Give Me Back My Legions! Read online

  “Keep your eyes open!” Arminius called in his own guttural language. “We don’t want these barbarians giving us a nasty surprise.”

  Some of the Germans chuckled. As far as the Romans were concerned, they were even more barbarous than the Pannonians. But they’d taken service with Rome. Why not? Augustus was a good paymaster. The Pannonian rebels weren’t, which meant that few Germans had gone over to them.

  One of the soldiers said, “Nothing to fear in open woods like these. The rebels couldn’t set up a proper ambush even if they wanted to.”

  “Keep your eyes open anyway,” Arminius answered. The other German nodded, but it was the kind of nod a man gave a chief he was humoring. Arminius recognized it; he’d used that kind of nod often enough himself.

  And the other warrior had reason enough to use it here. By German standards, these woods were open. Pannonia lay south of the Danube and also well to the east of the lands of the Cherusci, Arminius’ tribe. It was warmer, drier country than he was used to. Woods here were full of oak and ash and other broad-leafed trees. They were nothing like the dark forests of Germany, with pines and spruces growing close together, with a formidable understory of bushes and ferns, and marshes and swamps and bogs ready to swallow up a traveler unwary enough to wander off the track.

  Rome had pushed her border up to the Danube in these parts only a generation earlier: not long after the legions reached the Rhine. Tidy, thrifty Augustus wanted to push east to the Elbe, which would shorten the frontier by hundreds of miles and let him use fewer legions to garrison it. The Pannonians hadn’t much minded at first, not till they saw that permanent occupation went hand in hand with higher taxes than they’d ever known—till they discovered they were enslaved, in other words. Then they rose under two men named Bato and a third called Pinnes. They’d put up a good fight, but the Romans were wearing them down at last.

  Augustus aimed to enslave Germany, too. The German tribes hadn’t yielded as much as the Pannonians had before they rebelled. They loved their freedom, Germans did. Even so, quite a few of them would have welcomed slavery if it came with wine and silver drinking cups and gold coins to make them feel important.

  And, obviously, quite a few of them took service in the Roman auxiliaries. Some sought adventure. Some wanted to bring silver back to Germany when they went home. And some didn’t aim to go home, but to win Roman citizenship after twenty years of service and to settle inside the Empire.

  Most of the Germans with Arminius were dressed Roman-style. He was himself: he wore hobnailed caligae on his feet; a jingling mailshirt covered by a knee-length wool cloak; and an iron helmet whose crest, which ran from ear to ear rather than front to back, showed him to be an officer. Which he was, and a chief’s son to boot. The troopers he commanded had on cheap bronze versions of the standard legionary helmet. They carried oval shields like his, which covered less of them than the ones the Romans used themselves.

  Their weapons, though, were the ones they’d brought from Germany. They all carried spears, longer and stouter than the javelins Roman soldiers used. German spears were good for thrusting as well as throwing. And German swords, made for slashing, were half again as long as the stubby thrusting-swords the legionaries preferred. Since Germans ran at least a palm’s breadth taller than Romans and had correspondingly longer arms, they had more reach with their blades than legionaries did.

  But Roman soldiers could do wicked work with those gladii of theirs. Arminius had seen as much in this campaign against the Pannonian rebels, and before that in clashes with the Romans inside Germany. His own folk, who fought to show off each warrior’s individual bravery, often mocked the Romans for slavish obedience to their officers. They were no cowards, though. Arminius had also seen that for himself.

  And, because they worked so well together, the Romans could do things in war that his own folk could not. Germans who hadn’t come into the Empire had no idea how vast it was or how smoothly it ran. Arminius had signed up as an auxiliary to learn the Romans’ tricks of the trade, so to speak, and bring what he could back to Germany. He’d got more of a military education than he’d dreamt of before he left the forests of his homeland, too.

  The Pannonians had also learned the Roman style of fighting—they’d made a point of it, in fact. When Arminius and his followers came out of the woods and looked across the rolling meadow beyond, he saw a few scrawny sheep grazing on the lush summer grass and, beyond them, a knot of eighty or a hundred men in chainmail and cloaks and helmets. He peered at them, frowning. Were they legionaries and allies, or Pannonians and enemies? It wasn’t easy to tell at first glance.

