The Druid King (24 page)

Not wearing his customary Roman vestments but disguised by the simple brown cloak and tunic of a Gallic peasant.

Time seemed to stop as Vercingetorix regarded just the dead face and not the latest disguise. The dark hair. The olive-tinged complexion. Time crawled backward into the long ago, into the plaza of Gergovia, to the day of Keltill’s burning. And now Vercingetorix knew why the face of Gisstus had always seemed familiar.

For, as he regarded that face in death, he saw it cloaked in the blue of an Eduen warrior at his father’s last feast, whispering orders in the ear of a fearfully reluctant Gobanit.
Commanding
the druid Diviacx. And only one man commanded Gisstus.

“Caesar!”
Vercingetorix shouted in soul-deep agony.
“Caesar!”

And then yet another of Caesar’s cowardly assassins was up and running for his wretched life through the swamp grass.

This one Vercingetorix knew he wanted alive. The man was no woodsman, nor was he in the prime strength of youth, and it took but a short chase for Vercingetorix to exhaust and corner him against a thick tangle of undergrowth and trees.

The Roman in peasant disguise had no sword, only a javelin and a dagger, and these he tossed away.

“I yield!” he said fearfully.

“You yield? So what!”

“You’d kill a disarmed man? Where is your honor, barbarian?”

“Where is yours, Roman, as you beg for your worthless life?”

But then it was that Vercingetorix realized why he needed this man alive. “Perhaps not entirely worthless,” he told the Roman coldly.

Prodding him in the small of his back with the point of his sword hard enough to draw blood but not to do serious injury, he marched the Roman back to the body of Gisstus.

“You want your life, you shall have it,” he said. “It is of only one use to me. . . .”

He reached down with his left hand, grabbed the head of Gisstus by the hair, and lifted it out of the mud.
Then he sliced it from its neck with a one-handed stroke of his sword and threw it, still gushing blood and dripping gore, at the stomach of the Roman, who caught it reflexively.

“
Someone
must bear my tribute to Caesar,” he said.

And then, as the Roman ran off in terror, Vercingetorix raised his eyes to the sky, where the fog had given way to blue, and gave free vent to the rage he now allowed to course through him and fill his spirit. He howled at the heavens, at the gods, at Gaius Julius Caesar, at his own stupidity, at destiny itself, full-throated, at the top of his lungs, like a wolf.

Only Tulius and Labienus had chanced to be in the tent with Caesar when this Marius had unceremoniously dumped the severed head of Gisstus on the camp table, where it now stared up at him, blue-skinned, blind-eyed, but somehow having retained that sardonic expression even in death, as if bidding him a final bilious farewell.

“Tribute, he called it!” Caesar cried.
“Tribute!”

“That’s what he said, Caesar,” Marius said fearfully. “And when I escaped, he was howling like a mad dog.”

Tears welled up in Caesar’s eyes, tears that surprised him, for not until this dreadful moment had he realized how much he had loved this sour, unlovable man.
Yet somehow he could not bring himself to display those tears before his lieutenants, let alone a stranger.

The rage in his heart, however, was another matter. Rage at the man whom he would have made king, whom he might have come to love as a son, who had now turned this entire British venture into a pointless farce, and who had deprived him of the one man in all Gaul with whom he could share his secret thoughts—to
that
he could give full and free vent.

“
Tribute,
he called it?” he roared like a lion in outraged agony. “I will enrich the man who brings me the head of
Vercingetorix
as tribute! And anyone who gives him sanctuary will find his own impaled on a Roman lance!”

“Is that wise, Caesar?” asked Tulius.

“What would you have me do, Tulius, award him a laurel wreath for slaughtering my friend?”

Tulius shot a fleeting sidelong glance at Marius.

“Go,” Caesar ordered Marius.

“Well, Tulius?” he demanded when the man had gone. Tulius fidgeted nervously, apparently equally leery of spitting out whatever it was in front of Labienus.

“How will you explain such a decree to the Gauls?”

“How will I—? Oh.”

