Wolves of Rome

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ARMIN TRAVELLED FOR hundreds of miles through the woods and along the rivers, over the forested hillsides and down the endless shores of the ocean, mustering the Germanic forces in light of a new invasion. One night, as he was nearing the ford on the Weser River, he heard a pounding gallop of the planks of the bridge: a squad of Cherusci. They’d ridden day and night to catch up, collecting information about his whereabouts as they went.

  ‘Bad news, prince,’ said the chief guard. ‘Seghest has taken advantage of your absence and has seized Thusnelda. Your sentries fought bravely but they were slain. Someone betrayed you. It’s hard to protect such a big secret for such a long time. Come back with us now. No one can predict when the Romans will decide to attack.’

  Armin flared up with anger and indignation but he was soon gripped by a dark despair – the mere thought of never seeing Thusnelda again broke his heart. He returned to the house of his parents in Cherusci territory and waited there for more news. From there he continuously sent out messengers to all the other Germanic tribes, but his efforts were mainly concentrated on the liberation of his wife.

  One day his informer, the boatman of the Rhine, gave him an appointment at the abandoned village. Armin arrived escorted by a squad of horsemen who remained out of sight. He knew that Seghest’s killers were always looking for him; now that his daughter was back in his own hands, he would have no scruples about striking.

  A soft lapping announced the arrival of the boatman and Borr greeted him with a snort. Armin dismounted and approached the man, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  ‘News?’ he asked.

  ‘This is news that’s worth a lot.’

  ‘You’ve always been given what you asked for. I don’t deal with such matters. Speak up now or I’m leaving and that won’t be a good thing for you.’

  The boatman spoke: ‘Germanicus is preparing a campaign for the summer. He’ll cross the Rhine before the solstice.’

  Armin dropped his head, scowling.

  ‘Too soon?’ asked the boatman.

  Armin had heard enough. He jumped onto Borr’s back and rode off at a gallop.

  The news passed by word of mouth among the chiefs who were part of the coalition, on the condition that they kept this secret. Armin feared that the massing of forces could be delayed; the summer was still far off. He continued to gather information from other sources. The same news everywhere: a Roman attack in the summer.

  Thusnelda also managed to get a message through to him: ‘Your son will soon be born. He can wait no longer to see his father! He will be beautiful, and look like you. I think of you every day and night. I have to see you, at any cost. What name shall I give our son?’

  ‘Tumlich,’ Armin replied. ‘It’s the name of one of my ancestors who the Cherusci still venerate as a hero.’

  TAKING EVERYONE BY surprise, Germanicus crossed the Rhine three months earlier than expected, with four legions. He was followed by his second in command, an officer of ancient Etruscan lineage, Aulus Caecina, with four more legions and an equal number of Germanic and allied auxiliaries from the left bank of the Rhine. An enormous force for a simple act of retaliation and, furthermore, in blatant contrast with the intentions of Augustus first, and then Tiberius as well, to establish the border on the Rhine. But at that point Germanicus had grown to enjoy such great popularity that he could not be denied anything he wanted.

  He attacked the Chatti first. They had been members of the coalition that had taken part in the massacre of Teutoburg. They were annihilated, and their capital Mattium was razed to the ground. Germanicus then withdrew to the Rhine to let his engineers build the bridges and roads that would enable a long-term occupation of Germania. Armin saw his chance then to create a great alliance of all the Germanic tribes. He launched his own Cherusci into an attack, but they achieved nothing against the army of Caecina, and were forced to retreat.

  The face-off between Germanicus and Armin had turned into a fierce duel, fed into by a burning passion for what each believed in and by their many similarities. They were the same age, each was strong and ambitious, but it went even further than that, extending to their personalities and the women they loved. Each had fallen in love with a beautiful woman at a young age, and each of these women were not only deeply in love with their husbands but also incredibly ambitious. Each of them was pregnant, about to give birth. Thusnelda couldn’t bear being a prisoner of her father any longer, and she continuously sent messages to Armin begging him to come and free her. He’d instructed a slave on how to refer her words, and the girl had become so good at what she was asked to do that she could impersonate her mistress extremely well. She even imitated Thusnelda’s voice perfectly: ‘I can no longer live a single moment apart from you and I long for the time when I can put our son in your arms.’

