The Druid King (46 page)

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. Vercingetorix stood atop the wall, his staff lowered now, watching the horses galloping through the Teuton camp as the gates were slammed shut. They smashed down tents, kicked over fires, trampled men, panicked the Teutons’ own horses.

The Teutons themselves seemed to be in several different kinds of panic. Some fled the flying hooves. Some scrambled to seize equine booty for themselves. Some lashed out in a fury at horses with swords and axes. Some tried to retrieve their own mounts.

Few of them seemed to notice that groups of horses were galloping through gaps in the Roman wall, and none sought to stop them. Now, for the first time since the gates of Alesia had been closed behind his army, there was hope.

“You do realize that you’ve trapped us all in here?”

Vercingetorix had not noticed Marah coming out on the parapet beside him; he turned at the sound of her voice.

“Hope rides with them to the four winds,” Vercingetorix told her, but even he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

“You know what the chances really are,” Marah said scornfully. “You know what the Gauls are like. They’ll argue, they’ll bicker, they’ll fight over who is to lead. . . .”

“I stay here to challenge them to become something more than that,” Vercingetorix told her, and in these words was the clear ring of truth.

“And if they do not?”

“Then perhaps I may achieve in legend what I failed to do in life.”

Rhia, who had also come up onto the wall, held her distance as she saw Vercingetorix and Marah kiss briefly. She did not approach until he had descended, leaving Marah standing alone looking pensively up into the heavens.

“What did he say to you?” Rhia ventured.

“What you would expect a man of destiny to say under these circumstances,” Marah said sardonically. “Something about becoming in death a legend that might achieve what he failed to do in life.”

“You must be good to him in the time he has left,” Rhia said imploringly.

“I would if he would let me . . . but I think he would rather . . . have you.”

“You understand nothing, Marah.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t want him!”

Rhia seemed to hesitate, seemed about to say something, then choked it back, and replaced it with something else.

“I will be his till my death and beyond,” she said with a sad wistfulness. “But whenever his story is told, he will belong to you.”

XXI

CAESAR HAD BEEN JOLTED AWAKE by a hideous reveille of Gallic carnaxes, had found himself dodging maddened horses, and finally had watched half a dozen of them trample down his tent.

Then the Teutons had decamped like the feckless barbarians they were. Those who had captured horses had no further thought of fighting Gauls for Roman gold, since horses counted as a far more manly form of wealth among them. Those who had not caught horses had left to chase after their fair share. And none of them wanted anything more to do with Vercingetorix and his “druid magic.”

But once it was all over and calm descended, Caesar realized that the loss of the Teutons was after all no more than a minor annoyance: the fortifications were all but completed, and his own legions could easily enough hold what gaps remained against any attempt by the Gauls to break through. And the sacrifice of his cavalry surely meant that Vercingetorix had given up all hope of doing so.

In a better mood, Caesar curled up on the ground in his cloak, resolving to sleep the rest of the night in the open, which, after all, he had done more times in his life than he could count. He had dozed off when Tulius awoke him with a prisoner.

“Now what?” he grunted, rubbing sleep from his eyes and rising irritably to his feet. “This had better be important, Tulius!”

“I’m afraid it is, Caesar. We spotted men lashed to some of the horses. Most of them escaped, but we slew three of them: a Santon, an Atrebate, and a Cadurque by their garb. This is the only one we captured alive.”

The prisoner wore roughly tanned leather pantaloons and jerkin, ripped here and there, and bloodied. His hands were tied in front of him. The scratches, blackened eyes, and facial bruises might have been the result of the stampede, but it was difficult to imagine how his left thumb had become a bloody stump before capture.

“This man has been tortured?” asked Caesar.

Tulius nodded.

“What did you get out of him?”

“Not much more than his name and his tribe. Not
yet.
This is Oranix of the Arverni.”

So this was the great and terrible Caesar, the prey he had pursued in the longest hunt of his life, the prey that now would turn on him and make it his last. Oranix was not impressed. Indeed, he was disappointed.

Having lived his life as a hunter, Oranix had always hoped he would die a good hunter’s death, felled by a noble beast, as an old man by a great bear if the gods favored him, or even a lion if he was truly fortunate.

But this was no lion. This was a balding man in middle years, the top of whose head rose no farther than Oranix’s chin.

“Why were you and those men tied to horses?” Caesar demanded.

Oranix knew he was going to die. Any hunter must accept such a possibility in every hunt. It was a pact of honor between hunter and prey. Hunting a stag, you could always find yourself hunted by a bear.

“To keep from falling off,” Oranix told him. The knowledge that he would be denied a proper hunter’s death hurt more than the beatings or the throbbing stump of his left thumb.

“Who were the those men?”

“Gauls,” said Oranix.

