by George Green
Hawk
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Adrienne, without whom nothing really happens
Chapter One
General Varus was not feeling well. The night before he was due to march east from Gaul to begin his subjugation of the rebellious German tribes, he ate an oyster that disagreed with him. Varus had actually eaten several dozen oysters, but his doctors thought probably only one of them had made him ill. The result left him prostrate, retching and helpless. He was certainly unable to get on a horse for a full day’s march. Varus refused to lead his army in a litter or carriage. He wanted to march out of the camp at the head of his men, on horseback, like a latter-day Alexander.
His officers reported that everything was ready for the march to begin.
His doctors advised him to delay the start of the march, as he was not yet well.
His officers told him that delaying the march would be damaging to morale.
His doctors mused on the probable effect on morale if, as was likely to happen, two hundred paces into the march the General had to jump off his horse and sprint for the bushes while tugging frantically at his underwear. Not so much like the incomparable and warlike Alexander, more like a fat old man with bad guts.
Varus thought about that prospect, and then agreed to let the army march out of the camp without him. He lay in bed in a pool of oily sweat for three days in the grip of stomach cramps that bent his body like a grasshopper’s leg.
On the third morning he woke, feeling a little better. His doctors gave him some of the truly revolting lentil porridge that the soldiers lived on and which was regarded as a sovereign remedy for a rebellious stomach. If you were well it made you feel ill, but if you were ill it made you well. Varus had never been a legionary and so hadn’t eaten it before. To his amazement the bowl of greasy pulses stayed down, though the General now knew why most officers regarded legionary’s porridge as the greatest spur to the desire for promotion in the whole army.
The next day, still fragile but somewhat restored, and determined that fighting berserk Germans was preferable to eating even one more bowl of lentil porridge, Varus carefully mounted his horse and, wincing and shifting from side to side in his saddle, trotted briskly at the head of his personal guard to catch up with the three legions marching into Germany.
In the General’s saddle-bag was the Emperor Augustus’ most recent letter. Varus had it by heart.
Identify the German tribes in revolt with all possible speed, subjugate and punish them and then withdraw to your winter quarters. On no account commit all your men at one time to one endeavour. Better to lose a battle and withdraw with the army intact than lose the war. This is not an expedition to extend the Empire, and even if we wished it to be so you do not have sufficient troops or resources for such a venture. Your mission is to consolidate and pacify our northern border. I repeat, General Varus, for emphasis: quell the rebellious Germans severely and quickly; fill them with regret for their foolishness, ensure that they will not rise lightly again, then leave. I rely on you to keep our Northern Command an effective fighting force.
It was addressed to ‘Varus, Commander, Imperial Army of the Rhine’, and signed ‘Augustus, Emperor’. No salute, no recognition of his achievements or even his rank, none of the warmth he deserved. Varus was, he thought, a distant cousin of the Emperor, but this relationship had never been officially acknowledged. Augustus didn’t like him, had always treated him as a slightly dim-witted servant. He had made Varus a general because there was no one else available, and hadn’t taken the trouble to hide his unwillingness to entrust the expedition to him. Varus smiled as his black stallion trotted swiftly towards the rearguard of the huge Roman army in front of him. The Emperor was an old man and had an old man’s fear of adventure. He, Varus, would finish the German problem once and for all. Augustus would curse him for disobeying orders, but Old Butter-No-Parsnips would smile as he did so. The Empire would be larger, stronger and more secure, and Varus would have a Triumph, would march through Rome at the head of his victorious army, the envy of every man and the desire of every woman. Augustus would welcome his return home, flatter him, shower him with honours. The Emperor might even admit he had misjudged him. Well, on reflection, probably not that, but he would know it in his heart.
The General smiled to himself and kicked his horse forward. He could live without the apology. He’d settle for the Triumph.
The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth legions had set out to join Varus’ garrison command from Rome a month before, swelling it to eight times its normal size. They marched ten abreast in legionary style, a stride strict enough to be military but natural enough to allow a man to walk all day for weeks on end without breaking down. There was pride in their marching; they were the legions whose pace was so consistently precise that the army used them to measure distance when it had to be exact. When these legions marched two thousand paces, it was a mile, no more nor less.
When Varus and his guard caught up with the vanguard of the army, deep within the Teutoburg Forest, the General knew immediately that he had problems he hadn’t foreseen.
