“And they drink beer,” the tall one said, which answered that question. He went on, “They like wine better, though, when they can get hold of it.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Varus said. Both duumvirs nodded.
“Maybe you can teach them to like olive oil, too,” the short one said. “The Gauls use more of it than they did before Caesar conquered them.”
“If I can pacify the Germans, they’re welcome to keep eating butter, as far as I’m concerned,” Varus exclaimed.
“I can see that,” the stocky duumvir said judiciously. “Maybe you don’t have the biggest load on your shoulders this side of Atlas holding up the heavens, but not far from it, eh?”
Varus thought the same thing, though Augustus didn’t seem to. He couldn’t tell these fellows how he felt, or it might get back to the ruler of the Roman world. Things had an unfortunate way of doing that. He wanted Augustus to go on having confidence in him, which meant he had to act like a man who had confidence in Augustus. He said, “By all the reports that have come down to Rome, there’s been real progress the past few years. I’ve got to put the stopper in the jug and seal it with pitch, that’s all.”
The duumvirs glanced at each other for a moment. Varus had the feeling they didn’t like each other much, but they thought the same way. “Good fortune go with you,” they chorused again, and he was sure it meant the same thing this time as it had before.
II
Vultures and ravens and carrion crows spiraled down from the sky. The legions and auxiliaries had spread out a feast for the scavengers here near Poetovio. But the birds—and the little foxes that peered out from the edge of the oak woods not far away—couldn’t fill their bellies quite yet. Romans and German auxiliaries still strode about the battlefield, plundering corpses and making sure all the Pannonians sprawled there were corpses.
Not far from Arminius, another German auxiliary drove his spear into a feebly writhing man’s throat. When the man quit wiggling, the German bent and took his helmet. It was a fine piece of ironmongery, far better than the cheap bronze helms the Romans issued to auxiliaries.
The other German set the helm on his own head. Catching Arminius’ eye, he grinned. “Fits like it was made for me,” he said.
“A god made it so,” Arminius said. “May you have better luck with it than the fellow who wore it before.”
Something glinted in the late-afternoon sunshine. A dead Pannonian wore a heavy gold ring in his left car. Stooping, Arminius pulled on the ring till it tore through the flesh of the earlobe. It hardly got any blood on it; the enemy warrior must have died early in the fight. Arminius weighed the bauble in the palm of his hand. It had to be worth a couple of aurei. He stuck it into a belt pouch.
Somebody had driven a spear clean through the dead man’s mail-shirt. Arminius nodded to himself. That stroke deserved respect. He had no doubt he could have matched it—in his early twenties, he was at the peak of his strength (and also, though he didn’t think of it that way, at the peak of his arrogance)—but not many men could have.
A moment later, he nodded again. The way the Pannonians had fought back against the Germans and Romans also deserved respect. The Romans were unlikely to give it. Arminius did. He’d seen, not for the first time, how the Pannonians had imitated Roman fighting methods till they could stand up against the toughest soldiers in the world.
“Do you think we could have fought this well, Chlodovegius?” he asked—he made a point of learning the names of the men he led.
Chlodovegius had taken off his new helmet and was admiring it. He looked up. “That many of us against so many Romans? We’d’ve licked ‘em.” He made as if to draw his long, straight sword for a bit of cut and thrust. He was a few years older than Arminius, but he didn’t lack for arrogance, either.
Arminius smiled. “Well, maybe we would have.” He didn’t feel like arguing. But he also didn’t believe Chlodovegius. One German had an excellent chance against one Roman. Ten Romans had the edge on ten Germans. A hundred Romans would massacre a hundred Germans.
They would in open country like this, anyhow. In the forests and swamps of Germany, ambushes and harassment came easier. The Romans could send troops through Germany. They’d been doing that since Arminius was a little boy. But they’d never been able to hold down the countryside… which didn’t mean they didn’t keep trying.
“What will we do if the Romans turn our country, our homeland, into one of their provinces?” Arminius wasn’t really asking Chlodovegius; he was thinking out loud.
