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Chapter 28 - Victory and Defeat

In the Roman camp, the last fires had died to embers, and only a single torch remained lit in front of the praetorium, by the consul's tent. It illuminated two sentries. Calvinus himself had slipped out the rear, under the tent's wall, and now stood at the foot of the Via Praetoria. Because the legions had no allied troops, and because the camp itself was small, he had ordered the muster unconventionally: Ala I of the cavalry—one hundred and fifty horsemen—gathered in silence at the Porta Principalis Dextra, the west gate. Ala II was at the Porta Principalis Sinistra, the east. The foot troops assembled in two halves, with the first cohort just right of the Porta Praetoria, which faced Entremont, and the tenth just left of it. The cohorts stood in exact reverse order of the line of battle, with V on the extreme right, VI left. The ranks also were reversed, with hastati at the rear, and triarii at the front.

When the cohorts filed out of the wide Porta Praetoria, Cohors I through IV would march right, and Cohors X through VI left, thus exactly reversing their orders left to right and front to rear. The cavalry would angle from the side gates forward, and anchor both ends of the forming battle line. Calvinus estimated (and hoped) that the entire force would be deployed in record time, and would be across the open ground to the citadel before the Gauls could sortie.

The velites attached to each maniple formed up with ladders they had spent the night making—ladders built according to Polybius's clever formula, which guaranteed they would be tall enough to top the city walls, even though no Roman had gotten close enough to measure them. That formula—the Greek mathematics were beyond the consul's ability to follow—had served Polybius's friend Aemilianus well at Numantia. It would serve Calvinus now. But first, his troops had to reach the walls.

The velites would rush ahead to place the ladders. At the first sign that the Gauls had spotted their activity, the tribunes were to order horns sounded, and the entire Roman force would assault the walls. Ballistae, sighted in during the recent battle, would sweep the town's walls and fill the air in front of the sally port with their heavy bolts. Catapults would send fireballs, lead shot, and rounded basalt stones over the wall into the campus martius, to disrupt the Gaulish horsemen forming up inside.

Legio II, now joined by its triarii—for this battle was to be all or nothing, and there was no need to guard the refuge of the permanent camp—would attack from the south in similar fashion, sweeping the main gate with ballista arrows, shot, and fireballs—but with a difference. Most of the legion would not march against that gate, but would break away at the halfway point, and would throw their ladders against the east wall. There, they would bring a great steel-shod battering ram to bear against the Traders' Gate.

Calvinus's overall strategy (and his hope) was thus: the Romans could not stand against the Salyen line, augmented by the giant Teutomalos, who could stride from one end of the battle to the other, breaking the Roman formation wherever he wanted to. But if the Romans gained the walls, and once the troopers were in the streets, the giant's sweeping sword could only batter rooftops and walls, and trample over his own people as they scurried to hopeful safety.

All depended on surprise, on an ultimate application of Roman precision and discipline. Would they be enough?

* * *

Pierrette was almost ready. As soon as Guihen returned, they would slip through the streets, and if Kraton and his friends would help, she would soon be within the high town.

The door swung wide, and crashed against the wall. Pierrette gasped. Silhouetted in the moonlight was a tall figure, a man, but . . . above his head towered the branching horns of . . . "Cernunnos!" Cernunnos, the stag-god, right out of Pierrette's childhood nightmares. . . .

The apparition's eyes flared wide, and he spoke: "You! Again!" Then Pierrette understood—it was not Cernunnos, but a man wearing deer horns and fur. "Cunotar!" she hissed.

He pushed into the room, followed immediately by men with swords drawn. "I'm glad, now, that I didn't leave Entremont. I was at the postern, ready to fetch reinforcements—Allobroges and Calvarii, even now on their way. Swift horses awaited me below, beyond the Roman camp, but . . . I sensed you. I smelled the stink of burning oil, and I knew . . . But how? What magic do you command? I will have to find out before I allow you to die."

"The stink was your own corruption," Pierrette said, recovering slightly from the shock of his entrance to distract him from those trains of thought. "The very air reeks of it."

"Bind her well," the dryade commanded his men. "She escaped her fate once, in Heraclea, but not again." Two men pulled her arms behind her back. They flung her to the floor. Coarse-fibered ropes bit into the skin of her wrists.

