The Druid King (14 page)

Above the tower, above the eagle circling its pointed pinnacle, a silver bird flies at impossible speed, scribing a magic cloud across the blue sky, thin and straight as an arrow, white as chalk.

Vercingetorix’s spirit folds its eagle wings and stoops down, down, down, out of the magic of the skies, to the magic of the city below.

He alights on the head of a stone statue.

The statue of a warrior of the Arverni mounted on a noble steed, sword held high.

And an unseen multitude chants with the mighty voices of the gods:

“Vercingetorix, king of Gaul! Vercingetorix, king of Gaul!”

The face of stone becomes a face of flesh.

And it is Vercingetorix’s own.

And the living arms of the Tree of Knowledge, gentle as those of a mother with her babe, lower him to the earth between its ancient roots.

Where he awakens into the dream called time.

VII

DID YOU FIND that which you sought?” “That which I sought?” Vercingetorix muttered, scarcely Dable to comprehend where he was, or who was this white-robed gray-haired man staring down at him so intently.

“The meaning of your death! Your destiny!”

Slowly his spirit began to return to his body. It was a waning afternoon, to judge by the deepness of the sky’s blue and the length of the shadows of the trees surrounding the clearing upon whose mossy ground he sat, with his back up against the trunk of a mighty oak. He could feel the rough texture of the tree’s bark as if he wore no tunic. He could see motes of dust floating glittering in the air, and tiny midges flying among them. He could hear the leaves of the trees rustling in a gentle breeze and distinguish the song of a far-off merle from the gabbling of a nearby tribe of starlings. He could smell the resin of the trees and the warmth of sunlight on living wood.

Vercingetorix took a deep draft of the cooling afternoon air, redolent with the loamy fragrance of the forest floor, held it in his lungs, stilled the confusion that roiled his mind, let it fill him, then exhaled it, and remembered.

“Oh yes, I saw my destiny, Guttuatr,” he said. “I was . . . I am . . . My destiny is to become . . . king of Gaul!”

“King of Gaul!” cried the Arch Druid, deep dismay in his voice.

“What troubles you?” Vercingetorix asked. “You yourself placed . . . will place the Crown of Brenn on my head.”

“Never will I crown a king of Gaul!”

“That is what I saw, Guttuatr,” Vercingetorix told him calmly. “But . . .”

“But?”

Vercingetorix struggled to clear his thoughts. There was much to remember—or much to forget?—before the dead king of Gaul in a stone cell in Rome could once more fully become this living boy leaning up against an oak.

“But I was proclaimed king of Gaul in
Rome
!” Vercingetorix exclaimed, remembering only as he spoke. “And there will I die!”

And then he was the student again, at least for the moment, humbly seeking understanding from the man of knowledge. But this moment passed when Guttuatr shook his head, for it was the slow, heavy gesture of a troubled old man, not that of an all-knowing Arch Druid. Nor was there enlightenment in his words.

“This was
your
vision, Vercingetorix, not mine,” Guttuatr said. “Do not expect anyone else to explain your destiny. The magic of your death, for better or for worse, belongs to you alone.”

“But what of the magic I saw after my death, Guttuatr? Can you not—”

“You saw beyond your own death?”
Guttuatr exclaimed. “No one ever has seen beyond his death before!”

There was a long silent moment in which nothing could be heard but the birds in the trees. The very breezes of the air seemed to stop still as Guttuatr’s gaze turned inward.

“No one in this Age that is passing . . .” Guttuatr muttered softly. “Tell me what you saw.”

“When I died, my spirit entered a raven—”

“The bird of death—”

“But I rose into the sky as an
eagle
—”

“The bird of power—”

“—above the city, and I beheld a statue of a triumphant hero such as the Romans are said to erect to boast of their mightiest victories. . . . But . . .”

“But?”

“But the face on the statue was my own! And the city was a magic city, not Rome! Magic beyond anything I have words to describe or wit to understand,” he said, throwing up his hands in frustration.

And, so saying, it seemed to him that the boy who had entered the Land of Legend spoke as the man he had now become. Was he not the boy and the man, the raven and the eagle, the corpse on the stone floor and the king of Gaul? For would they not live together in his memory in this world while he yet lived and in the Land of Legend when he died?

Vercingetorix sat up straighter, feeling strength return to his flesh, clarity to his mind, power to his spirit.

“Indeed,” he declared, “the magic of this vision is mine alone!”

“And can you tell me what it means?” asked the Arch Druid.

