The Druid King (20 page)

There were general shouts of approval, and then the banging of daggers and swords on stools in the absence of shields. Dumnorix seemed genuinely moved.

Vercingetorix avoided being seen with Caesar after their dinner so as to not create any further impression that he was Caesar’s favorite.

The Arverni and the Edui being the strongest tribes and old rivals, it was inevitable that he and Dumnorix would be seen by the vergobrets of the other tribes as rivals for leadership of the Gallic forces. But it seemed there would never be a leader of a united Gallic army, for the Arverni would never accept the leadership of an Eduen, and the Edui would not accept the leadership of an Arverne. And whichever of them most appeared to be
seeking
such command would lose favor among the other tribal leaders.

So he and Dumnorix kept up the brotherly charade they had begun, serving as both the rallying points of differing factions and peacemakers between them. Dumnorix voiced his skepticism of Caesar’s intentions, whereas Vercingetorix professed hot-blooded eagerness for battle. Thus Dumnorix, leader of the tribe most closely allied to Rome, found himself in the uncomfortable position of looking askance at the Roman whom his own brother had brought to Gaul, and the son of the man who had sought to eject the Romans by force found himself something like the champion of Caesar.

Vercingetorix suspected that Caesar had somehow arranged for things to fall this way, for no one had more credibility as his supporter than the son of Keltill, no one less as his detractor than the brother of Diviacx, and if the invasion was successful, Dumnorix would look the fool, and he would emerge as a king acceptable to the Edui. He was coming to think like a future proconsul of Gaul already, like a Roman, as if Caesar were a lodestone and he but an iron nail.

Nor was his suspicion that Caesar had been using Marah for his own purposes lessened when he finally “chanced” to encounter her again.

The sun was sinking through a broken overcast of low clouds, turning the sand of the rocky beach upon which Vercingetorix strolled the color of copper, the sea the color of iron, and the sky a streaky and mottled orange and blue. He had wandered far from the docks and anchorages where the ever-growing Roman invasion fleet was being marshaled, and the only sounds were the rush of the waves breaking on the rocks and the raucous cries of seabirds. Looking out to sea lost in thought, Vercingetorix did not notice the figure approaching him along the strand until she was close enough for him to see that it was Marah.

She wore a simple brown dress that fell just below her knees, she was barefoot, and her long blond hair blew freely in the sea breeze. She was a vision of an honest and natural Gallic girl, and therefore even more enticing than the sophisticatedly garbed half-Roman he had met in Caesar’s tent. But Vercingetorix found himself wondering whether this innocent effect had been just as artfully crafted. And rebuking himself in the next moment for so mean-spirited a thought.

“And what are you pondering so deeply as you gaze out to sea, Vercingetorix?” she said softly. “Britain? The glories of battle to come?”

“Destiny,” Vercingetorix found himself blurting, and then was instantly chagrined at how ponderous and self-important it sounded.

“Destiny . . . ?” Marah said, and then she laughed. “
Whose
destiny, Your Future Majesty?”

His ears burned at the memory of how crudely he had made a fool of himself when they were children. Nor had he improved much since. The uncomfortable truth was that, though he might be silver-tongued in discussing the affairs of men, he was entirely innocent of the art of bantering with women.

“Mine, and yours, and Caesar’s,” he ventured. “He has sent you to me, has he not? Else it would not be allowed.”

Marah gave him a look that seemed older than her years. Or at least older than
his.
“Nothing happens here that Caesar does not allow,” she admitted.

How much more would she admit? Vercingetorix wondered. How much more do I really want to know? “And you are his . . . special favorite?”

“Believe me, Caesar has no . . . special favorite,” said Marah, and she laughed.

“What are you laughing at?”

Marah laughed again. “At you, Vercingetorix,” she said teasingly. “That is not the question you really wanted to ask—now, is it?”

Vercingetorix’s ears burned, and a bubble of emptiness blossomed in the pit of his stomach.

“You and Caesar have been . . . ?”

“Go on, spit it out!”

“Lovers,”
Vercingetorix managed to say, feeling quadruply the fool: at the tone in which he voiced it, at his embarrassment, at his callow-ness, at something else he cared not to confront.

