Gods and Legions

by Michael Curtis Ford

  'Look you!' he shouted. 'Look here at your fears!' And as Arintheus nodded, three Persian prisoners were brought forward, clad in the magnificent, gleaming mail of the King's infantry, the articulations of the joints so skillfully worked as to conform precisely to the wearers' muscles and limbs, and with representations of human faces so closely fitted to their heads that the men seemed to be clothed in metal scales. The only openings where a weapon could possibly lodge were small holes for the nostrils and eyes. The overall effect was terrifying. The impact was muted, however, for the hands of the three soldiers were tied behind their backs and they shuffled and cowered shamefully, as if afraid of being beaten by their captors. Indeed, they undoubtedly already had been, for as they stood before us one of them was dribbling blood into the ashes at his feet.

  The men were silent as they gazed at the three prisoners. Arintheus nodded again, and three heavily muscled guards stepped forward, one to each prisoner, and rudely began stripping them, tearing their helmets off with a roughness that bruised the Persians' faces, hastily cutting through the straps and clasps in the back that cinched the armor. The men were pushed before us, naked but for their loincloths, and were made to stand thus before the Roman army, a thing supremely shameful to the modest Persians. At the prisoners' clear signs of embarrassment, their hands clenching uncertainly in front of their groins, some of the Roman troops began laughing uncomfortably.

  'See here your fears!' Julian shouted, his eyes bulging and his face flushing in rage as he stared at the bewildered prisoners. Truly it is a condition peculiar to man alone to hate his own victims. 'See here the flower of the Persian army! Filthy little wretches who throw down their arms and flee like she-goats whenever battle is joined.'

  Indeed the scene was ludicrous, for as they stood next to the huge, tanned Thracians Julian had handpicked for the demonstration, the Persians looked like wretched beggars, their chests and limbs scrawny, their emaciated bodies white. They shrank away from the enormous legionaries, who glared at them in contempt.

  This time he himself nodded, and each Thracian quickly put his arm around the neck of his assigned prisoner and without further instruction cracked it to the side. The three captives crumpled to the floor without a word, their dead eyes staring upward in surprise. The Roman army fell silent.

  'Thus the fate of King Sapor when he dares to confront our forces!' Julian screamed, his voice rising to an almost hysterical pitch. He was rewarded with scattered, desultory cheers, and he stalked away, back to his quarters, muttering angrily to himself and gesturing broadly.

  The men shuffled off to their duties, and I ducked into my tent in shame at this appalling demonstration. Julian was cracking. For years I had suspected it, for months I had been convinced, but now even the troops could have no doubt in their minds. I pored through my medical texts in increasing despair at finding any remedy that would stabilize his looming paranoia, his overweening desire for glory even at the expense of his very survival. It was a disease that, I feared, was not organic, it was not of the body, for if it had been, it would have long been cured by the geniuses of medicine in recent centuries. No, it was one of mind, and not just of any mind, but the mind of the powerful and ambitious. Indeed, with few exceptions, it had afflicted to a greater or lesser extent every Roman emperor since time immemorial. And even philosophy was not an antidote for him — if it ever truly had been.

  Soon after departing the next morning we spied on the horizon an enormous cloud of smoke or swirling dust, a dark mass rising suddenly above the plain, far beyond the distance our scouts dared to range. Rumor spread at first that it was a huge herd of onagers, the wild asses that abound in these regions, traveling in a dense pack to protect themselves against attack from the equally numerous lions. This thought then gave way to the rumor that it was the army of Procopius, arriving with the Armenian hordes of King Arsaces to give us sufficient strength to resume our attack on Ctesiphon and to capture the city once and for all. The fear then surfaced that it was the mighty forces of King Sapor, finally returning from his misguided attempt to intercept us in the north. Julian listened to all these reports impassively, eyeing the cloud like every other man as it rose brown and soiled-looking into the sky, but he, too, was unable to divine what it might mean.

  To avoid making a fatal mistake in an uncertain situation, he ordered the trumpets sounded and the men to make camp where they were, on the banks of a small stream, though it was scarcely past the noon hour. He ordered it to be fortified by a palisade of shields stacked in serried sequence and braced in the earth like a wall. The dust from the enormous cloud moved toward us, blowing far ahead of the vast numbers of moving bodies that were at its source, and it soon enveloped us, blocking out the meager light of the setting sun and reflecting an odd, glowing red on the men's faces and skin. We went to bed that night in considerable alarm, still unable to make out what was approaching in the silent cloud to the north.

