Gods and Legions

by Michael Curtis Ford

  Julian alone was prepared. With the barbarian lying prostrate on the ground before him, he carefully spread his feet and placed both hands on the sword hilt. With the tip of the blade, he prodded the neck of his son's killer, deftly parting in two the mass of matted and encrusted hair, exposing the white flesh of the nape. All eyes, barbarian and Roman, were fixed on Julian's sword, all lips fell silent. He set the tip into the groove of the neck, just at the base of the skull, and paused.

  'Caesar,' I whispered, from close at hand. He remained unmoving, his eyes locked on the sword tip. 'Caesar,' I rasped hoarsely, slightly louder, and I could see the tendons in Julian's forearm quivering. 'Do not have this blood on your hands, Caesar. Send him away — send him to the Emperor. As a credit to you, and a burden to Constantius. The Beast's fate is sealed in either case.'

  Julian looked up at the silent men around him, then focused on me. His eyes had a strange light — as of intense feeling or turmoil, but uncontrolled, with a gleam of perhaps something like madness. 'This man is a scourge,' he said throatily, adjusting his fingers and tightening his grip on the handle. 'With one thrust I avenge thousands of innocent Romans killed, with one stroke I prevent thousands more from being murdered in the future. What is the life of this wretched… killer, compared to the souls of all those he has destroyed, compared to the life of my own son?' He spat out these words in a kind of muted sob, and Chonodomarius froze in his position on the ground, not understanding the words but surely gathering their meaning, waiting for the swift thrust that would end his life.

  I stepped closer, locking my eyes on Julian's wild gaze and speaking evenly. 'Your justice requires a rule of law — even in times of war. That is what separates you from him. He is unarmed and helpless. It is never right to execute a man this way. Your son's soul would not be avenged. God would see it not as justice but as cold murder, no better than the barbarian's own crimes. In God's name, let him up.'

  Julian stared at me grimly, composing his face into an expressionless mask. A hint of a smile curled at the corners of his mouth and he leaned slightly forward over Chonodomarius, again adjusting his fingers on the grip. I saw he was going to do it, he would do it, if I did not do something, did not risk something.

  'Julian — ' I urged once more, using his given name even though we were in the presence of his troops. 'Julian. As a favor to me, in the name of our friendship — let the man stand.'

  Julian's stare remained locked on mine for a long moment, weighing my words, the burden I had placed on him. For that instant I felt as if his hate were directed at me. Then looking away, he slowly straightened his back, lifted his sword away from the man's neck, and sheathed it. The terrible gleam disappeared from his eyes and they returned to their former depth and intelligence, though they were not without a sharp flash of anger — at the actions of Chonodomarius, or at the terrible toll I had charged on our friendship. He set his mouth in a narrow grimace, turned impassively, walked to his horse, and mounted.

  The pattern was now set by Sallustius. Expressionless and cool as ever, he bent down to the barbarian that had prostrated himself before him, a large fellow of a height equal to his own, and seizing him by the hair he lifted him bodily to his feet in a single, swift motion. Cutting the reins of his own horse, Sallustius roughly tied the man's wrists behind his back, jerking the knot tight until the barbarian winced in pain.

  The rest of us swiftly followed suit, until the only barbarian remaining unbound was Chonodomarius, who still lay motionless at the place where Julian had stood. As the rest of us watched in not a little trepidation to see how the Caesar would handle the prostrate king, he walked his horse over and stood staring at the huge body for a moment. Then, with a terse 'On your feet!' he ordered Chonodomarius to stand and walk behind him. To the surprise and wonder of all, the Beast did his bidding, and the entire party walked slowly and deliberately back to the camp. The procession was led by a grave Julian, walking his horse calmly in front of the towering, unbound Alemanni king, his long auburn hair and mustaches flowing, his heaving chest still painted with the flames of war and destruction, his cheeks flushed with frustration and shame.