“For a time,” Marah said easily, and her ease only made his unease worse.

“For how long?”

“You’re jealous!” Marah exclaimed. “As if you expected me to save myself for you!” She gave him a sardonic leer which suddenly made her seem utterly Roman. “Next will you declare that
you
have saved yourself for
me
!”

Vercingetorix found that it took more courage to meet her eyes in that moment than anything else he could remember having to do in his whole life. It was not made easier when she laughed, then reached out and took his hand.

“It’s all right,” she said gaily. “It’s charming. It’s a good sign.”

“A good sign?” Vercingetorix all but stammered.

“You have no cause to worry,” Marah told him. “Julius Caesar is a great man, and a season as his occasional companion has taught me more of the world than you can imagine. But he is also twice my age, married, and a man whose destiny lies not in the provinces with me, but in the center of the world in Rome. . . .”

“What . . . what . . . are you saying?”

“Caesar was my mentor in the amatory arts as he was in other things Roman, but that was all,” Marah told him. “And he had many other such students.”

“And you weren’t jealous?”

“Of what? Is every chicken jealous of every other who enjoys the services of the cock? Do you imagine that I am jealous of every girl you have lain with?”

Vercingetorix found himself blushing with shame, not for what he
had
done, but for what he hadn’t.

“Spoken like a Roman,” he managed to say.

“And why not? You had better start learning a little Roman sophistication yourself, Vercingetorix, future king and proconsul of Gaul!”

“You really believe Caesar’s offer was serious?” Vercingetorix said, eager to retreat to safer ground.

“If it were not, would he have made me part of it?” Marah said banteringly.

“So you admit it, then?” Vercingetorix replied in kind.

“He uses me for his own purposes as he uses everyone, if that’s what you mean,” said Marah. “But as I am his willing instrument, so he is also mine.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“This,” said Marah, and she suddenly kissed him fleetingly but openmouthed on the lips. Vercingetorix, his lust instantly inflamed, sought to clasp her to him, but, with yet another laugh, she danced away.

“You know Caesar . . . intimately, Marah,” Vercingetorix said to cover yet another callow moment of embarrassment. “Do you trust him?”

“Completely,” she said.

“Completely?”

“I trust him to be Julius Caesar! I trust him as much as I trust you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re both men of destiny,” said Marah. “And such men can only be trusted to follow their own stars.”

She gazed deeply into Vercingetorix’s eyes, then clasped him behind the neck with both hands and drew him into a longer, deeper kiss, her tongue touching his and sending a bolt of lightning to his groin.

Then she broke the embrace.

“That’s what makes them so exciting!” she said, and ran back up the beach.

There was perhaps a hint of gray in the bellies of some of the larger clouds fleecing the sky, and the usual foamy chop on the grayish-green waters of the Oceanus Britannicus, but the weather was holding, the last of the ships had arrived from the Mediterranean, the hulls that Gallius had built here were completed, the masts installed, and construction crews were even now putting up the rigging. Five hundred ships rode the rolling waves of the channel, as many as the sardines that a good fisherman might pull up in a successful cast of his net.

Caesar stood on the shore regarding his enormous fleet with satisfaction as Gisstus approached him. His legions would sail aboard the war galleys and the equally seaworthy merchant ships he had commandeered for the purpose, as would Vercingetorix and his Arverni, perhaps the forces of a few other tribes for appearances’ sake. The rest of the Gauls could cross to Britain aboard the troopships Gallius had thrown together here. These were little more than sharp-prowed barges fitted with oars and sails, but the channel was not wide, and it was not exactly vital that they be sturdy enough to make more than a one-way crossing.

“Three more days and we’re off to Britain,” he said when Gisstus reached him.

“Or off the land and onto the water anyway,” said Gisstus.

Caesar laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of seasickness like our suspicious friend Dumnorix?” he said.

“Oh, a little puking for the greater good and glory of Rome is not beyond my courage, Caesar,” said Gisstus. “But the gods of this piece of sea have an odious reputation for serving up sudden capricious changes in weather. Perhaps we should sacrifice a bullock or two to Neptune, in the Greek manner, just to be on the safe side.”

