The Druid King

by Norman Spinrad

  “A sign from us,” said Vercingetorix. “It would appear we must attack first, and hope that he will understand what we are doing, and thus what he must then do.”

  Vercingetorix made his way to the nearest watchtower and mounted it, so that as many of his troops as possible could see him and directly hear his words.

  He drew his sword, held it high above his head, and stood there silently until the beating of shields had ceased, and the silence had spread all around the wall, as the words he was to speak would spread from mouth to ear to mouth.

  Words that he had spoken before. Words that he could not find silver enough in his tongue to better now.

  “So be it! I will lead you into the jaws of death with a battle song in my heart!”

  And they cheered. And the cheering spread. And swords on shields began to pound out a mighty rhythm.

  The barricading rubble had been cleared from the gates of Alesia, and Vercingetorix’s army was assembled before them, a long column no more than a dozen men across at its widest, stretching far back out of sight into the smoldering ruins of the city.

  Vercingetorix stood at the head of the column, flanked by Critognat and Rhia, and directly behind him a score of warriors carried a battering ram crafted from the trunk of the great oak that had stood in Cottos’ courtyard. They had tipped it with an iron cauldron reinforced by lead.

  Behind the ram, twoscore warriors carried logs, bales of straw, pots of pitch, and burning torches. Learning from the Romans, Vercingetorix had positioned around this spearhead force fifty warriors with the largest shields to be found.

  Everything was in readiness. Or as ready as it could be.

  There was nothing left to say, save perhaps the words that might still the dark thoughts that slowed his mind.

  And so he drew his sword and declaimed them:

  “Open the gates! Do we want to live forever? Or would we rather become immortal?”

  Vercingetorix, Rhia, and Critognat, bunched tightly together with their shields forming a roof above them, ran down the slope toward the inner Roman wall. Behind them came the warriors carrying the battering ram, and then those with the logs and straw bales and torches and pitch pots, surrounded by more warriors, who likewise roofed them over with shields, a larger, Gallic version of a Roman turtle.

  Pouring out of the city after them, fanning out from the open gates into a human avalanche, came the rest of the Gauls.

  Caesar left Tulius in command of the outer fortifications and rushed to the top of the inner ones, where Galba was in charge. When he had clambered up the ladder to the top of the command tower, he saw that Brutus was there with Galba and the signalmen. He also saw that the front line of the Gauls from Alesia charging the wall was already within arrow range, but moving too fast for catapults or ballistae to adjust their ranges rapidly enough to be effective. Soon enough, the Gauls would be so close to the wall that the angle would render these weapons useless.

  “Brilliant!” he exclaimed when he saw how the advance spearhead with the battering ram was being protected from the archery barrage by auxiliaries with shields. Nor did he have to bother to look to know that Vercingetorix himself would be leading it.

  “Brilliant?” said Brutus.

  “See how he has adapted our infantry’s turtle formation to a specialized unit! Remember this, Brutus! What a pleasure it is to learn a new tactic from an enemy!”

  “Pleasure?” grunted Brutus with a look of befuddlement that Caesar found almost as choice.

  “Oh yes,” he said, “and unfortunately a rare one. And one, of course, that you can only enjoy when you know you will defeat him anyway.”

  Under a brutal fusillade of arrows and javelins clattering off their shields, Vercingetorix, Rhia, and Critognat reached the ditch at the foot of the Roman wall, halted until men protected by the shields of others brought up logs to bridge it, then crossed.

  Here the angle was difficult for the archers and javelin-throwers atop the wall, and the rain of arrows and javelins off his shield became a mere patter. But when Vercingetorix looked behind, he saw that the wave of warriors dashing toward the wall were using their shields in a much less organized manner and taking disheartening casualties.

  “Straw! Logs!” Vercingetorix commanded, and the men bearing them piled up an untidy pyre.

  “Pitch!”

  Pots of sticky black pitch were poured and tossed upon it.

  “Hand me a torch!”

