Gods and Legions

by Michael Curtis Ford

  At first, a few copies of this letter had merely been tossed into the legionaries' camps, crudely tied to rocks, but the effectiveness of its language soon became apparent. It was read and then copied repeatedly by the troops themselves, then spread to the very city of Paris. That night shadowy figures were seen pasting hastily scribbled copies of the text on street corners and walls, even scrawling it in chalk on the bases of monuments when scraps of parchment became scarce.

  The city was in an uproar. Julian remained cloistered in his workroom, now seeing no one except Oribasius, who slipped in and out of the closed doors as gracefully as his overtaxed frame would allow him. Julian ignored even Decentius when he returned to the palace in a fury, demanding in the strongest terms that Constantius' troops be selected at once and sent marching before similar letters were posted among the outlying garrisons. The Caesar replied simply, through Oribasius, that the Emperor's orders had been directed to Lupicinus, who was still absent, and to Sintula, who was by now overwhelmed and panicked at the troops' reaction, and that it was for them to take action — he was washing his hands of the affair. Decentius returned to his lodgings sputtering in anger.

  Crowds of angry women and camp followers were now beginning to gather in the principal squares, and though it was broad daylight, many bore lit torches. The municipal guards of the city prefect were overwhelmed by the mob, and resigned themselves merely to protecting their own quarters, adjacent to the palace, surrendering the rest of the city to the belligerent crowds. Chants were shouted, carried from street to street by milling women, and effigies of the Emperor and Decentius raised and burned, a capital offense if their instigators were ever caught. Still Julian remained in his room, though the cries and wailing of the crowds outside could not have failed to penetrate even the thick walls of the palace, and the shouts of the frightened servants and the scuffling of their scurrying feet as they sought to barricade the outer doors could not have failed to attract his notice. Through Eutherius, he ordered only that the departing troops be accompanied by the massive wagons of the imperial post, bearing the Gauls' legitimate wives and children as far as their homes might be on the route east, to make the separation less painful for all and attempt to assuage some of their fury. This order, however, was met with derision and cries of mockery from the crowds, outraged that even Julian, now, seemed to be giving in to Constantius' effrontery.

  Finally, at about noon, Decentius made his way back to the palace, in disguise and under a heavy guard, and burst into the office without announcement. There he found the Caesar calmly waiting for him.

  'What is the meaning of this rabble?' he shouted. 'Have you no control over this mob you govern?'

  'Apparently I do not,' Julian calmly replied, 'for the Emperor has seen fit to take it away from me and hand it to my subordinates.'

  Decentius sputtered. 'Paris is a mob scene, and will soon be a shambles. I demand that you restore order so we may assemble the departing troops and their supplies.'

  Julian stared at him thoughtfully. 'You are blind if you think Paris can be so easily silenced while you break Rome's commitment to the troops. If you insist on fulfilling the Emperor's orders — and I repeat that I will do nothing to impede you in this task — I suggest you assemble in an outlying area. Go to Sens or Vienne, even Strasbourg, and avoid confrontation with the camp followers. If you do not, you will be courting disaster.'

  Decentius fumed. 'Your words are traitorous, and will be duly noted to the Emperor. You are suggesting that Constantius run from a rabble of women and children, that he assemble a triumphant and conquering army from some collection of wooden huts in a remote village, that his legions fly Gaul in the dark of night. I will do no such thing. If, as you insist, you are bent on assisting us in this task, you will order all civil and military functionaries to gather before the palace three days from now, to officially launch the assembly of troops and collection of provisions. The presence of these officers will check the anger of the troops and they, in turn, will bring their unruly wives and offspring under control. If not, I will consider you as being in collusion with them.'

  Julian nodded obsequiously, and smiled. 'As you wish, sir tribune.'

  Decentius glared at him in fury and, for the third and last time, swept out of the office. Julian looked over at me with a glance of resignation, and I marveled at his calm while the city outside was in an uproar. 'I pray there is an afterlife,' he said, 'for this time tomorrow we, and half of Paris, may be there.'