"What's this?" Cunotar grated, passing through into the back room, where the table was laid with Pierrette's experiments. "Sorcery! We've captured not just a veleda, a seeress, but a witch." He snorted. "Thyme and sulfur, fool's gold and dried flowers—not much of a sorceress, I'll warrant . . . but gag her anyway. There's no sense taking a chance of her uttering some feeble spell."

His scornful words turned Pierrette cold. Were they simply bravado or were her efforts so obviously feeble? And was Cunotar a mage as well as a priest? She hadn't thought so, before. But for him, ten years had elapsed. What had he done with them? Ten years, under what evil tutelage?

Someone stuffed rags in her mouth, and wrapped her head in torn bedclothes. It immediately became hot and stifling within, and she had to fight for every breath. Rough hands lifted her to her feet.

"Take her to the nemeton." Cunotar's voice was muffled. "Leave everything here as it is. I'll study her magics later."

Pierrette tried to keep her feet as the soldiers dragged her down the rough, cobbled streets, but even before she felt the ground rising, approaching the old battlements of the original high city, she felt her bare feet slipping in her own blood. She could hear nothing over the leathery slap of her captors' sandals, the rattle of the double-chain belts that held their scabbards. It was almost daylight, and people must be about. Was anyone watching? Kraton? Guihen? Would anyone tell them?

She knew when they approached the nemeton by the tangy reek of cedar oil. She could imagine the preserved heads peering from their niches in the doorway columns. What did they think? Did they pity her, or welcome another future addition to their grisly camaraderie? Muffled as she was, she got no sense of them at all.

"Wait!" she heard Cunotar rasp. "Not here. I have unpleasant memories of what she did to the nemeton at Heraclea. Put her in a dolium instead, and weight the lid with heavy stones." A dolium—a huge grainary jar. If Guihen was still free, would he—or anyone—know where to look for her?

She felt herself dragged again, facedown, unable to regain her feet. Her knees battered against the cobbles, but not for long—the granaries were only forty paces away, adjacent to the big, common ovens that baked the town's bread. "Strip her. I don't think she's clever enough to have anything of use secreted in her clothing, but take no chances.

When they removed her blindfold, the glare of the grain-court was blinding, but she had no time to adjust to it. Her slit garments were torn from her. "You've got more meat on you than I'd have thought," Cunotar said dryly. "A pity no one will be able to enjoy those pert breasts and thighs before your head is separated from them. Perhaps I'll impale you on a sharp stake, when I return, in memory of the tree that gored me on the Plain of Stones." Then she was spun away from him, and thrust head-down into the darkness. Her forehead struck the bottom of the man-tall jar with a dull thump, and she knew no more.

* * *

Calvinus spoke with each element of the Roman force separately, in a quiet voice that did not carry beyond the fort's battlements. A hastily scrawled copy of his short speech had been rushed by carrier to the Legio II camp, where it would be read to the troops by the primus pilus, the senior centurion of the triarii, and thus of the entire legion.

Now it was time. The moon had set, the sun was soon to rise, and the initial deployment would be over ground carefully cleared of all obstacles during the night. The legion would move forward at quick time, and only the velites with the ladders would be out of breath when they arrived at the city walls. . . .

The consul nodded, and the tribunes quickly moved right and left, to Cohors I and X. The rude, unhinged timbers of the Porta Praetoria, Porta Principalis Dextra, and Porta Principalis Sinistra, were drawn aside, and the exodus began. . . .

* * *

Bellagos had kept Aurinia by his side all the night. Ordinarily, her father might have been expected to protest such impropriety, but these were not ordinary times. Now they stood on the wall near the sally port—so Bellagos would be near his horse and his men. A sentry stood a few paces away, his eyes only infrequently straying from the empty field below the wall to the lucky kentor and his pretty blond companion.

Aurinia's eyes, lovely, limpid, and blue, were better suited to moonless nights than were Bellagos's—or the sentry's. She could not tell exactly what she saw, except that it moved, like the rippling shadow cast by a passing cloud. She only guessed what it was. She turned to the sentry. "How long before dawn?" she asked him. "Do you think the Romans will come out against us again?"

"Soon," he replied. "In the time you'd take to descend the wall, the sun will rise. And yes, they'll come—and we will destroy them. Our vergobret is now a god—the dryadeae have said so. What mortal man can stand against a god?"

"Did you actually see him fight, today?" Her voice was warm, excited, girlish. It would have distracted even the most duty-bound man.

