When you got right down to it, he couldn’t.
Somebody shouted something. It didn’t sound like Latin. Caelius’ head snapped to the left, toward that hillock. But the cry sounded closer than the reverse slope should have been.
He wasn’t the only one who heard it. “What the demon?” another Roman said, his hand dropping to the hilt of his gladius.
Something sliced through the air. No - several somethings. No again - a swarm of somethings. For an instant, Caelius thought the cry had flushed a flock of birds, or perhaps even came from the throat of one of them. Only for an instant. Then, suddenly, horribly, he knew exactly what those somethings were, and he knew he and all the Romans with him had been betrayed.
The spears reached the top of their arcs. Some of them clattered together in the air. A few, knocked spinning, fell short. But most of them crashed down on the head of the Roman column.
Like his comrades, Caldus Caelius marched with his scutum slung over his back. The big, heavy shield would have been impossibly awkward on his arm. It was for battle, not travel. And so the shields did no good as the spears struck home.
One of the spears came down not half a cubit in front of Caldus Caelius’ foot and stood thrilling in the mud. Another pierced the thigh of the legionary marching to his left. The man stared at the shaft and the spurting blood for a couple of heartbeats, more astonished than in pain. Then reality caught up with amazement. He shrieked, clutched at the spear and at his leg, and crumpled.
A soldier two men to Caldus Caelius’ right took a spear through the throat. He made horrible gobbling noises, gore pouring from his mouth in place of words. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he too slumped to the muck of the track the Romans were following. In a sense, he was lucky: he didn’t suffer long before oblivion seized him. There were plenty of worse ways to go.
Caelius wished he hadn’t had that thought. How many worse ways would he see before this day died? And what sort of end will I find for myself? he wondered fearfully.
He turned to find out how the rest of the soldiers were faring. The answer was simple: worse than he could have imagined in his most dreadful nightmare. That enormous volley of spears had wrecked the head of the column. Dozens - no, more likely hundreds; maybe even thousands - of legionaries were down, some mercifully dead, more wounded and thrashing and screaming their torment and terror up to the wet, uncaring sky. The agonized din made him want to stuff his fingers in his ears.
More cries came from the Romans’ left. Those weren’t wails of pain but fierce, triumphant bellows. The Germans realized what they’d done with their shattering volley. Well, they could hardly not realize it, could they? They might be barbarians, but they weren’t stupid barbarians. They’d just proved that, by the gods!
They proved it again a moment later. They’d built ways to get up and over the curving rampart that concealed them. They dropped down on the near side and loped toward the legionaries. And they rushed out of the dark woods next to the rampart. Jove’s thunderbolt could not have struck the Romans a harder blow than those deadly spears.
“Fight!” Caldus Caelius yelled, shrugging out of his pack and drawing his sword. “We’ve got to fight them, or they’ll slaughter us like sheep! Deploy! Form line of battle!”
He wasn’t the only legionary shouting orders like that through the wounded soldiers’ howls and screams. Here and there, Romans did their best to obey. But the presence of their injured comrades not only demoralized them but also hampered their efforts to form up.
And, as Caldus Caelius rapidly discovered, even if that hadn’t been so, there was almost nowhere for the Romans to deploy. When they stepped off the track to the right, they sank to their knees in muck. The ground to the left was a little better, but sloped swiftly upward toward the hillock from which the spears had flown - and down which the baying German horde now swarmed.
Along with a few unwounded comrades, Caelius set himself. The legions were ruined. Even a blind man could sec that. The barbarians were going to slaughter every Roman they could catch. A few legionaries floundered out into the swamp, desperate to get away. Caelius might have done the same thing if it didn’t seem so obviously hopeless. Since it did . ..
“Come on!” he shouted. “We’ll make the whoresons pay for our hides, anyhow!” And if he made them kill him in battle, it would all be over pretty fast. Then they wouldn’t have the chance to amuse themselves with him at their leisure afterwards.
Something hard caught him in the side of the head. A stone? A spearshaft? The flat of a sword? He never knew. Inside a heartbeat, his vision went from a red flare to blackness. He crumpled into the mud, his hands scrabbling feebly.
Quinctilius Varus and Aristocles were arguing in Greek about Plato’s Symposium. It made time go by and helped Varus forget about the wet, gloomy German landscape all around.
“What I’d like to see is the Symposium on the stage,” Varus said.
“It’s not a play. It’s a dialogue!” Aristocles sounded shocked. He was fussy and precise. To him, everything had one proper place - and one proper place only.
“It could be a play,” the Roman insisted. “Aristophanes and Alcibiades are both wonderful roles, to say nothing of Socrates himself. You might -“ He broke off and fell back into Latin: “By the gods! What’s that?”
The color drained from Aristocles’ face. “Nothing good,” he answered. Numbly, Varus nodded. The two of them rode just in front of the baggage train, near the center of the long, straggling Roman column. That sudden eruption of shrieks and screams and wails from up ahead . . . It sounded like the noises from a slaughterhouse, but monstrously magnified.
No. Varus made himself shake his head. Thinking such thoughts is a had omen. I won’t believe it. I won’t let myself believe it.
He kept on not letting himself believe it for five more minutes, maybe even ten. Then a bloodied legionary came running back toward him, crying, “We’re buggered!”
“What do you mean?” Varus demanded. He feared he knew, but clung to ignorance as long as he could. Sometimes, as with a spouse’s infidelities, not knowing - indeed, deliberately looking the other way - was better.
But the wounded Roman cried, “The Germans! There’s a million Germans up there, your Excellency, and they’re slaughtering us.”
“No,” Quinctilius Varus whispered. “It can’t be.”
It could. He knew that only too well. And if the barbarians had attacked the legionaries ... If that had happened, then Arminius’ infidelities were likely to prove far more lethal than any mere spouse’s.
“What do we do, sir?” his pedisequus asked.
For a moment, Varus had no answer. Everyone from Segestes to Aristocles to Lucius Eggius had tried to tell him Arminius was not to be trusted. He hadn’t believed any of them. He’d been sure he knew better than all of them put together. And they were right. And he was wrong. And, because he was wrong, because he’d trusted where he shouldn’t, three Roman legions were in deadly peril.
No treachery since Helen of Troy’s had caused this kind of slaughter. Being remembered with Menelaus was a distinction Varus could have done without. He hadn’t even got to lay Arminius - or wanted to, no matter what some people thought.
“What do we do, sir?” This time, Aristocles and the wounded Roman soldier asked it together. They sounded more urgent that way - more frantic, really. A tragic chorus, Varus thought, and wished he hadn’t. He paused to listen to the racket from up ahead. It sounded worse than ever. Sure enough, the wounded man had told the truth. Varus couldn’t imagine why the fellow wouldn’t have; he could feel himself grasping for straws.