Текст книги "Give me back my Legions!"

Автор книги: Harry Norman Turtledove

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“This is the way it’s supposed to work!” said the auxiliary who’d wounded him, wiping blood from his blade on a grassy tussock.

“By the gods, it is,” Arminius agreed. “Let’s finish the rest of them. The looting should be good.”

“So it should. We don’t want to let those Roman greedyguts take more than their share, either, the way they like to do,” the other man said.

“I was thinking the same thing a little while ago,” Arminius replied. “Come on! We don’t want to let any of these cursed fools get away.”

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 toobad,” he said.

“Not too good, either,” Aristocles said darkly. The pedisequusliked 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 duumvirinvited 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 duumvirssaid 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 duumvirsnodded.

“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 duumvirsaid 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 duumvirsglanced 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.

II

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 werecorpses.

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.

“A god made it so,” Arminius said. “May you have better luck with it than the fellow who wore it before.”

Something glinted in the late-afternoon sunshine. A dead Pannonian wore a heavy gold ring in his left car. Stooping, Arminius pulled on the ring till it tore through the flesh of the earlobe. It hardly got any blood on it; the enemy warrior must have died early in the fight. Arminius weighed the bauble in the palm of his hand. It had to be worth a couple of aurei. He stuck it into a belt pouch.

Somebody had driven a spear clean through the dead man’s mail-shirt. Arminius nodded to himself. That stroke deserved respect. He had no doubt he could have matched it – in his early twenties, he was at the peak of his strength (and also, though he didn’t think of it that way, at the peak of his arrogance) – but not many men could have.

A moment later, he nodded again. The way the Pannonians had fought back against the Germans and Romans also deserved respect. The Romans were unlikely to give it. Arminius did. He’d seen, not for the first time, how the Pannonians had imitated Roman fighting methods till they could stand up against the toughest soldiers in the world.

“Do you think we could have fought this well, Chlodovegius?” he asked – he made a point of learning the names of the men he led.

Chlodovegius had taken off his new helmet and was admiring it. He looked up. “That many of us against so many Romans? We’d’ve licked ‘em.” He made as if to draw his long, straight sword for a bit of cut and thrust. He was a few years older than Arminius, but he didn’t lack for arrogance, either.

Arminius smiled. “Well, maybe we would have.” He didn’t feel like arguing. But he also didn’t believe Chlodovegius. One German had an excellent chance against one Roman. Ten Romans had the edge on ten Germans. A hundred Romans would massacre a hundred Germans.

They would in open country like this, anyhow. In the forests and swamps of Germany, ambushes and harassment came easier. The Romans could send troops through Germany. They’d been doing that since Arminius was a little boy. But they’d never been able to hold down the countryside . . . which didn’t mean they didn’t keep trying.

“What will we do if the Romans turn our country, our homeland, into one of their provinces?” Arminius wasn’t really asking Chlodovegius; he was thinking out loud.

But the other German heard him and, laughing, answered, “What are you worrying about? We’re already halfway to turning into Romans. If we serve out our terms in the auxiliaries, they’ll make us citizens.”

They’d already made Arminius a citizen: he came from a chieftain’s family. They’d even made him a member of the Equestrian Order, the social class one rank below the Senators who helped their chieftain, Augustus, rule Rome. While Arminius was tolerably fluent in Latin these days, he’d understood only a few words when he joined the auxiliaries a couple of years earlier.

He was a man with an itch to know. He always had been. He’d joined the auxiliaries to learn how the Romans did things. He’d also learned a lot, not all of it what he’d expected. Roman discipline looked different from the inside. In Germany, he’d always thought Roman soldiers were slaves because of the way they let their superiors order them around. No free German would have put up with that for even a moment.

When Germans went to war, though, they fought as individuals or as members of a little band. They went forward to show off their bravery to their kinsmen and friends. How else would you fight?

How else? The Romans had another way. A man in a legion, or in a troop of auxiliaries, was part of something bigger than himself. He still needed to be brave, but he also needed to remember he was only a part. If all the parts did what they were supposed to do – what their superiors told them to do – the legion or troop was very hard to beat.

