Druids (38 page)

As chief druid, I visited each of the princes resident at Cenabum before returning to the grove; I was within tradition to do so. I was careful not to spend appreciably longer with Cotuatus than with the others, but our conversations were held in desperately earnest whispers.

He was not perfectly suited to our need, but he would have to do. We were running out of time.

I invariably saw Crom Daral somewhere near Cotuatus’s lodge every time I visited the prince, the dark face turned toward me, the sullen eyes watching. Once I asked Cotuatus about him.

“Ah, the hunchback? He’s all right. Not much good with weapons, but he’s fiercely loyal to me. Won’t let me out of his sight.”

“That is his way,” I said, remembering.

“I’m grateful to have someone like that to guard my back, Ainvar. He’s like your Tarvos.”

“No one is like Tarvos,” I replied.

The seasons changed. Caesar had vanquished the Aduatuci on the pretext that they were a Germanic people, descendants of the Teutoni. Their punishment for daring to try to help the Nervii stand against him was for all who survived to be sold into slavery.

Without a qualm Gaius Caesar sent 53,000 people who had been born free to the auction block. He then went back to Latium for a time, leaving one of his strongest legions to attack and sub-due the tribes on the western seaboard.

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Though the heartland of Gau! was still free, Caesar had the temerity to announce in Rome that he had brought “peace” to the entirety of Gaul.

His peace including blatantly establishing a winter camp in Camutian territory.

As soon as I learned of this, I almost killed a horse under me riding to Cenabum, Tarvos and my bodyguard pounding along in my dust. The gates of the stronghold were thrown open for us, but when I left my men and went to the king’s lodge alone to avoid appearing provocative, the sentry on duty barred my way with his spear. Barred the chief druid!

Spitting in his face, I paralyzed the man with magic. Then I kicked open the heavy oak door; my leg ached for days afterward. I strode inside roaring, “Caesar has a camp on our tribeland! What do you know of it, Tasgetius?”

The king met me standing with his big freckled fists on his hips and belligerence in every line of his body. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s a friend,”

“Caesar is no friend to any free person.”

The king surveyed me coldly. Any pretense of normality in our relationship fell away like the shed skin of a snake. “He says my enemies are his enemies, druid.”

I ignored me bait. Instead, I said, “Are you aware that one of his legions has overrun the tribe of the Veneti on the northwest coast, killed thousands of them and smashed their boats? With mat one blow Caesar has cut off our entire supply of tin from Briton-land. Is that the act of a friend?”

“The Romans will sell us tin.”

“I’m sure they will! At five times the price! Tasgetius, you fool, can’t you see what’s happening?”

I should not have called the king a fool to his face—1, who constantly urged prudence on others. But a Celt can ride his passions for only so long before they run away with him.

Tasgetius turned purple with outrage. “Guards! “he bellowed,

The sentry I had spat upon peered dizzily in through the doorway, still trying to shake off the effects of my magic. “Gethelp!”

the king commanded.

The sentry blinked, swayed, backed out of our sight.

“I’ll have you thrown out of Cenabum, Ainvar.”

“You dare not publicly exile the chief druid,” I told him confidently. “The people would rise against you, terrified that you were courting the wrath of the Otherworld.”

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“Then I’ll kill you here and now and say you died of a fit!” He lifted those big fists and advanced toward me.

I did not take one step backward. I thought of stone; became stone. Cold granite on a winter’s night. “Raise one hand to me and before your next breath I call down the lightning on this lodge,” I warned. “You and everything in it will be burned to ash.” Even as I spoke, thunder boomed.

Tasgetius hesitated. “No chief druid has ever killed a king,” he said. He did not sound entirely certain, however.

I drew my lips back from my teeth in a grimace mat was not a smile. “Not yet, Tasgetius.”

The thunder spoke again. The stiffness went out of the king’s spine. “Just leave, Ainvar. Leave this lodge and leave Cenabum. You may not realize it yet, but the time of the druids is over.”

