The Druid King

by Norman Spinrad

  “Can you track them in there, Oranix?” Vercingetorix asked the self-styled great hunter.

  Oranix shook his head. “Not possible. We’ll have to use your technique, Vercingetorix—search out and flush our prey, not track it, the way we hunt pheasant with dogs. We separate into groups of two and—”

  “Separate!” moaned Baravax.

  “In there?”

  Vercingetorix’s warriors were unashamed to show each other their fears. Oranix and his hunters regarded them with contempt.

  “You are afraid?” shouted Vercingetorix. “Of frogs and birds and mud? I myself will go alone. And we will all stay within voice range by making the calls of birds from time to time—”

  “The merle,” suggested one of the hunters.

  “A bird that shuns marshlands—good choice,” agreed another.

  “We’ll always know it’s us, and I doubt this Dumnorix is woodsman enough to know the difference,” explained Oranix.

  “In any event, I doubt he and his men will be paying much attention to birdcalls,” said the hunter who had suggested the merle. “Goes like this.” And he demonstrated a sweet, harmonic, warbling whistle.

  “Anyone who encounters more of them than he can deal with, makes the cry of the wolf to attract aid,” said Vercingetorix.

  “He’ll attract a whole wolf pack instead!” exclaimed Baravax.

  All the hunters laughed. “Fear not,” said Oranix, “wolves no more favor such environs than we do.”

  “Well, they’re entering the marshes,” said Gisstus, lying prone in the tall, muddy grass of a hillock. “And so must we.”

  “On horseback?” groaned Marius.

  Gisstus shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. “You can hear a horse stumbling around for miles in there. Dumnorix and those with him are trying to evade detection, so they’ll end up on foot if they haven’t dismounted already. And so must we.”

  “I like it not, Gisstus; it’s a filthy mess in there.”

  Gisstus stood up, the front of his tunic caked with mud. “Our calling has always been a dirty one, Marius,” he said, “or hadn’t you noticed?”

  As he waded knee-deep in slimy water, leading his horse, long since rendered useless and worse by the treacherous terrain, it seemed to Vercingetorix that he had been slogging aimlessly through this swamp forever, even though the position of a wan sun dimly visible from time to time through the slowly evaporating fog told him it was not yet noon.

  Far-distant cries and clashes of metal on metal and three inept wolf calls told him that some of his men had encountered Dumnorix’s. But not Dumnorix, Vercingetorix hoped, for he wanted Dumnorix for himself; even though Caesar wished him brought back alive to be tried and condemned by Diviacx, if he resisted—

  There was another wolf call, this one much closer, then shouts and screams, the sounds of battle, another wolf call, and another, and another, more cries, and clashes of weapons.

  Vercingetorix waded heavily through the swamp toward the battle sounds, but he could not have gone a quarter of a league before they died away into silence—

  Then he heard a sodden sucking sound.

  Vercingetorix made himself as still and silent as a tree of the marshland.

  Yes, those were footfalls, and too heavy to be other than human, unless those of a horse.

  And no horse could be making those guttural cursing sounds.

  The footfalls seemed to be moving in his direction, but with the tall grass, the undergrowth, and the muffling tricks of the fog, it was difficult to tell exactly—

  His horse whinnied.

  The footfalls stopped.

  Vercingetorix pondered this ill luck for a moment, then realized it could be turned to good fortune. He dropped the reins, drew his sword, and slapped the horse hard on the rump with the flat of it.

  The horse whinnied again, this time in protest, as it plodded clumsily and noisily away through the swamp grass, and Vercingetorix, moving from tree to tree, bush to bush, shadow to shadow, followed at a discreet distance, making himself invisible in plain sight.

  “I tell you, Marius, not even one famished wolf would venture into this swamp, let alone a whole pack,” Gisstus said in a hushed tone as the two Romans crouched in the tall grass. “And even if they did, they certainly could do a better job of howling than that.”

  “And how, may I ask, do you intend to find anyone in here, Gisstus?”

  “I don’t. I’ll let them find us.”

  “But they don’t even know we’re here.”

  “They’re signaling each other with these wolf calls. Haven’t you heard the clashes of arms before and after? So I’ll just call them to us.”