"See him? I fought alongside him, outside the main gate, and—"

A wooden thud interrupted his brag. Aurinia squeezed Bellagos's hand, then stepped back from the wall to give her lover a clear path. Bellagos immediately understood—and in the moment made the decision he had so long avoided. . . .

The sentry had no time to cry out an alarm when he recognized the rag-wrapped ladder poles. Bellagos was the larger man, and he hit the sentry with the full impact of his weight, sending him over the low parapet. The thirty-foot fall was too quick for him to draw breath to scream. The night was still too dark for others along the wall to see what had transpired.

"Come," he commanded Aurinia. "The first men up that ladder won't stop to ask if we're their enemies." They hurried along the wall to the steep stairway. By the time they were halfway down, a sentry further along the wall raised the alarm. How much time had they granted the attackers? Was it enough to make the slightest difference in the outcome?

"My horse is ready," Bellagos whispered. "Come with me now."

"What of Father and Mother?"

"The veleda said nothing of them. What of . . . our son?"

"You know I'm with child? How . . ."

"The veleda told me. She . . . she saw him, in a far place, standing beside us. We must make her vision true. Come."

* * *

Dolia were not stacked above the ground, but were buried in it, an improvement on the grain-pits of earlier times. This one was empty, a groggy Pierrette realized, not because its contents had been consumed (the siege had not been that long) but because it was badly cracked. Silt had washed into it. She licked gritty mud from her teeth and spat it out.

She wriggled until her head was above her knees, then struggled to stand. Her fingertips just reached the stone lid of the jar, but she could exert no force on it. She was well trapped. Tears made muddy tracks down her cheeks. Even now, the Romans might be assaulting the walls, and she was stuck here. Even now Teutomalos would be . . .

She sank back to her knees. What hope was there? She would die in this black confinement, Calvinus would be slain, Marius and Caesar would be born as slaves to Gaulish overlords, and the spirits of a million dead would linger, slaves themselves to a greater Evil.

She would die. But would her body remain here? Or would it be found on the cold, foggy slope below the sacred cave? What was the reality? What was not?

Brightness like a sliver of daylight illuminated a small corner of her mind. The spell Mondradd in Mon did not transform her back in time—not exactly. At first, it had allowed her only to see events past, riding as a passenger in the tiny mind of a magpie. Later, it had permitted her to walk through the veil of years in a place where that barrier was weak. Later still, terrified, she had flung herself into a different reality, where she had encountered Cunotar at Heraclea. On Rhodanus's shore, she had walked out of that time into her own.

She reviewed the essence of the spell's ancient words, line by line, not translating them (because they refused translation) but sensing their totality.

* * *
Mondradd in Mon.Borabd orá perdó.Merdrabd or vern.Arfaht ará camdó.
* * *

There, in the second line—"Borabd orá perdó"—the sense was not of time, but of difference. Only the first line spoke of the Wheel of Time, once complete, now broken; there was a shift between different realities: she had a brief impression of a thousand worlds only a thought apart from each other, each one differing only by a single concept, a single rule or natural law, a single possibility.

In one, had been she been born a mouse, not a girl? Could she scurry out a crack in the dolium, and tunnel through the hard earth to freedom? In another, was she only a dream in someone's sleeping head and, as in a dream, could she be in one place one moment, and then abruptly in another, without a break in the dreamers credulity? If this were all a dream . . .

"Mondradd in Taìn," she whispered. "Borabd orá perdó." In the first verse, she had changed a single word, and "Time" became something else—a displacement of reality, a tiny bubble of oneness that stayed right where it was while the Earth continued to move along its regular course. A tiny moment stretched to seem as though all the sand in Polybius's glass had run through when, in actuality, a single grain might have fallen. In that moment, in her stubborn, immobile, bubble, Pierrette waited while the Earth turned, and she felt the dolium's hard clay pass through her, like the twinge she felt when she remembered Alkides's, touch. She felt the stony earth beyond as the gentlest of caresses, inside herself, and then she felt the quiet air of dawn on her bare skin. . . .

* * *

Cunotar had left a guard on her prison. Now he stood staring, eyes wide and terrified, his mouth agape. The naked girl had risen from the earth right before his eyes! Now she stood brushing mud from her tousled black hair, from her breasts, and she spoke words in a foreign tongue. As he drew breath to cry out, he felt a strange sensation in his feet, then his calves. He looked down, and saw that the stony ground was enveloping him. Already he was waist-deep in it. Then he screamed. It was not an alarm, only an inarticulate cry, his fear given voice, because his world was no longer a solid place, and he no longer stood upon it.

