Wolves of Rome

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  The legionaries listened to him in silence. In their eyes Taurus saw the signs of the inhuman strain that they’d been exposed to and the grief for their lost companions, lying on the pathways and among the trees of the Teutoburg Forest, cadavers stiff in the mud.

  Varus was there to listen to Taurus’s words. He walked among the victims of his ineptitude and credulity. His men did not turn away, did not shun him. They gave him the respect due to their supreme commander.

  Then, all at once, a solitary voice rose from the ranks, hoarse and powerful. He sang the notes of an old legionary song, the ones that soldiers sing at night around the campfire, on the eve of a battle. Bravado and melancholy premonition.

  ‘Miles meus contubernalis

  Dic mihi cras quis erit vivus

  Iacta pilum hostem neca

  Miles es, miles Romanus!’

  Another voice rose to join the first, and then another:

  ‘Miles es, miles Romanus!’

  Taurus’s voice joined those of his soldiers, joined Varus’s voice, weak and uncertain, but also the resonant voices of Rufius Corvus, Sergius Vetilius and Gaius Vibius, the young cavalry prefect who was Numonius Vala’s right hand.

  As Taurus and the other centurions ordered ‘Suscipite . . . scuta!’ all of the survivors of the three legions raised their shields and closed ranks. They were still singing.

  ‘Suscipite . . . insignia!’

  The standard-bearers raised the eagles and the cohort ensigns. The army sang as one, and the loud song spread through the forest and filled the gorges. It reached the formidable Germanic warriors crouching in the wood, impatient to fly at the enemy and annihilate them. It reached Armin, who felt in his hands and arms the force of tens of thousands of warriors waiting for his signal.

  But that absurd, incredible song, that not even the crash of thunder nor the echo of the hammer of Thor could stifle, stopped for an interminable moment his order for slaughter.

  Then something broke in him. That last shred of his Roman self was ripped clean from his ancestral Germanic soul and Armin yelled out, in the language of his fathers, the order for attack.

  A blinding flash illuminated the forest and for an instant the Roman soldiers appeared. They stood shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, swords in hand, around their standards. From that distance, their compact formation, their wall of shields, the steel cuirasses that cast away the flash of lightning, the open-winged eagle . . . all gave the impression of an intact force.

  But they were starving, exhausted, wounded.

  All they had left was their courage.

  They stood firm and waited for the onslaught of the Germanic deluge. Armin’s ranks pounded like the waves of a storming sea against the wall of shields that held for a moment, but then began to fall back. Armin in person pushed into the Roman formation, searching, as the tradition of his people demanded, for the enemy commander so he could claim his head for himself. Taurus tried to stop him; for a brief instant his rocky constitution, his courage, his skill in duelling and the experience of a thousand battles at close quarters seemed to test the young Germanic warrior.

  ‘Look out!’ growled the centurion. ‘I’m not dead yet!’ And he dealt a clean blow to Armin’s shoulder, drawing blood.

  Armin flew into a rage and responded with a hail of sword and axe strikes, forcing Taurus to his knees.

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ snarled the centurion, trying to drive his dagger into Armin’s foot.

  All around them, despite the winds of storm, the air boiled with savage screams, roars, blood rage, arms clashing against arms. There were so many Germanic warriors that not all of them could throw themselves into the fray they had so hungered for. Those among them who managed to capture a legionary alive dragged him into the forest, where many warriors were already crying out in victory and abandoning themselves to wild dances, gulping down Celtic beer. There the legionary would be tortured in every way possible. They would take off his hands, his arms, his legs, cutting him up until only the trunk remained.

  The screams lured another person to the scene. He wore a mask of bronze and mounted a black stallion. No one noticed him, so like a ghost he was. He descended down the slope at a fast gallop, holding sword and axe aloft. He swept through the sea of semi-naked warriors, his massive steed running them over, his axe and sword dismembering their bodies.

  He rode away from the battlefield, vanishing as suddenly as he had appeared.

