Harry Turtledove - Give me back my Legions!

The spears reached the top of their arcs. Some of them clattered together in the air. A few, knocked spinning, fell short. But most of them crashed down on the head of the Roman column.

Like his comrades, Caldus Caelius marched with his scutum slung over his back. The big, heavy shield would have been impossibly awkward on his arm. It was for battle, not travel. And so the shields did no good as the spears struck home.

One of the spears came down not half a cubit in front of Caldus Caelius’ foot and stood thrilling in the mud. Another pierced the thigh of the legionary marching to his left. The man stared at the shaft and the spurting blood for a couple of heartbeats, more astonished than in pain. Then reality caught up with amazement. He shrieked, clutched at the spear and at his leg, and crumpled.

A soldier two men to Caldus Caelius’ right took a spear through the throat. He made horrible gobbling noises, gore pouring from his mouth in place of words. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he too slumped to the muck of the track the Romans were following. In a sense, he was lucky: he didn’t suffer long before oblivion seized him. There were plenty of worse ways to go.

Caelius wished he hadn’t had that thought. How many worse ways would he see before this day died? And what sort of end will I find for myself? he wondered fearfully.

He turned to find out how the rest of the soldiers were faring. The answer was simple: worse than he could have imagined in his most dreadful nightmare. That enormous volley of spears had wrecked the head of the column. Dozens - no, more likely hundreds; maybe even thousands - of legionaries were down, some mercifully dead, more wounded and thrashing and screaming their torment and terror up to the wet, uncaring sky. The agonized din made him want to stuff his fingers in his ears.

More cries came from the Romans’ left. Those weren’t wails of pain but fierce, triumphant bellows. The Germans realized what they’d done with their shattering volley. Well, they could hardly not realize it, could they? They might be barbarians, but they weren’t stupid barbarians. They’d just proved that, by the gods!

They proved it again a moment later. They’d built ways to get up and over the curving rampart that concealed them. They dropped down on the near side and loped toward the legionaries. And they rushed out of the dark woods next to the rampart. Jove’s thunderbolt could not have struck the Romans a harder blow than those deadly spears.

“Fight!” Caldus Caelius yelled, shrugging out of his pack and drawing his sword. “We’ve got to fight them, or they’ll slaughter us like sheep! Deploy! Form line of battle!”

He wasn’t the only legionary shouting orders like that through the wounded soldiers’ howls and screams. Here and there, Romans did their best to obey. But the presence of their injured comrades not only demoralized them but also hampered their efforts to form up.

And, as Caldus Caelius rapidly discovered, even if that hadn’t been so, there was almost nowhere for the Romans to deploy. When they stepped off the track to the right, they sank to their knees in muck. The ground to the left was a little better, but sloped swiftly upward toward the hillock from which the spears had flown - and down which the baying German horde now swarmed.

Along with a few unwounded comrades, Caelius set himself. The legions were ruined. Even a blind man could sec that. The barbarians were going to slaughter every Roman they could catch. A few legionaries floundered out into the swamp, desperate to get away. Caelius might have done the same thing if it didn’t seem so obviously hopeless. Since it did . ..

“Come on!” he shouted. “We’ll make the whoresons pay for our hides, anyhow!” And if he made them kill him in battle, it would all be over pretty fast. Then they wouldn’t have the chance to amuse themselves with him at their leisure afterwards.

Something hard caught him in the side of the head. A stone? A spearshaft? The flat of a sword? He never knew. Inside a heartbeat, his vision went from a red flare to blackness. He crumpled into the mud, his hands scrabbling feebly.

Quinctilius Varus and Aristocles were arguing in Greek about Plato’s Symposium. It made time go by and helped Varus forget about the wet, gloomy German landscape all around.

“What I’d like to see is the Symposium on the stage,” Varus said.

“It’s not a play. It’s a dialogue!” Aristocles sounded shocked. He was fussy and precise. To him, everything had one proper place - and one proper place only.

“It could be a play,” the Roman insisted. “Aristophanes and Alcibiades are both wonderful roles, to say nothing of Socrates himself. You might -“ He broke off and fell back into Latin: “By the gods! What’s that?”

The color drained from Aristocles’ face. “Nothing good,” he answered. Numbly, Varus nodded. The two of them rode just in front of the baggage train, near the center of the long, straggling Roman column. That sudden eruption of shrieks and screams and wails from up ahead . . . It sounded like the noises from a slaughterhouse, but monstrously magnified.

No. Varus made himself shake his head. Thinking such thoughts is a had omen. I won’t believe it. I won’t let myself believe it.

He kept on not letting himself believe it for five more minutes, maybe even ten. Then a bloodied legionary came running back toward him, crying, “We’re buggered!”

“What do you mean?” Varus demanded. He feared he knew, but clung to ignorance as long as he could. Sometimes, as with a spouse’s infidelities, not knowing - indeed, deliberately looking the other way - was better.

But the wounded Roman cried, “The Germans! There’s a million Germans up there, your Excellency, and they’re slaughtering us.”

“No,” Quinctilius Varus whispered. “It can’t be.”

