Druids (60 page)

Meanwhile, Caesar had drawn up his legions below our encampment to keep our foot warriors from going to the aid of Vercingetorix and the cavalry. Reassured by this, his own cavalry, including the Germans, redoubled their efforts and began relentlessly driving our people back toward Alesia.

We had too many untrained warriors. They got in each other’s way as they attempted to retreat. The Germans pursued them all the way to me camp’s fortifications, where many of our cavalry abandoned their horses so they could scramble over the walls to safety inside. The Germans caught many more; there was a terrible slaughter.

Caesar then ordered his legions to move forward The sentries on the walls of Alesia interpreted this as a signal to storm the fort. They began shouting warnings, causing panic within the stronghold. I tried to reassure people by doing some yelling myself. “Caesar is no fool, he won’t try to storm the fortress! He knows it would be futile! You are safe here, be calm, don’t do anything foolish!”

But the frantic populace began opening the gates, begging our warriors outside to come in and protect them. A great crush took place in the gateways, injuring many.

Rix came riding toward the coimision on his black horse, yelling at the sentries to close and bar the gates of the fort so the warriors could not leave the camp deserted.

Once the stronghold was secured, Rix managed to rally his

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forces for a successful defense of their camp. Eventually the en-emy withdrew, having killed a great number of our men and captured many of our horses.

I left the fort to join Rix in the camp. Onuava and a score of surviving female followers were already there. They had announced their intention of staying with the warriors, eating with them, sleeping with them, and no one had argued.

I think no one dared.

I met Onuava leaving the command tent as I was going in. Her face was filthy, she had a huge lump on her jaw and a purple swelling around a half-closed eye, and her arms were motded with bruises. **I am going to ride back to Gergovia with the victor when he goes,” she told me proudly. “With Vercingetorix!” Her head was high; her eyes were fierce.

I bowed my head in respect and went into the tent. Hanesa and I had both misjudged the woman.

Rix looked haggard. There was dried blood on a torn strip of cloth wrapped around his arm—not his sword arm, fortunately. He greeted me, saying, “We’ve lost too many warriors, Ainvar. Tonight I’m sending what’s left of our cavalry to try to slip through the Roman lines and ride back to their own tribes to raise reinforcements.

“I want every person in free Gaul who is capable of wielding a pitchfork or throwing a stone to come to Alesia and stand with us, to fight with us for their freedom.”

“There isn’t enough food,” I said sadly. “The gram supplies won’t last thirty days as it is, never mind being stretched enough to feed more people. Caesar has us blockaded. And any additional mouth we attempt to feed will just lessen the length of tune we can withstand a siege.”

His eyes were sunk in sockets hollowed by fatigue. It was the first time I had ever seen Rix look exhausted. “Do you think I don’t realize that, Ainvar? But what else can I do? This is the last chance we’ll have to fight for Gaul. Do you know what will hap-pen if Caesar wins? The Nervii could tell you. When he defeated them, only three of their elders were left alive, and out of all their warriors, tens of thousands, only five hundred lived. And they were sold for slaves.

“When the Eburones rose against him he invited all the neighboring tribes to come in and plunder and pillage them, and destroy ‘their accursed race,’ as he called it. And when his warriors captured Uxellodunum, they cut off the hands of all the defenders

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and sent them out into the countryside to be a warning to other Gauls not to resist the Romans.

1 ‘Can I let that happen to your tribe or mine, Ainvar? Or to any of those people out there who believe in me and in the idea of a confederacy of the Gauls? Caesar means to take all this land, settle it with his own people, and put those of us who survive mto bondage forever.

*‘As for me,” he added, staring down at his huge and battle-scarred hands, ‘ ‘I have no doubt he would thoroughly enjoy torturing me to death.”

His voice was so calm, so uninflected, I had to ask, k ‘Does thai prospect frighten you?”

He met my eyes. “Nothing frightens me but losing,” he said.

I recalled a conversation I had had long ago with Tarvos the Bull. Men who are born to be warriors love to win, but they cannot bear to lose.