"This is the Otherworld," she said in Gaulish. "It's not real—no more so than anything is." He did not understand.

* * *

But Pierrette did. This was not really happening. The world was no different. This was some other place, some different universe. Elsewhere, she was still in the dolium (or perhaps outside the sacred cave, or in the Roman bath) but she was also here. And that was enough for her. There was Cunotar, his black eyes wide. She uttered soft, simple words, and raised her hand. Somewhere far away, lightning rippled above the western hills, and belated thunder echoed. Kin to the coming storm was the white, jagged light that leaped from her fingertips.

Cunotar recoiled, raising a warding hand—then screamed as Pierrette's blow struck. His fingertips flared with brilliant light. Burned flesh scaled away and floated toward the ground, leaving behind clawed, twig-thin, blackened bone.

He cursed, uttered harsh, unintelligible words, and his hand was again whole. "You've learned a few things since you burned my fantômes," he snarled, "but have you learned as much as I have?" His cloak hem fluttered, and the black cloth over his arms became feathers, his sharp nose a raven's beak, his words a harsh croak. He launched himself through the air at her, his talons spread wide.

A magpie squawked and fluttered away beneath the sooty shadow. It was green, black, white and blue, iridescent in the low morning light. Sun in the east and black towering clouds in the west fought to dominate the emerging day. The raven became a black viper, and struck at the magpie, but its fangs broke on the shiny basalt cobble it struck, where the magpie had been. Cunotar howled, and clapped his restored hand over broken, bleeding teeth, and Pierrette, whose name meant "little stone," stood where the cobble had lain, and laughed. Now she understood the magic of this place! Now she had the key to it. This was the Gauls' time, their universe, in which magic came from the Otherworld where they now fought. On Samonias, the holy day when the veil between the worlds stretched thin, the spirits of the dead wandered among mortal men, and unlucky mortals in the realm of the dead. Teutomalos's plot—or was it Cunotar's, and the king only his tool?—was to make every day of the year an unholy Samonias, and that task was well under way.

But now, that served her as well as them, because when nothing was truly real, nothing could be unreal. She remembered the limestone rocks above Citharista that Yan Oors had called "the dragon's bones," and even at this great distance she felt the earth shudder as the dragon arose, drawing stony flesh about itself, and took to the air. But even a dragon could not cover the miles in time to aid her.

The thunderheads took on the shape of a giant man whose legs were coils of snakes. "Taranis!" she cried in greeting. Her own fingers flashing with small lightning, for the god was her friend, from long ago and yet to be, in Minho's fair land. Cunotar snarled impotently at the god's thundering approach.

* * *

Calvinus eyed the coming storm with mixed feelings. Already, his men were atop the wall in two places, on both sides of the south sally port. Oil-soaked brush flamed against the gate itself, and no one could pass in or out. That trapped the Gaulish horsemen, who could only mill about in the campus martius, or seek other egress from the town—but the main gate was across the city, and the streets were filled with men, women, and children, directionless, not knowing which way they should go.

Overhead the whoosh of fireballs and the cleaner whish of basalt, fired clay, and lead projectiles was followed by the screams of the burned, the clatter of breaking roof tiles and falling masonry, the crackle of rising flames within the walls. The storm might put out the fires—but rain would intensify the confusion in the streets. A breathless tribune reported that the maniples of principes were now ascending the ladders, and that hastati held the walls against the Gauls, who assaulted them from within. "What of the giant?" the consul demanded.

"No one has seen him," the tribune answered. "Could we have injured him, yesterday? Or is his . . . strength . . . exhausted?" The educated, rational Roman could not bring himself to use the word "magic."

"We can't count on that," Calvinus said. "Order the triarii of the second cohort to attack the main gate with a battering ram. If he comes to defend it, like yesterday . . . are the ballistae in place?"

"They are."

"Then we may see if this Gaulish monster is proof against arrows as big as he is," Calvinus concluded.

He then took a report by a courier from Legio II. The Traders' Gate still held, and only the hastati of two cohorts had gotten over the walls. They had invested the houses—including, known to neither man, the one where Pierrette's magical appurtenances now lay trampled beneath the hobnails of Roman caligae. Their numbers were not yet enough, the senior tribune of Legio II judged, to carry the battle into the streets, or to assault the campus martius from behind.

