The Druid King Read online

  He is once more an innocently happy boy riding on the road to Gergovia beside his father. “Can you keep a secret?” says Keltill.

  Keltill anoints a dusty old crown with beer until it shines, then lowers it onto the brow of Vercingetorix. “Whatever the price may be, you must pay it,” he says, bursting into flame, “for there is no one to pay it in your stead.”

  Keltill burns in a wicker cage as Vercingetorix watches helplessly, the sweet odor of roasting flesh assailing his nostrils, choking his throat, tearing his eyes.

  “In fire shall you remember me!” his father proclaims, and he disappears into the flames, his eyes glaring from the face of a giant of fire.

  The burning giant strides through green meadows and golden grain, in his wake ashes and fields burned black and the smoldering skeletons of trees.

  Vercingetorix hears the voice of a far-off suffering multitude summoning him to battle.

  “Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix!”

  And he becomes the flaming giant.

  And he stands once more atop the hill above the dance of life. Through the swirling mists below he beholds a great army of Gauls, warriors of every tribe beneath the standards of the boar and the hawk, the owl and the horse, the wolf, the stag, and the lynx.

  And he rides at the head of this, his army, his heart joyously beating to the battle rhythm of the pounding hooves. Beside him rides Rhia, holding aloft the bear standard of the Arverni.

  But Vercingetorix carries the eagle standard of Rome. And he rides a white horse bedecked with the gold-and-red trappings of a Roman general and wears a cloak of brilliant crimson.

  Louder still becomes the chanting:

  “Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix!”

  He rides through the main plaza of Gergovia through a cheering multitude, up the stairs of the Great Hall itself into a Roman encampment, into an enormous tent draped in tapestries fringed with threads of gold, lit by golden lamps, the bare earth hidden beneath colorful carpets.

  He luxuriates upon a soft couch, sipping heady red wine from a golden goblet. On a couch beside him reclines a stocky balding Roman wearing a crimson cloak. The Roman offers him a crown of prickly green laurel leaves.

  “Vercingetorix? King of Gaul?”

  Vercingetorix rejects the crown of laurel.

  The Roman offers him the Crown of Brenn.

  Vercingetorix hesitates.

  The Roman becomes the Arch Druid Guttuatr.

  “The greater the price to be paid, the greater the magic,” says the Arch Druid. And he presses the Crown of Brenn down upon the head of Vercingetorix.

  Guttuatr’s robe becomes a gown of white mist, swirling, swirling, the gown of a woman without a face, with the face of his mother, Gaela, with the face of Epona, with the face of a golden-haired woman Vercingetorix knows from somewhere, with the faces, or so it seems, of all the women who were and are and will be flowing through time.

  In the crook of her right arm she cradles a baby. In her left hand she holds a dagger.

  She offers Vercingetorix the dagger. Vercingetorix takes it.

  And plunges it into his own heart.

  The golden-haired woman stands naked and beautiful before him. She kisses him. “Take that with you into the Land of Legend, Vercingetorix, king of Gaul,” she tells him as she places the Crown of Brenn upon his head.

  And Vercingetorix rides in a gilded chariot beside the crimson-cloaked Roman who wears a wreath of laurel. The Roman waves in triumph to the cheering crowds thronging a wide avenue through an endless canyon of great white buildings of ornately worked marble in the heart of a city that can only be Rome.

  And Vercingetorix receives the accolade of all Rome as he marches afoot through the triumphal aisle wearing the Crown of Brenn.

  “Vercingetorix, king of Gaul! Vercingetorix, king of Gaul!”

  His heart brims with pride. His spirit soars with joy. It bursts out of his body and takes wing.

  But the bird he becomes is the black carrion raven of death.

  He swoops down, down, down, to alight on the sill of a barred window and peer into a dank stone cell.

  Vercingetorix the raven beholds Vercingetorix the man lying dead in a pool of his own blood.

  “Vercingetorix, king of Gaul!”

