“Are you more afraid of a little snow and ice than of the Gauls?” Caesar had roared at the lot of them. “Are you going to let a little bad weather keep you from taking vengeance against the savages who burned Roman soldiers alive?”
Caesar picked up his pace, deciding to join the trailblazers at the very point of his huge army, eager to make himself physically useful, eager do his part to reach the other side of the mountains all the sooner.
Brutus puffed and groaned a step behind him, keeping up. “Who would have thought it possible to cross the mountains this early in the year?”
“No one, Brutus, least of all the Gauls, who believe Romans softer men than themselves!” Caesar told him. “And that is why we are doing it. To crush this barbarian horde before Vercingetorix can form it into a real army.”
This was no stripling barbarian chieftain. This was a clever and ruthless leader.
First he had heard travelers’ tales filtering back over the mountains which had seemed like fantasies crafted to horrify the credulous on dark and stormy nights.
Vercingetorix, accompanied only by a naked amazon, had used magic to force the gates of Gergovia. A wrathful mob had then poured through them, torn the Roman garrison to pieces with their bare hands, and roasted and eaten them. Vercingetorix had erected a giant wooden cage in the form of a man and burned a hundred legionnaires to death inside it. He had done this robed as a druid and holding the Arch Druid at sword point. According to yet another lurid tale, Vercingetorix was now himself Arch Druid, having come by the office via some hideous magical rite wherein Diviacx had been offered up as a human sacrifice to Pluto.
Then Tulius managed to send a messenger back to Gallia Narbonensis, and the report he delivered, though less florid, was grimmer still from a practical point of view.
Diviacx was indeed dead. He had been a human sacrifice at some grisly druid ceremony. Vercingetorix had not become Arch Druid, but the druids were now doing his bidding and calling all the tribes of Gaul to war against Rome under his command.
It was also true that the entire garrison of Gergovia had been slain, save for some score or so of legionnaires whom Vercingetorix had burned alive to seal some barbaric blood oath among the tribes at which most of the vergobrets had been present. After which he had placed all Romans in Gaul under sentence of death, to be conveniently carried out by any Gaul who wished to loot their property.
Many of the tribes had risen against the isolated Roman garrisons. No prisoners were being taken. Tulius had managed to concentrate the survivors in a single force near Bourges, large enough to keep the Bituriges from joining in and, for the moment at least, intimidating enough to keep Vercingetorix’s army from attacking.
This baleful news had enraged Caesar to the point where he suffered a bout of the falling sickness. If his spirit had had a vision wherever it had gone, he returned with no memory of it, but he had emerged calmer, in which state he had to admire Vercingetorix’s ruthless cleverness.
How Vercingetorix had turned the druids into his instrument might be a mystery, but the burning of the Romans in the presence of the vergobrets had been a demonic stroke of genius, implicating them all in a hideous outrage against Rome.
Vercingetorix was clever. Vercingetorix was ruthless. Perhaps he was even a master of druid magic, as the superstitious Gauls believed. But he was a Gaul commanding Gallic barbarians, facing Gaius Julius Caesar commanding the legions of Rome.
Caesar caught up to the trailblazers, and they greeted him like a comrade, pleased to see him among them, and by now no longer surprised.
“I thought I’d give you a hand again,” said Caesar, drawing his sword. “The more help you have, the faster you can blaze the trail, the faster our army can move, the sooner we can get there, and the sooner we can take our vengeance on the bastard swine who burned our comrades alive!”
He poked his sword into a snowbank, using it as they used their poles, but as he proceeded along the wall of whiteness, he began thrusting it with a vigor more appropriate to the skewering of enemies, for he saw images emerging from the glare, drawing him into it: burning men, burning fields, a burning city, walls of flame so hot and bright they were burning white, the white of desert-bleached bones, of the salted soil of what had once been Carthage, a lifeless wasteland and his legions marching across it, through white sand, white ash, under a pitiless sun burning out of a silvery-white shimmering sky, the taste of burning copper and thin, sour blood…
And a giant afire, striding toward him across this desolate landscape, crushing his legions to dust in his wake, and his face was that of Vercingetorix, and upon his head he wore the false Crown of Brenn that Gisstus had crafted, and he laughed and threw the severed head of Caesar’s dead friend at him, shouting, “Here is your tribute, Caesar! Take your triumph back to Rome!”
