The Druid King (34 page)

Jarak held up both hands for silence.

“You call it
stupidity
to die a hero rather than live a coward?” he demanded. “You would have victory at the price of honor?”

“
You
dare to question
my
honor, Jarak, vergobret of the Bituriges?” Vercingetorix shouted back in a blood-red fury. “You, whose people have profited from trade with the Romans while others have died and starved and sacrificed their all to drive them from Gaul?”

Veins stood out on Jarak’s temples, but his words cut all the deeper for the coldness with which he wielded them:

“Where is this ‘Gaul’ of which you speak, Vercingetorix? In the wasteland left behind by your army? In what way is the Gaul of
your
desires better than the Gaul of Caesar’s? He would rule Gaul as a province of his Rome. You would rule the lands of the Bituriges as a province of your Gaul. The only difference you offer us is that, whereas Caesar would purchase our grain, you would burn it. Is that what you would have us fight and die for? Or just your own glory?”

“You have until dawn to decide!”

Vercingetorix signaled to Baravax, and, with his guards before him and Rhia guarding his rear, he stormed out of the building, never looking back to confront the shouts and jeers and curses of the
fellow Gauls
of whom his vision had told him he would be king.

“Fighting you has made him think like you,” said Litivak, “and thinking like you has turned him into something no better than you are.”

“Many people might view that as a compliment,” Caesar said dryly.

Brutus had been subtler than Caesar had expected. He had persuaded Litivak to parlay by telling him that Caesar was not only willing to reward him with gold for continuing to maintain his neutrality, but was now of the opinion that he might prefer
him
over the feckless Liscos as vergobret of the Edui and was interested in discussing how he might assist Litivak in achieving such a mutually advantageous outcome.

Like all the best lies, it cut close to the truth. Indeed, why not make it so?

Litivak had insisted that they meet far from either of their armies, each accompanied by ten men only—here, on this bare hilltop, where approaching forces of assassins or abductors would be visible from afar, and before the sun was down.

Caesar, knowing the store the Gauls set in oath-keeping, had agreed, and now here they were afoot, man to man on the pinnacle, while Brutus and nine Roman cavalrymen and ten equally suspicious Edui sat on their horses, glowering at each other a carefully equidistant measure back.

“May I presume to ask what atrocity Vercingetorix has committed that persuades you to abandon his noble cause?” Caesar asked.

“It is nobility and honor which he is about to abandon,” said Litivak.

“Something which you, of course, would never do . . .”

“I would certainly not destroy my own people’s city and see its inhabitants starve in order to keep it out of my enemy’s hands!” Litivak declared self-righteously.

“You wouldn’t?”

“Would even
you
?”

Caesar held his tongue, for of course, were he in Vercingetorix’s position, that was exactly what he would do. Given the sound strategy Vercingetorix had been following from the beginning, it made perfect sense. He had already turned the countryside into a wasteland, so why not a city?

“Of course not,” said Caesar. “Indeed, we both have a common interest in preventing such an atrocity.”

“We do?”

“Of course we do,” said Caesar. “Fight with me to save Bourges from the Arverni, and I will leave half the food supplies for the populace.
You will become their hero, and I will pay you well besides. . . .”

“My men are no mercenaries to fight for Roman gold, and neither am I! You insult my honor with such an offer!”

“No such insult intended, I assure you,” Caesar told Litivak. “I will pay in coin both more honorable and far more valuable than mere gold. You will ride back to Bibracte at the head of an army that has not only triumphed over your ancestral enemies, the Arverni, but won the Edui the friendship of Rome. My favor will pass from Liscos to you, you will be elected vergobret, and when Vercingetorix is defeated and Gaul is conquered—”

“—
if
Gaul is conquered!”

“—
when
Gaul is conquered, and I need a loyal proconsul to rule over it, it will only be natural for me to turn to my good friend the vergobret of the Edui, who, by our crushing of the Arverni, will stand alone as the most powerful tribe in the land. . . .”

“If Gaul is conquered . . .” Litivak said in a much less defiant tone.

