" `The true gods require no statues of them to be erected,' he said. `They have the heads of man and they themselves appear when they choose, and they are living as the crops that come from the earth are living, as all things under the heavens are living, even the stones and the moon itself, which divides time in the great silence of its never changing cycles.'
" `Very likely,' I said under my breath, not wishing to disturb him. So it was zeal, this mixture of cleverness and youthfulness I had perceived in him. I should have known it. And something came back to me from Julius Caesar's writings about Gaul, that the Keltoi had come from Dis Pater, the god of the night. Was this strange creature a believer in these things?
" `There are old gods in Egypt,' he said softly, `and there are old gods in this land for those who know how to worship them. I do not mean in your temples round which merchants sell the animals to defile the altars, and the butchers after sell the meat that is left over. I speak of the proper worship, the proper sacrifice for the god, the one sacrifice to which he will hearken.'
" `Human sacrifice, you mean, don't you?' I said unobtrusively. Caesar had described well enough that practice among the Keltoi, and it rather curdled my blood to think of it. Of course I'd seen ghastly deaths in the arena in Rome, ghastly deaths at the places of execution, but human sacrifice to the gods, that we had not done in centuries. If ever.
"And now I realized what this remarkable man might actually be. A Druid, a member of the ancient priesthood of the Keltoi, whom Caesar had also described, a priesthood so powerful that nothing like it existed, so far as I knew, anywhere in the Empire. But it wasn't supposed to exist in Roman Gaul anymore either.
"Of course the Druids were always described as wearing long white robes. They went into the forests and collected mistletoe off the oak trees with ceremonial sickles. And this man looked more like a farmer, or a soldier. But then what Druid was going to wear his white robes into a waterfront tavem? And it wasn't lawful anymore for the Druids to go about being Druids.
" `Do you really believe in this old worship?' I asked, leaning forward. `Have you yourself been down to the bottom of Egypt?'
"If this was a real live Druid, I had made a marvelous catch, I was thinking. I could get this man to tell me things about the Keltoi that nobody knew. And what on earth did Egypt have to do with it, I wondered?
" `No,' he said. `I have not been to Egypt, though from Egypt our gods came to us. It is not my destiny to, go there. It is not my destiny to learn to read the ancient language. The tongue I speak is enough for the gods. They give ear to it.'
"'And what tongue is that?'
" `The tongue of the Keltoi, of course,' he said. `You know that without asking.'
" `And when you speak to your gods, how do you know that they hear you?'
"His eyes widened again, and his mouth lengthened in an unmistakable look of triumph.
" `My gods answer me,' he said quietly.
"Surely he was a Druid. And he appeared to take on a shimmer, suddenly. I pictured him in his white robes. There might have been an earthquake then in Massilia, and I doubt I would have noticed it.
" `Then you yourself have heard them,' I said.
"`I have laid eyes upon my gods,' he said. `And they have spoken to me both in words and in silence.'
"`And what do they say? What do they do that makes them different from our gods, I mean aside from the nature of the sacrifice?'
"His voice took on the lilting reverence of a song as he spoke. `They do as gods have always done; they divide the evil from the good. They bring down blessings upon all who worship them. They draw the faithful into harmony with all the cycles of the universe, with the cycles of the moon, as I have told you. They fructify the land, the gods do. All things that are good proceed from them.'
"Yes, I thought, the old old religion in its simplest forms, and the forms that still held a great spell for the common people of the Empire.