Druids (28 page)

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thought I would not discuss with anyone except other members of the Order.

Trusted members. I must not forget Diviciacus, vergobret of the Aedui. Ally of Caesar.

We must have no connections with Caesar, or with Rome.

One of the first policies I initiated in the fort drew howls of protest. We would buy no more wine from the traders, I announced. We would search out wild vines and begin to cultivate our own grapes.

“But what shall we do for wine in the meantime?” my people wailed.

I reminded them. “We haven’t always had wine. The Romans

introduced it to Gaul; before that we drank barley beer or mead or even water, if we were thirsty. Actually we have a small supply left, which will last us for a while, if we are frugal with it. When it runs out, the memory of wine will remind us to work together to produce our own. I do not want us to be dependent on the foreigners any longer.”

“What about other goods?” someone wanted to know.

“Begin with the wine,” I said simply, hi time I meant to wean us away from the luxuries that were making us weak, such as braziers to heat our lodges and silk to caress our skin. We must return to being self-sufficient.

By talking with druids from other tribes who made frequent pilgrimages to the grove, I was able to follow events occurring in the far reaches of free Gaul. I was also having Sulis make regular reports to me on her progress with Briga.

“She’s less resistant to the Order than she was,” the healer told me. “She’s beginning to see the good she might do as one of us. But every time I think I ‘m really getting somewhere with her, Crom Daral whines about his loneliness and his pain and she gives in to him. She says she cannot leave him.”

What about my loneliness? I thought silently.

The moon waxed, waned. The wheel of the seasons turnedi

Oozing goodwill, Tasgetius came to the grove to pay a formal call on the new chief druid. Neither Suits nor I had yet spoken, even to each other, about the cause of Menua’s death-She was waiting for me to do something, I knew. Dealing with the murder of a chief druid must be the responsibility of his successor.

As was entertaining the king. He must not know I suspected him; not yet. I mentally gritted my teeth and invited him in to my lodge.

His eyes gleamed when he saw Lakutu. “I’d heard rumors of

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your dancing gui,” Tasgetius said, fluffing his moustache. “Good foryou, Ainvar. Our chief druid is vigorous, eh? Eh?” He nudged me with his elbow. I moved out of reach.

He followed. “Is she any good?”

“She’s my guest,” I replied evasively.

“You know what I mean-Foreign fruit! And a slave! This sets a fine example for the rest of us, one I may follow myself. Unlike Celtic women, slaves don’t dare talk back, do they?” He licked his lips and rolled his eyes at Lakutu, who stared back at him with the expression of a rabbit watching a snake approach.

“I approve of these new customs,” Tasgetius went on, seating himself on my bench. “Your predecessor was a small-headed man, clinging to outgrown traditions. I myself am more progressive … like you, with your slave.”

He beamed at me in friendliness. In a moment, warned my head, he will ask you to share Lakutu with him as a gesture of hospitality.

Hastily I poured a large measure of wine and thrust it into his hand to distract him. He took a deep drink from the cup, then gasped and spewed the wine halfway across the room. “What is this! You dare oner your king watered wine?” Tasgetius leaped to his feet, his large hairy fists doubled, his whole being ready to fight. The cup rolled on the floor.

I kept my voice very calm. “I drink the same wine myself, I assure you. No insult was intended.”

He looked baffled. “Why would the chief druid drink watered wine?”

I bent and retrieved the cup, men poured a fresh measure. “To make it last longer,” I said truthfully, offering him another drink.

He pushed it away, but he relaxed. “You should have told me your wine stores were running low. As soon as I return to Cenabum I’ll send my traders to you with a new stock—as a gift from me. To celebrate our understanding, eh? Eh?”

With an effort, I smiled at him. My head warned me not to refuse his otter openly and put him on his guard against me. Not yet… be careful… .

“There is still a little unwatered wine, the last of Menua’s personal stock,” I told him. “I’ll get it for you. Come with me and help,” I said to Lakutu, leading her away from his reach.