  Armin hadn’t finished with Taurus; he delivered a cleaving blow from above, with the centurion bent over on his knees. Taurus shouted, ‘No! Never to the back!’ and with a final burst of energy he rose to his feet and threw himself at his adversary, taking the blow full in the chest. It pierced him from front to back. He clung to Armin as he was dying. ‘Nice work, boy,’ he sputtered. ‘No one has ever . . . managed to kill Marcus . . . Caelius . . . Taurus.’

  He collapsed. Armin found Quinctilius Varus standing before him, plunging his own sword under his breastbone straight through to his heart. When Armin’s sword gored him, he was already dead. The victors fought over the corpse avidly, chopping it to pieces. Armin cut off his head with a clean blow of his axe.

  Gaius Vibius had seen everything. He stood fast, unwilling to leave Taurus’s lifeless body.

  As the legionaries saw their officers falling one after another or being put into chains by order of Armin, they lost their last remaining strength. Many were thus captured alive, simply because they could no longer move, while others fell fighting. To the last man.

  The storm abated. The thunder rumbled only in the distance now, and the Berserkers were able to give free rein to their fury on the few survivors. Only their screaming could be heard, and the dry snap of bones being broken.

  Gaius Vibius, Numonius Vala’s personal aide, who had never stopped hoping that his commander would return with reinforcements, awoke before dawn in Armin’s camp, wrapped in chains. He had a deep wound in his right thigh that had clotted over. He realized he must have lost his senses.

  A gigantic Hermundur towered in front of him. He made a barely perceptible movement with his hand towards a group of Cherusci who were torturing a prisoner. He said in heavy Latin, ‘It’s your turn next. That’s why they kept you alive.’

  The boy looked around him in distress, then turned back to the Hermundur with a question in his eyes. The warrior lifted his chin towards the chain that bound the lad to the trunk of a tree. Gaius Vibius understood and nodded. Before the Cherusci could get to him, Gaius grabbed the chain, spun it with every bit of strength left to him and he split his own head wide open, spraying blood and brains all around.

  Some of the surviving officers were butchered on the altars scattered through that corner of the forest, offered up to the Germanic gods. Others were nailed to the trees through the empty orbits of their eyes.

  The legionary standards and the eagle were soiled and desecrated in every way possible and then hidden so they could never be found.

  The echo of Gaius Vibius’s final gesture arrived all the way to Tiberius’s camp in Pannonia, thanks to the Hermundur, along with news of Varus’s rout. Velleius, the supreme commander’s aide, was informed of this on the day in which victory against the Illyrians and Dalmatians was being celebrated and he decided not to tell Tiberius about it until the next day, so as not to spoil the joyful festivities.

  In his diary, Velleius extolled the virtue of Caius Vibius and defamed Ceionius and Numonius Vala as cowards, but no one would ever know the truth about the cavalry commander, buried in the mud and in the murky waters of the swamp.

  ARMIN WAS RECEIVED triumphantly by all the Germanic tribes; his was the credit for the crushing victory over the Romans and he was confirmed the supreme commander of the army. He started to let himself think about a great independent, unified Germania with a single army and a single leader. Him.

  He sent Varus’s head to Marbod, king of the Marcomanni, with a message that referred to the favour that the sovereign had don
e for him when he had been caught crossing his territory in Bohemia.

  Marbod put the head in a jar of salt and sent it to Augustus who had already had news of the defeat. The emperor was so shocked and so shaken that he stopped shaving. He took to always dressing in mourning robes and it was said that he wandered through his palace on sleepless nights crying, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’

  Varus’s head was buried in the family mausoleum.

  27

  AFTER THE TEUTOBURG massacre, Armin felt invincible. One by one, he would take by force the defensive structures and the legionary forts that stood at the Roman border beyond the western bank of the Rhine.

