The Druid King (30 page)

And Vercingetorix hears the voice of Keltill. Out of the long ago.

“In fire do I become the tale the bards will sing.

In fire, I enter the Land of Legend as a king!”

And Vercingetorix is declaiming with him.

“As the fire sets my spirit free . . .”

And then he stands before a burning man-shaped cage of wicker already beginning to crumble into embers, wrapped in the oily and obscenely savory smoke of the roasting corpses within. And, turning to gaze at the multitude who have witnessed the terrible magic he has made, leaves the Land of Legend, chanting the last words of his father’s death ode:

“So in fire will you remember me.”

XIII

CAESAR WAS CHILLED even wrapped in his heavy winter cloak, and once more, snow avalanched down from the mountain slopes onto the valley floor had forced him to dismount and lead his horse through the treacherous terrain of hidden rocks, sodden soil, and melt pools.

But he was mindful only of the larger logistical problem. Cavalrymen reduced to leading their horses. Wagons endlessly mired in snow and mud. Cracked wheels. Broken axles. Snow and misty rain. The infantry were most used to the hardship and grumbled the least. The infantry were the heart of his legions and highest in Caesar’s affections, and, were it not unseemly for their commander to do so, he would have given over his horse entirely and marched the whole way afoot with them.

At the moment, he was effectively doing it anyway, for the only men in front of him were trailblazers on foot, testing the way ahead with poles.

Young Brutus led his horse and slogged in the forefront with him, but Labienus, Antony, Trebonius, Galba, and the rest of his generals stayed back within the main body of the troops, so that they could ride through the passes on paths well trodden by thousands of foot soldiers.

Perhaps I should
order
all of them to lead from the front as I do, Caesar mused half seriously. It would serve them right.

They had all blanched at the prospect of crossing the Alps from the south with an army in early March.

“Never been done before,” Galba had grunted.

“Hannibal crossed the Alps with
elephants,
” Caesar had told him. “And that had never been done before either.”

“You’re sure you want to risk such a venture?” asked Labienus.

“Even you are afraid, Labienus?”

“I fear no danger in battle,” Labienus replied with proper indignation. “But who can fight the weather? Valor will avail us nothing if there’s a late blizzard in the high passes.”

“Are you more afraid of a little snow and ice than of the Gauls?” Caesar had roared at the lot of them. “Are you going to let a little bad weather keep you from taking vengeance against the savages who burned Roman soldiers alive?”

Caesar picked up his pace, deciding to join the trailblazers at the very point of his huge army, eager to make himself physically useful, eager do his part to reach the other side of the mountains all the sooner.

Brutus puffed and groaned a step behind him, keeping up. “Who would have thought it possible to cross the mountains this early in the year?”

“No one, Brutus, least of all the Gauls, who believe Romans softer men than themselves!” Caesar told him. “And that is why we are doing it. To crush this barbarian horde before Vercingetorix can form it into a real army.”

This was no stripling barbarian chieftain. This was a clever and ruthless leader.

First he had heard travelers’ tales filtering back over the mountains which had seemed like fantasies crafted to horrify the credulous on dark and stormy nights.

Vercingetorix, accompanied only by a naked amazon, had used magic to force the gates of Gergovia. A wrathful mob had then poured through them, torn the Roman garrison to pieces with their bare hands, and roasted and eaten them. Vercingetorix had erected a giant wooden cage in the form of a man and burned a hundred legionnaires to death inside it. He had done this robed as a druid and holding the Arch Druid at sword point. According to yet another lurid tale, Vercingetorix was now himself Arch Druid, having come by the office via some hideous magical rite wherein Diviacx had been offered up as a human sacrifice to Pluto.

Then Tulius managed to send a messenger back to Gallia Narbonensis, and the report he delivered, though less florid, was grimmer still from a practical point of view.

Diviacx was indeed dead. He
had
been a human sacrifice at some grisly druid ceremony. Vercingetorix had not become Arch Druid, but the druids were now doing his bidding and calling all the tribes of Gaul to war against Rome under his command.

It was also true that the entire garrison of Gergovia had been slain, save for some score or so of legionnaires whom Vercingetorix
had
burned alive to seal some barbaric blood oath among the tribes at which most of the vergobrets had been present. After which he had placed all Romans in Gaul under sentence of death, to be conveniently carried out by any Gaul who wished to loot their property.

