Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

“Come ahead and try,” the centurion repeated calmly, and stepped away.

Arminius bellowed orders. The Germans shot flight after flight of arrows at Aliso. Then, roaring like angry bears to fire their spirits, they rushed toward the fort with scores of scaling ladders. If rage and ferocity could overcome skill and a strong position, Arminius’ followers would do it.

But they couldn’t. The Romans dropped stones on the Germans who threw bundles of brush into the ditch around the palisade. They shot at them through holes drilled into the floor of their walkway. With hardly any risk to themselves, they used forked branches to reach out and overturn scaling ladders that did get placed against the walls. They poured boiling water and sizzling oil on the Germans swarming up the ladders.

In spite of everything, a few Germans did make it to the top of the palisade—but only a few. They didn’t last long up there. In a fight like that, the armored, disciplined, and desperate Romans had every advantage.

Cradling a horribly burned arm, a German who’d fallen off a ladder groaned, “They fight dirty.”

And so they did. Arminius acutely felt his folk’s ignorance of siege-craft. When he served with the legions in Pannonia, he’d seen the variety of engines and stratagems the Romans could roll out against a strongpoint that presumed to resist them. But having seen such things didn’t mean he could duplicate them. He didn’t know how to make the catapults that flung darts or thirty-pound stones farther than a man could shoot an arrow. Nor were Germans miners. He couldn’t order them to tunnel under Aliso and make the palisade fall over.

Even if he could have given that order, he wouldn’t have. He knew too well he couldn’t hold his army together long enough to let mining work. They would run out of food from the surrounding countryside pretty soon. One more trick of Roman siegecraft, he realized now when it was too late, was the stream of wagons that kept besiegers fed. Roman armies didn’t come down sick as often as those of the Germans, either. He couldn’t make his own men keep their camp clean and orderly, and he couldn’t stop them from dumping waste upstream from where they drew drinking water. They would have laughed at him had he tried.

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to stay outside of Aliso long, he kept trying to break in, hurling his warriors at the palisade again and again. Maybe luck would be with them, as it had been before. Maybe the Romans would despair. If they didn’t fight back with all their might, the German tide would surely lap over them and wash them away.

No matter how Arminius hoped either or both of those things would happen, neither did. The legionaries inside Aliso might have been some of the last Romans left alive on this side of the Rhine, but they fought as if they still thought they would turn Germany into a peaceful province any day now.

After a week of fruitless assaults, Sigimerus took Arminius aside and said, “This isn’t working, son. If we’re going to take Gaul away from the Empire, we can’t waste any more time hanging around here.”

“We can’t leave these legionaries in our rear, either,” Arminius answered. “One more try. They can’t hold us out forever.”

Maybe the Romans couldn’t. But they could hold the Germans out during that last assault. And, as Arminius had feared, a flux of the bowels and a coughing sickness broke out among his men. They started getting hungry, too. And word came that the Romans were rushing soldiers to the Rhine from all over Gaul.

Men began streaming away from Aliso and heading for their homes. Arminius cursed and wept and pleaded, all to no avail. The Germans had one great deed in them, but not two. Watching his army break up, he gloomily wondered if the same held true for him.

Late summer in Rome was the hottest, most unpleasant time of the year. Romans with even the faintest pretensions of importance got out of town. Some of them had seaside villas. Others went up into the mountains; on higher ground, the weather wasn’t nearly so oppressive. The truly rich enjoyed estates on one or another of the little islands that dotted the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Augustus had seaside villas. He had mountain hideaways. He had island estates. He had no pretensions of importance. He had no need for pretensions, and they would have seemed wantonly ostentatious on him. He was important, and he knew it. And so did everyone else in the Roman Empire.

Without pretensions, he stayed in Rome for the summer. If he went to one of his retreats, couriers would have to find out which one he’d chosen and then go there themselves. Things might get delayed for days. The Roman Empire ran slowly enough as it was. Making it run slower than it had to might turn indignation to rebellion, or might cost the chance to nip and invasion or a famine in the bud. Going out to a summer place might slow down good news: just a few days before, word came in that Tiberius had finally quelled the Pannonian uprising.

“The Palatine Hill is not so bad,” the ruler of the Roman world said to whoever would listen—and, when you were ruler of the Roman world, everyone listened to you. “We’re up almost as high as we would be in the Apennines.”

His countless servants and slaves listened, yes. And, behind his back, they rolled their eyes and spiraled their forefingers next to their ears. They knew bloody well it was hotter and nastier in Rome than it would have been at any of the many summer refuges Augustus could have chosen. If he wanted to put up with sweat and with city stinks wafted on the breeze, that was his business. If he wanted them to put up with those things, too… that was also his business, and all they could do about it was grouse and fume when he wasn’t watching or listening.

He liked to nap in the afternoon—no wonder, not when he was as old as he was. It gave his servants and his bodyguards (some Romans, others wandering Germans chosen for their size and ferocity) more of a chance to complain. And, as luck would have it, he was asleep when the courier from the north rode up on a horse he’d come as close to killing as made no difference.

Seeing the sorry state of the animal, one of Augustus’ grooms clucked reproachfully. Another said, “You could have come slower, friend, for he’s sound asleep right now. He’ll be up and about in a couple of hours.”

“Wake him,” the courier said in a flat, hard voice.

“Wha-at?” both grooms chorused, as if not believing their ears. One of them added, “He’d skin us if we did.”

“He’ll skin you if you don’t,” the courier said. “The news I bring is that important.”

“What is it, then?” asked the groom who’d talked of skinning.

The courier looked through him. “It is for Augustus—that’s what it is. He’ll skin you if anyone hears it before him, too.”

“Well, go on in,” that same groom said. “Not for us to say who sees Augustus and who doesn’t,” It’s not my job: the underling’s escape hatch since the beginning of time.

In went the courier. He had several brief but heated exchanges with Augustus’ slaves. He finally unbent enough to tell the senior servitors he brought news from Germany. When they asked him what the news was, he looked through them, too. They muttered among themselves, in Greek and Aramaic and perhaps other languages that weren’t Latin. By the way they eyed the courier, they loved him not at all. He was making them decide things in the absence of their master. If Augustus didn’t think they should have let him be disturbed…

But, in the end, the courier’s stubbornness carried the day. “Stay here,” one of the senior servitors told the fellow, sending him a baleful stare that he ignored. “We will rouse Augustus and tell him you are here with your important news. What he does after that is up to him, of course.”