Druids (53 page)

I raised a hand for silence. “Cenabum is a ruin. I did not go all the way into the town, there was no point. It’s nothing but burned timbers and tumbled stones, the people are gone. Most of them are still alive, we believe, and from all reports they have been sent across the Sequana River to the nearest permanent Ro-man camps. Caesar won’t try to send them south until fighting season is over. So they are still within our reach and when we have defeated him we will get them back. We will,” I said emphatically, meeting Briga’s imploring eyes. “All of them.”

Sulis pressed forward, wanting news of her brother, and I assured her the Goban Saor had reached Rix safely. She responded with a shaky laugh that revealed the depths of her concern. “He should have; he left here staggering under the weight of the charms and protections we heaped on him. We didn’t want the Romans to get him.”

I answered all the questions I could and then answered them again because the people could not stop asking. At last I was allowed to seek the sanctuary of my own lodge for a while, to eat and rest. There I had to observe all me little customs women hold dear. They must sit me on my bench, bathe my face and feet, exclaim to one another over the sad condition of my clothing. They worked in harmony; I wondered if they ever quarreled in my absence. If so, they hid it from me. In my presence Briga and Lakutu closed ranks and presented a unified front.

I looked curiously around the lodge. Each person who lives in

a place leaves an imprint, rather in the way that the crisscrossing lines of power between Earth and stars leave tracks on human palms. Briga and Lakutu had succeeded in submerging almost every trace of me in their clutter, their busy, bright domesticity. A loom, piles of fabric, pottery, new blankets, unfamiliar household implements, stools, jars, infant smells, cages on the wall for hens, baskets of eggs and nets of onions, clothes drying on ropes strung from the rafters. Only the iron firedogs spoke of the past;

those, and my carved wooden chest.

“Is there any news of our daughter?” 1 asked Briga as I took the first welcome bite of bread.

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“Not yet. But on the anniversary of her conception the druids convened for her name day, Ainvar.”

“Good. What name was discovered for her?”

“Maia. Daughter of the earth.”

The rightness of me name sang in me. Maia, daughter of the earth. Daughter of Gaul.

“And that boy?” I inquired, nodding toward the formerly blind lad, who was now sitting comfortably cross-legged beside my hearthfire, eating my food as if he were accustomed to doing so.

Which he was, I learned from Briga. “His mother has a bum-ing tumor in her belly, so while Sulis and I are working to heal we brought her children into the fort where they would be safer. We Ve divided them among the lodges. I took this one, of course.”

Of course. “I’m surprised you didn’t welcome the lot info my house,” I said with a sarcasm Briga chose to ignore. “Were there

dozens?”

She shook her head. “This is the oldest. His name is Cormiac

Ru. The Red Wolf.”

At the sound of his name Cormiac Ru looked up and met my eyes. I recalled holding him in my arms on a long-ago day and describing war for him. Now he was only a few seasons short of being of warrior age himself, had he been bom into a noble clan. His hair was copper, his eyes were ice; his lean, intense face was

not boyish.

“I defend these women,” he told me flatly. Then he went back

to his food.

His name suited him.

Under my breath, I said to Briga, “Are you going to send him back to his mother eventually?”

“If she regains her strength. But she’s very ill, Ainvar. She didn’t send for a healer when she should have and now it may be too late, even for the mistletoe. You’ve come at a most propitious time. Tomorrow is the sixth day of the moon.”

I understood at once. Circumstance had denied me recent rituals in the grove, but I could conduct a major one tomorrow.

The ceremony of cutting the mistletoe was always held on the sixth day of the moon. The plant grew on a number of different trees, but was rarely found on oaks. When it was, it was called the Oak’s Child and was an object of reverence, for it came with special gifts from the Otherworid. A decoction of the Oak’s Child, prepared in a manner zealously guarded by the druids, was capable of destroying burning tumors. Indeed, it was me most powerful of all medicines.

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Many oaks in the sacred grove were crowned with mistletoe.

