Druids (58 page)

“I do have a need, but not for meat and fruit.” Keeping my face impassive and my voice unemotional, I told her about sex magic.

Onuava gasped. “Are you saying that’s how my husband was elected king?” I could see that she believed.

“I’m just telling you what happened. Now I want to repeat the ritual to assure he will be elected commander of the united armies of Gaul, because there is a chance the Aeduans may refuse to agree. I’m asking you to help me.”

She made no reply. I could not even hear her breathing.

Perhaps, my head tardily suggested, Onuava does not want the Gauls to win. Perhaps she would prefer to ride in a Romans chariot, as Hanesa had suggested, and live in luxury in a Roman villa. You are no expert on women, my head reminded me, and this proud, sensual, savage female is like the Celtic women in the ancient legends, a law unto herself, as unsentimental as the earth.

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“I’ll help you,” said Onuava abruptly.

She caught me off guard, while I was still thinking. “Ah … good. Good! That’s good! But…”

“Yes?”

“We need not discuss this with your husband. He likes to believe he wins without any help from the Otherworld.”

“Ah yes, Ainvar, I understand,” she said, and I heard laughter hidden in her voice. “I understand very well.”

I hoped I was not making another mistake.

The wariords of Gaul gathered in the assembly house of Bibracte; they were a band of tall and powerful warriors, each the symbol of manhood to his tribe. When all was in readiness, Cotuatus of the Camules demanded silence and announced that the matter of selecting a commander for their combined forces was now to be put to the vote.

While the vote was being taken, I was in the sacred grove of the Aedui with the wife of Vercingetorix.

No woman is like any other, though some share a blandness mat makes them forgettable. Onuava was not forgettable. She threw herself into the ritual with such enthusiasm I had to restrain her; she was threatening to invade parts of my spirit reserved for Briga alone.

“Do you like this?” she kept asking. “Shall I put my hand here? Ah yes, rub me like that! Ah yes! And when I do this, how does it make you feel?”

Onuava was certainly not forgettable. Together we succeeded in making sex magic; when magic works, you know. We mated with a scorching joy. Joy is a force, an energy, a power. Joy soars.

At the peak of our soaring, Vercingetorix was elected commander in chief of the army of Gaul.

When the ritual in the grove was concluded, Onuava and I departed by separate paths. I hurried back to the fort to take part in the celebrations honoring Rix and the victory to come. Onuava slipped quietly back to her wagon, where she waited until when Rix sent a messenger to ask her to join us.

I sat on one side of him and she sat on the other as the Gauls cheered their chosen leader until the sky rang with the name’ ‘Vercingetorix! ”

“Was the vote unanimous?” I asked Cotuatus later.

“Litaviccus was with us from the beginning, but those two princes who had been with the supposedly massacred cavalry held out almost until the end. Then they suddenly changed their minds and voted for Vercingetorix. And almost immediately afterward

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changed their minds again, but by then it was too late, fortunately, and he had been acclaimed as commander ”

“Are they and their followers with us, though?”

“The> aie. Though I don’t like the idea of fighting beside grudging men.”

“You won’t be.” I assured him. “As always, the Aeduans will fight beside the Aeduans and the Camutians beside the Camutians. We may be one army now, but even Vercingetorix cannot make us one tribe.” Which proves how wrong my prophecies could be.

His command confirmed, Rix acted with such speed I knew he had made his plans well in advance. He assembled a cavalry of fifteen thousand strong to be the principal attack force of the army. He personally examined the weaponry and supplies of the tens of thousands of foot warriors who would support them. He demanded noble hostages from several clans whose loyalty was still in question. He delivered a stirring speech in which he urged the army to he willing to bum its own towns rather than have them fall into Roman hands. I could not have spoken better myself on the importance of sacrifice.

Most of that speech was my own creation, actually.

Several times each day, messages from distant patrols reached the command tent, keeping Rix informed of Caesar’s every move.

