The Druid King Page 5

  The last flaming sliver of the sun sinks below the horizon, and the sky, deep purple above the treetops surrounding the clearing, is already black at the zenith and toward the east. It is a lightly clouded and moonless night, and the brightest stars are already visible, among them one younger than a child who has not yet learned to crawl.

  Within the dark depths of the forest, glowing orange lights, like enormous fireflies, converge on the clearing from the wind’s four quarters, emerging into it as flaming torches in the hands of a dozen druids. All wear robes of white unmarked by tribal colors. They form a small circle in the middle of the clearing, facing outward. Torchless, bearing only his staff of office, the Arch Druid emerges from the western margin of the clearing, strides toward the circle of druids.

  As he enters the circle, they turn inward, so that when Guttuatr halts and plants his staff upon the earth he is the center of a circle of fire, a circle of inward-turned eyes, expectant, waiting.

  “I have called this convocation of Druids of the Inner Way to consider…”

  “The portents in the heavens—”

  “The new star—”

  “The Romans—”

  “Keltill—”

  The Arch Druid does not seem truly displeased by the interruption, by the cacophonous confusion of diverse voices, but he does not let it go on long before he demands silence by raising his staff and bringing it down again.

  “To consider the chaos in the heavens that brings chaos to the earth!” the Arch Druid intones. Then, in quite another voice: “Or, as you have just demonstrated, the reverse.”

  He smiles, as if he has made the driest of jests, but does not laugh. No one else does either.

  “The heavens have given us one true sign,” he says, “the birth of a new star…”

  “Sigil of the Wheel’s Great Turning,” says the druid Zelkar.

  Guttuatr nods. “But now there are those claiming to have seen a comet and sowing chaos and confusion.”

  “Easy enough for those without knowledge to mistake a large falling star for a small comet,” scoffs Zelkar, nodding toward the fallen star atop the Arch Druid’s staff.

  “The sign of the death of a king, time out of mind,” says the druid Polgar.

  “Or a king’s passing,” says the druid Gwyndo. “Easy enough, in the absence of a king, for someone to claim it means the coming of a king first. The same sort of someone who would thus benefit from calling a falling star a comet.”

  “If so,” says Zelkar, “like his falling star, one who will flash across the sky for a brief moment and then be gone.”

  “Let us hope—”

  “—that it’s a sign of the return of Caesar to Rome!”

  “There are those who say the omen points to Keltill—”

  “Nor does he discourage such talk—”

  “Nor does he claim it—”

  “Not openly!”

  “Enough!” shouts Guttuatr, slamming the butt of his staff down hard. Then his voice becomes intimate. “No Gaul has worn the crown of Brenn since before the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers. There have been myriad falling stars since, and some few comets, but as long as the land was at peace, no one thought to mistake the one for the other, whether by ignorance or by design. But now, when there is no peace, the people stare up into the sky and see what they might wish to see.”

  “Or what those who might wish to be king might wish them to see,” says Gwyndo.

  “So might Keltill or anyone else be accused by his enemies,” points out Polgar.

  “This is true!”

  “Silence!” commands Guttuatr. Then he shrugs. “We are men of knowledge, and yet we have seen how these portents, both real and false, bring even ourselves deep into the chaos of the world of strife…”

  “May I speak now, Arch Druid?” Polgar asks in a chastened tone of voice.

  Guttuatr nods.

  “We know that we stand on the cusp of a Great Turning from one Age into the next,” says Polgar. “Might it be…might it be…” He hesitates, as if what he is struggling to spit out is a morsel so enormous that it sticks in his throat. “Might it be that in the Great Age to come the heavens will speak in a different tongue?”

  “In which false comets become true signs?” sneers Zelkar.

  “A tongue that no man born in this Great Age can understand…” Guttuatr says softly. “Might it be that they speak it already?”

  There is no sound but the hissing crackle of the torches, the faint rustle of tree crowns in a light breeze, the far-distant hoot of an owl.

