Arminius

by Robert Fabbri

  ‘Because the thing that divided us is gone and is now in Rome’s hands.’

  ‘Thusnelda?’

  ‘Yes, neither of us have her now; you want her back and I am grateful to her because had Segestes not called Germanicus to his aid to relieve your siege and help him escape, I would most certainly be dead; such was the prize that Segestes offered that Germanicus dropped everything to come for Thusnelda and we were down to our last few days of food and water trapped in some caves in the south of our lands. Because of her capture we have lived. For the present, let us put what is gone behind us and unite our forces.’

  I looked at my enemy and although I could see no trace of friendship in his eyes I knew that his intention was honest; for the time being we could be allies. I took him into an embrace. ‘We will muster the tribes at Aliso again. We shall try to do what we did in the Teutoburg Wald, something that we could have done last year had. well, never mind what we could have done last year because we will do it this year. We will make them pay as they attempt the passage of the—

  ‘The Long Bridges,’ the street-fighter cut in. ‘I was there with the Fifth Alaudae.’

  Thumelicatz looked pleased at the admission. ‘Tell us then, Roman; and I’ll have my slaves take notes so that the narrative can be fleshed out, as my father didn’t leave that detailed an account.’

  The street-fighter rubbed one of his cauliflower ears and collected his thoughts for a few moments. ‘Well, the year before had been a fraught summer because Tiberius had refused our demands that military service be reduced from twenty years, and five in reserve, back down to sixteen years in the legions and then four years as a reserve; none of the lads was best pleased when the news came through and so we refused to take the oath to the new Emperor. We wanted Germanicus to be emperor; him we loved, whereas Tiberius was dour and distant; but he refused and eventually shamed us into backing down. Once we were back under military discipline, with hardly any warning, he had a bridge built and we crossed the Rhenus into the lands of the Marsi with the more rebellious cohorts of Germania Inferior’s four legions. Germanicus reckoned it best if we take out our frustration on the Germanic tribes rather than each other, and he was probably right. So, we were back in the land of fear and forest and unable to complain about it, as we had only just submitted to his will and couldn’t mutiny a second time without the consequences being far harsher than just handing over the ringleaders for execution.

  ‘But it seemed that it would not be a repeat of the disaster of five years previously as we caught the population unawares; we ripped through them, burning every homestead and slaughtering all the inhabitants, regardless of sex or age, who we could find. A few of the lads, a very few, who had made it out of Germania after Varus and had been drafted into the Alaudae – you can imagine the thoroughness with which they took to the task, if you take my meaning? Well, after about twenty days of laying waste to anything we came across, the Eagle of the Nineteenth was uncovered and Germanicus felt that would conclude proceedings for that season very nicely and so we headed back to the fortress of Aliso, which had been rebuilt by auxiliaries whilst we’d been off enjoying ourselves, in order to pick up the military road back to the Rhenus and a well-earned rest for the winter. And so we did and had a fine winter of it. The following spring we came east again, this time to give the Chatti a good taste of our iron, and they didn’t like it, that much was for sure. We burnt Mattium, killing or enslaving most of the inhabitants, before chasing the rump of the Chatti army south to a series of caves, high in some cliffs, that they’d fortified so that they were almost impossible to break into; but just as we were about to starve them out Germanicus suddenly lifted the siege and we raced northeast. When we saw why we could understand it.’ He looked at Thusnelda. ‘You were a beautiful young woman and we knew that you would be a great loss for Arminius and a trophy for Germanicus. By that time the season was coming to an end. Germanicus took two of the legions back to the empire by ship, sailing up the Amisia and then out into the Northern Sea – but that’s another story – us along with the Second, Fourteenth and Twentieth were to go back with his number two, Caecina, along the military road following the Lupia.

  ‘But it didn’t prove to be quite so straightforward; things never are in Germania.

  ‘“Shit!” my mate Sextus said as we paraded in front of the camp on the morning of our departure. “That don’t look good, Magnus, not good at all.”