The legions were stretched in a thin column, moving slowly through the dense centre of the huge forest. The officers reported that for the last four days the legionaries had not marched ten abreast, or any number abreast at all, and their step had been anything but precise. They had trickled across the ground like water, scrambling, tripping and cursing their way through the forest. There were no roads or paths, no straight lines, no space between the trees wider than a man. Much of the time they could not see their way in front of them. On every side a dark wall of leaves and wood rose up and joined above them in a thick mat that allowed only the most occasional shaft of light through. The day was eternal twilight, the night an absolute dark which moonlight – if it even existed in Germany – could not penetrate. Young trees spread their branches at head height so that the soldiers had to duck and sway to avoid them; mature trees stood a hundred feet high and six feet wide across the soldiers’ way, and between the growing and mature trees were every size and shape of fallen trunk and branch, laid across each other at random angles and in haphazard directions and crumbling with slick dark rot and pungent fungus. Everywhere around the fallen trees were thick bushes, fierce with thorns and sl
ippery with mildew, that tugged and snagged at the hessian puttees the legionaries wore to protect their calves. A sheen of damp and mould covered everything, like grease in an ill-tended kitchen. It rained constantly: sometimes a thin haze that crystallized on men’s tunics and then sank silently into their bones until the legionaries ground their teeth with the ache of it, sometimes a curtain of water that splashed audibly when it hit the ground, made every handhold treacherous and turned the ground into a swamp.
And reports were coming in of a different type of danger. There were shadows in the forest, wraiths that the nervous soldiers saw out of the corners of their eyes but that slipped away as soon as they looked directly at them. The Romans were in a foreign land and far from home, and the gods they had brought with them – so virile in the bright warmth of Italy – seemed old and cowed and timorous in the cold shadows of the silent forest.
The men pushed and hacked their way forward, slipping between the obstacles any way they could. Within an hour of entering the forest the officers had given up trying to maintain any sort of recognizable formation. The soldiers initially pushed forward briskly enough, but the baggage wagons behind them could not cross the fallen trees. The officers then ordered the trees to be cleared and straight roads driven through them, but the men were soon exhausted, and so they gave up on straight roads and began to look for the lines of least resistance. This meant winding and circling along narrow paths that might lead away from their direction of march, and often the carts would stutter along the track for a mile only to emerge almost where they had begun. The forward column of men would march for an hour and then see the middle of the army appear in front of them, and there was total confusion.
At the end of the first day after his arrival, General Varus came up from the rear of the army and held a meeting of his officers. He demanded to know why the army was moving so slowly, why there was so much noise, why the men were complaining. The officers were good soldiers, professionals, and their reply was unanimous and unsparing. A huge African captain called ‘Bull’ by his men spoke for them all. In short, brutal sentences he told of an army on the verge of chaos, moving cramped and blind over impossible terrain towards an enemy who must surely know it was coming. Once he had finished, he paused, then sat down slowly.
The situation was the exact opposite of the conditions that any Roman veteran liked. There was silence as the officers waited for Varus to speak. He looked around the tent. Every man met the General’s gaze, nodded agreement to what had been said. They waited for him to make up his mind.
Varus looked around and understood the situation. He was aware they thought him many kinds of fool, but he knew what they wanted him to say, and he knew that there are times when a leader has to appear to listen, even if he has no intention of committing himself to what he hears. He gestured in a way that gave them the floor.
‘What do you suggest?’
The leaders of the great army leant forward and talked into the night.
It was agreed that a series of groups of lightly armed sappers would go in front of the army to cut a trail as best they could. The soldiers would cut and hack and trample themselves into exhaustion for an hour, then another group would relieve them. They would work around the clock. At night they would make progress while the army rested and reorganized, and the army would gradually catch up during the day.
On the fifth day Varus rode up to just behind the vanguard of the army and smiled. It was raining, the usual bone-chilling German drizzle that made him yearn for the warm dry slopes of Tuscany. The rainclouds made the gloom even deeper under the trees, but Varus was content. The path-clearing idea was working. The way was rough and the wagons would find it heavy going, but the soldiers were getting better at clearing the undergrowth and the way was passable.
Varus rode around a sharp bend in the trail and was forced to halt. The vanguard were no longer moving forward. The narrow path was completely blocked by a tight press of soldiers, standing in a confused group and being shouted at by centurions. Varus stood in his stirrups to see what was holding the march up.
An officer shouldered his way slowly back through the group and saluted.
‘Centurion Morius, Tenth Legion.’
Varus nodded. ‘What’s wrong? Why have the men stopped?’
‘Sir, I…’ The centurion’s eyes looked sideways. The men around him were listening with interest.
Varus could feel his control slipping away. ‘Why have the men stopped moving? Answer me!’
Morius hesitated, then straightened himself to attention. He pointed to the front of the column. ‘Would you come with me, sir?’
The trail was narrow. Soldiers climbed up earth banks and disappeared into bushes to make room enough to permit Varus’ horse to pass up the line. It took a long time to travel the hundred paces to where the path ended. A wall of trees and matted vegetation rose up in front of them.