Caesar caught himself short. The sunlight streaming in through the tent flap was beginning to sparkle with the beginnings of an aura, turning purple around the edges of the beam. He was thinking with his guts, not his brain, and his rage was bringing the falling sickness near. He took four long, deep breaths and forced himself to think coldly in this most hot-blooded of moments.

Tulius, who knew all, had managed to say enough, without saying more than Labienus needed to hear.

I
can’t
outlaw Vercingetorix for slaying Gisstus, he realized, for the Gauls must never know that my agent had even been present at the death of Dumnorix, any more than that my hand was behind the elimination of Keltill. Still . . .

“Against my orders, against the will of the druids,Vercingetorix slew Dumnorix for being behind the plot to kill Keltill,” Caesar declared. “And you heard him make this foul accusation, Labienus.”

“I most certainly did not!” Labienus exclaimed in scandalized outrage.

“Oh yes, you did.”

“I heard no such thing!”

“I
order
you to have heard it, Labienus.”

“You are ordering me to
lie
?” Labienus said in an astonished tone, as if ordering a general to do that which politicians were constrained to do almost every day as part of their craft was somehow akin to ordering him to slay his own mother.

“Think of it as a military necessity, Labienus,” Caesar told him, to ease his punctilious conscience. “It will make your command of the Gauls a lot easier—”

“My what?”

“Back to the status quo ante, Labienus. Vercingetorix’s treachery will not be allowed to stop the invasion of Britain. I order you to announce this version of events to what Gauls remain here, and take command of the Gallic auxiliaries after all.”

“You do?” exclaimed Labienus.

“And as a gesture of my good faith and magnanimity, you can tell them that I am freeing all the hostages, so that all who choose to follow you do so of their own free will. Enjoy yourself, my friend. The storm is over. Off to glory. Hail, Titus Labienus!”

“Hail, Caesar!” Labienus shouted happily, and replied with a salute so heartfelt that it almost seemed he would disjoint his arm with the force with which he raised it.

“What was that all about?” a befuddled Tulius asked as soon as Labienus had departed.

“Giving my noblest general his heart’s desire.”

“But now most of the Edui will turn on the Arverni because Vercingetorix killed Dumnorix, and most of the Arverni will turn on the Edui because they will believe the Edui plotted to kill Keltill.”

“Exactly,” said Caesar.

“But you’re releasing the hostages, so most of the Edui and Arverni will probably just go home now.”

“Especially the most suspicious ones and the worst troublemakers,” said Caesar.

“But that means your plan—”

“—has changed. Which is why I’m sending Labienus on this futile adventure in your place. I have other work for you here. I’ll go along to Britain for a while, for appearances’ sake.
You will take command of the legions remaining in Gaul and hunt down Vercingetorix—”

“Four legions to hunt down one man?”

“We have made an enemy it would be much better to have had as an ally, but a good enemy can be put to use too,” Caesar told him. “Vercingetorix is going to be very difficult to capture. It’s going to take a long time. There will be Arverne resistance to crush. Make sure there is.
You’re going to have to conquer and occupy their territory, and those of any of the minor tribes allied with them, I’m afraid.”

“And, Vercingetorix having killed Dumnorix, the Edui will do nothing. . . .”

“Except, perhaps, applaud,” said Caesar. “And the remaining Arverni will not aid the Edui when we turn our full attention to conquering
them
afterward.”

“Utterly ruthless and cynical,” Tulius said approvingly.

Caesar nodded. “Which is why I could hardly entrust such a task to Labienus. Gisstus once suggested that we slay all the leaders and troublemakers and any Gaul presuming to replace them, lay as much waste as necessary to declare Gaul a conquered province, and go home in triumph. And that is what we are now going to do.”

Caesar laid a tender hand atop the bloody head of his dead friend and forced himself to gaze on his face one last time. Only now did he allow himself tears.

“Had I listened to him in the first place,” he muttered, “this utterly ruthless and cynical man might be alive today.”

And I would not be here so all alone.

