Harry Turtledove - Give me back my Legions!

“That would be splendid, sir,” Numonius replied. “A sign of civilization, you might say.”

“Civilization. Yes.” Once again, Varus fondly remembered Syria. He remembered Rome. He remembered Athens, where he’d stopped on the way back from Syria - and where he, like his son, had studied as a young man. He remembered seeing for the first time the Parthenon and all the other wonderful buildings up on the Acropolis. By the gods, that was civilization for you!

This . . . The day was cool. The sky was a grayish, watery blue. The sun seemed half ashamed to shine. He was riding away from a legionary camp - which, in these parts, counted as an outpost of civilization. He was heading for . . . The gloomy forests that stretched on and on east of the Rhine warned him what he was heading for.

Foot soldiers followed the cavalrymen. One thing the Romans had learned from painful experience: wherever they went in Germany, they went in force. Small parties of men were all too likely to disappear. Better not to tempt the barbarians into doing what they weren’t supposed to.

Varus’ horse stepped off the bridge and onto the muddy ground on the east bank of the Rhine. Its hooves stopped echoing. They made the usual thumping and squelching noises instead.

Vala Numonius had dropped back by half a length to let Varus precede him. Now he caught up again. “Welcome to Germany, sir,” he said.

“Germany,” Varus echoed. He didn’t seen any Germans here on their side of the river. He didn’t particularly miss them. He’d seen plenty in Vetera: big, fair, noisy men with an exaggerated sense of their own importance. Some of the soldiers’ women were pretty in an exotic way, though. They had plenty to hold on to, that was for sure.

The cavalry commander pointed toward the trees, which had been cut down for several stadia around the bridgehead. A lot of the timber from them probably went into the bridge. “They’re watching us from in there,” Numonius said.

“Let them watch. It will teach them respect,” Varus said.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a German stepped into the cleared ground from among the trees. The man turned around, bent over, undid his cloak, and waggled his pale, bare backside at the Romans. Then he straightened, wrapped the cloak around himself again, and loped off into the woods.

Some of the horsemen behind Varus laughed. Others swore. “So much for respect, sir,” Vala Numonius said.

Biting his lip in rage, Varus pointed out to where the German had vanished. “Seize him! Crucify him!” he shouted.

“Sir, there’s no hope,” said a cavalry officer who’d been on the frontier for a while. “In the forests, they’re like animals. They have dens to lay up in, or they can climb trees like wall lizards wish they could. And he might be trying to lure a detachment right into an ambush.”

He spoke respectfully, as a man had to do when trying to talk a provincial governor out of an order. Varus muttered, still steaming. But he could see that the soldier made good sense. If he fought on this side of the Rhine, he needed to fight on his terms, not the barbarians’.

“Very well,” Varus said heavily. “Very well. We’ll let him get away with that - for now. But the time will come when this whole province learns better. And that time will come soon, by the gods.”

Numonius clapped his hands. “Well said, sir!” he exclaimed. From the other cavalry officer came an unmistakable sigh of relief.

A pale moon shone down on Segestes’ steading. Arminius stood at the edge of the trees, looking things over. The steading seemed quiet, the way it should at night. If things weren’t as they seemed, chances were he would die inside the hour.

He shrugged. If he died, he would die doing what was right, doing what was important. No one would say he’d let Segestes dishonor him. He knew the woman he’d sent here had talked with Thusnelda. She’d told him so herself, after she came away. She wasn’t from his father’s steading, so Segestes would have had no reason to suspect her.

But Arminius didn’t know how Thusnelda felt. The woman who served him - he’d hired her with the fat gold earring he’d taken from the dead Pannonian - hadn’t been able to tell what she thought. She’d kept her own counsel. If she liked this Tudrus, or if she obeyed her father without thinking ... If any of that was true, Arminius would have a thin time of it tonight.

One of Segestes’ dogs let out a tentative bark. A couple of others joined in a moment later. They trotted toward him.

He wore a fat leather sack on his belt. He reached for that instead of his sword. “Come on, boys. Come here,” he called, as if the beasts belonged to his own father.

They weren’t so fierce as they might have been - that was plain. Arminius’ hopes soared. Through the woman, he’d told Thusnelda to feed them as much as they would hold. And now he pulled more chunks of raw meat from the sack and tossed them in front of the dogs.