“Caesar has realized that we are superior in cavalry,” Rix told me. “Our fifteen thousand horsemen are making him nervous. He has sent for German horsemen from across the Rhine, but because their animals are scrubby forest ponies, he is mounting them on quality animals taken away from his own officers so best horse and best rider will be together.”

“I shouldn’t think his officers like the plan,” I remarked.

“If I tried that with the Gauls, they’d revolt. How does Caesar hold his men?”

“Fear. And respect.”

“And love,” said Vercingetorix, his hooded eyes brooding. “They must love him, too.”

“Your men love you.”

“Some of them, Ainvar. Only some of them. The ones who haven’t been recent enemies.”

At dawn the next day the war trumpets sounded and Rix addressed the army before the gates ofBibracte, a vast mass of men. In spite ofRix’s deep voice and powerful lungs, only the foremost ranks could hear him, but they passed the word back quickly. ‘ ‘Caesar is on the march! He’s taken his legions out of camp and

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is headed for the borderlands of the Lingones. He means to try to get back to the Province where he can get more reinforcements, tut we won’t allow him. We shall march at once to head him off and finally crush him!”

Making my way through the swirling frenzy of breaking camp, I got to Rix just as he was leaving the command tent. ‘ ‘Was there any news of what Caesar has done with the captives of Gaul?”

He stared past me; the captives were not uppermost in his thoughts. “Taken them with him, I suppose. You there’” he shouted abruptly. “Bring my black horse!”

Rix had the army under way very early in the day; Caesar could have done no better. There was no opportunity for me to visit the grove, commune with the Otherworid, examine the signs and portents at my leisure. Almost before I knew it, I was on a horse, galloping along in the dust raised by Vercingetorix, and all around me were the warriors of free Gaul, clashing their weapons against their shields and singing war songs to heat their blood.

When we topped the first rise I looked back. The earth that had hosted the army was scarred and trampled, blackened by campfires, disfigured by forests of jagged stumps where trees had been felled to feed those fires. Once green fields had rolled to meet the sky; now there were only quagmires of mud and manure and piles of rubbish.

The sight reminded me of the damage done by the migration

of the Helvetians at the beginning of the Roman war in Gaul. No tribe had wanted the Helvetii to cross their land for fear of the same sort of destruction I was seeing; some had sent for Caesar to prevent it. Now the army of Gaul was ravaging the land it meant to save from Caesar.

The pattern of war, I mused.

I kicked my horse and galloped after Vercingetorix. Several times that first day I thought of turning back to see if Onuava was following with the baggage wagons, but my head chided me for such foolishness. She can take care of herself, and will, it reminded me.

But I could not quite forget her. We had worked magic together;

she had become a presence in my mind.

We had not been many days on the march before our scouts reported the Romans were ahead. Rix ordered us to encamp near a river, then he walked among his warriors as they prepared their evening meal. In the twilight I caught glimpses of his golden hair gleaming amid a throng of his favorites, the cavalry, and heard

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them cheer him, heard them shout with laughter at some jest he made.

Wherever he went that night, Rix scattered confidence like seed broadcast. His men fell asleep anticipating victory.

According to the scouts, Caesar now had eleven legions with him. We had almost twice as many men. Later I would learn that Caesar had claimed still larger numbers for us, inflating the Gaulish army to impossible proportions to make any successes of his seem greater and any defeats more forgivable. Before the conflict was over, he would claim we had outnumbered him by more than four to one. Beware the Roman version of history.

That night in my tent I did not dream of victory, but of the Two-Faced One, with Caesar’s face on one side and a Germanic visage on the other—glaring, terrifying. I awoke in a sweat, slipped from the tent without disturbing Cotuatus, and made my way through a felled forest of sleeping warriors to find Rix.

He was also awake, standing outside his tent and staring into the night. He did not even turn around as I approached. “Ain-var,” he said, knowing it was.

“Have you told your men they will probably face Germanic horsemen tomorrow?”

k ‘No, why should I? It doesn’t matter who we face. We’re going to win. That’s all they need to know or think about. We’re going to win.”

“The southern and western tribes have never fought the Germans, Rix. They won’t be prepared for their ferocity, they may panic.”