“You think it dies with the coming of Caesar? Then you are doubly a fool. We will always be needed. Who else understands the rhythms of the earth and the strength to be drawn from the patterns of the stars? Who else knows what sacrifices are needed to feed and reward the land for its fertility? Who else can placate the spirits of the insects so they don’t devastate our crops?

“Without the intervention of the druids, Tasgetius, Man in his ignorance would rape and plunder the earth as surely as Caesar rapes and plunders the tribes. The earth would cease to provide then. There would be disaster.”

The king sat down on his bench but did not invite me to sit also. With a sigh, he said, “Let me tell you a little plain truth, druid. There will be disaster if we shake our fists in Caesar’s face the way you and your followers are advocating. Those who oppose the Roman suffer more when he overruns them than those who accede to him from the beginning.”

He sounded tired, perhaps tired enough to listen to reason. “Don’t you see? We don’t have to be overrun, or to give in!’* I said eagerly. “We can fight and win, Tasgetius. One tribe alone cannot defeat Caesar, that’s been proven, but all of us together can—”

He snorted. “I’ve heard of your Gaulish confederation, heard of it until the very mention turns my belly. I tell you now and forever I’ll never surrender the Camutes to any other leader.”

“If you would just talk to Vercingetorix,” I urged, “and get to know him, you would—”

The king gave me a sardonic smile. “When I’m talking to you, I am talking to Vercingetorix—don’t you think I know that? My own chief druid supporting another king.” He sounded very bitter

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and I knew I had lost him-No matter how persuasive Rix, or Rix and I together, might be with the other tribes, Tasgetius would resist to the death anything that involved me-Yet how could I be extricated from the pattern?

While I searched inside my head for something to say, the king asked, “What turned you against me, Ainvar? Once I thought we might be friends, colleagues. Then you insulted me by rejecting my traders and the gift of wine I sent you not once but three times. I knew then you were as opposed to my kingship as Menua had been.”

The coldness returned to my voice. * ‘My refusal was not meant as an insult to you. I merely wanted to have no trade with the Romans. We arc growing our own grapes now; with one more warm summer we will be making Gaulish wine. Think of it, Tasgetius. We don’t need the traders; we don’t need Rome or anything it might offer. There is nothing that we cannot do for ourselves, in our own style—”

This time I was interrupted by a flurry of activity at the doorway as several armed guards shouldered through together, carrying daggers in their hands. When they realized they were confronting the chief druid, they halted, confused, and looked to the king for instructions.

For perhaps the only time in our lives Tasgetius and I thought the same thought at the same time; I could hear <5ur two voices echoing in my head. There must be no public break between the king and the Keeper of the Grove.

At least there was that much kingship in him.

But he should not have mentioned Menua.

“The chief druid is just leaving,” Tasgetius said rather stiffly to me guards. “Will you escort him to the gates?”

One of the guards asked in surprise, “Isn’t he accepting the kmg’s hospitality?”

“The king is famous for his hospitality but I have too many demands on my time,” I replied smoothly. Then I gave Tasgetius a smile so insincere it made my lips sting, and he returned the gesture with a nod of his head that must have hurt his neck.

I left the lodge. There was no storm outside, of course.

The king’s guards walked with me all the way to the main gates

of Cenabum, though they did put their daggers, a form of shortsword, back into their scabbards-When Tarvos and my men saw them coming, they put their hands on the hilts of their own weapons and me two groups of warriors eyed one another uneasily.

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“It’s all right, Tarvos,” I said. Then added under my breath, “But I have to see Cotuatus before I leave. Where is he?”

“He isn’t in Cenabmn, Ainvar. Crom Daral came by while I was arranging to exchange our tired horses for fresh ones. He was looking as sour as always, but I spoke to him for the clan’s sake. He complained to me that Cotuatus had gone off and left him because he isn’t a good enough horseman to keep up; they planned to travel fast.”

“Who planned? To travel where?”

‘ ‘Cotuatus and the prince Conconnetodumnus have gone to spy on the Roman encampment. Tasgetius doesn’t know they’ve gone, but Crom says the king will bar the gates of Cenabum against them when he learns of it. And you know Crom, he’s just resentful enough at being left behind to tell Tasgetius himself.”