Vercingetorix was silent, for he found that he could not. It seemed that the meaning hovered just beyond his grasp, like a floating midge that seemed so slow but could somehow just not be caught.

“Very well, then,
I’ll
tell you what the magic of your death truly means,” the Arch Druid said in a gentler voice, extending a hand to help Vercingetorix to his feet.

“But I thought you could not!”

“It means what you
make
it mean,
druid,
for that is what you have now become,” Guttuatr said when they stood facing each other, eye to eye, as equals. “Such visions in the Land of Legend are not plainspoken, for if they were, we would be no more than slaves of the gods, our lives entirely controlled by what is written in the heavens.”

“Are we not?”

“If we are, the gods do not wish us to know,” Guttuatr said somberly. “Or perhaps it is we who give visions their true meaning when we make them come to pass.”

“We make our own destinies, then?”

“Who knows?” said the Arch Druid. “Who can? When I as a youth ate of the mushroom, I saw myself taken up by the living arms of the Tree of Knowledge and placed on its highest branches. A great white bird descended from the sky and became a cloud. The cloud draped itself around my shoulders and became a robe of white. . . .”

Guttuatr shrugged. “I did not know that this meant I was destined to become Arch Druid until it came to pass. Perhaps, if it had not come to pass, the vision might just as truly have come to mean something else.”

“And your death . . . ?” Vercingetorix presumed to ask.

“A huge millstone rolls over the land crushing all beneath it, yet I ride untouched atop it,” Guttuatr said softly, his eyes meeting Vercingetorix’s own, but gazing far, far away, as if he were seeing it all now. “It approaches the mouth of a cave, or perhaps a tunnel, for the cave is not an opening into the earth but into the sky. The millstone enters the cave with my Arch Druid’s robe still riding it. I can see that the robe is empty as I lie on the ground and am crushed beneath it.”

“But what does this mean?”

“I never knew until I saw the birth of the new star. And then I knew that I was destined to die as the last Arch Druid of the Great Age that is. And must seek out the one to lead us into the Great Age to come.”

Now Vercingetorix knew why Guttuatr would not speak plain.
He
was the one of whom the Arch Druid’s vision had spoken.

Vercingetorix, king of Gaul.

Lying dead in a stone cell.

In Rome.

And then the true meaning of his own vision struck him, sent his spirit soaring like the eagle it was destined to become.

“If I must die as king of Gaul in Rome, I must first become king of Gaul, and therefore cannot be slain before I do!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “And I cannot be slain in Gaul! And, armed with that knowledge, I need fear no man, no battle, the daring of no deed! I need not fear to face those who slew my father even if I must face them alone! Even if I must face an army alone!”

“You are not a god, Vercingetorix!”

“But I am destined to be a king! And so neither can I be slain before I fulfill my destiny to wear the Crown of Brenn!”

“And die!”

“I die as a king in Rome.
That
is the magic of my death. I have paid the price, and now it is mine.”

“To do what?”

“To avenge my father’s death,” Vercingetorix declared. “To complete the great work that he died fighting for. To unite all Gaul under a king who will reclaim its honor.”

“This is not a man of knowledge speaking! This is a boy given drink too strong for him to command!”

Vercingetorix regarded the Arch Druid with an unwavering eye. He saw a man of knowledge as he himself had now become. But he saw also an old man past his prime who had schooled him for purposes which even he had never truly understood.

The visions of the Land of Legend are not plainspoken, Guttuatr had said. Perhaps not to an old man destined to die with the Great Age that is. But it seemed they spoke clearly enough to a young man destined to be the king bringing in the new Great Age. Surely that was why he alone had seen beyond his own death and been granted a vision of the Great Age to come.

“No, Guttuatr,” said Vercingetorix, “this
is
a man of knowledge who now speaks, not a boy. A man young and strong enough to wield the magic of that knowledge as his invincible sword.”

The Arch Druid Guttuatr shakes his head as he stands beside the school’s temple watching Vercingetorix disappear from sight into the forest. Vercingetorix wears a tunic and pantaloons of Arverne orange. From his belt hangs a sword. He does not look back.

“What have I created?” Guttuatr mutters.

“Have we the power to create anyone?” the druid Nividio says soothingly, summoned here not so much by command of the Arch Druid as by the need of Guttuatr, for Nividio is the closest thing that he has to a friend.

Guttuatr sighs. “Of course you are right, Nividio,” he says. “But all of us have the power to make mistakes.”

“The signs seemed clear, did they not?” says Nividio.