  They seemed in no doubt about his men. They started away from the Germans as fast as they could go. In their commander’s caligae, Arminius would have done the same thing: his force outnumbered theirs by about two to one.

  “After them, boys!” he yelled. “Good fighting, good looting!” The auxiliaries raised a cheer and swarmed across the broad meadow after the Pannonians.

  And then, about a quarter of a mile to the south, a force of legionaries about the size of his also emerged from the woods. They were the outliers of the legion to which Arminius’ auxiliaries were attached. As soon as the Roman soldiers spotted the Pannonians, they also cheered and began to pursue. One of their officers waved to the Germans, as if to make sure his force and theirs were on the same side.

  Arminius waved back, not without resignation. Auxiliaries and legionaries together, they’d make short work of the hapless Pannonians.

  But the Germans would have to share whatever loot there was with the Romans, and who’d ever heard of a Roman who wasn’t greedy?

  An average Pannonian was as quick on his feet as an average German or Roman (even though the Romans had short legs, they were formidable marchers). But that wasn’t what a pursuit was about. If the Pannonians wanted to stick together and not get cut down one at a time, they had to move at the pace of their slowest men. The Romans and Germans on their trail steadily chewed up the ground between the forces.

  One of the Pannonians shouted something. Arminius heard the words clearly, but couldn’t understand them. That proved the enemy was the enemy. Like most of the auxiliaries with him, Arminius had grown fluent in Latin. He still sometimes muttered to himself, going through a declension or conjugation, but he made himself understood—and he followed what Romans said to him. Pannonian, on the other hand, was only gibberish to him—and to the Romans as well.

  The rebels stopped retreating and formed a battle line. Long odds against them: longer, Arminius thought, than those against throwing a triple six in a dice game. But sometimes long odds were better than sure ruin, and sure ruin faced the Pannonians if they kept trying to run away. Maybe a fierce charge would make their pursuers think twice.

  Maybe. But Arminius didn’t believe it, not for a moment. “Be ready!” he called to his fellow Germans. “They’re going to try to bull through us.”

  “Let them try,” one of the big, fair men said. Several others nodded. Arminius smiled. No, his folk had never been one to back away from a fight.

  That officer shouted something. Sure as demons, the Pannonians charged Arminius’ band, not the legionaries. The Germans’ looks, bronze helmets, and smaller shields all declared them auxiliaries rather than regulars. The enemy officer had to think that made them the easier target. Well, he could think whatever he pleased. Thinking it didn’t make it so.

  “Sedatus!” the Pannonians yelled, and, “Succellus!” One of those was their fire god; the other was a smith, who carried a hammer. They were using sharper tools now.

  They showed almost Roman discipline as they bore down on the Germans. His own men fought with better discipline than they would have back in their native forests. Past that, Arminius indulged in no comparisons. With numbers on their side, and with the legionaries swinging up to help them, it shouldn’t matter much.

  Of course, even if the Germans and Romans would win in the end, a man still might get killed in the m
iddle of the fight. The Pannonians loosed a volley of javelins at Arminius’ auxiliaries. A German screamed when one of the light spears pierced his right arm. Another javelin thudded into Arminius’ shield. The Pannonians had copied Roman practice to the extent of using a long shank of soft iron on their javelins. The shank bent when the javelin went home. Arminius couldn’t throw it back, and yanking it out of the shield would take time he didn’t have. He threw the fouled shield aside. Fighting without one would have bothered a Roman. It left Arminius more vulnerable, but it didn’t bother him a bit—he was used to going into battle with no more than spear and sword.

  He jabbed at the man in front of him. The Pannonian used his big, heavy legionary-style shield well, holding it between Arminius’ spear and his vitals. His stabbing sword flicked out like a viper’s tongue. But he couldn’t reach Arminius with it, not when the German’s spear made him keep his distance.

