Gods and Legions

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 and 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 his 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.

He later told me that he concluded the barbarian's bluster was less for the sake of rankling us than for maintaining the cohesiveness of his own restless forces. Chonodomarius was the leader of a huge collection of families and clans, but the ties of fraternal kinship among barbarians extend only so far, and in that, Brother, the Alemanni are not much different from us civilized men, truth be told; for just as the sons of the Emperor Constantine slaughtered each other mercilessly, real love between brothers is a rare occurrence indeed. Whether this is because of the sins of Adam or, what is more likely, the effects of primogeniture and the inheritance laws, I cannot say. The Beast's strengths, to us, appeared formidable, but within his own clans his position could be precarious.

Fortunately, Sens was well stocked, due to the fresh influx of supplies for the farmers' market to have been held the day of the attack; and water was abundant, from the large number of springs and fountains inside the city walls. Defensive weapons, too, were readily available, for Sens had long been a regional distribution center for military provisions. Apart from each soldier's plentiful complement of arrows, bows, javelins, and spears, the walls were well supplied with more powerful devices, often requiring several men to operate: 'wolves,' which are a type of crane set up over gates, with tongs for grasping the head of a battering ram as it strikes, and a winch to haul it sideways; 'scorpions,' portable devices designed to hurl stones by applying the crank-twisting and sudden release of a rope of hemp or human hair; and 'wild asses,' which are rather larger and more unwieldy scorpions.

It was the catapult that was particularly fearful, from the standpoint of damage to humans and animals. The device is a huge mechanical bow designed with grooves fitted with thick bolts with wooden fletching, which can be shot with murderous force. It is operated by three men, one the 'spotter' to sight the target and place the bolt in the horn groove, while the two others wind the crank. The spotter then releases the catch and fires the heavy bolt to astonishing effect, at such a speed that no sloping of the arrow over distance even needs to be taken into account. On one occasion I watched as a barbarian cavalry officer was selected as the target. The spotter took careful aim, and upon firing, the bolt whizzed invisibly across the field and slammed into the officer's thigh, neatly piercing his thick armor and penetrating all the way through the horse's ribs. The impact was so strong it actually lifted the animal's hindquarters into the air before it fell, the man's near leg pinned to it by the bolt, and his far leg crushed under the fall of the horse. With that, I thanked God that I was not the barbarians' camp physician.

The garrison would be able to hold out for several weeks at full provisioning, twice that long if rationing were imposed, perhaps indefinitely if the civilians were ejected and thrown to their fate with the barbarians. It was simply a matter of waiting for Marcellus to arrive with reinforcements from Reims. But as day after day passed with no signs of salvation from that quarter, and with the barbarians becoming bolder, Julian's confidence in Marcellus' ability to lift the siege began to flag. On the day of the initial attack he had sent several pigeons, with identical messages, ordering Marcellus to bring assistance. He received no response. Runners were then dispatched, a riskier proposition given the likelihood of their being seized and tortured after slipping outside the walls; yet at least two of them successfully made it past enemy lines, as we were informed by the small signal fires they set that night on a vacant ridge just to the northern limits of our view. The messages, however, were as if scattered by the winds of heaven, puffed into the clouds unheard and unread. Marcellus did not arrive, and Julian boiled with anger at the delay, suspecting the worst of the commander.

It was soon apparent, from our vantage point high atop the walls and from the loud, unguarded voices of the barbarians wafting through the still night air, that Chonodomarius would not be able to keep his men in check much longer. When we could see that an all-out attack was being prepared, Julian ordered the city's smiths, both army and civilian, to work night and day on the manufacture of primitive and forgotten devices he recalled from his readings of Plutarch — caltrops. These consisted of iron balls, each fitted with four sharpened spikes a foot or so in length, equidistant from each other on the sphere. They could either be carefully positioned, or simply tossed on the ground from atop the walls; but however a caltrop lands, it always rests upon a firm tripod of spikes, with the fourth aimed straight up in the air. The troops called them the Devil's burrs. Hundreds of the devices were quickly crafted and by darkness strewn thickly on the ground outside the walls around the main gate, and on the narrow stone bridge leading to the entrance, where Julian had judged the enemy's attack would come.

This measure was none too soon, for the very night the caltrops had been placed, the enemy mounted a massive assault. It began with a feint by a smaller detachment that Chonodomarius had shrewdly directed toward a weak point in the walls on the far side of the city opposite our main gate, diverting a large number of our troops to that area. Just as we succeeded in fending them off, however, shouts rose from the sentries manning the entrance and we rushed back, fearing the worst.

