Gods and Legions

by Michael Curtis Ford

  The fighting that day was horrendous, hand-to-hand under the broiling sun and that fatal dust cloud. When the filth rose occasionally, lifted by the faint wafting of a breeze, one could see mountains of corpses and writhing horses in the ditches and at the bulwarks where they fell, so covered by layers of blood and filth that I was unable to make out to whose side they belonged. In the end, the dust cloud began slowly moving back, yielding toward the thick-stoned walls of Ctesiphon, as the Persians retreated. The cloud moved gradually at first, then faster, until with a final clash and a weary shout the Persian lines finally broke, and from the rear of the haze thousands of enemy raced panic-stricken toward their city, and I saw the enormous gates begin to swing ponderously open to receive them.

  'The gates!' Julian cried, rushing toward the battle line, which was quickly moving away from him as the men raced to the walls to head off the Persians. 'Victor — seize the gates!'

  It would have been impossible to hear him above the mad fray, but Victor was still there with his men, now slumped painfully over his horse's neck, supported by a guard who rode alongside him. The wounded general, weak from loss of blood, struggled to shout out his orders. The rout swirled around him as the Romans followed hard on the terrified enemies' heels, hacking at their backs and calves, hamstringing hundreds and tripping them up, then quickly slashing them to immobilize them and leave them to die in their own spilled juices. The Persians ran headlong toward the city and began pouring through the gates as the townsfolk on the walls above wept and tore their hair, raining rubble and bricks down on the Romans who were as yet too far down the slope to be hit.

  'The gates!' Julian called as he thundered forward on his mount, his voice hoarse from his exertions but his eyes glinting in triumph at having thus achieved his goal. 'Look, Caesarius! The city is ours!'

  Victor, in a supreme effort, pushed himself up from his horse's neck and rode directly in front of his line of men, between them and the fleeing Persians, the now broken arrow shaft still protruding forlornly from his injured shoulder. Stopping his mount and facing his troops, he raised his left arm, holding the sword sideways. It was the signal to halt. The exhausted Romans did so immediately, some almost collapsing in their weariness, falling to their knees, and then to their sides in fatigue, mingling indiscriminately with the thousands of cadavers already occupying the height.

  Victor sat swaying on his horse, triumphantly surveying the terrible carnage before him, as the last of the Persians scrambled up the hill toward the walls. As they limped and scurried inside, the huge gates again swung heavily shut; Julian stopped and sat thunderstruck, watching the scene before him, and a single, enraged, sobbing bellow filled the air, echoing over the field.

  'Victor, you fool… you fucking fool! The gates!'

  Two and a half thousand Persians had been killed, to our seventy Romans. The ground was covered with enemy cadavers, and wealth greater than that of all the cities we had taken on our march thus far was stripped from the bodies of the officers alone. Still, Julian was desolate, for Ctesiphon remained unconquered, its vast walls impregnable, its defenses intact. Victor was delirious from loss of blood and the pain of his wound, but in a lucid moment he justified his halt of the attack because he felt the exhausted men would have been endangered had they continued their mad rush into the circuit of the walls and been overwhelmed in the streets of the strange city. The argument had merit, but Julian was inconsolable.

  After raging in his tent for an hour, talking and muttering to himself while the generals cowered outside in the doorway, Sallustius entered.

  'My lord — the men have fought hard… fearfully hard. They will require some words from you, perhaps a sacri-'

  'And so they shall have one,' interrupted Julian, 'so they shall have one. Tonight let them sleep the sleep of the dead, for this they deserve even more than the dead themselves. At first light we shall have a sacrifice such as has not been seen this entire march!'

