by Ken Parejko
“I felt as though I’d fallen through the ice, and was caught under, in cold dark water.” My tongue stuck to my mouth, and the words did not come. For an instant Aulus’ eyes flashed up at me, eyes which visited me often.
“A bad dream?” Lucius asked.
“No, not bad.”
Lucius opened the wooden capsa, the traveling library which followed us everywhere, slipped into it from the nightstand Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
I swung my feet off the cot and onto the cold early-morning ground. “I dreamt of Drusus.”
“Drusus?”
“Yes. Claudius' father.”
“Ah, well.”
“He asked me to write a history of the German wars, and the part he played.”
Lucius helped me with my coarse woolen tunic. “It’s quite an honor."
“Do you think so?” I pulled the tunic down, sighed. “But I know so little of the German wars.”
“Surely you remember the stories, of Drusus and his son Germanicus, too. Today, you know, is his birthday.”
“Whose?”
“Germanicus!”
“Ah, yes, today.”
Lucius fussed over my tunic, his hands caring and familiar as he flattened it and tucked it in. “You should. Write the history, I mean. You’re the best man for it. I don't know anyone reads like you. And if you sleep just half the night you complain about the waste of time.”
“Well, yes...”
“So if Drusus came to you in a dream, I wouldn't think you should disappoint him.”
The water in the washing-bowl was cold on my face. Lucius handed me a cloth. “Do you believe, Lucius,” I asked, as I took the towel, “that it’s possible to escape one's destiny?”
“Oh, I think not,” Lucius answered, bending to straighten the blankets on my cot.
“Is it possible, then,” I mused, standing with the towel in hand, “that it’s my destiny to try to escape my destiny?”
“That seems to be the fate of many,” Lucius replied, with a small laugh.
“Well, is it possible I might succeed?”
Lucius was no match for me at these intellectual games. “If that is so, then that is what will happen.”
“No, don't you see.” I lay the towel over my arm, made a fist of my right hand, with the other hand uncurled the smallest finger. “That is exactly what won't happen.” I uncurled a second finger. “You see, if it is my destiny to escape my destiny, then by escaping it I am merely ...”
I stopped mid-sentence. For an instant the two of us stared sheepishly at one another. I balled the towel and threw it at him. He caught it and with two swift motions folded and tucked it under his arm. Now and again without warning I would catch in him a glimpse of my father, who though some years older than Lucius shone sometimes with the same repressed vitality Lucius radiated. Then, for a moment, I would feel a small wave of nostalgia, and regret that father and I’d not once played like this.
I stretched my arms wide, yawned. “Well, as you say, if Drusus asked, I suppose I really should.”
I strode to the tent’s door-flap, stuck my head outside and peered around. “Come on then Lucius, what are you waiting for? The sun's coming up, and the day awaits us.”
Chapter 4
The Germans…have nothing
in common with us
but voice and limbs.
Quintillius Varus, quoted
in Velleius, Roman History, 2.117.3
Yes, I had heard it from my father, Julius Caesar’s foray into Germania, then Augustus and his nephew the Drusus of my dreams, and how conquering the Germans was Tiberius’ goal, then Caligula, and now Claudius.
And he was right, Drusus was, here I was living the history they'd begun, the arc of my life, still rising, setting me down here right in the middle of it.
By looking closely I could find and mark out the steps in that arc, all the way back to the beginning, or one of the beginnings, which was my father's doing, how through hard work and good fortune he'd cobbled together the four hundred thousand sesterces we needed to bump the family’s estate along Lake Larius into the ranks of the equites. Then when I was old enough I was sent off to Rome and set down in the arms of the best tutor my father could afford, Publius Pomponius Secundus, friend of the imperial court, poet, lauded general. They have high hopes for me, my parents, and I suppose in part at least it’s what makes me what I am. When he was done with me he took me aside, Pomponius did, the morning we said goodbye, and told me I was the best of all he'd had and that his half-brother Corbulo, in more than one way Drusus' heir, had agreed to take me on.
