Oribasius shrugged. 'Proceed, then,' he said. 'I will observe your efforts, but don't ask me to participate.'
As it happened, an autopsy was unnecessary. When we unwrapped the swaddles, we were surprised to find not the normal two layers, but five full sets of wrappings — the outer ones hiding the inner layers, which were soaked in blood.
'The infant's cord was not tied,' I noted grimly. 'He bled to death.'
Oribasius peered at the bloody little corpse in astonishment.
'But I saw her tie it off?' he exclaimed. 'I held the cord in my fingers while she knotted the string — it was still pulsating!'
We stood staring at the baby in silence.
'And then,' I began slowly, 'and then you left, and Flaminia gave the baby to Julian to hold.' I thought hard, straining to remember all the insignificant details of the past night. 'A few minutes later she took him back, and then she and her daughter went to the corner and changed his swaddlings, before taking him in to Helena.'
'Changed his swaddlings? So soon?' Oribasius asked, puzzled.
'To murder him. She clipped off the cord above the knot, then wrapped extra cloths around him to hide the bleeding. My God — for a newborn, just losing a small cup's worth of blood would be fatal.'
He had died in his sleep in his mother's arms, losing blood so quickly as to be unable to sustain life in his little body for more than an hour or two at the most, or even to gasp in distress to his sleeping mother — but long enough for the culprit to make her escape.
As Julian had ordered, Flaminia was placed in the cellar below the palace, where in times past noble hostages who had been captured in battle were kept in relatively comfortable surroundings while awaiting ransom payments from their relatives. Prisoners had not been kept in those cells for two centuries or more, however, and the quarters now were far less accommodating. Her unceasing shrieks and howls, like those of a maddened dog, jangled our nerves that entire night and most of the next morning as Paul applied his instruments and techniques of interrogation. The sounds wafted up through the kitchen flues and ash drops, anywhere there was a vent or duct communicating with the cellars, and they trebled in volume a few hours later when Flaminia's husband and several other immigrant men were brought in, after being captured while attempting to flee disguised as beggars. The prisoners' incessant wailing drove all of us to near lunacy, and their cries were joined periodically by those of Helena, who herself drifted in and out of lucidity in her madness and grief. The only thing worse was the sudden silence from the cellar shortly after sunrise, almost at the peak of one of Flaminia's screams, leaving only the howling of the men, which itself was cut just as abruptly, one by one, moments later.
Oribasius looked at me and sighed, realizing the implications as well as I. We had just finished our own investigation and now walked slowly down the long hall to Julian's office, the same anteroom where I had left him the night before. He sat disheveled, his clothes unchanged, his face unwashed, a few of the candles still sputtering on the sills where he had left them lit, most of them dissolved into stinking masses of tallow. Papers and books were strewn on the floor where he had swept them off the tables in his misery and fury. Muffled sobs could be heard from the adjacent room where Helena lay, mixed with the soft voice of her Gallic nurse attempting to soothe her. In the midst of the chaos stood Paul the Chain, clean, freshly shaven, with a hint of perfumed scent and a faint, condescending smile on his lips as he calmly surveyed our rumpled clothes and hollow-eyed faces. He was flanked on either side by Pentadius and Gaudentius, looking somewhat less prim.
'The court physicians have arrived, Your Majesty,' he said unctuously, though Julian scarcely looked up from his vacant stare at the wall. Then casting an apologetic glance at us, he continued, 'I was just about to report the results of my investigation into the mat-'
'Our suspicions were confirmed, Caesar,' I hastily interrupted, wanting to avoid hearing the details of Paul's report. 'The child was murdered, by the midwife. If you wish me to explain how, I will be happy to do so.'
There was a long pause, during which the silence was broken only by the unremitting, choking sobs emerging from behind the thick oaken door of the next room. 'I do not,' Julian finally replied almost inaudibly, without moving. 'It is enough for me to know that she has been found and caught, the murderous bitch. Now all others involved in the conspiracy must be uncovered.'
At this Paul, as if on cue, stepped forward. 'Indeed, Caesar, they already have.'
