Harry Turtledove - Give me back my Legions!

A considerable silence followed. Lucius Eggius considered it. None of his considerations made him very happy. The centurion from Legion XIX didn’t look very happy, either. He got his mug refilled, tilted his head back, and took a big swig: Eggius watched his prominent larynx bob up and down as he swallowed. At last, he said, “Well, there are a few.”

Most of the Romans who heard that nodded. Lucius Eggius did himself. “Yeah, there are,” he agreed. “But we’ve been trying to turn that miserable mess of trees and swamps and fogs and frogs into a province for a demon of a long time now. If we were going anywhere with it, don’t you figure there’d be more than a few Germans you could count on when your back was turned?”

The centurion didn’t reply to that. Nobody else did, either, not right away. Then Marcus Calvisius said, “Well, Eggius, there is one other way to deal with that.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lucius Eggius said. “Like what?”

“Kill all the barbarians we can’t trust and make a province with whoever’s left. Why do you think XVII, XVIII, and XIX are here?”

Eggius did some more considering. When he was done, he let out a grunt. “You’ve got something there,” he admitted. “I do wish we still had Tiberius in command, though. He’s a sour bastard, sure, but nobody ever said he doesn’t know what he’s doing. This Varus . . . Well, who can tell? Gods rot the stinking Pannonian rebels, anyway.” He set about the business of getting seriously drunk.

“Amo. Amas. Amat,” Segestes muttered. “Amamum. Amatis. Amant.”

He was currying a horse. The beast snorted, perhaps at the unfamiliar sounds. Segestes went right on conjugating the Latin verb to love. Then he muttered under his breath in his native tongue. Plenty of Germans would have said - plenty of Germans did say - he was currying favor with the Romans, too.

He didn’t see it that way. If he had seen it that way, he wouldn’t have done it. How many folk had gone up against Rome? Lots. How many had lost? All of them - you could look west across the Rhine or southeast across the Danube to see the latest examples. Oh, the Pannonians were still kicking and bellowing, like a bull before it went all the way into the stall. That wouldn’t last much longer, though. The Romans were tough, and they had their whole vast empire to draw upon.

He ran his hand over the horse’s flank and nodded to himself. That was better. Like most horses in Germany, his was a small, shaggy, rough-coated beast. If you didn’t go over it with a curry comb pretty often, it would be all over tangles.

The horse made a snuffling, expectant noise. He laughed and gave it a carrot. It crunched up the treat. Then it nuzzled his hand, hoping for another one.

He laughed. “You’re no horse. You’re a pig with a mane and a hairy tail.” He patted the horse and fed it another carrot. When it tried for a third, he shook his head and stepped out of the stall.

As soon as he did, he wished he hadn’t. Thusnelda was out there playing with a puppy. That would have been bad enough any time. Spoiling a horse was one thing, but Segestes wanted his dogs mean. Why have them, if not toward the steading? With things between him and Thusnelda as prickly as they were . . .

He was more inclined to spoil his horse than his daughter. He didn’t see it that way, of course. Fathers never do.

Thusnelda had been laughing as she tickled the pup’s stomach. When she saw Segestes, her face closed like a clenching fist. She straightened up and turned her back on him.

“If a man used me like that, I would kill him,” Segestes remarked.

His daughter spun toward him, but not out of respect. “And you don’t think you’re killing me?” she retorted.

“What are you talking about?” For a moment, Segestes was honestly confused. Then he wasn’t, but wished he still were. “There’s nothing wrong with Tudrus,” he growled. They had this argument at least once a day. He was sick of it, even if Thusnelda didn’t seem to be. Why hadn’t he set an earlier date for the wedding? Then she’d be out of his hair, and Tudrus would have to worry about her.

Something had changed, though. That wasn’t just fury in her gray eyes. It was something very much like triumph. “Arminius is back. He’s out of the fight in Pannonia, and he’s hale.” She spat the words in his face.

He already knew that - he’d heard a couple of days earlier. He hadn’t said a word. But bad news always got where you didn’t want it to. He might have known it would here. “How did you find out?” he asked wearily.

By the way Thusnclda’s eyes sparked, he’d hear about knowing and not telling her. But that would be later. For now, she could score more points off him with the news itself. “One of the slaves brought word,” she answered. “He said it was everywhere - except here.”

So she wouldn’t waste time making him pay for keeping it from her. Not now, anyway. He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change a thing.”

“You don’t think so?” His daughter laughed at him.

If she weren’t of his own flesh and blood . . . But she was, so he had to hold his temper down. It wasn’t easy; he was a proud man. “I don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “And I don’t want a family connection with Arminius any more. He hates the Romans too much to make it safe.”

“You didn’t think so when you pledged me to him,” Thusnelda jeered. “And how can you say that, anyway? He joined the Roman army. You never did.”

“The man who best knows how to break a cart is one who makes carts,” Segestes said. His daughter stared at him as it he’d suddenly started spouting Greek. He couldn’t have even had he wanted to. Knowing Greek existed put him a long jump ahead of most Germans. With another sigh, he went on, “Arminius joined the Romans to learn how to beat them.”