  ‘Now, Sextus isn’t the brightest of the bunch – indeed, of any given bunch there’s a fair probability that he will be the least bright – but this time he was absolutely right: it didn’t look good at all. “Shit indeed, mate,” I said, sucking the wind through my teeth. “There’re a fuck of a lot of them.” And there were; thousands, or so it seemed, lining the crest of a hill a couple of miles to the east of us and looking hungry for some Roman blood. “And we’re two hundred miles and twenty bridges from the Rhenus.”

  ‘Sextus screwed up his face in the way that he always does on the very rare occasions that he attempts arithmetic. “That’s a bridge every seven miles,” he guessed eventually.

  ‘“Something like that, Sextus, my old son, something like that.”

  ‘“And who gave you permission to have an opinion, soldier!” Servius, our optio, screamed, from behind me, into my ear. “Any more talking in the ranks and the only opinion you’ll be having is how much the cane bruises on your back hurt with every shovelload of shit I have you move from one side of the latrine ditch to the other, and then back again.”

  ‘Sextus and I snapped to attention and pulled on our most earnest military expressions, staring intently somewhere in the middle distance. But Servius’ ire was distracted by a communal groan of anguish from the entire parade of four, almost fullstrength, legions, as if we was all being buggered for the first time. To our left, across the river, in the hills that followed it west, thousands more of the hairy bastards … er, my apologies, noble Germanic warriors appeared and, at some signal unseen, both groups gave a low roar of wicked intent: a nasty sound to say the least, but very chilling when you know you’ve got at least a ten-day march ahead of you with those bastards snapping at you all the time and then running away sharpish every time we turn to offer them a decent toe to toe to be settled by whose got the sharpest iron and the biggest balls.

  ‘Anyway, the blow-boys started rumbling away on their cornua, standards got waved and then dipped or raised depending on what series of oaths each primus centurion of the cohort roared. Our cohort standard leant left and then dipped once as the cornua rumbled a downwards call; the centurion of our century, Carrinas Balbillus, or the arse-widener as he was affectionately known, due to the novel usage he would put his vine cane to when he felt that a simple beating was not sufficient punishment, politely asked us to turn about and retreat one hundred paces. Once we had done that he requested us to be so kind as to form column. We were facing west; we were not going to offer battle but, rather, make a run for it. From where we were, in the Fifth Alaudae, ninth cohort, seventh century, it was impossible to tell what was going on, but rumour swiftly made it through the ranks that all four legions were forming a hollow square with the baggage in the middle and that we were the left-hand side with the First Germanica at the front, the Twenty-first Rapax on the right and the Twentieth watching our arses, something, Servius observed in a rare display of wit, they should be very good at given their habit of hiding behind us every time a rumble threatened.

  ‘Mars alone knows how long it took to sort ourselves out but eventually the centurions and optios decided that they had shouted at us enough for the present and we were all in the right place. Out to our flank we could see a couple of the Gallic auxiliary cohorts forming up defensively as if an attack were coming in from a previously unseen source whilst two of the Hispanic light cavalry alae swirled around either flank, no doubt wishing to dissuade the Germanic bastards from trying to claim a few Gallic heads – we all know they hate a Gaul as much as a Gaul hates a G
erman, but a Gaul in the uniform of Rome is a sight so provoking to them that they would trample their own grandmothers to get at such an offensive thing. As you can imagine, we were quite happy to let them sort it out by themselves, if it meant we could just get on with our marching in peace and quiet; eventually, after more rumbling of cornua and dipping of standards, the arse-widener, with the utmost consideration for our sensibilities, suggested that we might like to move forward at the convenient pace of double-quick march. We, of course, were only too willing to oblige him so kindly had been his entreaty, and with our equipment yokes over our shoulders but our shields in hand and not slung behind us, we happily yomped off west.

  ‘But Germania is not a place renowned for giving us Romans an easy go of it and they have some very anti-Roman gods, one of whom, Donar, seemed to have it in for us in a particularly spiteful way. He has a hammer, I believe, and it was at the same instant that we broke into a quick trot that he brought his hammer down on whatever he brings it down upon and the clouds burst with a rumble that put to shame all the efforts of the blow-boys during our recent manoeuvring. Down it pissed and the wind gusted so that the rain washed by in sheets and swirls, driving into our eyes and through our chainmail – our cohort hadn’t yet been issued with the new segmented armour- so that before we’d gone a mile we were all about as miserable as the arse-widener liked us to be, and it showed in the glee on his face as he gave us playful taps with his cane to help us along the way.

