He didn’t need to wait long. Augustus, a little stooped, hurried into the anteroom a few minutes later. His gray hair was tousled, his tunic wrinkled and rumpled; he rubbed at his eyes to get sleep out of them. “You have news from Germany?” he said without preamble. “Give it to me at once.”
“Yes, sir.” The courier bowed. He respected the master of the Roman world, if not the lesser men surrounding him. “I am sorry, sir, but the news is as bad as it can be. Quinctilius Varus’ three legions are destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest, only a handful of men escaping. Their eagles are lost, captured by the Germans. Varus trusted the chieftain named Arminius, and the barbarian betrayed him to his doom. When Varus saw the fight was hopeless, he had a slave slay him. He died as well as a man could, but thousands more died with him and because of him.”
As the courier spoke, color drained from Augustus’ face, leaving him pale as bleached linen. “You are sure of this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “No possible doubt?”
“None, sir. I’m sorry. The man who gave me the written message” - the courier took it off his belt and handed it to Augustus - “had it from one of the horsemen who somehow escaped the massacre inside Germany. The rider filled his ears with worse things than ever got written down, and I had some of them from him. To say it was a bad business beggars the power of words.”
“It can’t be,” Augustus muttered. “It can’t.” Moving like a man in the grip of nightmare, he broke the seal on the written message, unrolled it, and held it out at arm’s length to read it. The scribe who first composed the message must have remembered it was bound for an old man, for he’d written it large to make sure the intended recipient could make it out. By the look of anguish on Augustus’ face, the power of written words to describe what had happened in Germany wasn’t beggared after all.
“Are you all right, sir?” one of his underlings asked in Greek-flavored Latin, real anxiety filling his voice. The ruler of the Roman world was the very image of a man overwhelmed, a man unmanned, by disaster unlooked-for. Oedipus could have seemed no more appalled, no more horrified, on discovering he’d lain with his mother.
Were any pins or brooches handy, Augustus might well have sought to blind himself as Oedipus had done. As things were, he reeled away from the courier and the slaves and servitors who helped make him the most powerful man in the world. He might as well have been blind as he fetched up against the frame of the doorway through which he’d entered the antechamber.
He pounded his head on the sturdy timbers of the frame. While his servants exclaimed in alarm, he cried out as if he were indeed the protagonist of a tragedy on the stage: “Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions!”
In a tragedy, everyone knew - though the actors’ skill might almost disguise the fact - that the events portrayed came from the realms of myth and legend and history, and were not happening to those portraying them. Here ... It was real. No one would muster the men of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX again. They were dead - all too often, horribly dead.
“Give me back my legions, Quinctilius Varus!” Augustus wailed again, his forehead bruised and swelling. “Give them back, I tell you!”
Neither the courier nor any of the servitors seemed to know what to say. None dared say anything, for fear it would be wrong. When Augustus cried out once more and yet again battered his head against the doorframe, one of the men who served him - the men who helped him rule the Roman Empire - gestured to the courier.
By then, the man who’d brought the bad news was glad to get away, lest he be blamed for it. Augustus’ servitor took him off to the kitchen and told the lesser slaves there to bring him bread and wine and olives.
“Obliged, sir,” the courier said, and then, “I’m sorry. I knew it would be bad. I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
“He never imagined failure,” the servitor said. “Why should he, when he’s known so much success?”
“Beats me.” The courier gulped wine. He would never be able to drink enough to forget the look on Augustus’ face when the Roman ruler realized all his plans for Germany had just collapsed in ruin. “What will he do now?”
“I don’t know.” From one of Augustus’ aides, that was no small ad-mission. “I fear we shall have to change our policy, which is not something we usually do. Gods curse those barbarians for being difficult!”
As the courier nodded, Augustus’ voice echoed down the halls from the chamber where he still stood: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”