“So you want me to tell Convictolavus and Cotus to go on pretending to help Caesar,” said Litaviccus.
“Definitely. Just make sure the help never comes.”
Litaviccus turned and rode off. Vercingetorix kicked his pretty fawn horse in the ribs and put distance between himself and Cathbad, who fell back to inform the others of the news Litaviccus had brought, his fair smooth face grim, for he misliked this news sorely. But Vercingetorix didn’t notice; he was too busy thinking.
Where was Caesar? What did he intend? Litaviccus had lost him in Aeduan lands! An image of Caesar hung before his fixed gaze, but he couldn’t plumb the enigma behind those cool, unsettling eyes. Such a handsome man in an almost Gallic way; only the nose and the mouth were alien. Polished. Sleek. Very fit. A man who had the blood of kings more ancient than the history of the Gauls, and who thought like a king, for all his denials. When he gave an order, he didn’t expect it to be obeyed; he knew it would be obeyed. He would never turn away for politic reasons. He would dare all. None but another king could stop him. Oh, Esus, grant me the full strength and the instinct to defeat him! The knowledge I do not have. I am too young, too untried. But I lead a great people, and if the last six years have taught us anything, it is to hate.
*
Caesar arrived in Agedincum with Fabius and his two legions before Decimus Brutus and the Fifteenth got there.
“Thank all the Gods!” cried Trebonius, wringing his hand. “I didn’t think to see you this side of spring.”
“Where’s Vercingetorix?”
“On his way to besiege Gorgobina.”
“Good! We’ll let him do that for the time being.”
“While we… ?”
Caesar grinned. “We have two choices. If we stay inside Agedincum we can eat well and not lose a man. If we march out of Agedincum into winter, we won’t eat well and we’ll lose men. However, Vercingetorix has had things all his own way, so it’s time to teach him that war against Rome isn’t nearly as simple as war against his own peoples. I’ve expended a great deal of energy and thought in getting here, and by now Vercingetorix will know I’m here. That he hasn’t moved in the direction of Agedincum is evidence of military talent. He wants us to venture out and meet him on a field of his choosing.”
“And you intend to oblige him,” said Trebonius, who knew very well that Caesar wouldn’t stay inside Agedincum.
“Not immediately, no. The Fifteenth and the Fourteenth can garrison Agedincum. The rest will march with me for Vellaunodunum. We’ll cut Vercingetorix’s legs out from under him by going west and destroying his main bases among the Senones, Carnutes and Bituriges. Vellaunodunum first. Then Cenabum. Then into the lands of the Bituriges, to their Noviodunum. After which, Avaricum.”
“All the while moving closer to Vercingetorix.”
“But driving east, which separates him from reinforcements on the west. Nor can he call a general muster at Carnutum.”
“How big a baggage train?” asked Quintus Cicero.
“Small,” said Caesar. “I’ll use the Aedui. They can keep us supplied with grain. We’ll take beans, chickpea, oil and bacon with us from Agedincum.” He looked at Trebonius. “Unless you think the Aedui are about to declare for Vercingetorix.”
Fabius answered. “No, Caesar. I’ve been watching their movements closely, and there’s no indication that they’re giving Vercingetorix any kind of aid at all.”
“Then we’ll take our chances,” said Caesar.
From Agedincum to Vellaunodunum was less than one day’s march; it fell three days after that. The Senones, to whom it belonged, were compelled to furnish pack animals to carry all the food within it, and furnish hostages as well. Caesar moved immediately to Cenabum, which fell during the night after he had arrived. Because this was where Cita and the civilian traders had been murdered, Cenabum suffered an inevitable fate; it was plundered and burned, the booty given to the troops. After which came Noviodunum, an oppidum belonging to the Bituriges.
“Ideal ground for cavalry,” said Vercingetorix exultantly. “Gutruarus, stay here at Gorgobina with the infantry. It’s too cold and capricious for a general engagement, but I can hurt Caesar with my horse; he’s leading an infantry army.”