* * *

Teutomalos grasped the tree-trunk haft of his new sword, at last finished, and growled his displeasure that he had been kept so long from the developing battle. He stood too tall to pass through the main gate, so he strode down the Sacred Way instead, intending to step over the city wall itself at the north, where the Romans pressed hardest. The engineers at the edge of the forest beyond the main gate watched that great head of flamelike hair recede, as they stood impotently by their ballistae.

Teutomalos crushed his own folk with each heavy step, but did not care. He was no longer Teutomalos. He was Teutatis, the war god himself. He was teuta, the tribe, and those who died were no more important as individuals then the hairs he shed, the flakes of dried skin on his scalp, the chips knocked from his toenails when he plowed through a house he could not walk around.

* * *

Even beyond the veil that separated the Otherworld from the ordinary, Pierrette felt the god's crushing, pounding approach, but Cunotar was pressing her hard. One moment he was a wolf to her fox, a flood to her flame, a falling tree to . . . she could spare no effort for anything else. It was stalemate. Cunotar was master of this environment, she a talented, innovative newcomer. Desperately fending off a swarm of bees, she became smoke to disperse them, but Cunotar became wind. She would be better off fighting him in the real world with a knife or . . .

As quickly as the thought arose, Pierrette became . . . nothing. She was not even a void; she was air moving with the rest of the air, no more flecked with dust, and no less. Cunotar's wild eyes cast about himself. Where had she gone? From what direction would she next attack?

Pierrette was not gone. She was back in the "real" world. And there, where the soldier had flung them, were her clothes and . . . and her pouch. She dressed quickly. Groping in the pouch, her fingers touched something cool and smooth. She pulled the "serpent's egg" out. The blue and red veins in the clear glass seemed to pulse with a semblance of life. She draped its string around her neck. She remembered a time when there had been a similar thread between her voyaging spirit and her body. She had not broken past that early kind of soul travel until she been forced to stay in the past, to live, drink, eat, even love, there. Had there been such a thread trailing from Cunotar on the Plain of Stones? She did not know. Was there now?

The gentle breeze ruffled the dryade's hair. There! Thin as spider silk, invisible except by the inner light from her eyes (or so the Gallic philosophers believed light to be). The tenuous thread drifted into and out of Pierrette's perception, and only when the currents of her passage moved it could she trace its course, out into the street, the Sacred Way, and . . . into the nemeton. Of course.

A hurrying dryade hustled past . . . through . . . her, and out into the street. The breeze stirred dry leaves under the staircase, and rose with the warmest air. It sighed through the planks of the door, and there was Cunotar, asleep on his cloak, amidst the heads of his victims. And there at his waist was his sword.

The fingers of the zephyr tugged at the leather-wrapped hilt, and became visible: soft, glassy things like the tendrils of jellyfish floating in the sea near Citharista. They began to block the light from the sword hilt, and they became real. Pierrette's shadow fell across the sleeping dryade.

Ever so gently, grasping the scabbard with one hand, she pulled the sword free. Cunotar's eyes opened suddenly. "You! Here! How did you get out. . . ." His fingers curved into claws as he sprang to his feet.

She held the sword in front of her. Cunotar laughed. "Magecraft only works in the Otherworld," he grated. "You are still trapped in a grain-jar, into which I will pour oil—boiling oil." He rushed at her as if she were not there, and he was going to hurry down the stairs, believing her true self elsewhere. Holding Cunotar's blade point outward, Pierette stepped into the doorway to block his passage. He lunged forward, not even bothering to brush the sword aside: it was illusion, as was she. That illusion, his nemesis, with both hands on the hilt of the great weapon, thrust it at him with every effort of body and will.

Piercing Cunotar's belly just right of center, it spun him against the door frame, jerking the blade from Pierette's grasp. Cunotar staggered backward, eyes wide and incredulous: when would he truly believe that she—and the sword in his own vitals—were real?

Pierrette let go of the hilt, her one remaining question still unanswered: was she capable of killing him in cold blood?

Cunotar's hands ran red as he tried to pull the blade from his gut, but the point was lodged in his spine. His legs folded and he pitched forward, his face a mask of agony and surprise. His weight drove the sword point through, and the bloody blade stood out from his back.

Pierette had never hurt anyone like that. The only weapon she had ever held was her father's ancient, rusty spatha. What had she done now? Her mind recoiled: this was wrong! Suddenly she understood: Cunotar's death at her hands would soil her, poison and pollute her, impelling her in a terrible direction she did not wish to go. It would burden her with an evil that would fester within, and turn spells of moonlight and irises into . . . something else, something black . . .

