The Druid King Page 7

  Fists and tankards pounded the table. Arverne warriors behind Keltill pounded the pommels of their swords on their shields. Roars and cries of approval went on for long moments before subsiding enough for Epona to make herself heard. “Well spoken, Keltill! But only words!”

  Keltill spoke crooningly into the pregnant silence.

  “It’s deeds you want…? I’ll show you deeds!”

  And he reached down into a leather sack that had lain previously unnoticed beneath his feet and under the table.

  Keltill withdraws from the sack a dusty old golden crown, a band thin at the rear, rising into filigreed peaks in front, as if to adorn the brow of its wearer with a miniature range of mighty mountains.

  He raises it high above his head at arm’s length, and as he does, the bard in the purple-and-yellow robe rises to his feet, his eyes wide at what he beholds.

  “The Crown of Brenn!” croons Keltill. “Worn in the long ago by what we need now—a king!”

  He reaches for a mug, anoints the dirty crown with beer, and begins to clean it with the hem of his cloak. “Time to clean the cobwebs off this dusty old crown and make it shine! Time to do what these dark days demand.”

  Keltill holds up the crown, gleaming now in the firelight.

  “Time the tribes of Gaul fought Teutons and Romans alike under a single leader.”

  No one dares speak save the bard. “You, Keltill? You would wear the Crown of Brenn? The crown that no one has worn within living memory?”

  Once again, his presumption is met with glares of outraged anger. But not from Keltill, who turns to lock eyes with him.

  “Someone must, or we are lost…bard.”

  “The price might be higher than you can imagine…”

  “Whatever the price may be, someone must pay it,” Keltill says, offering the crown to the room in a slow, sweeping gesture. “Would anyone care to pay it in my stead?”

  The silence is total. No one moves.

  “I thought not,” says Keltill, and he raises the crown above his head.

  “You would crown yourself king of Gaul by your own hand?” asks the bard.

  “I would prefer the crown be placed on my head by the Arch Druid, according to sacred tradition,” Keltill tells him, and then leers at him like a wolf who has cornered his prey. “But tradition is crumbling, the hour is now, and he is nowhere to be seen—now, is he…bard?”

  “Do not do this, brother,” shouts Gobanit, glancing behind him, then at Diviacx. But Keltill pays him no heed.

  “Epona of the Carnutes has called for deeds. Deeds that shape an age, eh…Sporos? You hoped to learn a tale tonight of one who dares to enter the Land of Legend…?”

  Diviacx glances questioningly at the short, black-haired, dark-skinned Eduen warrior behind him, who nods, as if issuing or confirming a command.

  “Sing, then, of this, bard!” says Keltill.

  And lowers the crown onto his brow.

  “Your brother usurps the will of the gods, Gobanit!” Diviacx shouted at Gobanit. “Seize him!”

  Gobanit hesitated for a moment, then turned to issue the order to the warriors behind him. “Do as the druid commands!”

  The Arverne warriors behind Gobanit rose somewhat uneasily to their feet and drew their swords. Keltill’s guards immediately leapt up, some with their swords drawn, some not, both sides unwilling to strike the first blow against fellow Arverni.

  Keltill, the crown still on his head, leapt up onto the table, drawing his own sword. “Would you obey the command of an Eduen that sets Arverne against Arverne in our own Great Hall?” he shouted.

  “I obey the command of a druid!” cried Gobanit.

  The Eduen warriors on the other side of the table were now on their feet with drawn swords too.

  The Eduen vergobret Dumnorix whirled around to confront his men. “No!” he ordered. “The Arverni must do this themselves!”

  For a short moment no one moved or spoke.

  Then—

  “Take him!” Gobanit shouted. “Do it! Obey the druid!”

  Half a dozen of his men rushed at the table.

  Critognat lumbered drunkenly to his feet, drew his sword. “Don’t just stand there!” he shouted at Keltill’s warriors.

  “Father! Behind you!” Vercingetorix shouted.

  Keltill whirled just as three of Gobanit’s men were climbing up on the table. He sliced the first one’s head nearly off and kicked him backward, sliced the second across the face on the return stroke, then stabbed the third under the sternum.

