Gods and Legions (13 page)

To my amazement, I realized that General Marcellus had somehow confused the two men, though upon further reflection I admit that this is not as astonishing as it may sound. Sallustius had spent most of his career in the eastern theater of operations and was unknown to Marcellus, and of course Julian had never had any exposure to the military ranks at all before arriving in Vienne a few months before. Marcellus had most likely been apprised of Julian's promotion through a dry military dispatch, which lacked any sort of physical description of the new Caesar. Believing him to be a mere figurehead, there is really no reason why Marcellus
should
have been concerned with the prospect of meeting Julian personally. And when the occasion did arise, he simply assumed that the more regal-looking of the two men – Sallustius – was the Caesar.

Sallustius stared at Marcellus silently for a moment, deciding how best to disabuse the general of his misplaced identification, and then glanced slyly over to Julian. Julian gave Sallustius a quick, expressionless, almost imperceptible wink.

Sallustius nodded slightly to the two generals and strode imperiously past them into the Great Hall, and Julian began to step into place behind him. Marcellus and Ursicinus quickly closed ranks with their own bodies directly behind Sallustius, however, and marched him into the palace, leaving Julian to trail in the rear. As he disappeared behind the enormous, bronze-sheathed doors guarding the palace's entrance, he gave a quick look back at the troops, his face betraying only the slightest hint of amusement. Scattered titters rose from those in the front ranks on the steps below who were able to see and hear the brief ceremony of welcome, and then the palace guards stepped back into their places before the doors and snapped to attention, glaring haughtily down the steps at the battle-stained men before them. The troops broke formation and sat where they were in the middle of the forum, trading loud wisecracks with the starched and polished garrison, who remained at attention around them. The garrison troops' shining armor, clean-shaven jaws, and immaculately tanned strap leather were in sharp contrast to the grimy, sweat-drenched veterans who had accompanied Julian from routing the barbarians in three cities.

I regret, Brother, that I was unable to be a fly on the wall at this initial meeting with his army's two top generals, though I later heard snatches of what transpired from comments dropped by Sallustius. Although Ursicinus wisely remained silent for most of the conversation, in his role as observer, Marcellus, apparently, made a regular fool of himself. He spoke endlessly without letting the others get in a word, alternately fawning on Sallustius as the presumed Caesar, and patronizing him as the militarily ignorant cousin of the Emperor, who would be learning under the expertise of himself, the
true
military strategist.

The truth became apparent only when Marcellus stopped to catch his breath, preparing to dismiss his presumptive superior and the casually dressed young lackey tagging behind. At that point, Julian stepped forward.

'Thank you, General, for your warm welcome of both myself and my adviser Sallustius,' he said, and Sallustius bowed to Marcellus as the general stared in astonishment. 'I am indeed grateful for your military preparedness, though I might have been more impressed had you used your twenty-five thousand soldiers to rid your territory of barbarians, which I have somehow been able to do with a handful of retired veterans over the past four weeks.'

Marcellus mouthed silent protests like a fish gasping out of water, and the meeting only further degenerated from there. After an hour, I heard scattered shouts as the men around me began to gather their weapons and stand, and looking up I saw that the four leaders had emerged, though in quite a different order of appearance than before. Julian marched first out the brass doors, looking younger than before, if possible, his eyes flashing as he gazed down proudly at his troops. Sallustius stood just behind and to his right, his brooding presence impassive as ever, his dark eyes betraying no hint of any emotion as he stared calmly out at the men gathered in the forum.

Behind them walked Marcellus, stoop-shouldered and with a haggard face, like one whose diet consists of too much lard and insufficient fruit. His gaze avoided his own wondering troops lining the outside of the forum. He focused instead, with an expression of muted fury, on the animated face of Julian, whose arms were now raised as he motioned the troops to silence. Ursicinus, standing beside Marcellus, bore an expression of slight bemusement.

'Soldiers!' Julian shouted, and the men's shouts and calls gradually died to a subdued murmur. 'Soldiers! I address you not as "gentlemen," as did Xenophon when exhorting his troops, nor as "countrymen," as does the Emperor, but with the proudest title a Roman can bear: "Soldiers!"'