  I looked at him in surprise. 'Have you any doubt?' I asked.

  'In the gods, no. In man, that is another question.'

  'The gods?'

  Julian smiled, and gestured to the stack of dirt-encrusted deities littering an entire side of his room. 'A figure of speech, Caesarius. Just a figure of speech.'

  Paris' uproar quickly spread to the surrounding suburbs, and then to the neighboring garrisons and encampments, and the slanderous letter, having by now undergone various manifestations and revisions, had within two days been posted in every village within a hundred-mile radius of Paris. As the troops were ordered to the city and abandoned their barracks and quarters, their families became panic-stricken, and attempted to intervene to stop them, acting as if they expected the imminent return of Chonodomarius' invasions. Soldiers marched along the roads with sullen expressions as their wives trotted breathlessly alongside them, holding up their babies and imploring their men not to abandon them to the rapine of the Germans. The letter was having an effect far beyond even the wildest hopes of its anonymous authors.

  The first squadrons began to arrive in the city, fighting their way through the crowds of milling people and the beasts of burden barring their way. Julian roused himself from his closed offices and private consultations to ride out to the suburbs to greet them. This he did effusively, embracing those men and officers with whom he had campaigned or trained in past years, and praising them for the brave service they had provided under his command. True to his promise to Decentius, he entreated them to be faithful to their new commanders, whoever they might be, and assured them they would be amply rewarded for their sacrifice. On the two evenings before the official assembly, he held banquets for the arriving officers, toasting them in their new adventure, and asking them for any requests they might care to make, which he would do all he could to fulfill. His guests, puzzled at first as to Julian's calm resignation in the face of this enormous disruption to the forces of Gaul, left encouraged but saddened at being forced to abandon not only their native lands, but also such a noble general.

  All went well, with even Decentius seemingly satisfied at the progress being made, until night fell, and the hour arrived that has been the undoing of so many well-laid plans. With the darkness rose the fears and imaginations of the troops, fed by the tensions of the populace, who for three days had refused to disperse but had continued to gather angrily in the now filthy and foul-smelling streets and forums. The gutters ran with the effluent of thousands of sleepless women who had followed their men in from the countryside, the night silence was broken by the squalling of hundreds of infants terrified at the torchlight and the evil spirits seeming to hover everywhere over that benighted city.

  At about the fourth watch, the people could abide no longer, and whether at the instigation of secret ringleaders, or merely at the urging of their own self-fed fears, pandemonium suddenly broke loose. The Spanish guards stationed almost elbow to elbow around the palace to protect the Caesar were overwhelmed and trampled, and furious crowds surged to the palace walls, crushing between the stones and their bodies those unfortunate enough to be in the front lines of the mass of heaving, sweating females, who were soon joined by the thousands of sleepless auxiliaries only loosely barracked in their city quarters for the night. More torches were lit and raised, and screams ensued as the hair and clothing of some in the massed, milling crowd caught fire and the flames were swiftly extinguished, along with the lives of their victims, under trampling feet. The palace was sur
rounded and under siege, and I raced from my own quarters in the north wing to Julian's office, bursting in just in time to see him staring up blearily from his reading, his eyes half hooded as if he were waking from a dream. Upon seeing me, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and made his way groggily to his feet.

  'Thank God, Caesarius, you've come — such a dream I've had…'

  I looked at him in exasperation, wondering how he could have been able to sleep in such pandemonium, and how, even now, his greatest desire was to recount to me one of his endless dreams. A chant, faint almost to imperceptibility behind the three-foot-thick outer stone walls of the palace and formidable oaken doors of his office, was beginning to seep through from the outside, like a noxious gas.