  ‘Out to our left the rain partially covered the running battle that the Gauls were having with their friends, but with the help of the Hispanic cavalry and a couple of reinforcement cohorts of Aquitanians they seemed to be holding off any attempt at making a meal of our testicles.’ The street-fighter paused and scowled at Thumelicatz’s jar. ‘That just ain’t natural.’ Shaking his head he continued: ‘Anyhow, on we went, gritting our teeth as the miles mounted up, each one harder than the last and, bearing in mind that we were four legions in a hollow square, which was, in fact, a rectangle two hundred paces across and over a mile long, following a road that was only ten paces wide very few of us had any firm footing. Where we were in the exalted heights of the seventh century of the ninth cohort, by the time we got to any given piece of mud a few hundred other lads had been there before so the going weren’t at all good, if you take my meaning, not like a nice canter around the track of the Circus Maximus back in Rome. And then, of course, there was the small matter of the bridges, which only the transport could use seeing as they were on the road; the rest of us had to cross the rivers in whatever way we could, up to our necks often enough, and if we weren’t cold when we splashed in then we certainly were as we scrambled up the opposite bank.

  ‘On we yomped, our lungs bursting and our throats on fire, despite the rain, with hardly any of the lads able to at least make a quip, which mightily annoyed the arse-widener as the only excuse he had for savaging us was imagined slacking; but no one was going to slack when the choice was between physical torment under the loving strokes of Balbillus’ cane or to be entertained by a nice bunch of lads who are very keen on warming your toes on a cold day above one of their fires.

  ‘“Halt!” the arse-widener shouted just as I thought that a fire might not be so bad a thing after all. I came out of the nightmare that I’d been subjected to for however long to find that we were all standing still and were now being invited to knock up a marching camp for thirty thousand men.

  ‘Well, we ain’t never worked so hard so quickly; although each spade-full of earth seemed to be twice the weight it normally was due to the excessive amount of water it contained, we had very soon dug two and a half miles of four-foot-deep ditch and piled the earth up around it in a four-foot-high breastwork. As we worked, the auxiliaries kept the tribes at bay, covering us in long screens on both flanks of the column; but despite their efforts they couldn’t push the bastards back far enough into the forest to either side in order that we could cut the extra wood we needed for the palisade. As a lot of the stakes we carried with us had been lost, the ditch and breastwork were all that we had to shelter behind. But at least we had our tents and were soon taking our cheerless cold meals inside them, grateful to be out of the rain for a short while at least. And it was a short while for after just two hours the arse-widener slams his cane down on the tops of our tents and suggests that we might like to join the tenth cohort in spending the next couple of hours manning the perimeter so that the rest of the legion could sleep safe and sound tucked up in their bedding-rolls knowing that we were watching over them like concerned mother hens. Obviously we told the arse-widener that nothing would give us more pleasure and he and Servius showed their gratitude by thrashing us into position next to the eighth century.

  ‘And it weren’t nice, not one bit, because the auxiliaries had withdrawn into the camp so that there was nothing to prevent the blood-lusting bastards from coming right up to the ditch and throwing the javelins at us; and they did just that again and again. I had Sextus on my left and on my right this Greek, Cassandros, who had just been transferred into the Fifth from an eastern legion and had brought all those nasty eastern habits with him. We peered into the downpour and through it we could just see the shadow of a mass of men; forward they came, running towards us, halooing and ululating and making all sorts of ghastly sounds. We hunkered down behind our shields, resting on the top of the breastwork. “Brace yourself, Sextus, my lovely,” I muttered as I felt my arsehole clench tight enough to strangle an inquisitive rat. “I don’t think they’re coming to deliver our breakfast and enquire whether or not we slept well.”

  ‘My mate frowned. “That would be stupid because it ain’t breakfast time yet and they’re the ones who are keeping us awake.”