  In a subsequent search of the woods, an additional two hundred barbarians, many of them Chonodomarius' personal escort, were rounded up and taken back to camp. Three of his closest allies, including Serapion, his son, were among them. After several days of deliberation, it was decided to spare their lives and to send them to the Emperor in Rome, as the ultimate trophy of war: the Beast, who had troubled Constantius for so many years, with a troop of his fiercest warriors.

  Again, Your Holiness, if I might supplement my brother's narrative with a touch of additional background: Chonodomarius, though treated with mercy by his fellow blasphemer Julian, nevertheless met a tragic end. In Rome, the so-called 'Beast' was looked upon with awe and fear, not only for his great size but for the devastation he had wreaked among the Roman armies over the years, and out of deference to his military skills he was treated as something of a prisoner of honor, held in the castra peregrinorum, hunkered between the Caelian and Palatine hills. Tradition has it that it was at this very site that Saint Paul had been held in custody when sent to Rome in chains three hundred years earlier, though far be it from me to make any comparison between the two. From the windows of his confinement, the barbarian king would have had a clear view of the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, and no doubt his last contact with his kinsmen would have been as they were later led in chains through that very arch as prisoners of war, surrounded by jeering women and pelted with rotten fruit. These barbarians would then be thrown to the wild beasts for the entertainment of the crowds, or to be matched against the murmillones and the retiarii, the swordsmen and the net-minders, in the bloody gladiatorial combats.

  There, in the darkness of his damp, stone cell, far from the fragrant pines of his shady Germanic forests and lost in the blackness of his own soul, wretched Chonodomarius died of consumption, coughing up his own lungs. May Our Most Merciful Father forgive him his wicked deeds at the last.

  BOOK SIX

  PARIS

  All things that happen are as common and familiar as the rose in spring and the apple in summer; for such is sickness and death, calumny and treachery, and whatever else delights fools or vexes them.

  — Marcus Aurelius

  I

  That winter was the first of several Julian spent at his new military headquarters of Paris. This city, before Julius Caesar's time, had been little more than a flood-prone fishing village clinging to a marshy island in the middle of the Seine and inhabited by the now vanished tribe of the Parisii. In the intervening centuries, however, it had become an administrative and cultural center of the highest repute, Brother, as you are aware from your contacts with your fellow bishops of that Christian urb. It had long since expanded beyond the confines of the miserable river island, and the walls had several times been extended outward along the left bank to encompass a magnificent forum; a large arena, capable of seating sixteen thousand people and hosting gladiator spectacles and mock naval battles; and what was the greatest comfort to Julian, appealing to those slight sybaritic tendencies that remained in his soul after having been largely driven out by his Christianity and Stoic philosophy, a series of most magnificent baths.

  These were wonderfully high-arched facilities of glowing reddish brick, lit by broad expanses of high windows and skylights of glazed glass. They had been completely rebuilt by the best Roman architects several decades before, after the depredations of an earlier barbarian assault on the city. The ample frigidaria and tepidaria, as well as the ingeniously floor-heated hot pools and all the intervening interior waterfalls and fountains, were generously supplied, but not by the swampy Seine, which flowed lazily a mere thirty feet below the level of the baths. Rather, they were served by a massive stone aqueduct ten miles long, constructed of limestone cut from the underground quarries at the foot of the Montparnasse and sealed to a watertight impermeability by a rubbery
mortar mixed of fig milk, pork tallow, and sand, which brought vast quantities of cold, crystalline water from deep in the surrounding forests.

  Here Julian passed his morning hours in gymnastics and swordsmanship, training to which by this time he had arrived at quite a level of accomplishment. Here also he retreated at later hours whenever his public duties would allow, after the baths' official closing at sunset, to rest his mind. I lost count of the number of occasions I accompanied him through the dark, cobbled city streets in the very dead of night, to the house of the key-master adjoining the baths. This good fellow, tipped generously with a gold solidus or two, would open the facilities even at that unlikely hour and stoke the underground furnaces, that the Caesar might spend some quiet time alone with his muses and demons.

