Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

Not here. Not on the Rhine. Varus had seen more snow in one winter than in all his previous life. So he told himself, anyhow, though it might not have been strictly true. He was sure he’d never seen more snow, deeper snow, than the drifts that whitened field and forest around Vetera.

And he’d, never seen a greater rebirth than the one that came when the -sun at last swung north and melted all the snow. The bare-branched trees enrobed themselves in greenery. Fresh new grass surged up through the dead, wispy, yellow stuff the snowdrifts had hidden.

Butterflies, flying jewels, flitted from one magically sprouted flower to the next. Bees began to buzz. Flies and gnats and mosquitoes also came back to life, and were rather less welcome.

With the insects came swarms of birds. Sparrows and carrion crows and a few others had stayed through the winter. But now the woods and fields were full of music. Swallows swooped. Thrushes hopped. Swifts darted. Robins sang. Varus appreciated them the more because he’d done without them for so long .

Aristocles was less impressed. “If things weren’t so awful before, they wouldn’t seem so much better now,” the slave said darkly.

“I’d rather look on the bright side of things,” Varus said.

The pedisequus sniffed. “The bright side of things would be going back to Rome. Are we going to do that?” His woebegone expression answered the question without words. Then he used a few more: “No. We’re going into Germany.”

“Don’t remind me,” Quinctilius Varus said. Even with the broad-leafed trees across the Rhine getting new foliage, the German forests looked dark and forbidding. Varus had never seen them look any other way. The bright side of things was hard to find. He did his best: “Maybe this year’s campaigns will bring the province under the yoke once for all.”

“Gods grant it be so!” Aristocles exclaimed. “In that case, you can turn it over to somebody else and go back to Rome after all.”

“Nothing I’d like better.” Varus lowered his voice. “The company of soldiers begins to pall after a while.”

“Bloody bores,” Aristocles muttered, which was just what his master was thinking. The pedisequus went on, “Is there any chance we could send the legions across the river to do what needs doing while we stay here ourselves? Vetera is bad, but I don’t suppose it’s impossible. Not next to Mindenum, anyhow.”

Regretfully, Varus shook his head. “Augustus put me in charge of the three legions here. If I’m going to command them, I have to command them, if you know what I mean. And commanding means being seen to command.”

“You have a strong sense of duty,” Aristocles said. Varus would have liked that better had the slave not contrived to make it sound more like reproach than praise.

However much Varus wished he could, he couldn’t avoid the company of soldiers. Practically everyone in Vetera was a soldier or a retired soldier or someone who sold things to soldiers or someone who slept with soldiers. Some of the legionary officers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects for the coming campaigning season. “One more good push and we’ve got ‘em, I think,” Ceionius said at a supper of roast boar.

“Here’s hoping,” Varus said. By now, he’d got used to drinking neat wine—or he thought he had, anyhow.

“It’s still Germany. They’re still Germans,” Lucius Eggius said. “We’ve been banging heads with them for a long time, like a couple of aurochs in rutting season. How do we pull a miracle out of our helmet now?”

“We have a fine new leader,” Ceionius said. “That’s how.”

“You flatter me,” Varus said, which was bound to be true. Augustus’s courtiers were smoother at it than these provincial bumpkins. To keep from thinking about that, Varus added, “Aurochs are a disappointment.”

“Not if you boil ‘em long enough,” Eggius said. “After a while, the meat will turn tender. You’ve got to be patient, though.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Varus said. “In the Gallic War, Caesar makes them out to be fearsome monsters. And they aren’t—they’re nothing but wild oxen with long horns.”

“Caesar likes to tell stories,” Eggius said with a shrug. “Sometimes they’re true. Sometimes they just sound good.”

“How do you know which are which?” Varus asked.

“Sometimes you can tell. Sometimes—like with the aurochs—you can really find out. Sometimes…” The legionary officer shrugged. “It’s the same way with the stories about Caesar, I guess. He’s—what?—fifty years dead. Who knows which ones are true and which ones are just crap? Any old way, though, they’ll be telling tales about him forever.”

“Yes, I suppose they will,” Quinctilius Varus said in tones more bitter than he would have expected.

Lucius Eggius wasn’t wrong. Julius Caesar’s fame would last as long as men endured. So would Augustus’—Varus had no doubt of that. But what about my own? he wondered, not for the first time.

If he was the man who brought Germany into the Empire, his name would live. Some historian would write an account of Augustus’ reign, the way Sallust had written about the war against Jugurtha the Numidian and about Catiline’s plot against the Senate or the way Caesar himself wrote about the war against the Gauls. Nobody could talk about Augustus’ reign without talking about the conquest of Germany. And so, to some degree, people would remember that there had been such a man as Publius Quinctilius Varus.

But it wouldn’t be the same. Everyone would always know who Julius Caesar and Augustus were. People would always tell stories about them. The stories wouldn’t shrink in the telling, either. Stories never did. If a man two hundred years from now wanted to learn the name of the man who conquered Germany, though…

So many books were written and then forgotten, never recopied after the author put in the labor of composing them in the first place. Still, these were important times, and would surely attract an important historian, one whose works would be reproduced often enough to last… somewhere.

The library at Alexandria was supposed to keep at least one copy of every work in Greek and Latin. It had been damaged in the fighting in Caesar’s day, but say it did what it was supposed to do. That would give the future scholar a chance to discover the name of Publius Quinctilius Varus—if he could find the scroll he needed among the thousands in the library… and if he could afford to go to Alexandria to do his research in the first place.

Immortality, then. But a shadowy immortality, rather like the one Homer gave the spirits of the dead in the Odyssey. Better than nothing, less than enough.

“Something wrong, your Excellency?” Eggius asked. “You look a little peaked, like.”

“No, no, no.” Varus denied it not only to the soldier but also to himself. “Just thinking about what Germany will be like when it’s been Roman for a couple of hundred years, that’s all.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d been thinking, but it came close enough to let him bring the lie out smoothly.

Lucius Eggius made a face. “It’ll still be the back woods, you ask me. The Gauls, now, the Gauls are picking things up pretty quick. But these gods-cursed Germans? They’re stubborn bastards, no two ways about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still mumbling to themselves in their own language, even after all that time.”

Struck by an odd thought, Varus asked, “Have you learned any of it?”

“Me?” Eggius laughed. “Just a tiny bit, sir, so I can talk a little with the German girls I bed. They like that, you know? You can tell ‘em what you want ‘em to do, and they can let you know what feels good to them.”