The Druid King (28 page)

Vercingetorix lost all track of time, which now seemed to crawl as slowly as a snail across a stone as attackers came at him, and now seemed as rapid as his sword strokes slicing their limbs, piercing their stomachs, spearing their hearts. He was aware of the sharp slicing pains of his own wounds, not as agony but as goads. His heart pounded, his breath came freely and deeply, and there was a terrible pleasure in it all.

The more Romans appeared, the deeper and wider the barricade of their bodies became, and the easier the gateway passage to defend, for now Vercingetorix found himself fighting side by side with Rhia from behind it, close enough to smell the intoxicating aroma of her battle sweat, close enough to touch.

The shouts of pain and surprise and agony, of her battle cries and his own, the pounding of his blood, melded into a roaring torrent of sound upon which his spirit rose up. The sword in his hands seemed alive with a will of its own, wielding him as its instrument, as he gave himself over to an awful but exhilarating abandon.

“They’re here! They’re here!”

First Vercingetorix came to the awareness that Rhia was shouting at him. Then he realized that the roaring in his ears had become the exultant shouts and battle cries of a multitude advancing rapidly toward him.

Turning, he saw twoscore and more Arverne warriors waving their swords and screaming as they rushed up the last yards of the roadway leading to the open gates, and he thought he glimpsed Oranix among them. Behind them were hundreds of peasants, huntsmen, smiths, half-grown boys, even women, brandishing spears, scythes, hoes, torches, knives, tree limbs.

He had one moment to regard Rhia—naked save for a veil of blood; scratched, stinking, panting, and exhausted, but with her lips creased in a triumphant smile and her eyes blazing with lustful glory as they met his own.

Then the Arverne warriors surged between them, kicking and shoving aside the barricade of Roman corpses. And Vercingetorix found himself hard-pressed to make his way through his own forces to the front of the battle, to lead the Arverni pouring into Gergovia to take back what was rightfully their own.

For Vercingetorix, most of the night passed like a time passed in a Land of Legend aflame with blood-pounding visions of glorious and vengeful death and destruction.

The commotion at the gate quickly aroused the townspeople from their slumber, and they poured into the streets in shock and confusion that turned to vindictive elation when they realized what was happening. Those who were not armed returned to their dwellings only to snatch up what fell to hand—a sword, a knife, an ax, a mallet—before returning to the streets to join in the sanguinary search for Roman legionnaires.

Most of the Romans were awoken into a chaos in which they found themselves outnumbered by angry mobs consisting of the entire population of the city. It quickly turned into a bloody blur of a rout without order or strategy or the need therefor.

Once most of the Romans had been cut to pieces or beaten to death, and the remaining few score taken prisoner, the ire of the mobs turned on those who were deemed collaborators. Wineshops and other merchant establishments purveying Roman goods were looted and sacked, buildings that had been Romanized with wooden imitations of columns or merely an excess of white paint were set ablaze, and anyone caught in the street wearing an item of Roman attire was fortunate to escape with a beating.

Vercingetorix drifted through this night of retribution not as the leader who had called it into being, but as one more Arverne giving free vent to unfettered rage, joining in the slicing and mauling and stomping of Romans, smashing open amphorae with his feet, standing in the midst of a crowd setting a merchant’s goods ablaze, though careful not to harm a fellow Gaul, however Romanized.

But then he found himself in the plaza, crowded with joyfully irate Arverni. Scores of them had climbed into the Roman fountain and were ineffectually attacking the crudely carved stone bears with mattocks and hoes and wooden mallets. To judge from the hooting and cheering and torch-waving and debris-tossing, not all the Roman wine had been poured onto the stones of the plaza rather than down gullets.

Across the plaza, another such drunken and ecstatically vengeful mob had gathered in front of the Great Hall, working up their courage to storm it and no doubt attempt to destroy the Roman entrance portico that had been added to it. But standing at the foot of the steps and bravely trying to defend the Great Hall from the mob’s outrage were Baravax and a score of Arverne warriors armed with axes and javelins.

The sight of Baravax about to be torn down by the mob whose actions
he
had incited abruptly awoke the man of knowledge within the unthinking man of action.