  “It may be so,” Guttuatr finally says. “And as men of knowledge, we turn with the Great Wheel lest we be crushed beneath it.”

  “But how, Arch Druid?” asks Zelkar.

  Guttuatr sighs deeply, and there is no answer in his words, nothing like assurance written on his visage. “I do not know,” he says.

  These simple words, spoken so many times by so many men, now call forth gasps of dismay from these men of knowledge.

  “I cannot know.”

  He turns to look upward, skyward, into the star-speckled black depths of elsewhere, of elsewhen, of a time yet unborn.

  “For no man of an Age that is passing can ever see clearly into an Age that is being born. And so we must seek out he who can. He who destiny will choose to lead the people of Gaul into it.”

  IV

  WHO ELSE would be generous enough to put on a feast to celebrate the end of his year as vergobret?” Vercingetorix burbled gaily as father and son rode toward Gergovia.

  “This is less than a celebration, and more,” Keltill told him. “If the gods will it, much more.”

  The words revealed the existence of secrets without more than hinting at what they might be.

  A year as vergobret had wrought changes in his father. He had spent less and less time in the pleasures of the hunt, with his horses, out-of-doors like a natural man, and indeed less time with Vercingetorix, and more and more time within the house huddled with nobles, military craftsmen, collectors of taxes and tributes.

  At first Vercingetorix put this down to the natural order of things, for, after all, Keltill was not just his father but the father of his people. After his term was over, things would return to what they had been.

  But in the last three or four cycles of the moon, the changes in Keltill had become stronger, had changed in kind. Keltill, whom everyone loved, had found enemies.

  Namely the Romans, whom nobody loved, but who, according to Keltill, were seen as benefactors and sources of riches by all too many Gauls who should know better, rather than as the treacherous and cunning invaders they were.

  This had turned Keltill, the most hale and open of men, secretive. Moreover, he had taken to spending hours listening to the tribal lays, ofttimes alone with the bard.

  Vercingetorix found this atmosphere of mystery exciting, but it was frustrating for a boy so close to manhood to be kept outside the swirling mists of that secret purpose.

  The road from Keltill’s homestead to Gergovia was far older than any living man, wide enough for two carts to pass, beaten smooth by lifetimes of passage, and free of mud in this fair weather. It embraced the land as it wound around grassy hillocks and skirted the margins of the great forest. It lay rooted in the earth and made of it, a living thing.

  The closer the road got to Gergovia, the more traffic there was on it, almost all headed toward the city: carts bearing kegs of beer, heaps of fruits and vegetables, grains and loaves, butchered deer and wild boar, dun chickens and more brightly feathered wildfowl; drovers herding sheep and pigs; bards, harlots, musicians; purveyors of jewelry, cloth, even Roman wines; Arverne nobles and warriors, and those of other tribes; the occasional druid.

  As was his custom, Keltill tossed coins here and there from the leather sack tied to the saddle of his horse, taking care not to insult nobles or druids or warriors or any folk of tribes other than the Arverni by flinging money in their direction, but favoring all with his gr
eat winning smile.

  But Vercingetorix sensed that there was something deliberate about it, more like a rite than an expression of pleasure.

  “Everyone seems to be in a mood to celebrate,” Vercingetorix ventured.

  “And why should they not?” Keltill exclaimed. “They are to be guests at the greatest feast in the history of Gaul!”

  “Why, then, do you say that this is less than a celebration and more?”

  “The more is what I’m paying for it, and the less is what they are not!” Keltill told him, with a great laugh that went straight to Vercingetorix’s heart.

  “And this much more that it will be, if the gods will it?” Vercingetorix presumed to ask.

  Keltill reined his horse into a slow walk, leaned closer to Vercingetorix. “Can you keep a secret?” he said in a voice so soft as almost to be a whisper.

  “Certainly not,” Vercingetorix told him archly. “Whatever you tell me, I will shout at the top of my lungs in the marketplace of Gergovia when the sun is at its zenith and I may be sure all the world is there to hear.”

