Gods and Legions

III

Julian suffered a terrible blow at discovering the Empress's unspeakable treachery. Out of naivete or pure blindness, he had failed to recognize what everyone else in the Empire knew: that any son of the Caesar would be heir to the throne, and would thus endanger childless Eusebia's position. For rather than accepting Julian's son as his heir, the Emperor could simply declare a divorce and take a new wife who could produce a son — hence her betrayal.

Julian bid me tell no one of what I had learned from Matilda. I lied, or rather told only part of the truth in response to Eutherius' questioning, when I said simply that the girl had died of natural causes, and that her case was closed. The shrewd old eunuch suspected something more was amiss, I'm sure, but said nothing. Julian, though shaken, remained outwardly composed and efficient, with a face that had seemingly become granite. His path, however, was to descend from one hell to another, for the week after my return from Sens, news arrived that certain enemies of Julian's in the Emperor's court, including Florentius, Pentadius, and Paul the Chain, had succeeded in gaining Sallustius' recall to Rome, on the grounds that he was exciting Julian against the Emperor. Sallustius was said to be spreading the word that the Caesar, not the Augustus, was the greatest military and civil leader of the Empire, and that he alone was the savior and restorer of Gaul.

The charges were ridiculous, of course, as silent Sallustius rarely expressed a personal opinion on anyone or anything, much less the Emperor himself. The Emperor's sycophants, however, jealous of Julian's success against the Germans as well as within Gaul against the ancient and hidebound Roman bureaucracy, attributed his effectiveness to Sallustius' efforts. Indeed, they saw no better way to trip the Caesar up than to remove his access to his longtime adviser and friend. Their clever accusations to the suspicious and paranoid Emperor, couched in the form of eloquent praise and eulogies of Julian's abilities, had the effect of coarse sea salt being rubbed into an open wound.

Julian received the news at first with shock, which was reciprocated by Sallustius in the form of an even moodier silence than usual. The latter, however, even knowing he was being sent to his death rather than to the honorable and wealthy retirement he deserved for his long years of service to the state, kept his chin high, and within a day had packed a few belongings in a leather soldier's kit, slung it on his shoulder, and arrived to bid farewell. Julian was disturbed at the alacrity of his departure and the simplicity of his belongings, and delayed an additional day to arrange an escort of thirty mounted legionaries and a gift of his own personal armor, hurriedly refitted by the city's best smith, with a small coffer filled with gold Julians. When all was finally ready, however, and Sallustius had sorrowfully mounted his horse to depart, Julian's expression became surprisingly placid. Sallustius looked at him suspiciously.

'Julian,' he said, 'I forbid you to take any action on my account. I'll not have you endanger yourself, or the province, by angering Constantius in this affair.'

'Not to worry, old friend, not to worry. I seek only the good of Rome.'

Sallustius continued to stare at him. 'It's precisely words like that that make me worry.'

Julian smiled sadly, and slapped the horse's haunches lightly. 'Off you go, Sallustius. Stay alive.' He paused as the horse began to trot off. 'We will meet again.' The older man turned and glared at him from the saddle.

During these dark times, Julian had few comforts and motivations — indeed, if one were to quantify them, there would be at most three, by my count. The first and most fundamental, indeed the very salvation of his soul, was in stripping down his life to its most austere, to its barest core. While other men under such circumstances might seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, or mountains, and though he might have desired these things very much, Julian was of the opinion that such external needs were altogether a mark of a common, shallow type of man. Indeed, he prided himself on his power to retire into himself whenever he wished. Nowhere, he said, does a man retire with more quiet or freedom from trouble than into his own soul, particularly when he has within himself a store of thoughts that by looking into them, he may immediately fall into perfect calm.

As a physician, I would concur and go even further, by noting that such perfect calm is nothing more than a good ordering of the mind. Just as physicians always have their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so too does a man require principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest thing, with a recollection of the bond that unites the divine and human to each other. A man can do nothing well that pertains to himself without at the same time having a reference to things divine. And falling back on his fundamental principles, Julian was able to cleanse his soul and arrange his life to be free of clutter and distraction, allowing him to focus clearly now on developing the plan that would take him so high, and sink him to such depths.