“Come with me tomorrow, Litivak, and I promise you will see why there is no ‘if’ about it,” said Caesar. “You need only observe, and commit your men if you choose to join the winning side. And there will be a chest of gold for you either way, not as a payment, but as a gift from a man who would be your friend.”

Outside the Great Hall of the Bituriges, the sun was beginning to set in a fiery vision of the conflagration to come when Vercingetorix, Rhia, and Guttuatr, surrounded by Baravax and his little troop of guards, began to make their way back to the city gates, his life and theirs dependent on the honor of a people he had accused of having none.

The prosperous streets of Bourges bustled at this hour with wives going to and from the markets, men gathering in the taverns, merchants and artisans returning to their well-built houses, children playing and chasing each other home for the evening meal.

They all might as well be ghosts, or perhaps
we
are the ghosts, Vercingetorix mused somberly. For though none of the townspeople sought to harm them, no one would pay them heed either, looking away with curled lip as they passed, staring through them as if they were not there and no doubt wishing it were true.

“Spoken like a Roman, they said,” Vercingetorix muttered. “Guttuatr, is this so? Are we—am I—becoming like them?”

“We have all had to make our sacrifices, warriors their lives, farmers their crops, druids our lofty stance above the battlefield of worldly strife, and you—”

“My honor!”

The Arch Druid sighed. “We each do what we must. . . .”

“Enough!” grunted Vercingetorix. “Go now, all of you; I would walk the streets of this city alone—”

“It’s not safe!” said Baravax.

“If I die here, is it not meant to be? If I should fear to walk alone among my own people, what right do I have to call myself a leader of Gaul? Go, all of you!”

And then, when Baravax hesitated: “That is an order, Baravax.”

At that the guards reluctantly turned to leave. “Go with them, Guttuatr,” Vercingetorix said in a softer tone of voice. “You I cannot order, but you I ask to understand that this I must do.”

Guttuatr nodded and left with the guards, but Rhia hung back.

“Let me come with you,” she said.

Vercingetorix nodded at the standard she bore, the brazen bear upon its wooden pole. The standard of the Arverni. His standard.

“The people here hate the standard you bear, Rhia,” he said. “Lower it and take it from the city. Less dangerous if you can find a sack within which to hide its ensign.”

“Far more dangerous for you to wander these streets alone.”

“For the future king of Gaul?” Vercingetorix said bitterly. “I have seen my death in a vision, and it will be in Rome, not here, remember?”

“And if that vision was false?”

“Was it not you who declared that such visions do not lie?”

“But I also said that they do not always speak plain.”

“You fear for my life . . . as a woman,” Vercingetorix said, presuming to lay a tender hand on her cheek. “But as a warrior of honor, you know full well this is something I must do.”

“Perhaps . . .” said Rhia, gently touching his hand upon her own face.

“If I die here because my vision was unclear, then
that
is what was meant to be,” Vercingetorix said, almost wishing it would be so. “And I will be released from the iron hand of destiny.”

Rhia took his hand from her face.

“No one is ever released from the iron hand of destiny,” she said, and with that she departed.

As night falls upon the city, the streets empty out and Vercingetorix wanders them in a bubble of solitude.

Soon the only light is the glow of hearth fires and torches and oil lamps leaking wanly out from the shadowy shapes of the houses. He seems to be the only one abroad, and as a fog descends from the heavens upon the city, enrobing all in a pearly whiteness tinted pale orange here and there, Vercingetorix begins to doubt his own existence, becoming a phantom moving through the ghost of an already bygone city dissolving into mist.

There is nothing to be seen in the swirling whiteness, and so Vercingetorix might imagine anything therein, might see any vision, as a man standing upon the mountaintop of his death outside of time might see his life entire, might walk the Land of Legend while he yet lives.

With a grin more radiant than any gold, Keltill tosses a shower of coins into the sparkling festive air. “Life is to be spent on the pleasures of living!”

“Not so bad for someone who’s never kissed a girl before,” says Marah teasingly, pulling away with a girlish laugh, which becomes the laugh of the sophisticate telling him: “Is every chicken jealous of every other who enjoys the services of the cock?”

