The Druid King (23 page)

“What are they
doing,
Gisstus?” muttered his companion, a chunky balding man with a befuddled and grim demeanor. “And why are we following them? I thought we were supposed to be after Dumnorix.”

“We
are,
Marius, and so are they,” Gisstus told him. “That’s why we’re following Vercingetorix. He’s got hundreds of men, and he’s using them like a pack of hounds. The hounds find the trail, then the hunters run down the prey. . . .”

“But the jackals following them move in—”

“
Wolves,
please, Marius,
wolves
!” said Gisstus. “A much more honorable predator! The very one, in fact, whose teats suckled our noble ancestors Romulus and Remus.”

The storm was easing, though the rain had not yet ceased, and Vercingetorix could detect a hint of gray lightening the blackness of the sky at the horizon when a rider came galloping up to his party out of the southwest. The horse, a roan mare, was drenched with rain and its own foam, and wheezing with exhaustion. The rider was a wiry blond man a few years older than himself, helmetless, but with a sodden orange Arverne cloak pulled up over his head against the rain, and was breathless with excitement when he reported.

“We’ve found Dumnorix! My men are following him as we speak!”

“Where is he?”

The man seemed to catch his breath, or perhaps to rein himself in as he had his horse. “Well, actually, Vercingetorix,” he admitted in a somewhat more subdued voice, “we’ve found his
trail.
”

“You’ve not actually seen Dumnorix?”

The man shook his head.

“Well, then, how do you know—”

“A village. A half-dozen or so Edui practically rode through it, they said—”

“But how—”

“One of them had a vergobret’s standard. It was lashed to his saddle, not held aloft, but a boy saw the boar.”

“But if you never saw them, how—”

“I am
Oranix,
” the fellow declared, as if that was supposed to settle things. Then, when Vercingetorix showed no sign of reacting to what he clearly had intended as a boast: “You haven’t heard of me? I am the greatest tracker among the Arverni, and my men are experienced hunters all. Once we find tracks, we never lose the trail. I myself once tracked a wounded stag for six days across the passage of whole herds of deer before I slew it.”

There was something about this fellow that had Vercingetorix grinning. “Where are they heading?” he asked.

“Southwest.”

Vercingetorix turned to Baravax. “Have one of your men exchange horses with the great Oranix,” he ordered. “You
can
lead us to wherever your friends went?”

“Of course!” said Oranix indignantly. “They blaze a trail behind for us to follow, that’s the way it’s done, you know! Or did you imagine we grew to manhood within the walls of Gergovia?”

Oranix’s hunters had indeed blazed a trail that Oranix could easily follow, though Vercingetorix could not see how, and, moving as fast as the muddy ground would allow, they caught up with the hunters within the hour. All four bore bows, and all were helmetless and shieldless and garbed as woodsmen.

They were no more than a mile from the coastal marshes. Dawn was breaking, the rain had dwindled to a foul misty drizzle, the ground here was viscous brown muck, and Vercingetorix did not need Oranix or his men to tell him that the trail of churned-up mud and trampled turf they were following led straight into the swamp.

“Six of them.”

“Could be eight.”

“No more than a half hour ago.”

“Maybe less.”

The spirits of Vercingetorix’s men became as sodden as the terrain as he led them toward the marshes, for Dumnorix had made a cunning choice. These bogs were crisscrossed by innumerable creeks and rivulets, and what so-called dry land there was would be watery ooze where hoofprints or footprints would disappear as soon as they were made. Once inside, Dumnorix could choose any point at which to emerge, and one would either need to surround the entire marshland with an army, or be favored by the gods with fantastic luck, to intercept him emerging.

Not even Oranix and his hunters showed any enthusiasm for entering when they reached the margin of this dank and forbidding tangle of moss-greened trees, tall moisture-laden grasses, pools of stagnant water, clinging and reeking mud. A thick layer of fog lay heavily over it, from which emerged mournful cries of unseen birds, the guttural croaks of frogs.

“
Can
you track them in there, Oranix?”Vercingetorix asked the self-styled great hunter.

Oranix shook his head. “Not possible. We’ll have to use
your
technique, Vercingetorix—search out and flush our prey, not track it, the way we hunt pheasant with dogs.
We separate into groups of two and—”

“Separate!” moaned Baravax.

