Give Me Back My Legions!

by Harry Turtledove

  “No,” Vala Numonius whispered. “Please, no.” The Germans’ eyes were paler than their dogs’. That was the only difference between them, for both sets held death. The barbarians moved to surround the cavalry officer. He turned this way and that, about as helpless and hopeless as his horse.

  The Germans surged forward. Before too long, it was over—but not nearly soon enough to suit Numonius.

  Before Arminius could lead his swarms of Germans into Gaul, he had to finish driving the Romans out of his own country. Destroying three legions wasn’t quite enough—almost, but not quite. Several Roman fortresses persisted east of the Rhine. The men those forts sheltered might prove dangerous if he just forgot about them, and so he set out to reduce the forts one by one.

  Having served in the Roman auxiliaries, he knew a little something about siegecraft. What he failed to take into account was that the average German knew nothing, or perhaps a bit less. And the legionaries shut up inside the wooden palisades knew they would die horribly if his men broke in. Not many Romans had escaped the massacre of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX, but some few had, and spread word of what had happened there to the garrison troops. To his surprise, it made the men in the forts determined, not afraid.

  Aliso caused the most trouble. It stood on the south bank of the Lupia, not far east of where the smaller river joined the Rhine near Vetera. The Roman garrison inside Aliso was large and very stubborn.

  Speaking soldiers’ Latin, Arminius shouted to the legionaries: “If you surrender and come out, I swear I will let you keep your arms and march back to Gaul with no more attacks. I will give hostages to prove it.”

  A centurion came up to the edge of the palisade to answer him. Arminius recognized the Roman officer for what he was as much by his ingrained arrogance as by the transverse crest on his helmet. “No!” the man shouted. “You wouldn’t be howling out there if you hadn’t cozened Quinctilius Varus and murdered his men. The promises you make aren’t worth piss.”

  Every word of that was true, which only infuriated Arminius the more. He shook his fist at the Roman. “You’ll pay,” he said. “When we break in, we’ll give you all to our gods, a fingernail at a time.”

  “Come ahead and try.” The centurion spat in his general direction. “I don’t think you can do it, you bald-bottomed son of a whore. I bet your asshole’s as wide as a tunnel, from all the times you had Varus’ cock up you.” To make sure Arminius—and his followers—understood him, the Roman said that again, pretty fluently, in the Germans’ language.

  “You turd with legs! I’ll see how far your lying guts can stretch when I lay hold of you!” Arminius bellowed in blind fury.

  “Come ahead and try,” the centurion repeated calmly, and stepped away.

  Arminius bellowed orders. The Germans shot flight after flight of arrows at Aliso. Then, roaring like angry bears to fire their spirits, they rushed toward the fort with scores of scaling ladders. If rage and ferocity could overcome skill and a strong position, Arminius’ followers would do it.

  But they couldn’t. The Romans dropped stones on the Germans who threw bundles of brush into the ditch around the palisade. They shot at them through holes drilled into the floor of their walkway. With hardly any risk to themselves, they used forked branches to reach out and overturn scaling ladders that did get placed against the walls. They poured boiling water and sizzling oil on the Germans swarming up the ladders.

  In spite of everything, a few Germans did make it to the top of the palisade—but only a few. They didn’t last long up there. In a fight like that, the armored, disciplined, and desperate Romans had every advantage.

  Cradling a horribly burned arm, a German who’d fallen off a ladder groaned, “They fight dirty.”

  And so they did. Arminius acutely felt his folk’s ignorance of siege-craft. When he served with the legions in Pannonia, he’d seen the variety of engines and stratagems the Romans could roll out against a strongpoint that presumed to resist them. But having seen such things didn’t mean he could duplicate them. He didn’t know how to make the catapults that flung darts or thirty-pound stones farther than a man could shoot an arrow. Nor were Germans miners. He couldn’t order them to tunnel under Aliso and make the palisade fall over.

