Harry Turtledove - Give Me Back My Legions!

“Harder when the babe is your grandson. I beg you, Segestes—don’t hate me for being the one who brought you the news,” Alcus said. “I know you and Arminius… are at odds. If I had not come, you might not have heard for some time.”

“True. I might not have.” Segestes wondered if that wouldn’t have been for the best. Reluctantly, he shook his head. The news would have come sooner or later. And, sooner or later, grief would have speared him. Sooner wasn’t better, but it also wasn’t really worse. “I do not hate you, Alcus. You did what you thought best, and who is to say you did not have the right of it?”

“Thank you, lord. That is well said.”

“And I will show you good guesting.” Segestes realized he had to do that if he were not to be reckoned liar and niggard. “Eat as you will of my bread and meat. Drink as you will of my beer, and of my wine from beyond the Rhine. Sleep soft tonight before you fare forth to your farm.”

Alcus bowed. “You are gracious. You are kind.”

“Yes. I am,” Segestes said bleakly. “And much good any of that has done me.”

Rain pattered down on Rome. It was winter: the proper season for rain, as any man who lived round the Mediterranean would have agreed. Augustus was one of those men, and faced a problem common to a lot of them—his roof leaked. A drip near the entrance to his great house plinked into a bowl.

He gave the bowl a jaundiced stare. New leaks started every winter. The men who laid roof tiles always promised that everything would be perfect this time. They always lied, too. Augustus shook his head. In the scale of human calamities, there were plenty worse. His mouth tightened. He knew too much about that.

He opened the door and looked out. The guards standing outside stiffened to attention. “As you were, boys,” Augustus said, and they relaxed.

“What can we do for you, sir?” one of them asked.

“Not a thing. I’m only looking at the weather.”

“All right, sir. However you please.” The guardsman grinned at Augustus. He had a strong-nosed face with cheekbones that made sharp planes below his eyes. He spoke Latin like the native of Italy he was. All his comrades came from Italy, too.

In the frightening, frightened days after news of Varus’ disaster came to Rome, Augustus had eased all the Germans—and, for good measure, all the Gauls—out of his personal guard. Most of them, maybe all of them, remained loyal to him, but he dared not take the chance that they would do something to help Arminius. He didn’t cashier them. He did send them out of Rome. Quite a few of them were garrisoning Mediterranean islands these days.

Against whom were they garrisoning those islands? Pirates? Drunken fishermen? Skrawking sea gulls? Augustus had no idea. But doing things that way had preserved the honor of the Germans and Gauls. If he ever needed them again, he could use them.

He’d begun repairing the mutilated Roman army, too. The legions he’d raised in the aftermath of the disaster were no match for the ones Arminius had destroyed. He knew that. They held far too many older men, far too many squinting craftsmen and chubby shopkeepers. He’d had to draft men to fill out their ranks at all, which caused no end of grumbling.

But he’d done it, and he wasn’t about to look back and tell himself he shouldn’t have. Yes, those raw new legions would get hacked to bloody bits if they ever faced rampaging Germans in the field. Augustus knew that. So did the officers under whom the reluctant soldiers served.

All the same, the new men could fill up forts. They could protect backwaters that needed only a show of force to stay quiet. And, in doing things like that, they could free up better troops to deal with real trouble.

Augustus sighed. “Cheer up, sir,” one of the guards, said. “The rain’ll make the grain grow.” He was a stubby little fellow, and seemed all the more so when Augustus remembered the hulking blonds who’d protected him before. If you couldn’t trust your bodyguards, though, what were they worth to you? Not even a lead slug.

“I know, Sextus. I know,” Augustus answered. If Sextus wanted to think the weather was what was wrong, he could. Augustus only wished he could think the same thing himself.

Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions! How many times had he howled that in his torment? More than he cared to remember. He had no guarantee he wouldn’t start howling it again, either, if the black mood seized him again.

He’d gone on so long and done so well, maybe he’d started believing he couldn’t make mistakes any more. If so, he’d got a reminder of his own humanity, his own fallibility, far blunter and more brutal than the stinking turds in his chamber pot.

Forty years. That was how long he’d ruled the Roman world, the Mediterranean world. In all that time, he hadn’t had to pull back his horns very often. Oh, death had forced him to change his mind more than once about his successor. Irony there: he’d been sickly in his younger years—he was often sickly even now—but he’d outlived almost everyone to whom he’d thought to entrust the Empire after he was gone. Still, no mortal could outwit or outreach death.

Since he’d never had a son of his own body, he supposed Tiberius, his wife’s son from an earlier marriage, would have to do. Tiberius made a fine soldier. He’d proved that in Pannonia. If he hadn’t been busy settling that revolt, he might have proved it in Germany instead.

Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions! Again, die howl of torment rose unbidden in Augustus’ mind, though he managed not to cry out loud. Those legions were gone, gone forever.

Tiberius made a good soldier, yes. But did he have what it took to continue the delicate charade Augustus had carried on with the Roman Senate all these years? Augustus held all the power in the Empire worth holding, but he’d artfully pretended to be no more than a magistrate of the Republic. That was likely one reason, and not the smallest one, he’d escaped assassination for so long. People had feared his great-uncle would make himself into a king—and so Julius Caesar died under the knives of men who’d been his friends. Augustus cared little for the show of power. The reality sufficed.

He wasn’t so sure about Tiberius. Tiberius didn’t suffer fools gladly. If the Conscript Fathers got pushy… Tiberius would do whatever he had to do to remind them where power really lay. They wouldn’t like that. Tiberius wouldn’t care. Different parts of the Roman government shouldn’t squabble with one another.

Augustus had to hope they wouldn’t. He saw no one but Tiberius to whom he could hand over the reins. Death had cut down his other choices. When he was gone, all this would be his stepson’s worry.

And so would Germany. Bringing it into the Empire as Julius Caesar had brought in Gaul would have been Augustus’ greatest legacy to his successor. It would have been, but it wouldn’t be now. Augustus knew he would never—could never—mount another campaign to annex Germany. The Rhine and the Danube would remain the Empire’s frontiers.

Maybe, after enough time had passed, Tiberius would be able to avenge this defeat. Even as the thought formed, Augustus shook his head. Some wounds were just too large, too deep. Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!

Again, Augustus kept the shriek inside him. The first few weeks after the catastrophe, he couldn’t even manage that. All his servants flinched whenever he cried out. Varus would have flinched, too, were he not beyond any reproaches but the gods’.

Arminius, curse him, had managed what only death had done before: he’d made Augustus withdraw from a policy he’d set his mind to. If Germany was not to be Roman, it would stay… German. It would stay squalid, it would stay barbarous, it would stay independent. It would stay troublesome. Augustus could see that. He had to hope it wouldn’t become too troublesome too soon.