The Druid King by Norman Spinrad

Author:Norman Spinrad [Spinrad, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428479
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

XII

CAN YOU SEE the clouds moving?” asked Rhia.

Vercingetorix gazed up at a leaden ceiling of dirty grayish clouds, the sort from which snow or rain might come down, but not the sort likely to produce a short storm that would clear the heavens.

He shook his head.

“Neither can I,” said Rhia.

“I believe this weather will hold. . . .”

“And there will be no moon. . . .”

Gergovia perched atop a hill that rose out of a broad meadow, both logged clear in the long ago, but the stream meandering through the meadow nurtured a string of copses along its banks. A makeshift village had grown up under the shelter of these trees: crude huts of wicker and wattle with conical thatched roofs thrown up by impoverished peasants whose winter stores and livestock had been stolen by the Romans, and who hoped to survive until spring by fishing the stream and hunting the small game that gathered round the water source.

Or that was what the Roman garrison occupying Gergovia was supposed to think.

Vercingetorix and Rhia stood on the stream bank farthest from the city, just far enough out of the trees to be able to study the late-afternoon sky.

“So be it,” said Vercingetorix. “We do it tonight.”

Most of the inhabitants of the village were starveling peasant families, and huntsmen with their wives and children as well, for among the early arrivals were some dozen of them, led by Oranix, the “great hunter,” whose lives and livelihoods had been imperiled by pillaging Romans turning hunters into prey.

Vercingetorix had immediately put them to work winkling out the scattered warriors who had, singly or in small groups, escaped Caesar’s legions and hidden in the forest. Now there were about half a hundred of them in the village. Many had arrived lacking arms, but smiths had fled into the haven of the forest too, and deep within the woods they had forged new swords and axes.

The seemingly pathetic refugee village was now a hunting blind from which Vercingetorix intended to take Gergovia from the Roman cohort holding it.

Gergovia, like all such Gallic redoubts, was designed to be easy to hold and difficult to take. An approaching army would be visible from long distances, giving the defenders ample time to prepare a warm reception of arrows. The Roman general Tulius had obviously reckoned that a few hundred men would be enough to hold the city through the winter against whatever the scattered Arverni could muster.

Vercingetorix had hoped that the druids would gather him an army from the other tribes, particularly the intact forces of the Edui, to overwhelm by sheer numbers the six hundred or so Romans holding the city.

But the druids had failed.

The same word came back from all the tribes. Take your own city back, Vercingetorix, and then we shall consider joining your army of Gauls. Even Litivak, who now commanded enough Edui himself to make the difference, informed Vercingetorix that he would not endanger his own position by attempting to lead his warriors where he knew they would refuse to follow.

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