Did the boy blush? Be that as it may, Vercingetorix gave Caesar a cool, measuring look with those eyes that seemed decades older than the rest of him. “I do find it peculiar that you offer to quarter the Gallic commanders here together…”
“How so?” said Caesar, taking care to keep his voice and visage neutral.
“Why separate commanders from their troops?” asked Vercingetorix. “Why quarter rival commanders close by each other instead?”
What a strange youth this Vercingetorix was, one moment an embarrassed boy, the next a cunning general in danger of perceiving the true situation all too clearly.
“Your second question is the answer to your first, my young friend. It is my hope that quartering the commanders of the individual tribal forces close together may cause them to develop a camaraderie and come to see themselves as the leaders of a united Gallic auxiliary army.” Caesar gave Vercingetorix an ingenuous smile. “Did not your father seek something similar?” he said.
“To drive you out of Gaul,” said Vercingetorix. “And they killed him for it,” he added perplexedly. “And I still do not quite understand why you are so willing to see Gaul united—”
“Under Rome, not against us,” Caesar told him. “Your father failed because the vergobrets of Gaul saw no advantage in being united against me under him. But I will show the advantage of uniting under a Roman proconsul for profit and civilization.”
Caesar could see that, virgin or not, Vercingetorix was not naïve enough to swallow this whole, even though there was more truth than falsehood in it.
“Dine with me in my tent tonight,” he said, “and much will be made clear.”
But not everything, my young friend.
If the tent that Caesar had offered him seemed to Vercingetorix fit for a Roman bordello, Caesar’s own would have been fit for a king if the Romans had one. It was four times the size of the ordinary tents and divided into separate chambers by hanging tapestries depicting landscapes from various countries that must be Roman provinces, and the cloth borders framing them were interwoven with threads of gold. Instead of a bare earthen floor, there were carpets. The oil lamps illumining the tent were of gold, and the perfume they gave off was subtle. Two musicians sat in a far corner of the dining chamber, one strumming a stringed instrument, the other playing a set of wooden pipes. There was a large, low dining table set with silver platters and small golden plates offering fruits, nutmeats, olives, pastes of various strange kinds and colors, fishes in sauces, golden goblets, a small amphora of wine.
Three low plushly padded couches were set up around the table. One was empty. Caesar reclined on another, wearing a white toga trimmed in crimson. Reclining on the other couch was a stunningly beautiful young woman, blonde and fair-skinned like a Gaul, but wearing a diaphanous flowing white dress cut low in the Roman style, with her hair likewise elaborately done up in ribbons and a silver tiara trimmed with some shiny grayish gems that did not seem to be minerals.
The smile with which she greeted him was radiant.
Caesar rose and escorted him to the third couch with a hostly gesture which he hardly noticed, and if this was accompanied by words of greeting, Vercingetorix didn’t hear them. His attention was captured by the woman, not just by her beauty, but by the way her eyes tracked his every movement. Even when Caesar kissed her lightly on the lips before returning to his own couch, her eyes remained on him.
It was arousing, intriguing, but also embarrassing, for she must know him, and therefore they must have met. But how could he have possibly failed to remember meeting a woman like this?
“This lovely creature is one of the prize pupils of our Roman grammaticus,” said Caesar, “and, uh, a protégée of mine. Her name is—”
“Marah,” she said.
“Marah!”
“You two know each other?” said Caesar. “What an amazing coincidence!”
Too amazing to be coincidence, Vercingetorix realized. “We…met as children,” he said carefully.
“He offered to make me his queen,” said Marah with a little laugh that, though gently mocking, seemed affectionate as well.
“His queen?” said Caesar.
“It’s a long story,” Vercingetorix said dismissively, blushing at the memory of his boyhood braggadocio, but also rendered wary by this confluence of his old boast, the girl he had made it to, and the man who his vision had told him was destined to turn it into reality.
But Marah had no such compunction.
