Harry Turtledove - Give me back my Legions!

Here and there, two or sometimes four Romans carried an unconscious comrade toward the sacrificial groves. Nobody wanted to waste any of this enormous feast for the gods. If a man still breathed, his spirit was nourishment.

Sigimerus came up to Arminius and bowed before him. “You did it,” he said. “You truly did.”

“Germany is free,” Arminius said. “The Romans will never dare stick their noses across the Rhine again. We’ll visit them on their side before too long.”

“I do believe we will.” His father sounded almost dazed at the size of their triumph. “And after that . . .” He shook his head. Plainly, he couldn’t imagine what might happen after that.

Well, neither could Arminius. But he was sure he would think of something when the time came.

When Caldus Caelius came back to himself, he thought he was dead and being punished in Tartarus. His head ached as if it had been smashed to pieces - and so it nearly had. He needed a little while to realize he might have been better off if he were already dead.

He tried to raise a hand to his throbbing brow. Both hands came up - they’d been chained together. The links between the manacles clanked as they moved. Why would anyone have . . . ? Slowly, realization returned. “Oh,” he muttered. “The battle. We must have lost.”

If you lost a battle to the Germans, what happened next? No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he got an answer of sorts. A shriek rang out that made him wonder if he hadn’t been right when he first regained consciousness. Maybe he really had landed in a realm of eternal punishment.

No matter how much his battered head hurt, he made himself turn it so he could see where that shriek came from. A moment later, he wished he hadn’t. Several Germans were holding down a legionary - the luckless Roman was also chained, just like Caelius - while another barbarian slowly and clumsily decapitated him. The screams subsided into a gurgling wheeze. Blood poured out onto the damp ground and spattered all over the Germans.

At last, the sword - it was a Roman gladius - found its way between two neck vertebrae. With a grunt of satisfaction, the German held up the dripping head. To Caldus Caelius’ horror, the head wasn’t just dripping. Even after it was severed from its thrashing body, it blinked several times before its eves finally sagged shut. Its mouth might have tried to shape a word. Caelius hoped that was his imagination, but feared it wasn’t.

The other Germans congratulated the one who’d done the beheading. He grinned and shuffled his feet as if he’d never deserved such praise before. Then he carried the Roman soldier’s head over to one of the nearby oaks. He used a leather thong to tie it to a low-hanging branch. Other legionaries’ sightlessly staring heads already hung there. Still others were spiked to the trunk. Nor was that the only tree sprouting such fruit. The whole grove was full of butchered Romans. The iron stink of blood clogged Caelius’ nostrils.

And things only got worse. Along with heads and other pieces of legionaries hung the eagles of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX, as well as the lesser emblems from the cohorts that made up the beaten legions. Seeing them there, offerings to the grim German gods, wounded Caldus Caelius almost as much as the rest of the atrocities put together. He wished he could die of shame. He wished he could die any way at all, so long as it happened fast.

A big German came over and looked down at him. The man wore a legionary’s helmet at a jaunty angle and carried a legionary’s shortsword in his right hand. And he proved to speak Latin, too, for he said, “You are the one called Caldus Caelius, eh?”

“That’s right,” Caelius answered automatically. “Who the demon are you?”

“My name is Ingaevonus,” the barbarian answered. “Do you remember me?”

Caelius started to shake his head. Then he stopped, not only because it hurt but because he did remember. “That village,” he croaked.

Ingaevonus nodded. “Yes. That village. My village. Taxes.” He spat the word out through his mustache. “We do meet again, eh?” He thought-fully hefted the gladius.

“Yes.” Caldus Caelius forced the word out through dry lips. He didn’t want to show fear, though the barbarian had to know he felt it.

“I kill you,” Ingaevonus said. “I kill you slow, Roman. I kill you nice and slow, Caldus Caelius. I go think how to do it, then I come back, eh?” He ambled off, testing the sword’s edge with his thumb. Over his shoulder, he added, “Won’t be long.”

Not nearly far enough away, another legionary started screaming for his mother. The Germans were gutting him, the way they might gut a slaughtered boar. But they hadn’t slaughtered him first. They drew out his bowels a few digits at a time, laughing as they worked. The legionary kept on screaming. One of the barbarians had a new idea. He cut again, lower. The Roman wailed again, higher. The German stuffed what he’d cut off into the man’s mouth to muffle the noise.