  'Julian,' I began, 'the crowds outside-'

  'Caesarius — the guardian spirit, the woman I told you about, appeared to me again. She appeared looking as she has before, carrying her burden, Caesarius, it was the same, the goddess…'

  The chant began growing louder, more urgent, and I looked at him impatiently. 'Julian,' I said more insistently, 'they're calling for you. The city is in turmoil, something must be done.'

  But he was as if in a trance, a half-smile on his face, staring straight past me as if it were I who was the shade, not the phantasm by which he was haunted. 'She spoke to me, Caesarius, for the first time she spoke, and her voice was like light, like enchantment, but I didn't so much hear it as felt it, penetrating into me, and though she was rebuking me, her words felt comforting, as sweet as honey…'

  I saw by now that he was beyond me, that there was no dissuading him from this madness, and that the quickest way of addressing the urgent business of the mob outside was to encourage him to spill out his words as fast as he could.

  'What did she tell you?'

  'She scolded me, as a mother would a young and flighty son. "Julian," she said, "long have I watched you in secret, wishing to raise you higher, but always being rebuffed. If even now I am unwelcome, I shall go away sad and dejected."'

  'I don't understand — ' I began.

  'That's not all she said,' he continued, and I began to despair as the chant grew louder, more desperate, and the previously unintelligible syllables began to form words and meaning. 'She said, "Do not forget, Julian: if you reject me again this time, I shall dwell with you no longer."'

  'It was only a dream, a puzzling dream,' I said.

  'No, my friend, it was not, it was a vision, not puzzling in the slightest, as clear as any I have had yet. Listen!'

  And for the first time I realized that he too was aware of the rising chant, the fearful sound, which had begun to make its way through and around the palace, rolling and echoing through the corridors and anterooms, gaining strength like a wave rushing unimpeded over an open beach, as more and more voices picked up the refrain. Within moments the sound was bellowed deafeningly from a hundred thousand tongues, roared from every street and corner of the city within a mile of the palace, torches and clubs rising and falling in unison with the rolling vowels of his name and the terrifying, traitorous suffix they had appended to it, to which only the Supreme Emperor was entitled: 'Ju-li-an Augustus! Ju-li-an Augustus!' The thought of rebellion against Constantius was madness, it was suicide, for despite the might and loyalty of the Gallic army Julian had built over the past five years, it was but a small thing compared with the forces the Emperor could martial from his legions of the Danube and the East with a mere twitch of his finger. Julian, however, was unperturbed, and as he passed out of his state of halfsleep, half-wakefulness, I saw his expression take on a hard, alert cast and he listened more closely to the shouts from outside.

  The crowds roared his name and the forbidden title, they would not be put off. Within moments two officers burst into the room, begging Julian to address the troops and the camp followers from the balcony before the city was destroyed. The women, they reported, had begun dismantling the palace from the outside stone by stone, and in their frustration at being unable to reach the wall, the latecomers and soldiers in the back of the crowd had begun tearing up flagstones in the streets, and tiles and gutters from the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Paris was being taken apart, piece by piece.

  He listened in silence, and nodded his assent. With the two officers flanking him he strode out of the room and down the corridors, followed by a small detachment of Petulantes archers who had also forced their way into the building. I walked behind, to the grand balcony overlooking the forum, where he was accustomed to receiving and greeting dignitaries and addressing the crowds for great proclamations and religious occasions. Throwing open the wide double doors, he was practically pushed out to the stone railing of the balcony by his increasingly nervous guard, who then retreated and stood at attention behind him as if preventing the escape of a prisoner, though escape was far from his intention at the moment. We were met with an extraordinary sight.

