Empire of Wolves

Chapter 1: The Civilized Barbarian

The rain had not stopped for three days, and the roads of Germania had turned to rivers of brown mud that sucked at the hooves of Roman horses and the sandals of Roman soldiers alike. Gaius Varro, tribune of the Seventeenth Legion, sat astride his mare and watched the column of auxiliary troops march past, their Germanic faces stoic beneath iron helmets that mimicked the Roman style but never quite achieved it.

He was twenty-six years old, lean and dark-haired, with the careful eyes of a man who had been taught to observe before he spoke. His father had been a senator of modest standing, his mother the daughter of an equestrian family that had made its fortune in Iberian silver mines. They had given him an education, a commission, and a single piece of advice: make yourself useful to powerful men, and power will follow.

It was this advice that had brought him to the edge of the known world, to the forests and bogs of a land Rome claimed to govern but barely understood.

"Tribune Varro."

The voice came from behind him, rich and warm, carrying the precise diction of a man educated in the finest schools of Rome. Gaius turned in his saddle.

Arminius sat on a black stallion that was a full hand taller than any horse in the Roman column. He wore a Roman cavalry officer's cuirass over a Germanic tunic of deep blue wool, and his blond hair was pulled back from his face in a style that was neither fully Roman nor fully Germanic but something uniquely his own. He was smiling, as he almost always was, with an expression that conveyed both warmth and the faintest suggestion that he found the world privately amusing.

"Arminius." Gaius inclined his head. "Your men march well in this weather."

"My men were born in this weather." Arminius brought his horse alongside Gaius's. "It's your legionaries I worry about. They look as if they're melting."

Gaius glanced back at the Roman infantry trudging through the mud behind the auxiliary column. Arminius was not wrong. The soldiers of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Legions—nearly twenty thousand men, plus camp followers, supply trains, and families—stretched back along the forest road for miles. They were far from the stone highways of Italy, far from the ordered world of legion camps with their right angles and drainage ditches. Here, the trees pressed close on either side, ancient oaks and beeches whose canopy was so thick that even the rain seemed to come from the branches rather than the sky.

"They'll manage," Gaius said. "Romans always manage."

"That they do." Arminius's smile widened. "It is Rome's great talent—endurance. You outlast everything. Weather, enemies, even your own mistakes."

There was something in the way he said it that made Gaius look at him more carefully, but Arminius's face was open and friendly, as it always was. The man was impossible to read, and Gaius had been trying for two months.

He had arrived in Germania in early summer, assigned as military liaison to Arminius's auxiliary cohorts by Publius Quinctilius Varus, the governor of the province. It was a position of some prestige—Arminius was Rome's most important Germanic ally, a chieftain of the Cherusci tribe who had been raised in Rome as a hostage, granted citizenship, and given equestrian rank. He had fought for Rome in Pannonia and earned a reputation as a brilliant cavalry commander. Now he served as the bridge between Roman authority and the fractious Germanic tribes, a role he performed with such skill that Varus relied on him almost completely.

Gaius's official duty was to coordinate between Arminius's auxiliaries and the legion commanders. His unofficial duty, communicated to him in a private meeting with Varus on his first night in the province, was something else entirely.

"Watch him," Varus had said, pouring wine with the casual hand of a man who had never known want. The governor was in his late fifties, thick-bodied, with the soft hands of a politician and the confident voice of a man who had married into the imperial family. "Arminius is valuable, but he is still a barbarian beneath that polish. Augustus wants regular reports on his loyalty."

"Has there been cause for concern, Governor?"

"None whatsoever. Which is precisely why we must be vigilant." Varus had smiled at his own cleverness. "A dog that never barks is either perfectly trained or waiting for the right moment to bite."

Gaius had accepted the assignment with the appropriate expressions of duty and honor. In truth, he found it distasteful—spying on an ally felt like a corruption of the military virtues he had been raised to admire. But he was a practical man, and practical men did what was required.

Now, riding beside Arminius through the rain-soaked forests, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of genuinely liking the man he was supposed to suspect.

"Tell me something, Gaius." Arminius used his first name easily, as he did with everyone, a habit that charmed Romans and disarmed them in equal measure. "Have you read Tacitus's father-in-law? Agricola's campaigns in Britannia?"

"I've read the accounts, yes."

"Agricola understood something that most Roman commanders don't. He learned the land before he tried to conquer it. He studied the tides, the weather, the people. He didn't simply march in and expect the world to conform to Roman maps." Arminius gestured at the forest around them. "This is not Italy, my friend. These trees are older than Rome. The rivers don't run where your engineers would like them to run. The people don't think the way your philosophers say people should think."

"And yet Rome is here," Gaius said.

"Rome is here," Arminius agreed. "The question is whether Rome understands where 'here' is."

Before Gaius could respond, a rider came splashing up the column toward them. It was one of Arminius's personal guards, a thick-necked Cherusci warrior named Wulfric who wore his hair in long braids and regarded all Romans with the flat, measuring gaze of a man calculating how many he could kill before they brought him down.

Wulfric spoke to Arminius in the Germanic tongue—a rapid, guttural exchange that Gaius could not follow. Arminius listened, nodded, and turned to Gaius with an apologetic expression.

"A dispute between my men and some of your legionaries over firewood. I should go settle it before it becomes a dispute over blood." He wheeled his horse. "Ride with me tomorrow, Gaius. I want to show you something."

Gaius watched him go, the black stallion carrying him through the mud with an ease that seemed almost supernatural. Wulfric lingered for a moment, his pale eyes fixed on Gaius with an expression that was not quite hostility but was certainly not friendship. Then he followed his lord into the rain.

That night, in his tent, Gaius composed his report to Varus by lamplight. He wrote what he had written every week for two months: Arminius shows no signs of disloyalty. His men are well-disciplined. He speaks of Rome with genuine admiration. He coordinates effectively with the legion commanders. There is nothing to report.

He sealed the report and set it aside for the morning courier. Then he lay on his cot and listened to the rain drumming on the leather above him and the distant sounds of the camp—the clank of armor, the low murmur of soldiers' voices, the occasional bark of a dog.

He thought about what Arminius had said. The question is whether Rome understands where 'here' is.

It occurred to Gaius, not for the first time, that he did not understand it either.