But the other German heard him and, laughing, answered, “What are you worrying about? We’re already halfway to turning into Romans. If we serve out our terms in the auxiliaries, they’ll make us citizens.”
They’d already made Arminius a citizen: he came from a chieftain’s family. They’d even made him a member of the Equestrian Order, the social class one rank below the Senators who helped their chieftain, Augustus, rule Rome. While Arminius was tolerably fluent in Latin these days, he’d understood only a few words when he joined the auxiliaries a couple of years earlier.
He was a man with an itch to know. He always had been. He’d joined the auxiliaries to learn how the Romans did things. He’d also learned a lot, not all of it what he’d expected. Roman discipline looked different from the inside. In Germany, he’d always thought Roman soldiers were slaves because of the way they let their superiors order them around. No free German would have put up with that for even a moment.
When Germans went to war, though, they fought as individuals or as members of a little band. They went forward to show off their bravery to their kinsmen and friends. How else would you fight?
How else? The Romans had another way. A man in a legion, or in a troop of auxiliaries, was part of something bigger than himself. He still needed to be brave, but he also needed to remember he was only a part. If all the parts did what they were supposed to do—what their superiors told them to do—the legion or troop was very hard to beat.
They also kept more freedom than they seemed to from the outside. Arminius knew what he’d done in this latest clash with the Pannonians. So did the men around him. But he hadn’t done it to prove he was brave. He’d done it to help the larger unit.
The Pannonians fought the same way. They’d learned it from the Romans. Arminius wondered if his folk could, too. He hoped so. If they couldn’t, wouldn’t they go down the way the Gauls had, the way the Pannonians were now?
A wounded man nearby couldn’t hold in a groan. Arminius finished him off, then looked to see if he had anything worth taking. To the German’s annoyance, the Pannonian didn’t. Had Arminius known that ahead of time, he might have let the foeman lie there and suffer.
But no. Orders were to make sure the wounded died. And Arminius could see the reason for those orders. If legionaries and auxiliaries were parts of something larger than themselves, so were enemy warriors. The Romans didn’t just aim to kill individuals. They wanted to kill the very idea of nationhood among their foes.
Here, Arminius thought uneasily, and back home in Germany, too.
He dogged his men till they finished cleaning up the field and left it to the birds and foxes. Even that thought made him uncomfortable as he marched them back to the encampment they and the legionaries with them had made the night before. Am I anything but the Romans’ dog? he wondered.
Flavus, his older brother, was a Roman dog. Flavus liked life in the auxiliaries. He was fighting somewhere else in Pannonia, serving Augustus as best he could. Arminius didn’t know just where, and didn’t care to find out. He couldn’t decide whether Flavus frightened or infuriated him more.
He dismissed his brother from his mind with nothing but relief. Yes, back to the encampment. Only one thing ever changed about Roman fortified camps: the size, which depended on how many men they needed to hold. Otherwise, they were as much alike as two coins. Standardizing things was another idea the Romans had had that was new to the Germans. Arminius could see the advantage
s: if you always did this and that the same way, you just went ahead and did them. You didn’t have to wonder whether to do this first or how to take care of that or if you should bother with something else. Again, the Romans made each man one stick in the wattle of a house, so to speak.
A Roman centurion—he showed his rank by the cross-crested helm he still wore—waved to Arminius as the German brought in his warriors. “Your men fought like wolves today,” the veteran called.
“My thanks. You Romans were fierce, too,” Arminius answered. That wasn’t quite the right word. Capable came closer, but didn’t seem praise enough.
“Ai!” The centurion snapped his fingers, reminding himself of something. “There’s a fellow from your tribe in camp. He’s looking for you.”
“Thanks again. Did he say why?” Whatever news the man brought from the land of the Cherusci, Arminius feared it would be bad. Only bad news needed to travel fast. Good news could commonly wait. “Are my father and mother hale?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.” The Roman spread his hands. “I didn’t ask, and your friend doesn’t speak a whole lot of Latin anyhow.” He never imagined that he might learn the Germans’ language.