It could. He knew that only too well. And if the barbarians had attacked the legionaries ... If that had happened, then Arminius’ infidelities were likely to prove far more lethal than any mere spouse’s.

“What do we do, sir?” his pedisequus asked.

For a moment, Varus had no answer. Everyone from Segestes to Aristocles to Lucius Eggius had tried to tell him Arminius was not to be trusted. He hadn’t believed any of them. He’d been sure he knew better than all of them put together. And they were right. And he was wrong. And, because he was wrong, because he’d trusted where he shouldn’t, three Roman legions were in deadly peril.

No treachery since Helen of Troy’s had caused this kind of slaughter. Being remembered with Menelaus was a distinction Varus could have done without. He hadn’t even got to lay Arminius - or wanted to, no matter what some people thought.

“What do we do, sir?” This time, Aristocles and the wounded Roman soldier asked it together. They sounded more urgent that way - more frantic, really. A tragic chorus, Varus thought, and wished he hadn’t. He paused to listen to the racket from up ahead. It sounded worse than ever. Sure enough, the wounded man had told the truth. Varus couldn’t imagine why the fellow wouldn’t have; he could feel himself grasping for straws.

No time for that now. “We have to fight,” Varus said. He pointed to the man who’d brought the news. “Tell the troops ahead to form line of battle and give the barbarians worse than they get. And tell them to remember they’re Romans. We’ll win this yet.”

The wounded man set his hands on his hips, exactly as Claudia Pulchra might have done after Varus said something truly stupid. “Sir, they can’t form line of battle,” the fellow said, as if speaking to an idiot. “There’s nothing but swamp on one side of the track, and nothing but howling savages on the other. That’s got to be why the Germans picked this place to begin with.”

Hearing that, Varus knew at once that it must be true. He also knew the depth of his own folly. How long had Arminius been cozening him, stringing him along, while at the same time drawing Germans from all over the province to this . . . this ambuscade? From the very beginning, probably. From before the beginning, even: why would he have taken service with the auxiliaries if not to learn how the Romans fought and how to turn what he learned against them?

“Your Excellency - !” If that wasn’t desperation in Aristocles’ voice now, Quinctilius Varus had never heard it. The wounded Roman shifted from foot to foot, too, as if about to piss himself.

Varus wondered why he wasn’t more afraid. Maybe because, understanding that the worst had happened, he saw he couldn’t do much about it now. If your only real choice was making the best end you could . . . that was what you had to do.

He drew his own sword. “Well, my dears, we shall have to fight,” he said. “If we can’t deploy, we’ll take them on one by one, that’s all.” Something else occurred to him. “Oh - Aristocles.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t get too far from me, please. If worse comes to worst” - even now, Varus wouldn’t say when worse comes to worst - “I don’t aim to let the savages take me alive. I’d appreciate a friendly hand on the other end of the sword, if you’d be so kind.”

The Greek gulped. He couldn’t very well misunderstand that, even if his expression said he wanted to. Licking his lips, he said, “If I have to, sir, I’ll tend to it. I hope somebody will do the same for me, that’s all.”

“I think you may be able to find someone,” Varus said dryly. That might prove his last understatement, but it surely wasn’t his smallest.

Vala Numonius’ head whipped around. Only a dead man could have ignored that sudden, dreadful racket. “By the gods!” a mounted officer near him exclaimed. “What the demon is that!”

Although the cavalry commander feared he knew, he didn’t want to say the words out loud. Sometimes naming something could make it real where it hadn’t been before. Maybe that was only superstition. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t. Why take chances?

And Numonius didn’t have to. A man galloped up from behind him, crying, “The Germans! The Germans!”

“What about them?” Numonius knew the question was idiotic as soon as it passed his lips, which was just too late.

The man coming forward, fortunately, didn’t take it amiss. But that was the only good news the cavalry commander had, for the fellow went on, “They’re killing the foot soldiers, sir! Slaughtering them with spears!”

“We have to save them!” cried the officer who’d exclaimed about the awful noise.

“If we can,” Vala Numonius said. The officer looked at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Face hot with shame, Numonius realized the cavalrymen would have to make the effort. If he didn’t order it, they’d mutiny and go back without him. Easier to lead them in the direction they wanted to go . . if that didn’t get them all killed. Vala Numonius licked his lips before he shouted, “Back! We’ll do all we can for our comrades!”

Cheering, the horsemen turned and rode south and east, in the direction from which they’d come. Numonius drew his sword. Maybe the charge would frighten the Germans away. He hoped so. If it didn’t, the Roman cavalrymen would have their hands full. Vala Numonius knew he would. With the sword in one hand, he would have only the other to use to hang on to his saddle grip. If his left hand slipped, he might go right off his horse’s back.

Mounted spearmen were in the same predicament. They couldn’t charge home with the full weight of their horses behind them. A rider would go over his mount’s tail if he tried anything so harebrained. If only a man’s foot could grip the saddle as well as his hands could! Numonius laughed at himself. Talk about harebrained! If there were a way to do something like that, someone would surely have thought of it by now.