One ancient principle a studious god might find useful is that of consistency: an immutable rule is everywhere the same. If an event or a phenomenon seems to disobey a rule, then either the observer is deceived, or he has not delved deeply enough and the falsified rule is not fundamental.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale
Dawn was still hours away, but the entire camp was awake. Yet it was a silent wakefulness, without the horns the Romans used to denote every activity. No breathy wooden litui moaned, no buccinae blatted, no copper tubae shrilled.
No cooking fires burned, but the big ovens were already hot. Soon the embers would be swept from them, and raw, risen loaves slid in. The fine, golden, Gaulish-style bread, when baked, would be delivered to the troops even now filing by maniples to the front of the camp, assembling in muster order to each side of the Porta Praetoria.
Pierrette was puzzled. "You told me only the first legion would be sent into battle against the city," she said to the consul. "Both legions are mustering."
"Legio II has a separate task to perform. Their hastati and principes will march out, as a distraction. Their triarii will remain to guard the campand if our Massilian allies arrive, to advise them of my plan, and guide them."
By that time all the troops were formed upover a thousand men, their ranks bristling with pilishort weighted spears with iron shafts half their lengthand hastae, the longer wood-shafted spears of the heavily armed triarii veterans. Every man's shield was marked with his name and the number of his unit: I.IX, Legio I, ninth maniple. Some of the names were amusing, short epithets: Temerus, The Brave, or Trepidus, Fearfulor perhaps merely "Cautious."
"I must address my men," Calvinus said at last. "I won't see you until all is done. Perhaps then your heart will warm to this old soldier."
"You're not old, and it's not my heart that resists you, consul," she replied softly. "My head is full of doubts, and fear for my future."
"I know," he said with an exaggerated sigh. "But it is I, not you, who must face the Salluvii's mad, naked charge." He whirled away, his purple-edged cloak streaming out. Pierrette thought his dramatic exit was boyishly charming. Never mind that Gauls didn't, to the best of her knowledge, charge naked into battle any more.
The first ala of cavalry filed out the Porta Praetoria at the very first gray light in the east. Even two abreast, Pierrette guessed that a quarter hour passed by the time the last three men of the next unitthe first maniple of Legio I, in three files with hastati to the right, triarii to the left, had put the gate behind them.
"This agmenmarching orderis for movement through hostile country," Polybius explained. "The speculatores, who have scouted out the route and locations of Gallic camps outside the oppidum itself, have indicated that the column might be attacked from the north or west, so Calvinus has placed the hastati at the left. The maniples can form up quickly in battle order, facing the enemy."
By sunrise, only three maniples had passed out the gate. "It's so slow," Pierrette said.
Polybius, a sandglass in hand, raised his eyes. "It may seem so," he said, "but you will see how it works. The road to Entremont is only so wide, and two horsesor three files of troopsare all it will bear. Though the equites could race to the oppidum's walls in no time at all, they would be alone and unsupported, and any element of surprise would be lost. Besides, the siege engines can move only two miles in an hour, and all must move at the pace of the slowest unit."
Pierrette estimated that each maniple stretched almost a thousand feet as it marched. "The legion will be strung out all the way to Entremont," she said.
"You're right! When Calvinus chose the site for this camp, he had that in mind. Ala I will arrive before Entremont one and one-quarter hours after it leftfive turns of this glassjust as the second ala is passing out the gate. No stretch of road will lie unused between the leading and the following alae of horsemenand thus no one is undefended, far from his fellows. The last ala of cavalry, bringing up the rear, will arrive in battle order exactly ten turns of the glass after the first one departed."
Pierrette was duly impressed. This was truly a relentless force, its progress as inexorable as the great siege engines even then departing, their timbers stacked and bound between pairs of huge spoked wheels as high as a man, straddling the entire roadway, drawn by ten yokes of oxen strung out over a hundred feet. How could anything stand against such a force? But then she considered Entremont's walls, fifteen feet thick and twice that high, their projecting bastions' corners rounded to deflect battering rams. A vision of Teutomalos arose, as tall as the walls themselves, an enormous sword in one hand, unnatural muscles writhing with the combined strength stolen from a thousand fantômes . . . she shuddered.