  Even if he could have given that order, he wouldn’t have. He knew too well he couldn’t hold his army together long enough to let mining work. They would run out of food from the surrounding countryside pretty soon. One more trick of Roman siegecraft, he realized now when it was too late, was the stream of wagons that kept besiegers fed. Roman armies didn’t come down sick as often as those of the Germans, either. He couldn’t make his own men keep their camp clean and orderly, and he couldn’t stop them from dumping waste upstream from where they drew drinking water. They would have laughed at him had he tried.

  Knowing he wouldn’t be able to stay outside of Aliso long, he kept trying to break in, hurling his warriors at the palisade again and again. Maybe luck would be with them, as it had been before. Maybe the Romans would despair. If they didn’t fight back with all their might, the German tide would surely lap over them and wash them away.

  No matter how Arminius hoped either or both of those things would happen, neither did. The legionaries inside Aliso might have been some of the last Romans left alive on this side of the Rhine, but they fought as if they still thought they would turn Germany into a peaceful province any day now.

  After a week of fruitless assaults, Sigimerus took Arminius aside and said, “This isn’t working, son. If we’re going to take Gaul away from the Empire, we can’t waste any more time hanging around here.”

  “We can’t leave these legionaries in our rear, either,” Arminius answered. “One more try. They can’t hold us out forever.”

  Maybe the Romans couldn’t. But they could hold the Germans out during that last assault. And, as Arminius had feared, a flux of the bowels and a coughing sickness broke out among his men. They started getting hungry, too. And word came that the Romans were rushing soldiers to the Rhine from all over Gaul.

  Men began streaming away from Aliso and heading for their homes. Arminius cursed and wept and pleaded, all to no avail. The Germans had one great deed in them, but not two. Watching his army break up, he gloomily wondered if the same held true for him.

  XVIII

  Late summer in Rome was the hottest, most unpleasant time of the year. Romans with even the faintest pretensions of importance got out of town. Some of them had seaside villas. Others went up into the mountains; on higher ground, the weather wasn’t nearly so oppressive. The truly rich enjoyed estates on one or another of the little islands that dotted the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Augustus had seaside villas. He had mountain hideaways. He had island estates. He had no pretensions of importance. He had no need for pretensions, and they would have seemed wantonly ostentatious on him. He was important, and he knew it. And so did everyone else in the Roman Empire.

  Without pretensions, he stayed in Rome for the summer. If he went to one of his retreats, couriers would have to find out which one he’d chosen and then go there themselves. Things might get delayed for days. The Roman Empire ran slowly enough as it was. Making it run slower than it had to might turn indignation to rebellion, or might cost the chance to nip and invasion or a famine in the bud. Going out to a summer place might slow down good news: just a few days before, word came in that Tiberius had finally quelled the Pannonian uprising.

  “The Palatine Hill is not so bad,” the ruler of the Roman world said to whoever would listen—and, when you were ruler of the Roman world, everyone listened to you. “We’re up almost as high as we would be in the Apennines.”

  His countless servants and slaves listened, yes. And, behind his back, they rolled their eyes and spiraled their forefingers next to their ears. They knew bloody well it was hotter and nastier in Rome than it would have been at any of the many summer refuges Augustus could have chosen. If he wanted to put up with sweat and with city stinks wafted on
the breeze, that was his business. If he wanted them to put up with those things, too… that was also his business, and all they could do about it was grouse and fume when he wasn’t watching or listening.

  He liked to nap in the afternoon—no wonder, not when he was as old as he was. It gave his servants and his bodyguards (some Romans, others wandering Germans chosen for their size and ferocity) more of a chance to complain. And, as luck would have it, he was asleep when the courier from the north rode up on a horse he’d come as close to killing as made no difference.

  Seeing the sorry state of the animal, one of Augustus’ grooms clucked reproachfully. Another said, “You could have come slower, friend, for he’s sound asleep right now. He’ll be up and about in a couple of hours.”