“In there?”

Vercingetorix’s warriors were unashamed to show each other their fears. Oranix and his hunters regarded them with contempt.

“You are afraid?” shouted Vercingetorix. “Of frogs and birds and mud? I myself will go alone. And we will all stay within voice range by making the calls of birds from time to time—”

“The merle,” suggested one of the hunters.

“A bird that shuns marshlands—good choice,” agreed another.

“We’ll always know it’s us, and I doubt this Dumnorix is woodsman enough to know the difference,” explained Oranix.

“In any event, I doubt he and his men will be paying much attention to birdcalls,” said the hunter who had suggested the merle. “Goes like this.” And he demonstrated a sweet, harmonic, warbling whistle.

“Anyone who encounters more of them than he can deal with, makes the cry of the wolf to attract aid,” said Vercingetorix.

“He’ll attract a whole wolf pack instead!” exclaimed Baravax.

All the hunters laughed. “Fear not,” said Oranix, “wolves no more favor such environs than we do.”

“Well, they’re entering the marshes,” said Gisstus, lying prone in the tall, muddy grass of a hillock. “And so must we.”

“On horseback?” groaned Marius.

Gisstus shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. “You can hear a horse stumbling around for miles in there. Dumnorix and those with him are trying to evade detection, so they’ll end up on foot if they haven’t dismounted already. And so must we.”

“I like it not, Gisstus; it’s a filthy mess in there.”

Gisstus stood up, the front of his tunic caked with mud. “Our calling has always been a dirty one, Marius,” he said, “or hadn’t you noticed?”

As he waded knee-deep in slimy water, leading his horse, long since rendered useless and worse by the treacherous terrain, it seemed to Vercingetorix that he had been slogging aimlessly through this swamp forever, even though the position of a wan sun dimly visible from time to time through the slowly evaporating fog told him it was not yet noon.

Far-distant cries and clashes of metal on metal and three inept wolf calls told him that some of his men had encountered Dumnorix’s. But not Dumnorix, Vercingetorix hoped, for he wanted Dumnorix for himself; even though Caesar wished him brought back alive to be tried and condemned by Diviacx, if he resisted—

There was another wolf call, this one much closer, then shouts and screams, the sounds of battle, another wolf call, and another, and another, more cries, and clashes of weapons.

Vercingetorix waded heavily through the swamp toward the battle sounds, but he could not have gone a quarter of a league before they died away into silence—

Then he heard a sodden sucking sound.

Vercingetorix made himself as still and silent as a tree of the marshland.

Yes, those were footfalls, and too heavy to be other than human, unless those of a horse.

And no horse could be making those guttural cursing sounds.

The footfalls seemed to be moving in his direction, but with the tall grass, the undergrowth, and the muffling tricks of the fog, it was difficult to tell exactly—

His horse whinnied.

The footfalls stopped.

Vercingetorix pondered this ill luck for a moment, then realized it could be turned to good fortune. He dropped the reins, drew his sword, and slapped the horse hard on the rump with the flat of it.

The horse whinnied again, this time in protest, as it plodded clumsily and noisily away through the swamp grass, and Vercingetorix, moving from tree to tree, bush to bush, shadow to shadow, followed at a discreet distance, making himself invisible in plain sight.

“I tell you, Marius, not even one famished wolf would venture into this swamp, let alone a whole pack,” Gisstus said in a hushed tone as the two Romans crouched in the tall grass. “And even if they did, they certainly could do a better job of howling than
that.
”

“And how, may I ask, do you intend to find anyone in here, Gisstus?”

“I don’t. I’ll let them find us.”

“But they don’t even know we’re here.”

“They’re signaling each other with these wolf calls. Haven’t you heard the clashes of arms before and after? So I’ll just call them to us.”

Marius frowned unhappily. “But how do you know whether it’s Vercingetorix’s party or Dumnorix’s you’ll be calling?”

“I don’t. It doesn’t matter. The one is seeking the other. We keep them all coming toward us, stay hidden as they stumble into each other, and wait for Dumnorix to make his appearance.”

So saying, Gisstus raised his mouth to the sky and his hands to his mouth, and made the sound of a human inexpertly imitating the cry of a wolf.

