The Druid King

by Norman Spinrad

  “I have summoned you all here from the far corners of Gaul to bear witness to a sacred circle of judgment such as has never been held before…”

  Murmurs sweep through the assembled druids.

  “For it is a druid who is to be judged.”

  The massed intake of breath is like a wind through the trees, and the white exhalations drape the druids in a momentary fog.

  “And more. Much more. I call upon the druid Diviacx of the Edui to come forward.”

  There is a commotion in the middle of the crowded clearing, and then the way parts for Diviacx, who strides forward in his blue-trimmed white robe. His face is impassive; only his eyes, darting this way and that, betray his fearful unease.

  “I am to be judged by the druids?”

  “Far crueler than that, Diviacx. You must judge yourself.”

  “Myself?”

  “Who better to judge the story of your life in this world and what it will mean in the next?”

  “You ask a hard thing, Arch Druid.”

  “Have you not done hard things before, Diviacx?” shouts a voice from the assembly. It is Vercingetorix, coming forward in a druid’s robe, pure white like Guttuatr’s, unmarked by tribal emblem.

  “Or was it easy to conspire to bring the Romans here for your own profit?” he says as he approaches.

  Diviacx turns away from Guttuatr to confront Vercingetorix and his fellow druids. “I did it to save us all from the Teutons! And they are gone, are they not?”

  “You did it for the Edui!”

  “I did it for all Gaul!”

  “Then will you now prove it?” Vercingetorix asks insinuatingly. “Will you now save us from the Romans? Even the Arverni, Eduen?”

  “I am a druid before I am an Eduen!” Diviacx declares. “I would save us from the Romans if I could,” he says more weakly, and perhaps with genuine sorrow, “but I know not how.”

  “You begin by swearing to speak nothing but truth within this sacred circle,” Guttuatr tells him. “No matter where its path may lead.”

  Diviacx withdraws a dagger from beneath his robe. “With an open heart and the last drop of my blood, Arch Druid,” he says softly, and he slashes his palm, raises his hand aloft, and allows a few red drops to stain the whiteness of his robe.

  “Did you not conspire with Caesar to murder my father?” Vercingetorix demands.

  “Did your father not conspire to make himself king of the Gauls against all law and tradition?” cries Diviacx. “And did you not murder Dumnorix, my brother?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “What?”

  “I swear to speak nothing but the truth within this sacred circle, no matter where its path may lead,” says Vercingetorix, and from beneath his druid’s robe he withdraws not a dagger but a warrior’s sword. “With an open heart and the last drop of my blood.” And he slashes not his palm but his forearm, and allows his blood to flow down his white robe’s sleeve.

  “The truth is, I did wish to slay your brother, Diviacx, and this sword did pierce his innocent flesh, for I believed he conspired with you and Caesar to kill Keltill. For this I ask his spirit to forgive me. And for this that spirit’s brother may take my life if he so wishes.”

  Vercingetorix hands the dumbfounded Diviacx his sword.

  “But before you do, Diviacx, know that it was Caesar’s hand that slew your brother, not my own.”

  “Caesar…?” whispers Diviacx as the sword hangs limply in his hand. “Caesar?”

  “Through the instrumentality of his assassin Gisstus,” says Vercingetorix, “who slew him with a javelin from hiding like the serpent he was.”

  “Gisstus!” exclaims Diviacx.

  “Whom I then slew, and whose head I threw at Caesar as a token of my outrage and a declaration of war between him and myself.”

  “You knew this man?” asks the Arch Druid.

  Diviacx’s head droops deeper than the sword hanging from his hand. “He was Caesar’s secret emissary at…at…”

  “At Gergovia!” cries Vercingetorix. “At the seizing and burning of my father!”

  “Why should I believe he slew my brother?” Diviacx demands.

  “You have just admitted that you conspired in secret with him to burn my father.”

  “I admitted no such thing,” Diviacx insists, albeit weakly, and with an evasive look in his eyes.

  “Do you deny it under an oath sworn in blood?” says the Arch Druid.