“It was on the day his father sought to make himself king,” she said.
“He just couldn’t quite keep the secret, and I was a little provincial girl impressed by the son of a local chieftain who was even more impressed with himself…”
“And what have you now become?” Vercingetorix snapped, chagrined by the memory and more than a little vexed by her speaking the truth of it.
“A civilized and educated lady—”
“Impressed by a Roman general who is even more impressed with himself!”
Caesar broke the moment of tension with a laugh. “Can you blame her? Can you blame me? I am, after all, a most impressive fellow!” He laughed again. “In fact, the three of us are most impressive people!”
He poured three goblets of wine with his own hand, lifted his own in toast. “Surely we can drink to that!”
Thus far, the little play he had set up was going quite nicely, but it was best not to rush things. So, as servants brought course after course and he poured goblet after goblet, Caesar contented himself with pretending to drink more than he really was, cozening Vercingetorix into drinking more wine than your beer-guzzling Gaul would be used to, and listening to the hopefully future lovers catch up on their brief childhood memories and banter about their divergent paths into adulthood.
Romans did water their wine to diminish its intoxicating effect when they were struck by an attack of abstemiousness, but it was more often done to ameliorate the harshness of a mediocre vintage, such as what was usually palmed off on the Gauls. Caesar had, however, laid on an excellent vintage, the watering of which would have been an outrage to Bacchus—not because he imagined that Vercingetorix could be a connoisseur, but so that it would glide down his throat smoothly and rapidly at full strength.
He had not written Marah’s part in the drama beyond telling her who the third party at the feast would be and letting her know that he knew of their youthful connection, playing the avuncular older lover stepping aside to become matchmaker to the young couple. For, as any practical sophist knew, the best dissimulations were those that cut closest to the truth.
And so he ate, and he drank sparingly, and he listened to Vercingetorix tell Marah the brief story of his life, and he listened to Marah extolling the virtues of a Roman education and Roman civilization. He didn’t move to channel the proceedings in the chosen direction until Vercingetorix was somewhat drunk and their conversation was approaching the edge of acrimony.
“You sound as if you are glad to have been taken hostage by Rome, Marah.”
“And indeed I am! Had I not been, knowing what I know now, I would have volunteered!”
“Volunteered to be a hostage!”
“Gladly, if that were the price of a Roman education. Without it, what would I be?”
“The wife of an Arverne vergobret?”
“A girl given in marriage to seal an alliance between the Arverni and the Carnutes.”
“And what would have been so bad about that?”
“Between a boy and a girl there should be something more.”
“And there was not?”
“I didn’t say that…but were we not both to be used to help Keltill become king of Gaul? A plan foredoomed to failure.”
“The wrong man with the right idea,” said Caesar, seizing his opportunity.
“The right idea? To drive your legions into the sea?”
“That was the foredoomed part. But giving Gaul a king…”
For the first time in a long while, Ve
rcingetorix’s gaze was drawn away from Marah. His eyes were bloodshot and somewhat glazed, and what Caesar beheld was an inexperienced youth seeking a way out of an argument with a woman his lust sought to woo, but behind the boy was a man, and that was whom Caesar sought to address now.
With a negligent wave of his hand, he ordered the servants and musicians to leave.
“I’ve been in Gaul long enough to know that the political system here just doesn’t work,” he said when the three of them were alone.
“For you perhaps, Caesar,” said Vercingetorix. “It has served us well enough since the time of Brenn.”
“You believe your own father was wrong, then?” Caesar said slyly. This silenced and befuddled the boy utterly. “I have studied the histories and governments of many lands, and the most important lesson that I have learned is that peoples must adapt their forms of government to the needs of the times. Rome too was once a chaos of fractious tribes. Then a kingdom. Now a republic. Later…whatever destiny may require…”
He raised his goblet.
“This much Keltill understood, and for that I salute him!”
Vercingetorix seemed properly moved by this gesture.