The press of shouting people paid no heed to his presence among them as he shouldered through them, and for a moment Baravax menaced him with his javelin when Vercingetorix confronted him at the foot of the stairs.

Then he recognized him.

“Vercingetorix!”

“Death to the Romans!” a drunken voice shouted.

“Death to collaborators!”

Rocks and bits of rubble began to fly from the anonymous safety of the midst of the mob.

“You saved
my
head—now it’s time for me to save
yours,
” Vercingetorix told Baravax, and he mounted the stairs. From this vantage he could be clearly seen, and slowly recognized by a score of people, and then, as the word spread, by everyone. The shouts and cries of the crowd guttered away into silence, and then a foot-stomping chanting began.

“Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix!”

King of Gaul! King of Gaul!

In his mind’s ear, unheard voices added the refrain. Vercingetorix basked in this song to himself longer than was needful, for there was an intoxication to it headier than even the blood-hot thrill of battle.

And perhaps more dangerous.

“The Romans have been defeated and Gergovia is free!” he shouted to quell the chanting and his own sweet delirium. “Today Gergovia is free of Rome, tomorrow the lands of the Arverni, and after that all Gaul!”

“Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix!Vercingetorix!”

Was it a phantom of his desire, or
were
there now scattered voices out there indeed adding “King of Gaul”?

“The battle is won and the enemy is defeated! Go to your homes now, and let no Arverne’s hand be set against any other!”

This was greeted not with adulatory chanting but with hoots and jeers.
Taken aback,Vercingetorix realized that they would not be calmed until they were fed with meat they wanted to eat, until they were given something they wanted to hear.

“The enemy is Rome! The enemy is Caesar! From this day forward, let no Arverne’s hand be set against any other, and let no Gaul set his hand against any other Gaul! Harm not the Great Hall of the Arverni, for from this day forward it belongs to
you,
to all of you, from the loftiest noble to the bastard child of the tiller of the smallest plot of land! Sleep well on the memory of glorious victory won, for tomorrow you will taste the sweet fruit thereof. Tomorrow we will hold council here to choose a new vergobret—not elected by a lackey Senate, as in the days of Gobanit, or even by an assembly of nobles, as in my father’s day, but by
all of us
! A vergobret chosen by
you,
the brave Arverne people who have thrown off the yoke of Rome with your own hands!”

For the first time,Vercingetorix beheld a great multitude obeying his words as if he were a king as the crowd did indeed disperse toward sleep.

Shortly before noon the next day, Vercingetorix entered the Great Hall to the sound of his name’s being shouted, being chanted, being sung, by a throng such as had never been seen there before. Warriors. Peasants. Townspeople. Artisans. Even beggars and whores. The Great Hall of the Arverni was packed with Arverni, blood-spattered, wild-eyed, drunk with beer, and triumph, and glory.

The great old wooden table from Keltill’s day had been brought back into the center of the hall, and there stood the great old warrior Critognat presiding over a dozen warriors of similar vintage to keep it clear.

Critognat waved him to the table. This was hardly necessary, since it was the only possible place for him to stand and be seen by all; even so, Rhia, Baravax, and half a dozen guards had to clear a way for him through his own cheering and riotous people. The chanting broke up into a wordless cheer as he was seen to make his way toward it and then mounted it.

“The Arverni are without a vergobret, and I would—”

The chanting of “Vercingetorix! Vercingetorix!” resumed, accompanied now by the rhythmic beating of swords and daggers on shields, of feet on the stones of the floor. The sound was thunderous. And heady.

But Vercingetorix’s blood had cooled during the night, and now he sought to do more than bask in this adulation—he meant to shape and to use it.

“Hear me before you elect me!” he cried, after he had raised both arms above his head for a silence in which to speak. “As the Arverni are without a vergobret, so is Gaul without a leader, and I tell you truly, I would be both!”

A wordless roar, and then they were chanting again, but this time words of a kind surely not heard since the time of Brenn.

“Vercingetorix! King of Gaul! Vercingetorix! King of Gaul!”

“No!”
Vercingetorix shouted. When the chanting and banging of shields and stomping of feet still went on, he shouted even louder:
“NO!”