  The first wave of assaults had been successful because they were completely unexpected and because Numonius Vala’s cavalry, which had been sent out to find reinforcements, had been intercepted near the swamp. Although they were decimated, the few men who managed to survive raised the alarm, so when Armin arrived with his warriors at the first legionary outpost on his path, the commander was prepared and ready to counter the Germanic attack. While in the forest and the bogs, the warriors’ brute strength and ferocity – and even more so their complete familiarity with the territory – had made them unstoppable opponents, things changed radically in front of fort battlements packed with archers and artillerymen.

  Certain that reinforcements were on their way, the garrison soldiers waited calmly at first. The Germanics, however, by order of Armin, had set up roadblocks all over the territory so no one could get in or out of the forts.

  At this point many of the garrison soldiers, along with a great number of civilians, decided to try to pass the Germanic lines under the cover of darkness, risking another massacre. They succeeded using a very simple stratagem: someone sounded the cavalry charge and got out the word that Asprenas’s army was arriving from Castra Vetera. When Asprenas learned of the situation, he actually did show up with an army, effectively dispersing the Germanic attackers.

  Armin made other attempts to force the line of legionary bulwarks which defended the Rhine border, but he had to back down as his warriors were mowed down by the Roman war machines and archers. Furthermore, he had no equipment suitable for staging a siege. There was also a rumour that Tiberius himself was arriving at a forced march with an army of heavy infantry, and Armin decided to suspend his plans for taking over the border strongholds on the Rhine. The victory at Teutoburg had been like a drunken rampage, but now he had to organize and manage his warriors, which was no easy feat.

  He began to wonder how and when the Empire would react. For Rome, he was solely a deserter, an officer of the Germanic Auxilia guilty of treason. What would be their next move? When would they retaliate? Armin realized that he had enjoyed extraordinary success with traps and ambushes, but if he tried to cross the Rhine or to attack a fort or an entrenched camp, his enormous technical disadvantage would surely preclude any hope of getting away with it.

  He managed to find informers in Rome. It wasn’t hard as he knew so many people. He learned that the emperor had discharged his personal guard, made up of Germanics. He had sent them into confinement, in small groups, on islands in the middle of the sea, and enrolled new forces. He feared an invasion from the north like at the times of the Cimbri and Teutons.

  Tiberius arrived in Germania a year later. Velleius came with him as his trusted personal aide, as did a young man who Armin knew of well: Germanicus. He’d seen him for the first time when he was little more than a boy, on the marble frieze of the Altar of Peace. They had crossed their weapons in training when they were adolescents and Marcus Caelius Taurus was instructor to both of them.

  Thinking of Taurus made him remember his two freedmen, Privatus and Thiaminus; Armin had noticed them on the field of slaughter at Teutoburg. They’d surely been killed themselves as they were trying to carry off their patron’s body to perform funeral rites and give him a proper burial. This was vital in the Roman conception of pietas. They certainly had not been allowed to succeed in their intent.

  Tiberius did not immediately cross the Rhine, nor did Armin do so from his side to invade Roman Germania and Gaul. They simply studied, observed and spied on one another. Armin had fought with Tiberius and knew what a formidable foe he made. Tiberius knew that Armin would almost certainly never accept a conflict on the open field because he was aware that he would lose. He thus reinforced the garrisons, repaired the roads and bridges and made sure that the commanders of the legions and the cohorts were worthy of the tasks they’d been assigned.

  Armin kept an eye on everything Tiberius was doing, but at the same time he was busy recovering control over the various territories. He went as far as the Weser, but he didn’t try to engage the various tribes in battle and he was careful never to allow himself to be lured into a place which would favour an ambush. Tiberius on the other hand took to burning villages and devastating territory so that the Germanics who were contrary to war with the Romans would have something to blame Armin for.

  Perhaps Augustus would have preferred conduct that was more prudent, but he was also conscious that a catastrophe like Teutoburg could not remain unpunished.

