Gods and Legions (25 page)

It was not long, less than a half hour, perhaps, when a decidedly ill-looking soldier, an ancient Gallic auxiliary, shambled out from the vicinity of the rubbish heap, pale, unshaven, and tottering slightly on his feet like a sailor just landed after a three-week voyage. He stared at me with slightly unfocused eyes, and asked me in broken Latin what I wanted.

I stared down my nose at him haughtily. 'What do
I
want? You drunken ape. I am a physician, sent by the authorities to check on the status of your prisoner. Is this how you maintain the guard?'

The man stared at me insolently for a moment, sizing me up to determine whether I might truly have some authority over him, before he looked away and shrugged his shoulders in resignation.

'Were that it were only drunkenness, sir. It's the cholera, sure as can be, spread through the fetid parts like this dump, and sure to move on next to the city proper. I've been back of the latrines, pukin' and shittin' my guts out, sir, and I'd be happy to give you a sample of the results here and now if you like, for there's plenty more where that came from. You'd be better off saving your treatment for the likes of me than for the bitch what's inside the cell, for if she's not dead of the sickness already she will be in a day or two.' And leaning against the wall weakly, he managed to elicit a trickle of bile out of the corner of his mouth, and a mocking grin.

I stared at him in horror. In my wanderings of the past few days I had heard nothing, no reports of plague, and was unsure whether to give credence to the man. But if what he said was true, that Matilda was on her deathbed, then I had very little time. I backed away cautiously from the man as he watched me curiously, still smiling, then tossed him a gold piece, which landed on the ground at his feet.

'Let me in to see the prisoner. I have my orders.'

He kept his eyes on me, not even glancing down at the coin. 'I have my orders too, which is to let no man see her, and for four years that's the way it's been. Only way I know she's still alive is that each day the bread disappears and the slop is flung out that window above you.'

I glanced warily at the air slit just over my head, and sidled a few steps away. I tossed him another coin.

'Treatment for the cholera's expensive, my lord,' the man said quietly, almost threateningly.

Exasperated, I untied the small coin pouch from my belt and flung the entire parcel at him, which landed with a satisfying thud against the wall at his feet. He nodded silently, and without deigning even to pick it up, he brushed past me roughly, drawing a large, rusted key from a ring at his belt. He fumbled for a moment at the lock before it clicked and the door swung inward on rusty, long-unused hinges. I entered and heard the metal shriek in protest as the door swung back and closed behind me.

I stood still for a moment, adjusting my eyes to the darkness, which was broken only by the narrow beam of daylight streaming down at a steep angle through the barred and cobwebbed slit above. Thousands of tiny dust motes floated lazily and aimlessly through the bridge of light, as if undecided whether to stay in the known environment of the cell or to make their way up the shaft to the freedom beyond, the only beings herein allowed such a choice. On the far wall where the narrow beam fell, a tiny lizard sat motionless, bathing itself in a brightness that to it must have felt the ultimate luxury. Before my eyes had entirely focused, however, and while still unwilling to tear my gaze from the familiarity and safety of the floating particles, I felt a hand on my ankle, and a wheezing voice floated up to me from the ground.

'So, the great physician Caesarius stoops to visit his colleague and accompany her in her death sentence.'

I paused. The voice in the dark was expected, though the words were not. There was no need to enter into a debate with this madwoman, for she had been unable to keep to a thought even when in her right mind four years before. My orders were clear, to ascertain her physical condition and ability to travel.

'I am not your colleague, and I am not under a death sentence. Nor are you for that matter, yet. I'm here to examine you.'

At this there was a weak sigh. 'You are a trained physician, though in your career you have had perhaps three patients. I was merely a midwife's apprentice, but have delivered thrice that number in a single day. You bring life, and you bury it as well. So too did I, though among the humble and unwashed rather than among caesars and emperors, and in exchange for a basket of eggs rather than a palace sinecure. Who are you to deny your affinity to me –
colleague?
' And she drew a deep, rattling breath that broke in midgasp into a racked series of coughing and retching.

I listened silently to her gagging, gauging the depth from within her chest that the phlegm was rising, judging by the bitter, ironlike smell the quantity of blood and sloughed-off lung tissue she was spitting up with each hacking bark. Cholera, hell. She had pneumonia. And it would be a miracle if she lasted the night.

I knelt on the ground beside her in the darkness, and with dismay felt my knee sink into a soft, moist substance, and I reached out my hand to palpate her chest. There have been very few times when I have actually felt utter repugnance for a patient or a medical procedure, even during the autopsies of my most heavily fermented research subjects, though on this occasion it was difficult to feel anything but revulsion. I grasped her thin shoulder, the dry, scaly skin barely covering the birdlike bones, and I could feel death resting upon her like a shroud.