“You shall see who is the harder man, Vercingetorix!” Caesar cried, thrusting his sword through the flaming heart of the giant. “You shall see what happens to a people who dare to pillage what is Rome’s! How Caesar deals with a man who so spurns friendship offered freely as if by a father to a son!”
“Caesar? Caesar?”
Caesar came blinking up from whiteness into whiteness.
He was lying on his back in a snowbank with the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth from having bitten his tongue.
The falling sickness. And a vision therein.
One that he did remember but did not understand.
“Caesar? Are you all right?”
Brutus was standing over him, holding out a hand to help him up. The trailblazers had ceased their labor and gathered around him in a circle of concern.
Spurning the helping hand, Caesar rose unaided to his feet, forced a laugh. “Just the falling sickness, my friends,” he said. “They say it is the gift of the gods, though if I had my choice I’d prefer a pot of gold, or even wine.”
Brutus’ face was a carefully composed blank, but the simple and honest legionnaires eyed their commander with an unmasked nervousness tinged by a certain superstitious awe.
“But sometimes the gods grant me a vision with it,” said Caesar, “and they have done so today.”
“And what did you see, Caesar?” one of the trailblazers ventured uneasily.
“I saw the Gauls, my friends, as they are even now, drunkenly celebrating their atrocities and squabbling over the plunder, never dreaming that a Roman army is about to fall upon them. And do you know why?”
“Because no Roman army has ever crossed the mountains in winter before?”
“Indeed!” said Caesar. “Because they are barbarians and we are Romans! Because barbarians believe that what has never been done before is impossible. They will never understand that, for Romans like us, nothing is impossible. And that is why we will defeat them.”
This little speech seemed to satisfy the trailblazers, for they returned to their task with even more vigor and will than before. Caesar allowed himself to fall about a score of paces behind, to the apparent relief of Brutus.
“A noble speech, Caesar,” Brutus said.
“And true, as far as it goes,” Caesar told him. “But there is another and greater reason why we shall surely defeat Vercingetorix and his Gauls.”
Brutus gave him a quizzical look.
Caesar nodded in the direction of the trailblazers, then turned to point back at his army: horsemen, wagons, men marching in good order, filling the width of the Alpine valley, stretching back as far as the eye could see and farther, into the winding and narrowing pass leading beyond the far horizon.
“There is the other reason, Brutus!” he declared, and the pride he heard in his own voice was entirely unfeigned. “While the quarrelsome tribesmen of Vercingetorix spend the winter celebrating their cheap victories, my loyal legions trudge dutifully up these snowy mountains! He commands a Gallic rabble while I command a Roman army! His men fight for loot and their own glory. My men fight to win.”
“You see?” said Oranix. “There they ar
e!”
“It’s true!” exclaimed Litivak.
When Oranix had reported that his scouts had seen Roman troops moving through the Alpine passes before the winter snows had melted, Vercingetorix had assumed that this must be merely a scouting party. But Oranix insisted that his men had seen a Roman army on the march, and this Vercingetorix had found impossible to credit, so he decided to ride east to see for himself.
Rhia, who now never left his side, rode with them. Critognat, bored with the desultory looting, came along too. Likewise Litivak, who had been on the verge of withdrawing his Eduen warriors from the army of Gaul when the report arrived, for his men were growing restive and sullen lurking in the lands of the Arverni with little to do, and the Eduen vergobret was strongly suggesting he withdraw.
“Liscos still believes Caesar will content himself with destroying the Arverni,” Litivak had told Vercingetorix.
“And you…?”
“I’d best see for myself,” Litivak had replied.