They also kept more freedom than they seemed to from the outside. Arminius knew what he’d done in this latest clash with the Pannonians. So did the men around him. But he hadn’t done it to prove he was brave. He’d done it to help the larger unit.

The Pannonians fought the same way. They’d learned it from the Romans. Arminius wondered if his folk could, too. He hoped so. If they couldn’t, wouldn’t they go down the way the Gauls had, the way the Pannonians were now?

A wounded man nearby couldn’t hold in a groan. Arminius finished him off, then looked to see if he had anything worth taking. To the German’s annoyance, the Pannonian didn’t. Had Arminius known that ahead of time, he might have let the foeman lie there and suffer.

But no. Orders were to make sure the wounded died. And Arminius could see the reason for those orders. If legionaries and auxiliaries were parts of something larger than themselves, so were enemy warriors. The Romans didn’t just aim to kill individuals. They wanted to kill the very idea of nationhood among their foes.

Here,Arminius thought uneasily, and back home in Germany, too.

He dogged his men till they finished cleaning up the field and left it to the birds and foxes. Even that thought made him uncomfortable as he marched them back to the encampment they and the legionaries with them had made the night before. Am I anything but the Romans’ dog?he wondered.

Flavus, his older brother, wasa Roman dog. Flavus likedlife in the auxiliaries. He was fighting somewhere else in Pannonia, serving Augustus as best he could. Arminius didn’t know just where, and didn’t care to find out. He couldn’t decide whether Flavus frightened or infuriated him more.

He dismissed his brother from his mind with nothing but relief. Yes, back to the encampment. Only one thing ever changed about Roman fortified camps: the size, which depended on how many men they needed to hold. Otherwise, they were as much alike as two coins. Standardizing things was another idea the Romans had had that was new to the Germans. Arminius could see the advantages: if you always did this and that the same way, you just went ahead and didthem. You didn’t have to wonder whether to do this first or how to take care of that or if you should bother with something else. Again, the Romans made each man one stick in the wattle of a house, so to speak.

A Roman centurion – he showed his rank by the cross-crested helm he still wore – waved to Arminius as the German brought in his warriors. “Your men fought like wolves today,” the veteran called.

“My thanks. You Romans were fierce, too,” Arminius answered. That wasn’t quite the right word. Capablecame closer, but didn’t seem praise enough.

“Ai!”The centurion snapped his fingers, reminding himself of something. “There’s a fellow from your tribe in camp. He’s looking for you.”

“Thanks again. Did he say why?” Whatever news the man brought from the land of the Cherusci, Arminius feared it would be bad. Only bad news needed to travel fast. Good news could commonly wait. “Are my father and mother hale?”

“I don’t know. Sorry.” The Roman spread his hands. “I didn’t ask, and your friend doesn’t speak a whole lot of Latin anyhow.” He never imagined that he might learn the Germans’ language.

Well, this was a Roman province, so that wasn’t unreasonable. But if the Romans held Germany, wouldn’t Latin come to dominate there, too? Arminius pulled his mind back from such things to the business at hand. “Thank you for telling me. I find – I will find – him and see what the news is.”

“Hope it’s nothing too awful.” The centurion’s rough sympathy said he knew how these things usually went.

“Thanks,” Arminius said once more. He hurried off with his men to the northwest corner of the encampment, where then– always pitched their tents. In every Roman camp ever made, auxiliaries were quartered in the northwest and northeast corners. The Romans had done things that way for centuries. They were a tidy folk; everything had its place among them. And, once they found a way of doing things that worked, they stuck with it.

He found his man there – or rather, his man found him. “Arminius!” someone called.

“Hail, Chariomerus,” Arminius answered, recognizing him at once. He hurried up and clasped the other man’s hand. “Why have you come? Are Mother and Father all right?”

“As far as I know,” Chariomerus answered. He and Arminius weren’t close kin, though they’d grown up in the same little village. “They were when I set out, anyhow.”