Greedy as swine, they dug in. Arminius gave them more meat. He kept some in the sack, though: he was certain Segestes had more dogs than these. And, sure enough, two big brutes met him halfway to Segestes’ house. He bribed them the same way as he had the others. They hadn’t made much noise, and quieted down at once. Anybody who gave them meat had to be a friend.

The door. Arminius tapped it, lightly, with a forefinger. That tiny noise shouldn’t bother anyone sleeping in there. But if someone was awake and waiting for it ...

Was someone awake and waiting in there? Arminius tapped again, a tiny bit harder. II Thusnelda had fallen asleep in spite of everything, wouldn’t that make the bitterest joke of all?

When the door opened, his hand fell to the hilt of his sword. If she’d betrayed him to her father, if warriors boiled out through the doorway, what could he do but take some of them with him?

“Arminius?” No warriors. Only a tiny ghost of a voice from the darkness inside Segestes’ house.

“Thusnelda?”

She came out into the moonlight then. It shone oil her lair hair and glittered from the jewels - Roman jewels, probably - set into the brooch that closed her cloak. He touched her hand. He hadn’t done that since they were both children. Her fingers were chilly. Not the night, which was mild, but fear.

“Let’s get away,” he said, whispering himself.

She nodded. Slowly and carefully, she closed the door behind her. “You got past the dogs.”

“No. They ate me,” Arminius answered. Thusnelda stared at him in blank incomprehension. It was, he realized, a Roman kind of thing to say. He could explain it another time, if he decided to bother. For now, he just went on as if he hadn’t spoken before: “Yes, I’m here. Yes, I’m fine. Let’s get away. You do want to come with me, don’t you?”

He wished he had the last question back as soon as it came out of his mouth, which was, of course, exactly too late. But Thusnelda said, “Yes,” and that made it stop mattering.

They hurried away from Segestes’ house. When they went past the two dogs Arminius had met halfway there, one of them yawned while the other thumped its tail against the ground. The dogs had to be full to bursting . . . and Thusnelda was with him now, so they were bound to be sure everything was fine.

The other three, the beasts closer to the edge of the clearing, had also had plenty to eat. Thusnelda paused to pat one of them. “Blackie was always my favorite,” she said in a strangely muffled voice.

Arminius realized the muffling was swallowed tears. She wasn’t leaving only Blackie behind. She was leaving everything she’d ever known. Chances were she would never see this place or her kinsfolk again. No wonder she had trouble sounding steady.

He slipped an arm around her waist. “Everything will be all right,” he promised. “I will make sure everything is all right for you from now on. You are my woman now, Thusnelda. You are my wife.”

In the Germans’ language, woman and wife were the same word. Arminius repeated himself for emphasis’ sake. Latin had two separate words for the two notions. When he asked a legionary why, the fellow-had chuckled and said, “So we can think about women who aren’t our wives - why else?” He’d poked Arminius in the ribs, too, a familiarity the German wouldn’t have put up with from one of his own countrymen.

Germans took their wives’ fidelity seriously. They took few things more seriously. Romans joked about it. When Arminius showed how shocked he was, they laughed at him for a greenhorn. After a bit, he learned to stop showing it, so they stopped laughing. But the shock didn’t go away.

They really thought like that. Their men were seducers, their women sluts. They made lewd jokes about what should have been one of the most important things in the world. And they talked about how they were making the Gauls and Pannonians like them - and about how they would do the same for the Germans once they turned the land between Rhine and Elbe into a province.

To Arminius’ way of thinking, the Romans would be doing it to the Germans. That was when he decided he had to fight them, come what might.

Thusnelda took his hands in hers and brought him back from the campaigns in Pannonia to this quiet, moonlit night. “I am your woman,” she said. “I will be your woman, and your woman only, as long as we both live.”

“That’s why I’m taking you away,” Arminius said. If he was also doing it to stick a finger in Segestes’ eye, and in Tudrus’, that was nothing Thusnelda needed to worry about.

She looked up at him. He looked down at her. He bent to kiss her. Her arms came up and went around his neck.

One of the dogs - Blackie? - let out a questioning growl. That didn’t surprise Arminius, even if it did annoy him. He’d seen it before. Animals often thought people were fighting when they were doing something very different.

Evidently, Thusnelda had seen it before, too. “It’s all right. It really is,” she told the dog, and stroked it again. Then she turned back to Arminius. “Come on.”

