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An average Pa
One of the Pa
The rebels stopped retreating and formed a battle line. Long odds against them: longer, Arminius thought, than those against throwing a triple six in a dice game. But sometimes long odds were better than sure ruin, and sure ruin faced the Pa
Maybe. But Arminius didn’t believe it, not for a moment. “Be ready!” he called to his fellow Germans. “They’re going to try to bull through us.”
“Let them try,” one of the big, fair men said. Several others nodded. Arminius smiled. No, his folk had never been one to back away from a fight.
That officer shouted something. Sure as demons, the Pa
“Sedatus!” the Pa
They showed almost Roman discipline as they bore down on the Germans. His own men fought with better discipline than they would have back in their native forests. Past that, Arminius indulged in no comparisons. With numbers on their side, and with the legionaries swinging up to help them, it shouldn’t matter much.
Of course, even if the Germans and Romans would win in the end, a man still might get killed in the middle of the fight. The Pa
He jabbed at the man in front of him. The Pa
They might have danced like that for some little while, each trying to figure out how to spill the other’s blood. They weren’t alone on the battlefield, though. Another German threw a fist-sized rock that clanged off the Pa
The Pa
Even among Germans, Arminius was a big man. The Pa
“Your mother was a dog, and your father shat in her twat,” Arminius retorted. Latin wasn’t his language, either, which hadn’t kept him from learning to swear in it.
Roaring with rage, the big, burly Pa
Blood fountained from the Pa
Romans liked to say things like that. It was a line from a poem, though Arminius thought the poem was in Greek, not Latin. He knew there was such a thing as Greek, and that Romans with a fancy education spoke it, but it remained a closed scroll to him.
And he had no time to worry about poetry anyhow, whether in Greek, Latin, or his own tongue. Another Pa
Then the legionaries slammed into the rebels’ flank. After that, the fight wasn’t a fight any more. It was a rout. The Pa
Arminius’ foe suddenly had to face two other German auxiliaries, as the men they’d been fighting took to their heels. He had no trouble holding off one foe. He couldn’t turn enough directions at once to hold off three. One of the other Germans hamstrung him. He went down with a wail. Arminius’ stroke across his throat finished him off.
“This is the way it’s supposed to work!” said the auxiliary who’d wounded him, wiping blood from his blade on a grassy tussock.
“By the gods, it is,” Arminius agreed. “Let’s finish the rest of them. The looting should be good.”
“So it should. We don’t want to let those Roman greedyguts take more than their share, either, the way they like to do,” the other man said.
“I was thinking the same thing a little while ago,” Arminius replied. “Come on! We don’t want to let any of these cursed fools get away.”
He loped after the Pa
Quinctilius Varus stepped from the gangplank to the pier with a sigh of relief. He didn’t like traveling by ship, which didn’t mean he couldn’t do it at need. He’d got from Ostia - Rome’s port - to Massilia by sea faster than he could have by land. The rest of the journey, up to the legions’ base by the Rhine, would have to be by land.