  ‘“Never mind, Sextus, never mind.”

  ‘“He’s not that bright, is he?” Cassandros observed.

  ‘“He never claimed to be,” I replied.

  ‘Any further discussion on the subject was curtailed by an influx of javelins. They thumped into our shields all along the line, hollow and resounding, like hail on ox-hide drums. I don’t know how many stuck themselves into my shield but by the time the hairy bastards had started to fling themselves across our nice ditch it felt extremely unwieldy and there was nothing I could do about it.

  ‘Now, when you first join the legions you’re made to attack a wooden post with a wooden sword day after day for months, when you’re not doing twenty mile route-marches in full kit, that is; well, no one really understands just why the drill-masters favour such a seemingly pointless exercise until the first time you have to make your iron bite. And so it was that night, my blade punching through the gap between mine and Sextus’ shields, stabbing faces and chests as the Germanic tribesmen tried to climb over the breastwork, sometimes using the javelins in our shields as handholds, hauling themselves up and forcing us to pull hard on our grips so our protection wouldn’t be pulled down. Blood spurted from severed arteries and rough-hewn stumps as we worked our blades; now it was automatic, second nature and the hours at the post made sense and the cursing of the drill-masters now seemed like music our strokes could keep time to. Stab, twist, left, right, pull, stab again, all of us in a line, two deep, with the arse-widener at our centre, howling his hatred at the unwashed barbarians for having the cheek to try to break into his camp as he sent warrior after warrior to whatever the Germanic afterlife consists of in payment for such effrontery. Behind us, Servius, with his optio’s rod held to the backs of the second rankers to keep our line straight and also to dissuade any one from thinking that it might just be more comfortable back in the tent, yelled insults at us to keep us cheerful as we flung them back, dead, dying on top of the growing pile in the ditch. And that was just the problem: the more we killed the shallower was the ditch and the easier it became for them to scale the breastwork. I felt my shield being tugged at, hard, and had to squeeze the grip for all I was worth for it not to be ripped away; a quick glance down and I saw fingers wrapped around its ri
m. With a sideways jerk of the wrist my blade cleaned them off, their former owner’s screams lost in the din, and I felt the pressure release on my shield as, in the corner of my eye, something flashed towards me. Instinctively I raised my shield and blocked, with the top rim, a spear thrust aimed right at my eyes; but the move opened a gap between the breastwork and the bottom rim. I felt the air punched out of me and looked down to see a spear point rammed into my stomach. I cracked my shield back down onto it and, to my relief, it shifted; the thrust hadn’t been enough to break through the chainmail. However, by now I was starting to get cross, as was Sextus and Cassandros to either side; in fact the whole century was not in the best of moods and, much to Balbillus’ glee, we bellowed our defiance and took as many lives as we could before they slunk back off into the pissing rain.

  ‘Now, the trouble with Germans is that if one German does something then all the other buggers have to do the same thing so that they won’t seem to be deemed lesser men; and so when we beat off that attack that wasn’t the end of it, far from it. Back they came but this time it was fresh ones who’d been sitting out the last effort and now wished to show their beaten comrades how it really should be done. We swapped ranks so that Sextus, Cassandros and me just had to do some pushing whilst holding our shields over the men in front. Only the arse-widener seemed happy to stay in the front rank and we were all happy to see him there in the hope that some barbarian would do us a favour but, contrary as they are, none of them did. By the time we were relieved a couple of hours later he was covered in blood and in fine fettle, having piled up a nice big mound of dead in front of his section of the breastwork, and was more than ready to shout us to sleep. Sleep, however, was not the easiest thing to come by as the raids persisted throughout the night and air was constantly filled with the screams of the maimed and the dying so that they almost drowned out the blow-boys’ reveille an hour before dawn. Down the camp came, tents loaded onto each tent-party’s mule and the bigger items, like the grain-mill and the arse-widener’s tent, loaded onto the century’s cart that also carried the carroballista. The auxiliaries formed up again to shield us whilst we were bawled into the correct order of march, but for some reason the tribes held off, preferring instead to watch us from a distance and jeer and favour us with the sight of their arses as we moved off.