They hurried away, along the track by which Arminius had come. He looked back toward Segestes’ steading once or twice. The dogs didn’t come after him, and he heard no shouts or cries to make him think anyone but Thusnelda had awakened. Joy glowed in his heart. He’d got away with it!

Thusnelda didn’t look back even once. She’d made up her mind, and she was sticking with what she’d decided.

The moon went down. Darkness enfolded the world. “Spirits?” Thusnelda asked nervously.

“Before they take you, they’ll have to take me first,” Arminius said. He’d never seen - or never been sure he’d seen - a nighttime spirit, which didn’t mean he didn’t believe they were there. Some of the Romans - not all, but some - even laughed at gods and ghosts. If that didn’t prove they were a depraved folk . . . plenty of other things did.

Something hooted. Thusnelda started. “Is that only an owl?” It must have been. No spirits swooped out of the sky to strike. No demons came snarling out of the trees where they commonly hid.

“Nothing to fear,” Arminius said, and slid his arm around her waist. With a small sigh, she pressed herself against him. Her body felt so warm, he marveled that she didn’t light the way ahead like a torch.

Since she didn’t, his eyes had to get used to starlight. Little by little, darkness seemed less absolute. Wotan’s wandering star blazed high in the south, shining brighter than any of the fixed stars. The Romans had the arrogance to believe they could figure out why and how the wandering stars moved as they did. What answer did any proper man need but that the gods willed it so?

The dim gray light was, at last, enough to show him the place he remembered passing on the way to Segestes’ steading. “Here,” he said softly. He led Thusnelda off the path and out onto the little meadow he’d found. “Here you will become my woman in truth.”

“Yes,” she said, even more quietly than he. No going back from this, not for her. Once she’d lost her maidenhead, she was either a wife or a trull - nothing in between. The Romans might joke about women’s appetites, but not Arminius’ folk.

He undid the brooch fastening his cloak and spread the warm wool garment on the grass. Then he also unfastened Thusnelda’s. He spread it on top of his. “The best bed I can make for you,” he said, “and the grass is soft.”

“It will do, because you are here with me,” she said.

He quickly shed his shoes and tunic and trousers. Under his clothes, he wore tight-fitting linen drawers, which proved he came from a wealthy family. Bv the time he pulled down the drawers, Thusnelda was naked, too. He wished the moon still shone - he wanted to see her better. Foul-mouthed as the Romans were, they had a point about that: it added something.

Well, touch would have to do. They lay down together. He explored her with hands and lips. Then, when he couldn’t stand to wait any longer, he poised himself above her. “Oh,” she said in a low voice when he went into her. He met resistance - she was a maiden. “Oh!” she said again, louder and less happily this time, as he pushed hard. “You’re splitting me in half!”

“No,” he said, breaking through. “It’s like this the first time for women.”

“My mother told me the same thing. I thought she was trying to frighten me so I wouldn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to.”

Arminius hardly heard her. Intent on his own building delight, he drove home again and again. Soon, he gasped and groaned and spent himself. Stroking her check, he said, “You are my woman now.” And your carrion crow of a father won’t take you back no matter what.

Varus had thought Vetera was the back of beyond - and it was. To a cosmopolitan man, a man used to Athens, to Syria, to Rome, Vetera had seemed the edge of the world. Now that Varus found himself in Mindenum, he would have given a considerable sum to go back to Vetera once more.

Vetera was on the ragged edge of civilization - no two ways about it. When you went from Vetera to Mindenum, when you traveled from the frontier between Gaul and Germany into the heart of the German wilderness, you fell off the edge.

The soldiers and a handful of sutlers who traded with both them and the Germans were the only men from the Empire for many miles in all directions. But for the encampment on the Visurgis, this was Germany, pure and simple. Some other fortified camps - Aliso was the strongest - along the west-flowing Lupia led back toward the Rhine. From Mindenum, one of these days, legionaries could press on toward the Elbe, Augustus’ ultimate goal.

For now, Varus thought it no small miracle that this Roman island persisted in the midst of the German sea. The endless woods stretching away to north and south, east and west, the tops of the trees rhythmically stirred by the wind, put him in mind of waves scudding across the Mediterranean.

When he spoke that conceit aloud, the officers from Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX didn’t quite laugh in his face, but they came close. “When you see waves on the North Sea, sir, you forget everything you thought you knew about ‘em before,” said a bluff prefect named Lucius Caedicius. “The ones on the Mediterranean . . . well, they’re nothing but babies alongside of these.” Several other men nodded.