Throughout the rest of the day I plied him with wine, dancing a complicated pattern around him to keep him from Lakutu. I could only hope the wine would last long enough to render him harmless. First it made him sloppy, however, and careless with

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his tongue. He said one phrase that rang in my head like a bell:

“Now that we’ve cleared the deadwood away, Ainvar… all the deadwood …”

While I pondered his meaning, he drank still more wine, and by nightfall was snoring on my floor.

I carefully retrieved the cup he had been drinking from and tucked it into my robe. Then I took Lakutu to Damona’s lodge for safekeeping, and made my way to the lodge of Keryth the seer.

‘ ‘What do you want, Ainvar?” she asked through the half-open door. Behind her I heard the familiar domestic clatter of husband and children.

“I need you to read this for me, Keryth. Come outside in the

quiet.” I took out the cup and handed it to her.

To a druid seer, many hidden things are visible. By touching an object they can frequently observe past events involving the last person to use it. We are none of us solid. A minute portion of ourselves penetrates everything we touch, leaving impressions.

Keryth said something over her shoulder to her family, then disappeared from my sight long enough to get her cloak. When she came out into the night with me, we walked a little distance away from the lodges together, under the stars.

Then she stopped. She began turning the cup—a vessel of polished silver, the best the chief druid’s household had to offer-over and over in her hands. Her eyes glazed, her face was blank in the starlight. The spirit of Keryth withdrew to some distant place.

I waited, concentrating on Tasgetius.

Keryth’s voice, when she spoke, came from very far away. “Deadwood,” it said thickly.

“Yes, that’s it! Goon.”

“Deadwood. Should be cut down. One good throw. When his back is turned. A leader can take a spear in the back in the heat of battle and never know where it came from.”

A triumphant laugh followed, not in Keryth’s voice. She/was somewhere else-The being that spoke, spoke to me from the cup. “One good spear throw!” it crowed. “If that doesn’t kill the old fool, it will at least shorten the days of his kingship!”

I knew that voice. If I closed my eyes I could see the large, freckled hand of Tasgetius with its thicket of reddish hair on the back; see it launching a treacherous spear at the unwitting back of Nantorus.

Obviously me wound had not been fatal. But added to all the

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other wounds Nantorus had collected in years of leading our warriors into battle, it was sufficient to force him to surrender his kingship. Our king must be strong and vigorous; he symbolized

the tribe.

Assassination, my head pointed out, was not a Celtic custom. Ours was the way of open challenge, of testing and election.

Assassination came to us with the Romans. Its results were kings like Potomarus and Tasgetius.

I stayed with Keryth until she returned to herself. “Did you leam what you wanted, Ainvar?” she asked, her voice sounding weak and dizzy.

‘ ‘More than I expected,” I told her grimly.

When I returned to my lodge Tasgetius was still sprawled on the floor, snoring. I stepped over him as I would have stepped over pig droppings.

He left the next day when he realized there was no more good wine to be drunk. His eyes were red, his skin was pasty. As he rode out through the gates in his chariot, I concentrated every fiber of my being on sending him a headache he would never

forget.

Within half a moon the traders’ wagons came rolling up to the fort, laden with casks of wine. Wine from the Province, fragrant and luscious. My throat ached for its caress, but I sent the traders away, and then-casks with them. They would report the incident to Tasgetius, of course, but it could not be helped.

We would do without what the Romans offered,

The wheel turned. I was involved in a never-ending cycle of ritual, celebration, instruction, supervision, as I strove to keep my people in balance with the earth that supported us and the Otherworid underlying all. Nothing must be taken from the soil without something being given back. Water must be kept sweet. No animal could be slaughtered for food or in sacrifice unless its spirit was propitiated first. The patterns of our existence must conform to the patterns of wind and water, of sun and rain, of light and dark. Move and flow, avoid sharp edges, sing… .

Tasgetius sent more traders with more wine. And a second time

I refused them.

Sulis continued her efforts to win Briga as an apprentice healer. Inevitably I encountered Crom Daral or Briga or both around the fort. Wearing Menua’s impassive expression, I let them see me only as the chief druid, and I would not be drawn by Crom’s

taunting.