“
Must
you always worry about the worst possibilities, Gisstus?”

“It’s what you pay me to do, Caesar,” Gisstus reminded him, and of course it was true. An optimist would make a poor spymaster. Moreover, Caesar knew that his own sanguine temperament needed the balance of such a man whispering in his ear.

Tomorrow they could begin loading supplies; then the legions would board, followed by the Gauls, who, being incapable of choosing an overall commander for a unified auxiliary army, had no choice but to accept the overall command of a Roman general; they had been mollified by his choice of the Roman general they most admired, Labienus.

They would not be told that Labienus was to be replaced by Tulius until they were landed in Britain. Labienus was the last man Caesar wanted in command of such an admittedly dirty piece of business, whereas Tulius was unencumbered by an excessive lust for glory or an overdeveloped conscience. Tulius would have no compunction about sending those Gallic leaders whom Caesar did not wish to survive and their troops into well-chosen fiascoes. Vercingetorix and his Arverni would be given the easiest roles in the heroic drama. After a few battles in which the leaders of minor tribes were slain leading their forces into bloody disaster, it would be easy to get the remnants to accept integration into Vercingetorix’s army.

And when Dumnorix met his unfortunate end, the same could be done with the Eduen survivors, leaving Vercingetorix in command of a de-facto army of Gaul fighting at the side of Rome’s legions. When the dust had cleared, it would be easy enough to get the Gauls to accept a well-made hero like Vercingetorix as their king and the Senate to elect him proconsul of Gaul.

“Any more dark thoughts save the weather, Gisstus?” Caesar asked in fine good humor.

“Well, there’s always the Britons,” Gisstus replied. “It’s hard to imagine this armada sneaking up on them. Maybe they have mighty magicians. Maybe they have secret weapons. And in any case, I am reliably informed that the food there is horrible.”

Caesar laughed heartily. “You never fail me, do you, Gisstus?” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I
knew
you’d think of something!”

“An army is a war engine, and keeping it well armed and supplied is at least half the battle,” Caesar told Vercingetorix as they walked along the docks and jetties lining the shore.

Caesar had summoned him to watch the loading of the ships, no doubt to impress him, and impressed Vercingetorix was. There were more ships than Vercingetorix would have imagined existed being rowed in from anchor to be loaded, then rowed out again to anchor to make room for more. Some of the things Vercingetorix saw being loaded amazed him, and surely would have daunted him were he a Briton and civilized enough to comprehend what he saw. Swords, shields, armor, arrows, and javelins in profusion, but also wagons disassembled for more efficient storage, and parts of things Caesar called siege towers, catapults, and ballistae, which, he claimed, could launch clouds of arrows longer than a man and stones three times as heavy. And there were all manner of tools and implements to manufacture more in the field.

Assuming that the Romans would feed their army primarily by foraging, Vercingetorix was surprised to see the huge amounts of grain being loaded, and more surprised still when Caesar told him that his legions could fight on such stuff, without meat, without their energy or spirits flagging. They were even loading wine, because, Caesar told him, Britain was likely to have none, or at any rate none that would be drinkable, and when Vercingetorix jocularly demanded a supply of beer for the Gauls as well, Caesar quite seriously ordered his quartermasters to see to it.

“Rome has turned war from an art into a science,” Caesar told him as they reached the last dock in the line, where tents, stools, furniture, wax tablets, scrolls, maps, rugs, adzes, saws, hammers, and kegs of nails were being loaded. “It’s the difference between a band of warriors, however large, and an army.”

“But where is the glory in overwhelming your enemy with great engines that hurl huge stones and arrows?” Vercingetorix demanded. “Who among you will then be able to truly boast of victory in courageous battle?”

“Fear not, my young friend,” said Caesar, “I am quite good enough with words to take care of that!” And he laughed at Vercingetorix’s befuddlement. “Gaining victory by whatever means is the task of an army,” he went on in a much more serious vein. “You Gauls fight for glory. The legions of Rome fight to win. Better inglorious victory than glorious defeat.”

“Is winning everything?”