  “Like father, like son!” Keltill cried, clapping Vercingetorix on the shoulder, roaring with laughter. When his mirth had subsided, he leaned close again. “I can tell you that the true purpose of this fête is to gather together the leaders of the tribes of Gaul, something that would be impossible otherwise, and not to a celebration. What is there to celebrate? The raids of the Teutons? The plague of Romans invited up from the south by the Edui to save us from them? The loss of our freedom? Of our honor itself?”

  “Our honor?”

  “Where is the honor in summoning the mercenary army of this Caesar to do our fighting for us? Where will our freedom be when he finishes with the Teutons?”

  “But we are few and the Teutons are many.”

  “No, Vercingetorix, alone each tribe is few, but we Gauls are many! Fighting together, we could throw the Teutons back across the Rhine, and the legions of Rome into the sea!”

  “But that hasn’t happened since the time of Brenn, since we last had a…king.”

  “Did I say that?” Keltill said sharply. Then, with a wink, “Don’t you say it either!”

  He brought his horse up into a trot. “At least not before the fact!” he called back over his shoulder as Vercingetorix urged his mount to catch up.

  “And now I will offer you the strangest advice ever to escape my mouth,” he said when they were riding abreast again. “Stay sober tonight!”

  Vercingetorix stared at his father in amazement.

  “Take care to stay sober enough to remember this night, Vercingetorix, so that you will be properly able to boast to your son that you were there at a moment the bards will sing of forever!”

  Gergovia was built on a hilltop, the better to defend, and if the hill had in the dim past been wooded, now it was grassy and stood above a wide meadow, with a stream shaded by flanking copses meandering through it. The broadness of the meadow and the treelessness of the hill were the works of men, for forest had been felled not only to provide logs for the palisade and buildings of the city, but to render potential attackers plainly visible from afar.

  The city was enclosed by a wall four men high built of stones set in a framework of sturdy timbers and strengthened at intervals by low towers constructed in the same manner. The gates, now invitingly open, were flanked by taller parapeted towers, from which invaders attempting to batter their way in with a ram would be subject to a rain of arrows, lances, stones, boiling pitch, and scalding water.

  Today Gergovia was surrounded by the most marvelous sight that Vercingetorix had ever seen, a second city almost as large, extending halfway down the hillside—the encampments of the nobles of the visiting tribes and their entourages, surely the greatest gathering of the peoples of Gaul in the lifetime of even the oldest of living men.

  The leather tents of vergobrets were pitched beneath tribal standards—bear, hawk, boar, wolf, horse, and more—carved in wood or cast in bronze or, in the case of the Eduen boar, even silver, and held high on wooden poles. The tents of their nobles and warriors pitched around them flew pennants in their tribal colors.

  The spaces between tribal encampments were clogged with the hustle and bustle of servants, grooms, bards, musicians, artisans, and tradesmen. All around them were stalls selling beer, bread, meats fresh and cooked, even jugs and amphorae of Roman wine.

  Vercingetorix’s heart nearly burst with pride as he rode up the hill and into this joyous pandemonium at the side of the man who had called it all into being.

  Keltill’s sack of coins was soon empty, and he could only wave and toss smiles to his admirers as they rode past the tribal encampments, displaying his knowledge by reading off the identities of each from the standards and pennants as they passed.

  “The stag, the Cadurques…Brown, the Sequani…The owl, Bituriges…Green and yellow…uh, that’s a bull, so it must be the Turons…Ah, here we are, the Carnutes!”

  Keltill rode past the largest of the Carnute tents, displaying the horse standard of their vergobret, and reined in before a somewhat smaller one flying a red-and-black pennant.

  “Why here first?” asked Vercingetorix.

  “As a favor to you, Vercingetorix, for this is the tent of Epona, widow of Arthak, vergobret of the Carnutes, slain by the Teutons in battle, and an old friend—”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Oh, you will,” Keltill told him with a wink and a laugh as he dismounted, bidding Vercingetorix to do likewise.

  “Greetings, Epona, we are here!” Keltill shouted when they reached the entrance.