XI

IN THE HOT BLOOD of his lupine madness, with the Arverni whom he had led into the marshes scattering in terror and so too the Arverne army he had left in the Roman encampment, Vercingetorix retrieved his horse and began a frothing gallop across the countryside toward Gergovia. It took him four days to reach the Gallic road to the city, and along the way, he saw Roman infantry cohorts fanning out through the countryside, accompanied by small detachments of cavalry and many empty wagons, behaving nothing like serious search parties, and everything like serious sackers. Several times, he believed he had been spotted, but, strangely, they never gave chase.

The road itself was clogged with people fleeing the growing terror of the countryside and eyeing him as if he were a wolf from the forest, but no one sought to impede or seize him until he reached the foot of the hill upon which the city stood. There the road was blocked by a dozen Arverne guards led by Baravax. They were armed with swords, but none were drawn, and so Vercingetorix did not draw his as he reined up before them.

“Vercingetorix!” cried Baravax. “Are you mad? There’s a Roman garrison in Gergovia. There’s a price on your head.
You can’t go there!”

“I see they’ve given you your old job back, Baravax,” Vercingetorix said bitterly. “I also see that you’ve taken it.”

Baravax moved closer, and spoke softly for his ears only, for the people backed up on the road were forming an ever-growing crowd behind them. “Be glad that I did, else another might have come here to capture you rather than warn you.” Then, in a whisper: “And even so, I must not be seen to do so. I’m going to create a distraction.
You use it to be gone.”

And behind his back, he made a signal with his hand to his men.

“There’s a fat price on his head!” one of them shouted.

“Why don’t we collect it?”

Three of the guards moved slowly forward and even more hesitantly drew their swords.

“Sell one of our own to the stinking Romans!” some shouted from the crowd.

“He’s the son of Keltill!”

Few were the voices raised against him in what was swiftly turning into a mob whose ire was being turned against the guards, and as they shrank back in fear, Vercingetorix realized that this had been Baravax’s intent.

“Draw your swords!” Baravax ordered. “Disperse this crowd!”

The Arverne guards drew their swords but showed little interest in advancing with them on their own people.

Baravax rounded on Vercingetorix in a great mock fury. “See what you bring! I’ll not have my men slay Arverni in the service of Rome or be slain by their own people! Be gone, before the blood of Arverni shed by Arverni is on your head!”

And he whacked Vercingetorix’s horse on the rump with the flat of his sword. The horse reared and bolted, and Vercingetorix encouraged it to ride off in a fair imitation of an out-of-control gallop.

In the valley below, smoldering fires glowed blood-red in the darkness, revealing the flickering black silhouettes of ruined homesteads and ruined lives, mourned by the lonely bleat of orphaned cattle. Vercingetorix reined in his horse as he rode along the overlooking ridgeline, forcing himself to behold the desolation before slinking back into the safety of the forest.
This was surely the darkest of the many such nights he had known since he brought the wrath of Caesar down on his own people.

If wrath it truly was, and not something worse. For the Romans did not burn crops, they forced the peasants to harvest them and hauled them off. They did not slaughter sheep and goats and pigs, they herded them away.
They even rounded up and stole the geese and the ducks and the chickens. They did not kill the men they captured, they shackled the able-bodied and led them away into slavery. Only when all this had been done did they burn the buildings and set fire to the stubble in the fields, leaving those too old or too young or too feeble to be of value as slaves to fend for themselves in a blackened and smoking wasteland.

Caesar had not even been in Gaul when it had begun. He had given his orders, departed for Britain, and left them to his lieutenant Tulius to carry out.

Such could not be hot-blooded vengeance. It was being done in an orderly manner by disciplined troops for some purpose. Caesar had put a price on his head, and Tulius had declared that the lands of the Arverni would be occupied by Rome until he was either slain or captured.
Yet the actions of the Romans made it seem that this was the last thing they wanted to happen.

In the days that followed his shameful flight from Gergovia, he had at first wandered aimlessly, keeping to the forest, eating well enough off what he could forage, sleeping under the trees, trying with no success to formulate a plan to redress the wrong he had done both to the innocent Dumnorix and to his own people.