Well, this was a Roman province, so that wasn’t unreasonable. But if the Romans held Germany, wouldn’t Latin come to dominate there, too? Arminius pulled his mind back from such things to the business at hand. “Thank you for telling me. I find—I will find—him and see what the news is.”
“Hope it’s nothing too awful.” The centurion’s rough sympathy said he knew how these things usually went.
“Thanks,” Arminius said once more. He hurried off with his men to the northwest corner of the encampment, where then- always pitched their tents. In every Roman camp ever made, auxiliaries were quartered in the northwest and northeast corners. The Romans had done things that way for centuries. They were a tidy folk; everything had its place among them. And, once they found a way of doing things that worked, they stuck with it.
He found his man there—or rather, his man found him. “Arminius!” someone called.
“Hail, Chariomerus,” Arminius answered, recognizing him at once. He hurried up and clasped the other man’s hand. “Why have you come? Are Mother and Father all right?”
“As far as I know,” Chariomerus answered. He and Arminius weren’t close kin, though they’d grown up in the same little village. “They were when I set out, anyhow.”
“Well, that’s the biggest load off my mind,” Arminius said. “Come on with me and get some supper—you’ll be hungry after so long on the road.”
“You’re right about that, by the gods.” Chariomerus and Arminius got bowls of barley porridge and cups of wine from the cooks. Chariomerus wolfed his down. “I’m still hungry,” he said when it was gone. “I want some boiled meat, to let my stomach know it’s got something in there.” He drank. “Wine’s not bad, though.”
“No, it isn’t,” Arminius said. “The Romans think eating a lot of meat makes you slow. Maybe they’re even right—I don’t know. Going without doesn’t bother me the way it did: I know that. I’ve got used to doing things Roman-style.”
“I suppose you have to, but…” Chariomerus let his voice trail away, then resumed: “Better you than me.”
“I’m not Flavus,” Arminius snapped. “I’m—“ He shook his head like a man bedeviled by gnats. There were times when he didn’t know what he was. “Give me your news. It’s not my parents, and I thank the gods for that. So what did bring you from home?”
Chariomerus drained the cup. He looked as if he wanted more wine, too, to help grease his tongue. At last, with a sigh, he said, “Well, it has to do with Segestes.”
Arminius grunted. Segestes was another chief among the Cherusci. He liked and trusted the Romans more than Arminius did. More to the point, he was also Arminius’ fiancée’s father. “What about him?” Arminius demanded. “Is he well?”
“He was when I left,” Chariomerus said, as he had when talking about Arminius’ mother and father. The newcomer didn’t seem eager to go on.
After silence stretched, Arminius said, “If you keep me waiting any more, you’ll make me angry. You didn’t come all this way not to tell me something.”
“You’re right.” Chariomerus sighed. He still hesitated. At last, he brought the words out in a rush: “He’s gone and betrothed Thusnelda to somebody else.”
People said you didn’t always feel it right away when you got wounded. Arminius hadn’t found that to be true. Every time a sword cut him or an arrow pierced his flesh, it hurt like fire. But now he just stared, his mouth foolishly gaping. He’d heard the words, but they didn’t want to make sense inside his head.
“Who? Who?” he asked, sounding like an owl. An owl in daylight was the worst of omens—everybody knew that. What kind of omen was it, though, when someone took your woman away from you?
“Tudrus,” Chariomerus said.
The grinding noise Arminius heard was his own teeth clashing together like millstones. He needed a distinct effort of will to make himself stop. Tudrus was a man of about Segestes’ age. He was also friendly to the Romans. All the same… “Why?” Arminius seemed to have trouble coming out with more than one word at a time.
“I don’t know for sure. He doesn’t tell me his reasons,” Chariomerus replied. “My best guess is, he doesn’t think you’ll come back from this war. He wants Thusnelda to give him some grandchildren… and Tudrus has been one of his sworn companions for years.”