We were not lavish in its use; we did not pillage and plunder the trees. Instead, we took the mistletoe only when we most needed it, and offered suitable sacrifices in return. The mistletoe would be cut from the oak with a special golden knife, and two fine young bulls would water the tree’s roots with their blood while the druids chanted.

Administered in time, the medicine made from the Oak’s Child might save the Red Wolf’s mother. To my certain knowledge, it had saved many before her.

Also, after the ceremony I would have an excellent opportunity to speak to the druids and urge them to enlist more fighting men for Vercingetorix.

That night, sitting once more by my own fireside, I did not think of Vercingetorix. My eyes kept following Briga around the lodge, and the rising heat in me was not caused by the fire on the hearth. She seemed to have forgiven me for the loss of our daughter; her welcome had been warm and genuinely happy. When I lay down on my bed and opened my arms, she came Into them willingly, and Lakutu and Cormiac Ru ignored us as people must when they share a lodge. Each person has their own hood of invisibility accorded to them by the courtesy of the others. , But Briga lay stiffly in my arms and I felt my heat cooling. “What is it?” I whispered to her.

“Nothing.”

“Are you still angry with me?”

“Of course not. I’m glad you’re alive, and here.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

: But something was, and its name was Maia. The lost child was like a shadow between us. “I’ll give you another child,” I said urgently, moving over her. I rammed my rigid self into Briga as if I would find Maia there, someplace inside her, and she cried out and clung to me as if we could create life from desperation. ‘., Before dawn, as I was preparing to go out and sing the song

for the sun, Cormiac Ru came to me. In a voice not meant for the :, women to hear, he said, “I’ll go find your daughter. Give me a horse. I can do it. The women think I’m a child but I’m not.”

I looked down at his earnest face in the weak light of the banked •^ hearthfire. “No, you’re not a child. I can see that. But you can’t ; i just go off and find her, it isn’t that easy. You have no idea how f; large the worid is beyond the palisade, Cormiac, or what waits f: for you out there.”

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“It doesn’t matter,” he said with the wonderful confidence of ignorance. “Briga cries for her at night; I want to go get her.” He looked up at me with his ice-colored eyes, and I saw there was no fear in him, not in his body or his spirit. Briga had brought him out of the darkness and he owed her a debt. For Cormiac Ru it was simple. He was a Celt, a person of honor.

I felt a throb of triumph. These are my people, Caesar, I said in the silence of my head. Flawed and foolish and magnificent, these are my people and we will defeat you. We will survive when you and your ambitions are dust. The tribes will unite; our people

will sing together.

I concentrated the full force of my will on those words as if, through them alone, I could shape the history to come.

The lodge seemed to fade away, leaving me standing in shadows that might have been the shadows of trees. A sound rang through me; one pure note from a song I had never heard before. I almost touched it, tasted it, saw it… then Cormiac tugged at my arm and the walls surrounded me again.

“Are you afraid of Caesar, Ainvar?” the boy was asking.

“Caesar?” I looked at the vibrant upturned face and smiled. “No, Cormiac. Caesar is nothing of consequence—a short wick

in a small lamp.”

He went out with me to sing the song for the sun. That day we cut the mistletoe, and when the ceremony was concluded and the healers were hurrying away with the precious plant to prepare their decoction, I spoke with my druids- “Avoid Roman patrols, but visit every place known to you where there are strong men capable of fighting. They don’t have to be nobles. Common men can fight, too; this is their land as well as ours. Perhaps more so, because they are the ones who work it. Urge

them to take up whatever will serve as weapons and join in the resistance to the Romans. Use all your influence. Tell them the Otherworid requires it of them. When I return to Vercingetorix, I will guide those who are ready to go with me.”

“How can we be certain this is what the Otherworid wants?” asked a Jug-eared apprentice sacrificer who had accompanied

Aberth.

With the full authority of the Keeper of the Grove, I thundered

at him, “Because I tell you the spirit of Gaul demands it!”

There was no further argument. The druids dispersed to do my bidding, leaving me alone with the trees and my thoughts.