Indeed I did know Crom.

Once, on the banks of the river, I had watched as fishermen spread their nets in the sun to dry. Some of the network was tangled and I observed them patiently separate and unknot me strands. I was younger then; my fingers itched to take a knife and simply cut out the tangle.

How convenient it would be if human tangles like Crom Daral could be cut out when they threatened the integrity of the fabric. But Crom had a right to exist. He was, for all his flaws, part of us.

Nor would I have called down the lightning on Tasgetius—this was a standard druid threat none, to my knowledge, had ever actually succeeded in doing. I had made me thunder roll—or made Tasgetius think he heard the thunder roll—and that was sufficient.

“Did you say you’ve already arranged for fresh horses?” I asked Tarvos.

“I did, though I told the horsekeeper we wouldn’t need them until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“We need mem right now. We’re leaving.”

His shy, eager smile surprised me, “We’re going home? I’m going home? To Lakutu?”

Tom between amusement and envy, I replied, “Not yet. First we’re going after Cotuatus,”

W7 TE LEFT CENABUM at the gallop, ostensibly heading north

%»/ to the Fort of the Grove. Once out of sight of the watch—

W towers, however, we circled back and rode south to-ward the Roman camp. If my information was correct, it was located within striking distance of both Cenabum and Avaricum— and not much farther from the stronghold of the Senones, Vellaunodunum.

The sheer arrogance of Caesar was impressive. He ben&ved like someone who has already conquered and may go wherever he likes. That in itself gave him an advantage; people believe and accept what they see.

My head reminded me that this was the man who had impoverished himself in order to appear sufficiently magnificent to be a proconsul of Rome.

Perhaps Caesar appeared most confident when he was weakest?

If so, what weakness was he protecting by establishing a winter camp at the edge of the land of the Camutes, whose king was his avowed friend?

I felt as if Caesar and I were in a deadly contest of heads in which I had one small, but perhaps crucial, advantage. I knew of him, but he did not, to the best of my knowledge, know of me.

It was Vercingetorix he had noticed and would remember.

A stain of smoke in the sky ahead warned us that we were approaching the Roman camp. Drawing rein, Tarvos and I left our horses with the other warriors and advanced cautiously on foot, climbing a ridge mantled with tall grass. As we neared its crest, we bent low, men crawled the last few lengths on our bellies until we could peer over the top and down into the valley where the camp stood.

This was my first view of an invading army in free Gaul. A

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chill swept over me. Here was the embodiment of Menua’s horrific vision of rigid order, straight lines and exact edges.

A legion consisted roughly of 5,300 men, divided into nine fighting cohorts and a tenth cohort composed of clerks and non-fighting specialists. The camp before us would have sheltered perhaps three cohorts and attendant personnel. It had been precisely constructed according to an unvarying plan by the engineers the Roman army always carried with it. A protective ditch surrounded the facility, which had been built on a tributary of the Liger to assure a fresh water supply. The walls were of crisply cut turf blocks and timber, reinforced with an outer fence of timber stakes as level across the top as the horizon of the sea. Within the walls the Romans had already stamped the earth smooth and had erected blocks of identical buildings to house the troops, each holding a century, a group of about eighty men plus their equipment. At the end of each block was a larger room for me commanding centurion. There were horse pens, storehouses, and a long row of workshops. The winter camp looked almost like a town, but it was not a town; no one would ever be born there. Life was not its purpose.

In the center of the compound a headquarters building new the legion’s standards. To one side stood a small wooden structure built to imitate stone, complete with columns—obviously the camp’s temple. I wondered what lifeless god stood on a pedestal

inside.

A rustling in the grass made us whirl around, ready to fight for our lives; it was only Cotuatus coming up the slope behind us. “My men are stationed in that woodland back there,” he said, ; pointing. “You did not approach undetected, Ainvar.” ^ “What about the Romans?”

He grinned, “They didn’t see you, they have no guards on this side of the camp right now. They’ve all wandered to the other side, where some Carnutian women from the nearest farmstead are bathing in the river. Even Roman security is not proof against 1 man’s desire to look at naked women.”