Harry Turtledove: Give Me Back My Legions!

He loped after the Pannonians, who were frankly fleeing now. The westering sun stretched his shadow out ahead of him. The other Germans followed. War made a grand game—when you were winning.

Quinctilius Varus stepped from the gangplank to the pier with a sigh of relief. He didn’t like traveling by ship, which didn’t mean he couldn’t do it at need. He’d got from Ostia—Rome’s port—to Massilia by sea faster than he could have by land. The rest of the journey, up to the legions’ base by the Rhine, would have to be by land.

He wished he could just close his eyes and appear there. For that matter, he wished he could close his eyes and have somebody else appear there. But he was the man Augustus wanted in that spot, the man Augustus wanted doing that job. It was an honor. All of his friends said so. They all seemed glad it was an honor he had and they didn’t. None of them had shown the slightest desire to accompany him to the frontier.

Neither had his wife. “If my great-uncle said you have to go to Germany, then you do,” Claudia Pulchra had said. “He didn’t say anything about my going, and I don’t intend to.” She’d made him very happy in bed till his sailing time came round. He hoped she wasn’t making someone else very happy in bed right now—or, if she was, he hoped she was discreet about it. If Augustus could send his own daughter to an island for being too open, too shameless, with her adulteries, he wouldn’t think twice about banishing a grand-niece.

No matter what Claudia Pulchra was doing, Varus had to make the best of things here. He looked at Massilia from the pier, and found himself pleasantly surprised. “Not too bad,” he said.

“Not too good, either,” Aristocles said darkly. The pedisequus liked sailing even less than Varus did—his stomach rebelled on the water. He didn’t seem to realize he was on dry land again at last.

But Varus meant what he’d said. Massilia wasn’t Rome—no other place came close, not even Alexandria—or Antioch or Athens. But it was a perfectly respectable provincial town. Greeks had settled the southern coast of Gaul somewhere not long after Rome was founded. And Gallia Narbonensis had been a Roman province much longer than the wilder lands farther north. True, Caesar’s soldiers had besieged and sacked Massilia a lifetime ago, when it made the mistake of backing Pompey. It had recovered since, though, and was prosperous again. The temple to Apollo near the center of town was particularly fine, dominating the view from the harbor.

“Who will you be, sir?” a dockside lounger asked Varus in Greek-accented Latin. “I can tell you’re somebody, and no mistake.”

“I am Publius Quinctilius Varus, the new governor of Germany, on my way from Rome to take my post there,” Varus answered grandly. He nodded to Aristocles, who flipped the lounger a coin. “Will you be good enough to let the local leaders know I have arrived?”

The man popped the coin into his mouth. Most people carried small change between their cheek and jaw. Varus had himself in his younger days. Aristocles handled mundanities like money now. “I sure will, your honor,” the Massiliote said, and hurried away.

If he took the silver and disappeared… Well, what could Varus do about it? Nothing much. But the fellow proved as good as his word.

Before long, both of the town’s duumvirs —its paired executives, as consuls were the paired executives in Rome as a whole—hurried to the harbor to greet their distinguished visitor. By their Latin, they were Italians, not Greeks. One was tall and lean, the other short and stocky. Varus forgot their names as soon as he heard them. The tall one sold olive oil all over Gaul; the stocky one sold wine—or maybe it was the other way around.

Each duumvir invited him to a feast that evening. By the way they glared at each other, the one whose house he didn’t choose would hate him forever after. So he said, “I’ll stay a couple of days before going north. Why don’t I have my slave toss a coin to see which of you I visit first?”

As he’d hoped, that satisfied them both. “You know how to grease things, don’t you, your Excellency?” said the tall one—yes, Quinctilius Varus thought he was the one who sold oil.

“I try,” Varus answered.

“Can you grease things up in Germany?” the squat one asked, which confused Varus all over again.

“I intend to try,” he said. “Can you gentlemen tell me what it’s like up by the Rhine?”

Almost in unison, they shook their heads. They were Italians, sure enough; a Greek would have dipped his to show he meant no. The tall one said, “You wouldn’t catch me up there—not unless Augustus ordered me there, I mean.” He made a quick recovery. Then he continued, “I’d rather stay here. The weather’s better—not so chilly, not so damp. And there aren’t any savages around here.”

“My job is to turn them into provincials,” Varus said.

“Good fortune go with you,” the two duumvirs said together. It wasn’t Good luck and you’ll need it, you poor, sorry son of a whore, but it might as well have been.

“The Germans do buy wine,” the stocky one added. “Not much of a market there for oil, I’m afraid. They use butter instead.” He made a face to show what he thought of that. Since Varus thought the same thing, he made a face, too. If butter didn’t mark a true barbarian, what did?

“And they drink beer,” the tall one said, which answered that question. He went on, “They like wine better, though, when they can get hold of it.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Varus said. Both duumvirs nodded.

“Maybe you can teach them to like olive oil, too,” the short one said. “The Gauls use more of it than they did before Caesar conquered them.”

“If I can pacify the Germans, they’re welcome to keep eating butter, as far as I’m concerned,” Varus exclaimed.

“I can see that,” the stocky duumvir said judiciously. “Maybe you don’t have the biggest load on your shoulders this side of Atlas holding up the heavens, but not far from it, eh?”

Varus thought the same thing, though Augustus didn’t seem to. He couldn’t tell these fellows how he felt, or it might get back to the ruler of the Roman world. Things had an unfortunate way of doing that. He wanted Augustus to go on having confidence in him, which meant he had to act like a man who had confidence in Augustus. He said, “By all the reports that have come down to Rome, there’s been real progress the past few years. I’ve got to put the stopper in the jug and seal it with pitch, that’s all.”

The duumvirs glanced at each other for a moment. Varus had the feeling they didn’t like each other much, but they thought the same way. “Good fortune go with you,” they chorused again, and he was sure it meant the same thing this time as it had before.

Vultures and ravens and carrion crows spiraled down from the sky. The legions and auxiliaries had spread out a feast for the scavengers here near Poetovio. But the birds—and the little foxes that peered out from the edge of the oak woods not far away—couldn’t fill their bellies quite yet. Romans and German auxiliaries still strode about the battlefield, plundering corpses and making sure all the Pannonians sprawled there were corpses.

Not far from Arminius, another German auxiliary drove his spear into a feebly writhing man’s throat. When the man quit wiggling, the German bent and took his helmet. It was a fine piece of ironmongery, far better than the cheap bronze helms the Romans issued to auxiliaries.

The other German set the helm on his own head. Catching Arminius’ eye, he grinned. “Fits like it was made for me,” he said.