  The raven croaks, and hops into the cell. It hops through the blood, cawing. It hops up onto the dead man’s breast. Cackling, it hops onto Vercingetorix’s face. It pecks at the corpse’s eye—

  As it does, the raven is thereby transformed into an eagle.

  The bars of the cell window melt away. Brilliant sunlight pours through. The eagle flies up out of the cell, up, up, up, into the sky above Rome.

  “Vercingetorix, king of Gaul! Vercingetorix, king of Gaul!”

  Up through the swirling white mist of a cloud the eagle soars. Beyond is another time. Beyond is a starless night sky.

  A star is born in the perfect blackness.

  It waxes brighter and brighter and brighter. It becomes a brilliant golden sun burning away the night to reveal a blue noonday sky above.

  Burning away the mists below to reveal a great city.

  Which can only be a city in the Land of Legend. For it is a magical city.

  A magical river flows through it; the great boats upon it, made not of wood but of gleaming metal, glide downstream and up without sail or oar.

  Multitudes of wagons move through the streets of the city, drawn by magic alone, for there is not a horse or an ox to be seen.

  Although it is bright noon, here and there magical torches have been set up on poles. These torches are capped not with pitch-soaked hay giving forth smoky orange flame, but with giant jewels—rubies, emeralds, amber—shining star-bright from within as if they have been hollowed out and filled with fireflies.

  Close by the river rises a wickerwork tower tall as a mountain. But magic has transformed the wicker into metal.

  Above the tower, above the eagle circling its pointed pinnacle, a silver bird flies at impossible speed, scribing a magic cloud across the blue sky, thin and straight as an arrow, white as chalk.

  Vercingetorix’s spirit folds its eagle wings and stoops down, down, down, out of the magic of the skies, to the magic of the city below.

  He alights on the head of a stone statue.

  The statue of a warrior of the Arverni mounted on a noble steed, sword held high.

  And an unseen multitude chants with the mighty voices of the gods:

  “Vercingetorix, king of Gaul! Vercingetorix, king of Gaul!”

  The face of stone becomes a face of flesh.

  And it is Vercingetorix’s own.

  And the living arms of the Tree of Knowledge, gentle as those of a mother with her babe, lower him to the earth between its ancient roots.

  Where he awakens into the dream called time.

  VII

  DID YOU FIND that which you sought?”

  “That which I sought?” Vercingetorix muttered, scarcely able to comprehend where he was, or who was this white-robed gray-haired man staring down at him so intently.

  “The meaning of your death! Your destiny!”

  Slowly his spirit began to return to his body. It was a waning afternoon, to judge by the deepness of the sky’s blue and the length of the shadows of the trees surrounding the clearing upon whose mossy ground he sat, with his back up against the trunk of a mighty oak. He could feel the rough texture of the tree’s bark as if he wore no tunic. He could see motes of dust floating glittering in the air, and tiny midges flying among them. He could hear the leaves of the trees rustling in a gentle breeze and distinguish the song of a far-off merle from the gabbling of a nearby tribe of starlings. He could smell the resin of the trees and the warmth of sunlight on living wood.

  Vercingetorix took a deep draft of the cooling afternoon air, redolent with the loamy fragrance of the forest floor, held it in his lungs, stilled the confusion that roiled his mind, let it fill him, then exhaled it, and remembered.

  “Oh yes, I saw
my destiny, Guttuatr,” he said. “I was…I am…My destiny is to become…king of Gaul!”

  “King of Gaul!” cried the Arch Druid, deep dismay in his voice.

  “What troubles you?” Vercingetorix asked. “You yourself placed…will place the Crown of Brenn on my head.”

  “Never will I crown a king of Gaul!”

  “That is what I saw, Guttuatr,” Vercingetorix told him calmly. “But…”

  “But?”

  Vercingetorix struggled to clear his thoughts. There was much to remember—or much to forget?—before the dead king of Gaul in a stone cell in Rome could once more fully become this living boy leaning up against an oak.

  “But I was proclaimed king of Gaul in Rome!” Vercingetorix exclaimed, remembering only as he spoke. “And there will I die!”