Now the five of them sat on their horses just within the cover of a tongue of forest atop a foothill a safe distance northwest of the pass, watching the Roman army arrive in Gaul.
An army it indeed was. Formation after orderly formation emerged in narrow file from the pass, then spread out across the plain like honey pouring from the lip of a jug onto a tabletop. First came a screen of cavalry, then five ranks of infantry, then supply wagons, then another five ranks of infantry, then more cavalry leading another formation, and another, and another, like an endless succession of orderly waves rolling in across a sea of melting white snow and frozen brown mud.
“The gods favor us!” Critognat exclaimed enthusiastically.
Oranix and Rhia regarded him as if he had gone mad.
“More Romans to kill than we ever could’ve hoped for!”
Vercingetorix would have laughed were the situation not so grave. Here was a fearless Gaul such as might have ridden with Brenn, and he doubted that Critognat was jesting.
“Enough of a threat to rouse the fighting spirit of the Edui, Litivak?” he said dryly.
“This is indeed an army meaning to conquer all Gaul,” Litivak said. He shook his head. “But we are not prepared to confront an army like this.”
And we never will be, Vercingetorix knew full well.
“That is no doubt why Caesar has returned so unexpectedly early in the year,” he said instead. “To catch us unprepared and dare us to attack him with what we have.”
Which was no more than a force of some twelve thousand Arverne warriors Vercingetorix knew he could count on, about half that number of Litivak’s Edui, and a disorganized assortment of troops from the smaller tribes whose size and composition varied from day to day.
“A worthy enough challenge,” declared Critognat. “I say we should thank Caesar for offering us such glory by allowing him an honorable death in combat when we defeat him instead of burning him alive.”
“You’re getting soft in your dotage,” Vercingetorix told him with a laugh.
Only Critognat laughed with him, for in truth there was not much to laugh about. The sole glory to be gained by accepting Caesar’s challenge and attacking such an army would be a glorious defeat.
So that must be what Caesar is counting on, Vercingetorix realized. A full-force attack by an unprepared and outnumbered army of Gauls like Critognat: fearless of death, fighting for glory and honor, unable to obey any orders but those of their own stout and noble hearts.
Why else risk the mountain passes in winter? And arrive when there were no crops ripening in the fields or fresh grass for horses? Was it not Caesar himself who had declared that keeping an army well supplied was at least half the battle?
“Surprise may be on Caesar’s side,” Vercingetorix said, “but time is on our side if we make it our ally.”
“How so?” asked Litivak. “You sound as if you have a plan.”
“Perhaps I do…” Vercingetorix muttered, thinking aloud. “It is the end of winter, and our forces are far fewer than Caesar’s…”
“You sound as if this is an advantage!” exclaimed Litivak.
“And why not, if we make it so?” Vercingetorix told him as the strategy took full form in his mind. “We have stored up what we could of food and fodder, and we are among our own people. Down there is a vast army marching through a winter-barren hostile land that must survive with what it has brought with it. Caesar therefore must count on a quick series of great battles.”
“Perhaps only one!” said Critognat. “All the warriors of Gaul against all his legions! Night and day! Without respite or sleep! Gauls can stand up to that! These Romans certainly won’t! We’ll fight till they drop from exhaustion, or surrender in despair, whichever comes first!”
“No, Critognat,” Vercingetorix told him. “Why give the enemy what he hopes for? Instead, we will fight Caesar’s legions as the ants overcome the beetle that invades their nest, with a multitude of tiny bites that harry it and exhaust it and force it to be gone.”
“Ants!” roared Critognat. “We are not ants!”
“As a pack of wolves brings down a great stag, then, by ripping out its belly.”
“I like the sound of that better. But I still do not know what it means.”
“We starve them,” Vercingetorix told him. “Quick concentrated attacks on their supplies. Ride in, destroy, ride out—do it over and over again.”
“Where is the glory in that?” demanded Critognat.
“In victory, Critognat, in victory!”
“Who would wish to boast of such a victory without honor?”