There was so little time. Soon Caesar must return to his legions. Soon I must rejoin Rix for what surely would be the deci—

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sive confrontation. Awareness of my prior errors of Judgment weighed heavily on me. The advice I gave him from now on must be inspired. We could not afford any more mistakes. It was not enough that I had a good head; we needed the sort of assistance Vercingetorix scorned.

“Help me,” I murmured to That Which Watched- “Let me see … let me know …” With all my strength I reached out, pleading, to the Otherworid.

The other world. Glowing just beyond the realm of earthly senses, yet so near I could almost touch it, could almost tear through the thin veil that separated us and feel its warm light on my face. There it was, just beyond the trees, over there … and in it the dead I had loved. When I thought of them, they could see me. I envied them their untrammeled spirits and their expanded knowledge. “Show me the future,” I implored.

My stomach lurched. For the second time that day the world as I knew it dissolved around me. I found myself standing amid the shadows of trees that were not trees at all but pillars. My skin felt the cold echo of stone. A vertical immensity of stone.

I tilted my head back to follow the line of the pillars upward. There was no sky above me. Instead, incredibly, curving ceiling timbers arched upward to meet in a dim vastness higher than treetops. Or were they timbers? I had an impression of stone. And what was the source of the rainbowed light that dazzled my eyes? To one side a great circle shot through with vivid shades of blue and rose stopped my breath with its beauty.

Then the scene faded. I was in the grove again, amid the familiar oaks. But by the ringing in my ears and a sickening sense of dislocation I knew I had seen the mture.

TRUE PROPHECY is the most elusive and the most ambiguous

of druidic abilities. My own talent for it had always been negligible, my flare of prescience concerning the death of Caesar being the exception. Usually foretelling was a matter of recognizing patterns m nature, a form of divining rather than an

inspiration from the Otherworid.

Nothing had prepared me for the shocking vision of the sacred

grove of Gaul transformed into a structure of stone.

I told no one, not even the chief of the vates. Keryth would have been no more able to interpret the vision than I. Everything about it was alien, beyond comprehension. Yet the eerie beauty of the gigantic building in which I had so briefly stood, numb

with awe, haunted me.

Was this the future Caesar brought? Somehow I did not think so. For all its size, the construction was too graceful to be Roman. It soared like the trees.

The trees it replaced.

I fought back terror.

When Briga and Sulis went to treat Cormiac Ru’s mother with their mistletoe decoction, I went with them. The sight of her saddened me. She was no longer the creamy-skinned woman I remembered, but a sack of skin filled with knobby sticks. Her eyes stared blankly; I do not know if she recognized me or any of us. Her body was being eaten away from the inside, the tumor feeding on her as the mistletoe feeds on the oak.

The cure must be appropriate to the illness. The strength and life the mistletoe had taken from the oak, most powerful of trees,

would now be given to the woman.

She stirred in pain on her bed of straw. “Where are my children? Someone … ?”

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Briga bent tenderly over her. “They’re housed and cherished, don’t worry about them. Here, drink this.”

“Where’s your husband?” I interjected.

The woman tried feebly to push the cup away. “In the fields. Always in the fields. I should be with him, sowing the barley.” To my dismay, she broke into a quavering, pitiful attempt to sing the song for sowing, while with one skeletal hand she broadcast invisible seeds from her bed.

She tore my heart. “Will she live?” I asked Sulis.

The healer looked doubtful. “She may have waited too long to admit she was ill. They only have a small holding here and in the spring everyone is needed to work. She said nothing until she

collapsed. I don’t know if there is enough of her left now for the mistletoe to restore, but we’ll do our best, Ainvar.”

I could not linger to leam the outcome. Daily, from every possible source, I was receiving news of Caesar. He would be leaving the Aeduans very soon indeed.

Meanwhile, my druids had collected as many recruits as they could for our army; they were a mixed group of woodsmen and craftsmen and half-grown boys. There were few farmers or herders, because of the season. The land claimed her own. She was pregnant with new life and would not wait upon the convenience of man.

In my lodge young Cormiac Ru announced, “I’m going to go with you and fight for Vercingetorix”’ He planted himself resolutely in front of me, trying to stand taller man he was.