  The next morning as Dawn, the saffron-robed child of morning, spread her rosy fingers across the purple sky, the men were rousted from their sleep and gathered haggardly at the enormous altar that had been set up almost within an arrow's distance of the very gates of Ctesiphon. They limped and groaned into formation, stretching their protesting muscles, some of them bearing armor still slathered with the gore of their efforts the day before, but their quiet chatter was content as they looked forward to the sacrifice and the distribution of plunder that would follow soon afterwards. I stayed to watch, Brother; for one of those rare occasions I willingly stayed to watch Julian's sacrifice, for in truth, in that vast, empty plain, occupied only by our army and the enormous walls of the huge city, there was nowhere else for me to go. I stood among the ranks of a body of archers, rather than take one of the places of honor he always reserved for his inner court, Maximus, Sallustius, Oribasius. In any case, he was so accustomed to my absence from these bloody ceremonies that I suspect he would have been startled to know that this time I was watching the entire proceeding.

  At the very moment the sun's rays shot over the horizon, Julian slowly climbed the steps that led to the makeshift wooden platform on which the sacrifice to the war god Ares was to take place. He was dressed in the spotless white linen of a high priest, the only concession to his political standing being the broad purple border embroidered to the hem and sleeves of his robe. The men broke out in a lusty, enthusiastic cheer that swept over the plain and reverberated off the hard stone walls of the city, causing the heads of Persian guards and spectators to pop up over the edge of the ramparts to view the commotion, and drowning out the women's eerie keening and wailing that wafted over the walls, and which had been a constant background din ever since the end of the battle the evening before. Ctesiphon, I wagered, had never before experienced the death of so many of her native sons all at one time, and the city was in a paroxysm of mourning and fear for what was to come.

  As the men's cheering died, Julian gave a nod to Maximus, who stood waiting with the Etruscan haruspices on the ground just before the steps to the platform, and one by one they solemnly filed up, their flowing robes and conical hoods lending a funereal pallor to the clear brightness of the early morning rays. Each was accompanied by a herd boy leading by the halter a pure-white ox, ten in all, carefully chosen for the sacrifice from King Sapor's massive herds of cattle that had been grazing in the green pasturelands between the rivers. From these herds, our army had taken sufficient head for our immediate needs and scattered the rest. And on this day, as the ten bulls were led carefully up to the platform, a most extraordinary thing happened.

  The first bull balked at climbing the four steps, not an unusual occurrence, for cattle are unaccustomed to such structures. This one did not do so out of stubbornness, however, but out of sheer lassitude — it was physically exhausted. As it began slowly walking up, it collapsed on one foreleg, and it was only with great difficulty that the herd boy and two of the Etruscans were able to force it back to its feet, jerking at its halter and whipping it from behind, until it made its shaking but docile way to the edge of the altar.

  Had it been overdrugged? Poisoned? I wondered. It is well-known that such large beasts, who spend most of their time grazing in the wild, must often be fed drugged fodder to sedate them sufficiently to stand quietly at the altar until they can be clubbed and their throats cut — still, the seers were generally more skillful with their dosages. Perhaps Persian cattle were less tolerant of the poppy extract than were our hardy Cappadocian animals? In any event, the poor beast made its trembling way to the edge of the altar and promptly collapsed. Julian stood agog, and the entire camp went silent at this spectacle.

  Nor did it end there. All the rest of the oxen did precisely the same thing, stumbling and collapsing in various postures on the platform, draped over the steps, on the ground at the base, where they stood waiting to climb the riser. Their tongues lolled lazily out of their mouths and their flanks heaved as if from a great exertion, while their great mois
t eyes simply stared straight ahead, dumbly, unlike the fearful rolling one would expect to see in an animal being led before sixty thousand men. All the beasts, that is, but the tenth, which, after being urged to step over its prostrate and flagging comrades, suddenly perked and rebelled, emitting a bellow and kicking its rear legs into the air like a newly captured colt brought in to be broken. It shook its great head in terror and flung a spray of foamy spittle and mucus over the nearest soldiers, who recoiled in fear of being trampled. A dozen burly guards leaped onto the maddened animal, wrestled it to the ground, and held it immobile as the poor beast continued to bellow frantically, calling perhaps for its companions under Helios to come to its rescue, but the only response was from Julian himself.