  And then he was the student again, at least for the moment, humbly seeking understanding from the man of knowledge. But this moment passed when Guttuatr shook his head, for it was the slow, heavy gesture of a troubled old man, not that of an all-knowing Arch Druid. Nor was there enlightenment in his words.

  “This was your vision, Vercingetorix, not mine,” Guttuatr said. “Do not expect anyone else to explain your destiny. The magic of your death, for better or for worse, belongs to you alone.”

  “But what of the magic I saw after my death, Guttuatr? Can you not—”

  “You saw beyond your own death?” Guttuatr exclaimed. “No one ever has seen beyond his death before!”

  There was a long silent moment in which nothing could be heard but the birds in the trees. The very breezes of the air seemed to stop still as Guttuatr’s gaze turned inward.

  “No one in this Age that is passing…” Guttuatr muttered softly. “Tell me what you saw.”

  “When I died, my spirit entered a raven—”

  “The bird of death—”

  “But I rose into the sky as an eagle—”

  “The bird of power—”

  “—above the city, and I beheld a statue of a triumphant hero such as the Romans are said to erect to boast of their mightiest victories…But…”

  “But?”

  “But the face on the statue was my own! And the city was a magic city, not Rome! Magic beyond anything I have words to describe or wit to understand,” he said, throwing up his hands in frustration.

  And, so saying, it seemed to him that the boy who had entered the Land of Legend spoke as the man he had now become. Was he not the boy and the man, the raven and the eagle, the corpse on the stone floor and the king of Gaul? For would they not live together in his memory in this world while he yet lived and in the Land of Legend when he died?

  Vercingetorix sat up straighter, feeling strength return to his flesh, clarity to his mind, power to his spirit.

  “Indeed,” he declared, “the magic of this vision is mine alone!”

  “And can you tell me what it means?” asked the Arch Druid.

  Vercingetorix was silent, for he found that he could not. It seemed that the meaning hovered just beyond his grasp, like a floating midge that seemed so slow but could somehow just not be caught.

  “Very well, then, I’ll tell you what the magic of your death truly means,” the Arch Druid said in a gentler voice, extending a hand to help Vercingetorix to his feet.

  “But I thought you could not!”

  “It means what you make it mean, druid, for that is what you have now become,” Guttuatr said when they stood facing each other, eye to eye, as equals. “Such visions in the Land of Legend are not plainspoken, for if they were, we would be no more than slaves of the gods, our lives entirely controlled by what is written in the heavens.”

  “Are we not?”

  “If we are, the gods do not wish us to know,” Guttuatr said somberly. “Or perhaps it is we who give visions their true meaning when we make them come to pass.”

  “We make our own destinies, then?”

  “Who knows?” said the Arch Druid. “Who can? When I as a youth ate of the mushroom, I saw myself taken up by the living arms of the Tree of Knowledge and placed on its highest branches. A great white bird descended from the sky and became a cloud. The cloud draped itself around my shoulders and became a robe of white…”

  Guttuatr shrugged. “I did not know that this meant I was destined to become Arch Druid until it came to pass. Perhaps, if it had not come to pass, the vision might just as truly have come to mean something else.”

  “And your death…?” Vercingetorix presumed to ask.

  “A huge millstone rolls over the land crushing all beneath it, yet I ride untouched atop it,” Guttuatr said softly, his eyes meeting Vercingetorix’s own, but gazing far, far away, as if he were seeing it all now. “It approaches the mouth of a cave, or perhaps a tunnel, for the cave is not an opening into the earth but into the sky. The millstone enters the cave with my Arch Druid’s robe still riding it. I can see that the robe is empty as I lie on the ground and am crushed beneath it.”

  “But what does this mean?”

  “I never knew until I saw the birth of the new star. And then I knew that I was destined to die as the last Arch Druid of the Great Age that is. And must seek out the one to lead us into the Great Age to come.”

  Now Vercingetorix knew why Guttuatr would not speak plain. He was the one of whom the Arch Druid’s vision had spoken.

  Vercingetorix, king of Gaul.

  Lying dead in a stone cell.

  In Rome.