  Marius frowned unhappily. “But how do you know whether it’s Vercingetorix’s party or Dumnorix’s you’ll be calling?”

  “I don’t. It doesn’t matter. The one is seeking the other. We keep them all coming toward us, stay hidden as they stumble into each other, and wait for Dumnorix to make his appearance.”

  So saying, Gisstus raised his mouth to the sky and his hands to his mouth, and made the sound of a human inexpertly imitating the cry of a wolf.

  That howl seemed close, but Vercingetorix refrained from moving toward it, intent on following the horse that was the bait in his moving trap, for the animal was making a lot of noise as it struggled through the swamp, and beyond he could hear the footfalls moving tentatively in its direction.

  “What’s that?” hissed Marius nervously, dropping down on his belly in the mud at the sound of something heavy thumping and crashing toward them. Gisstus took cover below the tops of the swamp grass too, then groaned as he saw a riderless horse emerge from a copse of trees a tenth of a league or so away and begin listlessly cropping the vegetation.

  Vercingetorix stood still and silent behind the moss-covered bole of an old tree, watching his horse grazing, and listening to the footsteps moving through the trees on the other side of the marsh-grass meadow, this way, that way, circling, observing.

  At length, Dumnorix—shieldless, on foot, caked with brown mud and green smears of vegetation as well as the blood of battle—peered out at the horse from between two trees.

  Vercingetorix dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling invisibly and silently through the tall grass toward the horse as Dumnorix, in a crouch but clearly visible, began to edge toward it.

  By the time Dumnorix was nearly upon the horse, so was Vercingetorix. He drew his sword, leapt to his feet, and ran at him, shouting, “Dumnorix! Defend yourself, you cowardly Eduen bastard!”

  The horse bolted and ran.

  Dumnorix whirled to face him, drawing his own sword, and parried the blow with a loud sideways clang of steel on steel.

  “I should’ve known that Caesar would send his catamite!” he shouted, aiming a wild, swinging blow, which Vercingetorix easily enough parried.

  Containing his rage was another matter. “This isn’t for Caesar!” he shouted, with a sweep of his sword that Dumnorix countered with ease. “This is for my father!”

  “You hear that?” asked Marius.

  Gisstus covered Marius’ mouth with his hand, raised himself up high enough above the top of the swamp grass to see the two men clanging steel against steel and shouting at each other, then dropped down again and began crawling toward them through the cover of the grass, clutching his Teuton javelin.

  “Your father?” said Dumnorix, seemingly with enough genuine perplexity to let his sword droop along with his expression. Honor forbade Vercingetorix to take lethal advantage of this, even against a man such as Dumnorix.

  “You think I don’t know?” he cried instead. “You killed my father!”

  “I did what?” Dumnorix exclaimed, now slowly bringing up his sword and circling backward, away from Vercingetorix.

  Vercingetorix began a slow, deliberate circling dance toward him, but his mind was clogged with black thoughts, and his heart burned with the memory, and the blood pounded through him, and he could not stri
ke without first spewing it all forth.

  “Gobanit set the flame, but your foul brother condemned him, and you were there, you commanded the guard! Your plot! Your treachery! Your orders! You killed my father!”

  “You fool! You idiot!”

  With a wordless shout, Vercingetorix leapt forward and stabbed at Dumnorix’s stomach. Dumnorix parried the thrust, but clumsily, and Vercingetorix was able to slide his blade along Dumnorix’s sword and plunge a finger’s length of it into Dumnorix’s gut below his buckler. He was about to lean into it to turn it into a killing stroke when—

  —a javelin pierced Dumnorix’s back, the point emerging from his chest, as he screamed in outrage and agony:

  “It was Caesar!”

  “Caesar…?” whispered Vercingetorix, as the dying Dumnorix staggered backward and collapsed into the mud. “Caesar…?”

  “With my dying breath, I swear it,” said Dumnorix, raising his head in a final effort, speaking thickly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. “Who else could make Gobanit and Diviacx act together? Who else was Keltill’s declared enemy? Who else would set Arverni against Edui? Who else but—”

  “Caesar?”