"Are you cold?" asked Polybius. "Let's go back to the praetorium."
"I want to see everything."
He chuckled. "No one can do that. Even Calvinus, who will have a good vantage on the highest available ground, will not see the whole battle."
"Then you go, Master Polybius. I'll stay here until the last maniples have departed." Until that moment, she hadn't even noticed Guihen, but when she turned from Polybius back to the Porta Praetoria, there he was, beside her, just when she wanted him to be. "Can you get me out of this camp, unnoticed?"
"The consul expects you to stay here."
"Can you?"
"Could anyone stop me?" He grinned toothily. "Where do you want to go?"
"Polybius says no one can see a whole battle at once, but I want to try."
"That's a tall order . . . and I know just the tall tree for it. Come on . . . but you can't go dressed like that."
It was her turn to grin, as she lifted a corner of her sagus and revealed not a long skirt, but her old, travel-worn chiton and bracae. "Let me find somewhere to leave my mantle."
"Wait until we're outside the palisade," Guihen suggested. "Unless the consul has ordered someone to stop you . . . in that case it will take magic to get you outside."
There was no magic about their escapethey simply walked out in the slight interval between the seventh and eighth maniples, then edged along the palisade and ditch to the southwest corner of the camp.
Guihen led her through a copse and over great heaps of rough, white limestone tangled with scrub oaks, their leaves the size of her thumbnail. Then, to her surprise, they emerged on a smooth, gravelly road. "This is the road to Iberia," he said. "It's why Entremont is so importantwhoever controls the citadel controls the most important road in Gaul."
"The Via Tiberia," she said. But no, Tiberius Gracchus was dead, and anyway, the future Roman road was miles south, and would go through Aquae Sextiae, now only a Roman campif there were to be a Roman road, by any name at all.
The road led past the abandoned camp where the two of them had first encountered Romans after leaving Entremont. There it branched, one part going north, the other west. "We must leave the road here," Guihen said. "To the right is Entremont, and leftward leads to Iberia . . . though not right away, of course." They worked their way across rough, scrubby terrain dotted with stands of forest, skirting cleared fields not yet turned or planted with crops.
"There," Guihen said, pointing. "That is where we'll hide." Tall, straight pines pushed up from among fat-trunked oaks. One in particular towered above the rest. Its upper branches all swept eastward, and some looked thick enough to stand on.
They heard distant shouting, and the clash of metal on metal. "What's that?" Pierrette asked.
"A fightit sounds like the consul has lost the advantage of surprise already."
"I have to see it. Help me up."
"Not that way. Over herewe'll climb this oak, then crawl out that big limb to the pine, whose lower branches are dead, and might snap."
Pierrette scrambled into the branches of the oak and, such was her eagerness, she had no time for fear until she found herself clinging to the pine's bole so high up that she could almost encircle it with her hands.
"What's going on?" Guihen was just below her, working his way up the opposite side of the trunk.
Ala I of the first legion was in disarray. The clash of Roman weapons against Gallic long swords was what they had heard. "It looks like Gaulish horseman slipped up on them through the trees. The cohorts are forming up behind the Roman horse."
"Bellagos?" asked Guihen.
"No. I think they are Gauls from outside the oppidum."
Pierrette didn't think the milling, shouting Gauls had much of a chance. The Romans outnumbered them, and could always fall back on the prickly line of infantryman. Moments later, she was proven right when the Gauls broke off the fight and retreated into the forest, leaving one dead horse and its living rider on the field. The Roman knights made short work of the Gaulish horseman.
How strange to be watching a man killed, from on high. It was as if the greening pastures below were a chessboard, and the long line of Roman troops winding from the far side of the field merely game pieces not yet set in their places. Pierrette then suspected another advantage of Roman disciplinea consul, standing aside from the battle like this, in a high place, must feel somewhat this same dispassion, directing his troops less in the hot blood of combat than with cold intellect. Just as Cohors III formed up, with IV right behind, then beside it, a ripple of sound spread from far away, along Entremont's bastioned walls . . .
