To his disappointment, Quinctilius Varus shook his head. “I thank you for the suggestion, my friend, but I’ll pass this year. We’ve already made plans to use the same route we did before. Sometimes even the gods can’t change plans once they’re made.”
Arminius didn’t dare push too hard. He couldn’t show how disappointed he was, either, not unless he wanted to rouse Varus’ suspicions. “However you please, sir,” he said. “If you enjoy the muck, you’re welcome to it. And if you ever decide you don’t, speak to me of that. My route won’t disappear. It won’t flood, either.”
“Neither will the one we usually use—I hope.” Varus betrayed himself with those last two words. Knowing as much, he went on, “One of these days, Germany will have proper Roman roads. May they come soon.”
“Yes, may they.” As Arminius had so often, he lied without hesitation. Roman roads would tie Germany to the Empire, all right. He understood why Varus wanted them. Nothing could possibly be better for moving swarms of men on foot. Traders and travelers and farmers might use Roman roads, but they were for the legions. Varus’ dream of soldiers marching through Germany along them was Arminius’ nightmare.
“One more step in bringing Roman ways here,” Varus said. Arminius made himself smile and nod. He glanced toward his father. Sigimerus was nodding, too, but no smile lightened his features. Varus, fortunately, didn’t notice.
Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain poured down out of a dark gray sky. The Romans squashing through the mire between Mindenum and the headwaters of the Lupia cursed the gods who oversaw the weather in Germany.
Unlike most of the legionaries, Quinctilius Varus was mounted. That kept him from getting muddy past the knees, the way they did. But he couldn’t have got any wetter in the pools inside a bathhouse. The chilly, drumming, relentless rain stayed in his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears.
“A fish could do as well in this as I could!” He had to shout to make himself heard through the downpour.
“That’s a fact, sir.” Vala Numonius shouted, too. “And a fish would be more comfortable in its scales than I am in my cloak.” The wool garment clung to him the way a caul was said to cling to some newborn babes. Varus’ did the same thing. Soaked in rainwater, it was not only clinging but heavy.
The Roman governor’s eyes slid to Aristocles. The slave rode a donkey, so he too was out of the worst of it. But he looked like a drowned mouse. Some of the legionaries had their hair in their eyes. Varus and Aristocles didn’t: the first advantage to balding the governor had discovered. Water dripped off the end of Aristocles’ pointed nose. The pedisequus didn’t say anything, but every line of his body and of his cloak screamed out a reproach.
“One thing, sir,” Lucius Eggius said. “We don’t have to worry about the Germans jumping us in a storm like this.”
“Oh? Why not?” Varus had been worrying about just that.
“Don’t be silly, sir,” Eggius said. Before Varus could decided whether to be affronted, Eggius went on, “The savages would have as much trouble moving as we do.”
“Ah.” That hadn’t occurred to Varus. “Yes, one man’s miseries are every man’s miseries, aren’t they?” In spite of the deluge, he smiled, pleased with himself. “I’ve heard aphorisms I liked less.”
Vala Numonius also smiled. Eggius’ shrug loosed a small freshet from his shoulders. Varus wondered if he knew what an aphorism was. Career soldiers were more cultured than Germans, but sometimes not much more.
That reminded the Roman governor of something. “We might have been able to steer clear of all this.” His horse chose that moment to step into a deep puddle—the poor beast couldn’t see where to put its feet, after all. Varus had to grab its mane like a tyro and hang on for dear life to keep from getting pitched headlong into the slop.
Neither Vala Numonius nor Lucius Eggius laughed at him. It could have happened to them, too, and they both knew it. After Varus was securely seated once more, Numonius asked, “What do you mean, sir?”
“Arminius told me of a route back to the Rhine that never floods,” Varus replied. “If it’s raining when we leave Mindenum next fall, to the crows with me if I don’t think I’ll let him show it to us. I don’t care if it is longer, if it means we don’t have to put up with this again.”
“I didn’t think there were any places in Germany that never flooded,” Eggius said. “Are you sure that blond bastard isn’t hiding something under his cloak… sir?”
