Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

“Vetera’s not exactly a triple six, either,” Varus said. Rome would have been the best throw at dice. So would Athens or Alexandria. Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, came pretty close. Vetera… didn’t.

“Better than Mindenum.” Aristocles’ wave encompassed what was left of the legionary encampment. Troops didn’t overwinter here, not yet. When they left for land more firmly in Roman hands, they made sure they either took along or destroyed everything the locals could use. They took all the iron in the camp—everything from surgeons’ scalpels to horse trappings to hobnails to spoons. Anything left behind, German smiths would pound into spearheads or knives or swords. The soldiers burned all the timber in the camp. They would cut more next spring. When they were on the march, they built a fresh encampment every day. They didn’t mind wrecking this semi-permanent place.

“One of these days, this will be a Roman city in its own right,” Varus said. “Plenty of towns in Africa and Spain and Gaul started out as legionary camps. They’re respectable enough now.”

“I suppose so.” His pedisequus didn’t sound convinced. “Those weren’t stuck out in the middle of nowhere, though.”

Instead of arguing, Quinctilius Varus hid a smile. Aristocles was determined to despise Mindenum no matter what. Back when the Empire was younger and smaller, plenty of towns that now seemed comfortable and near the center of things would have been frontier posts fit only for soldiers.

Vala Numonius came up and saluted Varus. “We’re ready to head back to the Rhine, sir,” the cavalry commander said. “I won’t be sorry to see the last of this place for a while, and that’s the truth.”

Varus glanced over at Aristocles. The slave radiated agreement the way a red-hot piece of iron on an anvil radiated heat. Varus pretended not to notice. But he couldn’t help saying, “Well, neither will I.”

Before long, the legionaries would slog through the mud and the muck to the headwaters of the Lupia. After that, the going would get easier. Boats would take many of them down the river to the Rhine. Roman forts on the banks would make sure the Germans could only watch. The arrangement worked well enough, but it didn’t strike Varus as suitably triumphant.

“We ought to march through Germany,” he said. “We ought to show the natives we can go where we want whenever we care to.”

“Yes, sir,” Aristocles said resignedly.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like the idea?” Quinctilius Varus was sensitive to his slave’s shifts of inflection.

“Sir, I am delighted to march out of Germany,” the pedisequus replied. “As for marching through Germany… There’s nowhere in this miserable country I care to go to. As far as I’m concerned, the barbarians are welcome to every last inch of it.”

Since Varus held a similar opinion, he couldn’t exactly tell Aristocles he was wrong. “One of these days, this will make a fine province,” he said, hoping he sounded as if he meant it. “We just have to finish bringing it into the Empire, that’s all.”

Aristocles took an incautious step back and squelched in mud that tried to suck the sandal off his foot. Clothes that would have been perfect anywhere around the Mediterranean proved less than ideal here. Tunics and togas were drafty; no wonder the Germans wore trousers under their swaddling cloaks—the ones who could afford to wear anything under those cloaks, anyhow. And boots stayed on and protected the feet better than sandals.

Muttering in disgust, Aristocles cleaned his sandal and his foot as best he could with a tuft of grass he pulled up from the ground. “It would serve the Germans right if we left them to their own barbarous devices,” he said. “They don’t deserve to be part of the Empire.”

Again, Varus felt the same way. His opinion, however, wasn’t what mattered here. “Augustus wants this province. He has his reasons. And what Augustus wants, Augustus gets.” That had been true for almost as long as Varus was alive, and Varus, as he knew too well, was no longer young. It might as well have been a law of nature.

“Augustus has never seen this country. He’s never seen these barbarians.” Aristocles pulled up more grass. He swiped it across a muddy spot he’d missed before. “By the gods, sir, if he had seen them he wouldn’t want them.”

Quinctilius Varus laughed. He imagined Augustus surveying the outpost at Mindenum. It wasn’t that Augustus had never taken the field—he’d beaten Rome’s finest marshals during the civil war after Julius Caesar’s murder. But Augustus was, without a doubt, a creature of the Mediterranean. Imagining him here in these gloomy woods was like imagining a fish in the Egyptian desert. The picture didn’t want to form.

Well, I am a creature of the Mediterranean, too, Varus thought, and I still wish Augustus had sent me to Egypt, or to Greece, or anywhere but here. I don’t belong here, and I never will.

“Vetera,” he said aloud. When he’d first set eyes on the military town on the left bank of the Rhine, he’d thought it the most gods-forsaken place in the world. Then he’d crossed over into Germany and found out how little he knew about places the gods had forsaken—if, indeed, they’d ever come here at all. Next to Mindenum, Vetera seemed like Antioch. Next to Germany, even the frontier of Gaul seemed like civilization.

“Vetera,” Aristocles echoed. Varus heard the longing in the slave’s voice, as he’d heard it in his own.

“We’ll be back here come spring, you know,” Varus said.

“Yes, sir,” Aristocles replied with a martyred sigh. He was part of the price of empire himself. Prominent Romans needed clever Greeks to help run their affairs. The pedisequus was better off than he would have been as a free man in poor but proud Greece. Well, he was except for the mud on his ankle and between his toes.

“We can leave the savages to their own devices for a while,” Varus said. “We made a decent beginning here, anyhow.” He clucked like a worried hen. “I do hope Augustus will see it that way.” No, Augustus had never set eyes on Germany. But his will would be done here all the same.

Arminius had seen that, inside the Roman empire, steadings tended to clump together in villages and towns. In Germany, holdings were more evenly spread, here was a steading In itself in the woods; here were three or four together, perhaps formed by the descendants of someone who had farmed by himself a few generations earlier; here were a pair of brothers and their households side by side; here another lone farm; here six or eight steadings in a large clearing. His folk did have villages, though not large ones by Roman standards. He’d never seen a town till he took service with the auxiliaries.

Towns had their advantages. He understood that. If you brought news to a town, you had to tell it only once, everybody in town, or in the market square, anyhow, would hear it at the same time. So would farmers who’d come into town to sell whatever they had, and then they would spread the news through the countryside.

Towns were… efficient. The word and the idea existed in Latin, but not in the Germans’ tongue. Roman armies were efficient, too. Arminius wished his own people grasped the concept, tor it was as much a weapon as the edge of the sword.

But the world was as it was, not as he wished it were. It he wanted to spread news, he couldn’t do it by traveling to a few towns. He had to go to one steadily alter another, talk with one farmer or minor chieftain after another, and persuade or cajole or jolly the man and the lesser followers at each place to his own way of thinking.