The worst had occurred. While the bulk of the Acolytes and the garrison were defending the rear of the city, a half dozen traitors within the walls had made their way to one of the towers at the main gates. There, they overpowered the crew manning the massive oaken gate bars and pulled the winch, raising a beam and allowing one of the two enormous gates to swing open. With thundering, slashing hooves, a squad of torch-wielding Alemanni cavalry plunged toward the open door, followed by a mob of howling infantry, their bodies naked and streaked with flame-colored paint, like that of their barbarous leader. We ran breathlessly along the tops of the walls, still several tower lengths' distant from the defensive bulwarks over the gates, watching their approach in despair. The Germans' terrifying size and the ghastly paleness of their skin, an infernal vision if ever I had seen one, struck all of us with dread; as the ancients knew, in all battles it is the eyes that are conquered first, and if the outcome of this engagement had depended upon what we saw, we would by now all be laboring in some frigid, northern iron mine with brass slave chains pinning our manhood backwards by the foreskin.

As the Germanic horse troops stormed onto the narrow stone bridge, unable to see clearly by their wavering torchlight but trusting in the smoothness of the path that funneled them toward the open gate, the animals caught their hooves in the spikes of the caltrops lying thickly on the flagstones. Screaming in pain, they stumbled and fell, impaling themselves and their riders, raising howls of rage from those falling upon them from behind. We had not yet fired a single shot above the milling, moaning horses, and the barbarian infantry, running just behind the horsemen, must have assumed that the collision and piling were due merely to the riders' incompetence at trying to force too many horses simultaneously onto the narrow bridge. Bellowing in reproach at the writhing cavalry and animals blocking their path to the open entrance, which they could see only yards before them, they swarmed over the mounds of horses and men, leaping down the other side onto the caltrop-studded bridge — and impaled themselves in turn, in the feet and groin, on the evil spiked spheres awaiting them there like patient, ravenous spiders.

The nature of a caltrop, unfortunately, is that it can penetrate only one man, after which it has been neutralized; so by their sheer numbers, the barbarians charging blindly up the mounting piles of dead and wounded soldiers and down the other side were slowly, but effectively, making their way closer to the entrance. The caltrops had bought us sufficient time, however. The traitors wielding the winch that had opened the gate, seeing Julian's troops racing back to the entrance, lost heart in their task and dodged outside the gates to join their fellows. There, they were themselves pierced painfully and fatally through the feet and buttocks by the caltrops placed before the door. The open gate was quickly slammed shut and the Roman troops, taking their customary places on the wall up above, began raining missiles and stones down on the infuriated barbarians below, making short work of those who had had the misfortune to become impaled but had not yet died. The enemy retreated in disarray, and the remainder of that night was filled with the sounds of their howling, in pain and mutual recrimination, with the frustrated bellows of the Beast sounding loudest of all. Again and again he issued his obscenity-laced demands that the Caesar meet him personally to surrender the city. By morning, however, the barbarians had dispersed into the hills, leaving a thousand smoldering campfires as their only trace.

And what of poor Helix, you might ask, Brother? I daresay he is not in heaven, nor is that because he has made his lodgings in hell. After the chaos of the initial attack, he found his way to me with the help of a comrade, for the garrison was so understaffed it did not even have a camp doctor. Appalled at his grisly appearance, with the arrow still emerging two feet from the front of his face, I resigned myself to his imminent death and resolved simply to make his last hours more comfortable. Surprisingly, his greatest source of pain was his broken leg, and seeing that this was also the injury I could most easily fix, I ordered his comrade and a passing slave to hold the man down while I set it and splinted it. This Helix endured with nary a grimace, distracted, no doubt, by the strange sight of the arrow's fletching hovering before his eyes wherever he looked. Then as an academic exercise, I took a closer look at the arrow.

Having apparently been shot from rather a long distance, it had fallen into his face at a downward angle, and was aimed toward a point in the back of his neck. I walked behind him as he sat erect on the stool, and pressing his neck there I could actually feel a hard lump, which made Helix wince in pain as I touched it. Borrowing a pair of tin snips from a smith, I clipped off the shaft close to his nose, and then carefully cutting into the back of the man's neck, I located the arrowhead, grasped it with a pair of surgical pliers, and drew the entire arrow cleanly through, barb and all. Helix fainted from the pain and had to be supported by his comrade, and at first I thought he was dead, as the blood hardly flowed from either hole. Amazingly, however, he came to his senses an hour or two later, sat up in his cot, and weakly asked for water. When I handed him a cup I half expected it to flow out the back of his neck, but it did not, and after I had cleaned and sutured the injuries he stood and limped dazedly out of the room of his own accord, leaning on a crutch. Though weak of leg for many months afterwards, he eventually recovered completely and survived to fight more battles for Julian. As far as I am aware, Helix creeps still.