“Brother and sister of the sword,Vercingetorix, that is all that we can ever be,” Rhia tells him, and they share a chaste and bloody warrior’s kiss.

Vercingetorix does not understand why such visions should fill him with heartrending sadness, but they do, and it becomes an even deeper shame when the voice of Marah mocks from within a flaming giant.

“I owe this barbarian nothing!”

Bright-orange flame rolls across fields of green grain like a wave across a sea, trees laden with ripe red apples crumble to ashy skeletons, and the wave of fire surges ever onward, leaving a blackened landscape in its wake as it breaks over the walls of a distant city.

“No great warrior would buy victory at such a price!” shouts the voice of Litivak.

A pall of black smoke hangs above the burnt-out city, walls breached and tumbled, buildings hollow shells, roasted and blackened corpses set up on wooden stakes in the wasteland like scarecrows against the carrion birds who circle above, whirling, creating a great cruel wind that blows up dust, the gray ash of bone, a swirling white fog. . . .

The moon sends down a silvery beam to pierce the fog and reveal a woman standing in a pool of light. She wears a flowing robe of the purest white like that of a druid, but it is open at her right breast so that the naked babe she holds in her arms may suckle.

Vercingetorix, with a warrior’s reflex, has drawn his sword without even realizing he has done so.

“So quick to reach for your sword, Vercingetorix, man of action.”

Chagrined, mortified, Vercingetorix sheaths his weapon.

Her face . . .

Is the face of Gaela, his mother. Of Marah. Of Marah’s mother, Epona. Of a hundred women he has passed on a street, on the road, in a village he has burned. Of none of them. Of all of them.

“Who are you?” says Vercingetorix, but he knows, though he cannot put it into words or thoughts.

“Just an ordinary woman. A mother of Gaul. Come to offer a sacrifice to clarify the vision of Vercingetorix, man of knowledge.”

“You offer me a sacrifice?”

“As did Diviacx, Vercingetorix, Druid King of Gaul.”

The woman strides forward, taking the baby from her breast, and reaching beneath her robe to pull out a dagger. Cradling the baby against her, she holds the point of the dagger above its heart.

“I offer you the sacrifice of the innocent life of this child. Take it, if it should serve the cause of Gaul!”

“You know I would not do such a thing!” Vercingetorix exclaims in outrage.

“But you took the life of Diviacx to serve your just cause.”

“Willingly given!”

“And you burned a score of Romans alive—”

“Enemies—”

“—and you would leave thousands of innocents to starve and destroy a city to serve
your just cause.
So why not the life of this babe?”

“Because that’s different!”

“Tell me, then, silver-tongued Vercingetorix, how the lives of those unseen thousands are anything but the life of this single child before you, writ large.”

And she holds out the knife to Vercingetorix.

“The courage to take the life of a city, the courage to take the life of a single child—it should be all the same to the hero of Gaul,
serving his
just cause.
”

And the fog seals itself over the moon once more, and the terrible apparition disappears into the mists from whence it came.

It was a gorgeous sunrise. The brilliant crescent of the sun peering up over the walls of Bourges painted golden glory across a perfect blue sky. Atop the walls, half the population of the city had gathered to bid farewell to the army of Gaul. Carnaxes sounded, trumpets blared, women waved, children cheered.

Fools, thought Vercingetorix as he rode at the head of his departing army. And I am one of them. Yet his heart felt as if a dagger had been withdrawn from it, and his spirit soared with the eagle rising high above the battlements.

“I don’t understand you!” said Critognat. “First you won’t fight! Then you plan to burn the granaries! Now you change your mind and ride away! Why?”

“It came to me in a vision,” said Vercingetorix.

“In a vision? Now we follow visions?”

Vercingetorix laughed more freely than at any time he could remember in a dozen moons or more.

“When have we followed anything else?” he said gaily, and the old warrior laughed with him. “We are a people who hear the voices of our hearts, not slaves of cold logic, are we not? We are not Romans, after all—we are Gauls!”

XV

YOU DO NOT SEEM PLEASED, Caesar,” said Tulius.

“I am not pleased,” said Caesar.

“But you should be.”

“Should I?
” Caesar muttered.