  Vercingetorix sat there frozen as Arverne warrior fought Arverne warrior behind him. On the other side of the table, warriors of every tribe were on their feet, swords in hand. Marah regarded him with terror as Carnute warriors formed a protective shield around her, her mother, and their vergobret, Graton.

  Dumnorix screamed something at his Eduen warriors, who then took positions along their side of the table, backs to Keltill, a palisade of swords preventing any of the Carnute warriors or those of the other tribes from coming to his rescue.

  Four more of Gobanit’s men advanced on the table where Keltill stood, these not attempting to mount it but, rather, slashing at his feet as best they could from where they stood, as Keltill jabbed down at them with equal futility.

  Thus distracted, however, Keltill did not see two more climb up onto the table on the far side, then scramble to their feet, amidst tankards, beer kegs, platters, slabs of meat, half-gnawed bones, much of which clattered off the table loudly as they stumbled through the detritus toward him.

  Keltill turned at the sounds, in time to parry the first blow with his sword and kick the first man backward into to the second, but Vercingetorix saw that Gobanit had summoned up the courage to draw his sword and come up unseen behind Keltill. As Gobanit stepped up on a bench to stab Keltill on his blind side, Vercingetorix jumped to his feet and grabbed Gobanit’s sword arm with both hands, yanking it backward and downward with all his weight behind it.

  Gobanit screamed as he teetered backward and sideways. Keltill whirled at this, saw Vercingetorix struggling with his brother, and kicked Gobanit square in the jaw, knocking him to the floor and out of Vercingetorix’s grip, and as he did, the Crown of Brenn went flying off his head—

  The golden crown tumbles through the smoky firelight.

  And a boy’s hand plucks it out of the air before it can fall.

  And holds the Crown of Brenn high above his head.

  As a ray of torchlight behind gives momentary birth to a blazing new star. And when he brings the crown down to clutch it to him, the star disappears—not falling, but seeming to rise.

  “Not the father but the son?” whispers Sporos. “Not the passing of a king but…but…”

  Grasping the Crown of Brenn in his left hand, Vercingetorix picked up a fallen sword with his right and, as a dozen or more of Gobanit’s men began climbing up on the table, sought with great difficulty and little success to wield it one-handed in aid of his father.

  “No!” shouted Keltill. “You can’t save me! Save yourself! Go! Go!”

  “But—”

  An Arverne warrior smashed the sword from Vercingetorix’s hand with a two-handed stroke and decided matters for him. He rolled under the table and out the other side.

  V

  I HEARD SOMETHING down there, I tell you!”

  The fearful pounding of his own heart seemed as loud to Vercingetorix as the approaching footfalls as he crouched in a narrow alley.

  Clutching the Crown of Brenn with his left hand, he reached down for something, anything, with his right. His hand closed on a stone. He picked it up, leaned out into the cross-street, threw it with all his strength, and ducked back into the alley.

  The stone smacked against a distant wall and clattered down the street; a dog began barking.

  “I told you!” a voice shouted, and a few moments later, three Arverne warriors ran right by the mouth of the alley where Vercingetorix knelt. As soon as they had passed, he r
ose and ran away, deeper into the maze of dark streets where he had been eluding his pursuers for what seemed like a nocturnal lifetime.

  He could not leave Gergovia, for the gates had been closed and were guarded by Gobanit’s warriors.

  And even if he should somehow succeed in mounting the ramparts unseen and dropping down over the wall unhurt, he could not seek sanctuary in the tribal encampments outside, for he was now the son of a prisoner outlawed among all the tribes of Gaul.

  And so warriors of all the tribes were searching for Vercingetorix. Or, rather, for the talisman that he had captured and which Keltill had entrusted into his care.

  It’s the crown they’re after, not me, Vercingetorix told himself once more, though I can count on no mercy if they have to take it from me by force. But…

  There was one way he could end this nightmare pursuit. He could slink around back to the plaza, where he had some hours ago seen Diviacx gloating over his father confined in a wicker cage. He could hand the druid the Crown of Brenn before witnesses, and, having remedied his only breach of the law, he would live, he would be free.

