The Druid King

by Norman Spinrad

  He gave Caesar an imploring look. “I wish you’d let me deploy the catapults. I do believe I’ve perfected the formula for Greek fire, and I’m anxious to try it out.”

  “The point is to cook the grain supplies in Bourges in our pots, Gallius,” Caesar told him dryly, “not inside the city’s granaries.”

  “Couldn’t we at least heave dead horses over the walls? Or cows or dogs—it doesn’t really matter—you half cover them with water, leave them in the sun till they’re good and maggoty, then—”

  “Something strange is going on, Caesar!”

  Brutus came running up to the tent in a dither. Had he been a horse, he would have been in a lather.

  “When is it not, in this strange land?” Caesar said, still in a fine humor.

  “There’s been some disagreement between the Arverni and the Edui—”

  “Next you will surprise us with tales of cats falling out with dogs,” said Tulius.

  “The scouts have seen the Gauls making encampment outside Bourges, but they’ve also seen Litivak’s Eduen cavalry riding away!”

  “Well, well, well…” crooned Caesar.

  Vercingetorix’s alliance with this Litivak’s personal army of Eduen warriors had always been about as natural as an alliance between cats and dogs, which was why Caesar had not yet attacked the Edui on their home grounds, calculating that the implied threat to do so would sooner or later persuade their vergobret to recall him. But Litivak’s campaigning with Vercingetorix seemed also a campaign to succeed the spineless Liscos, and as long as the lands of the Edui were kept out of it, Liscos lacked the political authority to order him to defect.

  Now Litivak had defected anyway.

  But why? Caesar asked himself. Perhaps his own men forced it on him? Or perhaps he’s finally realized his chances of succeeding Liscos will evaporate entirely if he’s still supporting Vercingetorix when we destroy this so-called army of Gaul?

  In any case…

  “Bring Litivak to me, Brutus,” Caesar ordered. “I must speak to him.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Brutus asked glumly.

  “Use your imagination, Brutus! Show some initiative! Guarantee him safe passage. Offer him gold for his time. Tell him any lie you like. I don’t care how you do it.”

  “Yes, Caesar,” Brutus said without noticeable enthusiasm for this opportunity to prove his worth, and turned to depart.

  “Hold!” cried Caesar, suddenly realizing that he had been paying too much attention to one part of the report. “You said the Gauls were camped outside the city? They haven’t entered?”

  “No, Caesar.”

  “But why?” asked Labienus.

  “Why indeed?” muttered Caesar.

  And then it struck his brain like the gift of a joyous vision from the gods.

  “Of course!” he cried. “It’s obvious!”

  “It is?” said Tulius.

  “It certainly is if you’re the Bituriges in Bourges! You’ve managed to stay out of the war long enough to harvest your grain and store it up behind your walls. Now Vercingetorix arrives with an army to feed and us close behind. Would you invite a horde of rats into your granaries to protect them from an approaching cloud of locusts? Would the Bituriges invite his army in to devour their supplies and invite a Roman siege? This changes everything!”

  “It does?”

  “Vercingetorix is camped outside the walls because they won’t let him in! Knowing the Gauls, they’re still arguing about it! If we’re lucky, he’ll have to fight his way inside!”

  Caesar leapt to his feet.

  “Labienus! Tulius! Give the order to break camp at once! If we march all night, and into the morning, we can catch Vercingetorix out in the open with his back to the wall of a city still closed to him and crush him against it like a walnut!”

  At first, the Bituriges had refused all entry to Bourges, but they could hardly bar the Arch Druid, so Vercingetorix had dispatched Guttuatr to treat with them. He emerged an hour later with an agreement from their vergobret, Jarak, to allow Vercingetorix into the city to parlay, but accompanied only by his standard-bearer, Guttuatr himself, and half a dozen guards, and only afoot.

  And so a score of Biturige warriors surrounded Vercingetorix, Rhia, Guttuatr, Baravax, and five Arverne warriors as they made their way through the city to the Great Hall. The bear standard of the Arverni was greeted with hoots and curses.