  They might have danced like that for some little while, each trying to figure out how to spill the other’s blood. They weren’t alone on the battlefield, though. Another German threw a fist-sized rock that clanged off the Pannonian’s helmet. Without the ironworks on his head, it would have smashed in his skull. As things were, he staggered and lurched like a man who’d just taken a fist to the chin. He dropped his guard, too. Arminius sprang forward and jabbed his spear into the fellow’s thigh, just below his iron-studded leather kilt.

  The Pannonian howled in pain. He crumpled like a discarded sheet of papyrus—a comparison that never would have occurred to Arminius before joining the auxiliaries. The German chief stabbed again, aiming to finish him. But, even wounded, the Pannonian was wily: He used his shield like a turtle’s shell, covering himself with it as best he could. Arminius went on to fight another man. The wounded Pannonian couldn’t get away. Once the fight was over, somebody would cut his throat or smash in his head. All the wiliness in the world wouldn’t save him then.

  Even among Germans, Arminius was a big man. The Pannonian he came up against next was even bigger, and much thicker through the shoulders. The fellow screamed something at him. Since it was in the Pannonian language, Arminius understood not a word of it. Seeing as much, the warrior shouted again, this time in Latin: “Futter your mother!”

  “Your mother was a dog, and your father shat in her twat,” Arminius retorted. Latin wasn’t his language, either, which hadn’t kept him from learning to swear in it.

  Roaring with rage, the big, burly Pannonian rushed at him. He aimed to knock Arminius down with his heavy shield and then stab him—or, if he was furious enough, kick him to death. What he aimed for wasn’t what he got. Arminius sidestepped like a dancer and then used a flick of his spearpoint to tear out the Pannonian’s throat. It was as pretty and precise a stroke as he’d ever made. He was proud of it for days afterwards.

  Blood fountained from the Pannonian’s neck. He clutched at his throat, trying to stem the tide of gore. It was no use—Arminius knew a killing stroke when he gave one. The big man’s knees went limp as overcooked cabbage. He fell, and his armor clattered about him.

  Romans liked to say things like that. It was a line from a poem, though Arminius thought the poem was in Greek, not Latin. He knew there was such a thing as Greek, and that Romans with a fancy education spoke it, but it remained a closed scroll to him.

  And he had no time to worry about poetry anyhow, whether in Greek, Latin, or his own tongue. Another Pannonian was trying to murder him. The man’s thrust almost pierced him—the son of a whore even fought like a Roman. The fellow sheltered behind his own big scutum. Beating down his guard wouldn’t be easy. Arminius’ slashes gashed the thick leather facing of the Pannonian’s shield, but that didn’t harm it and certainly didn’t harm him.

  Then the legionaries slammed into the rebels’ flank. After that, the fight wasn’t a fight any more. It was a rout. The Pannonians realized what they should have seen sooner: they were desperately outnumbered, out in the open, and had no hope of reinforcement, nor any strongpoint to which they might escape. They were, in a word, trapped.

  Arminius’ foe suddenly had to face two other German auxiliaries, as the men they’d been fighting took to their heels. He had no trouble holding off one foe. He couldn’t turn enough directions at once to hold off three. One of the other Germans hamstrung him. He went down with a wail. Arminius’ stroke across his throat finished him off.

  “This is the way it’s supposed to work!” said the auxiliary who’d wounded him, wiping blood from his blade on a grassy tussock.

  “By the gods, it is,” Arminius agreed. “Let’s finish the rest of them. The looting should be good.”

  “So it should. We don’t want to let those Roman greedyguts take more than their share, either, the way they like to do,” the other man said.

  “I was thinking the same thing a little while ago,” Arminius replied. “Come on! We don’t want to let any of these cursed fools get away.”

  He loped after the Pannonians, who were frankly fleeing now. The westering sun stretched his shadow out ahead of him. The other Germans followed. War made a grand game—when you were winning.

  Quinctilius Varus stepped from the gangplank to the pier with a sigh of relief. He didn’t like traveling by ship, which didn’t mean he couldn’t do it at need. He’d got from Ostia—Rome’s port—to Massilia by sea faster than he could have by land. The rest of the journey, up to the legions’ base by the Rhine, would have to be by land.

