The Druid King (47 page)

As Vercingetorix beholds it, the Great Wheel seems to turn, and a pitiless sun arises over a wasteland where nothing moves but skeletal figures crawling their last across a charnel plain of corpses so emaciated that they dry to leather before they can rot.

The Great Wheel turns, but Alesia does not turn with it, and its walls creak and crumble. Fire falls upon the city of the Gauls, upon the lands of the Gauls, searing them brown, burning them black, replacing them with streets of stone and buildings of marble, with arenas and fountains and colonnaded avenues, with gladiators and legionnaires and slaves.

With that which is Rome.

“What are
we
to do, Vercingetorix?” said Cottos. “The food is running out. Perhaps we
should
surrender.”

Vercingetorix came mercifully blinking out of that cruel vision. “Surrender?” Vercingetorix said. “Surrender to
that
?”

“You do not think Caesar might show mercy?”

“Perhaps
Caesar
might,” said Vercingetorix. If given his victory to ride in triumph back to Rome, he might let the people of Alesia live, because he would have no reason not to. But not as Gauls.

“But
Rome
will not let Gaul live,” he told Cottos. “For Rome is like a millstone crushing and grinding all beneath it, rock into mortar like grain into flour, to turn it into more of itself.”

“This you have seen in a vision?”

“Yes,” said Vercingetorix, “but did I have to?”

Day and night, rocks fell from the sky—here a fusillade of fist-sized ones scattering the fortunate and wounding the less lucky, there a great boulder crushing a man, a woman, a child, a house, whatever it chanced to fall upon. They were as impossible to evade as sudden hailstorms or the capricious will of the gods.

The Roman catapults rained down fire too, though less generously, the amphorae bursting in the plazas or the centers of the wider streets doing relatively little damage, those hitting houses or marketplaces or nearly empty granaries setting whole quarters ablaze, for the Romans had blocked the waters of the Ose, and the wells were running too dry to allow water to be spent on fire fighting.

Of late the Romans had taken to flinging dead animals over the walls of Alesia as well—horses, pigs, dogs, whole or crudely butchered. But those of the famished Carnutes who fell upon Caesar’s largesse found that the carcasses had been left to rot for days beforehand, perhaps in water, so that the guts were a mass of gelatinous putridity and the flesh crawled with maggots. Those sufficiently maddened by hunger to attempt to eat them sickened and died, and even many who did not fell ill with unknown and terrible diseases.

Vercingetorix had taken to roaming the smoldering streets, the staff of the Arch Druid in his hand, to show the Alesians that he shared their danger as his army shared their meager rations, perhaps in the hope of rallying their spirits by reminding them of the druid magic that had scattered the Teutons.

But that hope had become more and more forlorn as the siege ground on and the rations dwindled away and the wells began to run dry, and the people of Alesia eyed the warriors of foreign tribes with sullen and desperate anger.

As the sun set on the nightmarish streets this evening, Vercingetorix sensed that the staff with the fallen star atop it had become more of a protective talisman than a scepter the starving Carnutes respected. Wherever he went, eyes looked away, or down, or to the side, and whenever he chanced upon a gaze not averted in time to conceal what was written within it, he saw not awe, or comradeship, or hope, but dread and hatred.

And could he justly blame them?

This eve he had seen children no older than nine come to blows over a moldy crust of bread, the victor gulping it down while holding off the others with a knife. And now he saw a wild-eyed man holding a squirming rat by the throat spear it up the anus with his knife and thrust the still-squirming and squealing creature directly into the flames of an empty market stall while a woman, perhaps his wife, knelt beside him, all but drooling.

“Where is this famous rescuing army of yours,
King Vercingetorix
?” the man snarled. “I’m a loyal Gaul, after all, and as proof, I’ll save the tail for those cowardly bastards!”

“Oh no, you won’t!” the woman cried. “Even a rat’s
balls
are too much meat to waste on them! We’ll cut off
theirs
and eat them if they ever get here!”

“Not much danger of that—now, is there?”

