Druids (10 page)

“No one is beyond Roman reach any longer,” Mallus said sadly.

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The king and the chief druid closed on him from either side. *‘I think you’d better tell us,” Menua said with deadly calm.

Words spilled out of the captive then. I could tell how serious the situation was by the expressions on the faces of Menua and Nantorus as they listened.

The land of the Aedui lay southeast of us, adjoining that of their age-old rivals, the Arvemi. Aeduan strength and influence had begun to wane in recent generations. They were increasingly reliant upon Roman trade for the materials and luxuries they had begun to think necessary for a way of life based on Roman standards of prosperity.

Not all of the tribe agreed, however, and internal strife had divided the Aedui. Their Arvemian neighbors had decided they might be ripe for attack and plunder, and began assembling war parties in the borderlands. To counter this threat, those Aeduan princes most kindly disposed to the Romans had begun trading grain for Roman warriors in order to build up then-own personal armies.

Menua’s bushy eyebrows caterpillared across his forehead. “Do you hear, Nantorus? The Aeduans have invited Roman warriors into Gaul! Every Gaulish setdement already has its Roman traders; now there are armed men here as well. If what Mallus says is true, no one is beyond Roman reach.”

“I speak the truth,” Mallus said indignantly. “I am an honorable man, that’s why I was in charge of the escort for the Roman trade delegation.”

Ignoring me temptation of that remark about honor, Menua said silkily, “And it was an ambassador of that delegation whom you killed? Some foreign woman-stealer who couldn’t keep his hands off Celtic women?”

“Exactly!” agreed Mallus, such easy prey to the druid’s manipulations that for a moment Menua looked bored and I almost laughed. The Aeduan said, “Imagine how I felt, being elbowed aside by a short man who was losing his hair. So many men from Latium go bald. They don’t have manly manes like ours, and to make themselves more ugly they scrape their jaws as bare as their heads. I don’t know what a woman would see in any of them.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Menua dreamily, tenting his fingers. “Go on. Tell us about it.”

“There was a woman of our tribe who liked me, but this Ro-man saw her and the prince I followed sent her to nun. I went after her. There was a struggle and I stabbed him. Then I put the woman behind me on my horse and fled.

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“But she was ungrateful, the perverse creature. She slid off the horse and ran back to sound the alarm. I had to ride for my life. I knew the druids would condemn me for killing an ambassador. I must have ridden for many days until at last I came across a party of Senones who were willing to iet me join them and go north with them.

“But I left that foreigner weltering in his own blood,” Mallus added with satisfaction.

When the interrogation was over, Nantorus appeared relieved. “It isn’t as bad as it sounded,” he told Menua. “Some of the Aeduan princes are enlarging their warrior bands with a few Ro-mans, but what harm? Mercenaries are common enough. It isn’t as if we were being invaded by Latium.”

“Isn’t it? Have you forgotten the history the druids tried to teach you? Wherever Rome sends warriors, she leaves them. They take women, sire children, build homes, and eventually Rome claims the lands they occupy.”

“If the Aedui are so foolish as to let Rome gain control of their land that way, they deserve to lose it.”

“Itisn’tjustamatterofAeduanland,” Menua insisted. “We’re talking about a part of Gaul being taken over by the foreigners. They already have the southern part, the Province; now they move into free Gaul, and we live in free Gaul. The rat that nibbles the Aeduans will nibble us next, Nantorus!”

“You overestimate the Roman threat.”

“I don’t think so. My own travels have never taken me into Roman territory, but when the druids from throughout Gaul meet each Samhain for the great convocation held in our grove, I talk to many who have. And what I have learned of Roman ways worries me.

“Inevitably, given the nature of human ambition, a little grain exchanged for a few mercenaries will become a lot of grain exchanged for entire armies—in other words, a major military alliance carrying Roman influence into the heart of Gaul.

“And I tell you this, Nantorus: Roman influence frightens me more than Roman warriors.”

‘ ‘Influence!” Nantorus scoffed, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand. Our king was a man of the sword; amorphous concepts had little reality for him.

