Give Me Back My Legions(7)

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?”