“He has a point,” said Litivak. “Few Gauls would have their fighting spirits roused by a call to such inglorious battle, and many would deem it craven, and not without justice.”
In his heart, Vercingetorix knew this to be true, but the man of knowledge knew that all other paths would lead to defeat, to a Gaul conquered by Rome. And where would be the honor or glory in that?
And so he must dissemble.
Perhaps even to himself.
“Once the Romans are out of food and weakened by starvation, then we destroy them in one grand, glorious battle.”
“It might work,” muttered Litivak. “And in truth, I can see nothing else that might.”
“Still,” said Critognat, “it seems cowardly. I have no love for the Romans, but even they should not be forced to fight with their ribs showing through their skin.”
The valley was broad, the hills to the east were low and sparsely wooded, but to the west there was forest, and the Roman road that ran arrow-straight through the valley was no more than a mile from the edge of it in places. Roman infantry, twenty ranks wide and ten ranks deep, marched with brisk assurance through the valley behind a screen of cavalry. Scores of heavily laden supply wagons rumbled along the road behind them in a long, narrow, vulnerable line, but the supply train was guarded along its entire length by infantry five ranks deep, in turn flanked by cavalry outriders.
Brandishing lances before them, a wild and unruly horde of nearly a thousand Gauls came galloping out of the forest along a wide front, howling and screaming toward the western flank of the Roman supply train.
The Roman cavalry guarding the wagons wheeled smartly to confront them, and the infantry behind them began to form turtles: the front ranks with their shields before them, the rest with their shields above their heads to form a protective roof.
The Gauls held on to their lances rather than throwing them like javelins as they clashed with the Roman cavalry, creating a terrifying and thunderous bang and clatter that was more noisy than effective, for most of the lances were blocked by shields. Even so, the shock and momentum of the charge knocked many Romans off their horses, to be trampled in the melee.
But the Roman line held, the Romans drew their swords, and in such close combat, swords were much more effective than unwieldy lances, and the Romans quickly broke the Gallic line roughly in the center—
—or so at least i
t seemed, as half the Gauls wheeled north, the other half south, fleeing along the roadside with the Roman cavalry in pursuit and other Roman cavalry units swinging out in broad arcs to cut off their escape.
But behind the first wave of Gauls had been a tighter, narrower formation of Gallic cavalry. Its front ranks were armed with swords and axes, and led by Vercingetorix himself; behind them galloped several hundred Gauls bearing flaming torches.
Vercingetorix led his warriors through the gap in the Roman cavalry, swords and axes smashing at the shields of the turtles. The Gauls behind flung scores of torches over the turtled Roman infantry. Most of them fell short, bouncing off shields, causing little more than confusion among their rear ranks.
But some of them reached wagons heavily laden with sacks of grain, ten of which smoldered, caught, burst into flame.
Their shields might protect them from the Gallic steel before them, but not from the searing heat of the roaring fires behind, and many of the Romans panicked and sought to flee, and their orderly formation broke. This in turn created chaos in the infantry lines to either side of the breach as Romans collided with Romans.
The Gallic cavalry formation now divided in two. Half of them followed Vercingetorix through the gap in the infantry line, came up behind the ranks of turtles, then wheeled up onto the roadway among the wagons headed north. The other half rode through the breach, executed the same maneuver, and reached the road headed in the opposite direction.
The Gauls galloped along the road in both directions through the narrow path between the wagons and the turtles, swordsmen and axmen shielding the torchbearers, who flung their torches into wagon after wagon at close range.
As these wagons caught fire, the drovers lost control of their terrified horses, who pulled flaming wagons this way and that, smashing into other wagons, adding to the panic, spreading the fires.
Both wings of the first wave of Gauls had meanwhile made for the forest with much of the Roman cavalry that had sought to cut them off now in pursuit. The rest of the Roman cavalry broke off to ride back in confusion toward the conflagration, where the infantry that had been guarding the supply train scattered in disarray as they sought to escape the swiftly moving fire.
The Druid King Page 28