“Speak plainly if you want to keep the right thumb,” said the torturer, whom Caesar had called Tulius.

“Why should I?” Oranix said defiantly. “I won’t have the use of it for very long—now, will I?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Caesar told him. “We could always start in on your testicles. . . .”

Oranix felt his scrotum contract.

To be denied a hunter’s death was to be denied a hunter’s honor. But there was no honor in betraying your fellows out of fear. If he was to die in fear like a cornered doe, perhaps in so doing he could at least inflict some fear on Caesar.

“I am Oranix the hunter,” he said. “You were my prey, and now I am yours. But soon enough you will be hunted down to your death by others.
You will kill me now, we will kill you later, and there is nothing either of us can do about it.”

“We?” said Caesar. “A handful of men tied to—”

Caesar suddenly silenced himself, and what Oranix saw in his eyes told him that this man had a cunning that made a fox seem like the dimmest of cows.

“Emissaries!”
Caesar cried.

A fox who pounced on Oranix’s vainglorious words as if he were a foolish chicken.

“I must have still been half asleep not to realize it immediately. He didn’t release his horses just to relieve himself of their useless and hungry mouths. There was no need to torture this man. Vercingetorix used his stampede as cover! The men tied to the horses were emissaries! He’s trying to raise a relief army.”

Caesar turned to Oranix and favored him with the smile of a lynx toying with its prey.

“Thank you, Oranix the hunter, you’ve been most helpful,” he purred, to Oranix’s utter mortification.

“Shall I have him executed now?”

“Oh no, Tulius, this fellow has earned Roman gratitude. He has earned himself a choice.”

“A choice?” Oranix said miserably.

“A glorious but possibly short career as a gladiator in the arena, or a much longer but surely less rewarding one in the lead mines.”

Caesar’s face showed no pity as he said this, and Oranix froze his own into a mask of dismay, for he would not show this man gratitude. But he had heard what went on in Roman arenas.

Caesar had not offered him this boon sincerely.

But boon it was.

Oranix the hunter might yet meet his lion.

Caesar slept little the rest of the night, and what sleep he managed to steal was haunted by the same dream repeated over and over again in different guises. His army was besieging a city. Bombarding it with catapults from behind a wall. Or storming it with siege towers, scaling ladders, and battering rams. Or just waiting. Sometimes the city seemed to be Bourges, sometimes Gergovia, sometimes Alesia. Each time, victory was within his grasp. Each time, his buttocks were one way or another suddenly exposed to the open air, and his army was attacked from the rear: by Eduen cavalry led by Litivak, by Arverni led by Vercingetorix, by bare-breasted women led by Vercingetorix’s amazon.

Finally, it was Rome itself he found himself besieging, and the army cravenly attacking from behind was one of senators armed with knives, and that was enough to have him bolting awake and upright at dawn. He needed no soothsayer to scry out the meaning, for the visions of sleep only told him what in the waking world he already knew:

Cover your rear!

If the Gauls succeeded in raising their relieving army, he would surely be attacked from the rear by a vastly superior cavalry force. He would be trapped between them and his own fortifications. And so he called a meeting of his chief lieutenants outside the wreckage of his tent in the bleak early-morning light to consider how to compensate for the defection of the Teutons.

Labienus was there, and Tulius. Trebonius, and Antony, and half a dozen others. Glavius and young Brutus as well. But among them all, only Gallius had come up with any idea at all, and his notion was ridiculous.

“Build another wall.”

“A
wall
to replace the Teutons?” said Labienus. “Why not dig a canal to the Mediterranean and bring up a fleet of galleys?”

Everyone laughed but Gallius and Caesar.

“Kindly confine yourself to engineering, Gallius, of which you are a master,” Caesar said irritably, “and leave strategy, of which you are ignorant, to the field officers!”

“We should storm the city now,” insisted Labienus. “We can capture it long before the Gauls can assemble another army.”

“And then what?” said Galba. “Then we trap ourselves inside.”

“
If
this second army ever materializes.”

“Why not sack Alesia and burn it to the ground like Bourges?”

On and on it went, and Junius Gallius could see that Caesar liked none of it, as well he should not. These
generals
believed that war was a contest of physical or tactical prowess like the Greek Olympics, or what went on in the Senate. Throw men at the enemy and overwhelm them, outwit the opposing general with your brilliance. To them, the power of Rome lay in their strategy and the numbers and discipline of their legions.

Gallius knew better.

The Persians and their barbarous ilk had larger armies, and no doubt their generals were no dimmer than this collection of bravos. But Rome had defeated them. Because Roman military engineering was so superior. And getting better year by year, war by war. Catapults. Ballistae. Mobile siege towers. Greek fire, which he was well on the way to perfecting. Even on the march, Roman battlefield engineers threw up palisades and enclosed them in entrenchments.
These Gallic barbarians had no military engineers at all.