Caldus Caelius shuddered. His chains clanked again. If Ingaevonus needed ideas . . . “Not me,” Caelius muttered hoarsely. “He wouldn’t do that to me.” But how could he possibly stop the barbarian?

If the Germans wanted to, they could have done it to him already. They seemed to be picking most of the men they tormented at random.

A savage would point at a Roman, a couple of others would seize him, and then they would set to work to see how much horror they could pack into the end of his life.

No one had pointed to Caelius yet. But Ingaevonus would, and soon. Maybe they’d waited for him to come to. They did prefer their victims aware and suffering till the end.

“Not me,” Caelius whispered again. If he’d had a sword, he would have fallen on it. If he’d had a dagger, he would have hoped it could reach his heart, or else slashed it across his throat. If ... But what he had was a head already half shattered and a stout set of manacles and chains.

And then, amidst the stench of blood and the worse stench of terror, sudden mad hope flowered in him. If he could use the manacles to finish the job of crushing his skull . . . But what if he couldn’t? His laugh sounded more than a little mad, too. If he couldn’t, how was he worse off?

He pulled himself to a sitting position. That drew the Germans’ notice, as he’d feared it would. One of them shouted for Ingaevonus. Three more strode toward him, anticipatory grins on their faces. Now or never flashed through his mind. He smashed at himself with all his fear-fueled strength. The last thought he ever remembered having was I hope I spoil their fun.

Vala Numonius’ horse stumbled south and west. The poor beast was on its last legs. The Roman cavalry commander - the Roman fugitive in a land all traps and snares for Romans - urged it on even so. If it foundered, when it foundered, he’d have to use his own legs, and it’s were swifter.

He was, he hoped, still ahead of the news of Quinctilius Varus’ army. He’d seen a few Germans working in their farm plots. They hadn’t paid him much special attention. They still thought of him as a Roman soldier, not as a fugitive from black disaster.

As long as they thought of him so - as a man who was dangerous to approach, as a man who would be avenged if he fell - he was fairly safe. But he knew better, or worse. Even if they didn’t, he knew he was nothing but a runaway. He also knew that scores, hundreds, maybe even thousands of Roman fugitives cluttered the German landscape. The barbarians might not have to hear the news. Just seeing so many Romans wandering at random over the countryside could be plenty to tell them the legions had met catastrophe.

And that wasn’t Vala Numonius’ only worry. Oh, no - far from it. Sooner or later, the cavalry commander knew he’d have to sleep. A German could come up to cut his throat or knock him over the head, and he’d never know it till too late. The legionaries joked about waking up dead if they got stuck in the middle of enemy country. Numonius didn’t think those jokes were funny, not any more he didn’t.

Maybe worse yet was that news and rumor would go right on spreading while he slept. They were liable to get ahead of him, even if he still had a lead on them for the moment. If they did ... If they did, the Germans would know he didn’t have the Empire’s might behind him now. They would know he’d suddenly become fair game. And they would hunt him.

He rode past a farm. Women and boys and one graybeard with a crooked back worked in the fields. No warriors. The Romans had wondered about that on their way north. Vala Numonius’ mouth quirked in a bitter grin. By the gods, he didn’t wonder anymore! Sometimes, though, knowledge came at too high a cost. People talked about that all the time. Now Numonius understood it in his belly, in his balls.

The barbarians all stared at him as he went by. They would know where their menfolk had gone, and why. But they wouldn’t - he prayed they wouldn’t - know what had happened. Maybe Numonius was only a scout, with a victorious Roman army not far behind him.

Maybe I am - but I’m not. The nonsense formed of itself inside his mind. It was one more measure of how worn he was. He wondered whether his horse’s head was full of moonshine, too. More nonsense. He was starting to have trouble even recognizing it.

He still had half a loaf of barley bread left. When it was gone, he’d need to buy food from the Germans, or steal it from them. The commander of the Roman cavalry, reduced to chicken thievery! Well, better that than being reduced to what had happened to the poor, sorry foot soldiers.

Numonius was glad when the track went into the woods and he couldn’t feel the Germans’ pale eyes on him anymore. The barbarians watched him like wolves watching a sick, staggering doe. If it fell over, they would feed. If it didn’t, they could catch something else before long.

He hated the German woods. Everything seemed to close in on you. You couldn’t see any farther than you could spit. Anything might lurk in there and lunge out at you. Anything. Wolves. A bear. A wide-horned aurochs, as fearsome as any meat-eating brute. Germans, the most fearsome brutes of all. You’d never know danger drew near till too late.