For Bellagos, astride a galloping mare, that same ripple was like thunderfour hundred and eighty iron-shod hooves pounding the gravelly turf. For Bellagos, at the front of his six score, it was as if Taranis, wielding his lightning, rode just behind, urging him on toward the Roman horsemen. Any moment now, the equites would ride out to meet them . . .
But they did not. They stood, and on their left, in a line that diminished into distant haze, the Roman foot also stood firm. If he completed the charge, Bellagos saw, those same foot soldiers could flank his horsemen, even surround them, before they could break clear. At the last possible moment, he pulled his mount's head around to the east, and the Winter Horse followed, riding along the Roman front just out of range of their spears. On they rode, and onthe line of Roman red and brown seemed endless. Some small part of Bellagos's mind noted that the troops furthest along were still in line of march, not in the tight blocks of men the Romans favored over the Massilian-style solid phalanx.
"Look!" Pierrette exclaimed. "Cohors IV is moving forward." She had recognized Bellagos by some combination of detailshis armor, helm, or posture. "Bellagos will be caught between them and the copse." But at the last moment, the kentor pulled his horse around, and his men followed, in a tight, irregular arc that curved back westward along the line of scrub, to the sally port in the city wall.
Bellagos handed his reins to a warrior afoot even as he slid down from the mare. He pulled his helmet off, and shook his hair from its sweaty coif. "Where is Teutomalos?" he demanded.
"Atop the bastion, there." The soldier pointed. Bellagos strode off, his two lances in one hand, helmet under the other arm. His tread on the wooden stairway was itself like thunder.
Teutomalos turned at the sound. Was he even taller today, even more massive? "Report!" the vergobret . . . the king . . demanded. "How many are they?"
"It's hard to say," Bellagos said, still somewhat breathless. "Over a thousand, maybe two, formed up in groups. I had no time to count ranks and files. There are perhaps half as many again in three files, stretching out of sight around the curve of the hill and the copses."
Teutomalos's face contorted in an ugly grimace that Bellagos first took for rage at his newsbut no, the kentor was not the object of his anger, his struggle. Bellagos drew back. Surrounding the king was a black-flecked haze, like smoke from burning fat, that darkened, coalesced, and then . . . Teutomalos sucked in an enormous breath, and the apparitions vanished as if consumed.
"Fantômes!" Bellagos struggled to maintain his warrior's mask, to conceal the horror behind it. He sucks in the newly dead like heady smoke, and he grows larger, stronger . . . Was this what Bellagos was fighting for? This unnatural, monstrous thing? But nohe fought for Aurinia, for golden hair set ablaze by the springtime sunlight, for the sweet fields they had walked together, the cobbled streets they had trod. . . . He fought for his teuta, his people, not for this hideous creature who bore their name: Teutomalos, Hammer of the Tribe.
"Can we attack their line of march?" asked a white-robed dryade.
"We have no forces east of the city," said a grizzled chief with huge, bristling red mustaches. "The Roman Calvinus knows this. Kentordescribe what you saw of their march. Were the most heavily armored in one file?"
"The rightmost," said Bellagos.
"You see?" The chief addressed Teutomalos, ignoring the spasms that seemed to occupy the king's attention. "I fought Romans last year at the Silver River, and it was like that. The strongest take the rear, not the fronteven marching, the triarii column marches furthest from the likely point of attack. He shows how good his spies areand that they have found our outside camps."
"We must wait," Teutomalos growled. "We must not close with them."
"What's happening?" Guihen demandeda feathery bough blocked his view of the Roman left.
"Gaul warriorshorse and footare coming out the sally gateand something is happening in the woods, too."
"They're coming out the main gate also," Guihen said. "Hundreds of them."
Pierrette saw a line of unarmored Romans run from behind Cohors I, among the equites. They threw spears into the shadows of the trees, then grasped fresh ones from bundles carried in their left hands. "Velites," she said. "They are attacking someone in the forest."
The spearmen withdrew, and a turma of horsethirty mounted menrode across the front of the trees, wheeled, and rode back. Pierrette described that for Guihen. "It's what Calvinus feared," he said. "The trees will break a concerted charge, but if the Gauls continue to sneak up, to distract the entire left wing, that will be the Romans' weakest spot."
"What can he do?"