“It was all very well for each of your tribes to be ruled by its own vergobret, and those rotating from year to year, as long as you could afford petty feuds and the occasional battle as sport and entertainment,” Caesar told him. “But, confronted by the need to wage war against a common enemy like the Teutons, it just didn’t work. And so you were constrained to seek the aid of Rome.”
“Diviacx sought the aid of Rome!”
“And was right to do so. Had he not, the Teutons would have ruined Gaul.”
“And instead we now confront Rome!”
“And I have come to believe that, to succeed in doing that, Gaul needs a king,” said Caesar.
Vercingetorix needed another swallow of wine to aid in his digestion of that one. “Caesar offers Gaul advice on how to fight his legions!” he exclaimed.
“No,” Caesar told him. “Gaul can never prevail against the legions of Rome. I offer advice on how Gaul may confront Rome and survive. Your people need a king to lead them into a fruitful relationship with the civilization destined to rule the world.”
Strangely enough, Vercingetorix seemed to take no great umbrage at this. “But Rome has no king!” he said instead.
“Rome had kings once, but we grew beyond them and established a republic,” Caesar told him, gliding blithely over a century or two of bloody and turbulent strife.
“And now Rome is ruled by a Senate of educated and enlightened men acting in harmonious concert under a system of written law,” Marah gushed with the convert’s enthusiasm, a description of the Senate that Caesar himself needed a drink of wine to wash down.
“Not that our system of government is perfect either,” he managed to say with a straight face. “Rome too suffers from lack of a single strong ruler able to hold office long enough to really get things done—”
“—but Roman law provides for the election of a kind of king called a dictator when needed,” said Marah, “and Caesar—”
“Gaul is hardly ready for such politically sophisticated solutions at this stage,” Caesar said, cutting her off hastily. “Why, it’s not even fully a province of Rome yet.”
“And never will be!” Vercingetorix exclaimed fervently. “How can you speak of our need for a king and turning Gaul into a Roman province at the same time?”
“And why not?” Caesar said spontaneously, and as he did, a grand vista opened up. Until this moment, he had simply sought to crown the boy his puppet king and use him to unite the fractious tribes long enough to declare Gaul a conquered province and return to Rome in triumph. But now he realized he had stumbled on a system that would serve him well when he became dictator, and indeed well serve the new Rome he would create even after he was gone.
“Every Roman province is ruled by a proconsul elected by the Senate,” Caesar said, thinking aloud. “Almost always a Roman politician sent to rule a conquered people. But if a local king agreed to his country’s becoming a province of Rome in return for being elected proconsul for life, Gaul, for current example, could indeed become a Roman province and be ruled by its own king at the same time! And so might the circle be squared!”
He fixed Vercingetorix with a seductive stare.
“What do you think of that, my young friend?”
Though the boy’s eyes remained bloodshot, something behind them suddenly seemed to clarify as he gazed unwaveringly back, like mist evaporating from the surface of twin pools to reveal bottomless blue depths.
“You seek not to become proconsul of Gaul for life yourself,” he said. It was not a question.
“Your gods and mine forbid!” Caesar told him with total honesty. “I tell you plainly, my destiny is to rule Rome, not Gaul, and since Gaul will then need another proconsul, why not a local king?”
“You sound as if you have someone in mind…” said Vercingetorix, in the strangest tone of voice, as if the wine had transported him elsewhere, as if he were speaking from within a dream.
“It would have to be someone rich enough so we wouldn’t have to worry about him skimming more than his fair share of the taxes…”
“Someone with a Roman education,” said Marah. “Or at least…with a queen who had one…”
“Can you think of anyone who fits that description, Vercingetorix?”
“You could not simply appoint a king of your own choosing, Caesar,” said Vercingetorix. “Gauls will only follow a hero who has proved himself so. A…man of destiny.”