  The forum was filled from wall to wall, the front half with thousands of women, their crying, tearstained children hoisted onto their shoulders and heads, away from the pressure of the surging crowds but into the danger of the waving, thrusting torches. The women peered up in exhaustion, their faces pale and haggard in the torchlight, hair disheveled and greasy, lips dry from three days of standing in the square with only such food and water as they were able to beg from sympathetic residents and bystanders. Behind them, filling the far end of the forum and spilling into every street and alleyway beyond, were the auxiliary legions, their pennants flying almost as if the troops had marched in unison to join the riots. Men hung precariously on drain pipes and downspouts, clambering and crowding onto the roofs far over the crowds, clinging even to rough spots on the sides of the walls that could afford a finger- or toe-hold to the most intrepid, all of them roaring the fearful chant as if with one voice: 'Ju-li-an Augustus! Ju-li-an Augustus!'

  When the balcony doors burst open and Julian emerged, the chant exploded and washed over us like a sudden downpour, and all faces turned toward us in the firelight. The crowd took a moment to realize who it was that had appeared on the balcony, and with cries of recognition and triumph, the people suddenly heaved forward, even though a moment before one would have thought them to have been already packed so tightly as to be unable to move. Scattered cries and gasps of pain rose to our ears from the stone walls below the balcony, out of our line of vision, but sufficiently close as to hear the agony of those being crushed below.

  The chant rose to a deafening pitch, and the very walls seemed to shake with the reverberations. Julian stared out at the crowd, and though I was unable to see his face from my position behind him, I knew, as if I had been looking at him directly, that he had applied his inscrutable military leader's expression and was now surveying the crowd with an impassive face. As word of his arrival spread to the farthest corners of the forum and back into the side streets and alleys beyond our vision, the noise level initially increased. The mob's excitement rose to a fever pitch, and all shouted and pointed in the direction of the balcony. Within moments, however, as Julian stood frozen, staring at the crowd, a hush fell, broken only by the scattered and distant wailing of the frightened children held over their mothers' heads.

  'The duty of a soldier is to obey his general,' he pronounced in measured Latin, without preliminaries, in a clipped voice that carried easily over the heads of the silent crowd and resounded off the smooth stone walls of the buildings surrounding the space. 'This my soldiers have always done, and they have been rewarded in their faithfulness to me by becoming the finest fighting force in the Western Empire, invincible, conquerors of the Germans and of all the barbarian peoples of the north.' Scattered cheers erupted from the farthest corners of the forum, where the soldiers had gathered. Most, however, stood as immobile as Julian, waiting to see what further words he might have. The women beneath the balcony, filling the entire front half of the forum, wore expressions at best slack and unimpressed, at worst hostile.

  'The duty of the people is to obey
its Caesar,' he continued, and now I saw where he was moving — testing the waters, as does a trained rhetorician, unsure of the level of attention or the sympathies of his crowd. 'In this, too, the people of the Western Empire have acquiesced, building here for themselves Paris, the grandest city of Gaul, renowned for its libraries and public buildings and its complete and utter fealty to Rome…'

  A murmur rose from the crowd, not yet loud enough or urgent enough to give one a precise idea of where they stood or where they might be led, but rather as of a rising tension, an anticipation for what they knew would be the concluding statement to come, the final installment of the trilogy of duty he was describing for his subjects.

  'And the duty of the Caesar' — the crowd held its breath — 'is to honor and obey the Emperor Constantius Augustus.'

  A roar ripped through the mob, high-pitched at first as the women nearest responded most quickly to his words, but expanding in volume and depth of tone as it surged to the back of the forum and Julian's words reached the ears of the soldiers and merchants whose lives most depended upon his acts. It was a bellow of fury, of exasperation and impotence, and the crowd surged forward and then swayed back as people tried to move, to run, to take some action, somehow, but were prevented and hemmed in by the press of the unwashed, cursing, roaring masses around them. Objects began to be hurled through the air — at first fruit, bread, bits of clothing and offal from the streets, but soon, as more rioters clambered to the tops of the buildings around the square and began ripping apart the rooftops and walls, more dangerous matter — clay tiles, bricks, and broken pieces of stone — began flying like missiles. Screams of pain and fury filled the air, and the women below looked up at us with expressions of terror.