He tacked on the title of respect too late to do himself any good. Better, in fact, if he’d left it off altogether. The slit-eyed look Quinctilius Varus sent him had nothing to do with the rain. “Why would you think showing us a better route smacks of treachery?” Varus inquired.
“I didn’t say that, sir.” This time, Eggius used the title without hesitation. But it was too late to mollify Quinctilius Varus. “I’d sure want to make sure the route was good before I used it, though.”
“Do you imagine a Roman citizen—and a member of the Equestrian Order—would intentionally mislead his fellows?” Varus asked in tones colder than the rain.
“He may be a Roman citizen, sir, but he’s still a German, too.” Lucius Eggius was stubborn.
So was Varus. “He may still be a German, but he is a Roman citizen. Like you, he’s risked his life for Augustus and for Rome.”
He waited. Eggius didn’t say anything. What could the officer say? If Varus had decided to trust Arminius, nothing he heard was likely to persuade him to do anything else. And he had. And every yard his horse fought to gain made him wish he’d done it sooner.
XII
“He almost bit, Father! By the gods, he almost did!” Arminius couldn’t hide his own excitement as they made their way north and west, back toward their own country. “He was like a fat trout. He nibbled at the worm, and he never saw the hook.”
“Like a trout, or like a water dragon?” Sigimerus asked. “What would you have done if he’d decided to take your route? What could you have done except let him take it—and eat half a dozen tribes out of house and home along the way? No one in Germany would have loved you after that. And you couldn’t have gathered an army together fast enough to fight him.”
Arminius scowled, not because his father was wrong but because he was right. Rain dripped through the pines. Arminius and Sigimerus both had their cloaks up over their heads. They were both wet even so. The rain also turned the track to mud. They slogged on without complaint—things in Germany had always been like this.
“Next year,” Arminius said. “Next year we can be ready—I’m sure of it. All Varus has to do is take the bait.”
“And then what?” Sigimerus insisted on looking at all the things that could go wrong. “Varus and the Romans see we have an army. So what? They have an army, too. They don’t fight like us, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad at it. If they were, we would have driven them off years before you were born.”
Rain dripping off the end of his nose, Arminius scowled again, for the same reason as before. He knew how good the Romans were. He hadn’t just seen them fight or stood against them—he’d used their system. He not only understood that it worked, he understood how it worked.
In his mind’s eye, he heard Roman trumpets blaring. He saw the swarthy little men moving from marching order to line of battle without wasted motion. He imagined the blizzard of javelins they’d send up, the wall of their big shields, and the way their sharp swords would bite like vipers.
“We have to ruin them before they can deploy.” He’d said that before . His inner picture of the legions getting ready to face a German host only made the words seem more urgent now.
Urgency failed to impress his father. “All very well to talk about it. How do you aim to do it?”
The question was as pointed as a Roman gladius. “We have to take them in a place where they can’t swing from column into line,” Arminius said.
“And where will you find a place like that?” his father asked. “You can wish f
or one, but it’s not the same thing.”
“I’ll do more than wish. I’ll be traveling this winter anyhow. Everywhere I go, I’ll look for what we need. Sooner or later, I’m bound to find it. Germany isn’t all flatlands and fields. If I keep my eyes open, I’ll find something.” Arminius made himself sound confident.
“I hope you’re right,” Sigimerus said. “Me, I’ll be glad to get home to your mother for a while. And I expect you won’t be sorry to see Thusnelda again, either.”
In spite of the rain, Arminius’ blood heated. “That’s so,” he said. He’d bought relief a few times while staying at Mindenum. Seeing German women selling themselves for silver distressed him, but not enough to keep him from taking advantage of them. He thought his father had done the same thing, though neither asked the other about it. If you were a long way from your woman, you took what you could find.
If she did the same while you were away, you had the right to slit her throat and fling her faithless body into a bog. Men didn’t need to be chaste, but women did.
“You should get a child on her,” Sigimerus said. “That will bind her to you even after passion fades.”