  A stern-looking woman with more gray in her hair than brown emerged, wearing a somber black tuniclike dress nevertheless secured at her right shoulder by a large and ornate filigreed silver broach in the form of a horse.

  “Greetings, Keltill,” she said much less loudly, and they embraced fraternally as Vercingetorix dismounted.

  “You remember my son, Vercingetorix…”

  “Who could forget the silver-tongued Vercingetorix?” Epona said in a dry tone.

  “We’ve met…?” Vercingetorix stammered.

  His father and Epona exchanged amused glances, which only made his discomfort worse.

  “Your attention, as I remember, was elsewhere at the time,” said Epona.

  Keltill laughed. “If you don’t remember Epona,” he said, “I’ll wager you remember her daughter, Marah.”

  Indeed he did.

  For the girl who then emerged from the tent had been the first object of his boyish lust. The girl who had so disdained him at his father’s inaugural feast. The girl he had not found the courage to speak to, but whose presence had somehow conspired with much beer to turn a tongue of wood to one of silver.

  Her face had tanned to a golden hue, and her long blond hair was now worn free and wild. She wore a plain white shift, snug enough to reveal breasts that had blossomed into womanhood. Her lips were if anything fuller, and there was a new…something in her eyes. All in all, the sight of her was now even more intoxicating to Vercingetorix sober than it had been when he was drunk.

  Keltill gave the gaping Vercingetorix an elbow in the ribs. “Why, if I were a few years younger…and, on the other hand, even so—”

  “Don’t even think about it, Keltill,” said Epona.

  Keltill exhaled a great false sigh. “Well, there’s always my son here to carry on…” And then, more seriously, “They make a fine couple, do they not? And your family is without a man to head the household…”

  “Now, there might be an alliance,” mused Epona. She continued, more sharply: “But we have something more pressing to discuss right now, don’t we, Keltill?”

  “Indeed,” said Keltill. “So why don’t we discuss it inside and leave them alone to see if they’ll do what comes naturally?”

  Vercingetorix blushed, for nothing could have been closer to his mind.

  “Not too naturally, Marah,” Epona said, and the maiden in que
stion blushed likewise. Then Keltill and Epona went into the tent, leaving the two of them to stand there staring at each other in red-faced mortification.

  “Shall we go walk down by the stream?” Vercingetorix summoned up the courage to suggest.

  “Well, I suppose so,” said Marah. “At the moment I seem to find myself with nothing better to do.”

  The stroll through the encampments together had been awkward, but not as awkward as Vercingetorix found himself when at last he had Marah alone under the trees fringing the stream.

  There, he could at least break the long silence pointing out the identities of the tribes whose encampments they passed, and boasting of the extent of Keltill’s holdings, and of his good fortune in being the son of such a great man.

  But here, alone with her in the cool brown shadows, with no sounds but the burbling of the stream through its rockier reaches, the chirping of the birds, and the breeze in the trees, the silver-tongued Vercingetorix found himself entirely at a loss for words. Only one thing filled his mind, and he only hoped the pantaloons he wore were loosely cut enough to conceal the extent to which it filled them.

  On the other hand…

  “Do you know what your name means—Marah?”

  “The she-horse, a mare.”

  “I would be happy to mount you, mare.”

  The look that Marah gave him was enough to freeze the stream in its bed.

  “There’s a little more to what’s supposed to happen between a boy and a girl than matching up the right bloodlines in a stable!”

  “I…I meant that someday you will be my queen,” Vercingetorix blurted.

  “Your queen?”

  “Uh…I mean that, were you mine…it would make me feel like a king,” Vercingetorix said. It was the best he could do to recover, without revealing that which he must not, and, however lame it sounded to him, it seemed to have the desired effect.

  “Well, at least that kind of talk’s a little more silver-tongued,” Marah said, regarding him with a bit more favor than she would a passing cur on the road.

  “Silver-tongued…?” he said teasingly, and, nothing ventured, nothing gained, took both her hands, pulled her to him, kissed her boldly upon the lips, pressing the point of his tongue between them.