That howl seemed close, but Vercingetorix refrained from moving toward it, intent on following the horse that was the bait in his moving trap, for the animal was making a lot of noise as it struggled through the swamp, and beyond he could hear the footfalls moving tentatively in its direction.

“What’s that?” hissed Marius nervously, dropping down on his belly in the mud at the sound of something heavy thumping and crashing toward them. Gisstus took cover below the tops of the swamp grass too, then groaned as he saw a riderless horse emerge from a copse of trees a tenth of a league or so away and begin listlessly cropping the vegetation.

Vercingetorix stood still and silent behind the moss-covered bole of an old tree, watching his horse grazing, and listening to the footsteps moving through the trees on the other side of the marsh-grass meadow, this way, that way, circling, observing.

At length, Dumnorix—shieldless, on foot, caked with brown mud and green smears of vegetation as well as the blood of battle—peered out at the horse from between two trees.

Vercingetorix dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling invisibly and silently through the tall grass toward the horse as Dumnorix, in a crouch but clearly visible, began to edge toward it.

By the time Dumnorix was nearly upon the horse, so was Vercingetorix. He drew his sword, leapt to his feet, and ran at him, shouting, “Dumnorix! Defend yourself, you cowardly Eduen bastard!”

The horse bolted and ran.

Dumnorix whirled to face him, drawing his own sword, and parried the blow with a loud sideways clang of steel on steel.

“I should’ve known that Caesar would send his catamite!” he shouted, aiming a wild, swinging blow, which Vercingetorix easily enough parried.

Containing his rage was another matter. “This isn’t for Caesar!” he shouted, with a sweep of his sword that Dumnorix countered with ease. “This is for my father!”

“You hear that?” asked Marius.

Gisstus covered Marius’ mouth with his hand, raised himself up high enough above the top of the swamp grass to see the two men clanging steel against steel and shouting at each other, then dropped down again and began crawling toward them through the cover of the grass, clutching his Teuton javelin.

“Your father?”
said Dumnorix, seemingly with enough genuine perplexity to let his sword droop along with his expression. Honor forbade Vercingetorix to take lethal advantage of this, even against a man such as Dumnorix.

“You think I don’t know?” he cried instead. “You killed my father!”

“I did what?” Dumnorix exclaimed, now slowly bringing up his sword and circling backward, away from Vercingetorix.

Vercingetorix began a slow, deliberate circling dance toward him, but his mind was clogged with black thoughts, and his heart burned with the memory, and the blood pounded through him, and he could not strike without first spewing it all forth.

“Gobanit set the flame, but your foul brother condemned him, and
you
were there, you commanded the guard! Your plot! Your treachery! Your orders!
You killed my father!
”

“You fool! You idiot!”

With a wordless shout, Vercingetorix leapt forward and stabbed at Dumnorix’s stomach. Dumnorix parried the thrust, but clumsily, and Vercingetorix was able to slide his blade along Dumnorix’s sword and plunge a finger’s length of it into Dumnorix’s gut below his buckler. He was about to lean into it to turn it into a killing stroke when—

—a javelin pierced Dumnorix’s back, the point emerging from his chest, as he screamed in outrage and agony:

“It was Caesar!”

“Caesar . . . ?” whispered Vercingetorix, as the dying Dumnorix staggered backward and collapsed into the mud. “
Caesar
. . . ?”

“With my dying breath, I swear it,” said Dumnorix, raising his head in a final effort, speaking thickly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. “Who else could make Gobanit and Diviacx act together? Who else was Keltill’s declared enemy? Who else would set Arverni against Edui? Who else but—”

“Caesar?”

Something was up and moving in the grass, in the direction from which the javelin must have come—

Vercingetorix whirled to see a running man. His spirit filled with fury and agony but empty now of the thought that slows the mind, Vercingetorix flung his sword like a spear and skewered the running man through the back.

As that man had skewered Dumnorix, who now lay unmoving in a growing pool of his own blood.

Vercingetorix ran to the man he had slain, who lay facedown in the muddy grass, pulled out his sword, kicked the corpse over on its back. The dead man was Gisstus.

Caesar’s
man Gisstus.