The Druid King Read online

  “Keltill ignorantly sought to make magic with the ring of metal that you conceal beneath your tunic. Give it to me, Vercingetorix, son of Keltill.”

  Without looking away from those coldly burning eyes, without his own volition, Vercingetorix handed the Crown of Brenn to the Arch Druid.

  Guttuatr placed the crown on his own head.

  “Am I now a king?” he asked. He placed the crown on the head of Vercingetorix. “You are not a king either.”

  He removed the Crown of Brenn and tucked it under his own robe.

  “Magic is not a thing. A crown does not make a man a king.”

  Guttuatr removed his hand from Vercingetorix’s shoulder, and Vercingetorix found he could move his legs, his arms, could flee if he so chose. And yet he did not.

  “Keltill sought to become king by making a forbidden magic. But he believed the magic was in a crown. He tried to make magic without knowledge, and so that magic was false, and failed. But even though it failed, he must pay the price.”

  “He…he must die…?” Vercingetorix found the strength to whisper.

  Guttuatr’s gaze seemed to soften slightly.

  “Your father knew that would be the price of failure, Vercingetorix,” he said. “But now he will make the greatest magic that a man can make.”

  “The greatest magic that a man can make…?”

  “The magic of his death. Which belongs to him alone. The greater the magic, the greater the price that must be paid.”

  As the sun crawled up a sky grayed with a glowering overcast, the plaza of Gergovia began to fill with equally sullen people. Guttuatr had insisted that, disguised as a beggar or not, it would not be safe for Vercingetorix to pass among them until it was well crowded and all eyes were drawn to the wicker cage at the center of the plaza; by the time they arrived at the edge of the plaza, it was densely thronged.

  From here all Vercingetorix could see was the top of a wicker cage, and he despaired of making his way close enough to get even a parting glimpse.

  “This is your fault, Arch Druid!” he said scathingly, rounding on Guttuatr in a fury. “What magic will you use to get us through this?”

  Guttuatr placed his hand on his shoulder, but lightly this time. “Even a crowd awaiting a burning will allow a poor sick blind man to pass. Lead on, boy!”

  He rolled his eyes back into his skull so that only the whites showed, an unwholesome sight that Vercingetorix himself did not care to view, and that did work its magic: the crowd gave uneasy way to a muttering, spittle-spraying, and possibly diseased blind beggar staggering through it, guided by a ragged urchin smeared with malodorous offal.

  It was mostly Arverni who had gathered to witness the death of Keltill, his former guests from the tribal encampments outside the city walls wisely choosing to stay well away from them during this somberly unwelcome rite. Vercingetorix overheard little conversation of consequence as he wormed his way across the plaza, for nobles and lesser folk alike seemed to be taking care to guard their thoughts and their loyalties.

  Vercingetorix understood why the Arverni thought it best to keep their opinions to themselves, for allegiance to Gobanit and the gods must be divided from allegiance to Keltill and the heart, even within the same soul, and who could tell which side his neighbor might be on. Keltill was greatly loved, but Gobanit was at best unenthusiastically respected. And though Keltill had committed a great offense against the gods and had been condemned by a druid for it, that druid was an Eduen.

  And when Vercingetorix finally led his blind beggar to the front ranks, he saw that the Arverni had good reason to suspect Diviacx of something less than druidic detachment from the affairs of his tribe.

  A rectangular pyre of oak logs like a tiny wooden hut had been erected in the center of the plaza, its interior filled with kindling, and atop this had been placed the wicker cage confining Keltill. Arverne warriors surrounded the pyre, and Gobanit stood to the left, as was his proper station as the new vergobret of the Arverni. So too was it correct for the presiding druid, Diviacx, Eduen or not, to stand beside him. But what was Dumnorix, the Eduen vergobret, doing standing next to his brother? And why were they screened from the Arverne crowd by a score of Eduen warriors?

  But all this was banished from Vercingetorix’s mind by his first full sight of his father since the battle in the Great Hall.

  Keltill’s tunic was freshly stained with not-yet-dried blood seeping redly from hidden wounds in his chest and side. There was a long cut on his left forearm. One eye was badly blackened.