“Good advice.” Arminius smiled wolfishly. “You’d best believe I aim to try.” Both men laughed. Arminius tried to pick up the pace, but the sloppy path wouldn’t let him. “Gods curse this mud,” he said, and laughed again, this time on a different note. “Now I understand why the Romans want to build their roads in our land.”
“So they can get to our women in a hurry,” Sigimerus said: one more gibe with too much truth behind it.
A jay screeched, high up in a pine. Most of the birds were gone now, heading off to the south: toward the Roman Empire. Some stubborn ones stayed through the winter, though. Vultures and ravens and carrion crows squabbled over carcasses regardless of the season. Arminius wanted to glut them on Roman meat. He had a plan. He needed a place.
My third winter in Vetera, Quinctilius Varus thought with a kind of benumbed wonder. When he first came up to the Rhine, he could have imagined no fate more dismal than spending three winters here. Now, though, this Roman military town seemed an outpost of civilization compared to what lay beyond the river.
He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “By the gods, sir, it’s good to have real walls around me and a proper roof over my head,” Aristocles said. “Meaning no disrespect to you and the job you’re doing, but I get tired of living under canvas.”
“I don’t think you’ll fall over dead with surprise if I tell you I feel the same way,” Varus said. “One day, Mindenum will make a fine city, I suppose. Plenty of places that started out as legionary encampments are. Even Vetera’s on the way, though I wouldn’t have believed it when I got here. But Mindenum does have… some way to go yet.”
The pedisequus dipped his head in Greek agreement. “Oh, doesn’t it just!” he said fervently. “Why, on this side of the Rhine I can go out beyond the wall by myself without worrying that some savage will murder me and spike my head to a tree.”
“That’s… not too likely around Mindenum.” Varus hid a smile, though part of what he hid was wistful. Being a slave, Aristocles didn’t have to pretend to courage he didn’t own. As Roman governor of Germany, Varus did. He knew he’d been better suited to peaceful Syria. Unfortunately, Augustus didn’t, and Augustus’ will was the only one that counted. Not only for Aristocles’ sake but for his own, Varus went on, “The Germans around there have learned more of our ways than any others, I do believe.”
“More, maybe, but not enough.” Plainly, nothing would turn Aristocles into a Germanophile. Well, he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
“We need time, that’s all.” Again, Varus worked to convince himself, too. “When I was born, these Gauls on this side of the river were nothing but trousered barbarians still smarting after Caesar’s conquest. You can’t tell me they don’t make good Roman subjects now.”
“Tolerable, I suppose.” Truth to tell, Aristocles didn’t approve of anything north of the Alps. “At least they mostly use olive oil, not butter.” He wrinkled his nose. “More than you can say about the Germans.”
“The olive won’t grow there,” Varus said. “For that matter, it won’t grow here, either, though it will farther south in Gaul. But our merchants take the oil all over the province. They can do the same in Germany. They will, once we get the place a little more settled.”
“That day can’t come soon enough.” Aristocles’ long nose twitched again. “Butter on bread is bad enough, even when it’s fresh. But the unending stink of the stuff in the lamps… It sticks to your hair, it sticks to your skin, and you can’t get away from it. And every German reeks of it.”
“Not every German.” Varus shook his head. His pedisequus would have tossed his. Varus was long used to that difference between Romans and Greeks. He continued, “Arminius and his father smell the same way we do.”
“They do when they’re scrounging our food and aping our ways,” Aristocles sniffed. “If you called on them in their village now, they’d be as rancid as all the other German savages.”
“Enough!” Varus snapped so he wouldn’t have to think about that.
“Arminius is a fine young man. We already have Roman Senators from Spain. Before too long, we’ll probably have some from Gaul. And, if Arminius lives long enough, he may be the first man of German blood to don the toga edged with purple. If he is, I don’t expect any of the other Conscript Fathers to complain about how he smells.”
“They’re polite. Arminius…” It was chilly in Varus’ residence despite fires and braziers, but that had nothing to do with Aristocles’ shiver. “He looks at me like a fox eyeing a pullet—and his father is even worse.”
“Sigimerus is a formidable man,” Varus said. Arminius’ father reminded him of a tough old wolf, too. “But if we tame the younger man, he will tame the elder for us.”