But when every breath was danger, the woods didn’t seem to matter so much. And, if the hunted couldn’t see far, neither could the hunters. Vala Numonius slid off his horse and led it away from the track. Then he tied it to a sapling and went back and covered its tracks, and his, as best he could. He didn’t know it his best would prove good enough, but you had to try.

Half a bowshot away from the path, he gnawed on the barley bread. It was dense and chewy. Bread made from wheat flour would have risen better. It would have tasted better, too. But it wouldn’t have packed so much nourishment into such a small space. For soldiers who had to carry their own rations, that mattered more.

He gave the horse a couple of bites of bread, too. That was all he had for the animal. A few ferns and weeds grew in the gloom under the forest canopy. The horse nibbled at those. It raised its head and gave Numonius a reproachful look, as if to say, You work me to death, and then all I get is this?

“Sorry,” he told it, his own voice a weary whisper. “Carry me back across the Rhine and I’ll fill you full of oats and barley. By Epona, I will.” Maybe the Gallic horse-goddess would hearken to his prayer here in the German woods. Plainly, the gods of his own folk held no power here.

He lay down beside the horse. No matter what the risks, he simply had to sleep. He’d soon be a babbling idiot if he didn’t, liable to tell the Germans he was on the run even if they hadn’t already figured it out. That most of them knew no Latin while he had only a handful of words in their tongue bothered him not at all. Once he lay down, nothing bothered him. Bare ground might have been Jupiter’s divinely soft bed up on Mount Olympus.

He didn’t wake up with his throat cut. Maybe Epona was listening. Maybe it was just luck. Whatever it was, he had to make the most of it. He found a few mushrooms growing not far from where he’d lain. He didn’t know German mushrooms well, but stuffed them into his mouth anyhow. If they poisoned him . . . well, so what?

His horse wanted nothing to do with mushrooms. All it wanted was rest. He couldn’t have cared less. A convenient stump made mounting easier than it would have been otherwise, but he knew he would have managed one way or another. A cavalryman had to be able to vault into the saddle from flat ground. So did a cavalry commander who expected his men to follow him. Vala Numonius met the requirements.

How many of his men had followed him away from the trapped foot soldiers? How many of them still lived? How many Roman infantrymen still did? Not many, he feared. Three legions, thrown onto the sacrificial altar and butchered.

What would Augustus say when he learned? Maybe I can be the one who brings the news to Rome, Numonius thought. That dignified his flight with purpose.

Of course, it had had purpose all along. If survival wasn’t a purpose, he couldn’t imagine what would be. But the Germans had a purpose, too: slaughtering Romans. Theirs seemed more likely to be fulfilled than his, curse them.

He managed to find the track again. Without it, he might have wandered in circles till he starved ... or till the barbarians found him. But he still had a chance to get away.

The track came out into open country as abruptly as the trees had swallowed it. Vala Numonius could ride faster - could flee faster - now. But who were those horsemen out there ahead of him? More Romans, he feared. If they’d got ahead of him in the night, word of the Germans’ victory would have, too.

And so it proved. Now the barbarians who spotted him didn’t stare and wonder what he was up to. They knew he was on the run. They pointed and shouted and came after him. He booted the horse up into a shambling, drunken trot, so the spears some of them flung fell short.

Dogs ran howling after the horse. Vala Numonius supposed they were dogs, anyhow; they obeyed better than wolves would have, no matter what they looked like. They terrified a brief gallop out of the horse. Then, no matter how Numonius screamed at it and beat it, it decided it could run no more, and stood still.

That was the last thing he wanted. Barbarians loped toward him behind the dogs. Few of them were in the prime of life, which didn’t mean their spears couldn’t kill him. Knowing he was in trouble deeper than the sea, he slid down from the horse’s back and started to run.

Some of the dogs gave chase. He slashed one in the snout with his cavalry sword, which was longer than the gladii foot soldiers carried. The horrible beast yelped in surprise and pain and fell back, bleeding. He hoped the others would turn on it, but no such luck. Another gray, sharp-eared beast darted forward to snap at his leg. He killed it.

But while he fought the dogs, he couldn’t flee their masters. Here came the Germans: youths and even one rugged blond woman who must have fancied herself a warrior. A sword was a perfectly good weapon against a pack of dogs. Against spears with three or four times the reach? That was a different story.