  But such an ignoble and dishonorable betrayal of Keltill would make his craven flight from the scene of his father’s capture seem like an act of heroism that would be celebrated by the bards for a thousand years.

  Down a street, through another alley, another street, going to nowhere, simply fleeing from the sounds of pursuit, Vercingetorix felt that he had been down all these streets and alleys before. Perhaps he had, for in the dark the shapes of the buildings all looked alike; Gergovia was not so large that all of it could not be run through in an hour or so, and he had been running for much longer than that.

  And when dawn came and with it the light, the advantage would pass from the singular pursued to the many pursuers…

  Lost in these thoughts, Vercingetorix suddenly found that he had blundered down an alley that led into a cul-de-sac.

  Or, rather, he saw, a corner where the street into which the alley led ran along the city wall and dead-ended to his right, up against a tower of the palisade.

  And then he heard the sounds of feet coming toward him down the street from the left. He turned around to flee back up the alley—

  —and he saw that it was blocked by a robed figure visible only as an ominous black silhouette against the dim starlight behind it.

  “Not so well played, Vercingetorix,” a familiar voice said.

  “Sporos!”

  But when the figure stepped forward under the greater panoply of stars illumining the intersection, Vercingetorix saw that the robe he wore was the purest unadorned white. And his hair and beard had become iron-gray.

  “You’re no bard! You’re—”

  “About to make us invisible!”

  So saying, he reached down, grabbed the hem of his white robe, pulled it up over his head to reveal a scrawny and pale form clad only in a breechclout, and made motions that Vercingetorix could not follow in the near-darkness; when he had donned it again a moment later, he was wearing filthy rags, his face was cruelly twisted by some horrid disease or accident, and spittle leaked from the corners of his trembling lips.

  “What magic is this?” Vercingetorix cried.

  “Invisibility?” cackled Sporos in the voice of a feeble and demented ancient. “A minor art. Which you are about to learn.”

  And he grabbed the astonished Vercingetorix by the tunic, ripping and tearing at it. He reached down and picked up a handful of shit-smelling gray-and-brown filth, smeared it all over Vercingetorix’s clothing, then mashed another handful of the putrid stuff on his face.

  He threw Vercingetorix backward and down against the palisade wall, and as he squatted down beside him, laid a hand on the tendons linking his left shoulder to his neck, did something that felt like the searing bite of a hawk’s talons, then grabbed Vercingetorix by the jaw with both hands, causing an even greater pain, all in less than a minute, while the approaching footfalls got louder and louder.

  Spying a loathsome old bone in a heap of offal, he picked it up and shoved it into Vercingetorix’s hand.

  “Gnaw on this as if you like it, idiot child—and, oh yes, drool!”

  Three warriors in Eduen blue cloaks running along the palisade wall stopped, noses wrinkling in disgust, before two foul beggars sitting on the ground and leaning back up against it—a filthy old man who immediately raised a palm for alms and a drooling, deformed, half-wit child gnawing a bone rejected by the local curs and for good reason.

  “You see a boy—?”

  “A thief with a stolen crown?” gabbled the old man.

  “Yes! Thief? Where?”

  The beggar thrust his stinking paw in the warrior’s face. “The little bastard took my last coin too!” he shrieked in addled outrage. Then, more shrewdly, “Perhaps you’d care to replace it?”

  One of the Edui raised his sword angrily, but the one doing the talking fished a small gold piece out of a pouch and held it above the beggar’s palm.

  “Over the wall and into the woods!”

  The warrior dropped the coin into the old man’s hand, and the three of them reversed direction and ran back toward the city gates as the beggar tested the coin by biting it between his front teeth and yanking it down with his fingers.

  It was base metal inside, and it broke.

  “The Arch Druid himself, are you?” scoffed Vercingetorix, as he sat against the city wall beside the beggar who had once called himself the bard Sporos and now called himself the Arch Druid Guttuatr. “Why should I believe such a ridiculous boast?”

  “I made us invisible, did I not?” said Guttuatr, or Sporos, or whatever his true name was, assuming that he had one. “And invisible we remain. Is that not magic?”