All because of a vision.

And if that vision were false?

At length, he decided that there was only one way to test the truth of his vision of his own destiny. He could not test whether or not he would one day be acclaimed king in Rome, but it would be easy enough to see if he could not be slain on the soil of Gaul.

All he had to do was court death.

If he was slain, he had followed a false vision into disaster for his people, and death would be just punishment.

So he had ridden out of the safety of the forest a dozen times, appearing openly on roads, in villages not yet sacked, inviting the desperate and the greedy to seek to claim the price Caesar had put on his head. None succeeded—singly, in pairs, in threes and fours—and his sword took more lives than he cared to count; enough, it would seem, for the legend of his invincibility to spread, for finally no Arverne would dare challenge him.

But this could all be laid to the teachings of Rhia, who had made him a swordsman no one in the land could best save herself. So next he attacked the rearmost wagon of a Roman train, heavily laden with grain, decapitating the legionnaire driving it, setting it ablaze with a torch, and easily outrunning the cavalry guards.

Perhaps
too
easily.

Perhaps he indeed could not be slain on the soil of Gaul. Or perhaps, to judge by the ease with which he escaped the feckless pursuit of the Romans, Caesar did not
want
him slain or captured. Either way, it was an invitation to boldness.

This afternoon he had observed from a safe distance a cohort of Roman infantry, with a small detachment of cavalry and a large train of empty wagons, moving toward a farmstead. At the pace at which they were moving, they would be there within the hour.

There might be no way to prevent the Romans from sacking the farmstead, but he decided to try to save its people from slavery. For, if he could not be slain in battle, might not he and those he led prove invincible?

And so Vercingetorix had galloped ahead and reached the farmstead in advance of the Romans. A palisade so new that its logs were still half green had recently been thrown up around the large round thatch-roofed manse of its master and the courtyard of his holdings; a barn, a pigsty, sheds of ducks, chickens, and geese, a smithy, a bake house. Beyond the enclosure, and surrounding it as far as the eye could see, were fields of golden grain ready for the harvesting.

The palisade gate was open, and when Vercingetorix rode unopposed through it, he almost passed unnoticed into the pandemonium in the courtyard. The courtyard boiled with panicked people. Half a dozen women were loading carts with household goods while adolescent boys attempted to hitch them to balky horses. Peasants were frantically butchering two freshly slaughtered pigs and a cow. Small boys and girls were chasing down chickens and ducks and trying to stuff them into wicker baskets.

A large, beefy man mounted on a black stallion—helmetless, shieldless, armorless, but wearing a sword—seemed to be presiding, and it was he who first noticed Vercingetorix and challenged him.

“Who in the name of the gods of shit and piss are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know the Romans are coming?”

“I would lead you against them,” Vercingetorix told him.

“
Lead us against them?
All we can do is flee with whatever we can, and perhaps thereby escape slavery.”

“Fleeing is useless. They’re close behind me, their cavalry will run you down easily, and their infantry will do the rest.”

“What do you suggest, then,
great leader
?” the man on the black stallion snarled sarcastically. “Are you mad? Who do you think you are?”

“I am Vercingetorix, son of Keltill.”

Then there was a sudden silence as they all ceased what they were doing and all eyes turned to regard him.

Dracovax, son of Marnil, did not think of himself as a rich man or a poor one. He held no slaves, though some seventy-three Arverni owed him their allegiance, working his fields, tending to his livestock, and otherwise living their lives and earning their sustenance under his aegis. Though he had fought in a few small battles when he was a hot-blooded young man eager to prove his manhood, he was no warrior. Dracovax was a successful farmer approaching the end of his middle years and content with the life he was living.

Or, rather, had been living. Now he and his people were about to lose everything they had, everything generations of his ancestors had so painstakingly won from the soil. And for causes comprehensible only to the likes of Caesar and the nobles and warriors who followed or fought him. And they had nothing to do with sowing and reaping crops to feed the seventy-three mouths that followed
him
—not for glory or conquest, but to fill their stomachs.