In this he continued with his routine of before, yet now with a severity and dedication that rivaled that of the most rigorous ascetics. He slept for only moments at a stretch, waking spontaneously without urging, and when fatigued would lie down again, not on a feathered bed or brightly colored silk spreads, but on a coarse woven mat which the local Gallic peasants called a susurna, under a worn, woolen soldier's blanket or, like Diognetus, with a mere plank bed and skin. Alexander the Great, it is said, used to keep his arm outside his bed over a bronze basin, holding a silver ball in his hand, so that when he fell asleep and his muscles relaxed he might be awakened by the sound of the ball's dropping. Julian, however, needed no such artificial devices to wake him whenever he willed.

He was utterly indifferent to cold or warmth; just as he ignored whether he was drowsy or satisfied with sleep, or whether he was spoken ill of or praised. I would go so far as to suspect that he would take only a mild interest even in whether he was dying or doing something else, for to his mind, dying was simply one of the acts of life, and it would have been sufficient to him merely to do it well, if that is what he had undertaken. His moderation in eating was legendary, limited mostly to a vegetarian diet, and he would sometimes go the entire day eating naught but a soldier's biscuit, as if the notion of feeding himself had simply slipped his mind. The common practice among banqueters of inducing vomiting in order to eat more, even during solemn occasions, was one in which he never indulged, nor would he countenance it in others in his presence.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the physical rigors to which he voluntarily submitted, I never saw him become ill, except on one occasion when he was nearly killed by a brazier that had been brought into his room. The winter had been severe, particularly in light of the normally mild climate of Paris, and the Seine was raising slabs of ice like marble, almost to the point that they could join and form a continuous path to bridge the river. Julian normally was strict in refusing to allow his domestics to heat his room, feeling that stuffiness and warmth induced drowsiness, which he could not abide, given all the other demands on his energies and time. On this night, when he relented and finally permitted them to bring in a few coals, his fears were realized, and he fell asleep. With the windows shuttered, he quickly became poisoned by the fumes, and it was only by a happy coincidence that a scribe reporting to him for duty discovered him sprawled on the floor, pale and scarcely breathing. By the time I arrived, he had recovered his senses and weakly waved me away, swearing he would never allow heat in his room again.

His quarters he decorated sparingly, a cross on the west wall to catch the light of the rising sun, and various dusty archaeological artifacts in which he had taken a recent interest heaped in the corners — strange, stonelike bones of giant creatures, shells of unknown mollusks that had been found on mountaintops, and, most especially, heads, torsos, and other body parts of various idols that had been found beneath the ground's surface when his engineers were excavating for new walls and buildings. Once, upon surveying an especially large deposit of what appeared to be pieces of sarcophagi littering his hallway and anteroom, I lost patience with — I'm not sure with what exactly, Brother, perhaps with what I viewed as merely the frivolity and futility of collecting and storing such vestiges of dead, or rather never-existent, gods.

'Julian,' I said, striving to maintain a neutral but pointed tone to my voice. 'Your collections are becoming a hazard to the guards. The corridors look like a pagan graveyard. Your Greek deities far outnumber the crosses.'

'More pagan gods than crosses?' he echoed absently. 'That is how it should be.'

'How so?' I asked suspiciously.

He stopped fidgeting with the stacks of papers covering his desk and looked at me in puzzlement. 'Just as one morsel of bread is sufficient when receiving the Eucharist, is it not? In fact, according to the Orthodox, even one crumb of the Host is sufficient for you to receive all of Christ's presence and grace. Grace is not doubled if you get back in line to receive two morsels, nor trebled if you receive three. Do you agree?'

'Of course. But what are you saying, precisely?'

'Only this: one cross in the room is sufficient for all God's purposes.'

'And one pagan statue is not sufficient?' I inquired, somewhat annoyed. 'You need thirty?'

'Ah, so your objection is not to the clutter after all.' He surveyed the rows of mutilated godlets and body parts with what seemed, I thought, an expression of supreme satisfaction. 'There are many pagan deities. And I… well, as you can see, I am a collector.'

By candles and lamps he continued his studies of philosophy and poetry, and his intellect ranged widely over the long history of Roman domestic and foreign affairs. Though he preferred to speak in Greek with me and whomever else was conversant in his native language, he made a thoroughgoing study of Latin as well, becoming quite fluent over time. Julian's true life was spent in working by lamplight, like his ancient hero Demosthenes, whose adversaries had sarcastically claimed that his orations smelled of lamp oil. To the lamp he remained bound, even to the evening of his death.