“Well, that’s the biggest load off my mind,” Arminius said. “Come on with me and get some supper – you’ll be hungry after so long on the road.”

“You’re right about that, by the gods.” Chariomerus and Arminius got bowls of barley porridge and cups of wine from the cooks. Chariomerus wolfed his down. “I’m still hungry,” he said when it was gone. “I want some boiled meat, to let my stomach know it’s got something in there.” He drank. “Wine’s not bad, though.”

“No, it isn’t,” Arminius said. “The Romans think eating a lot of meat makes you slow. Maybe they’re even right – I don’t know. Going without doesn’t bother me the way it did: I know that. I’ve got used to doing things Roman-style.”

“I suppose you have to, but. . . .” Chariomerus let his voice trail away, then resumed: “Better you than me.”

“I’m not Flavus,” Arminius snapped. “I’m – “ He shook his head like a man bedeviled by gnats. There were times when he didn’t know what he was. “Give me your news. It’s not my parents, and I thank the gods for that. So what did bring you from home?”

Chariomerus drained the cup. He looked as if he wanted more wine, too, to help grease his tongue. At last, with a sigh, he said, “Well, it has to do with Segestes.”

Arminius grunted. Segestes was another chief among the Cherusci. He liked and trusted the Romans more than Arminius did. More to the point, he was also Arminius’ fiancée’s father. “What about him?” Arminius demanded. “Is hewell?”

“He was when I left,” Chariomerus said, as he had when talking about Arminius’ mother and father. The newcomer didn’t seem eager to go on.

After silence stretched, Arminius said, “If you keep me waiting any more, you’ll make me angry. You didn’t come all this way notto tell me something.”

“You’re right.” Chariomerus sighed. He still hesitated. At last, he brought the words out in a rush: “He’s gone and betrothed Thusnelda to somebody else.”

People said you didn’t always feel it right away when you got wounded. Arminius hadn’t found that to be true. Every time a sword cut him or an arrow pierced his flesh, it hurt like fire. But now he just stared, his mouth foolishly gaping. He’d heard the words, but they didn’t want to make sense inside his head.

“Who? Who?” he asked, sounding like an owl. An owl in daylight was the worst of omens – everybody knew that. What kind of omen was it, though, when someone took your woman away from you?

“Tudrus,” Chariomerus said.

The grinding noise Arminius heard was his own teeth clashing together like millstones. He needed a distinct effort of will to make himself stop. Tudrus was a man of about Segestes’ age. He was also friendly to the Romans. All the same . . . “Why?” Arminius seemed to have trouble coming out with more than one word at a time.

“I don’t know for sure. He doesn’t tell me his reasons,” Chariomerus replied. “My best guess is, he doesn’t think you’ll come back from this war. He wants Thusnelda to give him some grandchildren . . . and Tudrus has been one of his sworn companions for years.”

“He should never have promised her to me, then,” Arminius said. “Does he think I have no honor, to take an insult like this lying down?”

“What will you do?” Chariomerus sounded apprehensive.

“Go home and set things right, of course,” Arminius answered. “What do you expect me to do when you bring me news like that? Just stand here and thank you for it and go about my business?” He looked around and dropped his voice. “Do you take me for a Roman?”

“No, of course not.” Had Chariomerus said anything else, Arminius would have killed him. The newsbringer also lowered his voice: “Is it true what they say about Roman women?”

“Not enough Roman women up here for me to know one way or the other. The stories are pretty juicy, but stories usually are.” Arminius set a hand on his fellow tribesman’s shoulder. “Now I have to tell the Romans I am leaving. They will not be happy to hear it, but” – he shrugged – “what can you do?”

The senior Roman officer with this detachment was a military tribune named Titus Minucius Basilus. He was short and lean and bald, with pinched features, a blade of a nose, and eyes cold as a blizzard. Arminius interrupted him at supper, which did nothing to improve his mood. He redeemed some of his bad temper with reckless bravery.

“You have to go, you say?” he growled when Arminius finished. “Just like that? In the middle of a campaign?”