“He should never have promised her to me, then,” Arminius said. “Does he think I have no honor, to take an insult like this lying down?”
“What will you do?” Chariomerus sounded apprehensive.
“Go home and set things right, of course,” Arminius answered. “What do you expect me to do when you bring me news like that? Just stand here and thank you for it and go about my business?” He looked around and dropped his voice. “Do you take me for a Roman?”
“No, of course not.” Had Chariomerus said anything else, Arminius would have killed him. The newsbringer also lowered his voice: “Is it true what they say about Roman women?”
“Not enough Roman women up here for me to know one way or the other. The stories are pretty juicy, but stories usually are.” Arminius set a hand on his fellow tribesman’s shoulder. “Now I have to tell the Romans I am leaving. They will not be happy to hear it, but”—he shrugged—“what can you do?”
The senior Roman officer with this detachment was a military tribune named Titus Minucius Basilus. He was short and lean and bald, with pinched features, a blade of a nose, and eyes cold as a blizzard. Arminius interrupted him at supper, which did nothing to improve his mood. He redeemed some of his bad temper with reckless bravery.
“You have to go, you say?” he growled when Arminius finished. “Just like that? In the middle of a campaign?”
“I am sorry… sir.” Arminius could use Roman notions of politeness and subordination, even though he scorned them. “It touches my honor. What would you do if your betrothed’s father gave her to another man?” He knew he was making a hash of his subjunctives, and hoped Minucius could follow him.
“I’d start a lawsuit against the double-dealing wretch,” Minucius answered. “He’d be sorry by the time I got through with him, too.”
His supper companions nodded. Arminius had only a vague notion of what a lawsuit was: a battle with words instead of swords was as close as he could come. He didn’t see the point. “We have not got this in my country,” he said.
“No, I suppose not.” The Roman eyed Arminius as he sipped from a silver winecup. Whatever else he was, he was sharp. “If I tell you you can’t go, you’ll up and leave anyway, won’t you?”
“It is my honor… sir,” Arminius repeated. Talking to a different officer, he might have asked if the fellow understood the word. Something told him that would be a very bad idea with Titus Minucius Basilus.
He would make a dangerous enemy, dangerous as a vip
er underfoot. Picking his words with care, Arminius went on, “How can I fight as well as I should, sir, when all I think about what this man does—uh, has done—to me?”
“You wouldn’t be the first man in that kind of mess—or the last.” The military tribune drank more wine. At last, still without warming up, he brusquely dipped his head. “Go on. Go home. If we can’t whip the Pannonians because we’re short one auxiliary officer, we don’t deserve to win, by Jupiter. Straighten out your woman troubles and then come back to us. They’ve already made you a Roman citizen, but we’ll make you a real Roman.”
He meant it for a compliment. Arminius reminded himself of that. He also reminded himself he’d got what he wanted—and more easily than he’d expected, too. Minucius was right: he would have deserted had he heard no rather than yes. Since he’d heard yes…
He bowed, red-gold locks spilling down off his shoulders as he bent forward. “My thanks, sir. My many thanks, sir. I am in your debt.”
“Maybe you will pay it one day—if not to me, then to Rome,” Minucius said.
“Maybe I will.” Arminius bowed again. “Please excuse me. I will not interrupt your supper anymore.” He turned and hurried off, conscious as he went of Minucius’ eyes boring into his back.
“Well?” Chariomerus said when Arminius got back to the auxiliaries’ tents.
“It is very well, in fact,” Arminius said. “He will let me go. He saw I would go whether he let me or not. Sometimes it is easier to lean in the direction the wind is already blowing.”
Chariomerus smiled in glad surprise. “I did not think it would be so simple.”
“Neither did I. Some god must be looking kindly on me,” Arminius answered. “And that can only mean the god is scowling at Segestes. How could it be otherwise? He has broken faith. But he won’t get away with it.”
Give Me Back My Legions! Page 3