Before him, as a banquet set out for his delectation upon a table, lay the city of Bourges atop its low hill—intact, and laden with grain, meat, and fruit. On the plain between the city and the higher hilltop where he, Brutus, and Tulius stood beside their horses was an army. But not the army of Vercingetorix.

It was
his own army,
blithely setting up its mobile siege towers, its catapults, its troop formations, its bivouacs, entirely unopposed.

“What troubles you?” said Brutus. “Vercingetorix has left us a fat, sweet plum for the picking!”

“Has he?” said Caesar. It was difficult to credit, since it made no sense. “Or has he secreted his forces inside the city?”

“Scouts
saw
his forces depart, and the plain down there was churned up with the hoofprints of thousands of horses clearly riding away from the city,” Tulius told him.

“But why. . . ? It makes no tactical sense! I would have destroyed Bourges rather than let it fall into my hands!”

“You would?”

“Of course I would, Tulius! He was a fool not to! I like it not!”

“The enemy’s mistake saves us from an ignominious starving retreat, and
you don’t like it,
Caesar?”

“I do not
understand
it,” said Caesar, “and I do not like what I cannot understand.”

“Perhaps things are about to become clarified,” said Brutus, nodding in the direction of Bourges, where the city gates were opening to emit five horsemen riding out under a flag of truce.

“Why do I doubt it?” Caesar muttered as the gates closed behind them. “Nevertheless, I suppose we should hear whatever it is they have to say.”

He started to mount his horse, then paused.

“You ride ahead, Brutus, and make sure our friend Litivak is otherwise occupied,” he said. “Whatever these Bituriges have to say before we batter down their walls, I doubt it would do us any good to have him hear it.”

Caesar’s tent had been set up and his standard planted in the middle of the army, as was his custom, so that to reach it the emissaries from Bourges were constrained to ride between two great siege towers, and through the midst of thousands of jeering legionnaires.

By the time Caesar and Tulius had ridden back down to the plain, the Bituriges had already reached the tent and, from the looks on their faces, seemed to have been suitably daunted. A crowd of centurions and ordinary legionnaires had gathered around, and Caesar saw no reason to disperse this audience.

The five Gauls—some sort of tribal leader and a pro-forma escort— had not dismounted, and so Caesar did not dismount either, nor, since they did not greet him with a proper “Hail, Caesar,” was he put in a mood for formalities himself.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I am Jarak, vergobret of the Bituriges,” said the bluff fellow with long graying blond hair.

“And I am Gaius Julius Caesar, proconsul of all Gaul,” Caesar said dryly, “and now that we have introduced ourselves, perhaps you will tell me what you want.”

“The question is, what do
you
want, Caesar,” said Jarak, “since it is
you
who have brought an uninvited army to the gates of
my
city?”

Caesar had to restrain his impulse to smile. There was something immediately likable about this Gaul, but that was a sentiment he could not afford to harbor.

“I think you know what I want,” he said. “And I think you also know that you are powerless to deny me.”

“You want food supplies from our city, and it is certainly true that your legions could easily enough overwhelm us,” said Jarak.

“Exactly,” said Caesar.

“Well, then,” said Jarak, “there is no need for you to attack Bourges. The Bituriges have never wanted any part of this ruinous war, Vercingetorix’s army has departed, and we have a surplus to sell; so all that remains is to settle on a fair price.”

At this, the press of legionnaires hooted and laughed as Caesar studied Jarak carefully, wondering if even such a barbarian chieftain could truly be as naïve as his words made him seem. Surely not. The man was desperate and doing his best not to show it.

“You misunderstand,” he said. “I have more men to feed than Bourges has citizens, they are near starvation, and so I must have
all
of it.
”

At this a great cheer went up from the troops, of the sort that might have emanated from a pack of famished wolves finally spying prey in the dead of winter, and Jarak could no longer hide his terror.

“What will become of my people?” he cried plaintively. “This is unjust!”

“This is
war,
” Caesar reminded him, “and justice has nothing to do with it.”

“I ask your mercy!”