Julian slowly turned his head, not yet facing us, for like anyone who has suffered a soul-crushing loss, he was not yet capable of looking another man directly in the face. He maintained his silence, however, and Paul continued.
'The midwife's husband was a German, who though a permanent immigrant to these parts was clearly bent on revenge at your defeat of his people. He was assisted by several Germanic cronies, relations of his, and they had infected the woman Flaminia with their hatred for Rome. Obviously they were in the pay of Chonodomarius' agents. Their gold, which the woman was carrying, has been sent to the imperial treasury, and the woman, her husband, and their collaborators… dispatched. We are still seeking the daughter.' Pentadius and Gaudentius, silent as leeches, nodded vigorously.
Julian remained motionless for some time, looking as wretched and careworn as any man I had ever seen, having aged twenty years in a night. Finally, he stood up with a motion slow and deliberate, facing us all and straightening his shoulders from their habitual slump with what seemed a mighty effort.
'Chonodomarius will die for this. Slowly and painfully. I shall make it not only my personal goal, but the mission of the entire Western Empire, and this I pledge: Chonodomarius will die.'
Matilda, the daughter, was captured several weeks later, purely by accident, when she was recognized begging in the city by one of the palace staff — she had returned after her escape, knowing of no safe place to hide. Since Paul had by then been recalled to Milan, and Julian could not be approached about the matter, Sallustius ordered that she be quietly executed. At my remonstrance, however, as to her youth and to the fact that the wretched girl was probably innocent of her parents' crimes, he shrugged dismissively and demanded simply that she be imprisoned outside the city walls, away from our sight. She was, and promptly forgotten.
II
During the winter, the season when officers are most often given leave to attend to their private affairs at home or in Rome, and the common soldiers simply hunker down to rest and recover their strength for the rigorous spring campaigning to come, Julian worked himself brutally, spending the mornings stripped bare to a loincloth in Sens's garrison camp, exercising with his own soldiers. He was completely absent of any shame of the fact that his physical skills and strength in the soldiering arts were barely equal to those of his bottom rankers, but he garnered the admiration of his troops for his relentless determination. His thin, common soldier's cloak, which he wore even in the bitterest wind that whistled down out of the north woods, and his unkempt hair were a familiar and welcome sight around the camp in the mornings. After his strenuous training at swordplay and the lance, and his physical conditioning with a boxing coach, he could often be found limping over to a campfire, throwing a blanket over his shoulders to spend a few moments savoring a bowl of soup and some hardtack like any infantry grunt, listening to the gripes and joking of his men.
In the afternoons he spent long hours huddled in his drafty, unheated quarters with Sallustius. One by one, he summoned each of the commanders of all the garrisons of Gaul and the Transalpine to meet with him personally over the course of several days during the winter. During these private meetings he and Sallustius grilled them mercilessly: What is the disposition of the barbarian troops in your area? Their numbers? Their weaponry? Their training habits and discipline? What is the level of fitness of your own troops? Your garrison's ability to withstand a prolonged enemy siege? Its ability to apply a siege to the enemy? What are the levels of cooperation between you an
d your neighboring garrisons? Frequency of communications? Sources of rivalry? Instances of incompetence? Each interview ended with the most important question of all: What of Chonodomarius? What of the Beast? But the barbarian king, with his unmistakable weapon and physique, had seemingly disappeared.
Indications of weakness or indecisiveness were immediately seized upon by Julian and derided as unworthy of the magnificent Roman army he was building. Relative troop strength was relentlessly debated, and thousands of men, from Spain to Britain to Gaul, were placed on the march that winter, as he and his advisers identified gaps in defenses that needed to be filled, officers who needed to be retired, dismissed, or promoted, and underutilized garrisons to be scheduled into routine rotation. The icy roads that winter witnessed a constant stream of shifting divisions, shouting officers, and infantrymen shivering and blowing vapor as they marched on the cobbles and flagstones in their standard-issue military tunics and cloaks. Dismissing such garb as impractical for a Roman fighting force, Julian insisted that the men be issued thick, woolen trousers, leather jerkins, and well-tanned ox-hide boots, to be equal to the winter-ready barbarians.