Nividio’s robe bears no tribal color, though he was born a Santon. Nividio is not a magistrate. Nividio does not teach. Nividio is one of the Druids of the Inner Way, from whose small self-selected company Arch Druids are chosen. But Nividio has no desire to become an Arch Druid. He would so serve if called upon, but he knows he will be spared, for he has eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and the life he sees before him is the life he sees behind, that of a wandering druid of the woods, a creature whose purpose is to have no purpose, not a singer but the song.

And the death he has seen is that of a very old man lying down to rest alone beneath an oak deep in the forest, his flesh slowly and sweetly melting into the soft damp earth to feed the roots of the tree, to rise with the sap into its branches, to become its leaves, and then to blow away on the autumn wind.

“Are the signs ever clear?” says Guttuatr. “The sign of the Great Turning was plain, and so too did it point to that boy, but . . .” His eyes become furtive. “I say this to you, Nividio, because I would say it to no one else and I must say it to someone,” he says in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper. “I would not have stopped Keltill’s execution even if I could have. Because I wanted . . . I did not want . . .”

“You did not want the coming of a king,” Nividio says. “And in that you were right, Guttuatr.”

“But when the signs pointed to Vercingetorix as he who would bring the new Great Age, I feared what such an Age might become,” Guttuatr says angrily. “And so I sought to raise him up as my successor, as the Arch Druid bringing in the new Great Age, and instead I may have made a terrible mistake. I gave Vercingetorix the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge so that he might enter the Land of Legend and return as a man of knowledge and a druid of the Inner Way. But he returned with the vision that his destiny is to be a man of action and a king.”

Nividio knows that druids must not meddle in the world of strife. And that this is what Guttuatr has unwittingly done.

He would lift Guttuatr’s burden if he could.

“You are too severe with yourself, Guttuatr,” he says softly, presuming to lay a friendly hand upon the Arch Druid’s shoulder. “There was no evil in your heart.
You but followed your destiny. As do we all.”

Guttuatr nods, he sighs, he reaches up to clasp the hand of Nividio on his shoulder. “But in so doing, I have brought into the world a man of knowledge pursuing the hot-blooded path of the man of action,” he says. “A druid who would be king. Something that has never walked the earth before.”

Considering that he did not know how long it would take him to reach Gergovia or what he would do when he got there, Vercingetorix felt strangely at peace as he made his way eastward through the forest. For the first time in his life, he was quite alone, and he took great pleasure in it. The forest was entirely empty of the sight and sound and smell of men; there was nothing but the sunlight dappling the tree crowns as the breezes whooshed through them, the songs and cries of the birds, the rustles and thumps of nearby or distant unseen animals.

Yet Vercingetorix did not feel an intruder in this realm. Carrying little but a sword, making his way where there were no paths by following the movement of the sun across the sky, the angles of the shadows, the position of the moss on the rocks and tree trunks, he felt himself a creature of it.

Here there was no school, no strife of tribe against tribe, man against man, Gaul against Rome, duty against desire, the way of knowledge against the way of action. No signs in the heavens, no vision of destiny. Here he was free. And he realized, to his surprise and consternation, that this was something he had never felt before.

He amused himself with the idea of simply remaining in the forest forever. He knew how to find roots and plants and fruits and berries, which might be eaten, and which not. He knew how to make snares to trap small animals and pits to catch larger ones. He had a sword, and flint to make fire. He knew how to find healing herbs should he fall ill, and build huts for shelter in foul weather if he found no cave. What more do I need? he teased himself by asking.

But he knew full well that he could not really remain a denizen of the forest for the rest of his life. A slain father, a destiny he could not forever deny, the world of strife would soon enough intrude.

“I still do not understand why I am here,” groaned Diviacx, bouncing along on his saddle inexpertly, giving himself, or so Caesar hoped, as grievous an ache in his own testicles as the druid was giving
him
in his posterior.

“Surely, as what passes for a local sage, you have noticed that this is a chronic human condition,” Caesar told him dryly, bringing his own horse up to a trot so as either to increase the druid’s discomfort or to escape from his whinings.

Labienus remained behind, at the head of his troops, but Gisstus, riding beside Caesar, gave a small coughing laugh and sped up to keep pace. The four Eduen bodyguards Diviacx had insisted on bringing did likewise. In a few moments, the six of them had literally left the five cohorts of foot soldiers marching up the road in their dust. But Diviacx, grimacing and wincing, doggedly refused to be left behind, leaving Caesar to wonder what, if anything, these druids wore under their robes, whether they had the sense to gird their loins when embarking on long journeys on horseback or not.