“Heroes are made, not born, my young friend, or, rather, they can make themselves, with a little help from their friends. And our campaign in Britain is a chance for many Gauls to earn themselves crowns of laurel. If the gods so will it.” Caesar shrugged. “On the other hand, Mars is a capricious god, and may decide that one hero is quite enough to wear the laurels. Or…if political necessity so dictates, I could always decide so myself…”
“You offer me a crown of laurel?” said Vercingetorix.
And once more he seemed to be speaking from within a dream.
“I cannot accept a hero’s crown that I haven’t earned, Caesar,” Vercingetorix tells the Roman general, just as he rejected the crown of laurel in the Land of Legend. Indeed, he seems to have entered the Land of Legend, outside the dream called time. He knows what Caesar will do next because he has seen him do it, and he has seen him do it because he has stood upon the hill of his own death looking down on all that was, and is, and will be, and his life does not proceed from the past into the future moment by moment like beads on a string.
And so, even though he remembers that he has entrusted it to Guttuatr, he is not surprised when Caesar reaches into a leather sack behind him and withdraws the Crown of Brenn—or a Crown of Brenn—and holds it up before him, for he has seen this moment before. The only surprise is Caesar’s, at his lack thereof.
But Caesar masks this quickly and proceeds as if he too is in the Land of Legend. “And would you accept this crown from my hand, Vercingetorix?”
“Nor can I accept the Crown of Brenn from your hand,” he tells Caesar. “But that does not mean it is not my destiny to wear it.”
And as he speaks these words, Vercingetorix realizes he has said too much, and the spell is broken, and he comes back down from the Land of Legend into the world of strife.
Where he now knew in all-too-practical detail how his vision in the Land of Legend would be fulfilled; how, and perhaps why, it would be Gaius Julius Caesar who would make him king of Gaul, and how it would be possible for him to be acclaimed as such in Rome.
The man of action was exhilarated by this revelation and more elated still by the rapt and eager gaze of the woman he had promised to make his queen. But the man of knowledge was troubled. For, although the vision he had seen in the Land of Legend had told him that it was his destiny to be acclaimed king of Gaul by Rome and Caesar, it h
ad not told him whether accepting such a destiny would be to serve Gaul and the memory of his father or to betray them.
More disquieting still, if a man’s life did not proceed through time from moment to moment like beads on a string, if he had stood upon the hilltop of his own death and seen his destiny entire, did he have the choice to accept or reject it?
Vercingetorix had more to digest than the copious Roman food soaked in strange sauces, and so spent an uneasy night sleeping in the open with his men. Who would not be tempted by the offer of a crown and the appearance of the girl he had lusted after as a boy as a beautiful and sophisticated woman eager to become his queen? Would I betray Gaul by accepting such an offer? How so, if Gaul would be united and ruled by a Gaul, and Caesar’s legions would return to Italy?
These thoughts troubled Vercingetorix’s sleep far more than the abundant snores of the men around him; while his mind could find no reason to reject what Caesar offered, his heart would not agree.
The next morning, Vercingetorix breakfasted with his troops, ordered Critognat to see to their more orderly disposition, and then returned to the Roman fortress to meet with the other Gallic leaders. It would seem that word that the Arverne leader had passed the night with his men rather than luxuriating in a Roman pleasure tent had spread among the warriors of the other tribes: for as he passed each of their encampments on the way, many warriors greeted him with smiles and nods and even the scattered thumping of swords on shields, no doubt as much in rebuke of their own leaders as in his praise.
The manner in which he was greeted by the Gallic leaders who had spent the night inside the Roman stockade, however, was another matter. These were gathering in the open near the tents that Caesar had provided for them. Some were already seated on Roman stools, others were still in the bleary process of emerging from the previous night’s revelries. There were about a score of them, among whom Vercingetorix recognized by face or reputation Epirod of the Santons, Comm of the Atrebates, Luctor of the Cadurques, Cottos of the Carnutes…and Dumnorix, a man whose face and reputation the son of Keltill was not likely to forget.
The Druid King Page 18