'I have buried no emperors,' I muttered absentmindedly, 'except for the future one your mother killed, and there is no sentence of death hanging over me.'

Another spasm of breathing broke down to a fit of sobs and coughs. I rested my palm lightly on her emaciated chest, feeling the spasmodic gasping and heaving of her fluid-filled lungs as she struggled to regain her breath.

'You're still... young,' she retorted with great effort, gasping with every word, 'like me. We have our entire lives before us, do we not? There is ample time... to bury emperors aplenty. As... as for the one you say Mother killed – you are mistaken, dear colleague. You are blaming the knife... for the deed of the butcher.'

Plague or no plague, the woman was disgusting to the extreme, but she was my patient nonetheless, and I had sworn an oath, both on the spirit of Hippocrates after my studies, and on that of Christ during my baptism, to do everything in my power to help unfortunates such as her. I opened my kit, which I had inadvertently set down into another suspiciously odoriferous substance, and began rummaging in it with one hand for something that might relieve the pain of her congestion during her last few hours. More with a view to making idle conversation to soothe her than to performing any serious inquiries, I pursued her last remark.

'And who might the butcher be?' I asked, instantly regretting the question for fear that it might provoke in her unhinged mind another lengthy coughing attack, this time fatal. I would be forced to live with the sin of killing a woman by having engaged her in small talk.

But the coughing, this time, did not come. Instead, she lay in silence for a moment, grasping my hand, which still lay on her heaving chest, in her own thin fingers, with a strength surprising for one so fragile. So long did she lie there clutching my hand that I thought perhaps she had drifted into unconsciousness before I was even able to slip her the draught, and I was about to stand up and step away when the rate of her breathing changed, and I could feel her clearing her throat to say something. I paused where I was.

'Better to have examined the coins than the body,' she said simply, and fell silent but for her wheezing breath. I was puzzled. The coins? The only coins I could think of were the gold pieces in the pouch Flaminia was carrying when she had been captured fleeing the city. I had had only a fleeting glimpse of them in the soldier's hands before Paul had confiscated them to the treasury. The girl was raving.

'What are you talking about?' I asked softly, all my senses on edge now. 'What coins?'

'The blood money,' she whispered back. 'The Julians... the bloody Julians.'

I strained to recall the events of that horrible night; a glimmer of understanding was beginning to form. The 'Julians' – this was the term used to describe the gold coins minted by Constantius to honor Julian's crowning as Caesar of the Western Empire. But I was not a numismatist – what did they have to do...?

Suddenly it all became clear. The coins had been minted almost five years ago in Milan. Julian had received a proof set inlaid in a special box shortly afterwards as a gift from the Empress Eusebia. But due to the normal slow pace of production and the gradual spread of currency throughout the Empire from its original place of minting, the coins had only recently begun to show up in general circulation in northern Gaul – within this past year. This was a fact I had noticed because of the remarkably good likeness of the Caesar on the obverse of the coin. But where had Flaminia obtained an entire pouch of the new coins almost four years ago, and why had Paul not noticed or investigated their origin, unless...

A searing pain shot through my head as I seized Matilda's face between my two hands. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

'Matilda – where did your mother get those coins? Who sent them to her? Tell me, girl, you're dying, you know that, you must tell me who sent those coins...' But my words were drowned out again by her moan of despair, and a fit of harsh, gurgling coughing from which I knew, this time, she would not recover. For long moments she hacked and choked until she could breathe no more and then, wheezing, gradually sucked in sufficient air to begin another round of spitting and croaking. Great globs of fluid and tissue bubbled from her mouth and down the side of her face as I stared at her dark form in the shifting shadows. The fading shaft of light still made its way through the high slit, its angle flattening as it climbed inexorably up the side of the inner wall, the lizard following it imperceptibly like a lost woodsman following a trail home, like a released soul following the path of light to its reward.

Matilda's coughing finally subsided to a harsh wheeze, a belabored breathing that brooked no attempt at voice, so she whispered the final words she would ever communicate to a colleague: 'The arms of Eusebia are long.'

When I left the cell in the late-spring twilight, the lightness and effervescence of the air, compared with the fetid heaviness in the cell, almost overwhelmed me, and for a moment I felt dizzy and bewildered, my eyes dazzled by the colors and the clarity of things, and I thought perhaps all I had just heard had been a dream, a terrible dream. If only, I thought, if only I had been born at Mount Atlas of ancient legend, where dreams are said to be unknown. Then I looked to the side, where again I saw the grizzled old Gaul slowly limping toward me from behind the rubbish pit. I stared at him, more in my own inner confusion and shock than at anything specific about him. He stopped at a distance when he saw me, then slowly raised an earthen jug from behind his back in a kind of salute, and grinned at me with rotting, blackened teeth.

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.