Give Me Back My Legions(120)

Vala Numonius’ horse stumbled south and west. The poor beast was on its last legs. The Roman cavalry commander - the Roman fugitive in a land all traps and snares for Romans - urged it on even so. If it foundered, when it foundered, he’d have to use his own legs, and it’s were swifter.

He was, he hoped, still ahead of the news of Quinctilius Varus’ army. He’d seen a few Germans working in their farm plots. They hadn’t paid him much special attention. They still thought of him as a Roman soldier, not as a fugitive from black disaster.

As long as they thought of him so - as a man who was dangerous to approach, as a man who would be avenged if he fell - he was fairly safe. But he knew better, or worse. Even if they didn’t, he knew he was nothing but a runaway. He also knew that scores, hundreds, maybe even thousands of Roman fugitives cluttered the German landscape. The barbarians might not have to hear the news. Just seeing so many Romans wandering at random over the countryside could be plenty to tell them the legions had met catastrophe.

And that wasn’t Vala Numonius’ only worry. Oh, no - far from it. Sooner or later, the cavalry commander knew he’d have to sleep. A German could come up to cut his throat or knock him over the head, and he’d never know it till too late. The legionaries joked about waking up dead if they got stuck in the middle of enemy country. Numonius didn’t think those jokes were funny, not any more he didn’t.

Maybe worse yet was that news and rumor would go right on spreading while he slept. They were liable to get ahead of him, even if he still had a lead on them for the moment. If they did ... If they did, the Germans would know he didn’t have the Empire’s might behind him now. They would know he’d suddenly become fair game. And they would hunt him.

He rode past a farm. Women and boys and one graybeard with a crooked back worked in the fields. No warriors. The Romans had wondered about that on their way north. Vala Numonius’ mouth quirked in a bitter grin. By the gods, he didn’t wonder anymore! Sometimes, though, knowledge came at too high a cost. People talked about that all the time. Now Numonius understood it in his belly, in his balls.

The barbarians all stared at him as he went by. They would know where their menfolk had gone, and why. But they wouldn’t - he prayed they wouldn’t - know what had happened. Maybe Numonius was only a scout, with a victorious Roman army not far behind him.

Maybe I am - but I’m not. The nonsense formed of itself inside his mind. It was one more measure of how worn he was. He wondered whether his horse’s head was full of moonshine, too. More nonsense. He was starting to have trouble even recognizing it.

He still had half a loaf of barley bread left. When it was gone, he’d need to buy food from the Germans, or steal it from them. The commander of the Roman cavalry, reduced to chicken thievery! Well, better that than being reduced to what had happened to the poor, sorry foot soldiers.

Numonius was glad when the track went into the woods and he couldn’t feel the Germans’ pale eyes on him anymore. The barbarians watched him like wolves watching a sick, staggering doe. If it fell over, they would feed. If it didn’t, they could catch something else before long.

He hated the German woods. Everything seemed to close in on you. You couldn’t see any farther than you could spit. Anything might lurk in there and lunge out at you. Anything. Wolves. A bear. A wide-horned aurochs, as fearsome as any meat-eating brute. Germans, the most fearsome brutes of all. You’d never know danger drew near till too late.

But when every breath was danger, the woods didn’t seem to matter so much. And, if the hunted couldn’t see far, neither could the hunters. Vala Numonius slid off his horse and led it away from the track. Then he tied it to a sapling and went back and covered its tracks, and his, as best he could. He didn’t know it his best would prove good enough, but you had to try.

Half a bowshot away from the path, he gnawed on the barley bread. It was dense and chewy. Bread made from wheat flour would have risen better. It would have tasted better, too. But it wouldn’t have packed so much nourishment into such a small space. For soldiers who had to carry their own rations, that mattered more.

He gave the horse a couple of bites of bread, too. That was all he had for the animal. A few ferns and weeds grew in the gloom under the forest canopy. The horse nibbled at those. It raised its head and gave Numonius a reproachful look, as if to say, You work me to death, and then all I get is this?

“Sorry,” he told it, his own voice a weary whisper. “Carry me back across the Rhine and I’ll fill you full of oats and barley. By Epona, I will.” Maybe the Gallic horse-goddess would hearken to his prayer here in the German woods. Plainly, the gods of his own folk held no power here.