"I don't know. He's a consul. He'll think of something." Pierrette hoped Guihen was right.
Three hours after the first Romans had left their camp, Legio I was in battle order, a scant quarter mile from the walls of Entremont, and most of the male population of the oppidum was formed up facing them. The Gaulish exodus via the north and west portals had been neither the rush of an untrained mob nor the choreographed movement of the Romans. It was uniquely Celtic, with the fire and élan of warriors born, with a precision that stemmed not from discipline but from personal pride.
Caius Sextius Calvinus leaned toward his staff prefect. "Are there any horsemen on the Gaulish left? I estimate nine hundred on the right." He was uneasy, puzzled. Good generalship demanded a balancing of forces, but the Gaulish line was definitely weak on its left, with only foot soldiers. Was that a ruse to lure the Romans toward their own right, exposing their left to a Gaulish cavalry charge? Or was it because the trees concealed a force the speculatores had missed, that would make up for the line's weakness?
The prefect shrugged. "Our outriders report that the woods are empty, and if there are horsemen on the Gaul left, they have been trained to lie down and hide behind the troops, or they are in trenchesbut you saw none when you reconnoitered the walls."
Calvinus nodded. "I did not." The commander's position was a slight rise just west of the line's center, ahead of the engineers who were busily assembling massive catapults and vicious ballistae. He tapped his sandglass against his palm as if to make the grains run faster, and the time as well. Thirteen turns since they had left the camp. Three and one-quarter hours. "How much longer?"
The prefect crossed the open grass and spoke with the chief engineer. "Any time now," he told the consul.
Pierrette swung her head to the right so quickly she almost lost her grip on the tree. There, far down the slope past the main gate, almost opposite the Romans on the south side of the oppidum were . . . more Romans! "Legio II," she breathed. "That is the rest of Calvinus's army." The new Roman force was compact: rank upon rank of shields and spears, all squeezed without intervals between the steep embankment crowned by the oppidum wall on their right and the edge of the forest on their left. A much smaller Gaulish force, all afoot, as were the Romans (Pierrette saw the Roman horses all herded together at the rear, riderless), was being pressed inexorably back toward the main gate. Then, with shrill cries, a disorganized mass of men emerged from the oppidum, and rushed forward to strengthen the resistance.
Several scores of warriors broke from the line opposing Calvinus and Legio I, and added to the confusion when their mass impacted those still sortiing from the gate. Somewhere in the Roman rear, the deep tones of a great wooden horn moaned, and though the soldiers of the second legion still outnumbered the Gauls three to one, they began slowly falling back. Watching them, suddenly despairing, Pierrette missed what was happening among the main Roman forces to the north . . .
"Now!" Calvinus shouted even before the last low moan of the distant lituus died. "Order the advance!"
The prefect nodded to the waiting trumpeters, who lifted their copper tubae to their lips. The high wails were repeated down the lines in both directions, and almost as one, the hastati began to move forward at a trot, quick time, their centurions shouting to keep them in line abreast.
A trickle of smoke from the rear became a billow. The thump-thump-thump of the catapults was followed by arcs of black smoke over the troops, then bursts of flame on the field between the armies, among the Gauls, and even on the walls of Entremont.
The principes moved out at an even more brutal double time, and at last the triarii stepped ahead, half the number of either of the others, but like great armored beetles, with breastplates of bronze and leather, greaves over their calves, their long, sturdy hastae like insect antennae probing the air ahead and overhead. Unarmored velites, burdened only with pili, ran out in front to throw their projectiles, then dashed back between the files. The field between the opposing armies narrowed as the Gauls at last (or so it seemed) advanced.
The catapults found the range after the first few volleys, and the fireballsoil-soaked rags wrapped around thick, round clay pots filled with oil and spiritsfell consistently among the Gauls. The spatters and bursts of flame might have disrupted a Roman cohort, but the Gauls, in no discernible order, just flowed around the temporary obstacles. The distance between opposing forces narrowed. . . .
"Telamon!" Pierrette hissed.
"What?"
"The battle that broke the Gauls in Italiacaught between two Roman armies, under Regulus and . . . somebody. Their greatest defeat . . . until now! The only difference is that here they have Entremont to fall back to." She fell silent, unable to watch and talk, or to talk while grinding her teeth.