  A torch was passed to Vercingetorix. He stepped back to what he deemed a prudent distance and tossed it onto the pyre, which exploded into bright-orange flame, sending billowing black smoke aloft, and a mighty cheer from the Gauls who saw it.

  “The ram!”

  A pillar of black smoke boiled skyward from the inner wall, not far from the tower where Caesar stood.

  “The wall’s on fire!” cried Brutus.

  Caesar leaned over the edge to get a better angle, and saw that the Gauls had built a roaring bonfire beside the wall.

  “No, Brutus,” he called out, “the wall’s not on fire. But it soon will be.”

  And indeed the wall by the bonfire was beginning to smolder as Caesar righted himself and returned to Brutus and the signalmen.

  “They’re trying to burn through the wall?” asked Galba.

  “Yes, they’re—”

  He was interrupted by a great thump that shook the tower and became the first blow of a continuous rhythmic pounding.

  Litivak, riding around the curve of the ditch, raised his hand into the air to signal a halt to the circling as the pillar of boiling black smoke came into view, slowed his horse to a walk, waited for the army behind him to do likewise, and then stopped entirely as the tips of tongues of flame licked teasingly at the top of the inner fortifications.

  Vercingetorix slung his shield and, trusting in the wall of shields above him, joined the crew at the ram battering the now burning section of the wall steadily and relentlessly through the roaring flames of the bonfire.

  “I’ve got to get to a closer tower,” said Caesar, scrambling down the ladder.

  “Caesar, don’t—”

  “You’re in command here, Galba! I’m going where I belong! Commanding from the front!”

  The scene within his fortifications was an admirably orderly contrast to the chaos outside.

  The infantry was lined up in neat cohorts positioned at regular intervals all around the circumference of the circular fortress, ready to reinforce any section of either wall at short notice in the event of a scaling or breakthrough. Cauldrons of pitch and some stinking sulfurous stuff that he could not identify were boiling merrily away, surrounded by soldiers ready to relay their contents to the parapets. Chains of legionnaires extended from the armories, up ladders, to the tops of the walls, constantly resupplying the archers, javelin-throwers, and catapults. Gallius’ mobile barricades, a score of them, were waiting along both walls to be wheeled into position to block any breach if needed.

  A complex and smoothly functioning war machine hidden from sight of the Gauls, Caesar thought in no little satisfaction. I myself have said I do not like what I do not understand. And I doubt that any Gaul, even Vercingetorix, could truly understand this, even if he could see it.

  Litivak’s army stood motionless, watching black smoke piling up like a small thunderhead into the clear blue sky. A distant tide of Gauls poured down from the city toward the inner wall, antlike at this distance, their deaths barely visible as they fell by the hundreds under fusillade after fusillade of Roman arrows and javelins, which were so numerous, and so grayed by the distance, that they appeared as a storm of driving rain.

  No one moved for a long moment. Then Litivak trotted his horse a few lengths to the fore and turned to them.

  “Are we lesser men than our brothers?” he screamed. “Do we fear death more than dishonor?”

  Few were close enough to hear his words. But none were so distant that they could not discern his meaning as Litivak wheeled his horse
around and galloped toward the battle without looking back.

  Had he done so, he would have seen an army of Gauls charging into the jaws of death behind him.

  Caesar felt the pounding of Vercingetorix’s battering ram through the soles of his feet as he ascended the tower nearest to it. The whole structure shook with each blow, and when he reached the top, the acrid smell of burning pitch and wood seared the back of his throat, and the thick black smoke obscured what was happening below.

  But the eyes of the catapult crew and the signalmen were fixed on what lay beyond the outer wall, and when Caesar followed their gaze, he saw Litivak’s entire force, cavalry and infantry alike, charging the fortification. Horses by the hundreds stumbled into pits and fell, and still they came. Men by the hundreds were pierced by arrows, and still they came. Amphorae of Greek fire burst in their midst, and even burning men pressed on.

  Here, he thought, comes Gaul itself. A vast pride of lionhearted warriors dashing gloriously into certain destruction. Fearless as a lion and just as simple. But beautiful as a lion is beautiful.