Vercingetorix found that his silver tongue had deserted him, and all he could do was slink off disconsolately like one more cur dog haunting the ruins. And it came to him that perhaps he walked these streets to dare the gods or destiny or the Romans to slay him with a rock or fire from the sky.

He who—

A whooshing roar above and behind him interrupted his thoughts.

Whirling around, he saw a hail of jagged rocks, dozens of them the size of a man’s head and more, fall from the sky upon the man, the burning rat, and the woman, smashing them all to abrupt and bloody silence, and half burying them in the ground where he himself had stood a moment before.

He who destiny had decreed could not be slain on the soil of Gaul.

A trestle table had been set out in the courtyard of Cottos’ house, shaded from the afternoon sun by the boughs of the great oak, and around it sat Vercingetorix, Marah, Rhia, Critognat, and Cottos, sharing the day’s singular meal. Vercingetorix’s heart left him no appetite for the meager handful of boiled millet on the plate before him, though his growling stomach commanded him to choke it down. It was not the paucity and tastelessness of the fare that so offended his palate, but the grim variance between the blue sky, the gay sunlight, the overarching oak, and the acrid odor of fire and the stench of rot and death that choked the air even here.

“This is all for today?” said Marah.

Cottos nodded disconsolately. “Tomorrow there will be less, and less the day after that, until . . .” He shrugged, unwilling to complete the thought.

But Vercingetorix had to know. “How long before there is nothing?” he demanded.

“Days, not weeks.”

“We should have slaughtered and smoked the horses,” said Critognat.

“You were the one who said he would sooner eat shit, as I remember,” Vercingetorix reminded him.

Critognat picked the millet off his plate with his hand, squeezed it, held up an object roughly the size and color of a pallid turd. “This is any better?” he said. “Perhaps we should . . .”

He hesitated, seemingly horrified at the thought that had invaded his mind.

“Should
what
?” said Rhia.

“Slaughter everyone who cannot fight and eat
their
flesh!” Critognat blurted.

“You cannot be serious!” exclaimed Cottos.

“He has a point,” said Vercingetorix. “We cannot
feed
them any longer—”

“Surely you don’t mean—”

“Of course not!” Vercingetorix said quickly, to quell the unanimous looks of outrage. “We cannot
eat
the women and the children and the less-than-able-bodied men, and so we have no choice but to trust them to the mercies of Caesar.”

“Caesar!” exclaimed Marah.

“If we keep them here, they will all starve to death within a week for certain, and so will we,” Vercingetorix said coldly. “We send them out, and at least they have
some
chance.”

“And we can hold out twice as long,” said Rhia.

“Do you really believe Caesar will feed them?” said Marah.

“Why not?” Vercingetorix told her bitterly. “After all, we may be barbarians, but Rome is an enlightened civilization, is it not? And Caesar is a great man. . . .”

“Better to attack now, while we still have the strength, and die like heroes!” declared Critognat.

“No, Critognat, we would not die as heroes if an army coming to our rescue found itself fighting the Romans alone over our corpses.”

“You really still believe they will come?” Cottos said dubiously.

Vercingetorix weighed both his thoughts and his words carefully, searching for a truth that would not dishearten them, for surely he owed them better than a silver-tongued lie.

“It matters not what
I
believe,” he finally told them, “for surely
Caesar
fears that they will, else why would he have built his mighty fortifications? Sometimes it takes more courage to endure suffering for a cause than to die for it.”

“What a horror!” groaned Tulius.

“But what does it mean?” asked Brutus.

“It means they’re running out of food and water,” Caesar told him. “The question is, what do we do about it?”

From this vantage atop a tower facing the gates of the city, Caesar could see the whole ghastly spectacle. Thousands of Gauls wandered disconsolately about the plain between the walls of Alesia and his own inner fortifications, the more enterprising among them, or the more desperately famished, crawling around the grass searching for worms or bugs or edible roots. Still more of them were emerging through the open gates, though the exodus seemed to be reaching its conclusion.

Women, children, old men, the sick, the lame, the blind—it was obvious what Vercingetorix was doing and why, for there was not a warrior among them, or a man able-bodied enough to be pressed into service even in desperation.

“Why must we do
anything
?” said Tulius.

