The Druid King

by Norman Spinrad

  Marah, bareheaded, but otherwise bizarrely garbed as an Arverne warrior.

  “What are you doing here?” Vercingetorix demanded. “And dressed like that?”

  “Did I not promise that I would go where you go? And that not even you could prevent me?”

  Indeed she had. And now here she was, to the grinning pleasure of Cottos, who had arranged this surprise. Litivak was obviously pleased too, and Critognat regarded the couple with avuncular approval. The smile on Rhia’s lips was less than genuine, but was that not a fleeting look of complicity passing between her and Marah?

  “Who better to welcome you to the city of the Carnutes than your future queen?” said Cottos, breaking the awkward silence in a manner that amazed Vercingetorix but pleased him not at all. “Surely you are pleased to see her here?”

  Even in the midst of a siege likely to end in disaster, the Carnutes still thought to use her to seal their primacy with the man who might emerge as king of Gaul!

  “Surely I am not,” Vercingetorix found himself blurting boorishly. “For I would not have wished to see her put in such mortal danger.”

  “Where you go, so go I,” said Marah gazing at him with a daunting intensity. “And if it is into the jaws of death, so be it.”

  “This is certainly no moment to dwell on danger and death, Vercingetorix,” Litivak said with forced gaiety. He nodded at Cottos. “Surely even the Great Leader of Warriors deserves a few moments of happiness alone with his betrothed.”

  “Surely,” said Cottos. “Let me show the rest of you your quarters.” He escorted Litivak, Critognat, and Rhia to a series of doors opening onto the courtyard. One by one, they disappeared inside, leaving Vercingetorix and Marah alone.

  Awkwardly alone.

  “When were we betrothed?” Vercingetorix finally said.

  “You asked me to be your queen. And I accepted.”

  “I was a boy then. And you did not accept until years later, and then before the world.”

  “And that is what troubles you? That I proclaimed my love for you before the world?”

  What is it about her that troubles me? Vercingetorix asked himself. That her tongue is as silver as mine? That she presumes to use it in public? That she loves the king I am supposedly destined to become rather than the boy that I was or the man that I am? But these explanations rang hollow, excuses for something that felt uncomfortably like fear. But that was ridiculous.

  “Between a man and a woman there should be something more than that,” he said.

  Marah took both of his hands in hers. “Let me share your chamber, and I can promise you the something more.”

  Before he could speak, she drew him to her and kissed him, prizing open his lips with her own, gliding her tongue into his mouth, first gently and gracefully, then deeply, and commandingly, as a man might enter a woman.

  Vercingetorix found his body responding as might a woman to a man, opening to her, pressing against her, trembling at the knees. He was, after all, a virgin, and she was the experienced one.

  It inflamed him, and yet he found himself weakened, as if some magic were being drained from him. He now began to understand what Rhia had never been quite able to make clear. Virgins both, their unslaked lust was somehow a source of power.

  “What’s wrong?” said Marah, pulling away.

  What could he say? That her amorous sophistication unmanned the virgin boy hidden within the Great Leader of Warriors? That he feared the loss of magic whose price destiny demanded that he must still continue to pay?

  No man could say such things to a woman.

  Where is your silver tongue now, Vercingetorix?

  “I…I do not have the heart for such pleasures the day so many of my men have been slain,” he said.

  He expected anger, scorn, reproach, but Marah instead favored him with a soft, tender smile, and Vercingetorix came to feel what love between a man and a woman might truly be.

  “I understand,” she told him. “Though it pleases me not, I can only love you for it.”

  “How long until the city is completely enclosed, Gallius?” Caesar asked peevishly as he and the chief engineer rode along a section of the fortifications under construction by grunting legionnaires pressed into service more suitable for slaves.

  Gallius shrugged. “A week or two. Possibly three.”

  “Too long.”

  “The logs have to be dragged long distances, Caesar, and these cavalry mounts are far from ideal dray horses. Nor do we have slaves to dig the ditches and pits, and—”

  “It’s not you, Gallius,” Caesar said, cutting him off before he could launch into an engineering discourse that could go on for hours. “It’s the Teutons. I don’t know if I can keep them here that long.”