  Bourges was a smaller city than Gergovia, but it seemed a good deal richer. The proximity of Tulius’ major garrison to their capital had given the Bituriges an excuse to keep out of the war during the winter, and the advent of Caesar’s huge army likewise in the spring. A walk through the city made it clear to Vercingetorix that Bourges had profited well from its craven neutrality and commerce with Rome. The people looked well fed; there was meat, fruit, vegetables, and beer in the market stall, as well as amphorae of Roman wine and olive oil, baskets of spices, rolls of cloth, jewelry, even scrolls, which could only have been brought here by Roman merchants. No wonder the townspeople did not welcome the commander of the army of Gaul.

  The exterior of the Great Hall of Bourges, ironically enough, was not defiled with any vain attempt to adopt Roman style. Inside, it was another matter. Roman tapestries depicting goatmen, naked women, impossibly lush forests, monstrous sea-beasts, gods and goddesses all but hid the stone and wood of the walls. The sunlight filtering in through the narrow window slits was augmented not by torches but by large brass oil lamps. A mosaic of many-colored small tiles covered the floor with a scene from a seacoast no one here could ever have seen. A semicircle of tiered marble seats in the Roman manner enclosed a well.

  These seats were half filled with Biturige nobles, perhaps threescore of them, some wearing bits and pieces of Roman garb and jewelry, a few even wearing togas. Vercingetorix could see no arms-bearing warriors among them. Perhaps this was meant as a sign to him, or perhaps it was the true state of things.

  Jarak stood alone in the well of this Biturige “Senate,” and he at least was dressed entirely as a Gaul, in yellow-and-blue pantaloons, white linen shirt, and leather jerkin. But he wore no helmet and bore no arms. His blond hair had gone half gray, and his sun-leathered skin had its lines of age, but he was still a vigorous man, and Vercingetorix felt his strength when Jarak approached and embraced him in greeting.

  Though his warrior woman bore the bear standard of the Arverni, surely the most detested tribal emblem in his city, Jarak found himself wishing that he were a bear, so that he might hug the life out of this arrogant young hero, who surely did not come here to confer any boons on his people.

  But the sigil of the Bituriges was the owl, bird of wisdom, not the bear, and it was as the owl that Jarak had not only kept the Bituriges out of this war but allowed them to wax prosperous. So it was as the owl that he spoke, or, rather, like an owl pretending to the innocence of a duck to hide his wisdom.

  “I welcome you to Bourges, Vercingetorix, son of Keltill, but I do not understand why you are here with your army.”

  “Caesar’s legions are even now approaching your city; surely you know that.”

  “If your army were not here uninvited, they would not be coming here, so take it elsewhere and they will leave us in peace,” he said.

  “Not so,” said Vercingetorix. “They are after your food supplies.”

  Everyone knew that the tactic of Vercingetorix was the famishment of the Roman army, and the Romans well knew that the granaries of Bourges held plenty of grain, thanks to their commerce with the Bituriges. Until now, this had seemed anything but a calamity. There was a good surplus, the Romans were rich in gold but poor in food, and, things being what they were, the exchange of the one for the other should have been on terms quite favorable to the Bituriges.

  But Vercingetorix was obviously here to prevent such commerce from happening. Jarak suspected that the fat days of neutrality were over, that the war had come to the Bituriges and now they would be forced to take one side
or the other. Or, rather, that Vercingetorix was here to force them to enlist in his cause whether it benefited them or not.

  “So you have brought your army to Bourges to defend the city from the Romans?” he said, resigning himself to the inevitable.

  “Not exactly,” said Vercingetorix evasively, and Jarak did not at all like the furtiveness in his eyes.

  “Explain yourself, then!” said Jarak.

  “I would rather address myself to all of you at once,” Vercingetorix told the Biturige vergobret nervously.

  “That is your right,” Jarak said coldly, and turned to address the assembled nobles.

  “Vercingetorix…son of Keltill…wishes to explain to us why he has brought his army here.” Jarak shrugged. “He is said to be silver-tongued, so perhaps he can make more sense of it than a speaker as unskilled as myself.”

