The Druid King (49 page)

Two men in cloaks of Eduen blue rode at the point, a horse-length or two in advance—one a standard-bearer, and the other therefore the commander, that treacherous bastard Litivak, in command of the whole army now, by the look of this formation. And they were moving purposefully. They had a plan. What could it be?

From his observation tower, Caesar could see that Gallic infantrymen were bearing long wooden objects—poles, or logs, or planks— perhaps scaling ladders or something of the like, which might be able to get a useful portion of the infantry across the ditch. But not all that cavalry. Surely the fools had learned that horses could not leap the ditches that entirely surrounded the fortification—

Oh no, they didn’t! Caesar suddenly remembered, and he ran to the ladder. When he reached the ground, he began shouting for signalmen, even as he ran for the nearest of the few horses left inside the fortress. “Another legion to the Ose! Bring up the barricades! Follow me!”

Gallius had left two gaps in the outer ditches and wall to allow the River Ose to flow through the encampment, to provide an inexhaustible supply of water. From the hilltop where the Gauls had been camped all day, those gaps had been clearly visible.

That’s where they’re going to attack! And if they get inside, they’ll turn these impregnable fortifications into a slaughterhouse!

The Ose was not a broad river, and the gaps left in the Roman wall were only large enough to allow it to flow through them with banks no more than a half-dozen horsemen wide. The gaps in the two ditches beyond the wall were unguarded, but the gaps in the wall itself were flanked by low towers.

Litivak broke his cavalry into two wings to pass through the gaps in the ditches, leading the right wing himself. Roman archers on the wall took a heavy toll as they did, for only a score or so horsemen could advance at any one time.

When half the Gallic cavalry had passed the outer ditch, the two wings converged to form a battle line between the two gaps in the wall and began slowly threading their way through the field of pits, as the Gallic infantry poured through the gaps in the outer ditch behind them as fast as they could, bearing planks, poles, and hastily constructed scaling ladders, their archers firing wildly up at the wall.

Caesar leapt off his horse and ran to the nearest ladder, for there was nothing to be seen down here but well-organized frenzy: men forming bucket brigades, boiling pitch in great iron cauldrons, and, in the distance behind him, cohorts of legionnaires arriving at the dead run, and behind
them,
more men desperately wheeling up the heavy mobile barricades.

He scrambled up the ladder to the walkway, where even his crimson cloak failed to gain him immediate attention, for it was crammed with archers crouched down behind the protective parapet, firing as rapidly as the men behind could feed them arrows; legionnaires forming up the lethal end of the bucket brigades; javelin-throwers rushing to take their positions; and swordsmen crowding into place.

Fusillades of the Gauls’ arrows clattered against the top of the wall, more flew on harmless high arcs over it, some reached their apogees and came tumbling down; none seemed to be doing more than forcing his own archers to keep their heads down and fire without taking meaningful aim.

Caesar elbowed and kneed his way through the crush to the first centurion he could find, who goggled at his sudden appearance and began to salute.

“Hail—”

“Never mind all that!” Caesar shouted. “What’s happening down there?”

“They’re trying to scale the wall and break through the gaps at the same time, Caesar.”

“This I have to see for myself!”

“Keep your head down, and your cloak hidden. They can’t hit very much from the angle they’ve got down there, but if they see it’s you, every archer among them will be trying for a lucky shot.”

Caesar nodded, swept his cloak well behind him, crept forward in a crouch, and peered carefully over the parapet.

A great mob of Gallic infantry—or, rather, armed peasants— crowded beyond the inner ditch immediately below the wall and as far along it to the left as Caesar’s eye could see. This ditch was comparatively narrow, and Gauls were crawling across it on poles, planks, and scaling ladders. Many had already crossed, but the ditch was almost up against the foot of the wall, leaving only a very narrow strip of ground, where perhaps two or three men might stand, pressed front to back to wall. This strip was crowded with men trying to scale the wall with crude ladders set perforce at steep angles, and his own archers weren’t doing much to thin them out, protected as the Gauls were from fire from the parapet by the very angle that made it all but impossible for them to reach it.

