Druids (35 page)

So we left Crom Daral with Cotuatus, but thoughts of him lingered troublingly at the back of my mind, like a small, nagging splinter in the flesh.

I was more glad than ever to return to the fort, and the grove. When my people came out to greet me, my eyes found one bright face in the crowd before any other, and I released a breath I did not know I had been holding.

Briga did not have to smile at me. It was enough to know she was there.

Meanwhile, Tarvos trotted past me, a wide grin gleaming through his moustache as he hurried toward the open doorway of his lodge, where Lakutu stood waiting.

As if the scattered sparks from the great fire of creation must obey a cosmological command to rejoin, we are compelled to seek the missing parts of ourselves, We collect friends, we require mates. Each of us separately is a fragment; life is the whole.

That night in my bed I was painfully aware mat Lakutu no longer slept curied at my feet.

In nie dead of winter the work of me dmids continues. While our people shelter in warm lodges, we whisper to the seedlings sleeping in the frozen earth. We light the fires that will guide the reluctant sun back from the realms of frost. We supervise birth

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and burial, keeping the living and the dead in harmony with the earth and the Otherworid.

And we leach. A druid’s words are most cleariy heard in the crisp silence of a winter’s day.

I resumed instructing the hopeful applicants tor the Order, Briga among them. “So many new faces,” old Grannus commented.

“They are drawn to you, Ainvar. Menua began building your reputation long before you became chief druid, you know. He claimed you could…”

His jaws snapped shut. The old often become garrulous, and Grannus obviously had just realized he was saying too much.

“What claims did Menua make for me?”

“Ah. You know. He said you had gifts.**

“What gifts?”

Grannus twitched a shoulder. “It’s been a long time, you can-not expect me to remember everything he said.”

But I knew he had not forgotten, not with his druid’s memory. Menua must have told him—and others—that I could restore life to the dead.

The idea appalled me. I did not want people looking to me for a magic beyond my ability. I could do many things that seemed impossible to the uninitiated, but were actually only a matter of manipulating natural forces. Yet even I could not lure an escaped spirit back into a cooling body.

Could I?

Sometimes 1 still awoke in me night, wondering.

WHILE THE DRUIDS were occupied with winterwork, the Romans were also busy. Though Caesar spent most of the winter in Latium, I learned mat the officers he had

W

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left behind in Gaul were enlarging and fortifying the winter camps and arranging supplies for his next campaign in the spring.

North of us lay the territory of the Belgae, tribes originally of Germanic origin for the most part, who had occupied northern Gaul for so long that they were as Gaulish as we. The fertile, easily worked land they had captured when they first came across the Rhine had encouraged them to abandon their wild ways and become fanners and herders. We of central Gaul took women from them, traded with them, waged war with them as we did with one another.

Caesar announced that the Belgic tribes were conspiring against Rome.

Vercingetorix sent for me.

“You can’t go before Beltaine,” Tarvos protested.

“Of course not, but I’ll leave immediately after. Why are you

so concerned about when we go?”

“I… I intend to marry Lakutu at Beltaine. She’s not a slave anymore,” he went on hurriedly before I could object. * ‘You gave me that scroll saying she was mine, so I made her face the sun and then I said, ‘I salute you as a free person.’ That was enough, wasn’t it? To make her free?”

The Bull was nervous as I had never seen him, and equally, desperately, serious. I swallowed a smile as I replied, “I should say so, yes. You have it on the authority of the chief druid: Lakutu is a free person.

“But are you certain you want to marry her? Do you want her to bear children for you? She isn’t one of us, she isn’t from any part of Gaul. She’s not even a German.”

“She’s from Egypt,” the Bull said with shy pride.

“What?”

“She’s from Egypt. She told me. Is Egypt very far away, Ain-var?”

I was finding mis difficult to digest. “It’s very far away,” I managed to say. “Why, does she want to go back?”

“Oh no, she says she’s content to spend her life here, even if we do smell.”

These revelations about Lakutu, former enigma, were unsettling. “What does she mean, we smell?”