The intervals between the Roman maniples were like chutes for the low-trajectory bolts from the ballistae, which plunged into the Gauls' front and impaled two, three, half a dozen men at a time. Fireballs arced overhead, and stone balls bounced and ricocheted from patches of rocky ground, taking out more Gaulish warriors, but not slowing the advance.
Velites darted out across the Roman front, and threw their pili. Most of the spears fell to ground. Some Gauls (those who had never fought Romans before, Pierrette guessed) picked them up to throw them back, but even the impact with the ground had bent the soft iron shafts. The two lines, hastati and Gauls, met, and a great roar arose, and the clash and thump of weapons. Principes from behind pressed into the hastati intervals, forming a solid front. The triarii still lagged back, their pace almost leisurely but for its precision, its determination.
Gauls tried to shake loose the pili that lodged in their shields, but the soft iron shafts, bent by impact and shaking, refused to come loose, and exasperated warriors threw down the encumbered shields and pressed on with bare arms and naked blades.
On the far end of the battle, from Pierrette's vantage, Gaulish and Roman horse wheeled past each other, then clashed in a melee of spears and long swords. There was no way to spot Bellagos in the milling mass. The Roman right pressed forward, and the Gauls seemed to bend backweakened by the loss of men who had turned to fight Legio II at their rear. "They're going to be cut off!" Pierrette shrieked, pounding a fist against the rough pine bark.
"Who?" cried Guihen.
"The Salyens!" The Romans had bent the Gaulish left like a fishhook, and if the impetus continued, would turn it short of retreat to the main gate. Then, if Legio II continued to press forward, the Roman forces would unite in one great line. Pierrette's eyes strained to see the cavalry fight at the east end of the conflict. If the Romans pressed forward there, they might cut off the sally port, and even surround the entire Gaulish army outside their own walls. Victory lay just ahead!
"What's that?" Calvinus demanded. A terrible bellowing erupted far to his right, out of sight around the northwest corner of the city wall. "Send someone to find out!" he commanded. A decurion of the turma assigned as couriers shouted an order, and a cavalryman broke away from his fellows and immediately galloped off. . . .
"Oh no!" Pierrette gasped. Guihen, who now clung to the skinny trunk just opposite her, his neck twisted at an almost impossible angle so he could see the battle below, moaned softly.
From the main gate emerged a giant man, towering heads above any others, the flaming orange crest of his golden helmet brushing the lintel. His sword looked as long as an infantryman's spear, and his bellow was as loud as the battle-horns that announced him. "It's Teutomalos!" Pierrette explained. "It's the Gauls' new god!"
The monstrous warrior brushed aside his own men and plunged into the fray south of the gate. His huge sword cut a swath through Legio II's front rank. Men fell, their shields cut in half, their bodies severed at waist or thigh wherever Teutomalos struck. Where he did not, the Salyen warriors, no longer driven back, took heart and pressed the Romans away from the gate. . . .
Teutomalos howled commands unintelligible over the din that beat at Pierrette's ears from two sides, and he wheeled about. Freshly inspired warriors filled the breach he left. The giant Gaul now headed toward the northerly battle for the gate. With a shriek that sounded like agony, he plunged into the Roman line.
The courier reined his lathered horse in front of the consul. "A giant!" he shouted. "A giant Gaul tall as two men is slaughtering the second cohort."
"What of the first? And of the cavalry?"
"Gaulish horsemen made a break for the trees, to cut off the gate. They're fighting with the first maniple, which the monster has separated from the legion."
"Have they broken our line?"
"Not yet. Not when I . . ."
Calvinus had already turned away. "Decurion! Another rider! Order the triarii upmaniples two through five to hold the flank, maniple one into the trees, to secure Ala I's retreat. Now!"
The rider turned his mount brutally, his legs flapping against its flanks. He clung desperately to its mane and neck. In minutes, the farthest horns sounded, and . . .