“I am sorry . . . sir.” Arminius could use Roman notions of politeness and subordination, even though he scorned them. “It touches my honor. What would you do if your betrothed’s father gave her to another man?” He knew he was making a hash of his subjunctives, and hoped Minucius could follow him.

“I’d start a lawsuit against the double-dealing wretch,” Minucius answered. “He’d be sorry by the time I got through with him, too.”

His supper companions nodded. Arminius had only a vague notion of what a lawsuit was: a battle with words instead of swords was as close as he could come. He didn’t see the point. “We have not got this in my country,” he said.

“No, I suppose not.” The Roman eyed Arminius as he sipped from a silver winecup. Whatever else he was, he was sharp. “If I tell you you can’t go, you’ll up and leave anyway, won’t you?”

“It is my honor . . . sir,” Arminius repeated. Talking to a different officer, he might have asked if the fellow understood the word. Something told him that would be a very bad idea with Titus Minucius Basilus.

He would make a dangerous enemy, dangerous as a viper underfoot. Picking his words with care, Arminius went on, “How can I fight as well as I should, sir, when all I think about what this man does – uh, has done – to me?”

“You wouldn’t be the first man in that kind of mess – or the last.” The military tribune drank more wine. At last, still without warming up, he brusquely dipped his head. “Go on. Go home. If we can’t whip the Pannonians because we’re short one auxiliary officer, we don’t deserve to win, by Jupiter. Straighten out your woman troubles and then come back to us. They’ve already made you a Roman citizen, but we’ll make you a real Roman.”

He meant it for a compliment. Arminius reminded himself of that. He also reminded himself he’d got what he wanted – and more easily than he’d expected, too. Minucius was right: he would have deserted had he heard no rather than yes. Since he’d heard yes. . . .

He bowed, red-gold locks spilling down off his shoulders as he bent forward. “My thanks, sir. My many thanks, sir. I am in your debt.”

“Maybe you will pay it one day – if not to me, then to Rome,” Minucius said.

“Maybe I will.” Arminius bowed again. “Please excuse me. I will not interrupt your supper anymore.” He turned and hurried off, conscious as he went of Minucius’ eyes boring into his back.

“Well?” Chariomerus said when Arminius got back to the auxiliaries’ tents.

“It is very well, in fact,” Arminius said. “He will let me go. He saw I would go whether he let me or not. Sometimes it is easier to lean in the direction the wind is already blowing.”

Chariomerus smiled in glad surprise. “I did not think it would be so simple.”

“Neither did I. Some god must be looking kindly on me,” Arminius answered. “And that can only mean the god is scowling at Segestes. How could it be otherwise? He has broken faith. But he won’t get away with it.”

“Thusnelda will be glad to have you instead of Tudrus,” Chariomerus said. “He is an old man – he has to be forty-five if he’s a day.”

“So she will.” Arminius didn’t love Thusnelda. Love, as far as he could see, was something the Romans had invented to give themselves an excuse for infidelity. But he’d known her since they were children. He liked her, and thought she liked him. Segestes had no right to rob him of her. No right at all.

When Varus governed Syria, the immemorial antiquity of the countryside impressed him. As he’d thought while conferring with Augustus, it made Italy, where even the oldest towns had but a few centuries on them, seem downright juvenile by comparison. As he traveled north to the Rhine frontier to take up his new province, he thought about that often. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Oh, Gaul had had towns before the Roman conquest. But they hadn’t been towns with civilized amenities. No theaters for plays. No amphitheaters for spectacles, gladiators, and beast shows. No public baths. No proper law courts. No colonnaded and porticoed public squares. And, of course, the barbarians had gabbled away at one another in their own incomprehensible language, not in Latin – to say nothing of Greek.

More than half a century of Roman rule had brought some changes. A few of the locals had forsaken tunic and trousers for the toga. Here and there, a proper Roman building– -stone with a tile roof– -sprouted amidst timber and wattle-and-daub and thatch. But it would be a long time before this country grew civilized, if it ever did.