Pierrette squatted beside him, fingering the glass bauble at her throat. It seemed to pulse in time with the blood that pushed from Cunotar's fatal wound. "What are you doing?" His voice was a harsh whisper.

"I'm waiting for you to die."

"How are you here? What didn't I understand?"

"You believed that spirits only travel in the underworld, though your eyes have long told you otherwise."

"What do you mean?"

"The fantômes are in this world. Teutomalos sucks them in as if they were swarms of flies. You saw them yourself."

He emitted one last, bubbling groan, then blood gushed from his mouth. Pierrette held her serpent's egg before his wide, panicked eyes, now glowing like coals. "Is your master coming for you?" she whispered. "Can you feel him? Are you ready? You can still escape. Quickly, dryade—come here instead." The jewel caught and reflected the color from his eyes, and . . . Cunotar died. She felt his last, desperate effort as his soul leaped from his eyes toward the glittering bauble. Somewhere near, but not in this world, she heard an angry, frustrated howl.

Pierrette smiled. "You can't have him," she said. "He's in here." She swung the serpent's egg back and forth. It pulsed more visibly than before, like the veins in a frog's bloated neck. The faint, hot glow was no longer a reflection. It emanated from within the glass. "He's safe from you at last," she told the Eater of Gods. Pierrette tried to feel something—anything—but her only emotion was gratitude that he had obliged her by dying, so she could do what she had to do. Belisama had been right. When it was time, she had known what to do, what the serpent's egg was for.

* * *

"The Greeks!" shouted a courier from Legio II. "The Massilians approach!"

"Where?" Calvinus asked.

"The coast road. Three thousand footmen and five hundred horse."

"Send them against the main gate. Wait—how goes the fight in the low town?"

"We are holding. All but the triarii are inside." Calvinus waved him off. A centurion led up a fresh horse, and the courier almost leaped from one mount to the other.

The exultation the consul felt at the news was not due to impending victory alone. He was thinking of his bargain with Pierrette. But it was short-lived: another courier galloped up from the west. "The giant is loose!" he cried. "He has vaulted the wall and is among us. Most of Cohort II is down already. The engineers are working to bring ballistae to bear, but one of his strides is ten ordinary paces."

"Tell them to do their utmost," the consul said. He turned away. The battle had gone well until now—just like yesterday. Would it now turn sour? Even with their Greek allies, could the Romans prevail against . . . he shaped the word with great distaste . . . a god?

* * *

"Kraton!" exclaimed Pierrette. The Gaul stood in front of his companions, in the Sacred Way.

"How can we help?" he asked, then ducked instinctively as a thrumming, spattering fireball plunged to the street and burst.

Pierrette looked at the burning oil and rags, then at Kraton, then at the nemeton. Kraton, whose eyes had followed hers, nodded wordlessly. What she wanted would not be easy for him. Had she asked Father Otho to burn his precious chapel, with its reliquary containing Sainte Claire's bones, or Anselm his library, their expressions would have been no less reluctant. But Kraton would do it. He picked up a burning rag on the point of his sword and stepped between the square pillars, past the desiccated heads of his countrymen.

His companions followed suit. Pierrette did not wait. She ran beside the swath of broken houses where Teutomalos had strode. She rushed up to the parapet of the city wall, then gasped. There he was, dwarfing the Roman horsemen who rode around him just beyond the reach of his terrible, bloody sword. His free hand batted at dozens of hastae and pili that flapped about his legs, clinging in his flesh. He roared in a voice louder and deeper than any ever heard before—a god's bellow, but . . . he was not a god. Not yet. Not quite.

* * *

From the tall pine tree Guihen watched as the fresh Massilian phalanx first drove back and then surrounded the Gauls who had come out of of the main gate. He could not see Legio II, now entirely within the low town, but he saw their results: creeping columns of smoke that marched slowly toward the campus martius and the high city. He occasionally glimpsed the flame-red brightness of Teutomalos's hair over the north wall, but could make nothing of the fighting there. Greeks swarmed in the main gate, four, even six abreast, abandoning their long spears outside. Surely the battle was almost won.

* * *

Caius Sextius Calvinus would not have agreed. His visions of dark hair spread across his pillow, of delectable small breasts brushing his chest, had evaporated. In their place was the very real sight of an entire cohort slaughtered, even the triarii, their mutilated body parts scattered across the trampled grass like bloody offal from a butcher's cart.