  Titus Labienus’ spirits soared as soon as he was close enough to confirm that the smoke he had seen before Alesia became visible was indeed a sign of battle. And a great one, by the looks of it from here! And it was not too late to join in and assure final victory.

  Labienus rode beside his general’s standard in the center of an orderly formation of Roman cavalry, some five thousand in identical crested helmets, reddish-brown cloaks, well-tended armor.

  Up there, Caesar had ten times as many men, but, to judge from the smoke, and the fires, and the extent of the human anthills boiling and roiling around the bottom of the hill on both sides of Junius Gallius’ precious fortifications, Labienus was sure that a second army of Gauls had indeed arrived.

  He knew that his five thousand cavalrymen would make little difference. But half a league behind rode something like twenty thousand Teutons.

  Caesar could never have done what was needed to bring Ragar and his mercenaries this far. For, famed as an orator as Caesar was, Labienus knew that Caesar would never have found the simple words and simple deed necessary to win the Teutons over.

  Gaius Julius Caesar was a complex man—warrior, yes, but also general, statesman, cunning politician. The Teutons were simple warriors. And so was Titus Labienus. And proud of it.

  Labienus had finally offered Ragar a chest of gold denarii, all he had with him, just to gather at least ten thousand Teutons to hear him speak. He assembled his cavalry on horseback in a tight, orderly formation—a mere five thousand facing a good deal more than ten thousand well-armed Teutons.

  “On this chariot, you see a chest of gold you could easily seize, and you wonder how I could be so stupid as to believe I could prevent you from just taking it,” Labienus told them. “The answer is simple.”

  He nodded to the charioteer and standard-bearer, who, groaning with the weight of it, hefted the chest and laid it on the ground before the Teutons.

  “I prevent you from seizing it by giving it to you. My men and I will now ride off to fight in the great and glorious battle I tried to pay you to join. My mistake. I insulted your pride. True warriors do not fight for money. True warriors fight for pride and glory and the pleasure of it. So I give you the money. Ride after us, and if the battle is to your liking, join us. If you see no pleasure or glory in it, you now have plenty of gold with which to gamble on the outcome as you stand aside like old men and watch.”

  And without another word, Titus Labienus wheeled his horse, turned his back on the dumbfounded Teutons, and rode off at the head of his men, not deigning to look back to see if they were following.

  Nor did Labienus deign to look back now as he ordered his trumpeter to sound the charge, and one trumpet blared, and then many, and five thousand Roman cavalrymen galloped across the plain toward death or glory.

  After a few minutes, the drumming rumble of their hooves was drowned out by a far greater thunder.

  Thousands of men and horses fell to arrows and then javelins before the sea of Gauls could reach the defensive ditch at the foot of the outer Roman wall, and then it seemed to pause, to pile up, to crest into a foaming breaker like a rolling wave against a rocky coast.

  Horses, unable to check their momentum, stumbled into the ditch, their riders thrown; more horses piled up behind them, fell atop them; and in moments the ditch was filled with the dead and the dying, with screams and whinnies and cries, with the mingled blood of horses and men.

  But more horses and men crossed over this bridge of flesh and gore, and reached the wall. Scaling ladders were thrown against it, and men fought with each other to climb them, but the angles were too steep for the weight by the time anyone reached the top, and they mostly fell down. Foot soldiers battered madly at the logs of the wall with swords, spears, and battle-axes. Cavalrymen tried to stand up on their saddles. Gauls tried to form human pyramids.

  Had any of those battling at the Roman fortifications thought to glance to the northwest, they would have seen a gleaming line of armor moving toward Alesia.

  And then, behind it and flanking it on either side, and wider still, darker and more indistinct, something like billowing clouds of dust, or a storm front moving in.

  Caesar was torn between two equally grotesque spectacles, for atop this tower he was high enough to see over both walls of his fortress.