  “I…I cannot,” Diviacx replies miserably in a voice barely above a whisper. Then, plaintively: “It’s true? Gisstus slew my brother? From hiding? Without honor?”

  “I swear it under blood oath as the man who saw it and avenged Dumnorix,” Vercingetorix tells him in a tone not devoid of sympathy.

  “Under orders from Caesar?”

  “Who else could order Gisstus?”

  Diviacx sighs. His eyes grow misty. His lower lip trembles. “Caesar betrayed me!” he cries. “And tricked me into betraying my own people! And killed my brother!”

  The assembled druids, who have maintained a rapt silence, now mutter and cry among themselves. The Arch Druid lets this continue a while before raising his staff to command a silence in which to speak.

  “Behold the work of Rome, which has not only set tribe against tribe, but Eduen against Eduen, Arverne against Arverne, brother against brother, druid against druid!”

  “What I did, I did for Gaul, or so I truly believed,” insists Diviacx. “I was the unwitting tool of treacherous Caesar. And yet…”

  “And yet?” says Vercingetorix.

  “And yet my own brother, full of honor, has paid with his life for what I have done!” Diviacx cries out in anguish.

  “And would you now be the tool of Gaul, Diviacx?” says Guttuatr.

  A light dusting of snow begins to fall. The druids sigh as if they have been given a sign. But of what, they do not know. Nor does Diviacx.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “You say you conspired to bring the Romans to save Gaul from the Teutons. You said you conspired to slay Keltill to preserve our people and our way…”

  “I swear this to be true!”

  “Would you now do as much to preserve Gaul and its way from the Romans?”

  “With the last drop of my—”

  Diviacx stops short as a terrible comprehension dawns in his eyes. The druids gasp, then murmur, then fall so silent that it seems the fall of the snowflakes upon their robes can almost be heard.

  “With the last drop of my blood,” he says softly, and humbly hangs his head.

  Guttuatr takes a step forward. There is something hesitant about it, and so too in his voice as he begins to speak.

  “It is not our way to fight as one people under a single leader. Our diversity has long been our strength and our freedom. It has preserved the tribes of Gaul from those who lust for power. The druids have always been the guardians of the things of the spirit, and never intervene in the worldly destiny of Gaul. And yet…and yet now, if we do not intervene, the destiny of Gaul will be for its very spirit to perish…”

  “No!”

  “It cannot be!”

  “Silence!” roars the Arch Druid, and, with one hand, he holds his staff aloft. “Hear my words, and spread the tale of what occurs here today to every corner of this land, and let it enter the Land of Legend! I, Guttuatr, Arch Druid of Gaul, take it upon my own spirit to commit a lesser evil in order to prevent a greater one. I command—yes, command—an unnatural pact among us, among all the tribes of Gaul!”

  He turns to regard Diviacx, whose eyes have remained downcast and averted. “And there is only one way to seal it,” he says in a much quieter voice.

  Diviacx looks up slowly to meet the gaze of the Arch Druid.

  “And you know what that way is, do you not, Diviacx?”

  “In blood sacrifice…”

  “Freely given, Diviacx, freely given.”

  “Is there no other way?” asks Diviacx, looking slowly aro
und the gathering of druids, but his voice betrays the knowledge that there can be none.

  No one speaks, no one moves.

  “So be it…” Diviacx declares.

  “Speak your judgment, Diviacx!”

  Diviacx hesitates, then raises his head high and speaks in a loud, proud voice:

  “Before the tribes of Gaul, I accept this sacrifice as a fitting end to my story in this world and a worthy beginning to my story in the Land of Legend!”

  “And at whose hand, Diviacx? You must choose.”

  Slowly Diviacx turns to regard Vercingetorix.

  “To seal this pact among the tribes in Eduen blood, I choose an Arverne. In the name of justice, I choose the man whose father I now see served the same destiny and made the same sacrifice for it. To unite the Gaul to which I brought the scourge of Rome, and which I now must give my life to save, I give it to the man the heavens have declared must lead us.”

  He hands Vercingetorix back his sword.

  “I choose Vercingetorix, son of Keltill!”