“Because,” said Caesar, “doing nothing would still be doing something. All these people would starve to death in plain sight of the army left in the city.”

“Excellent for that army’s morale,” Tulius said sarcastically.

“And if we try to feed them all?” said Brutus.

“Entirely out of the question,” said Caesar. “We must husband our supplies against the possibility that another army of Gauls might arrive in time to besiege
us.
The question is, how much mercy can we afford to show?”

“That wasn’t a question at Bourges,” Brutus blurted.

“Bourges was an atrocity committed for a strategic purpose,” Caesar told him coolly. “Ruthless, perhaps, but rational. But to commit an atrocity for no rational purpose is simply the act of a madman or a monster.”

Something of which I do well to remind myself of in this barbarous country, Caesar told himself. In a war against barbarians, the commission of barbarous acts may be inevitable, but now that the war is about to be won, a display of mercy would prove more useful than another atrocity. Of course, I had better not go too far, lest mercy be interpreted as weakness. And better that mercy turn a reasonable profit.

“Send out squads to make a selection, Tulius,” he ordered. “The women young and comely enough to be salable as slaves and please the troops in the meantime, we feed and keep. Also craftsmen and the like, who will pay back their keep on the slave market.”

“And the children?” Brutus asked, with more than a hint of pleading in his voice.

“Useless mouths to feed?” Caesar said teasingly. Poor Brutus looked aghast at what he believed he would hear next.

Caesar laughed. “Oh, all right, for your sake, I’ll feed the able-bodied children too, Brutus,” he said. “If we keep them healthy, we should be able to sell them to the slave merchants.”

While training up the best and the brightest and most pliable of them as a corps of Romanized Gauls to administer the province and serve as teachers to turn the next generation into more of themselves.

“You are not as hard a man as you pretend, Caesar,” Brutus told him.

“I am as hard or as soft as circumstances require, my young friend. Anyone who does otherwise is a beast or a fool or both.”

“And the rest of them?” asked Brutus. “The old men, the sick, the cripples?”

Caesar pondered that one carefully. He would certainly not feed them. The question was where to let them starve. If he kept them trapped within full sight of those in the city, it would sap their morale, to be sure, and it might even sow discord between Vercingetorix and some faction wishing to readmit them. But it would probably also harden resistance. If he allowed them passage through into the open countryside to expire out of sight,
not
knowing their fate might be more disheartening to the Gauls. Worse than the horror you see onstage, as the Greek dramaturges well knew, is the offstage one your mind’s eye is forced to imagine.

“We will let them choose their own fates,” Caesar said. “We will give those who wish to try their luck in the countryside an hour to pass through our fortifications. After which those who remain can try begging scraps from Vercingetorix. Let the gods decide.
Those who survive in the countryside may spread the tale of Caesar’s relative mercy. Any of the others who might manage to survive on bugs and the corpses of their fellows will only tell the tale of Vercingetorix’s cruelty.”

“But the rest . . . ?” said Brutus, obviously appalled.

Caesar shrugged.

“The rest, of course,” he said, “will not be around to say anything.”

The only sounds in the night were the impacts of Roman stones and amphorae and the cracking collapse of burnt-out buildings, for dogs and cats and even the birds were gone. Marah sat alone by the table under the oak, gazing longingly across the courtyard at the closed door to Vercingetorix’s chamber.

Then a door did open, but it was not his, it was Rhia’s. She emerged, wearing her armor and sword but not her helmet, crossed the courtyard, and sat down unbidden beside Marah.

“There is little time left,” said Rhia. “Why do you sit here alone? Why don’t you go to him?”

“Because he won’t have me!” Marah said angrily. “It’s
you
he wants! Why don’t
you
go to him?”

“That is not why he won’t have you.”

“You deny that he wants you?”

“No.”

“You deny that you want him?”

“No,” said Rhia, averting her gaze. “The truth of it is, he wants both of us. And we both want him. But I cannot have him, and he cannot have me.”

“Because of this stupid blood oath?”

Rhia looked down and nodded.

“Because you are sworn to virginity?”

Rhia nodded silently again.