  And then the true meaning of his own vision struck him, sent his spirit soaring like the eagle it was destined to become.

  “If I must die as king of Gaul in Rome, I must first become king of Gaul, and therefore cannot be slain before I do!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “And I cannot be slain in Gaul! And, armed with that knowledge, I need fear no man, no battle, the daring of no deed! I need not fear to face those who slew my father even if I must face them alone! Even if I must face an army alone!”

  “You are not a god, Vercingetorix!”

  “But I am destined to be a king! And so neither can I be slain before I fulfill my destiny to wear the Crown of Brenn!”

  “And die!”

  “I die as a king in Rome. That is the magic of my death. I have paid the price, and now it is mine.”

  “To do what?”

  “To avenge my father’s death,” Vercingetorix declared. “To complete the great work that he died fighting for. To unite all Gaul under a king who will reclaim its honor.”

  “This is not a man of knowledge speaking! This is a boy given drink too strong for him to command!”

  Vercingetorix regarded the Arch Druid with an unwavering eye. He saw a man of knowledge as he himself had now become. But he saw also an old man past his prime who had schooled him for purposes which even he had never truly understood.

  The visions of the Land of Legend are not plainspoken, Guttuatr had said. Perhaps not to an old man destined to die with the Great Age that is. But it seemed they spoke clearly enough to a young man destined to be the king bringing in the new Great Age. Surely that was why he alone had seen beyond his own death and been granted a vision of the Great Age to come.

  “No, Guttuatr,” said Vercingetorix, “this is a man of knowledge who now speaks, not a boy. A man young and strong enough to wield the magic of that knowledge as his invincible sword.”

  The Arch Druid Guttuatr shakes his head as he stands beside the school’s temple watching Vercingetorix disappear from sight into the forest. Vercingetorix wears a tunic and pantaloons of Arverne orange. From his belt hangs a sword. He does not look back.

  “What have I created?” Guttuatr mutters.

  “Have we the power to create anyone?” the druid Nividio says soothingly, summoned here not so much by command of the Arch Druid as by the need of Guttuatr, for Nividio is the closest thing that he has to a friend.

  Guttuatr sighs. “Of course you are right, Nividio,” he says. “But all of us have the power to make mistakes.”

  “The signs seemed clea
r, did they not?” says Nividio.

  Nividio’s robe bears no tribal color, though he was born a Santon. Nividio is not a magistrate. Nividio does not teach. Nividio is one of the Druids of the Inner Way, from whose small self-selected company Arch Druids are chosen. But Nividio has no desire to become an Arch Druid. He would so serve if called upon, but he knows he will be spared, for he has eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and the life he sees before him is the life he sees behind, that of a wandering druid of the woods, a creature whose purpose is to have no purpose, not a singer but the song.

  And the death he has seen is that of a very old man lying down to rest alone beneath an oak deep in the forest, his flesh slowly and sweetly melting into the soft damp earth to feed the roots of the tree, to rise with the sap into its branches, to become its leaves, and then to blow away on the autumn wind.

  “Are the signs ever clear?” says Guttuatr. “The sign of the Great Turning was plain, and so too did it point to that boy, but…” His eyes become furtive. “I say this to you, Nividio, because I would say it to no one else and I must say it to someone,” he says in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper. “I would not have stopped Keltill’s execution even if I could have. Because I wanted…I did not want…”

  “You did not want the coming of a king,” Nividio says. “And in that you were right, Guttuatr.”

  “But when the signs pointed to Vercingetorix as he who would bring the new Great Age, I feared what such an Age might become,” Guttuatr says angrily. “And so I sought to raise him up as my successor, as the Arch Druid bringing in the new Great Age, and instead I may have made a terrible mistake. I gave Vercingetorix the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge so that he might enter the Land of Legend and return as a man of knowledge and a druid of the Inner Way. But he returned with the vision that his destiny is to be a man of action and a king.”

  Nividio knows that druids must not meddle in the world of strife. And that this is what Guttuatr has unwittingly done.

  He would lift Guttuatr’s burden if he could.