Noviodunum of the Bituriges was in the process of yielding when Vercingetorix appeared, and changed its mind just as the hostages were being handed over. Some centurions and troops within the oppidum were trapped, but fought their way out, the Bituriges howling for their blood. In the midst of this Caesar sent the thousand Remi horse troopers he had with him out of his camp, with the four hundred Ubii in their lead. The speed of the attack took Vercingetorix by surprise; his horsemen were still coming out of their ride formation into battle lines when the Germans, shrieking a ululating cry which hadn’t been heard in this part of Gaul in generations, cannoned into them broadside. The savage, almost suicidal assault caught the Gauls unprepared, and the Remi, taking heart from the Germans, followed them in. Vercingetorix broke off the engagement and retired, leaving several hundred cavalrymen dead on the field.
“He had Germans with him,” said Vercingetorix. “Germans! But they were riding Remi horses. I thought he was busy with the town; I couldn’t see how he’d get anyone into the field quickly. But he did. Germans!”
He had called a war council, smarting.
“We’ve gone down three times in eight days,” growled Drappes of the Senones. “Vellaunodunum, Cenabum, and now Noviodunum.”
“At the beginning of April he was in Narbo. At the end of April he’s marching for Avaricum,” said Daderax of the Mandubii. “Six hundred miles in a single month! How can we hope to keep up with him? Will he go on doing this? What are we to do?”
“We change our tactics,” said Vercingetorix, who felt lighter after this confession of failure. “We have to learn from him, and we have to make him respect us. He walks all over us, but he won’t keep on walking all over us. From now on, we make it impossible for him to campaign. We make him retreat to Agedincum and we lock him up in Agedincum.”
“How?” asked Drappes, looking skeptical.
“It will require many sacrifices, Drappes. We make it quite impossible for him to eat. At this time of year and for the next six months there’s nothing to be had in the fields. It’s all in silos and barns. So we burn our silos and barns. We burn our own oppida. Anything in Caesar’s path must go. And we never, never offer battle. We starve him out instead.”
“If he starves, so will we,” said Gutruatus.
“We’ll go hungry, but we will eat something. We bring food up from those places far from Caesar’s path. We send to Lucterius to give us food from the south. We send to the Armorici to bring us food from the west.
We also send to the Aedui to make sure they give the Romans nothing. Nothing!”
“What of Avaricum?” Biturgo asked. “It’s the biggest town in Gaul and so full of food that it’s threatening to sink into the marshes. Caesar’s marching for it even as we speak.”
“We follow him and we sit ourselves down just too far away to be compelled to give battle. As for Avaricum”—he frowned—”do we defend it or burn it?” The thin face tightened. “We burn it,” said Vercingetorix with decision. “That’s the right course.”
Biturgo gasped. “No! No! I refuse to consent to that! You made it impossible for us Bituriges to remain aloof, and I tell you now that I will obey your orders—burn villages, burn barns, even burn our mine workings—but I will not let you burn Avaricum!”
“Caesar will take it and eat,” said Vercingetorix stubbornly. “We burn it, Biturgo. We have to burn it.”
“And the Bituriges will starve,” said Biturgo bitterly. “He can’t take it, Vercingetorix! No one can take Avaricum! Why else has it become the most powerful town in all our wide lands? It sits there so superbly fortified by Nature as well as by its people that it will last forever. No one can take it, I tell you! But if you burn it, Caesar will move on to some other place: Gergovia, maybe, or�
��—he glared at Daderax of the Mandubii—” Alesia. I ask you, Daderax—could Caesar take Alesia?”
“Never,” said Daderax emphatically.
“Well, I can say the same of Avaricum.” Biturgo transferred his gaze to Vercingetorix. “Please, I beg of you! Any stronghold or village or mine working that you like, but not Avaricum! Never Avaricum! Vercingetorix, I beg you! Don’t make it impossible for us to follow you with our souls! Lure Caesar to Avaricum! Let him try to take it! He’ll still be there trying in the summer! But he won’t! He can’t! No one can!”
“Cathbad?” asked Vercingetorix.
The Chief Druid thought, then nodded. “Biturgo is right. Avaricum cannot fall. Let Caesar think he can succeed, and keep him sitting before it until summer. If he’s there, he can’t be elsewhere. And in the spring you’ll call a general muster, summon every people in the whole of Gaul. It’s a good plan to keep the Romans occupied in one place. If he finds Avaricum burning, Caesar will march again and we’ll lose track of him. He’s like trying to eat quicksilver with a knife. Use Avaricum as an anchor.”