  Something was up and moving in the grass, in the direction from which the javelin must have come—

  Vercingetorix whirled to see a running man. His spirit filled with fury and agony but empty now of the thought that slows the mind, Vercingetorix flung his sword like a spear and skewered the running man through the back.

  As that man had skewered Dumnorix, who now lay unmoving in a growing pool of his own blood.

  Vercingetorix ran to the man he had slain, who lay facedown in the muddy grass, pulled out his sword, kicked the corpse over on its back. The dead man was Gisstus.

  Caesar’s man Gisstus.

  Not wearing his customary Roman vestments but disguised by the simple brown cloak and tunic of a Gallic peasant.

  Time seemed to stop as Vercingetorix regarded just the dead face and not the latest disguise. The dark hair. The olive-tinged complexion. Time crawled backward into the long ago, into the plaza of Gergovia, to the day of Keltill’s burning. And now Vercingetorix knew why the face of Gisstus had always seemed familiar.

  For, as he regarded that face in death, he saw it cloaked in the blue of an Eduen warrior at his father’s last feast, whispering orders in the ear of a fearfully reluctant Gobanit. Commanding the druid Diviacx. And only one man commanded Gisstus.

  “Caesar!” Vercingetorix shouted in soul-deep agony. “Caesar!”

  And then yet another of Caesar’s cowardly assassins was up and running for his wretched life through the swamp grass.

  This one Vercingetorix knew he wanted alive. The man was no woodsman, nor was he in the prime strength of youth, and it took but a short chase for Vercingetorix to exhaust and corner him against a thick tangle of undergrowth and trees.

  The Roman in peasant disguise had no sword, only a javelin and a dagger, and these he tossed away.

  “I yield!” he said fearfully.

  “You yield? So what!”

  “You’d kill a disarmed man? Where is your honor, barbarian?”

  “Where is yours, Roman, as you beg for your worthless life?”

  But then it was that Vercingetorix realized why he needed this man alive. “Perhaps not entirely worthless,” he told the Roman coldly.

  Prodding him in the small of his back with the point of his sword hard enough to draw blood but not to do serious injury, he marched the Roman back to the body of Gisstus.

  “You want your life, you shall have it,” he said. “It is of only one use to me…”

  He reached down with his left hand, grabbed the head of Gisstus by the hair, and lifted it out of the mud. Then he sliced it from its neck with a one-handed stroke of his sword and threw it, still gushing blood and dripping gore, at the stomach of the Roman, who caught it reflexively.

  “Someone must bear my tribute to Caesar,” he said.

  And then, as the Roman ran off in terror, Vercingetorix raised his eyes to the sky, where the fog had given way to blue, and gave free vent to the rage he now allowed to course through him and fill his spirit. He howled at the heavens, at the gods, at Gaius Julius Caesar, at his own stupidity, at destiny itself, full-throated, at the top of his lungs, like a wolf.

  Only Tulius and Labienus had chanced to be in the tent with Caesar when this Marius had unceremoniously dumped the severed head of Gisstus on the camp table, where it now stared up at him, blue-skinned, blind-eyed, but somehow having retained that sardonic expression even in death, as if bidding him a final bilious farewell.

  “Tribute, he called it!” Caesar cried. “Tribute!”

  “That’s what he said, Caesar,” Marius said fearfully. “And when I escaped, he was howling like a mad dog.”

  Tears welled up in Caesar’s eyes, tears that surprised him, for not until this dreadful moment had he realized how much he had loved this sour, unlovable man. Yet somehow he could not bring himself to display those tears before his lieutenants, let alone a stranger.

  The rage in his heart, however, was another matter. Rage at the man whom he would have made king, whom he might have come to love as a son, who had now turned this entire British venture into a pointless farce, and who had deprived him of the one man in all Gaul with whom he could share his secret thoughts—to that he could give full and free vent.

  “Tribute, he called it?” he roared like a lion in outraged agony. “I will enrich the man who brings me the head of Vercingetorix as tribute! And anyone who gives him sanctuary will find his own impaled on a Roman lance!”

  “Is that wise, Caesar?” asked Tulius.

