Thusnelda didn’t look back even once. She’d made up her mind, and she was sticking with what she’d decided.
The moon went down. Darkness enfolded the world. “Spirits?” Thusnelda asked nervously.
“Before they take you, they’ll have to take me first,” Arminius said. He’d never seen - or never been sure he’d seen - a nighttime spirit, which didn’t mean he didn’t believe they were there. Some of the Romans - not all, but some - even laughed at gods and ghosts. If that didn’t prove they were a depraved folk . . . plenty of other things did.
Something hooted. Thusnelda started. “Is that only an owl?” It must have been. No spirits swooped out of the sky to strike. No demons came snarling out of the trees where they commonly hid.
“Nothing to fear,” Arminius said, and slid his arm around her waist. With a small sigh, she pressed herself against him. Her body felt so warm, he marveled that she didn’t light the way ahead like a torch.
Since she didn’t, his eyes had to get used to starlight. Little by little, darkness seemed less absolute. Wotan’s wandering star blazed high in the south, shining brighter than any of the fixed stars. The Romans had the arrogance to believe they could figure out why and how the wandering stars moved as they did. What answer did any proper man need but that the gods willed it so?
The dim gray light was, at last, enough to show him the place he remembered passing on the way to Segestes’ steading. “Here,” he said softly. He led Thusnelda off the path and out onto the little meadow he’d found. “Here you will become my woman in truth.”
“Yes,” she said, even more quietly than he. No going back from this, not for her. Once she’d lost her maidenhead, she was either a wife or a trull - nothing in between. The Romans might joke about women’s appetites, but not Arminius’ folk.
He undid the brooch fastening his cloak and spread the warm wool garment on the grass. Then he also unfastened Thusnelda’s. He spread it on top of his. “The best bed I can make for you,” he said, “and the grass is soft.”
“It will do, because you are here with me,” she said.
He quickly shed his shoes and tunic and trousers. Under his clothes, he wore tight-fitting linen drawers, which proved he came from a wealthy family. Bv the time he pulled down the drawers, Thusnelda was naked, too. He wished the moon still shone - he wanted to see her better. Foul-mouthed as the Romans were, they had a point about that: it added something.
Well, touch would have to do. They lay down together. He explored her with hands and lips. Then, when he couldn’t stand to wait any longer, he poised himself above her. “Oh,” she said in a low voice when he went into her. He met resistance - she was a maiden. “Oh!” she said again, louder and less happily this time, as he pushed hard. “You’re splitting me in half!”
“No,” he said, breaking through. “It’s like this the first time for women.”
“My mother told me the same thing. I thought she was trying to frighten me so I wouldn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to.”
Arminius hardly heard her. Intent on his own building delight, he drove home again and again. Soon, he gasped and groaned and spent himself. Stroking her check, he said, “You are my woman now.” And your carrion crow of a father won’t take you back no matter what.
Varus had thought Vetera was the back of beyond - and it was. To a cosmopolitan man, a man used to Athens, to Syria, to Rome, Vetera had seemed the edge of the world. Now that Varus found himself in Mindenum, he would have given a considerable sum to go back to Vetera once more.
Vetera was on the ragged edge of civilization - no two ways about it. When you went from Vetera to Mindenum, when you traveled from the frontier between Gaul and Germany into the heart of the German wilderness, you fell off the edge.
The soldiers and a handful of sutlers who traded with both them and the Germans were the only men from the Empire for many miles in all directions. But for the encampment on the Visurgis, this was Germany, pure and simple. Some other fortified camps - Aliso was the strongest - along the west-flowing Lupia led back toward the Rhine. From Mindenum, one of these days, legionaries could press on toward the Elbe, Augustus’ ultimate goal.
For now, Varus thought it no small miracle that this Roman island persisted in the midst of the German sea. The endless woods stretching away to north and south, east and west, the tops of the trees rhythmically stirred by the wind, put him in mind of waves scudding across the Mediterranean.
When he spoke that conceit aloud, the officers from Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX didn’t quite laugh in his face, but they came close. “When you see waves on the North Sea, sir, you forget everything you thought you knew about ‘em before,” said a bluff prefect named Lucius Caedicius. “The ones on the Mediterranean . . . well, they’re nothing but babies alongside of these.” Several other men nodded.