  The Emperor, his face red with fury and the veins in his neck standing out in his tension, vaulted off the stage, ignoring the sickened and prostrate animals surrounding him, and without a word strode directly to the trembling, struggling bull lying on the ground. A priest brought the iron hammer crashing down onto its forehead to stun it, and with a swift knife stroke to the throat, the animal was dispatched and fell silent. Julian, without even waiting for the assistance of Maximus, as was his custom, bent down, sliced open the lower belly, and thrust his hands blindly into the steaming stew in search of the critical organ.

  What he found left him stunned, and the Gallic guards around him sucking in their breath. The liver was cancerous, riddled with dry spots and scar tissue, swollen to twice its normal size. The crowd of soldiers surged forward for a better look, until driven back by the swatting swords of the bodyguards. In the end Julian rushed back onto the platform to hand the organ to Maximus, who, after a quick examination of it, turned his back to the troops and left the stage without a word. Julian turned back to the men and raised his hand still bearing the bloody knife, to call their attention.

  'By the king of gods, Zeus!' he cried, his voice unnaturally high-pitched and shaking, and the troops fell silent. 'By the holy god Mithras and by all the inhabitants of Olympus, I swear: never, by the gods, never shall I make sacrifice to Ares again! For a more fickle and treacherous god than he has never before cursed the race of man!'

  The men stood silent a long moment, frozen in their shock at his cursing of the god of war. Julian leaped off the platform, his gaze avoiding the panting and twitching bulls littering the ground around him, and swept past his court to his tent without a word. Shaking their heads ruefully, the men slowly scattered to their quarters while I stood gazing at the ruins of the ceremony. It was not the first pagan sacrifice I had ever witnessed, but it was undoubtedly the foulest ever undertaken, and I confess the question crossed my mind as to whether the cursed results had been due to my presence.

  Julian kept his oath, to the letter.

  VI

  'Burn the fleet.' Maximus' head shot up, his red-rimmed eyes wide in a kind of malignant amazement. Even staid Sallustius recoiled.

  'Sire?' he inquired after a moment, setting to one side the maps he had been examining in Julian's tent.

  'You heard me. Burn it. Every vessel. We'd have to occupy half the army dragging the damn ships up the Tigris, and they would be a temptation for us to flee. Burn the fleet, or it will prevent us from meeting Sapor with all our strength and wits.'

  Already the decision had been made not to lay siege to Ctesiphon. The city was simply too strong, its surviving garrison too numerous, its supplies, according to information we had received from defectors, too copious. Moreover, our position at the foot of the walls was untenable, if only for a hazard we had not counted on: the enormous clouds of biting flies and mosquitoes that swarmed in from the nearby river and canals, in such quantities that they dimmed the sun by day and obscured the stars by night, driving the men and animals to near madness. Thus God's tiniest creatures summon the attention of His largest. Sapor's prime minister within the city had sent Julian a cautious embassy, offering to cede back to him all the Roman cities the Persians had taken in the last decade, but this proposal was scornfully rejected.

  'Returning that which is already rightfully ours is no concession!' Julian stormed, flinging the calligraphed document back in the face of the startled ambassador. 'Let the cowardly Persians emerge from their walls and fight on the plains like men!'

  But this the Ctesiphon garrison would not do. They shouted taunts and fired arrows at us desultorily, challenging the Emperor to demonstrate his bravery by seeking out the Great King himself and engaging his army rather than a besieged city garrison. Julian took the insult to heart. But to attack King Sapor without being pincered by the garrison on the other side would require leaving Ctesiphon and marching north along the Tigris — upstream. It would be impossible to bring the enormous fleet.

  'Burn it,' he repeated stubbornly.

  'Augustus,' Sallustius interjected cautiously, as if addressing an overexcited child, 'at least keep it here where it is, as a… as a…' He faltered uncharacteristically for a moment as Julian glared at him stonily. '… as a fallback. Post a guard on it to defend against attacks by the Ctesiphon garrison. If worse comes to worse, our men can burn it then, to prevent it from being captured. Otherwise, if Sapor forces us to… retreat, we would still be able to sail down the Tigris to the Gulf and make our way safely from there to Egypt.'