  Armin used that time to unite as far as possible the tribes which had been part of his alliance against the Romans in Teutoburg, putting in chains anyone who threatened to betray the cause. He realized very quickly that although that kind of coalition could be put together for a limited time, it tended to unravel once the objective was achieved. His efforts were also hindered by Thusnelda’s father Seghest, still a mighty and powerful warrior, who remained hostile towards him; he had never stopped accusing Armin of the abduction and even the rape of his daughter.

  After the first confused reactions from Rome, there was reassuring news for Armin: Augustus was apparently realizing that it was impossible to turn Germania into a Roman province and that the border could not be moved to the Elbe river. The frontier would stop at the Rhine. Forever.

  Armin reflected at length on the recent turn of events and he felt increasingly at a loss about how to proceed. One important thing was clear: the victory was not due solely to him. It was nature herself that had fought alongside his warriors. The land of Germania was wild and fierce. This was thrilling from one point of view but discouraging from another. The Romans had never feared nature; they drained swamps, chopped down forests, dug canals, built dams to keep the rivers from flooding. He often thought of the day that he and Flavus had gone to see the road that never ends, which seemed so very long ago now. Roman soldiers were indefatigable and well used to hard work: they were the ones who built the roads and the bridges when they weren’t fighting. Even when the arrows were raining down on them, Varus’s armies had cut down trees, built footbridges, turned paths into roads.

  He remembered his father’s stories about his secret meetings with General Drusus, and he knew well that such a bond could never exist between himself and a Roman commander. Teutoburg had cut the bridges between Germania and the Empire forever.

  Armin’s plan for uniting Germania was very difficult to put into action. Even his own relatives were against it. His uncle Ingmar had not joined the coalition and had allied with Seghest, Thusnelda’s father and Armin’s worst enemy; it was lucky for Armin that Varus hadn’t listened to Seghest’s warning about the ambush waiting for them in Teutoburg.

  Armin had heard that when Seghest was asked to account for this humiliating and even contemptible move, he said that he hadn’t done it for personal reasons, but because he thought that peace was preferable to war and that the interests of the Romans and those of Germania were one and the same. Armin could imagine that his brother Flavus felt the same way. He’d been there, at Teutoburg. One of them could have killed the other that day. It didn’t matter who. When brother kills brother, does it matter who dealt the first blow, or the final one?

  Another person he thought about was the Hermundur: who was the titanic tattooed warrior who drifted in and out of his life? He never really tried to find out. He might have bee
n a god of the forests, a solitary, invulnerable giant who passed from one world to the other, from one universe to another. Did he delight in deviating the course of events and then standing back to watch the consequences?

  Years went by without anything very unusual happening. Had Augustus managed to forget Varus’s debacle?

  ‘No,’ replied the Hermundur. ‘Augustus is simply very old and he doesn’t have the strength to react any more, not even against the most atrocious offences. He’s tired and sad and you know why: his daughter languishes on a small desert island for having plotted against him. His only surviving grandson, Julia’s lastborn, is confined to another small island and he will almost certainly die there. His only blame is that he was considered violent and thick-witted as a boy, but he has actually never harmed a living soul. Augustus went to visit him once, accompanied by his best friend. They embraced, grandfather and grandson. They wept in each other’s arms. A journey that should have remained a secret but didn’t and this means only one thing: the young man will die. It’s only a question of time. If it hasn’t happened already.’

  ‘Who will be Augustus’s successor?’

  It was the day of the winter solstice. The Hermundur turned around, mounted his horse and disappeared into the fog.

  HE TURNED OUT to be right on all accounts. Augustus died the next year, in the month that bore his name, and was entombed in the mausoleum where Varus’s head had been buried. In his will he stated that the border between the Empire and Germania must be the Rhine.

  Tiberius succeeded him.

  A ruthless, indomitable soldier, thought Armin. He’ll want revenge for Teutoburg.

  But in the meantime, a mutiny had broken out among the legions of the Rhine due to their miserable living conditions, and Tiberius had decided to send Germanicus – his adopted son and nephew by blood – to quell the revolt.