  Armin had worked long and hard at urging the men of Seghest’s tribe to lay siege to the stronghold where their chief had taken refuge, in the hope of liberating Thusnelda and taking back total control of his people. In the end they obeyed him. But Seghest knew that Germanicus had crossed the Rhine once with a very strong army and had soundly defeated the Chatti and he soon discovered that the Roman was said to be advancing again, with two armies this time, one led by him personally and the other under the command of his deputy, Aulus Caecina. Seghest sent Germanicus a message asking for his immediate intervention to break the siege his own men had laid on him.

  Germanicus held council.

  Lucius Asprenas, who commanded the garrisons on the Rhine, was the first to speak. ‘We must respond to this request at once. If we capture Seghest’s daughter, pregnant with Armin’s child, we’ll succeed in weakening that dirty traitor, if not breaking him. No one can understand what I’m saying better than you: imagine how you would feel if your beautiful wife Agrippina, seven months pregnant, were to fall into Armin’s grasp.’ Germanicus frowned. ‘You know how the “king’s game” is played. Whoever takes the queen already has the king in his hands and knows he’ll win the game.’

  ‘Lucius is right,’ said Quintus Florius, legate of the Twentieth. ‘We’ll seize the girl and Armin will have to play our game.’

  Germanicus nodded. The next day he diverted his army from the objective he had decided upon, and went to liberate Seghest from the siege. The besiegers scattered quickly and Seghest paraded out surrounded by his friends and supporters, by his family and his women. The man had a huge build and he had put on his most beautiful armour for the occasion. Ingmar was the only one of his followers to abandon him; he was disgusted by Seghest’s behaviour and promptly went over to his nephew’s side, joining the coalition.

  The person who had caused Germanicus to deviate from his route emerged from the stronghold as well: Thusnelda. She didn’t say a word, asked nothing, did not cry, but she spat into her father’s face when she passed in front of him. In a single moment she had lost everything, except for what she carried in her womb; she guarded her unborn child like the treasure he was.

  She was handed over to a military tribune, as if there had been a tacit agreement. ‘This one is coming with us,’ the officer said, but his tone was not rough; Germanicus had ordered that she be treated with respect.

  In the aftermath of Seghest’s release, many of the men of his retinue declared their willingness to give up the spoils of the Battle of Teutoburg that they had kept as plunder. They hoped that the gesture of handing them over to the Romans would save their lives.

  Publius Caelius, the innkeeper from Bononia who had always stayed close to Germanicus’s men, asked if he could look at those objects to see if he could find anything familiar. He stammered out a few words in the natives’ language that he had practised, hoping for information about his brother. All to no avail.

  The Roman army moved on to attack the territories of the other Germanic tribes. They burned down their villages, destroyed their crops and put to the sword any man of arms-bearing age. In the land of the Bructeri they found that everything had already been destroyed b
y the inhabitants themselves, but they discovered the eagle of the Nineteenth Legion that had been exterminated at Teutoburg. The eldest centurion washed it until it shone again and delivered it personally to their supreme commander so he would be able to take it back to Rome when the time came.

  When Armin learned that his wife had been taken prisoner by Germanicus and that his son would be raised a slave of the Romans, he thought he would go mad. But he did not give up. He sent no one to Germanicus to offer to pay a ransom for his wife, knowing well that his grovelling would only give the Roman leader greater satisfaction.

  He gathered his people instead, and gave a rousing speech. ‘This is what they call a hero of the Roman Empire: a man who uses his eight legions to capture a single, harmless pregnant woman. I instead brought three legion commanders to their knees in front of me, and my warriors killed the best soldiers of Rome, one on one, sword against sword! This is the difference between a Roman and a Germanic!’