  Such demons as he had were of both the domestic and official variety. Since the death of their child, his wife had become a source of torment and puzzlement to him due to her complete lack of regard for things of this world. Like her namesake in the Iliad, Helena came to Paris, after her long sojourn with the Emperor and his wife in Rome. But she had returned in body only, her mind having long since fled its physical confines. Her figure was restored to its former plumpness, though she lacked the sweet expression I so clearly recalled as decorating her homely face upon her earlier arrival in Gaul four years before. Her dignified bearing, too, had returned, for she no longer appeared as Julian's giggling bride but had reverted to her original state as the Emperor's unapproachable sister, a matron cold and distant even to her husband, for whom she had become a wife in name only.

  She was not scornful and haughty — on this I must set the record straight, Brother, for I am certain that she made no conscious attempt to humiliate or bewilder Julian; it was simply as though there were a piece missing — some indefinable part of her soul that had been buried along with the baby, that part of her that had formerly made her capable of love and affection. Without that part she was able to function only adequately, not normally, like a disturbed child one occasionally sees who shrinks from the prospect of any human touch, even from her own parent. Thus did poor Helena make her way stumblingly through life, the inward flame eating away at her vitals, the silent wound bleeding in her breast. She ignored, even fled, any relations with her husband or other humans.

  From Julian I heard never a word of complaint at this state of affairs; indeed, he rarely even mentioned the matter. Nor did his head ever turn toward any other female face or form, though the palace and official facilities were full of lovely Gauls, both slaves and noblewomen, who would have willingly bestowed their favors on the not-unhandsome young Caesar. He was so conspicuous in his chastity that even his closest servants, or those who had been dismissed by him for cause, never accused him of any hint of lustfulness. It was as if he had renounced all desire for commerce with the female race and with his own physical passions, and, indeed, he often quoted Marcus Aurelius' rather off-putting description of the act of love as being a mere 'internal rubbing of a woman's entrails and the excretion of mucus with a sort of spasm.' Instead, he masked his passions by an even more energetic application to his morning training sessions and his marathon nights of study and philosophy. Still, whenever the topic of conversation touched upon domestic issues, his expression assumed a sad wistfulness that could not but lay bare the true feelings he had for the wife he obviously still loved.

  Despite the drubbing of Chonodomarius the summer before, the barbarians were not yet defeated, and Julian still had much work to do before his victories were completely consolidated. As a result of his campaigns over the past several years, the upper and middle courses of the Rhine, from its source in the Alps to the vicinity of Cologne, were entirely in the hands of Rome or its allies. The lower regions of the Rhine, however, to its discharge in the North Sea, were still in the hands of various barbarian tribes. These regions were of the utmost concern to Julian, for not only would securing them provide additional buffer against the barbarians' periodic marauding from the East, but would also open an alternate line of provisioning, from Britain across the sea and up the river. To take advantage of this route, however, two conditions needed to be fulfilled, the first being an adequate fleet, and the second free passage along the entire course of the Rhine to the sea. Both of these were lacking, and it was to these objectives that Julian devoted much time huddled with Sallustius and his other military advisers that winter. Indeed, many sessions were held in the steamy, torchlit baths, as soft snow fell on the sleeping city outside the high-vaulted chamber, and the vengeful barbarians plotted in their drafty huts many miles away on the banks of the Rhine.

  The first requisite he succeeded in fulfilling himself, through a combination of outright audacity and brutal labor. A fleet of six hundred ships was assembled over a period of several months, beginning with the coordinated and closely timed seizure of two hundred vessels along the hither coasts of Britain and the navigable stretches of the upper Rhine. Their owners had been a combination of foreign merchants lax in the safekeeping of their property and Roman citizens delinquent in their tax payments, whom Julian decided had the patriotic duty to contribute their vessels to the Roman cause in lieu of the cash debts they otherwise would have owed. Upon inspecting his booty, however, it was determined that most of these vessels were in a rather wretched state of repair, being mere grain barges and fishing boats with the occasional rotting hulk formerly used in the Germanic and Britannic fleets, scarcely fit for use. As a result, he mobilized all his troops not on active garrison duty for the winter, marched them to the Rhine, and embarked on a massive shipbuilding campaign, resulting in the creation of an additional four hundred vessels by the next summer, which, if not masterpieces of craftsmanship, were certainly sufficient to transport quantities of men, horse, and grain the length of the river and across the channel.