"The triarii advance!" Pierrette cried out. The armored men of the second, third, fourth, and fifth maniples moved forward as one, each maniple in perfect order, rank and file, shifting rightward a step for every pace forward. The gap between them and the swaying, breaking Roman line lessened, then disappeared. Some hastati and principe survivors of Cohors I broke formation and faded into the woods at the side, and shortly later, Pierrette saw some of them emerge alongside the beleaguered cavalry. Then the Roman presence near the gate seemed to evaporate as the horsemen pulled back to the woods. The triarii of Maniple I slowly backed away after them.
Pierrette watch a few Gauls pursue them into the trees. But most werewith the giant Teutomaloscompleting the slaughter of the principes and hastati now surrounded before the open gate.
Pierrette wept as each man fell, skewered on a Salyen lance or hacked through by the king's never-blunting sword, and trampled beneath his feetpoor, pathetic bundles of rags and shattered shields. She hardly heard the Roman horns that sounded all along the third-of-a-mile battle line. She hardly saw the effect of their blaring calls, but their purpose soon became evident. Everywhere it had advanced before, the Roman army stopped. Triarii moved up on the Roman left, and velites dragged away the bodies of the dead and wounded. On the right, the reinforced line held, then slowly retreated, fighting still.
Nowhere did the Gauls advance against themas if they, too, had been commanded to hold. Pierrette glanced toward the main gate. Where was Teutomalos? There was no sign of the giant warrior, except the Roman dead that strewed the approach to the town. She saw Gauls filing back through the gate, into the oppidum. All along the line it was the same: Romans backed awaythose who couldand velites carried or dragged those who could not. Gauls sidled sideways toward either the main gate or the sally port, and surprisingly soon, the Romans were again almost a quarter mile from the walls of Entremont, back where they had first formed their line of battle, and the last living Gauls had retreated into the town.
Behind the Roman lines seethed many scores of men, swarming like ants. What were they doing? Leftward, Pierrette saw no sign of Legio II, which had retreated out of sight beyond the corner of the city wall.
"We have to get to the consul!" Pierrette said. "We can't let him retreat to the camp! He'll never come forth again, if he does!"
Painfully, quickly, they slid, climbed, half-fell down the height of the tree, then leaped from its lowermost branches to the ground. They made their way, not by the route they had come, but northward among the big, widely spaced forest trees toward the place they had last seen Legio I.
The Romans of Legio I were digging in. It was not as big a camp as the one by the hot springs, only a hundred paces on a side, but it would have a ditch and a berm, and even a light palisade of poles cut from the copses along the day's line of march.
Pierrette wrapped herself in a blue-and-yellow horse blanket from a Gaulish mount slain on the battlefield. A centurion supervising the digging recognized her and Guihen. They were pointed toward the new praetorium, where a tent had already been set up. Calvinus sat on a folding stool of Egyptian design, elbows on knees, chin on fists. Deep in thought, he hardly noticed the newcomers, and when he did, he failed to remonstrate about Pierrette's presence on the field of battle, instead of in the main camp.
"Where were you?" he snapped. "Did you see the monster Gaul?"
"Teutomalos? We saw him." Pierrette shuddered. "He has grown even in the last few days."
"How do you know that?" Calvinus eyed her suspiciously. "Have you been in contact with someone . . . among the Gauls?"
"Not in any manner you would accept as true," she replied. "But I saw him, in a dream that was not false. Believe me. Every death, every head whose lips and eyes are sewn shut to capture its spirit, enhances his power. You must press ahead, or it will be too late."
"I didn't see him with my own eyes," the consul mused, "but . . . I am now inclined to believe you. Can he continue to grow like that? How many of those heads . . ." He abruptly sprang to his feet. "Varro! Summon a turma immediately. And thirty torches." The centurion leaped to obey.
"The velites have recovered our own dead from the field," he explained as he mounted his horse. "But even now, Gauls are out there . . ."
Without asking, Pierrette tossed her cloak aside and reached out a hand to the consul. He grasped it, and she swung up behind him. The thirty horsemen, torches and spears in hand, assembled in the newly established Via Praetoria. Calvinus waved them ahead, and followed them out the unfinished Porta Praetoria, the camp's south gate, facing the enemy.
Beyond, where the lines had met, torches flickered like angry firefliesGauls, recovering their own dead. Calvinus spurred his mount alongside that of the first decurion of the squad. "Can we drive them off?" he asked.