The men cheered lustily. Julian sought out my eyes in the crowd and smiled slightly. His stance and gestures as he stood before the troops were somewhat awkward and contrived, the pose of a student calmly debating a belabored point of sophistry before a like-minded crowd of academics. Still, I noticed as he raised his hands to quiet the troops that he consciously mimicked the broad, sweeping arm motions and commanding jut of the chin that had so well served Constantius, who himself was a master orator. Julian's trump was his youth and confidence, his open sincerity with his men. With a little practice and coaching, I reflected, young Julian would be giving even the Emperor a run for his money.

'For too long,' he continued as the men gradually fell silent, 'you have been serving inside your walls; for too long you have been on the defensive; for too long you have been eating preserved rations from the quartermaster, polishing your armor, maintaining your fitness by combat among yourselves, unable to prove your superiority against the barbarians just outside your gates. For too long, soldiers, the Alemanni have failed to feel the fury and the might of the Roman army. They have strayed with impunity beyond their borders, ravaging the countryside and occupying the lands – Roman lands, for this is Gaul, this is land your ancestors conquered under Julius Caesar four hundred years ago, this is land as Roman as Sicily – and it shall remain Roman!'

The cheers increased in volume, with scattered clanging of shields on knees. I felt a terrible unease, however – Julian had stepped far beyond the role to which Constantius had assigned him. Julian would ascribe his actions to a greater cause, to the task of saving a diminished Roman Gaul from attacks by savages and the incompetence of its own military leaders. True, patriotism is a cause that is difficult to reproach. But overriding those same military leaders without orders, as he was so blatantly doing – at what point does patriotism become treason?

'Tomorrow, lads – tomorrow,
soldiers
! – by the grace of the Almighty God we shall emerge from our walls fighting, and we shall not stop until we have reached the Rhine and cleared it of the infernal barbarian presence, from its source in the Alps to its mouth in the North Sea! We have marched from Vienne to Autun, from Auxerre to Troyes, routing the Alemanni and reclaiming Gaul for Rome and the Emperor. We will continue our march of death and salvation. Tomorrow, by God, our forces will have been combined under the joint command of General Marcellus and myself, and woe to the barbarians, who have never seen such fire and steel as we will give them in the bellies, who have never felt such muscles as we will flex – whose memories of mighty Rome, their rulers and masters, have begun to fail them, but who will soon be reminded of the penalties to be paid for their insolence. Tomorrow we shall start!'

The forum erupted in a massive cheer, as Marcellus' disciplined forces lining the colonnade joined with Julian's rough-hewn veterans. The Caesar stood erect and still for a moment, and then stepping forward to the front ranks of his men, he seized a cavalry lance that had been fitted with one of the mounting hooks. Spying his horse, which a groom had led forward as if by prearrangement, he deftly flipped the weapon backward, raced several steps toward the waiting stallion, and vaulted flawlessly onto its back. The troops exploded. Never had they had a leader, much less a full Caesar, who was so much one of them. Julian drank it in, his lance raised in triumph and his horse rearing and prancing on cue, as Marcellus slumped, glaring in fury at the man who had so deeply humiliated him.

That night the air was heavy with the smell of burning flesh, as the worshipers of Mithras among Julian's troops celebrated their triumph over the Alemanni with a sacrifice of three oxen. The carcasses burned on an altar whose flames were visible for miles around, a stark repudiation of the attacks of the roving barbarians. It was also, I felt, a repudiation of the victory of Christ over these obsolete and satanic pagan sacrifices, and I sought Julian out to demand that he put a stop to such rituals. I found him in the vicinity of the altar itself, from which sizzling blood was still flowing down the makeshift gutters and forming in pools at the feet of the priests who energetically tended the roaring flames. He was surrounded by a company of his men, eating heartily of the charred meat they offered him from the coals and laughing uproariously at the crude camp jokes and ditties they plied him with in their drunken good humor. Unable to force my way through the crowd of troops to catch his attention, I left in a foul mood.