  Vercingetorix looks deeply into his eyes, and his expression is tender. “Noble words, Diviacx,” he says softly.

  Then he turns to address the druids.

  “Behold, it is not the son of Keltill who sends Diviacx from this world and into the next in the name of vengeance, nor an Arverne in the name of his tribe’s honor, but a druid in the name of the people and the spirit of Gaul!”

  Diviacx spreads his arms and offers up his chest.

  “I offer up my life with an open heart that that spirit not perish!”

  Vercingetorix places the point of his sword upon Diviacx’s breast. He pauses. He takes Diviacx’s right hand in his own, and places it upon the hilt of the sword, then the left, so that their four hands are clasped together around it.

  And together they plunge the sword into Diviacx’s heart.

  XII

  CAN YOU SEE the clouds moving?” asked Rhia.

  Vercingetorix gazed up at a leaden ceiling of dirty grayish clouds, the sort from which snow or rain might come down, but not the sort likely to produce a short storm that would clear the heavens.

  He shook his head.

  “Neither can I,” said Rhia.

  “I believe this weather will hold…”

  “And there will be no moon…”

  Gergovia perched atop a hill that rose out of a broad meadow, both logged clear in the long ago, but the stream meandering through the meadow nurtured a string of copses along its banks. A makeshift village had grown up under the shelter of these trees: crude huts of wicker and wattle with conical thatched roofs thrown up by impoverished peasants whose winter stores and livestock had been stolen by the Romans, and who hoped to survive until spring by fishing the stream and hunting the small game that gathered round the water source.

  Or that was what the Roman garrison occupying Gergovia was supposed to think.

  Vercingetorix and Rhia stood on the stream bank farthest from the city, just far enough out of the trees to be able to study the late-afternoon sky.

  “So be it,” said Vercingetorix. “We do it tonight.”

  Most of the inhabitants of the village were starveling peasant families, and huntsmen with their wives and children as well, for among the early arrivals were some dozen of them, led by Oranix, the “great hunter,” whose lives and livelihoods had been imperiled by pillaging Romans turning hunters into prey.

  Vercingetorix had immediately put them to work winkling out the scattered warriors who had, singly or in small groups, escaped Caesar’s legions and hidden in the forest. Now there were about half a hundred of them in the village. Many had arrived lacking arms, but smiths had fled into the haven of the forest too, and deep within the woods they had forged new swords and axes.

  The seemingly pathetic refugee village was now a hunting blind from which Vercingetorix intended to take Gergovia from the Roman cohort holding it.

  Gergovia, like all such Gallic redoubts, was designed to be easy to hold and difficult to take. An approaching army would be visible from long distances, giving the defenders ample time to prepare a warm reception of arrows. The Roman general Tulius had obviously reckoned that a few hundred men would be enough to hold the city through the winter against whatever the scattered Arverni could muster.

  Vercingetorix had hoped that the druids would gather him an army from the other tribes, particularly the intact forces of the Edui, to overwhelm by sheer numbers the six hundred or so Romans holding the city.

  But the druids had failed.

  The same word came back from all the tribes. Take your own city back, Vercingetorix, and then we shall consider joining your army of Gauls. Even Litivak, who now commanded enough Edui himself to make the difference, informed Vercingetorix that he would not endanger his own position by attempting to lead his warriors where he knew they would refuse to follow.

  And so Vercingetorix had been reduced to assembling about half a hundred actual warriors and about three hundred peasants and hunters, and hiding them here in plain sight of the Romans. It would be suicidal folly to attempt to storm the city and scale the walls or ram in the gates with such a force, and he had assembled and held this “army” together only by swearing a blood oath that they would not be called upon to try.

  “The gates will open themselves for you,” he promised whenever wills had wavered. “If they do not, you will know I have been slain. And I cannot be slain on the soil of Gaul.”

  Only his death could render the vision false and his boast vain. No matter how many times he defied death and prevailed, he could never truly know that the next time might not be the last.

  And tonight he was going to have to do it again.

  The only magic that he truly had was the magic he must make.