So he introduced us and to test me Corbulo drilled me in the details of military history. The questions he asked weren’t hard, but I must have impressed him. He offered me a turma of cavalry if I’d come with him back to Germany. He was a great general, this was a chance to see the world, how could I turn him down? Traveling north we surprised my parents, stopped for a day’s rest at the estate outside Novum Comum. They were delighted to see me and even more delighted to see me doing so well.
It was hard, leaving them, but I was headed off into adventures of my own. We followed Claudius' new road north over the mountains. Though born and raised on their southern slopes, this was my first time into the great alpine wilderness. As we climbed we left spring behind. Higher up the narrow rocky road was covered with deep drifts of snow and slanting ice-slicks which threatened to throw you over the edge of a thousand-foot drop. But the eagles and lammergeyers circling high above us, and the chamoix and ibex, carrying their wide horns proudly, looking down on us from their own perspective as we made our way up the road, it was lovely. There the cold thin air aggravated my asthma, but as we came down again toward the Rhine I breathed more easily. Then day after day we followed the river northward, nearly to its mouth, to Vetera, our northernmost fort.
I was with Corbulo putting down a Chauci uprising, upriver at Mogontiacum, when I had my Drusus dream. But then we'd had to hurry back here to Vetera to put down that devil Gannascus' treachery.
So here I am again, settled into Vetera’s stockade, the very place Drusus himself had set out from on his German misadventure. You could still feel him here, his energy and courage. It's really the perfect venue for writing my German history. I've access to the fort’s archives and pour over them long into the night. There are grizzled veterans here who knew Drusus, some who claim to have had friends, now dead, who were at Varus’ massacre. So I listen and write what they say.
I’ve taught Lucius a shorthand so he can keep up with me and I can continue my writing in the bath or while eating or even on horseback so long as he’s with me. And more than once I’ve astonished myself, after scribbling away at the history under the flickering light of the oil-lamp to look up and it’s dawn and I’m exactly where I’d sat down hours before. Now after months of this the papyri, rolled and carefully labeled, have grown to almost fill my field chest.
Life at the frontier, no indoor plumbing, heated rooms, or private baths, and with the monotonous barely edible food, is really quite unpleasant. But I’ve discovered how little comfort or luxury mean to me. Here along the Rhine is a beautiful, harsh land. Winter was cold and seemed to last forever. Spring brought interminable rains which turned the fort into a sea of mud. Summer I'm told will bring swarms of biting insects, some so small they are invisible. But autumn, with its harvest of grains, fruits, and nuts, after the frosts kill the insects and before the bitter cold comes, is said to be the best season of all.
Meanwhile my men, who have come from all parts of the empire to fill the turma of cavalry I command, fill their days with the drudgery of swinging axes, piling logs for the stockade, dragging boulders to repair the road that runs along the river, training their horses, and maintaining their weapons. Spare time they spend gambling at cottabus and getting drunk on the thin, sour wine which makes its way this far north. Sometimes too they sit by the fires and share stories of their hometowns, some far and exotic, some nearby, an
d of battles they’d endured, and of the great men they’d served under or seen from a distance. I hang at their margins, listening and writing anything I judge worthwhile enough to put into my History.
To them I’m an eccentric egghead, scribbling away as I do at my books or spilling waves of words over poor Lucius. Sometimes I look up from my oil-lamp deep in the night to see them passing by on their way to the latrine. Lucius tells me they call me Captain Strix, the night-owl, and behind my back hunch over, making big owl-eyes and with a talon-like fist scratch at imaginary paper.
One rumor I'd overheard is of an ancient Gaul living deep in the woods to the west who was beside the great Drusus when he died. So when warmer days of spring melted back the snow and the forest birds sang their first cheerful songs I talked one of my men, who’d grown up to the west of the fort and knew that country's landscape, to help me find the old man.