“He wants us to be free,” Thusnelda said.

“Free to brawl among ourselves. Free to run through the woods - and no farther. Free to be as wild as the Wends and the Finns.” Segestes named the most savage peoples the Germans knew.

“The Finns tip their arrows with bone. They live on the ground, or in huts woven like baskets. They sleep on the ground.” Thusnelda sounded disgusted.

“To the Romans, we look the way the Finns look to us,” Segestes said.

“Then the Romans are stupid!”

Segestes shook his head. “They aren’t. You know they aren’t. They have all kinds of things we don’t, and they don’t fight one another the way we do,” he said. “I want us to live the way they do. So does Tudrus. Is that so bad?”

“We should be free.” Thusnelda might have been listening to Arminius. Before he left, she probably had on the sly.

“What good does that do us? Knowing things, living in peace - those do us some good,” Segestes said.

Thusnelda stuck her nose in the air. Segestes wondered if Tudrus could charm - or beat - the nonsense out of her. He hoped so.

III

Back before Publius Quinctilius Varus was born, two German tribes invaded Gaul. If not for Julius Caesar, they might have taken it away from the natives before the Romans could. If not for my wife’s great-uncle’s great-uncle, Varus thought, bemused. That his father had killed himself rather than yielding to his wife’s great-uncle’s great-uncle he forgot for the moment. He remembered little about Sextus Quinctilius Varus. Augustus he knew very well indeed.

And he knew very well what Julius Caesar had done. With characteristic energy, Caesar bundled the Usipetes and the Tencteri back into the German forests. And then he went after them. In ten days, his engineers bridged the Rhine. The German tribes fled before him. He stayed on the east bank of the Rhine for eighteen days, then went back and finished conquering Gaul.

And he left the problem of conquering Germany for another day - for another generation, as it turned out. For me, as it turned out, Varus thought. Marching through Germany was easy enough. Holding the place down, really subjecting it, wasn’t. Plenty of Romans had proved that, too.

One of his servants intertwined the fingers of both hands, forming a cup into which Varus could step. With help from the leg-up, he swung over his horse’s back and straightened in the saddle. A mounting stone would have served as well, although a leg-up from a man better suited a commander’s dignity. If he had to, Varus thought he could vault into the saddle with no help at all, like a proper cavalryman. But only a barbarian, and a stupid barbarian at that, would do things the hard way when he didn’t have to.

Once seated on the horse, Varus nodded to Vala Numonius. “Let’s cross,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” The cavalry commander nodded. They both urged their mounts forward. The rest of the cavalry detachment followed. The horses’ hooves drummed on the bridge over the Rhine.

It was built on exactly the same principle as Caesar’s. Roman engineers had fixed two sets of piles in the riverbed. The upstream piles leaned with the current, the downstream against it. They were about twenty-five cubits apart. Trestles slanting against the current on the down-stream side helped support the structure. Upstream, a timber breakwater protected the bridge from logs or fire rafts or anything else the barbarians might aim at it.

“Once we subdue the Germans, we’ll get a proper bridge with stone piers, not this military makeshift,” Varus said.

“That would be splendid, sir,” Numonius replied. “A sign of civilization, you might say.”

“Civilization. Yes.” Once again, Varus fondly remembered Syria. He remembered Rome. He remembered Athens, where he’d stopped on the way back from Syria - and where he, like his son, had studied as a young man. He remembered seeing for the first time the Parthenon and all the other wonderful buildings up on the Acropolis. By the gods, that was civilization for you!

This . . . The day was cool. The sky was a grayish, watery blue. The sun seemed half ashamed to shine. He was riding away from a legionary camp - which, in these parts, counted as an outpost of civilization. He was heading for . . . The gloomy forests that stretched on and on east of the Rhine warned him what he was heading for.

Foot soldiers followed the cavalrymen. One thing the Romans had learned from painful experience: wherever they went in Germany, they went in force. Small parties of men were all too likely to disappear. Better not to tempt the barbarians into doing what they weren’t supposed to.

Varus’ horse stepped off the bridge and onto the muddy ground on the east bank of the Rhine. Its hooves stopped echoing. They made the usual thumping and squelching noises instead.

Vala Numonius had dropped back by half a length to let Varus precede him. Now he caught up again. “Welcome to Germany, sir,” he said.

“Germany,” Varus echoed. He didn’t seen any Germans here on their side of the river. He didn’t particularly miss them. He’d seen plenty in Vetera: big, fair, noisy men with an exaggerated sense of their own importance. Some of the soldiers’ women were pretty in an exotic way, though. They had plenty to hold on to, that was for sure.

The cavalry commander pointed toward the trees, which had been cut down for several stadia around the bridgehead. A lot of the timber from them probably went into the bridge. “They’re watching us from in there,” Numonius said.

“Let them watch. It will teach them respect,” Varus said.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a German stepped into the cleared ground from among the trees. The man turned around, bent over, undid his cloak, and waggled his pale, bare backside at the Romans. Then he straightened, wrapped the cloak around himself again, and loped off into the woods.