  Under other conditions, Vercingetorix would hardly have considered a cold, misty rain a favorable omen, but on this moonless night under a starless sky, it was a gift of the gods, further cloaking their approach to Gergovia.

  Vercingetorix and Rhia climbed the hill under cloth blankets smeared with mud from the stream and then coated with the brownish remains of winter grass. They crawled quickly for a bit, stopping still for longer intervals, so that only by unfortunate chance might the Romans on the wall catch sight of these little knolls in motion.

  Theirs was a slow, soggy, miserable progress, but in the end worth the discomfort, for they reached the base of the wall without causing the alarm to be sounded. Here, pressed against the foot of the wall, they were invisible to those upon it, and made their way to a section of the wall midway between two of the towers.

  Vercingetorix made certain that both his sword and the trumpet he carried were firmly fastened to his belt and well baffled with the rope coiled about his waist, then nodded to Rhia. From her sack, Rhia withdrew two daggers and handed them to him. The daggers had been purpose-crafted by the most skilled of the smiths. Their blades were short and stout and sharpened for only half their lengths. The handles, forged of a piece with the blades, were overlarge, and their broad, flattened sides formed a cross with the blade edges.

  Gergovia’s wall was constructed of large rough stones held in a kind of log cage rather than simply mortared together. The logs were arranged in no rigid order, their placing complementing and reinforcing the piling of the stones, and there were plentiful chinks and small gaps between rock and wood.

  Vercingetorix drove the first dagger into such a chink at knee height, then the second into a chink at waist height. Rhia handed him a third dagger, which he drove in at head height above the first. He put his right foot on the handle of the first dagger, then, using the third as a handhold, put his other foot on the second, so that he was now standing on both dagger handles, using them as steps.

  Rhia handed him a fourth dagger, which he placed an arm’s length above the third; then he withdrew the first, placed it an arm’s length above the fourth, and, using the highest dagger as his next handhold, climbed a step farther up the wall.

&nbs
p; Slowly, painstakingly, quietly, Vercingetorix scaled the wall on a movable ladder of daggers. It was arduous, muscle-straining going, and when he finally reached the top of the wall, he was panting, his arms and legs ached, and he was sweating even in the wintry night. But even now he could not ease his limbs’ fatigue. He hung by the knives just below the lip of the parapet, uncoiled his rope, and dropped the end down to Rhia.

  He then raised his head cautiously to peer up over the lip of the parapet. A single legionnaire, armed with a lance and patrolling the section of the walkway between the nearest two towers, was approaching. Vercingetorix ducked back down until he heard him pass, reach the right-hand tower, turn, pace back to the left-hand tower, turn again, and return. He clung there, timing the guard’s movements, as the Roman repeated the cycle twice.

  When the guard’s footfalls dwindled away to the left a third time, Vercingetorix waved to Rhia, pulled himself up onto the walkway, drove two daggers into the top of the wall, and secured his end of the rope to their handles, allowing Rhia to scramble quickly up the wall behind him.

  As the guard reached the left-hand tower and turned, they both dropped to their bellies in the shadows. Rhia handed Vercingetorix her sword and its belt and doffed her cloak.

  Beneath it she was entirely naked.

  She crawled toward the approaching Roman until they were only a body’s length apart, then suddenly stood up.

  Startled, the Roman brought his lance down to bear on her, but then, in the next instant, he froze.

  “Where…where did you come from?” he stammered.

  “From a cold and lonely bed,” purred Rhia, striding forward with arms opening wide to embrace him.

  Transfixed, the Roman lowered his lance, no doubt without thinking, as Vercingetorix could well understand, for, inappropriate to the occasion though it might be, his brain was powerless to prevent his own manhood from rising.

  Rhia pressed her naked breast hard against the unprotesting Roman’s chest, reached up behind his neck with both hands to draw his face down into a kiss.

  There was a dull crack and a low grunt as she snapped it.

  Quietly, almost tenderly, Rhia slid the dead legionnaire to the walkway as Vercingetorix ran toward her. She buckled on her sword and threw her cloak around her shoulders, hiding very little, as they dashed to the ladder by the tower and scrambled down it.