Sometimes, however, I raised my hood and let my eyes follow

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Briga when she did not know. She looked tired and drawn; the sweet roundness of her was melting away.

As chief druid I knew to the heartbeat how far away we were from Beltaine and the festivals of marrying.

Meanwhile, Lakutu made herself as handy as a little pot. She anticipated my needs so accurately that I need waste no thought on myself, but could give it all to my profession. The only complaint I could make of her was that she refused to leam my language, but 1 did not have time to talk to her anyway. At night, when I fell onto my bed too tired to enjoy her body, at least she did not complain. She never complained.

The third time the traders came, I was unfortunately away from

the fort. Leading a work party of diviners and laborers, I had gone to prepare a vineyard we were establishing across me Autura River. The diviners would walk the earth barefoot, feeling for the hidden pathways of life. There the bare rootstock would be planted and staked into place, then watered with blood and quickened with a ritual I had spent many nights devising.

I had lain on my bed with a cloth dipped in the dregs of Menua’s wine—all that remained now, after Tasgetius’s visit—pressed to my face while from its scent I divined the music that would sum-mon the magic of the grape.

I was singing that song to the newly planted vines when the wagons of the Roman traders creaked through the gates of the fort.

By the time we returned, the traders had done a brisk business. The air rang with the clink of coins. The metallic sound was a cry of warning to me.

“Who let them in here?” I demanded of the sentry at the gate, a younger brother of Ogmios.

“The king sent them. Who was I to refuse them entry?”

I ran past nun and pushed my way into the throng around the wagons, where my people actually ignored me in their eagerness to trade good furs and well-made bronzework for imported ban-gles of inferior craftsmanship. “Who is in charge here?” I demanded.

“I am. These are my wagons,” replied a swarthy man with a professional smile and hard, mean eyes.

“Galba Plancus,” I acknowledged. “I thought I told you the last time you were here not to come back unless I sent for you.”

“So you did, Ainvar; indeed you did.” He wrung his hands together as if rubbing them free of guilt. ” And I would never have disobeyed the chief druid of the Carnutes had not me king him—

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self, our noble Tasgetius, insisted. What is a poor merchant to do when he finds himself caught between two fires?” He smiled appeasingly and shrugged in a style more Gaulish than Roman;

Plancus had been a long time in our land.

Tasgetius had insisted. So Tasgetius had finally grown suspicious; I was surprised it had taken him so long to realize that Menua’s chosen successor must surely have been imbued with his teachings.

“Tasgetius says you must have a season’s supply of the finest wine in your storehouses,” Plancus was saying, “and the pick of the trade goods recently brought north from the Province. In honor of your position. In fact, the king feels it is time we established a permanent trading post here for your convenience.”

The king feels! I hid the anger I felt at the idea of Romans building houses for themselves in the Fort of the Grove. With pretended regret, I said, “But we have very little room here, Plancus, as you can see. Our walls are crowded with lodges and sheds. This is a small settlement and we are at our full complement now, we just don’t have room for you. Nor could I allow you to build outside the palisade,” I added hastily, killing the suggestion I saw springing to life in his eyes. “There are wolves, of course … and constant raiding on the part of other tribes. You simply would not be safe.”

The man’s smile—almost—faded. “Raiding? I had not heard. …”

“This is Hairy Gaul,” I said smoothly. “You know how we are, always at war with each other. We would not want our good friends from the south to be injured, so I think it best you return to Cenabum.” My eyes were sweeping the crowd as I spoke; I saw Tarvos a distance away and brought him to me with the slightest nod of my head.

” Get Ogmios and a body of warriors to escort the traders safely back toward Cenabum,” I ordered. ‘ ‘Go with them at least a day, to be sure they finish their journey and don’t try to turn around,” I added under my breath.

Plancus continued to try to argue, but I was in no mood for listening, I had traveled; I had seen how effectively seductive Roman merchandise was when spread out, glittering, before the dazzled eyes of the Gauls. They only saw the shimmering fabrics and gleaming enamels; they did not see the price that must ultimately be paid for welcoming the Roman way,