“Very well then, we use Avaricum as an anchor. But for the rest of it, burn everything within fifty miles of him!”
*
Every Roman deemed Avaricum the only beautiful oppidum in Longhaired Gaul. Like Cenabum only much larger, it functioned as a proper town rather than a place to store foodstuffs and hold tribal meetings. It stood on a slight hill of solid ground in the midst of miles of marshy yet fertile grazing ground; the bulblike end of a spur of forested bedrock a mere three hundred and thirty feet wide outside the gates, Avaricum owed its impregnability to its very high walls and the surrounding marsh. The road into it came across this narrow bedrock causeway, but just before the gates the solid ground took a sudden downward dip which meant that the walls virtually towered right in the only spot where they might have been assailable. Elsewhere they rose out of marsh too soggy and treacherous to take the weight of siege fortifications and engines of war.
Caesar sat his seven legions down in a camp on the edge of the bedrock spur just before it narrowed into that last quarter-mile of road with the steep dip rising again to Avaricum’s main gates. The city wall was made of murus Gallicus, a cunning interleafing of stones and wooden reinforcing beams forty feet long; the stones rendered it impervious to fire, while the gigantic wooden beams lent it the tensile strength necessary to resist battery. Even if, thought Caesar, gazing at it while the controlled frenzy of camp making went on behind him, even if I could work a ram tilted at such an angle. Or protect the men using the ram.’
“This one,” said Titus Sextius, “is going to be difficult.”
“You’ll have to build a ramp across the dip to level it out and batter the gates,” said Fabius, frowning.
“No, not exactly a ramp. Too exposed. The available width is just three hundred and thirty feet. Which means the Bituriges inside have a mere three hundred and thirty feet of wall to man in order to fend us off. No, we’ll have to build something more like a terrace,” said Caesar, his voice betraying to his legates that he had known exactly what to do almost at first glance. “We start it right where I’m standing, which is the same height as the Avaricum battlements, and advance it fully built. It won’t need to be a three-hundred-and-thirty-foot-wide platform, yet it will be three hundred and thirty feet wide. We’ll flank each side of the causeway with a wall going from here to Avaricum’s walls, level with its battlements. Between our two walls we’ll simply ignore the dip until we can almost touch Avaricum. Then we’ll build another wall between our two flank walls and connect them to each other. By advancing forward evenly we keep complete control. We’ll be three quarters of the way there before we have to worry too much about the defenders’ doing us serious damage.”
“Logs!” exclaimed Quintus Cicero, eyes gleaming. “Thousands of logs! Axe time, Caesar.”
“Yes, Quintus, axe time. You’re in charge of the logging. All that experience against the Nervii will come in handy, because I want those thousands of logs in a hurry. We can’t stay here more than a month. By then it has to be over.” Caesar turned to Titus Sextius. “Sextius, find what stone you can. And earth. As the terrace advances, the men can tip it over the edge into the dip for fill.” It became Fabius’s turn. “Fabius, you’re in charge of the camp and supplies. The Aedui haven’t brought up any grain yet, and I want to know why. Nor have the Boii sent any.”
“We’ve heard nothing from the Aedui,” said Fabius, looking worried. “The Boii say they don’t have any food to spare, thanks to Gorgobina—and I believe them. They’re not a numerous tribe and their lands don’t yield a cornucopia of plenty.”
“Unlike the Aedui, who have the best and most in Gaul,” said Caesar grimly. “I think it’s high time that I wrote a note to Cotus and Convictolavus.”
His scouts informed him that Vercingetorix and his enormous army had settled down fifteen miles away in a place which prevented Caesar’s leaving the area without encountering them, for the Bituriges marshes were not merely around Avaricum and the amount of solid ground was limited. Worse than this, every barn and silo within reach was in ashes. Caesar detached the Ninth and Tenth from construction work and kept them ready in camp in case the Gallic army attacked, then commenced his siege terrace.