  He wished he could just close his eyes and appear there. For that matter, he wished he could close his eyes and have somebody else appear there. But he was the man Augustus wanted in that spot, the man Augustus wanted doing that job. It was an honor. All of his friends said so. They all seemed glad it was an honor he had and they didn’t. None of them had shown the slightest desire to accompany him to the frontier.

  Neither had his wife. “If my great-uncle said you have to go to Germany, then you do,” Claudia Pulchra had said. “He didn’t say anything about my going, and I don’t intend to.” She’d made him very happy in bed till his sailing time came round. He hoped she wasn’t making someone else very happy in bed right now—or, if she was, he hoped she was discreet about it. If Augustus could send his own daughter to an island for being too open, too shameless, with her adulteries, he wouldn’t think twice about banishing a grand-niece.

  No matter what Claudia Pulchra was doing, Varus had to make the best of things here. He looked at Massilia from the pier, and found himself pleasantly surprised. “Not too bad,” he said.

  “Not too good, either,” Aristocles said darkly. The pedisequus liked sailing even less than Varus did—his stomach rebelled on the water. He didn’t seem to realize he was on dry land again at last.

  But Varus meant what he’d said. Massilia wasn’t Rome—no other place came close, not even Alexandria—or Antioch or Athens. But it was a perfectly respectable provincial town. Greeks had settled the southern coast of Gaul somewhere not long after Rome was founded. And Gallia Narbonensis had been a Roman province much longer than the wilder lands farther north. True, Caesar’s soldiers had besieged and sacked Massilia a lifetime ago, when it made the mistake of backing Pompey. It had recovered since, though, and was prosperous again. The temple to Apollo near the center of town was particularly fine, dominating the view from the harbor.

  “Who will you be, sir?” a dockside lounger asked Varus in Greek-accented Latin. “I can tell you’re somebody, and no mistake.”

  “I am Publius Quinctilius Varus, the new governor of Germany, on my way from Rome to take my post there,” Varus answered grandly. He nodded to Aristocles, who flipped the lounger a coin. “Will you be good enough to let the local leaders know I have arrived?”

  The man popped the coin into his mouth. Most people carried small change between their cheek and jaw. Varus had himself in his younger days. Aristocles handled mundanities like money now. “I sure will, your honor,” the Massiliote said, and hurried away.

  If he took the silver
and disappeared… Well, what could Varus do about it? Nothing much. But the fellow proved as good as his word.

  Before long, both of the town’s duumvirs—its paired executives, as consuls were the paired executives in Rome as a whole—hurried to the harbor to greet their distinguished visitor. By their Latin, they were Italians, not Greeks. One was tall and lean, the other short and stocky. Varus forgot their names as soon as he heard them. The tall one sold olive oil all over Gaul; the stocky one sold wine—or maybe it was the other way around.

  Each duumvir invited him to a feast that evening. By the way they glared at each other, the one whose house he didn’t choose would hate him forever after. So he said, “I’ll stay a couple of days before going north. Why don’t I have my slave toss a coin to see which of you I visit first?”

  As he’d hoped, that satisfied them both. “You know how to grease things, don’t you, your Excellency?” said the tall one—yes, Quinctilius Varus thought he was the one who sold oil.

  “I try,” Varus answered.

  “Can you grease things up in Germany?” the squat one asked, which confused Varus all over again.

  “I intend to try,” he said. “Can you gentlemen tell me what it’s like up by the Rhine?”

  Almost in unison, they shook their heads. They were Italians, sure enough; a Greek would have dipped his to show he meant no. The tall one said, “You wouldn’t catch me up there—not unless Augustus ordered me there, I mean.” He made a quick recovery. Then he continued, “I’d rather stay here. The weather’s better—not so chilly, not so damp. And there aren’t any savages around here.”

  “My job is to turn them into provincials,” Varus said.

  “Good fortune go with you,” the two duumvirs said together. It wasn’t Good luck and you’ll need it, you poor, sorry son of a whore, but it might as well have been.

  “The Germans do buy wine,” the stocky one added. “Not much of a market there for oil, I’m afraid. They use butter instead.” He made a face to show what he thought of that. Since Varus thought the same thing, he made a face, too. If butter didn’t mark a true barbarian, what did?