That summer was one to remember, one of terror and victory. Though Sallustius continued to offer valuable advice from his long years of experience, he no longer dominated the late-night strategy sessions. Julian had gained much confidence, and the student now surpassed the master in craftiness and skill. Gathering together the bulk of his combined army, the Caesar marched east to the Rhine, leaving sulking Marcellus behind to consolidate the earlier conquests of that spring. Despite the barbarians' best efforts, their wiliness, their ability to appear unexpectedly in our very midst or melt into the forests at will, Julian seemingly had them stymied. With almost bewildering speed and precision, he divided his forces to lure the Alemanni into indefensible valley positions, where they were surrounded. He routed their camps and destroyed their fortresses, capturing their scouts to prevent his presence and intentions from being disclosed, seeming to be everywhere at once, yet nowhere the barbarians ever expected him.

In fury they fled east before him to the Rhine, where they resolved to make their pitched stand; yet in Julian's cunning, he had sent divisions of troops racing ahead of them through the Vosges mountains to intercept them before their arrival at the river, preventing them from consolidating their forces into a beachhead. The barbarians fled across the river in disarray, commandeering any available vessels, sometimes riding nothing more than logs paddled out into the stream for the current to take them away, anywhere, as long as it was far from the Caesar's fury. After every victory, large or small, he ordered an immediate count and inspection of the enemy dead, even before the Roman victims themselves were buried, and it was always the same question he anxiously put to Sallustius:

'What of Chonodomarius, the Beast? Has he been captured? Killed?'

Sallustius would carefully scan the ledgers prepared for him by the parties detailed to strip the enemy dead, seeking any description that might indicate great physical size, or armor or body ornamentation more elaborate than that of the typical barbarian soldier – even evidence that uncommonly large weapons had been retrieved – but his answer was always the same.

'No, Caesar, I fear he was absent from the battle.'

What Sallustius failed to mention was that his conclusion had already been drawn long before the accountants had calculated the numbers of enemy dead. For Chonodomarius' absence in a battle was simply assumed by default, by dint of the fact that the barbarians had retreated. The enormous king had seemingly vanished without a trace, like an ephemeral spirit, into the vast, black forests beyond the Rhine. Though the Alemanni were losing battles, Chonodomarius was holding back – feeding our confidence, lulling us, perhaps, waiting for the time when he could organize his hordes into the crushing blow he was surely planning in his dark, wooded fortresses.

Fall approached, the time for returning to winter quarters, and the cornered barbarians, we knew, would soon be breathing sighs of relief; still, Julian did not abate in his fighting. Upon reaching the left bank of the Rhine, the current speckled with barbarians fleeing in their makeshift craft, he paused no more than a day, just long enough to let his troops relish their triumph. He then struck north, aiming at the great Roman cities that had been lost over the past decade, and which he had resolved to regain for Rome. He met no resistance at shattered Coblenz, the city which since earliest antiquity had been known as the Confluence because of its location at the juncture of the Moselle and Rhine rivers. Tens of thousands of displaced barbarian farmers and soldiers retreated in terror and surrendered the entire city to a dozen of Julian's advance scouts before the main forces of his army had approached within twenty miles of the city walls.

Arriving effortlessly at Cologne, the city which only a year before had been a source of nightmares and terror upon his first learning of its fall to the barbarians, he gathered together at the single tower still left standing with the representatives of the united barbarian tribes. There, he dictated to them conditions that would maintain their peace and subjection through the winter, after which, he made it clear, his campaign would begin anew until all of Rome's former territory in Gaul had been returned to the Emperor's domains.

Leaving garrisons to man the cities and towns he had reconquered, he marched back to Reims with a skeleton force consisting largely of his Acolytes, as a personal guard. He gave an account of his actions to Ursicinus and the surly Marcellus, and then coolly retired to his winter quarters at Sens, which he had chosen in large part for the reputed vastness of its governor's library, and for the healing qualities of the sulfur baths to be found in the vicinity, which he felt would be comforting to Helena when recovering from the birth of her child. The library did not disappoint, though Julian's information on the baths was apparently out of date, having been gleaned from an ancient commentary on Julius Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars. The springs, it seems, had been dry for three centuries.