  Dressed tree trunks were planted in deep postholes to form a stout palisade, cross-braced with long split logs. Immediately in front of the palisade was a deep and wide ditch, which Gallius planned to fill with water from the River Ose once the work was completed. Before this trench, the plain had been sown with pits bristling with sharpened stakes, and before that, yet another ditch, this one to be filled with larger stakes to impale horses. Gallius’ plan called for a second wall to be erected outside the first and a walkway between them to connect towers. And, if time permitted, for the space between them to be filled with packed earth. And between Alesia and the construction, protecting it from attack, at least for now, were the Teutons.

  As far as Caesar knew, no one had ever before besieged a fortified city by surrounding it with his own fortification. It was a task that might have daunted Hercules. But Gallius displayed as much enthusiasm for the project as a man commissioned to slake the lust of a bordello-full of courtesans.

  His architectural ambitions knew no bounds. A wall. A double wall. A double wall filled with rammed earth. Small catapults or ballistae atop its towers. Given time and left to his own devices, he no doubt would clad the whole thing in armor and surround it with a moat full of crocodiles brought up from Egypt.

  But time was a factor. The Teutons were getting more restless, bored, drunk, quarrelsome, and obstreperous day by day.

  The Teuton encampment was a hideous and ominous vista whose stench was nearly overpowering even from here. Twelve thousand or so barbarians and an equal number of their horses. No proper latrines. Hundreds of rotting heads impaled on spears. Back and forth they rode when they were sober enough to mount, sometimes staging mock battles, which often got out of hand.

  Caesar had already been constrained to pay Ragar half of what he still owed to keep them from fleeing “druid magic” and the reeking midden they had made of their own camp, and he had no doubt they would depart the moment he let go of the rest.

  Even with the arrival of Labienus and the Roman cavalry, he needed the Teutons, for the Gallic cavalry inside Alesia greatly outnumbered his own. If the Gauls sought to escape now, a significant number of them would almost certainly elude death or destruction to fight another day, and all too probably with Vercingetorix among them.

  “How much is completed now?” Caesar asked nervously.

  “You mean fully completed, double walls, watchtowers—”

  “I mean how many gaps remain open?”

  “Oh, a dozen or so…”

  “A dozen!”

  “But none more than half a league wide.”

  “Concentrate all your efforts on closing them,” Caesar ordered. “Doubling the walls and the rest of it can wait.”

  Gallius frowned, his artistic sensibilities injured, but the sooner the Teutons were rendered superfluous, the sooner Caesar could breathe easy, and then Gallius could indulge whatever fancies he liked.

  Caesar worried that future military historians might criticize this strategy for lack of elegance, but certainty was what he now required. Though there might be no drama or glory in it, once the fortifications were completed Roman military engineering would ensure victory. Vercingetorix and his army could starve to death in there or squash themselves like
bugs against impregnable fortifications if they liked, but the military conquest of Gaul would be completed.

  Vercingetorix, Litivak, and Critognat, wrapped in heavy cloaks, paced the ramparts of Alesia, watching the Teutons and Romans. It was raining again, a cold, steady downpour that dampened the enthusiasm of the Teutons for riding around and cursing in favor of huddling under their cloaks or hide tents, and, of course, drinking. But the Romans seemed indifferent to the rain, working busily on their fortifications like an enormous tribe of beavers building an immense dam. Thousands of warriors doing the work of peasants or slaves without complaint, enlarging the ditches encircling the city, and beginning to build a second wall of logs only two man-lengths behind the first.

  What were they doing? Vercingetorix had been asking himself this since the Roman construction began, and it had been the subject of endless discussion, but no one had come up with a convincing answer.

  Vercingetorix had expected Caesar either to storm Alesia as he had Bourges or to lay siege. When the attack didn’t come, he had assumed that Caesar had chosen the surer strategy. But then the Romans had started building these fortifications, a mighty yet seemingly pointless undertaking.