“No, Arverni,” he went on when the crowded Great Hall had been reduced to silent mystification. “You have the power and the right to acclaim me vergobret, but no single tribe may proclaim me king of Gaul. Only
Gaul
may do that! Nor would I wear the Crown of Brenn until I have earned it in battle! I would lead an army of Gaul to victory, but not as king, for I will not rule in Gaul until there is truly a Gaul in which to rule! And I have seen it in a vision that this
shall be
! A king of Gaul shall parade in triumph through Rome itself!”

“Vercingetorix! King of Gaul!
Vercingetorix! King of Gaul!
”

Now Vercingetorix let it go on, until at length it died away of its own accord.

“Our vergobret had long been chosen by the council of nobles, and then by Gobanit’s Senate of traitors. But now the Great Wheel is turning, and we must all become great to turn with it. And so I would be proclaimed vergobret by
all
of the people!”

“Ver-cin-getorix! Ver-go-bret!” someone shouted out, and then someone else, and then it became a kind of chanting song, the words sung by voices, the rhythm beaten out by stomping feet, clapping hands, swords and daggers upon shields.

“So be it!” Vercingetorix finally declared when he was granted silence in which to speak. “And these are my first words as your vergobret: I, Vercingetorix, vergobret of the Arverni, outlawed by Caesar, now outlaw
Gaius Julius Caesar
! I declare his life forfeit should he dare once more to set foot in Gaul! So too do I outlaw all Romans in Gaul! I declare all their goods the property of the first loyal Gaul to seize them! Take what you want and destroy the rest! Let us sweep all things Roman from our hearts and our land! Let us begin this happy task here and now!”

At this a tremendous cheer went up, as Vercingetorix had known it would, and what was supposed to happen next was what he had given them leave to do, pour out of the Great Hall and begin the cleansing of all things Roman from the lands of the Arverni, and, he hoped, inspire the other tribes of Gaul to follow their lead.

But this plan went awry.

“Death to Caesar!” someone shouted. “Death to Rome!”

This was met with full-throated roaring enthusiasm, and instead of emptying out, the Great Hall was filled with a chanting of
“Death to
Caesar! Death to Rome!”
that swiftly proceeded to ferocious cries of fury.

And to Vercingetorix’s horror, he found himself beholding a gathering whose mood had changed with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm from victorious elation into bloodthirsty rage. Fists shook in the air, daggers and swords were brandished. He found it a fearsome and ugly sight—the face of the madness of the night before exposed in the full light of day, made no more bearable by the knowledge that he had taken part in it himself.

His people, like famished wolves, were howling for something to tear apart, something to kill; he could see it, he could hear it, he could smell it on their breath and sweat, and he could not deny that he felt it himself.

“Death to Caesar! Death to Rome!”

And then the prey was tossed into their midst.

“Death to these Romans!”
shouted a grizzled old warrior at the back of the hall near the entrance.

Their hands tied behind them, their armor and helmets gone, stripped to their breechclouts, their bodies scratched bloody, their faces bruised purple by beatings, a score or so of Roman legionnaires, prodded by spears, swords, broom handles, pitchforks, staggered inside.

This stilled the chanting and caused a surge of people to rush at the helpless Romans, kicking, pummeling with fists, some armed with swords and daggers.

“Stop!”
Vercingetorix shouted as loud as he knew how.
“Stop before
you dishonor yourselves before the gods and all Gaul!”

This stayed the impending murderous vengeance for a moment Vercingetorix knew would not last.

“Are we to become the barbarians the Romans say we are?” he added quickly. “Is it our way to rip our enemies to pieces like a pack of mad dogs, or are we Gauls?”

“Is it our way to let
these mad dogs
live?” demanded the old warrior who had first called for their blood.

“All Romans in Gaul are outlawed!”

“By our vergobret himself!”

“Kill them!”

“Tear them apart!”

“No!” declared Vercingetorix.

“Would you spare them, Vercingetorix, vergobret of the Arverni?”

“No,” said Vercingetorix, “I would not spare them.”

And he gazed out at his people, red-faced, blood-lusted, their fury stayed by his words for what could only be moments. The silver-tongued Vercingetorix knew not what to say next. And so he allowed whatever might come forth to speak through him.