So too did he develop his rhetorical skills at this time, declaiming endlessly by night in the echoing baths, engaging in mock arguments with himself or with a favored instructor or two, while I or another of his friends passed judgment and offered observations. In this his criteria for success was not that which would impress the savants, but rather that which would move the common soldier, the rough stalwart unencumbered by formal education yet blessed by an unerring degree of common sense. Consequently, such flourishes as might have left a professional rhetorician cold, he practiced and learned because of his conviction that they would strike to the heart of the common soldier. In response to my skepticism at the usefulness of these efforts, he reminded me that Aristotle, the greatest rhetorical theoretician of all, had been hired by the great Philip of Macedon to tutor his son Alexander, the greatest general of all, and therefore it had been recognized for centuries that eloquence went part and parcel with military success; he felt it to be a great shortcoming of modern education that this fact had been forgotten or ignored. He set his sights higher by aiming his rhetoric lower, at the men of arms who supported him.

His second driving force, after stripping his life to the bare fundamentals, was religion, and of the Christian faith he was a faithful supporter and financial contributor. The Bishop of Paris was a frequent guest at his dinner table and partner in animated discussions, particularly on the nature of the Trinity, which was a topic of much interest and concern to Julian. On the fifth anniversary of his appointment to the office of Caesar, a large celebration was held at the palace, of course, but he took special care in preparing for a solemn service of blessing at the Cathedral of Vienne, the first city in Gaul at which he had arrived five years earlier. In a rather belabored commemoration of the Caesar's skill at unifying the peoples and armies under his command, the local bishop, a passable amateur musician, herded together four disparate groups outside the cathedral to sing parts of the service in the four biblical tongues: Hebrew, Latin, the Greek of the Gospels, and that undocumentable dialect, the speech of lunatics possessed by demons. Under the bishop's skillful direction, the music of this combined chorus ascended to the heavens in perfect, otherworldly counterpoint and rhythm. The sequel, however, was less harmonious, as the three sane choruses proceeded into the church to continue their efforts in the nave, while the lunatics were enjoined to maintain beggarly silence outside. Several weeks later, at the feast of Epiphany, Julian celebrated another solemn Mass presided over jointly by the bishops of Vienne, Sens, and Paris, and arranged for a general absolution of sins, for which all those in attendance thanked him profusely. At this event he wore a magnificent diadem set with gleaming gems, in contrast to the beginning of his reign five years before, when he had worn only a cheap crown like the president of a local athletic meet.

That very evening, poor, troubled Helena died of the stomach malady from which she had long been suffering. She departed this world, however, with a smile on her face, no doubt her last thought being that she would soon be united with the one of her flesh who had preceded her by four years into heaven, if indeed it can be said that the unbaptized, even if innocent children, ever can enter the Kingdom, a matter on which you, Brother, are better qualified to opine than am I. Shortly thereafter we received word that the Empress Eusebia had died as well, on the very next day, in Rome. Both husbands shed tears, I am certain, though what were the proportions dedicated to which wives it is impossible to say.

As for the third force in his life: I had no idea at the time, though I realized it much later, that his driving motivation, indeed his very essence, was such an ungodly one. That flame of determination that made him rise in the morning and work himself to exhaustion the entire day and half the night was so unworthy of a philosopher, yet perhaps so meritorious in a Caesar, that it could scarcely have occurred to me during those days in Gaul. Yet now as I write this years later I have the eyes and the wisdom to identify and name the obvious, his third drive, the very force of his existence.

It was vengeance.

I did not have occasion to reflect long on such things, however, for it was during these times, just after my return from Sens with the news of the midwife's daughter, that another event became of much more concern to me. One sleepless night I had gone to his rooms seeking company, knowing that he would be awake and most likely happy to talk. When I arrived, however, I found his door closed, and soft conversation coming from within. Not the dramatic pauses and cries of declamation, as when he practiced his speeches, but rather animated conversation, even argument, and I stood thinking, uncertain whether to knock. I resolved not to interrupt him, and so sat a moment on a bench in the corridor outside his rooms, until my own thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the scribe who had been scheduled to take Julian's dictation for a shift.

It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps Julian had been dictating inside, and I spoke to the scribe.

'I believe he's busy with your predecessor,' I said as he went to open the door. 'Don't interrupt the Caesar until he finishes.'

The man looked at me in puzzlement. 'Can't be,' he said. 'I'm the first scribe he's scheduled for this evening.'

I stood up, surprised, and followed the man into the room, finding Julian sitting flustered behind his table, his books closed and set to the side, and a vacant, almost clouded look in his eye. There was no other person in the room. It was the first of many evenings that I would find him talking to himself.