Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

“Tolerable, I suppose.” Truth to tell, Aristocles didn’t approve of anything north of the Alps. “At least they mostly use olive oil, not butter.” He wrinkled his nose. “More than you can say about the Germans.”

“The olive won’t grow there,” Varus said. “For that matter, it won’t grow here, either, though it will farther south in Gaul. But our merchants take the oil all over the province. They can do the same in Germany. They will, once we get the place a little more settled.”

“That day can’t come soon enough.” Aristocles’ long nose twitched again. “Butter on bread is bad enough, even when it’s fresh. But the unending stink of the stuff in the lamps… It sticks to your hair, it sticks to your skin, and you can’t get away from it. And every German reeks of it.”

“Not every German.” Varus shook his head. His pedisequus would have tossed his. Varus was long used to that difference between Romans and Greeks. He continued, “Arminius and his father smell the same way we do.”

“They do when they’re scrounging our food and aping our ways,” Aristocles sniffed. “If you called on them in their village now, they’d be as rancid as all the other German savages.”

“Enough!” Varus snapped so he wouldn’t have to think about that.

“Arminius is a fine young man. We already have Roman Senators from Spain. Before too long, we’ll probably have some from Gaul. And, if Arminius lives long enough, he may be the first man of German blood to don the toga edged with purple. If he is, I don’t expect any of the other Conscript Fathers to complain about how he smells.”

“They’re polite. Arminius…” It was chilly in Varus’ residence despite fires and braziers, but that had nothing to do with Aristocles’ shiver. “He looks at me like a fox eyeing a pullet—and his father is even worse.”

“Sigimerus is a formidable man,” Varus said. Arminius’ father reminded him of a tough old wolf, too. “But if we tame the younger man, he will tame the elder for us.”

“Yes, sir. If.” A slave wasn’t supposed to take the last word when he argued with his master. Aristocles walked away anyhow, leaving Varus with his mouth hanging open.

The Roman said something that would have made Aristophanes blush. But he said it quietly, to himself. And then he started to laugh. He’d dealt with slaves his whole life. Every once in a while, you had to remember they were people, not just property with legs.

The governor of Germany summoned his leading officers to plan the next campaigning season’s moves inside the province the Romans didn’t quite rule. “I want to see more of Germany than Mindenum and the miserable route we use to reach it,” he declared.

“It’s not so miserable, sir,” Lucius Eggius said. “We can use boats most of the way. They’re faster than marching, and they’re safer, too.”

“Foot soldiers can use boats,” Vala Numonius said. “Not so easy for cavalry, by the gods! There are never enough boats for the horses -”

“Or for the mules and donkeys and oxen,” a quartermaster broke in.

“That’s right.” Numonius nodded. “We slogged back through the mud every cubit of the way. If the savages came screaming out of the woods, we wouldn’t have had a smooth time of it, either.”

“I see. I understand.” Eggius nodded, too. Quinctilius Varus thought everything would go smoothly after that. But Eggius aimed a sarcastic dart at the cavalry commander: “You enjoy marching through mud so much, you want to take the long way back from Mindenum and go through even more of it.”

Vala Numonius turned red. “No, curse it! I want a route that doesn’t go through mud.”

“Good luck, friend. It’s Germany,” Eggius said. “You’ve got swamps, and you’ve got woods. Sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, you’ve got swamps in woods. That’s what the country is.”

That certainly fit what Varus had seen. Even so, he said, “Arminius tells me that if we swing north of the low hills north of the Lupia, the land is drier. He says we can march up around there and keep our feet dry-almost the whole way.”

If a portrait painter had wanted to sketch insubordination, he could have used Lucius Eggius as a model. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I’d sooner not trust a German if I don’t have to,” Eggius said.

Whenever a man said Meaning no disrespect, he meant disrespect. Varus had learned that rule when he hardly needed to scrape down from his cheeks. It had served him well ever since, and he recalled no exceptions to it. “I think Arminius is reliable,” he said now. “Never mind his past service to Rome. Would he have spent so much time at Mindenum last summer if he meant us ill? He prefers us to his own savage kind.”

“Will you say his father likes us better, too, sir?” Lucius Eggius asked. “The old bastard spent as much time at Mindenum as Arminius did.”

Varus opened his mouth, then closed it again. He might want to say that, but no one who’d ever set eyes on Sigimerus would claim he was Romanized, even if his son was. “He came along with Arminius to see what Roman ways are like. He didn’t seem to mind sleeping soft or drinking wine.” Having said so much, Varus knew he’d gone as far as he could.

Eggius’ chuckle had a wry edge. “Your Excellency, I like sleeping soft and drinking wine, too. That doesn’t tell me much about what this barbarian’d do to me if he ever got the chance.”

“The Germans seem to pay more attention to Arminius than they do to Sigimerus, and Arminius is in our company any way you care to use the phrase,” Varus insisted.

Another officer—a junior man, one whose name Varus was always forgetting—said, “What about those things Segestes keeps telling us? If even a quarter of that’s true, Arminius isn’t such a big friend of Rome’s as he makes himself out to be.”

Several other soldiers nodded. Varus fought to hide his exasperation: a losing battle. “Oh, by the gods, mm, Caelius!” he said. There—he’d remembered. “You might as well be Jews and Egyptians and Cappadocians back at Rome, caring more for gossip than you do for truth.”

Vala Numonius nodded. Most of the other legionaries eyed Varus in stony silence. They didn’t like him calling them a bunch of Jews. He groaned silently. Now he’d have to waste Mars only knew how much time jollying them along till they weren’t angry at him anymore. They were even more foolish than Jews; they reminded him of spoiled children. He was tempted to tell them so, but that would only make things worse.

It began to pour outside. Vetera might have been built of wood rather than canvas, but the place wasn’t well built of wood. Every other roof leaked, including this one. Water started plinking into two pots set out under the leaks. The sound would have annoyed Varus most of the time: it would have reminded him how far away he was from places where they did things properly. Now, though, it came as a welcome distraction. Pointing towards one of the pots, he said, “Well, gentlemen, it’s still winter. We don’t have to make up our minds right now.”

That seemed to satisfy the soldiers, at least the ones with sense enough not to show too much. Some of them—the more naive ones—would believe him when he said nothing was decided yet. The rest would see that antagonizing Augustus’ kinsman by marriage wasn’t the smartest thing they could do.

“For now, let’s discuss something else,” Quinctilius Varus went on. The officers looked relieved. “We took far more taxes in silver last fall than we did the year before, and correspondingly less in kind,” he said. “I want that trend to continue next fall. Before many more years go by, I expect Germany to use as much money and to take money as much for granted as any other Roman province… Yes, Eggius?”