  Vercingetorix gave him a scornful look. “Magic such as might be performed by anyone with a pile of rags and a handful of shit,” he said.

  “Magic as might be performed by anyone who knew how,” said the beggar, his deformed face so warping his smile that Vercingetorix could not tell whether there was any mirth in it or not. “Magic lies not in a pile of rags, or a handful of dung, or a mandrake root, or any talisman, but in knowing how to use them. Magic is not a thing. Magic is knowledge.”

  These words seemed far deeper to Vercingetorix than the man who spoke them appeared to be. And if he did not believe that this was the Arch Druid Guttuatr, he found himself wishing to believe it was true, for if it was, he was talking to the one man in all Gaul who could save Keltill.

  “Prove you are the Arch Druid,” he demanded with a challenging sneer. “Show me now true magic.”

  “There is always a price,” said the man who called himself Guttuatr.

  Vercingetorix picked up half of the false gold coin that the beggar had discarded and tossed it to him. “Guttuatr” threw it aside. “You do not choose the price you must pay,” he said. “It chooses you.”

  He laid a bony hand on Vercingetorix’s shoulder once more. “Rise,” he said, applying a complex but only slightly painful pressure. “Or try to.”

  Vercingetorix willed it, but his body did not obey; it was as if he had been turned to stone.

  “Do not move,” said Guttuatr, and suddenly changed the grip of his fingers and stood up.

  Against his will, Vercingetorix found himself bolting to his feet.

  Guttuatr—and Vercingetorix was beginning to believe, beginning to have hope, that it was he—released him, and he regarded the “Arch Druid” with new respect, not untinged with fear.

  “That is magic,” he admitted. “Magic that I would learn.”

  “You have already learned the first lesson,” Guttuatr told him, waving his hand. “The magic is neither in my hand nor in your body.”

  “But in knowing how to use them…” whispered Vercingetorix.

  Guttuatr nodded. “There is in you the making of a druid,” he said. “If you are willing to pay the price.”

  “You are really a druid?” Vercingetorix said. He was beginning to be
convinced, not by magical feats, but by something else he did not quite understand. And perhaps that too was a kind of magic. “You are really the Arch Druid Guttuatr?”

  “What would be my purpose in lying?”

  “What is your purpose in saving me?”

  The beggar’s mask suddenly fell away. The previously almost comically overlarge nose was transformed into the noble prow of an eagle by the intensity of the predator’s eyes that now seemed to bore through his own and deep into his soul.

  “That you may not yet know,” said the Arch Druid Guttuatr in a deep, resonant voice, and Vercingetorix no longer doubted it was he. “The price for that knowledge may prove more than you will be willing to pay.”

  “Is that not for me to decide?” Vercingetorix said angrily through what he recognized as fear, though he could not say of what.

  “Not in ignorance,” Guttuatr told him. “That is knowledge only a druid may contain. And therefore I offer you the chance to learn to become one.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Years. An age.”

  “We don’t even have a day to save my father!” Vercingetorix cried. “They’ll burn him when the sun reaches its zenith.”

  “Your father cannot be saved, Vercingetorix.”

  “If you’re the Arch Druid, you can save him with a word!”

  “Your father should not be saved,” said Guttuatr.

  “How can you say such a thing to me!” Vercingetorix demanded.

  “Your father must not be saved,” said Guttuatr in a cold, even voice devoid of all pity.

  “Why?” shouted Vercingetorix.

  The Arch Druid now hesitated, and when he spoke again, it seemed to Vercingetorix that, despite the certainty in his voice, he was dissembling.

  “Because it is written in the heavens that he will not be saved,” he said.

  “Not by you!” Vercingetorix shouted at him in a fury. “So I’ll have to do it myself!” And he took a half-step away, into running flight, before—

  —the bony hand of the Arch Druid had him by the shoulder again and froze him in place where he stood.

  “Now I will speak and you will listen, Vercingetorix, son of Keltill,” Guttuatr said, and Vercingetorix found that he could no more speak or avert his gaze from those eagle eyes than he could move his limbs.