Harry Turtledove: Give Me Back My Legions!

Several officers drew away from him, as if he carried something catching. And so he did: tactlessness could kill off even a promising career. Varus almost dismissed him from the council. At the last instant, though, he held back, remembering how Augustus had voiced some of the same worries.

“Anyone can do an easy job,” Varus said. “You need uncommon men to handle a harder one. Augustus has decided that we are the men he needs for this particular job. To my way of thinking, that’s a compliment to every one of us and to every single soldier in Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX. Will anyone tell me I’m wrong there?”

He waited. No one said a word, not even the obstinate Lucius Eggius. Varus had expected nothing different. A bold man could quarrel with a provincial governor. No one had quarreled with Augustus in any serious way for more than thirty years. If you quarreled with Augustus, you lost. Rome had learned that lesson well.

“Since Augustus gave us this job, we’ll find a way to do it,” Varus continued. Nobody disagreed with that, either.

The track wound through the woods. Arminius’ boots squelched in the mud. He slipped and almost fell. He’d traded his Roman caligae —his hobnailed marching sandals—to a farmer for the boots and a meal and a bed. The caligae didn’t fit the farmer very well, but the iron hobnails made them valuable.

Even if Arminius got less traction on bad ground, he preferred his native footgear. He preferred the soft dirt track to a paved Roman highway, too. March on stone from sunup to sundown and your legs felt like stone themselves when you finally stopped for the night.

Arminius also preferred the way the track followed the contours of the land. Roman roads ran straight as stretched strings. If the straight route was bad, the Romans built it up with stones or dug away hillsides. They were as arrogant in their engineering as they were everywhere else.

He tried to explain that to Chariomerus. The other German didn’t get it. “What’s wrong with taking the short way if you can?” he asked.

“How can the gods love anyone who tears up the landscape the way the Romans do?” Arminius returned.

He got only a stare and a shrug from his traveling companion, who said, “If the gods don’t love the Romans, how come they’re so stinking strong?”

That question was good enough to keep Arminius walking in silence for some little while. At last, he said, “To give us foes worth fighting. That must be it. If our enemies were weaklings, what kind of glory would we win by beating them? Not much. They have to be strong, or they wouldn’t make proper enemies.”

Chariomerus grunted. “But what happens if they’re too strong?” he asked. “What happens if they beat us?”

“Then we turn into slaves,” Arminius answered. “So do our mothers and our sisters and our daughters and our sweethearts.”

That made Chariomerus shudder. Arminius had known it would. His folk had a greater horror of slavery for its women than for its men. German minstrels sang of battles that had turned when the women on the side that was losing bared their breasts and warned their men they were about to be enslaved, inspiring the warriors to fight with desperate ferocity. A tribe that could claim hostages from among its neighbors’ noblewomen held those neighbors in a grip stronger than iron.

“We mustn’t lose, then,” Chariomerus said.

“And we won’t.” But Arminius sounded more confident than he felt. Roman influence seemed stronger in Germany than it had when he went off to learn how the legions fought. It was much stronger than it had been when he was a boy. People passed coins—Roman coins—back and forth without even thinking about what they were doing. In his younger days, barter had been king of all. He’d gotten better wine from some of the nobles who had him as a guest than he had as a Roman auxiliary. When people found out he’d fought for the Romans, they wanted to try out bits of Latin on him. If those weren’t the early marks of slavery, what would be?

Dogs barked up ahead. “There’s your father’s steading,” Chariomerus said.

“It’s been a long road,” Arminius replied. “My father’s steading—at last. Here I will stay till I can see my way to avenging the insult Segestes has given me.”

When he and Chariomerus came out into the open, four or five dogs rushed toward them. The big, rough-coated, wolfish beasts growled and snarled and bared their formidable fangs. The Romans had dogs like that.

What herdsman or farmer would want any other kind? But the Romans also had small, fluffy, mild-mannered dogs to keep women and children company. They turned good working dogs into toys. They would do the same with—to—Arminius’ folk if they got the chance.

He shouted at the dogs. He didn’t know if that would prove enough—he’d been away a long time. His hand fell to the hilt of his sword. If they kept coming, he would do what he had to do to keep them from biting him. Chariomerus, perhaps less sure of the animals’ temper, drew his blade and widened his stance so he was ready to strike.

But shouting sufficed. The dogs skidded to a stop. A couple of them—beasts Arminius recognized—cocked their heads to one side. He had to laugh at their expressions: they looked like men trying to remember something. Did they know his voice? His scent?

Something a Roman had told him floated up into his thoughts. There was a Greek poem that had an old dog remembering its master in it. He came home alter years and years away adventuring, and the dog died after it realized who he was.

Arminius didn’t know much about the Greeks. He gathered that the Romans thought them very clever. Since Germans thought the same about Romans, that made these Greeks clever indeed… didn’t it? If they were so clever, why didn’t they run things instead of the Romans?

“Hail, Lance. Hail, Speedy,” he said gravely, and scratched the dogs he knew behind the ears. They let him do it, where they would have snapped at a stranger. The other dogs—young ones that had grown up or been born after he went away—eyed Speedy and Lance as if wondering why they would betray a trust like that.

Some Germans were friendly to the Romans. Arminius’ brother was one. And Segestes was another. He always had been. He thought Germany stood to gain more than it lost by coming under the Roman eagle. Arminius had thought he was wrong before. Now the younger man despised any opinion of Segestes’ just because his betrayed fiancée’s father held it.

The commotion from the dogs brought a gray-haired man carrying an axe out to see what caused it. A gray-haired man… “Father!” Arminius shouted, and ran to him.

“Arminius!” His father’s name was Sigimerus. He definitely hadn’t been so gray when Arminius went off to learn what he could of Roman fighting. He hadn’t been so stooped, either. He wasn’t an old man, not yet, but the years had a grip on him.

As they embraced, Arminius forgot all about that. “It’s good to see you. It’s good to be home,” he said, and kissed Sigimerus on both cheeks and then on the mouth.

“How is Flavus?” his father asked.

Arminius’ mouth tightened. “The last I heard, he was hale,” he said carefully. “That was… let me think… two months ago, or maybe a little more.”

“The Romans are fools not to put two brothers in the same band, where you could spur each other on,” Sigimerus said.

“The Romans are fools,” Arminius agreed. But he found he couldn’t leave it there: “They don’t care so much about men spurring each other on. They want men who do as they’re told.” He grimaced again. “Flavus has always been good at that.”

His father coughed. “Sometimes obeying is good. I walloped you a lot more than I hit your brother.”