“Because of the food we eat. Remember Rix explaining that the reason the Roman warriors reeked of garlic was because they were fed it to build up their strength? Lakutu says we Gauls stink of blood because we eat so much meat.”

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I stared at him. I had never known that Lakutu found my odor offensive,

For a second season I conducted the Bettaine ceremonies as Keeper of the Grove. I watched as Tarvos led Lakutu in the ancient steps of pursuit and capture, coupling and thanksgiving. Many couples came to the grove to be married that year; the air rang with song.

We were a people who sang.

The poisoning had left Lakutu very thin, and there were now streaks of gray in her black hair. Yet on the day she married Tarvos she was young. Her eyes were as shiny as two black olives and she giggled behind her hand.

Because she had no clan of her own, the women of the fort provided her marriage costume. They dressed her in a close-fitting bodice of softest fleece, like a spun cloud against her olive complexion. Her skirt was embroidered with red and blue knotwork,

and boots of dyed kidskin covered her feet to the anklebone. Around her waist was my own contribution.

“I want you to make a girdle for her,” I told the Goban Saor, “superior in value to what I paid for her on the auction block. Under the law it will remain her property in marriage; it will speak for her worth. *’

When Lakutu danced the pattern dance with Tarvos around the Beltaine tree, she wore gold and silver at her waist, and the watching women exclaimed enviously at its magnificence.

Perhaps she was Egyptian, as she claimed. I never knew. Watching her in her happiness, I saw no different race. I saw only Lakutu, who was part of us.

Part of the whole.

Tarvos would never know how I envied him that day.

In the cycle of seasons since the last Beltaine when I had taken Briga by the river, somehow there had never been an opportunity for us to be just a man and a woman together, to come to the understanding that precedes a marriage. When we were in the grove, I was chief druid with neophytes to teach; when we were in the fort, my people were likely to come to the door at any time of the day or night, requesting my wisdom or my magic.

The demands of my office left me little time for devoting myself to winning a difficult woman.

And Briga was maddeningly unpredictable. Other women ran until you caught them, then they were yours. Briga, once caught, would not stay caught,

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When I finally succeeded in bringing together an uncommitted moment and a private place, she shied away from my arms.

‘ ‘What’s wrong?”

“I can’t… care for you, Ainvar.”

I was baffled. “Why not? I am young, strong, healthy … I have high rank in the tribe. …”

“You don’t understand,” she said in a voice so low I could hardly hear her. ‘ ‘There is something worse than grief, you know. There is an anguish so deep it becomes a pit of nothingness. I’ve been in that pit. I’m never going back there.

“I’ve thought and thought about it—you’re always urging us to think. So I have. I’ve decided the only way to avoid that pit is never to love anyone, so I can never be hurt by losing them.” She set her chin, she stiffened her spine. Prince’s daughter.

The irony was, I knew the irrefutable answer. ‘ ‘But no one ever really dies, Briga. You haven’t lost those you loved, their spirits are immortal. Death is merely an incident in the middle of a long

life.”

“I know, I know,” she said dismissively. My facile words had not reached the suffering core of her. She refused to be freed of her fear. She wanted some proof that went beyond words, she needed a confirmation of me soul’s survival that would permeate her blood and bone.

That gift came with being accepted into the Order by the Otherworld. Its season could not be rushed. Even the Keeper of the Grove could not force it. I must be content with teaching her and preparing her.

So I did not dance with Briga around the Beltaine tree that year. I stood in the shadow of the oaks and watched her broodingly from the darkness of my hood as she laughed and clapped with the other celebrants surrounding the dancing couples. In my pride, I did not go to her when the pattern dance was over and the married pairs stretched themselves upon the earth. Some of our people joined in a general coupling, with which we traditionally supported the newly married. But I stood aloof, wretched in my dignity.

I would have killed anyone else who tried to touch Briga. But no one did. Her erect posture forbade it, and for once I was glad she was a prince’s daughter.

The season of celebration ended; Vercingetorix needed me. Tarvos and I set out with a complement of warriors as my bodyguard. It was unwise for anyone to travel unarmed in Gaul anymore, not even a chief druid. The predators had come.