Even as he watched, Teutomalos's monstrous blade cut a horse right through, just behind its rider, who went down in a tangle of slithery gore. Even as he watched, he became aware that Teutomalos had seen him. The giant Gaul turned toward the rise where the consul stood with his two tribunes and the primus pilus holding the eagle standard. Calvinus's dark eyes locked with the monster's fiery ones.

* * *

Atop the wall, Pierrette gritted her teeth in helpless rage. She could not get down, because battles raged in the streets below where heavily armored Greek hoplites fought larger, but less well-armored, Gauls.

The first raindrop fell, and splashed off her nose. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud. Her fingers tingled sympathetically. "Taranis," she whispered. Perhaps there was yet something she could do. The face of a storm was like an ancient house unchanged in centuries; the veil between one reality and another was thin there. This time, she had no need to part the veil, only to blow a breath of air against it, to shape what was already there into something that was . . . almost . . . there.

As the flame-haired monster waded through the Romans toward the consul's golden eagle standard, reaping them like dry wheat, thunder boomed behind him, and the black clouds coalesced near the ground, whirling madly. They roared—a long, continuous basso howl that seemed to form the syllables of a name: "Teutomalos!"

The giant whirled around and faced this new challenge. A sword of brilliant lightning swept toward him, and he caught the blow on his own blade. The battle of the gods had begun. Pierrette, the Romans, the Greeks and Gauls, all stood as if transfixed, as argent lightning and aureate flame did battle, towering over them all.

It seemed an even match: Taranis, chief god of the Gauls, whom the Romans might call Jupiter, and Teutatis the Red, whom they called Mars. Around they whirled, grunting thunderously as each struggled for advantage, their blades locked. One caught the other's heel to trip him, and both swayed, but remained upright. Taranis seemed attached to the sky itself, and would not fall, while Teutatis's feet were in the earth and could not be lifted from it. On and on they struggled, for gods did not tire.

Pierrette forced her gaze away from the combat and glanced toward the high town, where a new light flickered and a new column of smoke rose skyward. "Yes!" she cried exultantly. Kraton had fired the nemeton. As she watched, the flames reached the second floor, then the third . . . and the whole roof lifted on a pillow of orange flame, then fell back, and collapsed inward. Thick, oily smoke shot with brilliant sparks climbed quickly and spread out across the bases of Taranis's clouds. The temple's upper walls wavered like parchment, but did not fall.

Pierrette heard the war cries of the Massilians, and saw several of them dart into the yet-unburned ground floor of the nemeton. They emerged with the statues of the Gallic gods, which they tipped and smashed on the cobbles of the Sacred Way. Then the walls collapsed, the first floor plunged downward, the square columns pitched outward into the street, and smoke obscured everything in that direction, filling the air from ground to the low clouds. From it arose a silent shout, a thousand exultant voices, as the flames set the captive fantômes free. Behind Pierrette, Taranis's voice rose in a bellow of equal glee. She turned to look.

Teutomalos shrank. He narrowly avoided being crushed by his own sword, that he could no longer hold. His scream of rage was a thin, distant piping as he scurried away from his giant enemy, who laughed scornfully and sheathed his flashing sword. Taranis whirled about, faster and faster, and he rose up into his black, roiling clouds.

A different shadow scudded across the ground: great wings, long ophidian neck, and lashing tail. Pierrette waved gratefully to the great beast, and bade it go home. "The battle will soon be won," she called out to it. "You may resume your long nap."

Then the rain began to fall in earnest, and soon Pierrette's eyes were blurred by rainfall mixed with salty sweat and tears. The downpour put out the lesser fires, but the nemeton blazed on, crackling, whistling as if the spirit of a giant god still animated it. But Teutomalos was gone. He had leaped onto a Roman horse, and had galloped off, abandoning his city and his people. So much, Pierrette thought, for Teutatis, god of the tribe. The real Teutatis was not a captive construct of evil men, but endured in the living tribe, lingering a while in proper fantômes hung respectfully from ridgepoles and doorways, and filling the fertile soil with his living essence, drained from the bodies and bones of all who lay within it.

And there, far below, stood Caius Sextius Calvinus, who raised his eyes to the wall, and saw her there. Even at this distance she saw—or imagined—his smile, as he looked upon one more prize he had won today.

 

 

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