  With this inauspicious introduction, Jarak took his place in the front row of seats, Rhia and Guttuatr did likewise along with Baravax and the guards, and Vercingetorix found himself facing the hostile attention of the assembly.

  “Caesar is on his way here with his starving army, and his intent is plain,” he began forthrightly, “to get his hands on the abundant food supply of this city—”

  “Or is Caesar on his way to Bourges because your army is here unbidden?” someone shouted out from the back of the hall, to hoots and jeers.

  “Caesar is desperate to feed his army with the harvest you have stored up here!” Vercingetorix shouted back. “The army of Gaul is here to prevent him.”

  “So you have come to defend our city?” said Jarak.

  Vercingetorix hesitated. This was moving far faster and more bluntly than he had intended, but he could conjure up no words that would glide it down their throats without provoking their outrage.

  “No,” he said, “for that is what Caesar wants me to do.”

  “What, then?” Jarak demanded.

  Vercingetorix sighed, took a deep breath, and said it:

  “You must evacuate Bourges and take with you all you can carry, for the granaries of Bourges must be burned along with every scrap of food left in the city.”

  The outrage was fully what Vercingetorix had expected. The Bituriges were on their feet, red-faced with rage. The warriors who had escorted him inside drew their swords and looked to Jarak for orders.

  Rhia had her sword out and had leapt to his side. Baravax and his men formed a protective circle around them a moment later. But Jarak stayed his men with an upraised hand.

  “We are not oath-breakers here!” he shouted. “You came to our city under peace bond to parlay, Vercingetorix, and that oath shall be honored. Anyone who slays you within these walls shall answer to me. But you shall not burn our granaries or our city.”

  “You do it yourself, if you deem that more honorable. But anything edible in Bourges will burn.”

  “We will do no such thing!”

  “You have no right!”

  “The choice is yours!” Vercingetorix roared over the tumultuous shouting. “You will open the gates, or you will force me to smash them down and do it with your people still inside!”

  “Spoken like a Roman!”

  “The Romans themselves will be here soon enough, and they shall not have the granaries of Bourges!”

  “The Romans might at least pay something for turning us into famished wretches,” Jarak snarled. “You would turn us out into the countryside you yourself have made a wasteland both starving and destitute!”

  “I will pay you ten times the worth of what is destroyed, in the Land of Legend when we are all dead, in the good old Gallic fashion,” Vercingetorix blurted, and immediately wished he had bitten his tongue before the leaden jest rolled off it, for the jeers and howls of contemptuous rage with which it was greeted burned his ears with well-earned shame.

  “Fight Caesar for the city if you must, and we will defend Bourges at your side!” someone shouted.

  “I told you, that is the trap Caesar sets for us!” said Vercingetorix, his shame transforming into chagrin, and thence easily enough escaping into anger. “He would destroy us in open battle and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, thanks to our stupidity!”

  Jarak held up both hands for silence.

  “You call it stupidity to die a hero rather than live a coward?” he demanded. “You would have victory at the price of honor?”

  “You dare to question my honor, Jarak, vergobret of the Bituriges?” Vercingetorix shouted back in a blood-red fury. “You, whose people have profited from trade with the Romans while others have died and starved and sacrificed their all to drive them from Gaul?”

  Veins stood out on Jarak’s temples, but his words cut all the deeper for the coldness with which he wielded them:

  “Where is this ‘Gaul’ of which you speak, Vercingetorix? In the wasteland left behind by your army? In what way is the Gaul of your desires better than the Gaul of Caesar’s? He would rule Gaul as a province of his Rome. You would rule the lands of the Bituriges as a province of your Gaul. The only difference you offer us is that, whereas Caesar would purchase our grain, you would burn it. Is that what you would have us fight and die for? Or just your own glory?”

  “You have until dawn to decide!”

  Vercingetorix signaled to Baravax, and, with his guards before him and Rhia guarding his rear, he stormed out of the building, never looking back to confront the shouts and jeers and curses of the fellow Gauls of whom his vision had told him he would be king.