  “Wake him,” the courier said in a flat, hard voice.

  “Wha-at?” both grooms chorused, as if not believing their ears. One of them added, “He’d skin us if we did.”

  “He’ll skin you if you don’t,” the courier said. “The news I bring is that important.”

  “What is it, then?” asked the groom who’d talked of skinning.

  The courier looked through him. “It is for Augustus—that’s what it is. He’ll skin you if anyone hears it before him, too.”

  “Well, go on in,” that same groom said. “Not for us to say who sees Augustus and who doesn’t,” It’s not my job: the underling’s escape hatch since the beginning of time.

  In went the courier. He had several brief but heated exchanges with Augustus’ slaves. He finally unbent enough to tell the senior servitors he brought news from Germany. When they asked him what the news was, he looked through them, too. They muttered among themselves, in Greek and Aramaic and perhaps other languages that weren’t Latin. By the way they eyed the courier, they loved him not at all. He was making them decide things in the absence of their master. If Augustus didn’t think they should have let him be disturbed…

  But, in the end, the courier’s stubbornness carried the day. “Stay here,” one of the senior servitors told the fellow, sending him a baleful stare that he ignored. “We will rouse Augustus and tell him you are here with your important news. What he does after that is up to him, of course.”

  “Of course,” the courier said, and visibly composed himself to wait.

  He didn’t need to wait long. Augustus, a little stooped, hurried into the anteroom a few minutes later. His gray hair was tousled, his tunic wrinkled and rumpled; he rubbed at his eyes to get sleep out of them. “You have news from Germany?” he said without preamble. “Give it to me at once.”

  “Yes, sir.” The courier bowed. He respected the master of the Roman world, if not the lesser men surrounding him. “I am sorry, sir, but the news is as bad as it can be. Quinctilius Varus’ three legions are destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest, only a handful of men escaping. Their eagles are lost, captured by the Germans. Varus trusted the chieftain named Arminius, and the barbarian betrayed him to his doom. When Varus saw the fight was hopeless, he had a slave slay him. He died as well as a man could, but thousands more died with him and because of him.”

  As the courier spoke, color drained from Augustus’ face, leaving him pale as bleached linen. “You are sure of this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “No possible doubt?”

  “None, sir. I’m sorry. The man who gave me the written message”—the courier took it off his belt and handed it to Augustus—“had it from one of the horsemen who somehow escaped the massacre inside Germany. The rider filled his ears with worse things than ever got written down, and I had some of them from him. To say it was a bad business beggars the power of words.”

  “It can’t be,” Augustus muttered. “It can’t.” Moving like a man in the grip of nightmare, he broke the seal on the written message, unrolled it, and held it out at arm’s length to read it. The scribe who first composed the message must have remembered it was bound for an old man, for he’d written it large to make sure the intended recipient could make it out. By the look of anguish on Augustus’ face, the power of written words to describe what had happened in Germany wasn’t beggared after all.

  “Are you all right, sir?” one of his underlings asked in Greek-flavored Latin, real anxiety filling his voice. The ruler of the Roman world was the very image of a man overwhelmed, a man unmanned, by disaster unlooked-for. Oedipus could have seemed no more appalled, no more horrified, on discovering he’d lain with his mother.

  Were any pins or brooches handy, Augustus might well have sought to blind himself as Oedipus had done. As things were, he reeled away from the courier and the slaves and servitors who helped make him the most powerful man in the world. He might as well have been blind as he fetched up against the frame of the doorway through which he’d entered the antechamber.

  He pounded his head on the sturdy timbers of the frame. While his servants exclaimed in alarm, he cried out as if he were indeed the protagonist of a tragedy on the stage: “Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions!”

  In a tragedy, everyone knew—though the actors’ skill might almost disguise the fact—that the events portrayed came from the realms of myth and legend and history, and were not happening to those portraying them. Here… It was real. No one would muster the men of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX again. They were dead—all too often, horribly dead.

