And this fellow didn’t know what taxes were? Well, he’d find out. Oh, sure! Wouldn’t he just? “You’re a Roman subject now,” Caelius explained. He sounded sympathetic - he couldn’t help it. What were taxes? Oh, my! Shaking his head, he went on, “You have to pay to keep things going.”
“Pay?” Another word that meant little or nothing to the natives. The Germans mostly didn’t deal in silver and gold, or even in copper. They made no coins of their own, and were just learning to use the ones from Roman mints. They traded sheep for barley, or beer tor boards, or honey for blankets.
This year, Quinctilius Varus had said the legions could collect taxes in kind. Next year, the Germans would have to start forking over silver like everybody else. One thing: that would make payments a demon of a lot easier to carry away.
Caldus Caelius stopped woolgathering - although he’d be doing just that, literally, soon enough. “Pay,” he repeated. “You give me some of what you have, and the Empire lives on it.”
One of the other men, an older fellow, asked the one who spoke Latin something. The younger man with the mustaches answered in the Germans’ incomprehensible, guttural language. The older fellow growled like a mean hound. His hand dropped to the hilt of his sword.
“Tell your kinsman that isn’t a good idea,” Caelius advised. He turned and waved at the hard-faced Roman soldiers behind him. “We don’t want any trouble, but we’re ready for it.”
The mustachioed man spoke again. The graybeard’s hand fell away from the sword. Hate still smoldered in his pale eyes. The younger man, the one who spoke Latin, didn’t exactly look thrilled, either. “You say we taxes pay. You mean you us rob.”
“No,” Caelius said. Yes, he thought. “Robbers take whatever they want. We take only a little, only so much from each steading. The law tells us how much we are supposed to get.”
“Law? This is not law. This is robbery,” the German said. “Could you from my village take without soldiers behind you? No. Of course not. Robbing.”
“In the Empire, the tax collector comes without soldiers behind him,” Caelius said. “People give him what they owe, and he goes away.” Sometimes. Some places. When the harvest was good two or three years in a row. But it could happen.
“Then your men are without penises born,” the German said. It was a funny-sounding insult, but Caelius had no trouble understanding what it meant. The barbarian went on, “And what do your penisless men get for these taxes your robbers from them steal?”
“Roads. Baths. Courts. Soldiers who keep the peace so they don’t have to worry about getting robbed and murdered. Things they can’t do for themselves - things you people here don’t have yet.”
“But they lose their freedom.” That was not a question.
Caldus Caelius shrugged. “Who cares if you’re free if you’re stuck in the middle of the woods and nobody ten miles away even knows you’re there? The Empire reaches from Gaul to Syria. You could go trading to any of those places. You could be a soldier and serve anywhere. Augustus has German bodyguards even now.”
“Dogs,” the German said, and spat on the ground. “I am no dog. I am wolf.”
“Look, friend, I don’t care if you’re a dog or a wolf or a purple hedgehog. You’ve got to pay any which way,” Caldus Caelius said. “That’s what my orders are, and that’s what’s going to happen.”
“And if I want to fight instead?” the German asked.
Caelius glanced behind him. The native’s gaze followed his. The legionaries looked tough and ready for anything. Caelius’ mailshirt jingled on his shoulders as he shrugged. “Well, you can do that. You won’t like what comes of it, but you can.”
The German weighed the odds. Unless Caelius missed his guess, the fellow was also weighing his pride. Was getting his whole clan slaughtered worth it to him? He spoke in harsh gutturals to his countrymen. They went back and forth in that grunting, coughing language.
At last, the German asked, “How much you make us pay?”
Now they were at the stage of doing business. Caelius tried to hide his relief; he didn’t want the barbarian to think he was gloating - even if he was. Sounding as matter-of-fact as he could, he answered, “For a village of this size, two cows or eight sheep - or eight denarii, if you’ve got em.
“No denarii,” the German said, as if the idea was ridiculous. In his mind, it probably was. He went on, “We give you, you take, you away go, you us alone leave?”
“That’s the idea,” Caldus Caelius agreed. He didn’t say the Romans would be back to collect the tax next year, too, and the year after that, and the year after that. One thing at a time. And, with any luck at all, he wouldn’t be the one who came back to this village.
More back-and-forth in the Germans’ language. The barbarians didn’t like it. Well, who in his right mind did like paying taxes? You did it, and you thanked your gods you didn’t have to cough up more.
“We give you eight sheep, then,” said the man with the mustache. “You take them and you go. What is your name?”
“I’m Caldus Caelius,” Caelius answered. “What’s yours, friend, and why do you want to know?”
“Caldus Caelius.” The German said it two or three times, tasting it, fixing it in his memory. “Well, Caldus Caelius, I myself call Ingaevonus. Maybe we meet again, the two of us. We see who then remembers.”
“Anywhere you please, Ingaevonus.” Caelius knew he made a mess of the big man’s name, but he didn’t care. “Any time you please. With your friends or without them. With mine or without them, too.”
Ingaevonus looked at him in surprise. “It could be, after your own fashion, you have the makings of a man.” Before Caelius could even get mad at him for doubting it, the German turned away and started yelling in his own language. A couple of pimple-faced brats yelled back at him. He shouted them down. Caelius didn’t know what he said, but it sounded like a storm roaring through bare-branched winter trees.
The older fellow behind Ingaevonus put in his copper’s worth, too. The young punks stopped arguing. They trotted off, rounded up the sheep, and brought them back to Caldus Caelius. “Here. You take,” one of them said in fragmentary Latin.
“Thanks,” Caelius answered dryly. The kid, by the look on his face, wanted the Roman’s liver the way the vulture wanted Prometheus’. He probably hated all Romans on general principles.
Hate them or not, though, he’d picked up some of their language. Just about all the Gauls spoke some Latin these days, even if they still used their own tongue when they talked among themselves. Old-timers in the legions said a lot fewer people on the west side of the Rhine had known Latin when they were first stationed there. It would probably work the same way in Germany over the next thirty years.
That wasn’t Caldus Caelius’ worry. “You have paid the tax for this village, Ingaevonus,” he said in loud, formal tones. To his own men, he added, “Now we take the tax back to Mindenum.”
They would look like a pack of fools doing it, too: all these legionaries escorting eight skinny sheep. But overwhelming force had its advantages. The Germans weren’t going to try to take back their miserable beasts.
“You know what’d be funny?” a soldier said as they headed off toward their camp.
“What’s that, Septimus?” Caelius asked.
“If another bunch of our guys hit that village by mistake and try to squeeze eight more sheep out of those natives. You think that big fellow with the fur on his lip wouldn’t go up like Mount Etna?”
Caldus Caelius thought about it. Then he chuckled. “Crucify me if he wouldn’t.”
Laughing and joking, the Romans trudged back to Mindenum.
Arminius scowled in black fury as Roman soldiers led a horse and two sheep away from his father’s steading. Sigimerus and the other men there were also angry, but there were too many legionaries to fight. Trying would have meant throwing German lives on the dungheap.