  “Fighting you has made him think like you,” said Litivak, “and thinking like you has turned him into something no better than you are.”

  “Many people might view that as a compliment,” Caesar said dryly.

  Brutus had been subtler than Caesar had expected. He had persuaded Litivak to parlay by telling him that Caesar was not only willing to reward him with gold for continuing to maintain his neutrality, but was now of the opinion that he might prefer him over the feckless Liscos as vergobret of the Edui and was interested in discussing how he might assist Litivak in achieving such a mutually advantageous outcome.

  Like all the best lies, it cut close to the truth. Indeed, why not make it so?

  Litivak had insisted that they meet far from either of their armies, each accompanied by ten men only—here, on this bare hilltop, where approaching forces of assassins or abductors would be visible from afar, and before the sun was down.

  Caesar, knowing the store the Gauls set in oath-keeping, had agreed, and now here they were afoot, man to man on the pinnacle, while Brutus and nine Roman cavalrymen and ten equally suspicious Edui sat on their horses, glowering at each other a carefully equidistant measure back.

  “May I presume to ask what atrocity Vercingetorix has committed that persuades you to abandon his noble cause?” Caesar asked.

  “It is nobility and honor which he is about to abandon,” said Litivak.

  “Something which you, of course, would never do…”

  “I would certainly not destroy my own people’s city and see its inhabitants starve in order to keep it out of my enemy’s hands!” Litivak declared self-righteously.

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Would even you?”

  Caesar held his tongue, for of course, were he in Vercingetorix’s position, that was exactly what he would do. Given the sound strategy Vercingetorix had been following from the beginning, it made perfect sense. He had already turned the countryside into a wasteland, so why not a city?

  “Of course not,” said Caesar. “Indeed, we both have a common interest in preventing such an atrocity.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course we do,” said Caesar. “Fight with me to save Bourges from the Arverni, and I will leave half the food supplies for the populace. You will become their hero, and I will pay you well besides…”

  “My men are no mercenaries to fight for Roman gold, and neither am I! You insult my honor with such an offer!”

  “No such insult intended, I ass
ure you,” Caesar told Litivak. “I will pay in coin both more honorable and far more valuable than mere gold. You will ride back to Bibracte at the head of an army that has not only triumphed over your ancestral enemies, the Arverni, but won the Edui the friendship of Rome. My favor will pass from Liscos to you, you will be elected vergobret, and when Vercingetorix is defeated and Gaul is conquered—”

  “—if Gaul is conquered!”

  “—when Gaul is conquered, and I need a loyal proconsul to rule over it, it will only be natural for me to turn to my good friend the vergobret of the Edui, who, by our crushing of the Arverni, will stand alone as the most powerful tribe in the land…”

  “If Gaul is conquered…” Litivak said in a much less defiant tone.

  “Come with me tomorrow, Litivak, and I promise you will see why there is no ‘if’ about it,” said Caesar. “You need only observe, and commit your men if you choose to join the winning side. And there will be a chest of gold for you either way, not as a payment, but as a gift from a man who would be your friend.”

  Outside the Great Hall of the Bituriges, the sun was beginning to set in a fiery vision of the conflagration to come when Vercingetorix, Rhia, and Guttuatr, surrounded by Baravax and his little troop of guards, began to make their way back to the city gates, his life and theirs dependent on the honor of a people he had accused of having none.

  The prosperous streets of Bourges bustled at this hour with wives going to and from the markets, men gathering in the taverns, merchants and artisans returning to their well-built houses, children playing and chasing each other home for the evening meal.

  They all might as well be ghosts, or perhaps we are the ghosts, Vercingetorix mused somberly. For though none of the townspeople sought to harm them, no one would pay them heed either, looking away with curled lip as they passed, staring through them as if they were not there and no doubt wishing it were true.

  “Spoken like a Roman, they said,” Vercingetorix muttered. “Guttuatr, is this so? Are we—am I—becoming like them?”

  “We have all had to make our sacrifices, warriors their lives, farmers their crops, druids our lofty stance above the battlefield of worldly strife, and you—”