“Vercingetorix . . .”

“They say he has slain a hundred Romans.”

Dracovax had heard that this boy was the cause of his misfortune. He had slain an important Eduen, had somehow enraged Caesar against not only himself but all Arverni and those weaker tribes who had previously considered themselves under Arverne protection.

“It is said he cannot be defeated in battle.”

This too Dracovax had heard, and also that the Romans offered a handsome price for his capture or death. But what Arverne would betray another to these Roman thieves and slavers for slaying some Eduen who no doubt had it coming?

Fighting the Romans seemed madness, but Dracovax could see no other hope for himself or his people. He might be getting too old for battle, but he was yet too young for slavery. And still would be when the last tooth had fallen from his gums, and the last white hair from his skull.

“I am Dracovax, son of Marnil; this is my homestead, and I would save my people from slavery if I can,” said the man on the black stallion. “Is it really true that the Romans cannot defeat you?”

“This I do not know,” Vercingetorix admitted.

He hesitated. Then he said something he had never presumed to proclaim before, not knowing whether he spoke truth or a silver-tongued lie, but knowing that he must say it to learn whether it was the one or the other.

“But I
do
know that I cannot be slain on the soil of Gaul,” he said. “This the gods have granted me in a vision.”

The intakes of breath around him made a sound like the sighing of the wind through the tree crowns of a forest.

“Druid magic . . .” said a woman’s voice.

“You are a druid?” asked Dracovax.

Am I? wondered Vercingetorix. Just what have I become?

“I am a man of knowledge,” he said. “But I am also a man of action.”

“But druids never join in battle,” said Dracovax.

“Never have we faced such an enemy as the legions of Caesar,” said Vercingetorix. “When the Wheel makes such a turning from one Great Age into another, even druids must turn with it or be crushed beneath it.”

“Well spoken!”

“The words of a druid indeed . . .”

“But of a warrior also!” cried Vercingetorix, drawing his sword.

And thus did he commit himself and the people of Dracovax’s farmstead to seemingly hopeless battle.

There were nearly four hundred men in a Roman cohort. Vercingetorix now commanded fewer than four dozen: peasants, bakers, smiths, stablehands, and a third of those half-grown boys. There were swords and spears for a dozen of them; the rest had only scythes, woodsman’s axes, and butchering knives. There were half a dozen horses, none of which had ever faced battle.

“Accept that you cannot save your fields or your property, Dracovax,” Vercingetorix said when he had this pathetic force assembled. “So do not leave them for the Romans. Forget the carts. Move your people out of here now, and set this place on fire. Let all flee on foot through the fields, firing the grain behind them. All save you, and me, and these other five horsemen. When the Romans see the flames, they will send their cavalry ahead.
We will ride to meet them and delay them until your people have time to retreat from their infantry into the forest behind a wall of fire.”

Dracovax regarded him with a mixture of awe and terror. “Seven of us against a Roman cavalry detachment!” he exclaimed.

“I have seen their cavalry, and there cannot be much more than a score of them.”

“Three or four to one! Hopeless odds!”

“You are right,” declared Vercingetorix. “For they are mere Romans and we are Gauls! Perhaps we should leave half our number behind to make the fight a fair one!”

The brave cheer that went up set Vercingetorix’s blood afire and his spirit soaring, and so, sword held high and flames of destruction behind him, he galloped forth to meet the cavalry of Caesar at the head of his tiny army of peasants and stableboys.

The Roman cavalry were galloping two abreast down the narrow earthen road approaching the burning farmstead, but as soon as their commander saw Vercingetorix’s little force riding up toward him, he had his trumpeter blow a short series of notes, and the Romans spread out across the road and on either side of it in a wide skirmish line.

Vercingetorix led his horsemen off the road to the left, as if attempting to pass them on the flank, but since his goal was to delay the Romans, not escape them, this was a feint, and when the two forces were but half a dozen horse-lengths apart, he wheeled his mount and made straight for the center of the Roman line, hoping to break through, create chaos, attack the right flank from behind.