Many of the tribes had risen against the isolated Roman garrisons. No prisoners were being taken. Tulius had managed to concentrate the survivors in a single force near Bourges, large enough to keep the Bituriges from joining in and, for the moment at least, intimidating enough to keep Vercingetorix’s army from attacking.

This baleful news had enraged Caesar to the point where he suffered a bout of the falling sickness. If his spirit had had a vision wherever it had gone, he returned with no memory of it, but he had emerged calmer, in which state he had to admire Vercingetorix’s ruthless cleverness.

How
Vercingetorix had turned the druids into his instrument might be a mystery, but the burning of the Romans in the presence of the vergobrets had been a demonic stroke of genius, implicating them all in a hideous outrage against Rome.

Vercingetorix was clever. Vercingetorix was ruthless. Perhaps he was even a master of druid magic, as the superstitious Gauls believed. But he was a Gaul commanding Gallic barbarians, facing Gaius Julius Caesar commanding the legions of Rome.

Caesar caught up to the trailblazers, and they greeted him like a comrade, pleased to see him among them, and by now no longer surprised.

“I thought I’d give you a hand again,” said Caesar, drawing his sword. “The more help you have, the faster you can blaze the trail, the faster our army can move, the sooner we can get there, and the sooner we can take our vengeance on the bastard swine who burned our comrades alive!”

He poked his sword into a snowbank, using it as they used their poles, but as he proceeded along the wall of whiteness, he began thrusting it with a vigor more appropriate to the skewering of enemies, for he saw images emerging from the glare, drawing him into it: burning men, burning fields, a burning city, walls of flame so hot and bright they were burning white, the white of desert-bleached bones, of the salted soil of what had once been Carthage, a lifeless wasteland and his legions marching across it, through white sand, white ash, under a pitiless sun burning out of a silvery-white shimmering sky, the taste of burning copper and thin, sour blood. . . .

And a giant afire, striding toward him across this desolate landscape, crushing his legions to dust in his wake, and his face was that of Vercingetorix, and upon his head he wore the false Crown of Brenn that Gisstus had crafted, and he laughed and threw the severed head of Caesar’s dead friend at him, shouting, “Here is your tribute, Caesar! Take your triumph back to Rome!”

“You shall see who is the harder man, Vercingetorix!” Caesar cried, thrusting his sword through the flaming heart of the giant. “You shall see what happens to a people who dare to pillage what is Rome’s! How Caesar deals with a man who so spurns friendship offered freely as if by a father to a son!”

“Caesar? Caesar?”

Caesar came blinking up from whiteness into whiteness.

He was lying on his back in a snowbank with the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth from having bitten his tongue.

The falling sickness. And a vision therein.

One that he did remember but did not understand.

“Caesar? Are you all right?”

Brutus was standing over him, holding out a hand to help him up. The trailblazers had ceased their labor and gathered around him in a circle of concern.

Spurning the helping hand, Caesar rose unaided to his feet, forced a laugh. “Just the falling sickness, my friends,” he said. “They say it is the gift of the gods, though if I had my choice I’d prefer a pot of gold, or even wine.”

Brutus’ face was a carefully composed blank, but the simple and honest legionnaires eyed their commander with an unmasked nervousness tinged by a certain superstitious awe.

“But sometimes the gods grant me a vision with it,” said Caesar, “and they have done so today.”

“And what did you see, Caesar?” one of the trailblazers ventured uneasily.

“I saw the Gauls, my friends, as they are even now, drunkenly celebrating their atrocities and squabbling over the plunder, never dreaming that a Roman army is about to fall upon them. And do you know why?”

“Because no Roman army has ever crossed the mountains in winter before?”

“Indeed!” said Caesar. “Because they are barbarians and we are Romans! Because barbarians believe that what has never been done before is impossible. They will never understand that, for Romans like us,
nothing
is impossible. And that is why we will defeat them.”

This little speech seemed to satisfy the trailblazers, for they returned to their task with even more vigor and will than before. Caesar allowed himself to fall about a score of paces behind, to the apparent relief of Brutus.

“A noble speech, Caesar,” Brutus said.

“And true, as far as it goes,” Caesar told him. “But there is another and greater reason why we shall surely defeat Vercingetorix and his Gauls.”