A low pall of smoke hung over the fields as the garrisons and camps on the front lines of the Rhine territories filled with soldiers newly transferred from the reconquered cities in the rear. The forum rang with the men's cheers in response to Julian's patriotic exhortations, and the workshops rang with the sounds of the armorers' anvils as they reshod the long-neglected battle horses, and restocked the quartermasters with spare javelins, swords, shields, and helmets. The smithies created length after endless length of thick, sturdy chain, which we strung across every road and minor river to inhibit the passage of all persons except those authorized by each local garrison commander.
But although he spent his days in constant motion, his nights offered little respite, for in the hours after dark, when the rest of the city and the camp lay in exhaustion from his demands, he paced and watched, preparing himself for the bitter cold of his shirtless morning training sessions with his men, only a few hours away. He never used his bed or even a camp cot anymore, but preferred to take his rest for only an hour or so at a time, his head down on his arms at his study table, or leaning back against the hard stone wall as he sat upright on a stool. Fearing the effect on his health, I would try to force him to rest.
'Rest?' he asked questioningly. 'Impossible. Idle hands are the devil's tools. You know that old saw, Caesarius.'
'And what does that mean? Exhaustion and sickness are the devil's delight as well. You drive yourself too hard.'
He shrugged it off. 'If building an army means losing some sleep, then I will lose sleep. I could not forgive myself if Rome's borders were breached because her Caesar was sleeping. When preparations are complete, then I will slow down.'
His nights he spent with his beloved philosophers, Plato and Marcus Aurelius foremost among them, and passed hours discussing with me the subtleties of thinkers such as Plotinus and Iamblichus. He took much delight in my ability to pick up on the neo-Platonists' closely reasoned arguments, though he laughingly derided my opinion that such philosophies were unworthy of an enlightened Caesar in the new Christian age. God, however, he had relegated to a tier far down on his list of priorities, as he attended Communion services only when required for reasons of state, and read Scripture almost never. It was almost as if, rather than seeking out comfort from Christ during times of torment, he avoided Him out of a sense of betrayal. I often kept Julian company during his long hours in the dark library, distressed that the jewel-encrusted, illuminated codex of the Gospels Eusebia had sent him that winter as a gift had been carelessly relegated to a corner shelf. On several occasions I artfully arranged to leave it lying open to passages I thought might be appropriate to his mood that day, but he ignored or refused the hint, impatiently returning the heavy volume back to its place.
By February, after almost six months of turmoil and movement among the armies of Rome in Gaul and the West, Julian and Sallustius finally seemed satisfied with the arrangement of their forces and their preparations for the spring campaign. The barbarians had begun testing the resolve and strength of the Romans with predatory raids in eastern Gaul, but had been repulsed by the reinforced garrisons on every occasion, confirming Julian in his thinking that he had effectively anticipated the strengths and weaknesses of both his and the enemy's forces.
And then disaster struck.
Stupidly, blindly, he had been so focused on building effective bulwarks for the Empire against the Alemanni massing on the far side of the Rhine that he had neglected his own base of operations. The local commander at Sens had not been subjected to the exhaustive weeks of probing and discussion that every other commander in the province had suffered. The city's walls were collapsing in some points, and crumbling nearly everywhere else; worst of all, the local garrison had been reduced through reassignments, leaving Julian even without the services of the scutarii and gentiles in his personal bodyguard, the shield-bearing Gallic infantrymen and mounted lancers who were traditionally assigned to support high-ranking Romans when visiting Gaul. Only his Acolytes and a skeleton garrison remained in the city.
And the Beast noticed.
He arrived on precisely one of the endless nights that I have described for you, Brother, just before Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingers to light the face of the heavens, the coldest part of the night when even the sentries on watch are beginning to nod in their drowsiness. An arrow, whizzing silently through the frigid air in the midst of a cloud of such angry missiles, slammed into the face of one of the watchmen, an enormous man and a crack wrestler from Phrygia nicknamed Helix, 'the Creeper.' The arrow pierced his cheekbone and knocked him off the wall, but incredibly, the man survived the twenty-foot fall with full consciousness, and true to his name, he crawled to the next sentry post dragging a broken leg behind him, the arrow shaft lodged deep in his face, and sounded the alarm.
