One of a pair, it seemed.
My moment of superiority vanished as the Varini’s eyes suddenly narrowed and she lunged for the pile of leaves at my feet. When she stood, her fist was wrapped around the hilt of her own found weapon—another sword, almost identical to the one I held. We had stumbled upon a weapons cache left over from the great battle of Alesia.
I knew the stories. I’d heard them told around the fire of my father’s great hall. Four year earlier, word had reached our tribe that, across the sea, the king named Arviragus—the mighty Arverni chieftain, the brave rebel the Romans had come to know by his war title, Vercingetorix—had been defeated by Julius Caesar in his wars against a confederation of Gallic tribes. And not just defeated. Shamed. Shackled and dragged off to Rome in chains like an animal. I shuddered at the thought. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate for such a man.
Alesia had been the battle that had ended the war. Caesar had surrounded the fortified town with not one but two rings of earthworks and hunkered down for a devastating siege. The defenders had eventually sent their women and children out into the no-man’s-land between the fortifications, hoping that Caesar would allow them to go free. He hadn’t. Instead, he’d let them starve.
Desperate, the Gauls had eventually been forced out of the town and into pitched battle with the legions, to no avail. And Arviragus had ultimately surrendered—but not before tens of thousands of Gaulish Celts had died. Tens of thousands more had been taken as slaves. And the once-bustling town of Alesia—what remained of it—had been left to rot, surrounded by crumbling fortifications and ditches filled with bones and brackish water. And, it appeared, ancient rusting weapons.
The Varini girl and I stared at each other for a long, tense moment. Then I let out my breath and lowered my battered blade.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m in no mood to kill you, and if Charon and his slavers come after us, rusty swords aren’t going to be much help if we’re still tethered together like a pair of oxen.”
She thought about it for a moment, then shoved her own rusted weapon through the rope belt tied around her waist and gestured me forward. When we finally reached the ruins of the hilltop town, the night’s cloud cover had grown heavier. By the little moonlight that managed to break through, we could barely make out the ragged breaches in the high stone wall. We clambered through one of the gaps, the chain between us hissing over the tumbled stones like a warning whisper.
Once inside, I could see the peak of a large thatch-roofed building rising up out of the center of the town, higher than all the rest. It reminded me with a sharp pang of homesickness of my father’s great hall, only much larger, and the outline of the roof was irregular, as if half of it had fallen in. Most of the buildings were nothing more than skeletal remains. Here and there, darkened windows set in the shells of mud and wicker walls stared vacantly at us like the eye sockets of empty skulls. In places, torn door curtains and scraps of leather awnings flapped listlessly in the chill breeze.
The place was utterly deserted.
“There.” The Varini pointed with her blade. “There’s a well.”
Dragging the slave chain between us, we stumbled toward the low, round wall that surrounded the well. But as we approached, the small hairs on the back of my neck rose. I saw the remains of a smashed water bucket that lay next to a frayed coil of rope. When we were close enough to peer over the low wall, the Varini girl gasped and covered her mouth.
The well was filled more than halfway to the top with pale, tangled bones. Skulls and long bones, cages made of ribs, the smaller bones of arms and legs. Bodies once, thrown into the well until they stacked up, one on top of the other, now bleached and arid where they piled higher than the water level. A lingering waft of decay hung in the air over the well.
That’s your imagination, I chided myself, even as I felt the bile rising in my throat. Those people have been dead for years.
“They fouled the well,” the Varini girl said, her voice gone guttural, as if she was also on the verge of retching. “Stuffed it full of corpses to make the water undrinkable.”
“The Romans must have done it.” I shook my head in disgust, unable to keep my feet from carrying me backward. “After they broke the siege. So the Arverni wouldn’t come back here.”
“Or the Arverni did it,” my companion said. “So the Romans couldn’t use the town for themselves after they won.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “They wouldn’t do that to their own dead. It’s a dishonor.”
“It’s smart,” she countered. “It’s war. Don’t leave anything behind for your enemy to use. Scorch the earth, kill the cattle, foul the water.”