Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

He advanced, his little bodyguard spread out behind him and on both flanks. He kept both hands away from his weapons and displayed them palm out to show they were empty.

A German stabbed the butt of his spear into the ground and came forward. The middle-aged man also showed off his empty hands. He stopped just out of javelin range and asked, “What are you doing here?” in halting but clear Latin.

Won’t need the interpreters, Eggius thought. Good. “We are passing through our province,” he answered. “Will you give us food and beer?” Asking for wine around here was hopeless.

“Your province?” the German said bleakly, and then, more bleakly still, “What befalls us if we feed you not?”

“Well, you can always find out,” Eggius said with his sweetest smile.

The German muttered something his mustache muffled. One of the Romans who followed the local language stirred. Eggius pretended not to see him. He didn’t care whether the locals loved him, only whether they obeyed. “We will give you,” the German said, and then some more things Eggius affected not to notice. The Roman smiled again. Why not? He’d won.

Arminius was used to sleeping in a tent surrounded by other tents full of soldiers loyal to Rome. His father wasn’t. Sigimerus wasn’t used to eating Roman rations, either. They seemed to agree with him; his breeches were tighter than they had been when he came to Mindenum.

He seemed unhappy even so. He did have the sense not to talk about it inside the encampment. By the nature of things, Mindenum had no privacy. But Arminius could see something was wrong. He and Sigimerus went for a walk outside the fortified perimeter.

“Tell me what it is, Father, before you burst like a sealed stewpot forgotten in the hot coals,” Arminius said.

Sigimerus turned a look of pure hatred on Mindenum. Fortunately, they were too far away for any sentries to make out his expression. “We are that gods-cursed Roman’s hounds!” he said. “His hounds, I tell you! We eat from his hand, we sleep in his kennel, we lick his face and roll over to show him our bellies. Faugh!” He spat in the grass.

“He thinks we’re his hounds,” Arminius answered. “That’s what he needs to think. If he thinks we’re anything else, he’ll close his hand on us instead of patting us with it.”

“I want honest war,” Sigimerus said. “Better—a hundred times better—than this game of pretending and lying.”

“Better if we win, worse if we lose,” Arminius said. “Right now, I think we would lose. Not enough of us are ready to fight the Romans. Too many would stand aside and wait to see what happened. And too many traitors to our folk follow Segestes’ path.” Flavus’ path, too, but Arminius didn’t name his own brother. “They’re the true hounds, the ones who want to see Varus as governor here and Augustus as king.”

Kings among the German tribes reigned by virtue of their blood. Their real power, though, depended on their prowess and their wisdom. If they couldn’t get people to follow them, they heard boos and catcalls in the tribal assembly. If they did win approval, the tribe’s menfolk clashed their spears together—the sweetest sound a German leader could hear.

To Arminius, Augustus was a German king writ large. He had to be fierce and clever, for men did his bidding even when far out of his sight. That showed he enjoyed both fear and respect. Arminius wished he knew Augustus’ tricks—he would have liked to use them himself. If all the Germans followed him the way the Romans followed Augustus… well, who could say what wonders he might work?

Right now, he had trouble getting even his father to follow him. Sigimerus said, “I think we should just kill Varus, then get away if we can. And if not, we will have given our folk a mark to aim at.”

Among the Germans, if a man died all his designs died with him. Arminius had needed a while to realize the Romans were different. That was one more part of what made them such a menace. “If we kill Varus, Vala Numonius steps into his place till Augustus sends some new governor up from Italy,” Arminius said. “And everything they do, they will do as if Varus still lived—except they will also strike at our folk to avenge his death.”

“That will do,” Sigimerus said. “If they come out of their encampment, we have the chance to beat them.”

“But can we? In the fights that have gone on as long as I’ve been alive, they win at least as often as we do,” Arminius replied. “And when they lose, what do they do? They fall back and get ready to fight some more. We don’t need to beat them, Father. We need to crush them.” He bent down, picked up a clod of dirt, and closed his fist on it. Only dust fell when he opened his hand again.

“Yes. That is what we need,” his father agreed. “How do we get it? You said it yourself—the Romans don’t leave themselves open to such disasters.”

“We have to trick them. That must be how to beat them. It’s the only way I can see,” Arminius said. “If they don’t know something dreadful is about to befall them until it does, they’re ours!”

“If,” Sigimerus said heavily.

“Aren’t we tricking Varus now? You complain we are his hounds, but we both know that isn’t so,” Arminius said. “But does Varus know? If he knew, he would have killed us two weeks ago. Since he thinks he has hounds, he feeds us and houses us.”

“Tricking one man is easy. Tricking an army’s worth of men must be harder, or we would have done it long since,” his father said.

Arminius grunted—his father had a point. Even so… “If the man we trick commands an army—and Varus does…”

“If this Augustus is such a mighty king, he should have found a better war leader than that fellow,” Sigimerus said.

Arminius nodded, for the same thought had occurred to him. “Thank the gods the Roman called Tiberius commands the army in Pannonia,” he said. “That is a man to beware of. If he were here, we could not play these games with him.”

“Let him stay far away, then.” Sigimerus hesitated. “Or maybe not. Some of the things Varus does would rouse our folk against him even if the two of us were never born. Not just taxes, but taxes in coin this year, he says. How many of us can pay in silver?”

“Not many. I know that, even if Varus doesn’t,” Arminius answered.

“I should hope so. And what is this talk about taking our spears away?” His father spat again. “How can a man be a man without a weapon?”

“Many Romans who are not soldiers in the legions don’t carry anything more than an eating knife,” Arminius said. Sigimerus snorted his disbelief. Arminius set a hand over his heart. “It’s true, Father—I swear it.”

“Well, what do they do when they quarrel?” Sigimerus demanded. “With no spears or swords, what can they do?”

“They have lawyers instead,” Arminius said. His father snorted again, this time in fine contempt. Arminius went on, “I scoffed when I first heard it, too. But a Roman told me a spear can only kill you once, where a lawyer can make you wish you were dead for months at a time.”

“Then you kill the lawyer.” Sigimerus was relentlessly practical—or thought he was, anyhow.

Arminius shook his head. “If you do that, Augustus and his servants go to law against you. The Romans have fewer blood feuds than we do, but the king’s justice reaches further with them.”

“Faugh!” Sigimerus repeated contemptuously. “They’re a pretty poor sort of man, if they have to have the king do what they should do themselves.”

“It could be so.” Arminius respected his father too much to quarrel openly with him. “Yes, it could indeed. But I still wish they were a poorer sort of man yet, for then they wouldn’t trouble us at all.”