The amorphous was Menua’s realm, however. He continued to press the point until at last Nantorus agreed to call a meeting of the tribal council at Cenabum and let Menua express himself toil.

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By virtue of clinging to Menua’s cloak I could go, too. I was wildly excited. This would be my first real journey.

Nantorus rode off in his chariot, leaving a swiri of dust to maik his passage, but it took Menua and me two long days of hard walking to reach the stronghold of the tribe. Menua disdained the use of horses and carts. “Druids need to keep their feet on the earth,” he reminded me.

The land we traversed was level, sometimes gently rolling, thickly forested and fertile. On cleared meadowland we saw prosperous farmsteads, each capable of supporting a small clan. Crops thrived in the sandy soil; the clear air carried the smell of cooking fires, and the sound of people singing,

In those days, we were a people who sang.

Since then I have seen larger forts and mightier cities, but my first sight of Cenabum is with me still. Compared to the Fort of the Grove, the stronghold of the Camutes was immense, a sprawling, irregular oval of timber-reinforced earthen banks studded with watchtowers, the sky above permanently stained with smoke. Cenabum stood on the bank of the river Liger from which it drew its water supply, and a number of small fishing boats thronged the wide river, defying its occasional treacherous currents and pockets of quicksand.

“Five thousand people can be comfortably sheltered within these walls at a time,” Menua said with pride, pointing toward the palisade. “I myself was bom there.”

Everything about Cenabum impressed me. The main gate was a double one, with two watchtowers connected by a bridge. As I passed beneath the bridge, the sentries looked down and one waved. Entering the fortified town, for Cenabum was truly a town, we were immersed in the music of ironworkers at their forges and the lard-fat cackle of geese a day away from the roasting spit. A team of carpenters brushed past us carrying some heavy timbers, then halted in confusion, stammering apologies, when they recognized Menua’s hooded robe. Everywhere I looked I saw people at work or in conversation. My nose wrinkled at the mingled smells of excrement and fish and midden heaps.

Just within the gates I noticed a group of square, flat-topped buildings unlike Celtic lodges. As I watched, several dark-haired men in pleated tunics emerged from one of the buildings, chattering away among themselves and waving their hands in the air.

Menua followed my gaze. “Roman traders,” he said souriy. “They live here more or less permanently and everyone assumes they are harmless and makes them welcome for the sake of their

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trade. But 1 wonder if they are harmless. Would they throw open the gates of Cenabum, do you suppose, for invaders?”

The druids who lived at Cenabum escorted us to a guest house, a well-appointed lodge set aside for the purpose. Menua cast a contemptuous glance at the carved benches and cushioned

couches. “Roman softness,” he said under his breath to me. “We’ll sleep outside tonight, in our cloaks.”

We did. That night it rained.

At highsun the next day the council met in the assembly house. Uke all tribal councils, ours consisted of the princes and elders of the tribe. The princes arrived, each with his own band of armed followers, and left their shields and weapons stacked outside the door. The elders came wrapped in cloaks and trailing wisps of time behind them like long gray hair.

Holding aloft the ram’s horn that designated him as speaker, the chief druid addressed the council while I stood at the back of the lodge, trying simultaneously to listen to him and read the reactions of his audience.

“In the flight of the birds and the spattering of bullocks’ blood I have seen patterns that disturb me,” Menua announced. “I have seen armies marching. Now I have learned that the Aedui arc making Roman warriors welcome in Gaul.”

“Celtic people are famous for their hospitality,” commented me prince Tasgetius, a rawboned, loose-jointed man with thickets of sandy-red hair on the backs of his huge hands. “And some of my best friends are Roman,” he added, glancing down at the imported arm rings he was wearing.

“Don’t judge a people by its traders,” Menua warned. “It is in their self-interest to appear affable, but the Romans are nothing like us and you must never think they are.

” Many generations ago they abandoned me reverence of nature and began substituting manmade images in human form to serve as their gods, an idea they stole from the Greeks. The Romans are great thieves,” he added contemptuously.

