Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

“Before they take you, they’ll have to take me first,” Arminius said. He’d never seen—or never been sure he’d seen—a nighttime spirit, which didn’t mean he didn’t believe they were there. Some of the Romans—not all, but some—even laughed at gods and ghosts. If that didn’t prove they were a depraved folk… plenty of other things did.

Something hooted. Thusnelda started. “Is that only an owl?” It must have been. No spirits swooped out of the sky to strike. No demons came snarling out of the trees where they commonly hid.

“Nothing to fear,” Arminius said, and slid his arm around her waist. With a small sigh, she pressed herself against him. Her body felt so warm, he marveled that she didn’t light the way ahead like a torch.

Since she didn’t, his eyes had to get used to starlight. Little by little, darkness seemed less absolute. Wotan’s wandering star blazed high in the south, shining brighter than any of the fixed stars. The Romans had the arrogance to believe they could figure out why and how the wandering stars moved as they did. What answer did any proper man need but that the gods willed it so?

The dim gray light was, at last, enough to show him the place he remembered passing on the way to Segestes’ steading. “Here,” he said softly. He led Thusnelda off the path and out onto the little meadow he’d found. “Here you will become my woman in truth.”

“Yes,” she said, even more quietly than he. No going back from this, not for her. Once she’d lost her maidenhead, she was either a wife or a trull—nothing in between. The Romans might joke about women’s appetites, but not Arminius’ folk.

He undid the brooch fastening his cloak and spread the warm wool garment on the grass. Then he also unfastened Thusnelda’s. He spread it on top of his. “The best bed I can make for you,” he said, “and the grass is soft.”

“It will do, because you are here with me,” she said.

He quickly shed his shoes and tunic and trousers. Under his clothes, he wore tight-fitting linen drawers, which proved he came from a wealthy family. Bv the time he pulled down the drawers, Thusnelda was naked, too. He wished the moon still shone—he wanted to see her better. Foul-mouthed as the Romans were, they had a point about that: it added something.

Well, touch would have to do. They lay down together. He explored her with hands and lips. Then, when he couldn’t stand to wait any longer, he poised himself above her. “Oh,” she said in a low voice when he went into her. He met resistance—she was a maiden. “Oh!” she said again, louder and less happily this time, as he pushed hard. “You’re splitting me in half!”

“No,” he said, breaking through. “It’s like this the first time for women.”

“My mother told me the same thing. I thought she was trying to frighten me so I wouldn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to.”

Arminius hardly heard her. Intent on his own building delight, he drove home again and again. Soon, he gasped and groaned and spent himself. Stroking her check, he said, “You are my woman now.” And your carrion crow of a father won’t take you back no matter what.

Varus had thought Vetera was the back of beyond—and it was. To a cosmopolitan man, a man used to Athens, to Syria, to Rome, Vetera had seemed the edge of the world. Now that Varus found himself in Mindenum, he would have given a considerable sum to go back to Vetera once more.

Vetera was on the ragged edge of civilization—no two ways about it. When you went from Vetera to Mindenum, when you traveled from the frontier between Gaul and Germany into the heart of the German wilderness, you fell off the edge.

The soldiers and a handful of sutlers who traded with both them and the Germans were the only men from the Empire for many miles in all directions. But for the encampment on the Visurgis, this was Germany, pure and simple. Some other fortified camps—Aliso was the strongest—along the west-flowing Lupia led back toward the Rhine. From Mindenum, one of these days, legionaries could press on toward the Elbe, Augustus’ ultimate goal.

For now, Varus thought it no small miracle that this Roman island persisted in the midst of the German sea. The endless woods stretching away to north and south, east and west, the tops of the trees rhythmically stirred by the wind, put him in mind of waves scudding across the Mediterranean.

When he spoke that conceit aloud, the officers from Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX didn’t quite laugh in his face, but they came close. “When you see waves on the North Sea, sir, you forget everything you thought you knew about ‘em before,” said a bluff prefect named Lucius Caedicius. “The ones on the Mediterranean… well, they’re nothing but babies alongside of these.” Several other men nodded.

Absurdly, Varus felt compelled to defend the honor of the sea that was a Roman lake. “Well, but we don’t sail on the Mediterranean half the year, for fear of what it might do.”

“That’s so, sir,” Caedicius agreed, and Varus smugly thought he’d made his point. But the prefect continued, “You can get waves like that the year around in the North Sea, and bigger ones come winter.”

“Oh.” The Roman governor of Germany felt obscurely punctured.

Varus discovered to his dismay that the Germans around Mindenum paid their taxes in grain and cattle and fruit—when they paid them at all. That made a painful contrast to Syria, where the tax collectors used a system older than the Roman occupation, older than the Greek occupation that preceded it, and probably older than the Persian occupation that preceded the Greek. In Syria, the Empire took every copper it was entitled to. Here… ?

“They need to use coins with us,” Varus told anyone who would listen to him—and, since he was the governor, everyone had to listen to him. “Coins, by the gods! How do we know what a cow is worth, or a basket of apples, or a local measure of barley? The natives must go home laughing at the way they cheat us.”

“Sir, the Germans are only just learning about coins. I think you’ve heard that before,” Lucius Caedicius said. “They mostly swap back and forth, like.”

“I don’t care what they do amongst themselves. That’s not my worry.” Varus would gladly have sacrificed an ox in thanksgiving that it wasn’t his worry, too. “But this is supposed to be a Roman province now. When the Germans deal with us, they should act like proper provincials.”

“You said it, sir: this is supposed to be a Roman province,” the prefect replied. “But there’s a difference between what it’s supposed to be and what it is. A dog is supposed to be your friend, but sometimes he’ll bite you anyhow.”

A lot of the other Roman officers seemed to feel the same way. Their attitude left Varus fuming. How was he going to do the job Augustus had given him if the men who were tasked with helping him tried to thwart him instead? Whenever he rounded on them, they denied with oaths that they intended doing any such thing. But what they intended and what they did—or didn’t do—seemed very different to him.

He found he preferred dealing with the Germans to his own folk. With the natives, at least, he knew where he stood. They seemed to lack the refined hypocrisy with which too many Romans armored themselves against the world. When a German said he would do something, he would. When a Roman said he would do something, he would… if he felt like it, or if he decided it was to his advantage.

And when a German had a problem, it was commonly a simple kind of problem, one a man could easily deal with. A chieftain paid a call at Mindenum. The German didn’t come alone, of course; one measure of a man’s status here was the size of his retinue. One of the fierce-looking men in his retinue, a certain Tudrus, was also an aggrieved party.