Give me back my Legions!

They seemed in no doubt about his men. They started away from the Germans as fast as they could go. In their commander’s caligae, Arminius would have done the same thing: his force outnumbered theirs by about two to one.

“After them, boys!” he yelled. “Good fighting, good looting!” The auxiliaries raised a cheer and swarmed across the broad meadow after the Pannonians.

And then, about a quarter of a mile to the south, a force of legionaries about the size of his also emerged from the woods. They were the outliers of the legion to which Arminius’ auxiliaries were attached. As soon as the Roman soldiers spotted the Pannonians, they also cheered and began to pursue. One of their officers waved to the Germans, as if to make sure his force and theirs were on the same side.

Arminius waved back, not without resignation. Auxiliaries and legionaries together, they’d make short work of the hapless Pannonians.

But the Germans would have to share whatever loot there was with the Romans, and who’d ever heard of a Roman who wasn’t greedy?

An average Pannonian was as quick on his feet as an average German or Roman (even though the Romans had short legs, they were formidable marchers). But that wasn’t what a pursuit was about. If the Pannonians wanted to stick together and not get cut down one at a time, they had to move at the pace of their slowest men. The Romans and Germans on their trail steadily chewed up the ground between the forces.

One of the Pannonians shouted something. Arminius heard the words clearly, but couldn’t understand them. That proved the enemy was the enemy. Like most of the auxiliaries with him, Arminius had grown fluent in Latin. He still sometimes muttered to himself, going through a declension or conjugation, but he made himself understood - and he followed what Romans said to him. Pannonian, on the other hand, was only gibberish to him - and to the Romans as well.

The rebels stopped retreating and formed a battle line. Long odds against them: longer, Arminius thought, than those against throwing a triple six in a dice game. But sometimes long odds were better than sure ruin, and sure ruin faced the Pannonians if they kept trying to run away. Maybe a fierce charge would make their pursuers think twice.

Maybe. But Arminius didn’t believe it, not for a moment. “Be ready!” he called to his fellow Germans. “They’re going to try to bull through us.”

“Let them try,” one of the big, fair men said. Several others nodded. Arminius smiled. No, his folk had never been one to back away from a fight.

That officer shouted something. Sure as demons, the Pannonians charged Arminius’ band, not the legionaries. The Germans’ looks, bronze helmets, and smaller shields all declared them auxiliaries rather than regulars. The enemy officer had to think that made them the easier target. Well, he could think whatever he pleased. Thinking it didn’t make it so.

“Sedatus!” the Pannonians yelled, and, “Succellus!” One of those was their fire god; the other was a smith, who carried a hammer. They were using sharper tools now.

They showed almost Roman discipline as they bore down on the Germans. His own men fought with better discipline than they would have back in their native forests. Past that, Arminius indulged in no comparisons. With numbers on their side, and with the legionaries swinging up to help them, it shouldn’t matter much.

Of course, even if the Germans and Romans would win in the end, a man still might get killed in the middle of the fight. The Pannonians loosed a volley of javelins at Arminius’ auxiliaries. A German screamed when one of the light spears pierced his right arm. Another javelin thudded into Arminius’ shield. The Pannonians had copied Roman practice to the extent of using a long shank of soft iron on their javelins. The shank bent when the javelin went home. Arminius couldn’t throw it back, and yanking it out of the shield would take time he didn’t have. He threw the fouled shield aside. Fighting without one would have bothered a Roman. It left Arminius more vulnerable, but it didn’t bother him a bit - he was used to going into battle with no more than spear and sword.

He jabbed at the man in front of him. The Pannonian used his big, heavy legionary-style shield well, holding it between Arminius’ spear and his vitals. His stabbing sword flicked out like a viper’s tongue. But he couldn’t reach Arminius with it, not when the German’s spear made him keep his distance.

They might have danced like that for some little while, each trying to figure out how to spill the other’s blood. They weren’t alone on the battlefield, though. Another German threw a fist-sized rock that clanged off the Pannonian’s helmet. Without the ironworks on his head, it would have smashed in his skull. As things were, he staggered and lurched like a man who’d just taken a fist to the chin. He dropped his guard, too. Arminius sprang forward and jabbed his spear into the fellow’s thigh, just below his iron-studded leather kilt.

The Pannonian howled in pain. He crumpled like a discarded sheet of papyrus - a comparison that never would have occurred to Arminius before joining the auxiliaries. The German chief stabbed again, aiming to finish him. But, even wounded, the Pannonian was wily: He used his shield like a turtle’s shell, covering himself with it as best he could. Arminius went on to fight another man. The wounded Pannonian couldn’t get away. Once the fight was over, somebody would cut his throat or smash in his head. All the wiliness in the world wouldn’t save him then.

Even among Germans, Arminius was a big man. The Pannonian he came up against next was even bigger, and much thicker through the shoulders. The fellow screamed something at him. Since it was in the Pannonian language, Arminius understood not a word of it. Seeing as much, the warrior shouted again, this time in Latin: “Futter your mother!”

“Your mother was a dog, and your father shat in her twat,” Arminius retorted. Latin wasn’t his language, either, which hadn’t kept him from learning to swear in it.

Roaring with rage, the big, burly Pannonian rushed at him. He aimed to knock Arminius down with his heavy shield and then stab him - or, if he was furious enough, kick him to death. What he aimed for wasn’t what he got. Arminius sidestepped like a dancer and then used a flick of his spearpoint to tear out the Pannonian’s throat. It was as pretty and precise a stroke as he’d ever made. He was proud of it for days afterwards.

Blood fountained from the Pannonian’s neck. He clutched at his throat, trying to stem the tide of gore. It was no use - Arminius knew a killing stroke when he gave one. The big man’s knees went limp as overcooked cabbage. He fell, and his armor clattered about him.

Romans liked to say things like that. It was a line from a poem, though Arminius thought the poem was in Greek, not Latin. He knew there was such a thing as Greek, and that Romans with a fancy education spoke it, but it remained a closed scroll to him.

And he had no time to worry about poetry anyhow, whether in Greek, Latin, or his own tongue. Another Pannonian was trying to murder him. The man’s thrust almost pierced him - the son of a whore even fought like a Roman. The fellow sheltered behind his own big scutum. Beating down his guard wouldn’t be easy. Arminius’ slashes gashed the thick leather facing of the Pannonian’s shield, but that didn’t harm it and certainly didn’t harm him.

Then the legionaries slammed into the rebels’ flank. After that, the fight wasn’t a fight any more. It was a rout. The Pannonians realized what they should have seen sooner: they were desperately outnumbered, out in the open, and had no hope of reinforcement, nor any strongpoint to which they might escape. They were, in a word, trapped.

Arminius’ foe suddenly had to face two other German auxiliaries, as the men they’d been fighting took to their heels. He had no trouble holding off one foe. He couldn’t turn enough directions at once to hold off three. One of the other Germans hamstrung him. He went down with a wail. Arminius’ stroke across his throat finished him off.

“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 too bad,” he said.

“Not too good, either,” Aristocles said darkly. The pedisequus liked 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 duumvir invited 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 duumvirs said 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 duumvirs nodded.

“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 duumvir said 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 duumvirs glanced 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 were corpses.

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, was a Roman dog. Flavus liked life 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 did them. 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. Capable came 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.”