Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

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.

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.

Some of the horsemen behind Varus laughed. Others swore. “So much for respect, sir,” Vala Numonius said.

Biting his lip in rage, Varus pointed out to where the German had vanished. “Seize him! Crucify him!” he shouted.

“Sir, there’s no hope,” said a cavalry officer who’d been on the frontier for a while. “In the forests, they’re like animals. They have dens to lay up in, or they can climb trees like wall lizards wish they could. And he might be trying to lure a detachment right into an ambush.”