  “Could it be that Caesar seeks to force us to attack him?” suggested Litivak, hardly the first time Vercingetorix had heard this explanation.

  Perhaps Caesar supposed that, once the nature of what he had started to build became clear, impatient Gauls would rush from the city to be slaughtered by the Teutons and finished off by the Roman infantry behind them.

  “Well, why don’t we give him what he wants and break out of here now!” declared Critognat.

  “If we try to fight our way out, we’ll be destroyed,” Vercingetorix told him, “and Caesar will do to Alesia what he did to Bourges.”

  “But if we don’t, we’ll die of hunger or thirst,” said Litivak. “The water from the Ose won’t be enough when the wells run dry, the horses are already running out of fodder, and Alesia hadn’t laid up enough food to feed even its own people for very long.”

  “So let’s die like men with our swords in our hands, not starving to death like cowards!” said Critognat.

  “And be remembered as the heroes who abandoned the city they were defending to slaughter to purchase their own glorious deaths in battle?” Vercingetorix said. “No, Critognat, I don’t think the bards would find much honor in that.”

  “Well, then, what do we do?”

  “Whatever it is,” said Litivak, “we had better do it soon, before they finish their wall and—”

  “Why?” blurted Vercingetorix.

  “Why what?”

  Vercingetorix nodded toward the Roman wall, where thousands of warriors were swarming busily over the fortifications under construction. Day and night. In the mud. In the rain.

  “Why are they in such a hurry to finish it?” he muttered. “It cannot be because of anything Caesar fears we might do first, so it must be…”

  “The Teutons…?” said Litivak. “Caesar fears they might turn on him?”

  Vercingetorix speculatively studied the Teuton encampment sprawling below the walls of Alesia. Thousands of them with nothing to do but ride around threateningly or hunker miserably in the mud. He imagined an army of Gauls constrained to endure such sodden boredom. An army of Critognats. Add an ocean of drink and subtract all sense of a cause, and you had the Teutons surrounding Alesia and keeping his army inside its walls.

  “Or just leave!” Vercingetorix exclaimed, groaning with the mortifyingly belated realization of the obvious. “The Teutons are there to defend the construction! And the fortifications are being built to replace them!”

  “A wall replaces the Teutons?” said Critognat. “Have you gone mad?”

  “Without Caesar’s Teuton mercenaries, we could fight our way out with enough of our army to continue the war. But now it’s too late. The wall is nearly complete. And the Teutons are still there.”

  “So there’s no way out?” said Critognat.

  “Not for us,” said Vercingetorix. And hearing his own words, it came to him. No, not for us…“But perhaps for the horses…”

  “The horses?”

  “Horses are useless and worse in surviving a siege. They soon starve to death, draining supplies before they do. We should really kill them now and smoke the meat to eat later.”

  “Eat our horses!” Critognat cried in utter horror. “I’d sooner eat…I’d sooner eat…” He threw up his hands in outraged frustration.

  “Shit?” suggested Litivak.

  “It’s that or give them their freedom,” said Vercingetorix.

  “What’s all this sudden concern about the fate of our horses?” asked Litivak, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “I have heard a story about a siege and a horse,” said Vercingetorix. “Some Greeks built a great horse of wood and hid men within to get them inside a city they were besieging. Why can we not hide men within a herd of our horses to get them out?”

  The light of the nearly full moon sharpened shadows and silvered the backs of the great herd of horses assembled before the gates of Alesia. Behind the horses were dozens of warriors with carnaxes, and behind the warriors, a dense crowd of townspeople had gathered. The rubble reinforcing the gates had been temporarily cleared by townspeople eager to be quit of the useless horses draining the water supply and fouling the city with their dung.

  All of the horses had been stripped of saddles, bridles, blankets, and all other human accouterments, save some three dozen fitted with simple reins of rope, and more ropes tied under their bellies to be gripped by their riders.