We rode for hours through thick forest before reaching our goal. The smell of the old man's village greeted us first, a deep, repugnant blend of smoke from low smoldering fires, human waste and the rotting skin and bones too putrid for even the dogs to devour. A chorus of dogs announced our approach then came closer, growling, sniffing and snapping.
As we dismounted and tied our horses a young woman carrying a naked infant appeared from one of the huts, no more than random branches thrown together and covered with layers of bark and deer-skins. My aide, who spoke their language, asked where the old man lived. She pointed to a huge oak out beyond the village. As we walked that way we could feel the presence of unseen eyes.
Around the old man’s hut, which seemed as much an animal’s lair as a house, were scattered the bones of deer, boar, rabbits and dogs, remnants of long-past meals. Over the hut’s deer-hide entrance hung a dried wolf’s muzzle, talisman against evil spirits. These silly superstitions were as common in the streets of Rome as out here in the wild.
Friends I grew up with would eat rabbit because, they said, it made you good-looking. But that was a silly notion I cracked in half long ago. It's all based on a simple word-play, the coincidence that that lepos which means attractive is so similar to lepus, the rabbit.
I lifted the deer-hide and announced myself. A low, wheezy voice responded. We ducked into the smoky darkness where sat the village elder, wrapped in an old bear-skin.
A withered hand slowly appeared. I reached out, touched and held it. The hand was warm and soft, like a woman’s. He gestured for us to sit.
As we settled ourselves around him the noisy wailing of an infant and a spasm of barking came from a nearby hut. I spoke through my interpreter. “We’ve come from Vetera, where men still speak of your bravery. I’ve come to hear about Nero Claudius Drusus, and how he died.”
The old man listened and was silent. His response came slowly, and softly. His eyes lit up as he spoke. I waited for the translation. “You honor me with your visit. Yes, I fought many battles with your men, and could not count on all my limbs how many of your enemies I’ve killed.” He paused a moment. “Drusus was a good man, and a great soldier. He protected us from the German tribes. I rode with him for many moons. Though I was a Gaul, he treated me as a Roman.” The old man coughed, stopped to breath. The hut filled with silence.
“That time he died we were across the river, a century of us, two days’ ride east. We'd found no Germans so we meant to return to Mogantiacum.” I smiled as I heard him mispronounce the Roman town. “We set camp. That night came a terrible storm. In battle we were very brave, but that night many cowered in their tents like frightened children. The wind shrieked and moaned like a legion of witches.”
The old man’s eyes turned inward. He seemed to be seeing, hearing, reliving the terror of the past. “Like wrestling giants the trees groaned and cried, tearing at one another. All night they crashed down. But, the gods be thanked, none onto us. At last with morning the storm was gone. We crawled out into a new world. All around stretching as far as we could see was a tangle of fallen trunks, gaping roots and branches lying this way, that.” He gestured the tangle with his hands.
“Drusus was full of life, bigger he thought than the storm. Those who slept with him said all night each time a tree tumbled to earth he roared and shook his fist at the heavens. Now he roared again and shouted: The storm has brought us a game! We’ll race back to camp, he said, laughing, and jumped on his mare, Papilione and away they flew, over one fallen tree-trunk after another. Some of us rose to the challenge, but Drusus was soon far ahead. Next to him, I was the fastest. We left the others behind. Now and then I would catch sight of him ahead, then he would be gone.
“It was Papilione I saw first, lying beside a fallen tree, whimpering as she struggled to stand. Poor Papilione. She must have tired, or jumped wrong, or maybe he pushed her too hard. Her back was broken. Then I saw Drusus, sprawled over the trunk of a big downed oak.”
“I thought maybe he was dead. But when I bent over him he looked up at me and smiled. He said -- I could still talk your talk then -- he said: ‘We can jump high,’ he said, ‘but we can’t leap over fate, can we?’ It was like a joke, he said it with a big smile. But then I saw the blood pouring from his leg.”
“It was here.” The old man pushed back the bear-skin and touched his hand to the inside of his thigh. “Right here. This is where the branch entered his body to make its work.” I remembered. It was right where the wound was in my dream.