To Caesar’s right, close by the right-hand gap in the wall, cavalry was massing to do something he could not quite fathom, a suicidal attempt to ride through on the embankments, perhaps. . . .

“Move aside! Coming through!”

A legionnaire carrying a steaming bucket barked orders at Caesar.

Caesar good-naturedly obeyed.

The poor fellow did not even see whom he was ordering around until he had poured his bucket of hot pitch down on the Gauls. Even then, he did not have time to stammer an apology before he was handed another bucket.

Litivak’s cavalry contingent was now massed on both banks of the river where it flowed through the right-hand gap in the wall, and another such formation was poised by the left-hand gap. He looked around, raised his sword high; a carnax blew, then another, and another—

And Gallic cavalry, half a dozen horsemen wide and thousands deep on each embankment, broke into a gallop toward the gaps, waving swords and lances, shouting battle cries.

As the front ranks neared the walls, the ranks behind the first score suddenly wheeled and rode into the river, which in moments became filled with swimming horses reaching far back beyond the outer Roman ditch—an attempt to breach the fortifications in force via the river flowing through them.

The spearheads of the cavalry formations on the embankments reached the towers guarding the gaps in the wall, surged beneath them, and—

Palisades of stout wooden logs suddenly wheeled into place, entirely blocking their way. And from the towers flanking the gaps, torrents of steaming black pitch came pouring down.

Litivak, near the river’s edge, escaped by diving his horse into the Ose. More than half of the others in the leading ranks were not so fortunate. Covered with the sticky boiling stuff, horses and men crashed into each other half blinded, spattered by flesh-searing gouts, raising a horrid clamor of screams and neighs of agony. The horsemen behind them either wheeled around to flee, or rode their horses into the river, many of them knocked off their mounts in the panic and confusion. Litivak, as it turned out, was twice fortunate, for he was knocked off his horse, had to swim frantically to catch another mount, and thus was spared the further disaster that followed.

The now leaderless cavalry already in the river heroically kept their mounts swimming toward the open gaps. As the front ranks passed the guard towers, more pitch was poured, to roll down the banks and into the river, setting it steaming; arrows and javelins rained down at close range and favorable angle.

Still the swimming cavalry pressed desperately forward, those behind eagerly replacing those who had fallen, even those aflame urging their mounts on with their dying breaths, and a spearhead of some hundred made it through the wall—

—where the embankments were lined with Roman legionnaires afoot, who caught them in a deadly crossfire of javelins.

Some of them bravely kept their horses swimming forward through the crossfire to make room for more Gallic cavalry swimming in behind them. But the farther the Gauls advanced up the river, the more of them were slain by the Romans on the embankments.

Some tried to climb up the embankments to push back the Romans and hold the river breach open, but the embankments were too steep for their horses, and the Romans easily slaughtered them.

The Romans then wheeled up more mobile barricades, these to the riverbanks
behind
the Gauls who had penetrated their fortifications.
They tumbled them into the Ose, where they splintered and cracked but blocked the river like beaver dams, cutting off the Gallic spearhead and trapping them within the fortress. Legionnaires dashed up with buckets of some greasy liquid, threw it on the barrages, and set them ablaze.

More of the stuff was poured on the river behind the burning dams, where it floated on the surface until it touched the flames. Then it ignited, sending walls of fire floating toward the cavalry still outside the fortifications, who now found themselves swimming right toward the flames.

From the walls of Alesia, Vercingetorix had seen the Gauls moving toward the outer Roman wall where the Ose flowed through, had seen them pause, had seen them mass before the defensive ditches, had seen the cavalry then advance toward the fortifications with infantry behind them.

But from this angle, there was a blind area reaching from the outer Roman wall halfway to the gaps in the outer ditch, so all he had been able to see of what was obviously a battle was a rising pall of oily black smoke, cavalry in the river swimming toward the fortifications, a sudden eruption of distant orange flame, yet more smoke, and then horsemen in the river turning to flee in unruly confusion, followed by thousands of running men.