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As we were about to leave, Grannus drew me aside. “Are you certain it’s wise for you should go off like this to the Arvemian? It’s one thing to leave your people during the honey moon, Ainvar. But this is different.”

“Are you questioning the wisdom of the Keeper of the Grove?”

“I’m questioning the wisdom of your going so far away from your own people for long periods. I’m an old man,” he added m a voice as thin as the skin on boiled milk, “and that is one of the prerogatives of age. I can question anyone and anything.”

“I’m doing this for the sake of my tribe, Grannus. The Carnutes are best served by my supporting Vercingetorix in every way I can.”

Grannus was shaking his head. “You’re mad if you think the Arvemian, or anyone, can unite the tribes. Only a man too young to know better would dream such a dream.”

“Only young men dream, Grannus. When a man stops dreaming, he knows he is old.

“As for my leaving the grove, I am appointing someone I trust fully to serve in my absence and protect the grove with his flesh and his spirit.”

“DianCet?”

“Abenh.”

Grannus peered at me from rheumy eyes. “You continue to surprise me. Why the sacrificer? I would have thought the chief judge was the obvious choice.”

Thinking ofDiviciacus of the Aedui, I replied, “I have become reluctant to put too much power into the hands of judges. Aberth is a fanatic, the one person who can never be swerved from his course.

“The only restriction I have laid upon him is that he is not to give the neophytes any instruction until I return,” I added. I did not want Briga to leam about sacrifice from Aberth’s lips. I had enough problems.

On the morning we left the fort, the region was bathed in the sultry golden light that precedes thunder. It was too eariy in the year for such a storm, yet one was gathering in the air. The weather made our horses nervous.

We would be traveling on horseback like a company of cavalry, riding animals Ogmios had arranged for us. Walking took too long and events were moving too fast. To deal with constantly changing situations, I had determined to take my feet from the earth and let them dangle at the sides of a swift-galloping horse.

I missed the walking, however.

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The Gaulish style of riding differed from the Roman. Caesar mounted his cavalry on animals with African blood in them. They were thin-skinned, thin-legged animals with nostrils flared for drinking the desert wind. The horses we bred in Gaul were sturdier, with good strong heads and dense leg bones. We rode them bareback; Roman cavalry sat on felt pads held in place with breast-collar and crupper.

Our horses were allowed to gallop freely so long as they went in the desired direction; Caesar’s troops rode in rigid ranks with every animal under tight rein. Yet, surprisingly, most Roman cavalry comprised Celtic auxiliaries drafted in the Province and the outlands. This was because the Romans were more often than not indifferent horsemen, while everyone admitted the Celts were magnificent riders even when conforming to Roman order.

We were riding down a long, narrow valley when a dark ribbon appeared on the skyline to the east. “Look there!’* cried Tarvos, reining in. “A Roman scouting party, do you recognize the formation?”

“Unmistakable,” I agreed-My every sense was alert, my skin prickled with warning. “They’ve never come so deep into our territory, Tarvos.”

We halted, huddled together, fifteen men on horses staring east

while our mounts snorted and pawed, sniffing the wind blowing toward us from the invaders.

Tarvos said tensely, “They’ve seen us.”

The column on the horizon halted in perfect order, every rider maintaining his exact distance from the others. The figure in the lead was the only one who moved, turning toward us and coming a little way down the slope to get a better look.

My warriors reached for their weapons.

“Don’t move,” I ordered.

They hesitated, turning their eyes toward me.

Tarvos said crisply, “You heard the chief druid. Don’t move, any of you.”

The Roman officer advanced, drew rein, stared in our direction for a while, then turned and cantered back to his men, his short campaign cloak billowing from his shoulders like a farewell wave to us. The column moved away down the other side of the slope and out of sight,

“Where are they going?” Tarvos wanted to know.

“North, obviously. Not to attack, there aren’t enough of them. They’re looking for something, and I don’t like it. There is noth—

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ing for them in the land of the Carnutes … at least nothing I ‘m willing to let them have.