To protect it in the early stages he put every piece of artillery he had behind a palisade on high ground, but conserved his stone ammunition for later days. The present situation was ideal for scorpions, which fired a three-foot-long bolt made very simply from a piece of wood; the business end was sharp, the other end whittled into flanges which acted like the flights on an arrow. Suitable branches lopped from the trees Quintus Cicero was logging were stockpiled, and the specialist noncombatants who did nothing save make scorpion bolts set to shaping them, checking against templates to make sure the flanges were correct.
Two parallel log walls rose on either flank of the causeway, the dip in between them only partially filled to afford the laboring troops better protection from the archers and spearmen on Avaricum’s battlements. The long shelter sheds called mantlets advanced in time with the terrace. The two siege towers were built at the Roman camp end of the parallel walls, and would not be pushed down the walls until they were finished. Twenty-five thousand men toiled from sunrise to sunset every day, logging, shaping, winching, rolling, dropping the finished round beams into place, all at the rate of many hundreds of logs a day.
At the end of ten days the terrace had crept half the way to the walls of Avaricum, and at the end of ten days there was no food left save scraps of bacon and a little oil. Messengers kept coming in from the Aedui full of apologies: there had been an epidemic of winter illness, a cloudburst had bogged a train of wagons to the axles, a plague of rats had eaten all the grain in the silos closest to Avaricum, grain would have to be brought from the other side of Cabillonum, a hundred and twenty miles away…
Bivouacked at the terrace itself, Caesar started to make rounds. “It’s up to you what I do, boys,” he said to each laboring group in turn. “If you want, I’ll lift the siege and we’ll return to a good feed in Agedincum. This isn’t a crucial business; we can beat the Gauls without taking Avaricum. Your choice.”
And the answer was always the same: a pestilence on every Gaul, a bigger pestilence on Avaricum, and the biggest one of all on the Aedui!
“We’ve been with you for seven years, Caesar,” said Marcus Petronius, centurion spokesman for the Eighth Legion. “You’ve been mighty good to us, and we’ve never brought you disgrace. To give up after all this work would be a disgrace. No, thank you, General, we’ll tighten our belts and soldier on. We’re here to avenge the civilians who died at Cenabum, and the taking of Avaricum is a task worth our salt!”
“We’ll have to forage, Fabius,” said Caesar to his second-in-command. “It’ll have to be flesh, I’m afraid. They’ve left no granary unburned. Find sheep, cattle, anything. No one likes to eat beef, but beef is better than starvation. And where
are our so-called allies the Aedui?”
“Still sending excuses.” Fabius looked at the General very seriously. “You don’t think I ought to try to get through to Agedincum with the Ninth and Tenth?” he asked.
“Not past Vercingetorix. He’s hoping to see us try. Besides, if the Aedui continue to be delinquent after Avaricum falls, we’ll need everything it contains.” Caesar grinned. “Rather foolish of Vercingetorix, really. He’s forced me to take Avaricum. I suspect it’s the only place in this benighted land where I’m going to find food. Therefore Avaricum will have to fall.”
On the fifteenth day, when the siege terrace was two-thirds of the way to the walls, Vercingetorix moved his camp closer to Avaricum and set a trap for the Tenth, foraging. He rode off with his cavalry to spring it, but the ploy came to nothing when Caesar marched with the Ninth at midnight and threatened Vercingetorix’s camp. Both sides drew off without engaging, a difficult business for Caesar, whose men were spoiling for a fight.
And a difficult business for Vercingetorix, who found himself accused of treachery by none other than Gutruatus. Gutruatus was beginning to have doubts about the high command, and wondered if perhaps he would fill a king’s shoes better than Vercingetorix. Who talked the war council onto his side and actually managed to gain a little ground in his struggle to be hailed as King of Gaul. For the army, on hearing that he had been forced to defend himself, cheered him mightily after the war council ended in the manner peculiar to Gallic warriors, by clashing the flats of their swords against their shield bosses. The army then gave him ten thousand volunteers to reinforce Avaricum. An easy matter to get them into the town, for the marshes held a man’s weight comfortably; they were helped over the walls on the far side of Avaricum from Caesar’s siege terrace.
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