Gaius Julius Caesar could not bear to lose.

Vercingetorix took the grain supplies of Alesia under his personal control, measuring them out judiciously so they would last as long as possible. He also took charge of the Mandubian cattle to feed his own warriors. And as Caesar continued to build siege-works nearer and nearer the stronghold, Rix began moving the army to safety within its walls.

If Alesia had been crowded before, it was impossible now.

Some of the princes came to him to complain about his sending for reinforcements. Like myself, they foresaw food shortages, and each was concerned about his own tribesmen. ‘ ‘You are loo short-sighted,” Vercingetorix told them. “Can you not withstand a

little privation in order to have ultimate victory? It seems easier to get men to die willingly than to suffer discomfort willingly!

“But there is good news. We have just received a message that a great force of Gauls is gathering in the land of the Aedui in response to my summons, and will soon be coming to relieve us. So tell your people to hold out just a litde longer. When the reinforcements arrive we shall trap Caesar and his army between us and them and it will all be over. We’ll make a victory feast of the Roman supplies!”

Afterward, I asked Rix privately, “Is it true?”

“So I am told. I just’hope they come quickly.”

I longed to go to a grove and invoke the Otherworld. But at Alesia, as at Gergovia, the tribal grove was at some distance from the fort, and the Roman lines lay between-So I must content myself with finding links with nature’s pattern within the walls of

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Alesia, amid throngs of anxious, fnghiened people, where the clamor of voices continued night and day and a druid could find no quiet place in which to listen for the Source.

I did my best. But I knew in my heart it was not enough. I began longing for silence as the others were longing for more food There were 100 many people around me and my spirit cried out for the trees’

“Take care of the grove, Aberth,” I sent out my whisper on the wind.

The day came when the relief force was to arrive, but there was no word of it. Caesar had closed his lines so tightly no message could get through. We could not even learn if the reinforcements had actually left the land of the Aedui.

Despair gripped the besieged Gauls. The grain in the storehouses was gone. Children were crying and rubbing their empty bellies. Women were white-faced and bitter-tongued, men were gaunt. Rix ordered the few remaining hordes to be slaughtered and distributed for food, but this was not enough to feed even a portion of the eighty thousand people packed into Aiesia.

Rix did not kill his black stallion. R was not to be a total sacrifice.

We were all hungry. Hunger can clarify the mind in strange ways. One morning I climbed onto the palisade to sing the song for the sun, and happened to notice a parade of geese beyond the walls, making its way to the river.

How the geese had survived being seized either by us or by Roman foraging parties I could not imagine. Yet there they were, as unconcerned as if there were no such thing as danger. The adults waddled along fat with self-importance, followed by a sin-gle file of half-grown goslings, which must have hatched unusually late in the season. The trip to the river was the major event

of their day. Man and war meant nothing to them.

One word from me would have summoned a score of archers, and a fortunate few would have feasted on goose. But I did not shout. I stood silently watching, cherishing the sunlit vision of a reality isolated from what was happening at Alesia.

Yes. Reality was that line of geese. Adults leading their young into the future.

When they had passed from my sight, I heard my voice say dreamily, “Menua, when we are gone and forgotten, geese must continue to parade to the river on bright summer mornings.”

A nearby sentry in his watchtower turned to stare at me as if I

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were mad-Perhaps I was. Perhaps we were all a little mad by

then.

But I was thankful he had not noticed the geese. When human excrement had become ankle-deep between the

lodges and people were picking lice from each other’s heads for

food, the relief force at last arrived.

THE NIGHT BEFORE, a vote had been taken to send the old, the enfeebled, and the children away from Alesia. Some of the Mandubians had already slipped away, approaching the Roman lines and begging for food. But the Romans had turned them away. To save the remaining youngsters, it was resolved to find some stratagem to get them past Caesar’s army, and various suggestions were put forth, but none seemed likely to succeed.

Several times I had opened my mouth to speak. Several tunes intuition had whispered to me, Wait. Wait.