Vetera, on the west bank of the Rhine, had more than enough Romans to make a good-sized town. It was the headquarters of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX. But legionaries, however necessary they were in the grand scheme of things, weren’t . . . interesting people.

Varus had been used to gossip about matters of state, gossip about Augustus’ family (his own family, thanks to the marriage connection – not that Claudia Pulchra was daft enough to come up to the edge of the world, though she’d gone with him to Syria), and gossip about the other great and powerful men – and women – of Rome.

In Vetera, he got gossip about an ambitious military tribune jockeying for promotion, gossip about a centurion’s drunken German mistress, gossip about what happened when a prefect’s Gallic mistress found out about his German mistress, gossip about the outrageous way a wine merchant overcharged for the swill he swore was Falernian (no, some things didn’t change from Rome to Vetera, not even a little bit).

Power. Sex. Money. What else was there to gossip about? But when the power was minuscule, when the sex was with women whose fair tresses reminded Varus that whores in Rome were required by law to wear blond wigs, when the money was chicken feed, how were you supposed to get excited about any of it?

People in Vetera did. Varus imagined that people in any provincial town had their tiny squabbles and feuds and scandals and triumphs. The trouble was, the Roman officers in Vetera expected Varus to be interested in theirs. And so he had to be, or at least to pretend to be. Hypocrisy wasn’t the least important art a high-ranking Roman needed to cultivate.

In Syria, soldiers always worried about Parthia. If Rome had a real rival, the successor to the Persian Empire was it. Roman armies had come to grief against Parthia. Back around the time Varus was born, Crassus got his force annihilated at Carrhae, and even lost legionary eagles – what greater and more humiliating disgrace was possible? And the Parthian Kings of Kings weren’t afraid to invade the Roman East when they thought they could get away with it.

In Vetera, soldiers – and no one else there mattered – worried about Germany instead. Varus did not find that an improvement. Parthia was a more or less cultured country. The King of Kings and his nobles spoke Greek as a matter of course. They had elegant manners they’d learned from Alexander the Great’s successors while they were beating them. (If the Macedonians had learned theirmanners from the Persians while they were beating them, Varus didn’t dwell on that.)

Hearing that two German tribes were threatening to go to war with each other over some stolen pigs was not edifying. Neither was the news that some petty German noble – as if there were any other kind! – was raising a row in his tribe by giving a girl previously promised to one suitor to another instead. And that was the kind of thing Varus had to listen to day after day.

He didn’t take long to tire of it. He summoned a meeting of the leading soldiers in Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX and spoke without preamble: “You already know Augustus sent me here to bring Germany all the way into the Empire. I aim to do that as fast as I can.” Then I’ll go back to Rome and let somebody else take charge of the miserable place.

The assembled officers nodded. Vala Numonius, the cavalry commander, said, “It shouldn’t be too hard, sir. By what I’ve heard since I got here, we’ve softened up the Germans a lot. They’re getting used to our ways. Plenty of their nobles already see lining up with us is the smart way to go. All they need is a show of force, and they’ll roll onto their backs and show their bellies like whipped dogs.”

“Does anyone disagree?” Varus put the question for form’s sake. He’d said what he intended to do, and one of his principal subordinates had declared that the assembled legions could do it. What more did anyone want?

But, to his surprise, an officer named Lucius Eggius said, “I do, sir. The Germans just aren’t that easy. Whenever we cross the Rhine, we own the land where we march and the land where we camp. The rest still belongs to the barbarians.”

“It’s not so bad as that,” Numonius said.

Lucius Eggius set his chin. Even when Varus said, “I should hope not,” Eggius still looked discontented. Varus wondered if the soldier found himself in this gods-forsaken spot because of an unfortunate habit of speaking his mind regardless of whether anybody else wanted to listen to him.

“I think you’re right, sir,” said yet another officer, a prefect named Ceionius. Unlike Lucius Eggius, he knew the words a governor liked to hear. Better yet, he came up with good reasons why Varus was right: “Quite a few of the Germans are learning Latin – “