“They’ll be more likely to panic if we warn them in advance and give them time to frighten themselves with their own imaginings. No, Amvar—the Germans may present a terrifying spectacle, but the odds are on our side now, and I have faith in our men.”

Faith in men.

I returned to my tent and thought about my dream. The Goban Saor was back with the wagons, with one wagon in particular. I wished the baggage train had caught up with us, but unfortunately it was at least a half day behind.

While I was singing the song for the sun next morning, Rix was dividing our cavalry into three sections. Two sections were sent to attack the Roman flanks. The third rode ahead to block the Roman column’s advance.

Sitting on my horse atop a nearby hill, I had a clear view of the action. The Roman column formed itself into a huge hollow

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square with baggage wagons in the center. I was not close enough to tell if any of the mass of people with the Romans were Gaulish prisoners, but they might be.

They might be.

There might be a tiny captive girt child in any of those covered wagons. If so, she had not been awakened by the song for the sun, but by the sonorous voice of the battle trumpet summoning men to slaughter.

I could almost feel her terror.

What price would my beautiful, perfect child bring on a Roman auction block?

Bile flooded my mouth.

Opposite the hill was a long, steep ridge. As I watched, a wave of horsemen crested the ridge and swept down into the valley below, behind our cavalry. Unearthly, savage screams carried cleariy in the morning air as Caesar’s German horsemen fell upon our men and began cutting them to pieces.

The Germans fought without style or grace, but with a deadly dedication to killing. The startled Gauls held their ground as long as they could, but then their nerve broke and they fled the savage horde. The Germans pursued them, roaring like wild beasts and killing every man they caught in the bloodiest possible way.

Meanwhile, Caesar’s legionaries were peeling away from the outer edges of the hollow square in disturbingly precise order, making ready to follow up the attack.

Our horsemen, afraid of being surrounded, scattered in all directions.

The rout was complete. Vercingetorix on his black horse raced back and forth, trying to hold his men, trying to turn them, shouting defiance at the Germans and orders to his cavalry, making a desperate effort to rally them lest they keep riding all the way back to their tribelands. When it was obvious nothing would induce his men to turn and face the Germans, Rix surrendered to the inevitable and herded them back toward our former campsite on the river.

He was too far away for me to see his face, but anger was implicit in every line of his body.

We had lost perhaps a quarter of our cavalry, either to the Germans or to their own terror, and the rest were badly demoralized. They had seen the Germans hack the flesh off living men for the sheer pleasure of it and deliberately trample the wounded beneath their horses’ hooves. They had seen a face of war that

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was neither stylized nor heroic, but merely brutal, an expression of the darkest recesses of the human spirit.

Vercingetorix ordered the tribal princes to assemble their warriors, and made a valiant speech praising them, attempting to soothe their fears, promising them a victory that would more than offset the toss. Yet all the time I saw the men glancing nervously first to one side and then to the other, as if they expected the Germans to come leaping out at them from the bushes.

Rix called the tribal leaders aside for a humed conference. He did not beckon to me, but I walked over and stood quietly at the fringes, listening ‘ ‘We have lost too many men,” he said bitterly. “The cavalry are our principal attack force, or were, and they’re all but shattered. We cannot afford to be caught in the open like that again until we’ve recovered ourselves.

‘ ‘We are not very far from Alesia, the stronghold of the Mandubii.” He turned to Litaviccus. “The Mandubians are old allies of the Aeduans, I believe?”

Litaviccus nodded-

‘ ‘Then I ask you to ride ahead and tell them the army of Gaul is on its way to them. We shall use Alesia for a base the way we used Gergovia. With strong walls to rely on, our men will find their courage again and we shall hand Caesar a defeat to make the one he suffered at Gergovia look no worse than a skinned knee.”

He spoke with all that vibrant confidence they had come to expect of him. As calmly as if nothing had gone wrong, Vercingetorix gathered his men, issued his orders, and soon had the army under way. To a casual observer it might have appeared we were an attack force. But I saw the fear and doubt carved deep in the faces of those who had survived the German onslaught.