Vercingetorix might not have seen what had happened, but he and everyone else on the city walls had certainly seen enough to know that the attack had somehow ended in a catastrophe, sending Litivak’s army of Gauls reeling back toward their hilltop sanctuary in desperate disarray.

There was not even a dirgelike banging of swords on shields. No shouts or cries of anger or grief. Only hundreds of accusatory eyes and grim faces turned toward Vercingetorix, and the terrible chastisement of utter silence.

It was Critognat who finally broke it, but in words meant for the ears of Vercingetorix alone.

“No more if and when,” he said. “No more hammers and anvils. No more clever strategy. The next time our brothers out there attack, you lead us out of here or I will do it myself.”

Caesar had been awakened at the first glimmerings of dawn by a breathless Brutus, who had informed him that the entire army of Gaul had magically crossed the outer defensive ditch.

Caesar had ascended to the walkway atop his outer wall and walked a quarter of the way around, surveying what the Gauls had done. Spread out before him, just inside the outer ditch and around its curve to either side as far as his eye could see, were the Gauls in their tens of thousands, both cavalry and infantry, apparently waiting for enough light to traverse the field of pits, and apparently transported there by druid magic.

But now, as the sun rose halfway above the horizon line, Caesar saw, hardly to his surprise, that the only magic that had been involved was of the usual sort—well-directed muscle and sweat—though he had to admit that it was rather amazing what thousands of men without any better equipment than battle-axes, swords, shields, tree limbs, and bare hands had been able to do between sunset and dawn.

The whole sector of the outer ditch behind the Gauls had been filled in with earth, branches, and brush, compacted into a mass sufficiently strong for horses as well as men to cross.

As if spotting his presence on the wall, the Gallic cavalrymen began banging their swords on their shields, the foot soldiers doing likewise if they had them, or thumping lances, scaling ladders, logs, and feet on the ground if they didn’t. The tens of thousands of them yelled ferociously, and those flat, ominous carnaxes blared, a hideous din certain to awaken every Roman still sleeping.

“What’re they
doing,
Caesar?”

“No doubt working up their courage to cross the field of pits and storm the wall.”

“I mean, why would they bring up all that useless cavalry?”

Caesar shrugged. “Because they’re
Gauls.
The nobles and warriors believe it beneath their dignity to fight afoot.”

Tulius clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shook his head.

Caesar glanced at the nearest tower, atop which was a small catapult with its piles of stones and amphorae, its crew rubbing the sleep from their eyes and making it ready. All along the walkway, bleary archers and javelin-throwers were ascending to their positions.

“Look on the bright side, Tulius,” he said. “They
do
make excellent targets.”

A volley of arrows flew from the top of the Roman wall, then another, and another, a ceaseless barrage that at this range mostly clattered off the shields of the cavalry and those of the infantry who had them, but skewered scores of those who did not, and discouraged all from advancing any closer.

Then heavy ballistae and catapults inside the Roman camp, and lighter ones on the wall, began to hurl long spearlike bolts, showers of rocks, large stones, clay amphorae. Their effects were far more terrible.

Ballista bolts went through men’s breastplates and bodies to emerge from the other side with enough force to kill another man or even a horse. The clouds of light rock took out eyes, cracked noses. The heavy rocks crushed all whom they fell upon. And the amphorae burst on impact, releasing a gush of sticky burning stuff that could not be brushed off and could not be extinguished.

Litivak waved his sword above his head and shouted something to his standard-bearer, who raised the boar high; the two of them retreated through the field of pits and began riding at a trot around the inner edge of the outer Roman entrenchment. Eduen cavalrymen began to follow, then more cavalry, then infantry, and finally the whole army, horsemen circling just slowly enough for running men more or less to keep up.

This did not put them out of range of the catapults and ballistae, but, as a flock of birds wheeling in unison might present less of a collective target than the same birds sitting in a tree, in motion each individual was less vulnerable, or at least seemed to be so.

Instead of disintegrating under the fearsome bombardment, the army of Gaul held together.