  The second requisite at first promised to be somewhat more difficult, but in the end proved to be an easier task than expected, when Julian's hand was forced by the Roman prefect Florentius, a sycophant of the Emperor Constantius whom Julian openly despised. This man, in his capacity as civil administrator of the province, took it into his own hands to engage in secret negotiations with the barbarians on the lower Rhine, and obtained their consent to allow the free passage of Roman boats in exchange for a one-time payment of two thousand pounds of silver. When the Emperor was informed of the treaty he ratified it and ordered Julian to pay the sum. I happened to be with him at the baths one freezing night in late November, reading official correspondence aloud to him while he soaked in a hot pool, seemingly dozing. When I came to Constantius' payment order, buried in an otherwise innocuous piece of droning bureaucratic drivel, he sat up with a start, swallowing a mouthful of water in his astonishment.

  'Caesarius — read that again!' he spluttered. 'A ton of silver to those filthy barbarians, for allowing us passage on a river that is ours by right?'

  I returned to the offending passage and reread it aloud.

  '"…in exchange for a one-time payment of two thousand pounds of silver…" Indeed, that is what it says, Julian.'

  'This is how he informs me of Florentius' dealings, by ordering me to pay two thousand pounds of silver in a treaty with which I was in no way involved?'

  Julian was outraged. He clambered out of the pool and paced dripping wet along the side, naked in the frigid air, his furious expression ill-disguised by the dim light of the torches. He was still slight of build, but the stoop with which he had trudged as a scholar had been replaced by a springy, almost nervous bounce and the ramrod straightness of a soldier. So too, his physique had developed a hard, well-defined musculature and a series of scars resulting from his daily physical training and strenuous living on campaign. The boy Caesar now had a coarse coating of hair on his chest and shoulders, and a hard, determined look in his eyes, and his demeanor was far more impatient and demanding than when I had first come to know him. In fact, I reflected, there was very little left of the Julian I had first encountered years ago i
n Athens. I reexamined the letter.

  'Here,' I said, 'the Emperor perhaps anticipated your resentment at being informed in this way of Florentius' agreement — in the next sentence, he softens his command by adding the phrase, "unless it seems absolutely disgraceful for you to do so…"'

  'Disgraceful? It's an outrage! I refuse to submit to Florentius' bullying, and his preying on Constantius' ignorance of conditions here. Is he so uninformed of my goals? Does he believe this is how we restore Gaul to prosperity? This is how we recapture Rome's lost glory in the eyes of the barbarians? It is scandalous, an outrage!..' And for long moments afterwards he muttered in fury, until he finally realized the discomfort of pacing in that temperature outside the confines of the hot water, and slipped back in.

  I did not even inquire at the time what he found so disgraceful about the payment: whether it was the high price or the manner in which it was presented to him. I suspect, however, that even if the outlay had been nothing more than a pound of dried cod and an old shoe, he still would have been infuriated with Florentius' back-dealing.

  'And what do you imagine the Emperor's reaction will be at your refusal to pay the negotiated settlement?' I inquired evenly after he had calmed somewhat.

  Julian glanced at me slyly and then slid under the steaming water till his head was completely submerged, where he remained motionless a long while, only a trail of bubbles rising to indicate he was still alive. After a moment, he slowly rose up again, now with a faint smile on his face as he wiped the water from his eyes with the back of his hand.

  'He will have the same reaction as he did when I sent General Marcellus packing, when I reconquered Cologne, when I defeated the Alemanni without assistance from Barbatio, when I exceeded my mandate — nothing.'