Caesar ran his gaze slowly around the circle of gaunt faces surrounding them, playing to his own men rather than to the Gaul as he spoke in a scornful voice expressing what their eyes told him they felt, using the orator’s inner art to invoke his own ire so he could give it full voice.

“You dare to snivel for mercy from an army that has been forced to march through a wasteland eating grass and bugs?” he roared. “You, Gaul, who burned Roman prisoners alive like the barbarians you are, instead of enslaving them like a civilized people?”

A great howl of fury went up from the legionnaires, and a few swords were even drawn; it was clear to Caesar, and to no one more than Jarak, that, flag of truce or not, they would tear these Gauls to pieces at a word from him.
With that thought, an even darker one began to knock ghoulishly at the door to Caesar’s mind.

“The Bituriges had no part in it!” Jarak whined.

“So you say,” Caesar said coldly. “Why should we believe you?”

“I swear it upon my honor!”

Jeers and hoots and more swords drawn.

“A dog’s honor!” someone yelled.

“A swine’s!”

“A serpent’s!”

“A
Gaul’s
!”

“There is a difference?”

There was ominous laughter at this last, and it came to Caesar that now he knew what he was inciting, and to what bloody purpose.

He was going to do a terrible thing. He was going to do it
because
it was so terrible. Because terror was such a potent weapon.

Vercingetorix had not shrunk from using it in such a manner—now, had he? He had sacrificed the lives of Romans in a hideous but effective blood rite to bind the tribal leaders to his cause.

So I will counter with a blood rite of my own, and far grander, as befits a proconsul of Rome.

“We are not oath-breakers!” Jarak cried angrily, allowing his outrage to overcome his fear. “Our word is good! We are an honorable people!”

There was an inchoate roar at this, which Caesar immediately formed into words. “Not oath-breakers! An honorable people!” he shouted. “You Gauls would break your oath to your own mothers for a barrel of beer!”

The legionnaires cheered. Caesar was pleased to see Jarak’s face purple with rage.

“Your word is good? You bugger your sons and lie to your wives about it!”

This was finally enough to goad Jarak into drawing his sword, just as Caesar had intended, and his guards followed their vergobret’s foolish, hot-blooded lead.

“You would even draw sword under flag of truce!” Caesar roared in righteous indignation as a score or more legionnaires rushed forward to confront them.

“Stop!”
shouted Caesar. “
We
do not dishonor a flag of truce, even if the barbarian dogs traveling under it do! We are Romans, not barbarians!”

The legionnaires froze. Jarak froze too, then regarded Caesar much more coldly, apparently realizing, but too late, that the whole thing had been a deliberate provocation. His men held their swords upright, uncertainly, as their horses bucked and reared.

“We do not slay emissaries, however treacherous,” said Caesar. “Surrender your swords and you shall return unharmed to your city. If you do not, we can always . . . burn you alive.”

Jarak lowered his sword, hesitated, then handed it to Caesar. Seeing this, his men sullenly dropped theirs to the ground.

“Have these men tied backward on their horses and smeared with dung before they are sent back to Bourges,” Caesar ordered Tulius in a voice loud enough for only him to hear, and then addressed himself to Jarak for the benefit of the legionnaires.

“You will open your gates or we will smash them open—it is a matter of indifference to me,” he said. “But know this, Jarak, vergobret of the Bituriges, if I find so much as
one sack of grain
burned or otherwise withheld, I shall do to your city what Vercingetorix has done to the countryside of his own land. Only, being Gaius Julius Caesar, proconsul of all Gaul, and not a stripling savage chieftain, I will do a much more thorough job of it.”

At this, there were not only cheers but a chanting of “Hail, Caesar!”

“Now take these creatures out of my sight!” Caesar ordered.

When the Bituriges had been removed, Tulius turned to Caesar with a befuddled expression.

“What was all that about?” he said. “Surely you realize that, when their vergobret returns to Bourges tied backward on his horse and covered with shit, there will be hotbloods who will take it as a something of an affront.”

“Do you really think so?” Caesar crooned.

“They’ll do exactly what you have warned them against doing.”

