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Chapter 25 - New Gods and Old

The leaders of the Gaulish cavalry and infantry converged on the high town, bearing torches made from bundles of oily pine wood. They converged on the Sacred Way, but passed by the nemeton and turned right, gathering in front of a large building with a columned portico in the Greek style. One of the men was Bellagos.

Three others joined them: an ancient woman, who hobbled with the aid of her companions, one a girl of perhaps thirteen years, and the other a matron holding a nursling in the crook of her free arm. None spoke. There was no need—they had come with one intent: to lay their demand before Teutomalos. "I count nineteen and three," said a half-Greek clerk who monitored the doorway, even at night. "I will summon the vergobret."

Vergobret: the word "king" had no exact equivalent in the Gaulish tongue. "Rix," cognate to the Latin "Rex," denoted a war chief only. A vergobret was something between a mayor and a supreme magistrate, elected from among the noble families every two years. But Teutomalos had continued in office years beyond his term, and as yet no one had mentioned holding an election, which required a quorum of nineteen heads of clans or military leaders (often the same thing), and three others. Nineteen and three were both sacred numbers; the nineteen years of the calendar and the three aspects of the most ancient deity: virgin, mother with flowing breasts, and crone.

Their primary intent was not to reject the leadership of Teutomalos, though his authority had grown well beyond its traditional limits over six consecutive terms in office, but to raise the issue of an election with one objective: to bring a false war to a real conclusion—battle with the Romans.

"Enter," said the clerk moments later. "Follow me." The vergobreon was not huge, as palaces went—perhaps sixty feet long and wide—but it was all one room, divided into thirds by two rows of fluted columns. The middle was a wide aisle with clerestory arches over the colonnades. By day, diffuse bright sunlight poured across the central aisle, but oil lamps between columns, and even the flaring torches at the far end of the room, did little to relieve the nighttime gloom.

The three women led, and the warriors following at the pace of the eldest. As they approached, Bellagos distinguished a shadowy form ahead, a man-shape drawn huge, seated on a throne black as night, that shimmered like polished marble. Teutomalos was a big man—anyone who had seen him speak, standing a full head above his tallest dryades, knew that. But the figure on the throne seemed larger still.

Bellagos's eyes went wider than the gloom could account for. Teutomalos's muscles rippled like writhing snakes, like independent creatures beneath his skin. The big hands that gripped his onyx seat's arms were white-knuckled, as if he struggled to keep his body under control, as if those massive muscles were all at war, each one with the others. But it was his face that made the hardened warrior cringe: had the vergobret's eyes always been so wide, the whites showing all around? Had the graven lines furrowing his cheeks always been deep as sword slashes?

"You want war, do you?" His voice was as harsh as iron-shod hooves on sharp gravel. "You shall have war. And I will lead you forth. But not yet. I am almost . . . ready." What, Bellagos wondered uneasily, had he almost said? "I am almost . . . what?"

He remembered the veleda's words: Teutomalos was creating . . . a new god. A god compounded of the captive spirits of a thousand dead. Old Segoboros had called that a figure of speech—but was it? There was Teutomalos, struggling as if he fought a war within his own body, against . . . himself? Or against those thousand fantômes?

Bellagos had seen the salt lagoons at the mouth of the Rhodanus. When the brine was sufficiently concentrated by sunlight, crystals formed at the pond edges. The salt dissolved in the water then formed new crystals that grew ever outward from the first ones. Teutomalos was that first crystal, Bellagos realized, the core of the growing god. But the fantômes, blind and mute as they were, did not simply surrender. They fought against Teutomalos's domination, and that was the source of his hideous struggling.

Junior member of the delegation, Bellagos was not required to speak, which was just as well. Around him, ahead of him, other voices droned, and Teutomalos responded in rasping tones. But who was the shadowy figure behind the vergobret? Whose face was hidden within that dark cowl? Bellagos edged closer.

The mysterious one gripped Teutomalos's massive shoulder as if to hold him in his seat by main force. A trick of acoustics made his whisper as clear as if uttered in Bellagos's ear: "Subdue them, king. Bend them to your will."

"They tear me apart!" hissed Teutomalos. "They will not be still! They fight for command of my hands, my eyes!"

"Shut your eyes, and you deny them sight. Master them. Win this battle, and become the god, and you will be ever victorious."