"They're afoot, and unarmored. The tribune Marcus Caepio has ordered the triarii of the seventh maniple to back us up."
Calvinus nodded. "See to it, then."
When thirty shouting, torch-wielding equites bore down on them, the Gauls quickly abandoned their tasks, and took up spears and shields. Pierrette, behind the consul, caught only glimpses of the skirmish that ensued. The Salyen warriors gathered in line abreast, and made no attempt to fleebut behind them, a horse-drawn wooden sledge made a quick retreat toward the sally port.
"Stop them!" Pierrette cried. "Don't let them reach the portal!" Her words came too late. The Roman horsemen were already engaged with the Gauls, and none could extricate themselves from the fight. The sledge drew up to the portal. The light of torches flooded its approach as the wooden gate opened.
Thirty horsemen and sixty tough, heavily armored triarii made short work of the lesser number of Gauls, and chased down several who tried to make a run for the gate. When the last Gaul was slain, Pierrette slid from the horse, and Calvinus dismounted after her, to examine the Gauls' handiwork.
Pierrette tasted sharp, sour bile when she saw what she had known she would see: the Salyens had not used the de facto truce of night to gather their honored dead. The field of war was as littered with Gaulish corpses as it had been when the action had been halted, with one grisly difference: the bodies that sprawled in the awkward postures of death had no heads. Those had been roughly hacked off and piled on the horse-drawn sledge, and were now safely within the walls of Entremont.
Bellagos heard the commotion by the sally port. He dropped the rag he had been using to rub down his horse, and sprinted for the wall. The sledge drivers had already crossed the corner of the campus martius, and were almost to the high town gate when he overtook them. "Stand aside, kentor," said one. "We're taking these to the nemeton."
" `These?' you say? As if you carry broken pots or a load of vegetables?" He angrily yanked the canvas cover from the sledge. . . .
Like a heap of melons they lay, in bloody disarray. Some heads faced up, their dull eyes staring at the night sky. Others showed only the tufts of lime-stiffened hair, or the ragged stumps of necks. Bellagos reached into the heap and grasped white-blond hair. He pulled. Several heads fell to the ground with sodden thumps as he withdrew the one. "This one goes with me," he said. "He was of the Winter Horse."
"You can't do that!" protested one sledge driver. "Teutomalos wants all of them."
"What kind of man are you? What of this man's wife? What of his orphaned children? Better he be hung from their ridgepole, with painted eyes, where he can protect his home, than eyeless in the sacred place."
"We won't fight you for one head," the driver said. He turned away and coaxed the horses through the high-town gate. Bellagos turned the head around and stared into its sightless eyes. Then he sat down, and he wept.
Like silent black flies they swarmed around the hulking giant Gaul. Now grown too large to fit through the doorway of the vergobreon, Teutomalos squatted in the street in front of it. When the swarming, elusive black motes were thick enough, he raised his tormented face, opened his gaping maw, and sucked them from the air. With every breath, he swelled. His abandoned helmet would no longer fit: a copper washtub would be none too large for his enormous head. His great sword would now serve to pick his teeth. Even squatting, his haunted eyes looked over the heads of the fawning dryades surrounding himthough none too closely; the king was not particular whose fantômes he consumed, and none of the priests wanted to be crushed beneath his elephantine feet.
At a distance huge charcoal fires roared as twenty men worked the multiple bellows of an impromptu forge. Four smiths hammered at once, reshaping a dozen swords into one enormous blade as long as a Greek sarissa, a twenty-foot spear. It was clearly an impossible task; no bellows could pump fast enough, no heap of glowing coals was hot enough, to raise that great mass of metal to the white heat required to hammer-weld those blades into one . . . but under Teutomalos's intense gaze, red iron became yellow, and yellow white. The impossible sword took form. The king, the almost-god, had not yet grown tall enough to wield it, but when the eyes of the newly dead were sewn shut, when their ghosts bumbled blindly with no hope of sight but through his eyes, he would do so. By morning, the new sword's barrel-like haft would fit his hand.