Julian's first act was to order the arrest of Marcellus. When Sallustius heard this, he was livid, despite Marcellus' undeniable treachery. Striding into Julian's library, where he and I were assessing the procurator's report on the damage to the city, Sallustius closed the door sharply behind him.

'By the gods, Julian!' he protested, waving a copy of Marcellus' arrest order in our faces. 'He was appointed by the Emperor! You may outrank him on paper, but you are defying the Emperor himself by arresting his general! This is not your mandate!'

With his face reddening and eyes flashing, Julian stood up slowly and snatched the paper away from his mentor. 'Damn the Emperor!' he said deliberately, with calm but unmistakable fury. We immediately fell silent. After a moment, Sallustius let out his breath.

'I'd advise you to hold your tongue,' the older man said quietly, staring hard at Julian. 'The rank of Caesar has never before stopped Constantius from eliminating a rival who defied him.'

Julian held his gaze, clenching and unclenching his fists in pent-up emotion. 'For a year you've known me, Sallustius,' he said, his voice barely controlled. 'And you, Caesarius, for longer than that. With your help, I have built up the armies of Gaul. I have campaigned from the Atlantic to the Rhine. I have resisted every German assault and we have reconquered territory the barbarians had held for years. I have reformed the tax system, the state's coffers are overflowing, government administration has never been more efficient.'

'This we know,' I interjected. 'Why recite it to us?'

His eyes remained locked on Sallustius. 'You tell me,' he said. 'What was my mandate?'

Sallustius glared at him in silence.

'What was my mandate?' he roared.

Still we said nothing, though Sallustius dropped his glare.

'By God, my mandate was to do nothing! To let the state continue to rot, to see Gaul fall piecemeal to the barbarians while the Emperor's incompetent generals cowered behind their walls. My mandate was to be a figurehead!'

Julian strode around the end of the table to Sallustius and laid a hand heavily on his shoulder, placing his face within inches of the older man's.

'You trained me, Sallustius!' he shouted hoarsely, his eyes full of emotion. 'You made me march, up there in the Alps above Vienne! You have watched every step I've taken since I arrived in this bloody province! Where in the hell do you think my loyalties lie? With an emperor who would just as soon have me dead as see me take any initiative beyond feasting and protocol? My ruler is Rome itself! Rome! All that I've accomplished, all that we've accomplished, Sallustius, has been for the glory of Rome! Caesars are beheaded, emperors die, but Rome lives forever — and Rome will not be stymied by a petty general in Reims who refuses to come to the aid of a besieged garrison!'

Sallustius stared thoughtfully at the floor for a moment, then nodded, composed his face, and strode out without a word. In the hallway I heard him barking orders to a centurion of military police to send a squad to Reims immediately to arrest General Marcellus. Julian slumped back down in his seat, exhausted, his hands over his face. I sat in silence for a moment, observing him, then quietly stood to go out myself. Just as I approached the door, however, he stopped me.

'Caesarius,' he muttered, and I turned to face him. 'We are doing right, are we not?'

I thought for a moment before answering. 'Can you have any doubt?' I asked. 'Have faith, in both God and yourself.' I took the heavy codex of the Gospels and set it on the table in front of him. 'Count on this,' I continued. 'And count on me.'

He put his hands down, and his face looked years older from tiredness and strain. He ignored the book I had set in front of him, but instead looked up at me steadily, and smiled with genuine warmth.

'Sometimes,' he said, 'the hardest battles to be fought are within one's own camp.'

When the military police arrived in Reims several days later to discharge their duty, they found that the commander of the Roman army of Gaul had already anticipated them, and fled days before to Rome. By this time, Sallustius' anger had cooled, and he strode into Julian's room to announce the unfortunate news.

'Marcellus has fled to the Emperor, Julian,' he said impassively. 'It is his version of events, now, that the Emperor will hear first, not yours. The first rule in court politics is to control the flow of information — and in this instance we have failed.'

'We have not failed, Sallustius,' Julian said, glancing up from the parchment he was reading. 'We have the power of right and the good of Rome on our side, and with Marcellus gone we now have the entire army of Gaul at our disposal. With assets such as those, are Marcellus and the Emperor really of such concern?'

Sallustius shook his head in frustration and raised the subject no more. The barbarians were continuing to mass in the East, Chonodomarius was still at large, and our work had just begun.