"I shall! I shall be Teutatis, god of the people." Then he moaned aloud as a particularly vicious spasm twisted him, and the shadowy one stepped away, and flung back his cowl.

"You see how the king suffers, to master the god within," said the dryade—an evil, hatchet-faced fellow, Bellagos thought, and no one he had seen before. He would have remembered those cruel, burning eyes. "He does this for you, the Salluvii," the dryade said. "Go now, and say nothing of what you have seen. When the time is right—a day, a week—his power will be as a thousand men, and he will lead you against the Romans, to victory."

Disconcerted, disoriented, the twenty-two retreated. Bellagos needed to speak with the aged crone. Surely a priestess of the Mother would have something to say about this new "god." He could not accept that what was happening was right. Surely the priestesses of the Mother would not accept this new "god."

But when they passed out into the street, the night was thick with humidity, the sky black as the inside of a sack, without moon or stars—an unnatural night. Unspeakable things seemed to lurk in the darkness that their rekindled torches could not dispel. "Tomorrow," they said to one another. "Tomorrow, we'll speak of this." The two younger women hustled the elderly one away.

Inside the king's chamber, someone screamed—a hoarse, baritone bellow without words. The thick air damped the sound—or the greedy, hovering spirits consumed it.

* * *

Pierrette awakened suddenly in the stygian darkness of her tent, her bedclothes twisted and tangled, hair plastered to her head with sweat. She crawled to the foot of her pallet and thrust her head outside, just as the moon's face emerged from thick cloud. The camp was silent, and nothing seemed amiss.

But something was. The dream had been too real. She had been there, in the oppidum, her spirit peering from Bellagos's eyes. Was the old one a priestess of the goddess, as Bellagos believed? Were all three women? But there was no sacred spring or pool within Entremont's walls. Ma did not appear often within the stone walls of a city.

Shifting moonlight made shadow and silvery light dance, outlining the red-tiled roof of the fane, only a short distance away. The fane was here, within the Romans' palisade, inaccessible to the Gaul women . . . but not to her.

She threw her sagus over her shoulders as she stepped from the tent. Thinking of her pouch with its powders and herbs, she hesitated, but did not go back for them. She did not intend to go anywhere but into the fane itself.

The moon and clouds made a path between lesser pools where women washed clothing by day. It painted the weathered wood of the fane's door with argent glitters. She pushed inside. There were no benches in the Gallic fane. She remembered benches, in her own time, when she had undressed and lowered herself into the water, but remembered none when she had awakened, in her warm bath.

A cricket chirped lethargically in a corner, but he was the only occupant besides herself. Where was the goddess—the woman in the crimson dress? Would she have to undress, and bathe in the pool, and fall asleep, for the goddess to visit her here? She was no longer the least bit sleepy, after her terrifying dream, but she was chilled from her moonlit walk. She wrapped herself in her mantle, then sat, leaning against the stone of the wall. She had no intention of falling asleep. . . .

* * *

A cool breeze brushed her forehead as the door of the fane swung open, letting the night air inside. The goddess—or the Ligure woman?—shrugged her heavy red, ocher, and green plaid sagus from her shoulders, then sat on it, next to Pierrette. "I thought you'd be here sooner," she said, "but when you didn't come, I stopped watching for you. Have you been here long?"

The woman was unquestionably the same one who had greeted her here before—with the same crimson scarf and dress, the same ornate golden torque resting on her collarbones—but she had come from outside the fane. Would a goddess just walk in through the door? Was this the goddess—or just a camp follower, a woman who shared some centurion's tent, now dressed in her feast-day best, for some reason that eluded Pierrette?

"Did you expect me to emerge from the pool itself?" the woman asked, smiling. "I saw the way you looked at me. You walked in here, didn't you? You didn't just appear from nowhere at all, like the last time. Why should I do differently?"

"Are you the goddess?"

"Some might say so. But what does it matter? You came here to speak with me, didn't you? Now here I am."

Pierrette surrendered to her logic, such as it was. Whore, priestess, or goddess, the Mother was all of those, and more. Did one girl's doubts change that? "Do you know why I came?" Pierrette asked.

"You want me to play guessing games? Why don't you just tell me?"