The old man paused. “I gathered moss and spider-webs and stanched the blood. When the others came we took him to camp. We did what we could. All night our healers and yours worked on him. But it was not to be. He suffered, but he never complained.”
When I left to meet the old Gaul I was a skeptic, but there was something in his eyes which seemed to be looking back across the veil of time directly into the past that convinced me what he said was true.
Worn out from the excitement of retelling this, the most memorable event of his life, the old warrior fell into a deep sleep. I laid in his lap a knife I'd bought at Mogontiacum's market, on its ivory handle a gladiator facing an angry bear. We turned and made our way out, the bright sun blinding. As we remounted I relived what I’d heard, and it was the image of the great Drusus fallen against the tree-trunk which kept coming back to me. Back at Vetera I sat and wrote the story of Drusus’ death, long into the night, and as I wrote, it seemed the great general was standing there beside me
I basked a few days in the pleasure of having met someone who’d known Drusus. But then it was time to move on with the German wars. In all our history there were two defeats which we could not forget. The first was Hannibal and the Punic Wars.
The second was the slaughter of Varus’ legions deep in the German wilderness. Several of the cranky old veterans with nothing better to do than hang around Vetera watching drills, talking over old times, and complaining about how sloppy the new army was claimed to have been there at the Varus massacre, the image of the slaughter burned into their brains. It was to them and what they knew that I turned next.
It all happened in August of the year 762, and this is their story, in short.
Tactically Julius Caesar made the right decision, fifty years ago, to retreat back across the Rhine, but the vacuum he left to the east brought us a hundred years’ unrest. It’s why our fort, Vetera, was built, and others up and down the river, to keep the Germans at bay. Under Augustus the empire prospered and our armies were unstoppable at every frontier but this. To the west the Gauls had been civilized, but the Germanic tribes to the east remained unconquered. Augustus meant to change that.
Inexplicably, he turned to Quintilius Varus, most known for the brutality with which he collected taxes and for milking his position as fiscal administrator for outrageous personal gain. It remains one of the most inscrutable mysteries I’ve uncovered in all my studies, why Augustus would choose Varus over all the experienced officers available to him, to command the German legions. Some say it was to reward him for filling the Imperial coffers. He was, after all, a dis
tant relative of Augustus'. Some, say it was to punish Varus for something he said or did. Whatever the reason, it was the biggest mistake of Augustus’ august reign.
When he took command at Vetera Varus fell back into old habits, forcing the local tribes into taxes so punitive he seemed to be daring them to rebel, which of course they did. Finally the Cheruscans, east of the Rhine, murdered a tax collector, an act of terrorism Varus could not allow to stand. His immediate response was a long, vitriolic rant directed against the stupidity of the brainless Germans, followed, in the heat of the moment, by the fatal decision to lead his men eastward, and let the murderers taste the cold steel of Roman justice.
His aides demurred. The eastern forest was thick with wild animals, deep bogs and swamps and thickets so full of thorns and vines it was almost impassable. The strength of the German forces was completely unknown, and once in their own territory it would be impossible to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Varus wavered, and decided to leave the decision to the omens.
In a back corner of the fort we have a small flock of chickens, pampered birds not destined for the dinner-plate. Before starting a campaign by some mysterious process a priest selects one bird, sprinkles its head with holy wine, mutters a few prayers, and cuts its throat. The bird’s body is opened and the innards read to determine the gods' thoughts on the campaign.
Compared to the infantryman, the priest’s job is soft, and requires little more than performing the rituals with proper dignity and establishing a better-than-chance record in his predictions. It is helpful if his soothsaying matches his commander’s wishes, and smart to couch his predictions in general terms, leaving himself wiggle-room no matter the outcome.
It was clear to everyone that Varus was set on punishing the Cheruscans. What the innards of that morning’s sacrifice actually indicated to the priest is a secret he took to his grave. What he told Varus was that the gods would be beside him.
