had been pushing German customs in their direction a little at a time, so slowly that only old men noticed things weren’t done now as they had been in the days of their youth. Had the invaders kept on with that slow, steady pressure, they might have turned a lot of Germans into willing - even eager - imitators of their ways without the locals’ even noticing.

But paying taxes the way Roman subjects did was not to the Germans’ liking. Arminius seized on that. “Who knows what this Varus will want from you next? Who knows what he will take from you next?” he asked, again and again. “You can’t trust him. You don’t dare trust him. If you give him a finger, he’ll take an arm. If you give him an arm, he’ll take all of you. Then you’ll be one more Roman slave.”

He wanted to talk about Roman soldiers stealing German women.

He wanted to, but soon found out he couldn’t. It would have been lovely if he could; to the Germans, every Roman alive was a natural-born lecher, a threat to their women’s virtue. Whenever Arminius tried that tack, though, a pro-Roman German would sing out, “What about Thusnelda?” A man who’d stolen a woman himself couldn’t very well accuse others of wanting to do the same thing.

Oh, he could, but he got no profit from it if he did. And so Arminius, a practical man, soon stopped trying. He found plenty of other bad things to say about Varus and the Romans that didn’t leave him open to heckling. His own folk were glad enough to listen to him when he steered clear of talk about women.

He’d just finished another harangue when a man he knew came up to him and spoke in a low voice: “Masua got away. We couldn’t nab him, and he’s been seen at Segestes’ steading. We’ll never get him there.”

“Thunderweather!” Arminius said. “So he went and told lies to Varus and made it back, did he? That’s not good.”

“Sorry.” The other German hung his head and spread his hands. “He’s a sneaky bastard - that must be why Segestes chose him to go to the Roman in the first place. He gave our friends the slip some kind of way. We still don’t know how. They thought they were going to catch him and give him what he deserved . . . but they didn’t.”

“Too bad. Oh, too bad!” Arminius said. “Has anyone we know come back from Vetera? Have you heard whether Varus paid any attention to him?”

“No, I haven’t,” his acquaintance answered. “The only way to find out will be how the Romans behave come spring.”

“Yes.” Arminius drew out the word till it sounded uncommonly gloomy. He could picture Varus summoning him to Mindenum. He would have to go if the Roman governor called him. Not going would show mistrust, and would make Varus mistrust him if he didn’t already. But if Varus did already mistrust him . . . chains and the headsman’s axe might be waiting for him when he came to the legionary encampment.

I am a Roman citizen, Arminius thought. If Varus does try to take my head, I can appeal to Augustus, the Romans’ king. That would put off the inevitable. But how likely was Augustus to spare a rebel chieftain’s life? If he was as canny as people said, he would want to nail Arminius’ head to a tree or do whatever the Romans did with their sacrificial victims.

“You keep telling people Varus likes you,” the other German said. “If he does, he wouldn’t have listened to Masua.”

“Yes.” Arminius stretched the word again. “If.” A foreigner’s fondness was liable to decide his fate, and his country’s. A slender twig to have to trust, but the only one he had.

VII

Quinctilius Varus got the feeling that he’d never properly appreciated spring before. That was what came of living his life around the Mediterranean. Winters were mild there, snows uncommon. Winter was the rainy season, the growing season, the season that led toward spring harvest.

Not here. Not on the Rhine. Varus had seen more snow in one winter than in all his previous life. So he told himself, anyhow, though it might not have been strictly true. He was sure he’d never seen more snow, deeper snow, than the drifts that whitened field and forest around Vetera.

And he’d, never seen a greater rebirth than the one that came when the -sun at last swung north and melted all the snow. The bare-branched trees enrobed themselves in greenery. Fresh new grass surged up through the dead, wispy, yellow stuff the snowdrifts had hidden.

Butterflies, flying jewels, flitted from one magically sprouted flower to the next. Bees began to buzz. Flies and gnats and mosquitoes also came back to life, and were rather less welcome.

With the insects came swarms of birds. Sparrows and carrion crows and a few others had stayed through the winter. But now the woods and fields were full of music. Swallows swooped. Thrushes hopped. Swifts darted. Robins sang. Varus appreciated them the more because he’d done without them for so long.

Aristocles was less impressed. “If things weren’t so awful before, they wouldn’t seem so much better now,” the slave said darkly.

“I’d rather look on the bright side of things,” Varus said.

The pedisequus sniffed. “The bright side of things would be going back to Rome. Are we going to do that?” His woebegone expression answered the question without words. Then he used a few more: “No. We’re going into Germany.”

“Don’t remind me,” Quinctilius Varus said. Even with the broad-leafed trees across the Rhine getting new foliage, the German forests looked dark and forbidding. Varus had never seen them look any other way. The bright side of things was hard to find. He did his best: “Maybe this year’s campaigns will bring the province under the yoke once for all.”

“Gods grant it be so!” Aristocles exclaimed. “In that case, you can turn it over to somebody else and go back to Rome after all.”

“Nothing I’d like better.” Varus lowered his voice. “The company of soldiers begins to pall after a while.”

“Bloody bores,” Aristocles muttered, which was just what his master was thinking. The pedisequus went on, “Is there any chance we could send the legions across the river to do what needs doing while we stay here ourselves? Vetera is bad, but I don’t suppose it’s impossible. Not next to Mindenum, anyhow.”

Regretfully, Varus shook his head. “Augustus put me in charge of the three legions here. If I’m going to command them, I have to command them, if you know what I mean. And commanding means being seen to command.”

“You have a strong sense of duty,” Aristocles said. Varus would have liked that better had the slave not contrived to make it sound more like reproach than praise.