Varus looked around uncomprehendingly. He opened his mouth to shout at Morius, then paused and gestured the centurion to come closer. He leant forward, and said, ‘Centurion, where are the men supposed to be cutting the path? Why aren’t they working?’
The centurion swallowed, and looked over Varus’ shoulder as he replied in an undertone similar to the General’s. ‘We don’t know, sir. When we arrived this morning to relieve them, this was as far as they had got. None of them were here.’
Varus sat straight on his horse and tipped his head back so that his chin pointed straight out in front of him, a habit much imitated by his soldiers. ‘What do you mean, not here? Deserted?’
There was a snort of derision from one of the soldiers behind him. ‘No bloody chance of deserting here. Where the fuck would they go to in this midden of a place?’ The men around him laughed and murmured their agreement.
Morius snapped a glance sideways and the soldiers were silent. He knelt down and pointed to a spot just in front of him. ‘I don’t think so, sir.’
Varus looked at the ground. The darkness made the muddy grass almost black, but he could see that the ground was darker where the centurion was pointing. Varus swung his leg across the horse’s back and dismounted. He knelt and put his hand on the grass, then lifted it close to his face. His palm was dark and slippery. There was a smell, a sweet, sickly odour, animal. Varus looked around. Nearby, a gap in the foliage allowed a thin stream of weak sunlight to filter through. He walked across and let the light illuminate his hand.
It was covered in blood.
He turned to the centurion. ‘All gone?’
Morius nodded. ‘No sign of them, sir. No bodies, no weapons, just blood on the ground.’
Varus lifted his head again. He had been faintly aware of a distant sound beyond the hundred clashings and murmurings that a marching army makes. He realized that the sound was becoming louder.
‘What’s that noise?’ he said.
* * *
When Alraic was almost a man but still a boy, it was the greatest story they had, so they all heard it often. Everyone who sat around the camp fires knew by heart how the Great Chief Armin led their leaders to where all the German tribes had agreed to meet in council. They knew the story of how Armin spoke and how the tribes buried their differences, and made plans to wipe out the Romans and ensure they never came to trouble the Germans again. The bards told about the incredulity that filled the tribes when they heard how the Romans were advancing into the Teutoburg, and how that disbelief became a fierce joy when it became clear that their prayers had been answered and the god Wodan had delivered the Romans into their hands.
Alraic heard the stories too, and his heart rose as he remembered how he had walked with his brothers that day, moving silently beside the advancing Roman column, often close enough to reach out and touch the miserable soaking legionaries as they hacked their way forward, and yet the alarm was not given once. The Romans slipped and fell and cursed and got up and pushed on, ever deeper and deeper into the forest. The Germans’ natural inclination had been to meet th
e invaders at the earliest opportunity and protect their homeland at its frontier, but Armin had made them see that letting them advance well into the forest made the Roman defeat more certain by stretching both their supply lines and their defences, as well as making sure that the column was not the bait in a trap. The tribes let the legions slide and curse and struggle their way deep into the forest until there were thousands of warriors and many tens of leagues between the Romans and safety, until even the most cautious chief agreed that the fear of a trick or an ambush was an illusion.
Then they struck at the invaders like a clenched fist, all Germans together, harder and more united than ever before.
The Romans were stretched into a thin spine of disorganization, without formation or lines of communication. The main body of soldiers travelled by day and rested at night, but the vanguard worked constantly to clear a path. It was hard, slow work, and when the army stopped for the night there was no distance between the vanguard and the main body. However, they worked on through the night, and by the morning they were a good distance in front of the army. They were lightly armed and exhausted from the work. They were killed easily with arrows, and their bodies dragged away. Silent men filled the trees and bushes to wait for the Roman chief to arrive, to see him realize his men had vanished, that he was not alone in the forest.
The expression on his face was worth the wait.
Meanwhile, the encircling warriors attacked the back of the column, partly because it was the weakest part of the line, partly to prevent any possibility of a retreat. The forest was so dense that legionaries in the rearguard were dying while their comrades a bow-shot away were unaware that anything was happening. The Roman line lay across the forest floor like a carelessly dropped rope. They could not form their squares, could not co-ordinate their movements. There was no possibility of taking up a defensive formation, no chance of doing anything but fighting the man who rose up out of the ground in front of them. The attackers worked their way up the line like tidal water moving up around a sandbar, some of them punching up through the line, killing every Roman they met, while others moved silently and unseen up both sides of the column. As the next section became aware of the attack behind them they would turn to face it, and then the encircling Germans struck from the front and both sides. There was added confusion caused by the Roman habit of positioning their food wagons and other supplies near the back of the column. When the soldiers guarding them were killed, the horses panicked and ran forward, dragging the broken wagons through the ragged lines the legionaries were forming to meet the German attacks and wrecking what little order their officers managed to create.