When trumpets and shouts told us the relief force had arrived, I was thankful I had waited. The children of Alesia would see freedom won for all the children of Gaul.

For my daughter.

Everyone who could scrambled up onto the walls to watch the forthcoming battle. My hooded robe assured me of being ceded a good vantage point from which I could just make out the distant dark mass of the approaching Gauls coming up behind Caesar. They occupied a hill beyond the Roman encampment and filled the plain with cavalry and foot warriors.

Inside the besieged fort, the people gave way to hysterical re-lief. I wanted to shout with joy also, but once again the voice whispered to me, Wait. Wait.

Mounted on his black horse, Vercingetorix led our warriors out

of the stronghold and positioned them in front of the walls.

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Caesar posted foot soldiers atong both lines of his fortifications, one line facing inward toward us, the other facing outward toward the relief force.

The image of the Two-Faced One leaped into my head.

The Gauls attacked the Romans.

The newcomers had many archers, as well as a great number of foot warriors, so many that at first the Romans were overcome by the sheer size of me opposition. The battle was fought in full view of everyone on the walls of Alesia. which seemed to encourage men on both sides to show exceptional valor and determination- The fighting lasted from midday to almost sundeath, with neither side gaining a victory.

The inner line of Roman fortifications held, denying Rix the opportunity of joining the battle. I could see hiniJust below me, riding back and forth in a frenzy of frustration, shouting encouragement to his allies.

The spectators on the wall were shouting, too, with such violence that in time the voices of Alesia were reduced to one great, hoarse whisper. Someone pounded me on the arm. I turned to find Hanesa beside me. “We’re winning, we’re winning,” he rasped through a ravaged throat.

We were, for a time, and then the Romans were winning, and then our side seemed dominant again. The momentum shifted back and forth.

And then we saw a column of German cavalry sweep out from the Roman camp and hurl itself like a spear at our relief force.

Most of them were raw recruits. Many were farmers and herders who had abandoned their fields and their animals to answer the summons of Vercingetorix. They were not trained warriors, and they had never imagined facing men who appeared to be homicidal maniacs.

They broke and ran. A company of Germans surrounded many of the archers and killed them very bloodily. The legions came up then and drove the confused and demoralized Gauls back to their most recent campsite on the horizon.

Looking down, I saw Rix slump on his horse. Then he gave the signal for the gates of Alesia to be opened, and he led our men back inside.

During the next day, the relief force in its camp quietly prepared wattles, ladders, and grappling hooks. In the darkest part of the night they crept forward and began throwing the wattles into the Roman trenches and storming the Roman line with lad—

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ders and hooks, at the same time shouting to Rix and his men to assault the Romans from the other side.

Chaos erupted within Alesia.

I cannot say how many warriors had been asleep. Perhaps most of them, like myself, had been lying, eyes open, too anxious and too exhausted to rest. But at Rix’s call the men were soon on their feet and snatching up their weapons. There was great confusion at the gates as too many of them tried to get through at the same time.

I climbed onto the palisade once more, though it was impossible to see anything. The night was moonless and the stars hid behind shredded clouds. Once I had loved the darkness. Now I was peering into it with burning eyes, trying to see what was not to be seen.

The relief force was attacking courageously at a number of points around the Roman perimeter, as we learned later, but it was not able to break through anywhere. Having anticipated just such an attempt, Caesar had his forces so deployed that no vulnerable area could be found. We heard screams and yells and the thud of stones being hurled by the wooden machines the Romans called ballistae, but no Gaulish shouts of triumph.

As for Rix and his men, it took them too long to organize. They never got near to breaking through the inner circle of fortifications before the relief force had withdrawn from the outer one. Once more the warriors returned to the fort, defeated.

I had longed for silence, but the silence that now descended upon Alesia raked my nerves. Some people were too hoarse to speak, others were too dispirited. Only the children could be heard, crying with fear. Their thin, drawn faces were very pale, their eyes were full of questions no one could answer.