"Be ready," Bellagos commanded his betrothed. "If the vergobret commands the Winter Horse onto the field at dawn, I must go, but . . . just be ready."
"Will you fight the Romans again tomorrow?" asked Aurinia.
"I don't know what I will do."
"Now you see why you must not wait?" The consul had been silent since leaving the grisly field, after commanding his cavalrymen to drag the headless Gauls away. He had not said to bury them, but the senior decurion found a ravine deep enough, and ordered rocks and dirt pushed down atop the bodies.
"We were winning today," Calvinus said, "but when the monster entered the fray, we could not hold. Why will tomorrow be different?"
"You must win! Or else march back to your camp by the hot springs, and from there to your ships on the Argentia, and home to Romayou may have several years, even a lifetime, before your children see the face of Teutomalos there, towering over your seven hills."
"I will fight," Calvinus said softly, grimly. "But know thisI cannot win. You need have no further concern for your maidenhood, because I will not be alive at the end of the day to exercise our bargain."
Pierrette knew then what she must do. There was no other course. She wrapped her borrowed cloak about her shoulders. She leaned down and kissed the top of the consul's head. "Where are you going?" he asked, seeing her gesture to her elfin-eared familiar, the Ligure, Guihen.
"As you said, you were winning the natural battle. Only the advent of unnatural forces stopped your advance. I have no choice but to fight a supernatural battle of my own. I am going back to the citadel, to do what I should have, before. I only regret that my chance for success is less now, because I waited so long."
"What will you do?"
"I will confront the god Teutomalos with what poor magic I have learned. What choice is there? And at dawn, you too must do battle, whatever happens to me. Promise me that you will not retreat."
"Many of my men have seen Teutomalos, and by now all have heard of him. When I address them at muster, I will speak of their mothers and fathers, their sisters, brothers, and children. They will willingly die to spare them the sight of Teutomalos's face."
Pierrette and Guihen departed.
"How can we get in?" Pierrette asked.
"The way we left, I think. Sentries will be alert for Roman activity in the camps, but not for moon-shadows creeping up the wall. If the ladder is still there . . ."
The skirted the dense copses east of the battlefield. The eastern road was alive with couriers and mounted sentries keeping the line of communication with Legio II open. The second legion's camp was at the first branching of the road to Iberia, where they had departed from the common line of march to Entremont. Pierrette and Guihen saw the torches and fires of that camp, a quarter mile south. They slipped close to the city wall, beyond the Traders' Gate to the low town. Only sporadic cumulus clouds crossed the moon's face. They crept uphill in the clouds' passing shadows. The ladder was there. When they had raised it, Guihen climbed first.
"All is safe!" he whispered moments later. "The house is empty."
Pierrette scrambled up. As soon as she lowered herself into the courtyard, the moon deigned to sweep the cobbles with silvery light. There, on the table inside the door, were her powders and potions, just as she had left them.
"Can you warn Kraton?" she asked her companion. "I don't know what help he can be, but perhapsafter todayhis friends have had a change of heart."
"If they have, what shall I tell them?"
"The Romans will muster in darkness, and will march at first light. If there is to be a . . . a battle . . . inside these walls, it will have to be at the nemeton, at that time. Have them be readywith torches. If they can think of a way to distract the sentries on the north wall as well . . ."
"I presume that the torches will be used for something besides their light."
Pierrette nodded. "I'll need all the help, all the distractions, that I can get."
Guihen left Pierrette seated at her table, staring at the poor collection of magical things laid out there. Herbs and potions, against thousands of fantômes? She had little hope of winning. But she had to try. Softly, she whispered a spell ancient when the Minoan sea kings first made boats of wood, instead of branches and greased animal skins.
"Yes, that one," she murmured. "And this one. . . ." She uttered other words in the staccato syllables of the Hittite tongue. The unseen effects of one spell combined with those of the other, and she felt a surge of power, a tingle like the very moment before lightning was to strike. . . .
Sorcery, unlike simple magic, was in the free and flexible combination of such spells, just as music was the combination of notes, or a stew, of ingredients, each with its own spice, savor, and taste, making a unique dish. And, she reminded herself, she was a sorceress, not a simple housewife. She would brew up a dish fit for a king.