Gods and Legions by Michael Curtis Ford Page A

three days. He also said it was the first food lacking in maggots that he had eaten in a month. Brother, what kind of a physician am I that I accept a patient's own diagnosis unquestioningly? I was ashamed at my employer's rudeness in not having attended to the poor soldier upon his earliest arrival, and embarrassed at my own lack of provisions to offer, for the only other nourishment I had in my store was a bruised apple, which he also gulped down in three or four bites, core and all. I rang for a slave and demanded more food and some uncut wine. While we awaited the servant's return I asked the messenger to relate his story.
    'For months,' he said, 'the Cologne garrison has been under siege by the Alemanni. Their king is Chonodomarius; we call him "the Beast." He's leading them personally. Our garrison commander, Lucius Vitellius, sent runners asking the Emperor and the legions of Gaul to send reinforcements, but got no answer. We figured the messengers had been captured.'
    I said nothing at this, but I knew the messages to Constantius had indeed arrived. The Emperor, dismissing the situation in far-off Germany as inconsequential compared with his more urgent concerns in the Empire's tinderbox Eastern regions, refused to transfer troops to the suffering garrison, believing that his commanders in Gaul and Britain would find the wherewithal to lift the siege.
    'We finally broke, five days ago. The men were starving, sir, and the barbarians had poisoned the city's water supply. I think we might've been able to hold out a few more days, but we broke when the Beast started raining heads down on us.'
    'Soldier,' I said, 'I've never been to war, but I've heard that this is often a tactic of the besiegers – to place the heads or even the bodies of their captured enemies onto the engines and launch them into the fortifications to demoralize the defenders. Surely you expected something of the sort.'
    'Indeed we did, sir, but nothing like this. You see, sir, they weren't even Roman heads. It was worse. They were Germans. You could tell by their long blond mustaches.'
    I looked at him in puzzlement. 'German heads? Why would Chonodomarius rain German heads on you?'
    'We asked the same question, sir, of course. Then it dawned on us when we looked out at the hills. Sir, the hills were swarming with Germans, on every side. Just arrived. Every tribe from the Pannonians to the Frisians had sent their men in reinforcement, thousands, tens of thousands. They were cutting down every tree to the horizon, making hundreds of catapults, battering rams, siege towers – you name it, sir, they'd learned their lessons well from us. But the Beast didn't have Roman heads to shoot at us. Hell, he hadn't caught enough of us outside the gates, I suppose. So he used his own Germans. Lord, he had enough to spare, he just had his guards seize a couple hundred prison drunkards, lopped off their heads, and sent them on over. When we saw that we knew we were through.'
    I sat in stunned silence.
    'And that's not the worst of it, sir,' the man continued after a short pause to catch his breath. 'The worst was when Chonodomarius himself rode up to the gates of the city, bellowing at Vitellius to come out and parley. Sir, you've never seen a man like the Beast.'
    The messenger shuddered, and I begged him to continue.
    'He's a giant, sir – stands seven feet if he's an inch, and with muscles like an ox. He wears a bloodred plume from some huge evil bird affixed in his helmet, and no clothes but a loincloth – just paints his body with red and blue streaks, the worst sort of barbarian you can imagine. He rides up like that practically naked, hair and mustaches flowing in the wind, on his enormous white horse, itself painted with flames like the devil's own steed, foaming and rearing, its eyes rolling around it its head, and he waves his weapon in the air, not a spear like any normal barbarian would carry, but a harpoon – sir, I haven't seen the likes of that thing