  Vercingetorix’s heart was breaking, and yet it was also bursting with pride, for Keltill stood there within his wicker cage upon his pyre neither cringing in fear like a man about to die a horrible death nor sighing in regret like a penitent who had offended the gods; his arms were folded across his chest, his feet spread wide, his shoulders erect, and his gaze was fierce and fearless and as unwavering as that of a lion.

  Like a king.

  Diviacx took one short step forward. The crowd murmured, a sound like the lowing of a cranky bull. Diviacx’s Eduen bodyguards tensed.

  Diviacx looked uncertain and nervous as he began to speak. “Keltill of the Arverni has offended gods and men—”

  “Speak for the gods, druid,” a voice from back in the crowd shouted, “but not for the Arverni, Eduen!”

  Grunts, roars, shouts of sullen approval.

  “Keltill of the Arverni has offended the gods by seeking to crown himself king of Gaul with his own hand!” Diviacx shouted angrily. “And for this sacrilege he must die!”

  “Keltill!” shouted the voice of Critognat from within the cover of the crowd. Others picked it up. “Keltill! Keltill! Keltill!”

  The Eduen bodyguards brandished their swords. The Arverne warriors surrounding the pyre brought their hands to the hilts of theirs, and that reluctantly, but went no further.

  “This is not a dispute between Edui and Arverni,” Diviacx insisted, “this is not a dispute among men! It is not Edui or Arverni who demand the death of Keltill! It is the gods whose will he has defied, and the gods who demand his death, and the gods for whom I speak!”

  A groan replaced the chanting, like that of cattle knowing there is after all no escape from the slaughter.

  A short, dark-haired Eduen warrior whispered something in Gobanit’s ear. Gobanit frowned, shook his head no. The Eduen whispered to him again, and he stepped forward. The same man shot a commanding glance at Diviacx, and the druid stepped back.

  “It is my own…my own brother who must die to…to appease the wrath of the gods…” Gobanit declaimed hesitantly. “And Keltill has also violated the sacred traditions of the Arverni…and so…and so…”

  Gobanit succeeded in reducing the crowd to silence, but it was a merciless silence, a void which the assembled Arverni opened up and an invitation for him to fall into it. The Eduen warrior who had been directing Gobanit and Diviacx nodded a sign at one of the Arverne warriors. The man lit a torch and handed it to Gobanit.

  It seemed to Vercingetorix that every man beholding his father in the wicker cage, gazing upon the torch in Gobanit’s hand, felt what he felt. Surely he had but to leap forward and demand it of them and they would rush to Keltill’s rescue.

  A claw of pain bit hard into his left shoulder, and a voice whispered in his ear. “No,” it said. “The magic of his death is his alone. You can do nothing save what you must—endure!”

  And Vercingetorix found that he could neither take a single step forward nor look away.

  Gobanit regarded the torch in his hand fearfully.

  “And so…and so, my brother, whom I love…”

  Diviacx stepped forward, his brow creased in exasperation.

  “And so in fire must die any man who would crown himself king of the free tribes of Gaul!” he shouted.

  Gobanit offered him the torch. Diviacx shrank back.

  Keltill had regarded this disastrous attempt at solemn ceremony in lofty disdain, standing in his wicker cage upo
n his funeral pyre with his gaze upon his people and eternity, as if he had already left the world of men and composed himself into an image fit for the Land of Legend.

  But now he laughed.

  And spoke into the stunned silence.

  “Edui! Arverni! Slaves of Rome! Even on this you lack the courage to agree? You’re not fit to call yourselves Gauls! You’re more afraid to kill me than I am to die at your hands! So hand me the torch, you cowards, and I’ll light the fire myself!”

  The crowd laughed, then cheered, and at this Gobanit finally tossed the torch onto the pyre, a convulsive gesture owing more to chagrin than to newfound resolve.

  Vercingetorix watches in stone-still silence as the kindling within the pyre catches with a crackling burst of orange flame, and then the inner logs, not knowing whether the magic in the hand of the Arch Druid restrains him or not, for now nothing in this world or any other could make him move or look away.