  “What would you have me do, Tulius, award him a laurel wreath for slaughtering my friend?”

  Tulius shot a fleeting sidelong glance at Marius.

  “Go,” Caesar ordered Marius.

  “Well, Tulius?” he demanded when the man had gone. Tulius fidgeted nervously, apparently equally leery of spitting out whatever it was in front of Labienus.

  “How will you explain such a decree to the Gauls?”

  “How will I—? Oh.”

  Caesar caught himself short. The sunlight streaming in through the tent flap was beginning to sparkle with the beginnings of an aura, turning purple around the edges of the beam. He was thinking with his guts, not his brain, and his rage was bringing the falling sickness near. He took four long, deep breaths and forced himself to think coldly in this most hot-blooded of moments.

  Tulius, who knew all, had managed to say enough, without saying more than Labienus needed to hear.

  I can’t outlaw Vercingetorix for slaying Gisstus, he realized, for the Gauls must never know that my agent had even been present at the death of Dumnorix, any more than that my hand was behind the elimination of Keltill. Still…

  “Against my orders, against the will of the druids, Vercingetorix slew Dumnorix for being behind the plot to kill Keltill,” Caesar declared. “And you heard him make this foul accusation, Labienus.”

  “I most certainly did not!” Labienus exclaimed in scandalized outrage.

  “Oh yes, you did.”

  “I heard no such thing!”

  “I order you to have heard it, Labienus.”

  “You are ordering me to lie?” Labienus said in an astonished tone, as if ordering a general to do that which politicians were constrained to do almost every day as part of their craft was somehow akin to ordering him to slay his own mother.

  “Think of it as a military necessity, Labienus,” Caesar told him, to ease his punctilious conscience. “It will make your command of the Gauls a lot easier—”

  “My what?”

  “Back to the status quo ante, Labienus. Vercingetorix’s treachery will not be allowed to stop the invasion of Britain. I order you to announce this version of events to what Gauls remain here, and take command of the Gallic auxiliaries after all.”

  “You do?” exclaimed Labienus.

  “And as a gesture of
my good faith and magnanimity, you can tell them that I am freeing all the hostages, so that all who choose to follow you do so of their own free will. Enjoy yourself, my friend. The storm is over. Off to glory. Hail, Titus Labienus!”

  “Hail, Caesar!” Labienus shouted happily, and replied with a salute so heartfelt that it almost seemed he would disjoint his arm with the force with which he raised it.

  “What was that all about?” a befuddled Tulius asked as soon as Labienus had departed.

  “Giving my noblest general his heart’s desire.”

  “But now most of the Edui will turn on the Arverni because Vercingetorix killed Dumnorix, and most of the Arverni will turn on the Edui because they will believe the Edui plotted to kill Keltill.”

  “Exactly,” said Caesar.

  “But you’re releasing the hostages, so most of the Edui and Arverni will probably just go home now.”

  “Especially the most suspicious ones and the worst troublemakers,” said Caesar.

  “But that means your plan—”

  “—has changed. Which is why I’m sending Labienus on this futile adventure in your place. I have other work for you here. I’ll go along to Britain for a while, for appearances’ sake. You will take command of the legions remaining in Gaul and hunt down Vercingetorix—”

  “Four legions to hunt down one man?”

  “We have made an enemy it would be much better to have had as an ally, but a good enemy can be put to use too,” Caesar told him. “Vercingetorix is going to be very difficult to capture. It’s going to take a long time. There will be Arverne resistance to crush. Make sure there is. You’re going to have to conquer and occupy their territory, and those of any of the minor tribes allied with them, I’m afraid.”

  “And, Vercingetorix having killed Dumnorix, the Edui will do nothing…”

  “Except, perhaps, applaud,” said Caesar. “And the remaining Arverni will not aid the Edui when we turn our full attention to conquering them afterward.”

  “Utterly ruthless and cynical,” Tulius said approvingly.

  Caesar nodded. “Which is why I could hardly entrust such a task to Labienus. Gisstus once suggested that we slay all the leaders and troublemakers and any Gaul presuming to replace them, lay as much waste as necessary to declare Gaul a conquered province, and go home in triumph. And that is what we are now going to do.”