“But while the Hellenes retained a certain sensitivity to the natural world, the Romans have none. I have heard that the only nature gods they acknowledge are sun and moon and sea, and even those have human forms and identities.

“Making gods in their own image has given the Romans an exaggerated idea of Roman importance. They assume mat because they make gods they have the authority of gods. They have ^ acquired a lust to control, which they call a desire for order and i seek to impose on everyone else.

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“The Roman concept of order does not suit Celtic people. Our free-flowing spirits are not comfortable in square boxes and communities where even access to water is regulated. We arc accustomed to free water and tribal ownership of the earth upon which we live, we elect our own leaders and celebrate the Source.

‘ *The Romans have chosen the rigidity of their manmade order over the flow of nature’s pattern. Such an arrangement cannot endure forever, of course. A paving stone can be laid over grass, but the pattern is never still. Beneath the stone, the roots will

continue to grow. They will press against their barrier until someday they break through and lift green arms toward the sun.

“Meanwhile, the Romans have chosen to disregard the inevitability of natural law and have created their own lawmaking body, which they call the senate. The senate designs laws to fit the worid the way Romans want it to be, not the way it is.”

Some of the council were listening intently, I noticed. A few looked bored. Generally the elders were paying more attention than the princes.

Menua said, “I am told that its citizens believe Rome is the center of the universe. Because me existence of the Otherwodd challenges Rome’s authority, they ignore matters of the spirit and concentrate on the flesh. Those gods of theirs are only to satisfy fleshly needs and have nothing to do with keeping Man and Earth and Spirit in harmony.

“As interpreters of natural law, we druids have always sought to clarify our vision of nature in order to see beyond the visible to the invisible, the forces that underlie and shape existence. We know that humans are inseparable from the Otherworid because our bodies house immortal spirits-The Romans, however, believe one brief lifetime is all they have, and the belief has made them frantic and greedy.

‘ *I cannot understand the Roman way of thinking but it dismays me. If such people ever gain dominance here we will find ourselves trapped in their rigid worid and it will cripple us.”

I found the idea as terrible as having my living spirit trapped inside my dead body. But strangely, some of the council were unmoved. Men like Tasgetius refused to see any danger in the Roman presence in Gaul. “We need the Romans here, “Tasgetius insisted. “They are our source for wine and spices and our market for furs and surplus produce.”

Others agreed there might be some eventual military threat but were swaggeringly confident that Gauls could defeat any soft

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southerners. As for the idea of something as nebulous as Roman influence being a danger, they scoffed.

A third group, including Nantorus and Menua’s own kinsman the prince Cotuatus, was finally convinced but was not able to sway the rest. The factions fell to arguing among themselves with much shouting and fist pounding, resolving nothing.

Menua left in disgust. 1 trotted after him. We had not gone far when Nantorus hurried up to us, panting. Too many wounds had left him a battered man. “It is unfortunate, Menua,” he said. “But you know how they are… .”

“They’re fools,” the chief druid replied shortly. “Fools who have been seduced by traders’ trinkets.”

“I say this to you, Menua. As king of the Camutes, I charge

you and the Order of the Wise to take whatever precautions you deem necessary to protect our tribe from this threat you foresee. You need no one’s support but my own. Protect us, druid, because we are free people and not to be crushed beneath paving stones.” Witih this injunction Nantorus turned aside to the warmth and comfort of his own lodge, leaving us in a darkness that had fallen like a stone upon Cenabum.

Instinctively I understood that the king felt he had fully discharged his duty by putting the responsibility onto the druids. Nantorus would sleep this night with a peaceful mind. Menua, however, shifted his shoulders uncomfortably, as we walked on, like a man carrying a heavy burden.

The wind had swung around and came howling out of the north, ending our golden summer. Cold rain lashed us. Menua abandoned his resolve to sleep under the open sky. Together we ran for the shelter of the guest lodge.

The rain followed us only to the eaves. The cold followed us into our beds.

Next morning the chief druid told me we were returning at once to the grove. “We have work to do, Ainvar.” We. He had said we. “We are going to raise a cry for assistance in protecting the tribe, a cry so loud it will ring throughout the Otherworid.”