  For all the time that remained to him, Armin did nothing else but roam the land far and wide in his effort to unite all the tribes in a single undertaking: to force out the Roman invaders. His gaze was always enflamed with passion and his words vibrated with enthusiasm for freedom. Only at night, when he fell onto whatever makeshift bed happened to be available, did he weep bitter tears in silence for his lost love and for the son he would never see.

  GERMANICUS LED HIS troops on to devastate the territory between the Lippe and the Ems rivers, the region near Teutoburg, where it was said that the unburied remains of Varus and his legions still lay.

  ‘Don’t do it, Commander,’ said Asprenas when he understood that Germanicus wanted to lead the army to the field of death. ‘Don’t take your soldiers among those restless ghosts. It will destroy their morale, many will take fright . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Germanicus, ‘on the contrary. They’ll become more ferocious and more ruthless. They’ll be even more anxious to avenge their fallen comrades who were butchered like animals.’

  When he learned where they were going, Publius Caelius started to tremble. For years he’d been searching for news of his brother who’d gone missing in battle. He had been saving all that time for the day in which he would journey to that bloody place and build a funeral monument in his honour, but now that he was there, he was deeply in pain. He was afraid he would succeed in finding and recognizing Taurus’s remains, and he’d have to see the mark of the atrocious tortures he must have suffered. He didn’t want to see that.

  Germanicus often found himself observing Publius Caelius because he saw him as a simple citizen whose heart held the values of an entire civilization. He noticed how the innkeeper loved to buy wine from traders so he could offer some to the soldiers, saying that he felt somehow that he was pouring a cup for his brother Marcus.

  ‘Publius Caelius of Bononia,’ Germanicus said to him one day, ‘don’t be afraid. We will give burial to our comrades and we’ll fight on with renewed vigour to avenge them. We’ll bring peace to their vexed spirits. No one will dare to stop us. Just let them try! We’ll hunt down Armin until we’ve caught him and strangled him, like the criminal he is.’

  Publius Caelius thanked him for the great honour bestowed upon a simple innkeeper by the son of legendary General Drusus, and he joined the march as if he were a soldier. He’d even bought a sword that swung at his side.

  The army, guided by a very small group of survivors, started down the same road that Varus had taken six years before. But this time Aulus Caecina was advancing at the head and sending his scouts forward on horseback. They widened the path where the road was obstructed or narrow, they built footbridges across the streams and the stagnant waters, they cleared fallen trees and boulders dragged there by ancient torrents. When Germanicus finally reached the passage between the mountain of rock and the Great Swamp, he found Caecina’s legions drawn up to the left and right of the place of massacre. He recognized the hastily dug trenches of the camp improvised by Taurus on the second day. The entire stretch of land was covered by skeletons that shone white in the afternoon sun. Thirty thousand legionaries were mute and a leaden silence fell on the field of death. Publius Caelius covered his face with his hands to hide his despair, but he kept his back straight in honour of the fallen.

  He started to search then, running from one spot to another. He barely stopped at the lone skeletons scattered here and there, lingering instead when many bones together showed the will to resist. That’s where his brother would be. Time and plunder had done their work, however, stripping clean the bodies of the fallen and making them unrecognizable. Publius Caelius would not give up; he feverishly went through the bones with his fingers, trying to find anything he could recognize, but he realized that the abandoned bodies had become prey to wild animals, who’d left the marks of their fangs and mixed the legionaries’ bones with those of their enemies and with the pack animals. Many of the soldiers who were present had friends and family who had fallen in those cursed days, and seeing the scene of the massacre up close made them shake with grief and outrage. Some of them took up shovels and pickaxes and started burying the bodies scattered here and there over the plain, without knowing whether they were burying the bones of their own relatives and comrades, or of the enemies that had been dragged to hell by Varus’s legionaries in their last desperate stand.

  For the first time in six years, a Roman army had returned to the Teutoburg Forest, to lay to rest their fallen comrades. But the horror had no end: it was in the forest that they found the skulls of the centurions and the high officers nailed to the tree trunks through their eye sockets and the skeletons of others chopped to pieces on the altars of the Germanic divinities.