  “Give me back my legions, Quinctilius Varus!” Augustus wailed again, his forehead bruised and swelling. “Give them back, I tell you!”

  Neither the courier nor any of the servitors seemed to know what to say. None dared say anything, for fear it would be wrong. When Augustus cried out once more and yet again battered his head against the doorframe, one of the men who served him—the men who helped him rule the Roman Empire—gestured to the courier.

  By then, the man who’d brought the bad news was glad to get away, lest he be blamed for it. Augustus’ servitor took him off to the kitchen and told the lesser slaves there to bring him bread and wine and olives.

  “Obliged, sir,” the courier said, and then, “I’m sorry. I knew it would be bad. I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  “He never imagined failure,” the servitor said. “Why should he, when he’s known so much success?”

  “Beats me.” The courier gulped wine. He would never be able to drink enough to forget the look on Augustus’ face when the Roman ruler realized all his plans for Germany had just collapsed in ruin. “What will he do now?”

  “I don’t know.” From one of Augustus’ aides, that was no small ad-mission. “I fear we shall have to change our policy, which is not something we usually do. Gods curse those barbarians for being difficult!”

  As the courier nodded, Augustus’ voice echoed down the halls from the chamber where he still stood: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

  Scowling, Arminius stared across the Rhine. He wouldn’t be able to invade Gaul now, and he knew it. As soon as he’d stopped encircling Aliso, the Romans trapped inside the fortress broke out and fought their way west to the Rhine. Most of them had made it across. So had the garrisons from forts on the Lupia closer to the greater river.

  And two full legions had rushed up from the south when the Romans in Gaul got word of what happened to their countrymen in Germany. Over on the west bank of the Rhine, a detachment from one of those legions paced Arminius’ army. He hadn’t been able to shake loose of the Romans, even with night marches. He wouldn’t be able to fight on ground of his choosing if he did force a crossing. On ground of their choosing, the legions had the edge. He wouldn’t have had to work so hard to draw Varus into his ambush otherwise.

  Someone called his name. “I’m here!” he answered, waving, glad for any excuse not to think about the west bank of the Rhine.

  A man from his own clan came up to him. “Good news!” the fellow said. “Your woman has given you a son. She and the baby are both doing well.”

  “Gods be praised! That is good news!” Arminius took off a golden ring—spoil from the vanquished legion
s—and gave it to the other German. “This for bringing it to me.”

  “I thank you.” The other man found a finger on which the ring fit well. “What will you call the baby?”

  “Sigifredus,” Arminius said without the least hesitation, “in memory of the victory I won against the Romans.” That victory, however great it was, was also turning out to be less than he’d hoped it would. With an old man’s sour wisdom, his father insisted things were often thus. Arminius had hoped Sigimerus was only carping. When he looked across the Rhine and saw the Roman soldiers there, he knew his father had a point.

  “I also visited the grove of the sacrifice,” his clansman said. “Never have the gods feasted like that before, not in all the days since the world was made. So many heads spiked to the holy oaks and hung from them!” The man’s eyes glowed. “And three eagles! Three! Have the Romans lost three since their realm began?”

  “That I don’t know,” Arminius admitted. He’d served with the legions long enough to know the Romans had suffered military disasters before. But they were tight-lipped about them. Well, what warriors in their right minds boasted of battles lost?

  “Ah.” The other German didn’t much care about the answer. He was only making conversation. He went on, “In among all of them, though, I didn’t see Varus’ head, and I wanted to.”

  “You wouldn’t have. I brought it with me as we moved toward the Rhine. I wanted to use it as a talisman to frighten the Romans, but that didn’t work out so well as I hoped it would.” Arminius sighed. “Can’t have everything, I suppose.” For a little while, he’d thought he could. He’d thought he had. Almost, but not quite—the price he paid for aiming so high.

  “What will you do with the head now? Pitch it in the river?” the other German asked.