  Most of these were the vergobrets and war leaders of all the tribes trapped in the city—Litivak, Netod, Epirod, Comm, Luctor, and the rest. Only the Arverni and Alesia’s own Carnutes were not so represented. Among them were also Oranix and a dozen of his scouts, who had begged to leave a walled city where their huntsman’s skills were useless, in favor of escaping to the countryside, where at least they might track the movements of the enemy. Vercingetorix could not imagine how they could possibly report back, but he had not had the heart to point this out.

  Vercingetorix stood high on the stairs leading up to the parapet, his sword sheathed, the staff of the Arch Druid lying on the step beneath him.

  “Stay as low on your horses as you can, make for the gaps in the wall, and, once beyond, take care to split up,” Vercingetorix said. “Ride to the four winds! Let all Gaul know that here we stand!”

  “Why not escape with us?” cried Litivak, as they had planned.

  “I will not leave another city defenseless for Caesar to butcher as he did Bourges; come what may, my destiny is here.”

  “Without your voice to unite us, who is to say whether ours will be heeded? And if not, you will die here and our cause will be lost.”

  This he and Litivak had not arranged beforehand, and Vercingetorix found it vexatious: there might be all too much truth in it.

  “I have seen in a vision that I cannot die on the soil of Gaul. And even if that vision should prove false, if one man’s death can defeat our cause, does it not deserve to be lost?”

  He drew his sword and held it high.

  “Go, and bring me back an army of Gauls! When you return, you will be the hammer and we the anvil, and we will crush the Romans between us!”

  Even so, Litivak persisted. “You know what we are like, Vercingetorix,” he said pleadingly. “Who is to say how many will answer the call?”

  And Vercingetorix finally perceived what Litivak was pleading for. If he and the others were to risk their lives to bear a message that would bring an army of Gauls to the rescue, that message must possess a magic sufficient to call such an army into being.

  And so…

  “I swore a blood oath to lead Gaul and its cause no matter the sacrifice!” Vercingetorix shouted. “Tell them of this oath that I now swear in blood!”

  He sliced his forearm lightly, waited for the red blood to anoint his sword clearly, then
held it aloft.

  “Tell them that Vercingetorix, whom they would acclaim their king, swears not to leave Alesia alive before an army of true Gauls arrives! Death before dishonor! If they fail to arrive, the dishonor will be theirs, not mine!”

  He sheathed his sword, picked up the staff of the Arch Druid, turned, and ascended the parapet.

  A warrior appears atop the wall of Alesia, the bright moonlight burnishing his armor a lucent silver. He bears not a sword but a staff of wood crowned with a fallen star of black and pocked iron, the dark sister of the queen of this brilliant starry night.

  Vercingetorix turns to face the Teuton encampment. He takes the Arch Druid’s staff by the tip, raises it high above his head with a bloody arm, and stands there immobile as a statue.

  And then a sound begins to stir the sleeping Teutons. A multitudinous chorus of the same low and ominous carnax note, like the angry, wakening buzz of a hive of unthinkably enormous bees.

  Louder and louder. Coming from within the walls of Alesia.

  Louder and louder still, rousing Teuton after Teuton from drink-befuddled sleep. Until at length thousands of Teuton warriors stand uneasily enthralled by the monotonous music, muttering to each other as they stare up at the apparition atop the wall, its arm dripping blood as it holds up a fallen star to reflect the light of the heavens.

  Or to call something down?

  And then the music suddenly stops.

  In its abrupt absence, the silence is total.

  Vercingetorix does not move.

  The Teutons dare not.

  Somewhere an owl hoots.

  Vercingetorix sweeps his staff down and across his body and points its fallen star threateningly at the Teutons like the point of a lance.

  A tremendous blaring—far louder than what has been heard before—issues forth from Alesia. And a cacophony of whinnying, neighing, and nickering as the gates suddenly fly open.

  And out pours a stream of horses. A surging river of horses. Black ones, brown ones, white ones, piebald, dappled, roan. Stallions and mares and geldings. Eyes rolling, hooves pounding, nipping, kicking, and bucking in their shoulder-to-shoulder panic, a mighty fountain of horses spouting from the gates of Alesia, spreading out to inundate the Teuton camp in a rushing tide.