  These were more words than Sallustius was accustomed to speak at any one time — clearly the issue was important to him. Julian would have none of it, however.

  'Retreat is not an option, Sallustius,' he snapped, 'and I will suspect your loyalty, as I already do your wisdom, if you raise the issue again. Nor do we return the way we came. We have already laid waste to that country and there would be no provisions for us. Tomorrow we march up the Tigris to meet with Procopius, and Sapor, sooner or later, will meet us and fall. Burn the fleet.'

  As he looked around the tent, all his old comrades, Oribasius, Sallustius, myself, all of us who had served him so faithfully in Gaul, whose advice he had solicited and followed in the past, all fell silent. Even Maximus remained motionless, refraining from his customary whispering in Julian's ear.

  Julian surveyed our sullen faces with what seemed a look of satisfaction.

  'Is that clear?'

  As we left, Sallustius pulled me aside. It was the first time, I believe, he had ever sought me out directly.

  'Physician,' he said gruffly, as if embarrassed, though staring at me intently, 'you have served him for years. Has he gone mad?'

  'Yes,' I said, without hesitation. 'Years ago, when he first made sacrifice to Mithras.'

  Sallustius snorted. 'Then we are all of us mad, are we not? Except you. Are you the one voice of sanity in the Emperor's circle?'

  'Perhaps. I cannot speak for the rest of you.'

  At this, Sallustius' face became uncharacteristically tense.

  'If he is mad, why did you follow him to this hellhole, rather than staying in your precious Nazianzus?'

  I paused, slightly stunned at this one time I had ever seen Sallustius drop his perpetual mask of calm and self-composure. Sallustius apparently thought I had not heard, for his face contorted even more. 'I said, physician, if he is mad-'

  I snapped out of my reverie and interrupted him.

  'You are asking the wrong person, General,' I said. 'I go where healing is required. It is because he is mad that I followed him to this hellhole. You would do better to ask that question of yourself.'

  The next morning the greasy, black smoke from the sacrifice was uncustomarily thick. For twenty miles around the city, every field, every mill, every orchard, house, and vineyard had been torched. The pall mingled dolorously over the river with the thin wisps still wafting up from the smoldering remains of a thousand ships — the largest destruction of a Roman fleet since Actium four centuries before. Within an hour we had broken camp.

  The inhabitants of Ctesiphon lined the city ramparts to watch our departure, shaking their heads in relief and wonder.

  For a week we marched north, our goal the Roman province o
f Corduene, some three hundred miles distant. We lived only on the provisions we carried with us, for all about us, for miles on every side, the country had been laid to waste, first by our own troops in the vicinity of Ctesiphon, and thereafter by the Persians themselves. A large body from the Ctesiphon garrison followed us at a respectful distance. Not large enough, Brother, to engage us in pitched battle, for the Persians had found that their forces were no match for us in direct combat. Nevertheless, they continually harassed and raided our flanks, making off with precious supply wagons, diverting troops that could otherwise have been used to assist with the provisions, and burning the country far ahead of us, leaving us to march in ashes. At one point we were unable even to move for two days, surrounded by flaming grasses and choking smoke on all sides.

  Finally, Julian could take no more of the men's muttering and fears, for even the Gallic veterans were beginning to openly express their doubts as to our prospects. He resorted to an old tactic of the Spartan king Agesilaus, and calling a hurried assembly, he stood before them with Arintheus, a burly Thracian commander. Exhausted in both body and mind, Julian could scarcely bring himself to talk, much less compose a rousing speech of the kind he had habitually used in the past to encourage his men.

  'Tribunes, centurions, and soldiers of the Roman army!' he shouted hoarsely. His voice barely carried beyond the front rows. 'Word has come to my ears of the fright you are taking from the enemy's harassment. Their armor, you say, is impenetrable. Their archers are unerring. Their cavalry too fleet of foot for our heavy Roman ponies to catch.'

  He paused, and disgruntled muttering was heard from all around.