However much Varus wished he could, he couldn’t avoid the company of soldiers. Practically everyone in Vetera was a soldier or a retired soldier or someone who sold things to soldiers or someone who slept with soldiers. Some of the legionary officers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects for the coming campaigning season. “One more good push and we’ve got ‘em, I think,” Ceionius said at a supper of roast boar.

“Here’s hoping,” Varus said. By now, he’d got used to drinking neat wine - or he thought he had, anyhow.

“It’s still Germany. They’re still Germans,” Lucius Eggius said. “We’ve been banging heads with them for a long time, like a couple of aurochs in rutting season. How do we pull a miracle out of our helmet now?”

“We have a fine new leader,” Ceionius said. “That’s how.”

“You flatter me,” Varus said, which was bound to be true. Augustus’s courtiers were smoother at it than these provincial bumpkins. To keep from thinking about that, Varus added, “Aurochs are a disappointment.”

“Not if you boil ‘em long enough,” Eggius said. “After a while, the meat will turn tender. You’ve got to be patient, though.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Varus said. “In the Gallic War, Caesar makes them out to be fearsome monsters. And they aren’t - they’re nothing but wild oxen with long horns.”

“Caesar likes to tell stories,” Eggius said with a shrug. “Sometimes they’re true. Sometimes they just sound good.”

“How do you know which are which?” Varus asked.

“Sometimes you can tell. Sometimes - like with the aurochs - you can really find out. Sometimes . . .” The legionary officer shrugged. “It’s the same way with the stories about Caesar, I guess. He’s - what? - fifty years dead. Who knows which ones are true and which ones are just crap? Any old way, though, they’ll be telling tales about him forever.”

“Yes, I suppose they will,” Quinctilius Varus said in tones more bitter than he would have expected.

Lucius Eggius wasn’t wrong. Julius Caesar’s fame would last as long as men endured. So would Augustus’ - Varus had no doubt of that. But what about my own? he wondered, not for the first time.

If he was the man who brought Germany into the Empire, his name would live. Some historian would write an account of Augustus’ reign, the way Sallust had written about the war against Jugurtha the Numidian and about Catiline’s plot against the Senate or the way Caesar himself wrote about the war against the Gauls. Nobody could talk about Augustus’ reign without talking about the conquest of Germany. And so, to some degree, people would remember that there had been such a man as Publius Quinctilius Varus.

But it wouldn’t be the same. Everyone would always know who Julius Caesar and Augustus were. People would always tell stories about them. The stories wouldn’t shrink in the telling, either. Stories never did. If a man two hundred years from now wanted to learn the name of the man who conquered Germany, though . . .

So many books were written and then forgotten, never recopied after the author put in the labor of composing them in the first place. Still, these were important times, and would surely attract an important historian, one whose works would be reproduced often enough to last . . . somewhere.

The library at Alexandria was supposed to keep at least one copy of every work in Greek and Latin. It had been damaged in the fighting in Caesar’s day, but say it did what it was supposed to do. That would give the future scholar a chance to discover the name of Publius Quinctilius Varus - if he could find the scroll he needed among the thousands in the library . . . and if he could afford to go to Alexandria to do his research in the first place.

Immortality, then. But a shadowy immortality, rather like the one Homer gave the spirits of the dead in the Odyssey. Better than nothing, less than enough.

“Something wrong, your Excellency?” Eggius asked. “You look a little peaked, like.”

“No, no, no.” Varus denied it not only to the soldier but also to himself. “Just thinking about what Germany will be like when it’s been Roman for a couple of hundred years, that’s all.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d been thinking, but it came close enough to let him bring the lie out smoothly.

Lucius Eggius made a face. “It’ll still be the back woods, you ask me. The Gauls, now, the Gauls are picking things up pretty quick. But these gods-cursed Germans? They’re stubborn bastards, no two ways about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still mumbling to themselves in their own language, even after all that time.”

Struck by an odd thought, Varus asked, “Have you learned any of it?”

“Me?” Eggius laughed. “Just a tiny bit, sir, so I can talk a little with the German girls I bed. They like that, you know? You can tell ‘em what you want ‘em to do, and they can let you know what feels good to them.”

“I suppose so.” Varus had slept with some German women, too. What else was he going to do, when Claudia Pulchra’d stayed down in Rome? But he’d made sure his bedwarmers understood enough Latin to get by. The other approach hadn’t even occurred to him.

Eggius chuckled again. “Hate to talk business instead of pussy, sir, but when do you aim to cross the Rhine again?”

“How soon can the men be ready?” Varus asked.

“An hour from now, if they have to be.” Professional pride rang in Eggius’ voice. “If you’re not in a hurry, though, a few days to get organized won’t hurt.”

“All right. Do that, then. I don’t think there’s any great rush,” Varus said.

“Right you are, sir.” Lucius Eggius nodded. Then he raised a curious eyebrow. “You sure this Arminius fellow isn’t as much trouble as people say he is?”

“I’m not losing any sleep over him,” Varus answered. “I don’t think anybody else needs to, either.”

The Romans had cut back the woods on the right bank of the Rhine opposite Vetera far enough to make it impossible to bushwhack them when they crossed their bridge into Germany. That didn’t mean Arminius couldn’t watch them cross without being seen himself.

This wasn’t the first Roman army on the march he’d seen, of course. He’d fought alongside the legions in Pannonia, and, before that, he’d fought against them here in Germany. He didn’t think the Romans knew about that. They wouldn’t have granted him citizenship if they did. Back in those days, he’d been nothing to them but another shouting barbarus with a spear and a sword and a shield.