War was a
craft,
and superior military engineering would win out every time.
This
was the future of war,
this
was why Rome was destined to rule those who did not even comprehend the concept. It was mostly a pleasure working for Caesar because Caesar understood this, as his lieutenants did not.

Right now, though, he was letting these generals babble on uselessly, and by his deepening frown, by the impatient tapping of his right foot on the ground, Gallius could tell that Caesar’s frustration was ripening. Best to try again now.

“A second wall!” he shouted.

“I told you to keep out of it, Gallius!” Caesar shouted back.

Gallius steeled himself and presumed to shout down the great man himself.

“An impregnable fortress!”

“What?”
grunted Caesar, and Gallius sighed in relief.

“What I have been trying to tell you all along, Caesar,” he said peevishly. “A fortress impregnable to attack from both the Gauls inside Alesia and any army outside.”

He picked up a twig and began scrawling with it in the dirt.

“Look!”

He drew a rough circle.

“Alesia . . .”

He drew another circle around it.

“Our present fortifications . . .”

He poked repeatedly at the ground behind the wall, stippling the ground with dots.

“The present position of our forces . . .”

He drew a third ring, a wider one, so that the pocked earth was now contained within it.

“A double palisade with our entire army inside!” exclaimed Caesar. “And Alesia a prisoner within it!”

Gallius nodded.

Caesar had come to his senses.

“But
we’d
be trapped inside!” said Labienus.

“No,” said Caesar. Now that he understood what Gallius had been trying to tell him, he saw at once that this was the surest solution. “Not unless and until this relief army appears, and then inside an impregnable fortress will be exactly where we want to be.”

“Besieged within our own siege,” said Labienus. “I like it not.”

“I have not heard a better idea from you, Labienus,” said Caesar.

“You’d render our cavalry useless by penning it up within walls? Look what happened to Vercingetorix!”

“What would you do with our cavalry, Labienus?”

“Ride after the Teutons. Bring them back to fight at our side.”

“And how do you propose to accomplish that feat?”

Labienus’ mien displayed a certain lack of certitude.

“I’d . . . well, shame them into it.”

“You’d do what?” said Galba.

“They count themselves fearless. So I’d . . . I’d challenge their courage . . . by . . . by riding off to attack this relieving army myself—”

“Into certain death!” said Trebonius.

“Exactly!” declared Labienus, and now Caesar could see his fervor arise. “They must either follow, or count themselves cowards and lesser men than Romans!”

Caesar considered it. If anyone could pull off such a thing, it would be Labienus. And even if he didn’t, he was certainly right about one thing—the cavalry would be worse than useless within the walls of a siege.

“Try it if you like, Labienus, and promise them as much gold as you like,” he said, and turned his attention back to Gallius, whose design seemed more elegant, more infallible, more
Roman
the more he pondered it.

“How long would it take you to build this thing, Gallius?”

“The basic structure? A lot less time than it would take Gauls to put together another army and get it here,” Gallius said. “Of course, the refinements . . .”

“Refinements?”

Gallius nodded happily and began sketching in the dirt again. “We’ll want towers with light catapults and ballistae atop them, of course.
We’ll need to put the heavy ones on platforms inside the fortress, so they can fire over the walls with usable trajectories—the calculations will not be so easy—and we’ll have to forge enough proper kettles for the boiling pitch, and build an underground aqueduct from the Ose at some distance in case they try blocking the river, perhaps dig wells inside too, and I’d like to construct as many wheeled barricades as possible to seal the river entrance and any breaches. . . .”

“What about baths and a theater for dramatic performances?” Caesar suggested dryly.

Gallius regarded him humorlessly.

“Do you really think that’s necessary, Caesar?” he said. “It would make more sense to build a proper sewer system first.”

A thin, misty rain hung in the air as Vercingetorix stood with Cottos atop the highest tower on the ramparts of Alesia, watching the Roman army, rank after orderly rank, moving into its enormous and strange fortress.

“What is it?” Cottos demanded of him, not for the first time. “What are they
doing
?”

And, not for the first time, Vercingetorix refused to utter aloud the words in his mind. What the Romans had now completed was a structure that no Gaul could have even imagined, and it filled him with a grudging admiration for the power of Rome.

What Caesar had built was more than a fortress. It was more than what Gauls deemed a city, for it enclosed a city entire. No matter how hard he tried to put the thought from his mind, Vercingetorix could not keep from thinking that the Romans had built a Great Wheel.

The Great Roman Wheel’s rim contained a circular Roman city imperiously implanted in the soil of Gaul. A city of tents and sheds and smithies, of catapults and ballistae and armories, and its population was a Roman army, and at its hub and dwarfed by it was Alesia.