  On the far side, a vast pile of corpses was already heaped up, and had many of them not been steeped in burning pitch and Greek fire or whatever other noxious stuff Gallius had cooked up, the Gauls probably would have tried to use this pile as a human scaling ladder, yet they kept coming and coming, even as more death poured down, even as catapults and ballistae devastated their rear.

  When would the poor fools break or run? Or was their idea of honorable glory to be slaughtered to the last man?

  “Look! Look!” cried a signalman, presuming to grab Caesar by the arm with one hand, and direct his attention westward by pointing with the other.

  “By the balls of Mars, he did it!” exclaimed Caesar.

  There, descending on the rear of an army of Gauls too valorous to admit that it was already defeated, was a formation of Roman cavalry led by the standard of Titus Labienus and followed by a vast horde of Teutons.

  In a way, it was a double mercy. Even though the battle was already won, Mars had granted Labienus his moment of glory. And perhaps what was about to happen would finally convince those poor brave bastards that Gaul was conquered.

  Caesar crossed the platform and turned his attention to the state of things on the Alesian side. It was much the same, except for the lack of an onrushing Teuton horde. The Gauls crowded as close as they could behind Vercingetorix and his battering ram, where the wall was on fire, virtually right below Caesar’s own position.

  Somewhat concerned at this, Caesar surveyed the situation between the walls of his fortress. It was quite reassuring. He saw the backstage machineries of his army grinding smoothly and purposefully on, boiling more pitch and water, relaying ammunition to the walls, and bringing up two cohorts of infantry to face the section of the inner wall beneath him.

  Which had blackened and begun to smolder clear through and was now beginning to splinter under the blows of the battering ram.

  The earth rumbled with the thunder of onrushing hooves, and finally eyes at the back of the crumbling army of Gauls turned to behold a small formation of Roman cavalry leading a mighty wave of Teuton horsemen descending on their rear.

  So great was the collective cry of despair that it could be heard above the din of the battle.

  The rear ranks of Gauls—those who saw what was coming—turned to flee, cavalry and infantry alike scrambling back across the filled-in section of the outer ditch, then scattering in all directions.

  The army of Gauls disintegrated from the rear, each rank turning in confusion as the rank behind disappeared, then fleeing in terror. It did not take long for the process to reach the carnage bene
ath the wall, for all to realize that they were about to be caught between the merciless Roman war machine and the onrushing Teutons, whose massed hoofbeats could now be heard above the din of the lost battle.

  Courage abandoned those vergobrets still living, those standard-bearers still holding their tribal ensigns aloft. One by one, the Santon hawk, the Parisii wolf, the Cadurque stag, the Atrebate eagle, and the rest turned to flee, dispersing as widely as they could, their tribesmen running, riding, smashing into each other, in their desperation to follow the standard of their own people.

  Seeing this, Litivak could only wave his sword in a rage, screaming and cursing in a futile attempt to rally the Gauls to continue their suicidal attack on the Romans—

  He reared his horse, wheeling it and—

  A ballista bolt struck him in the throat and passed clear through, ripping his head almost free from his neck in a fountain of bright, spurting blood, and struck his standard-bearer in the navel, knocking him off his horse, and the standard of the Edui to the blood-soaked ground.

  “Now I have finally conquered them,” Caesar muttered to himself, as he saw Litivak fall and the Eduen standard fall with him.

  If this ghastly rout could be dignified by such a military term. The battle was won, the war was over, and he should have felt triumphant elation.

  There was that, but there was also something akin to what those who suffered from it described as postcoital sadness. In which state Caesar realized that the poor Gauls were still being bombarded to no useful purpose by ballistae and catapults.

  “Tell them to cease firing and let the poor bastards go,” he ordered a signalman.

  Am I becoming soft in my maturity? he wondered. But no; for while mercilessness might be a virtue while there was a war to be fought, it was unseemly once it was won.

  Turning his attention to the other front in this war that was already won, Caesar saw that Vercingetorix and his army didn’t yet know it.

  They were still there being slaughtered, and Vercingetorix was still humping away with his battering ram like a dutiful but insensitive lover.