Pierrette sighed. Things were never easy, nor often completely clear. "I had a dream . . ." she began. As she recounted it, the other woman toyed with a ringlet of dark hair that had escaped from her scarf. She nodded knowingly from time to time, but did not interrupt until Pierrette had finished.

"I knew something was terribly wrong, up there on the hill," she mused, "but no one has told me more—when the Romans built their palisade, I stayed here. And of course, the Three in Entremont haven't been able to speak with me. So what do you want me to do about it?"

"Tell me what I should do."

"Me? You know what you have to do: what you came for."

"What about Calvinus? What if I . . . surrender to him?"

"Use your head. He didn't come all the way from Roma to bed you. He hasn't tried to force you. Do what you must, to get him to move against the oppidum."

That was not the advice Pierrette wanted—it was not even a promise that she would succeed, or that Calvinus would. Was it always up to her, alone? If the woman was not the goddess, she sounded just like her, and Pierrette felt just as angry with her.

"Why don't you go back to your tent, and get some sleep. You'll need to be bright-eyed tomorrow."

Was that, Pierrette wondered, a prophecy? "Thank you," she said, rather coldly, as she got to her feet. The woman did not rise.

"You're welcome. If all goes well for you, then it is you I will thank."

Pierrette stepped outside, and took several steps from the door. Then as she whirled her heavy cloak over her shoulders, she turned and looked back. The pool glittered with fragmented moonbeams, but nothing cast shadows across the floor, because nothing—and no one—was there. She resisted the urge to run to the far end of the fane, to check the other door.

Back in her tent, she straightened the tangled bedclothes and lay down, doubtful that she could fall asleep again—but when she awakened, even the late-rising birds were in full chant, and Guihen lay sleeping, each breath making faint whistling noises like tiny sparrows as it passed among the hairs in his nose.

* * *

The bath attendant, with his heavy basket, eyed the scholar ibn Saul disdainfully. The crazy old man and his surly boy were exactly as he had left them, one at each end of the old structure. They had rigged brass pots and cords from the two doors so that if anyone opened them, it would make a clatter—but no one had been in or out since they had arrived and taken up their positions. He wished he had made a mark on the wall for every day they had been there. How long had it been? There had been two Sabbath masses, but he could not remember how long before the first one they had arrived, or how many days since the second. . . . His understanding of mathematics was minuscule. They had been there, he concluded, more than a week, and less than three.

Despite the old scholar's grumbling if the bread he brought was not still warm from the oven, the wine cool from the cellar, the cheese scraped clean of mold, they paid well for his attendance upon them, in tiny silver coins with a face on one side, an animal on the other. The scholar's purse must be bottomless, he reflected, because he already had more coins than fingers.

"What kept you?" ibn Saul snapped. The attendant shrugged, set his basket down, and waited for his coin.

"This is the same old stuff," the boy Lovi whined. "Didn't I tell you I wanted meat? Crispy lamb?"

Ibn Saul snorted. "Heavy food will make you sleep too soundly. I want you alert. When we finish here, we'll feast at the hostelry by the south gate on our way out of town. But now . . ."

"I know. I know. We have to be sure no one comes out or goes in."

"Exactly," said his master. "The experiment, to be valid, must be rigorous."

"But if Piers is still in there, he's starved to death by now!"

"But if he isn't? If indeed he has gone . . . somewhere else?"

"If he has, I'll wager he's not living on old bread and sour wine, and cheese that smells like my feet!"

* * *

"It's a perfect spot," the consul said at mid-morning, when Pierrette visited him. Guihen could not say what the consul had thought, and she could not wait longer to find out. "We'll be able to advance within bowshot of the walls, with our flanks secure all the while. We'll never have to spread our line of advance thinly, and the ground is even enough that the maniples won't get out of step with each other."

She smiled brightly. "I told you it was a good spot."

His next words dashed her risen hopes. "Of course none of that may matter, you know. In fact, if Teutomalos has any sense at all, it won't."

"What do you mean?"

"If I were at home, and I wished perhaps to honor a god with a feast, and I invited half the Senate to attend, how would I feel if no one showed up to dine? If the setting is perfect for the Roman legions, Teutomalos will surely see that, and will refuse battle. And after all my efforts to provide a feast for him . . ."

"You must make him want to sample your fine fare," she said softly, thinking of the hideous, arrogant face of the Gaulish king.

 

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