“Well, then, they won’t be able to say they weren’t warned—now, will they?” said Caesar. “Assuming, for the sake of argument, that any of them will be left alive to say anything.”

“You
want
to provoke a bloodbath? But why? We could’ve probably gotten what we wanted without a fight.”

“Then we wouldn’t have gotten what we wanted, Tulius,” Caesar told him.

“Which is?”

“A demonstration of our credibility.”

“Our credibility in doing
what
? A demonstration for whom?”

“For Vercingetorix. I will credibly demonstrate my will to commit atrocities even more horrendous than his own.”

Tulius shook his head.

“I can see why you didn’t want Litivak to witness any of this,” was all he could say.

“Ah yes, Litivak!” said Caesar. “No, better that he not be troubled with the bothersome details of the arrangements. But not for all the world would I have him miss out on the entertainment.”

Bourges had been surrounded by orderly formations of Roman infantry deployed out of arrow range of the walls. Eight mobile siege towers—two before each quarter of the city walls—were positioned within the front rank of the infantry. These were huge wooden ladders on wheels inside log frameworks clad with thick planking for protection. They were provided with parapeted platforms at their summits, slightly higher than the city palisade, and clad with wooden shields at their bases to protect the men poised to propel them forward.

To the east and far to the rear, eight catapults sat unmanned, and among them was a battering ram of logs bound together with iron hoops and faced with iron, so enormous that it was set on two wagons, one behind the other, with fifty men manning the poles jutting out from each, like so many galley slaves.

A man appeared atop the left-hand siege tower facing the gates. His armor and helmet were no different from those of his troops, but the bright crimson cloak blowing in the breeze behind him announced the presence of Gaius Julius Caesar. A cheer went up from his army. A few futile arrows were launched his way from the parapets of Bourges, but fell far short. Caesar raised his right arm high above his head, and held it there for a dramatic moment. Then he brought it down, trumpets blew, and it began.

The eight siege towers began to roll slowly toward Bourges, the Roman infantry advancing at a measured pace behind them. Archers on the city walls shot arrows at them as they came into range, and Roman archers crouched down behind the tower-platform parapets answered the Biturige volleys. Both were largely ineffective, which worked to the advantage of the Romans, since their archers were able to suppress the fire of the Bituriges well enough so that flaming arrows could not prove a significant counter to the siege towers.

When the siege towers were all but upon the walls, another signal was sounded. An aisle opened up in the eastern infantry formation, and the hundred legionnaires manning the poles of the battering-ram wagons began to push. They had to lean into it with all their strength and weight to get the ram to move at all, and when it began to move it rolled forward slower than the slowest walk of a very old man. But once in motion, it began to gather momentum.

The siege towers reached the walls, and legionnaires scrambled up their interior ladders. Where the summit platforms met the top of the walls, the leading Romans, fighting shoulder to shoulder from behind a wall of their shields, engaged the defenders in bloody close combat in restricted quarters, seeking not to slay as many Bituriges as possible but merely to push them back off the wall so that the troops behind them could pour into the city.

The battering ram, meanwhile, was gathering force, rolling toward the gates faster and faster, the pace of a man walking vigorously, trotting, beginning to run—

The Romans heavily outnumbered the Bituriges, and there was an endless line of replacements waiting to ascend the tower ladders. They were inexorably pushing the Bituriges back, and in several places were already fighting them atop the walls when—

With a tremendous rumble that shook the earth and a great cheer from the legionnaires, the huge battering ram, rolling at the speed of a trotting horse, and with the men on the poles hanging on now rather than pushing, struck the city gates head-on with a crash that shattered them completely and shook the walls themselves. The ram rolled through the flinders unaided for a few wagon lengths, and the Roman army began to pour into Bourges behind it.

The first waves of Romans made directly for the walls, running alongside them, dashing up the interior ladders and stairways to attack the defenders from below and behind, trapping them between themselves and the other Romans atop the wall and the siege towers. The Bituriges on the walls had no chance at all, nor did the Romans give them any quarter, cutting them to pieces with swords, spearing them with javelins, throwing them off the parapets, as more Romans dropped into the city via the towers, and formation after formation of legionnaires marched through the shattered gates.