  For as Keltill stands erect and unmoving in his wicker cage, as the bonfire begins to roar and blaze beneath him, as the flames begin to lick at his feet, the pain in Vercingetorix’s heart is burned away by the fiercer flame of the passion to gaze upon the fire consuming the best man he would ever know and love. He watches with the same unwavering courage, so that perhaps he might prove worthy of having some small portion of his father’s spirit pass into him, and one day people might say, “Like father, like son,” and speak the truth.

  And perhaps the gods look upon him with their cruel favor, for as the flames rise higher and higher, and his face contorts with pain, Keltill’s eyes scan the crowd, and while the smoke rises to obscure his blistering body and his tunic catches fire, they find what they seek.

  Vercingetorix finds himself looking directly into the eyes of Keltill and doubts not that Keltill sees him. As his hair ignites in a crown of flame, his visage becomes a mask not of pain but of the iron resolve to triumph over that pain, and Keltill’s eyes burn far brighter than the fire consuming him as they gaze from the next world into his own.

  And if there is any doubt in Vercingetorix’s heart, it is gone when Keltill speaks from within the flames, loud and clear, for all the world to hear, reciting his own funeral ode from his funeral pyre.

  “In fire do I become the tale the bards will sing.

  In fire I enter the Land of Legend as a king!”

  The flames mount higher, and there is nothing in Vercingetorix’s vision but the fire and the eyes peering out of it into the depth of his soul.

  “As the fire sets my spirit free

  So in fire will you remember me.”

  And something passes from those eyes into those of Vercingetorix, the eyes of a filth-smeared boy dressed in rags with love and pride filling his burning heart.

  It lasts but a heartbeat.

  And when it is gone nothing remains but the flames.

  And Vercingetorix knows that the boy he was has died with the father he had loved.

  He swears a silent oath by the flames that consumed them both that the father would live on in the man the son must become.

  VI

  WHAT ARE THE THREE necessary virtues of the man of knowledge?”

  The voices droned on.

  Vercingetorix heard, but did not listen.

  He squatted on the well-beaten earth within the semicircle of students around Gwyndo, seated before the evening bonfire. Behind the fat and balding druid was a small square temple of roughly dressed granite. Beyond that were the wattle-and-thatch huts where he had lived with his fellow students for twenty cycles of the moon, and beyond the huts the darkening oak aisles of the forest. And outside this hateful and ignoble refuge was the world from which he was banished, the world where he longed to be.

  But Vercingetorix’s attention was captured by the flames alone.

  “The courage to follow the will of the gods in this world…”

  The words were willow-bark bitter in his ears. What craven gods willed that he endure these lessons, which taught him nothing of the warrior’s way? What cruel gods willed that he endure the contempt of the sons of vergobrets and nobles of many tribes as an outcast who had gained refuge here only by the will of the Arch Druid himself? Where was the courage in that?

  “The will to make his own destiny in the Land of Legend…”

  Oh, I have the will! he thought bitterly. I have the will to finish the great task Keltill died to begin. I have the will to be my father’s son. But where is my courage to act?

  “Vercingetorix? Vercingetorix?”

  Gwyndo was shouting at him. Some of the students were laughing.

  “If you have returned to this world from the other, Vercingetorix,” Gwyndo said, “perhaps the wisdom you have gained there will now enable you to answer the question.”

  More laughter.

  “The third of the necessary virtues of a man of knowledge?” Vercingetorix muttered. “The wisdom to tell the one from the other,” he grunted sourly, knowing the proper response, but finding it worse than meaningless to his own heart.

  “To tell which from what?” sneered Viridwx. “This world from the one you seek to enter in the fire?”

  Viridwx, three years older than Vercingetorix, was the son of an Eduen noble who had once been a famed warrior, served a term as vergobret, and was now waxing richer and richer through commerce with the Romans. He did not have to say “like your father” for Vercingetorix to hear it in his voice.

  “We must all enter the other world sooner or later, Viridwx,” he said, his hands balling into fists. “Some of us with honor, some without.”