Brutus gave him a quizzical look.

Caesar nodded in the direction of the trailblazers, then turned to point back at his army: horsemen, wagons, men marching in good order, filling the width of the Alpine valley, stretching back as far as the eye could see and farther, into the winding and narrowing pass leading beyond the far horizon.

“There is the other reason, Brutus!” he declared, and the pride he heard in his own voice was entirely unfeigned. “While the quarrelsome tribesmen of Vercingetorix spend the winter celebrating their cheap victories, my loyal legions trudge dutifully up these snowy mountains! He commands a Gallic rabble while I command a Roman army! His men fight for loot and their own glory. My men fight to win.”

“You see?” said Oranix. “There they are!”

“It’s true!” exclaimed Litivak.

When Oranix had reported that his scouts had seen Roman troops moving through the Alpine passes before the winter snows had melted, Vercingetorix had assumed that this must be merely a scouting party. But Oranix insisted that his men had seen a Roman army on the march, and this Vercingetorix had found impossible to credit, so he decided to ride east to see for himself.

Rhia, who now never left his side, rode with them. Critognat, bored with the desultory looting, came along too. Likewise Litivak, who had been on the verge of withdrawing his Eduen warriors from the army of Gaul when the report arrived, for his men were growing restive and sullen lurking in the lands of the Arverni with little to do, and the Eduen vergobret was strongly suggesting he withdraw.

“Liscos still believes Caesar will content himself with destroying the Arverni,” Litivak had told Vercingetorix.

“And you . . . ?”

“I’d best see for myself,” Litivak had replied.

Now the five of them sat on their horses just within the cover of a tongue of forest atop a foothill a safe distance northwest of the pass, watching the Roman army arrive in Gaul.

An army it indeed was. Formation after orderly formation emerged in narrow file from the pass, then spread out across the plain like honey pouring from the lip of a jug onto a tabletop. First came a screen of cavalry, then five ranks of infantry, then supply wagons, then another five ranks of infantry, then more cavalry leading another formation, and another, and another, like an endless succession of orderly waves rolling in across a sea of melting white snow and frozen brown mud.

“The gods favor us!” Critognat exclaimed enthusiastically.

Oranix and Rhia regarded him as if he had gone mad.

“More Romans to kill than we ever could’ve hoped for!”

Vercingetorix would have laughed were the situation not so grave. Here was a fearless Gaul such as might have ridden with Brenn, and he doubted that Critognat was jesting.

“Enough of a threat to rouse the fighting spirit of the Edui, Litivak?” he said dryly.

“This is indeed an army meaning to conquer all Gaul,” Litivak said. He shook his head. “But we are not prepared to confront an army like
this.
”

And we never will be, Vercingetorix knew full well.

“That is no doubt why Caesar has returned so unexpectedly early in the year,” he said instead. “To catch us unprepared and dare us to attack him with what we have.”

Which was no more than a force of some twelve thousand Arverne warriors Vercingetorix knew he could count on, about half that number of Litivak’s Edui, and a disorganized assortment of troops from the smaller tribes whose size and composition varied from day to day.

“A worthy enough challenge,” declared Critognat. “I say we should thank Caesar for offering us such glory by allowing him an honorable death in combat when we defeat him instead of burning him alive.”

“You’re getting soft in your dotage,” Vercingetorix told him with a laugh.

Only Critognat laughed with him, for in truth there was not much to laugh about. The sole glory to be gained by accepting Caesar’s challenge and attacking such an army would be a glorious defeat.

So that must be what Caesar is counting on, Vercingetorix realized. A full-force attack by an unprepared and outnumbered army of Gauls like Critognat: fearless of death, fighting for glory and honor, unable to obey any orders but those of their own stout and noble hearts.

Why
else
risk the mountain passes in winter? And arrive when there were no crops ripening in the fields or fresh grass for horses? Was it not Caesar himself who had declared that keeping an army well supplied was at least half the battle?

“Surprise may be on Caesar’s side,” Vercingetorix said, “but time is on our side if we make it our ally.”

“How so?” asked Litivak. “You sound as if you have a plan.”

“Perhaps I do . . .” Vercingetorix muttered, thinking aloud. “It is the end of winter, and our forces are far fewer than Caesar’s. . . .”

“You sound as if this is an advantage!” exclaimed Litivak.