The Acolytes were immediately roused, as were the two hundred men of the garrison, and Julian, who was naturally already awake, quickly called the city magistrate and ordered him to summon the local militia. The old man did so immediately, gathering together a thousand merchants, tradesmen, and farmers lodging within the walls for the morrow's weekly market to assist in defending the city. It was only with great difficulty, and the loss of some forty Acolytes and garrison soldiers, that we were able to repel the fierce barbarian attack that night. I confess that our success in doing so was due not so much to our own skills and training as to the barbarians' astonishing misfortune: During a clever feint on our main gate, they had sent a large body of crack assault troops to a point on the other side where our walls had crumbled so far that the local urchins routinely climbed through the rubble to steal fruit from the orchard on the other side. It was only by the merest chance that one small boy happened to be doing just that when he spied the band of barbarians assembling for the rear attack. The brave lad was able to rush back and sound the alarm in time for Julian to divert his forces to that sector, and thereby save the city.
Daylight revealed our precarious situation. Sens had been ripe for a bold stroke, for the barbarians to effect a lightning raid to capture the Caesar and all his staff in one fell swoop. God's grace had prevented this for the time being, but when I peered over the walls that morning I surveyed ten thousand Alemanni massing just out of our arrow range, their officers racing and prancing up and down the lines on their horses. In their midst was a single, enormous German, shirtless in the cold and brandishing a harpoon, as my old acquaintance at the palace in Milan had put it. My blood ran cold. All I could think of was the fate of Lucius Vitellius and his men at Cologne, and I sought out Julian to inform him that his prayers had been granted: he was about to face the Beast.
Julian, however, was not to be delayed by my morbid warnings; the man had become a tornado. Despite having taken no sleep the night before, he and scowling Sallustius seemed to be everywhere. The city's gates had attracted h
is first attention, just as the attack was getting under way, and were barricaded in time. Sections of the walls that were threatening breach were immediately repaired as well, though not without loss of a considerable number of men to arrow wounds, as they were forced into exposed positions low on the walls to replace the missing stones. For two days and nights he stalked the ramparts ceaselessly, pressing into service every man and woman in the city above the age of twelve. The youngest and least skilled he assigned to the menial tasks of hauling hods of mortar and collecting spent barbarian arrows from the streets; the oldest men and women were made to prepare food in their own kitchens for the soldiers and workers so they would not have to take the time to do so on their own. Within two days, two normal weeks of defensive works had been accomplished, and Julian, at my persistent urging, allowed himself to take a nap, one of an unthinkable duration for him, five hours — at which point he rose, refreshed, and recommenced his urgent pacing of the walls.
Night and day he strode the battlements and ramparts, grinding his teeth in fury at his stupidity in retaining for himself such meager numbers of troops, which prevented him from breaking the siege. Below the walls fumed Chonodomarius, in equal rage that his plans for a swift blow against the Caesar had been thwarted, and that he was now reduced to besieging a large, walled town with troops that were insufficient in either number or patience to do so successfully. For hours every night we could hear him bellowing in pidgin Latin in his great voice, taunting Julian with harsh words:
'Come down, little Greek, and fight like a man! Come down, you show me what Greeks are made of, you tiny-dicked dog! A pole I have for your comfort, great Caesar, as big as my own, the same pole that Lucius enjoyed…!'
I raged loudly at his obscene prattling, but Julian merely stared from the tops of the walls, his eyes glinting murder and hatred, his expression reflecting the frustration he felt at having the killer of his son so close as to see his very face, to hear his voice — yet to be unable to emerge from his own harried defenses. He forced himself to study the maneuvers of the attackers, occasionally commenting to Sallustius on the discipline and arrangement of the Alemanni forces. It took a supreme effort of will to prevent the Beast's taunts from rattling him.
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