  The time had come. Germanicus gave an order and tens of carts drawn by mules arrived and were loaded with the remains of three obliterated legions. They would be buried in a single grave. The supreme commander threw the first grassy clod of earth and then, one by one, legionaries, centurions, tribunes and legates, tossed clumps of dirt on those bare bones until they were covered.

  Germanicus donned his parade armour and the red cloak of command. He signalled to Legate Asprenas. The legions drew up in a single formation, unit by unit. A monumental standard-bearer from the Fifth Alaudae took three steps forward and raised the eagle of the Nineteenth that had just been recovered. The legate ordered the troops to present arms and twenty thousand swords were drawn.

  Another order: ‘Percutite . . . scuta!’

  And twenty thousand legionaries started to pound their gladii against their shields all together, at a steady beat. A deafening din rose from the formation, a roar of thunder that echoed through the valley.

  One hundred beats. The thunder would shake all of Germania.

  Publius Caelius never dropped his hand from its salute and held his sword forward towards the burial mound: a green hill that the rains would water with tears from the sky.

  Then, the silence that always accompanies death.

  29

  GERMANICUS DECIDED TO hunt down Armin wherever he was, and began making his way through the most impervious regions of Germanic territory. He felt he was finally closing in on him, in a flat area between the forests and the bogs of the north, and he sent his cavalry out in a surprise attack. The Germanic forces counter-attacked and the Roman heavy infantry had to be sent in, on swampy ground that was not viable for their style of combat. Germanicus ordered his men to retreat to the area of the pontes longi, the roads bridging the bog that Armin and Flavus had so admired as boys. But the structures had been damaged in part and the enemy troops were constantly at their heels.

  The Romans found themselves in serious difficulty. They were sinking into the mud and could not manage to react effectively to their attackers. Discouragement and panic spread; the conditions were terrible, the area hostile and unfamiliar. On the contrary, the Germanic troops – who had no need for a baggage train, with wagons submerged up to their wheel hubs in sludge, and who knew the area so well – were more agile
in their movements. They were lightly but effectively armed and they were becoming more aggressive by the moment.

  Despite this situation, Caecina managed to cover Germanicus’s troops as they pulled back and made their way to the river Ems. There the legions would embark onto the fleet and be removed from harm’s way.

  Caecina remained, and the spectre of Teutoburg loomed large on the exhausted ranks of his army. It hung in the shouts of Armin: ‘Forward, men! Onward! We’re going to see a new Teutoburg! They’re sinking into the swamps. We can win this and we’ll be free forever!’

  But Aulus Caecina was a thick-skinned veteran: he didn’t know what fear was, his tongue was as salty as any jailbird’s, and he never lost heart. At the price of incredible strain, risking their lives repeatedly, he and his men managed after two days of marching to reach dry ground on open terrain. But the enemy was pressing from all directions and Armin narrowly missed killing Caecina, disembowelling his horse instead.

  Late that night the old soldier spoke to the legionaries and succeeded in instilling trust and calm: ‘Men! Do you really want to die in this slime and let that son of a bitch traitor who led your comrades into the slaughterhouse at Teutoburg have his way? Don’t you want to get back to your army quarters? Don’t you want to see those girls you left there, fuck those pretty whores? You’re not interested in some decent food, good wine, a dry bed and a nice fire to roast some tasty game?’

  No answer.

  ‘By Hercules! Did you hear me?’ cursed Caecina.

  ‘We heard you, Commander!’ one soldier piped up. Another snickered.

  ‘I’m ready to wager double what you earn, down to the last penny, that tomorrow we win!’

  ‘Deal, Commander!’ someone shouted.

  Caecina was bluffing, but he got the results he’d hoped for.

  It was still a dark and harrowing night. They had no tents, and no fire to dry out the damp. They were trying to work up their courage, but no one felt like talking. No one was sleeping that night in either camp, some for one reason and others for another. In fact, the Romans could see the fires of the Cherusci close by and hear the laughter and victory songs of the warriors.