His countless servants and slaves listened, yes. And, behind his back, they rolled their eyes and spiraled their forefingers next to their ears. They knew bloody well it was hotter and nastier in Rome than it would have been at any of the many summer refuges Augustus could have chosen. If he wanted to put up with sweat and with city stinks wafted on the breeze, that was his business. If he wanted them to put up with those things, too . . . that was also his business, and all they could do about it was grouse and fume when he wasn’t watching or listening.
He liked to nap in the afternoon - no wonder, not when he was as old as he was. It gave his servants and his bodyguards (some Romans, others wandering Germans chosen for their size and ferocity) more of a chance to complain. And, as luck would have it, he was asleep when the courier from the north rode up on a horse he’d come as close to killing as made no difference.
Seeing the sorry state of the animal, one of Augustus’ grooms clucked reproachfully. Another said, “You could have come slower, friend, for he’s sound asleep right now. He’ll be up and about in a couple of hours.”
“Wake him,” the courier said in a flat, hard voice.
“Wha-at?” both grooms chorused, as if not believing their ears. One of them added, “He’d skin us if we did.”
“He’ll skin you if you don’t,” the courier said. “The news I bring is that important.”
“What is it, then?” asked the groom who’d talked of skinning.
The courier looked through him. “It is for Augustus - that’s what it is. He’ll skin you if anyone hears it before him, too.”
“Well, go on in,” that same groom said. “Not for us to say who sees Augustus and who doesn’t,” It’s not my job: the underling’s escape hatch since the beginning of time.
In went the courier. He had several brief but heated exchanges with Augustus’ slaves. He finally unbent enough to tell the senior servitors he brought news from Germany. When they asked him what the news was, he looked through them, too. They muttered among themselves, in Greek and Aramaic and perhaps other languages that weren’t Latin. By the way they eyed the courier, they loved him not at all. He was making them decide things in the absence of their master. If Augustus didn’t think they should have let him be disturbed . . .
But, in the end, the courier’s stubbornness carried the day. “Stay here,” one of the senior servitors told the fellow, sending him a baleful stare that he ignored. “We will rouse Augustus and tell him you are here with your important news. What he does after that is up to him, of course.”
“Of course,” the courier said, and visibly composed himself to wait.
He didn’t need to wait long. Augustus, a little stooped, hurried into the anteroom a few minutes later. His gray hair was tousled, his tunic wrinkled and rumpled; he rubbed at his eyes to get sleep out of them. “You have news from Germany?” he said without preamble. “Give it to me at once.”
“Yes, sir.” The courier bowed. He respected the master of the Roman world, if not the lesser men surrounding him. “I am sorry, sir, but the news is as bad as it can be. Quinctilius Varus’ three legions are destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest, only a handful of men escaping. Their eagles are lost, captured by the Germans. Varus trusted the chieftain named Arminius, and the barbarian betrayed him to his doom. When Varus saw the fight was hopeless, he had a slave slay him. He died as well as a man could, but thousands more died with him and because of him.”
As the courier spoke, color drained from Augustus’ face, leaving him pale as bleached linen. “You are sure of this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “No possible doubt?”
“None, sir. I’m sorry. The man who gave me the written message” - the courier took it off his belt and handed it to Augustus - “had it from one of the horsemen who somehow escaped the massacre inside Germany. The rider filled his ears with worse things than ever got written down, and I had some of them from him. To say it was a bad business beggars the power of words.”
“It can’t be,” Augustus muttered. “It can’t.” Moving like a man in the grip of nightmare, he broke the seal on the written message, unrolled it, and held it out at arm’s length to read it. The scribe who first composed the message must have remembered it was bound for an old man, for he’d written it large to make sure the intended recipient could make it out. By the look of anguish on Augustus’ face, the power of written words to describe what had happened in Germany wasn’t beggared after all.
“Are you all right, sir?” one of his underlings asked in Greek-flavored Latin, real anxiety filling his voice. The ruler of the Roman world was the very image of a man overwhelmed, a man unmanned, by disaster unlooked-for. Oedipus could have seemed no more appalled, no more horrified, on discovering he’d lain with his mother.
Were any pins or brooches handy, Augustus might well have sought to blind himself as Oedipus had done. As things were, he reeled away from the courier and the slaves and servitors who helped make him the most powerful man in the world. He might as well have been blind as he fetched up against the frame of the doorway through which he’d entered the antechamber.
He pounded his head on the sturdy timbers of the frame. While his servants exclaimed in alarm, he cried out as if he were indeed the protagonist of a tragedy on the stage: “Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions!”
In a tragedy, everyone knew - though the actors’ skill might almost disguise the fact - that the events portrayed came from the realms of myth and legend and history, and were not happening to those portraying them. Here ... It was real. No one would muster the men of Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX again. They were dead - all too often, horribly dead.
“Give me back my legions, Quinctilius Varus!” Augustus wailed again, his forehead bruised and swelling. “Give them back, I tell you!”
Neither the courier nor any of the servitors seemed to know what to say. None dared say anything, for fear it would be wrong. When Augustus cried out once more and yet again battered his head against the doorframe, one of the men who served him - the men who helped him rule the Roman Empire - gestured to the courier.
By then, the man who’d brought the bad news was glad to get away, lest he be blamed for it. Augustus’ servitor took him off to the kitchen and told the lesser slaves there to bring him bread and wine and olives.
“Obliged, sir,” the courier said, and then, “I’m sorry. I knew it would be bad. I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
“He never imagined failure,” the servitor said. “Why should he, when he’s known so much success?”
“Beats me.” The courier gulped wine. He would never be able to drink enough to forget the look on Augustus’ face when the Roman ruler realized all his plans for Germany had just collapsed in ruin. “What will he do now?”
“I don’t know.” From one of Augustus’ aides, that was no small ad-mission. “I fear we shall have to change our policy, which is not something we usually do. Gods curse those barbarians for being difficult!”
As the courier nodded, Augustus’ voice echoed down the halls from the chamber where he still stood: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”
Scowling, Arminius stared across the Rhine. He wouldn’t be able to invade Gaul now, and he knew it. As soon as he’d stopped encircling Aliso, the Romans trapped inside the fortress broke out and fought their way west to the Rhine. Most of them had made it across. So had the garrisons from forts on the Lupia closer to the greater river.
And two full legions had rushed up from the south when the Romans in Gaul got word of what happened to their countrymen in Germany. Over on the west bank of the Rhine, a detachment from one of those legions paced Arminius’ army. He hadn’t been able to shake loose of the Romans, even with night marches. He wouldn’t be able to fight on ground of his choosing if he did force a crossing. On ground of their choosing, the legions had the edge. He wouldn’t have had to work so hard to draw Varus into his ambush otherwise.