  “You insult my honor, Vercingetorix?”

  “I only meant that some of us will enter later and others sooner than they might wish or expect,” Vercingetorix said in a false tone of sweetness.

  “Is that a threat, Arverne?”

  “Do you feel threatened, Eduen?” Vercingetorix asked with the same mocking sweetness, glaring at him menacingly. Viridwx might be heavier and taller by half a hand, but Vercingetorix had given as good as he had gotten in their previous bouts, and was eager to take him on again.

  “Enough!” shouted Gwyndo.

  “Perhaps the son of Keltill has just wandered too deep into his dreams to notice that we are now learning the virtues of the man of knowledge, not the arts of combat,” said another Eduen, to a round of laughter at Vercingetorix’s expense.

  This was Litivak, Vercingetorix’s size and build, but dark-haired and, like Viridwx, both his elder and the son of an Eduen noble. But where Viridwx was dim, Litivak was bright, and where Viridwx was forthrightly hostile to him and all things Arverne, Litivak’s barbs were far more finely pointed, often as not delivered with a mirthful grin.

  “Must the man of knowledge listen quietly and grind his teeth to stubs while the honor of his father is insulted?”

  “I heard no insult to your father’s honor,” Litivak replied mildly.

  “Perhaps I was mistaken,” said Vercingetorix, turning his gaze back on Viridwx. “Viridwx need merely say that Keltill was a man of honor and a hero and I shall be happy to apologize for my error and hail him as my brother.”

  Litivak groaned.

  And then there was a long moment of tense silence as Viridwx sat there befuddled by the trap Vercingetorix had set for him.

  Guttuatr might command that Vercingetorix not venture into the world outside the forest, but he learned of events there from those who came and went.

  Among the Arverni, there were those who found it expedient to support Gobanit, and according to these men, Keltill had been justly condemned by the druids for defying the will of the gods. But to those who were eager to do battle with not only the Teutons and the legions of Caesar but the Edui as well, Keltill was a hero.

  Most of the other tribes accepted that Keltill had offended the gods, but, thanks to the depredations of Caesar, more and more had come to agree that uniting long enough to drive off the Romans was becoming a necessity. Only the Edui, waxing richer, stronger, and by thei
r lights “more civilized,” thanks to their cooperation with the Romans, were united in their approval of things as they were now.

  And since the druids mingled students from all of the tribes in their schools, the world inside this forest mirrored the world outside. Except here the memory of Keltill had a living heir and champion. It might be a petty game, but Vercingetorix had no other worth playing. Viridwx might not be very clever, but he was clever enough to realize that whatever he did now would be wrong.

  If he acknowledged Keltill as a man of honor and a hero, he might be hailed by those who believed it, but he would be scorned by his fellow Edui as a traitor speaking out of cowardice. But if he did not, the Arverne students would be given a fine excuse to come to blows with the Edui, and Vercingetorix’s esteem would be raised in their eyes no matter who won the fight.

  But Gwyndo saw Vercingetorix’s intent and spoke before Viridwx was forced to. “Observe what your words are about to kindle in the name of your father’s honor, Vercingetorix, and then tell us you have nothing more to learn of the wisdom of the man of knowledge.”

  “Must the man of knowledge be without honor?” Vercingetorix countered angrily.

  “Would the father whose honor you seek to defend be proud of a son who sowed strife among the tribes of Gaul to do so?”

  To that Vercingetorix had no reply, for he could not deny that Gwyndo had spoken truth, and a truth which shamed him.

  “Well spoken, Gwyndo,” he was forced to mutter sullenly.

  “Spoken like a man of knowledge who is also a man of honor.”

  “And yet…”

  And yet you men of knowledge killed my father! Vercingetorix thought, but he found himself hesitant to so challenge a druid.

  “And yet?” Gwyndo asked him encouragingly.

  But Vercingetorix still lacked the courage to speak the angry words in his heart. “You invoke the honor of Keltill to shame me, and justly so, and yet…and yet…”

  “And yet he was condemned to burn by the law of the druids,” Gwyndo said for him.