The Druid King Read Online Free PDF Page A

detritus from the table in preparation for the main course.
    “If I understand correctly, Diviacx, your robe indicates that you are a druid. . . .”
    “This is so,” said Diviacx, reclining torpidly, but nevertheless sipping at his wine goblet.
    “And yet here you are, a priest, at the head of a trade mission.”
    Diviacx carefully placed his goblet on the table, as if now sensing it would not do to befuddle his brain further. “Not all druids are priests,” he said.
    “My husband was a priest for a time, you know,” said Calpurnia.
    “But, like myself, more a man of this world than the other?” said Diviacx.
    “Like yourself?” blurted Brutus. “I had heard you were all magicians.”
    “In our tongue, ‘druid’ means not ‘priest’ but ‘man of knowledge.’ And as there are different kinds of knowledge, so are there different kinds of druids. Magistrates.
Teachers. Many bear the knowledge of this realm, a few bear the knowledge of the other.”
    “The other realm?” said Brutus.
    “The Land of Legend.”
    Diviacx turned from Brutus to lock eyes with Caesar, and though his eyes were rheumed and bloodshot with wine, they had the power to hold Caesar’s own.
    “
You
know whereof I speak, do you not, Caesar?”
    “Do I?” said Caesar, staring back unwaveringly, for he had learned this trick too, not as a pontifex, but from his studies of oratory on Rhodes under the master of the art, Molon.
    “I have heard it said you consider yourself a man of destiny. . . .”
    “Guilty as charged,” said Caesar.
    “And the spirit of Great Alexander reborn.”
    “That, my friend, is metaphor,” said Caesar, dismissing the notion with a laugh, albeit one that sounded hollow to his own ears. This druid had seen more deeply into his soul than he found comfortable. For, although he had had difficulty taking the gods and their otherworldly realm seriously even when elected to perform their rites, he did feel a lineal connection between his own spirit and that of the long-dead Alexander.
    Not that he believed he was Alexander reborn; on the contrary, he believed that Alexander had been his primitive forerunner, as Alexander’s own father, King Philip, had been a more modest version of the great man himself. Caesar believed that his destiny was to succeed where the Macedonian had failed.
    Alexander had conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen, and it was said he had wept for lack of more to conquer. This Caesar doubted, since all he would have had to do was turn his attention westward—toward Gaul, for example. If he had wept at all, it was probably because, being a great general but no genius as a political craftsman, he had no notion of how to turn his conquests into a nation that would long survive him. He started as a king and died as an emperor, leaving the posterity of what he had built to be inherited and squabbled over by the usual royal mediocrities.
    Caesar would start with a republic and build upon that not an empire but something yet nameless, ruled not by his heirs but by a political system of his creation. This would be his monument, greater than the Pyramids or the Colossus of Rhodes or the Library of Alexandria. Greater because it would be built not of the stone and cement of the material world but of the immaterial stuff of the world inside his own cranium. Caesar shuddered. How deeply did this druid see? For that realm of future destiny was indeed his Land of Legend.
    “Are you all right?” asked Calpurnia, leaning closer to whisper in his ear in some agitation. “Not the falling sickness?”
    “Perhaps he has had a vision?” suggested Diviacx, a shade too knowingly for Caesar’s equilibrium.
    “Perhaps,” said Caesar, shaking his head, both to return his focus to the here and now and to reassure Calpurnia with the same gesture. “In a metaphorical manner of speaking.”
    Fortunately, a moment later four slaves carried in a huge bronze platter bearing the main course, and it