Give Me Back My Legions(12)
“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).