“Yes, sir. If.” A slave wasn’t supposed to take the last word when he argued with his master. Aristocles walked away anyhow, leaving Varus with his mouth hanging open.
The Roman said something that would have made Aristophanes blush. But he said it quietly, to himself. And then he started to laugh. He’d dealt with slaves his whole life. Every once in a while, you had to remember they were people, not just property with legs.
The governor of Germany summoned his leading officers to plan the next campaigning season’s moves inside the province the Romans didn’t quite rule. “I want to see more of Germany than Mindenum and the miserable route we use to reach it,” he declared.
“It’s not so miserable, sir,” Lucius Eggius said. “We can use boats most of the way. They’re faster than marching, and they’re safer, too.”
“Foot soldiers can use boats,” Vala Numonius said. “Not so easy for cavalry, by the gods! There are never enough boats for the horses -”
“Or for the mules and donkeys and oxen,” a quartermaster broke in.
“That’s right.” Numonius nodded. “We slogged back through the mud every cubit of the way. If the savages came screaming out of the woods, we wouldn’t have had a smooth time of it, either.”
“I see. I understand.” Eggius nodded, too. Quinctilius Varus thought everything would go smoothly after that. But Eggius aimed a sarcastic dart at the cavalry commander: “You enjoy marching through mud so much, you want to take the long way back from Mindenum and go through even more of it.”
Vala Numonius turned red. “No, curse it! I want a route that doesn’t go through mud.”
“Good luck, friend. It’s Germany,” Eggius said. “You’ve got swamps, and you’ve got woods. Sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, you’ve got swamps in woods. That’s what the country is.”
That certainly fit what Varus had seen. Even so, he said, “Arminius tells me that if we swing north of the low hills north of the Lupia, the land is drier. He says we can march up around there and keep our feet dry-almost the whole way.”
If a portrait painter had wanted
to sketch insubordination, he could have used Lucius Eggius as a model. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I’d sooner not trust a German if I don’t have to,” Eggius said.
Whenever a man said Meaning no disrespect, he meant disrespect. Varus had learned that rule when he hardly needed to scrape down from his cheeks. It had served him well ever since, and he recalled no exceptions to it. “I think Arminius is reliable,” he said now. “Never mind his past service to Rome. Would he have spent so much time at Mindenum last summer if he meant us ill? He prefers us to his own savage kind.”
“Will you say his father likes us better, too, sir?” Lucius Eggius asked. “The old bastard spent as much time at Mindenum as Arminius did.”
Varus opened his mouth, then closed it again. He might want to say that, but no one who’d ever set eyes on Sigimerus would claim he was Romanized, even if his son was. “He came along with Arminius to see what Roman ways are like. He didn’t seem to mind sleeping soft or drinking wine.” Having said so much, Varus knew he’d gone as far as he could.
Eggius’ chuckle had a wry edge. “Your Excellency, I like sleeping soft and drinking wine, too. That doesn’t tell me much about what this barbarian’d do to me if he ever got the chance.”
“The Germans seem to pay more attention to Arminius than they do to Sigimerus, and Arminius is in our company any way you care to use the phrase,” Varus insisted.
Another officer—a junior man, one whose name Varus was always forgetting—said, “What about those things Segestes keeps telling us? If even a quarter of that’s true, Arminius isn’t such a big friend of Rome’s as he makes himself out to be.”
Several other soldiers nodded. Varus fought to hide his exasperation: a losing battle. “Oh, by the gods, mm, Caelius!” he said. There—he’d remembered. “You might as well be Jews and Egyptians and Cappadocians back at Rome, caring more for gossip than you do for truth.”
Vala Numonius nodded. Most of the other legionaries eyed Varus in stony silence. They didn’t like him calling them a bunch of Jews. He groaned silently. Now he’d have to waste Mars only knew how much time jollying them along till they weren’t angry at him anymore. They were even more foolish than Jews; they reminded him of spoiled children. He was tempted to tell them so, but that would only make things worse.
Give Me Back My Legions! Page 21