  We woke at dawn to find ourselves surrounded by a Persian army. They were silent, mysteriously subdued. They did not attack, nor bluster, nor even send envoys — they merely observed us from a safe distance. We struck camp and continued our march north, the barbarians parting before us from afar as we moved, accompanying us cautiously from the sides and behind. We soon found that their passivity was due not to fear, but rather to the fact that they were waiting — for this was merely the van of the King's army. Another huge body arrived the next day, an enormous troop of a hundred thousand infantrymen, archers, and elephants commanded by the King's senior general, Meranes, and assisted by two of the King's sons. Nor was this all. Heaven help us, a third detachment, of equal size to that of Meranes, yet advancing somewhat more slowly because of its heavy equipment and additional elephants, arrived soon afterwards. The third army was commanded by King Sapor himself.

  Still the Persians refused to join battle with us, and wisely so, for time was on their side. The full force of the summer was now dead upon us and the heavy-set veterans of Gaul and Germany were wilting under the suffocating layers of dust and the incessant heat. Their heads and bodies baked if they wore armor, yet they were wary of removing it, for the constant flank attacks and alarms by the Persian archers and cavalry forced them to be constantly vigilant. The men's faces and necks, especially those of the palest races, were reddened and blistered from the constant beating of the sun, and raw from the bites of the blackflies that hovered everywhere. Stinging insects landed and lingered on any place where moisture was to be had: a sweaty armpit, a corner of a mouth, a draining sun blister on a neck or shoulder. The men were in constant torment, and still the Persians harassed us only from a distance, burning every living plant around us, forcing us to march through miles of smoking desert waste which only hours before had been grassy plains and fields of ripening grain.

  At a dry, desolate valley known in the local dialect as Maranga, the king finally showed himself, commanding a cavalry charge against our troops in an action almost worthy of being termed a battle, though still nothing on the scale we were desperate to provoke. Nevertheless, the clash was marked by a considerable loss of Persian satraps and cavalry, and not a few infantrymen on our side as well. The conditions were most favorable to the training and skills of the Persian cavalry, able as they were to dart their javelins and shoot arrows at full speed from any direction on their swift horses, and then flee in a cloud of dust before any Roman defenses could be brought to bear.

  On the evening of this action, the twenty-fifth of June, with Julian still unsure as to which side had taken the greater losses, a truce of three days was arranged for the two sides to clean the field and tend to the wounded. Our men worked in the darkness by torchlight to collect the Roman dead, for it was Julian's intent to take advantage of the truce to depart the next morning and put space between us and the King, or to at least find favorable ground on which to draw up lines and provoke a full-scale battle. Our strategizing session that night extended so late, and Julian's advisers were so weary, that most o
f us simply dozed off fitfully where we were, on benches and the floor in Julian's crowded and paper-strewn field tent.

  And thus we come full circle in my narrative, Brother, for this was the night of which I have already written, the darkest night of my life, when I dreamed that the strange woman of unearthly beauty had entered the tent and silently approached Julian, bearing the mysterious burden in her arms.

  After I awoke in alarm from the vision, Julian ordered us all to return to our own quarters. I trailed out the tent behind Sallustius and Maximus, while Julian attempted to laugh off my bewilderment, which was apparently still evident by the paleness of my face.

  'A dream!' he pronounced. 'Our physician has had a dream! Perhaps it is the gods finally coming to communicate with him after all!'

  I winced. When we emerged from the tent, however, an enormous meteor streaked across the sky from the house of Ares, just as it had in the mountains of Thrace, trailing flame in its wake until it vanished into the dark horizon as suddenly as it had appeared, startling Julian into silence. Without his saying so, I knew he was thinking it a response from the gods to his oath at Ctesiphon, when he swore he would not sacrifice again to the god of war. I could see from the perspiration suddenly standing out on his brow that he regretted those hasty words.

  'Maximus and the haruspices will say that we must abstain from action until a more favorable sign is revealed to us,' he said, as if unaware as to where my own sympathies lay in this wizards' game.

  'If you believe in omens, Julian, there is no reason to think that a comet is not a favorable sign for you,' I said.

  He paused long, still staring into the dark sky.

  'Caesarius, I have lost my confidence. My dream appeared to me again tonight, the Genius of Rome.'

  'I know, Julian.'

  He looked at me, surprised. 'But it was different from before. She held out the cornucopia to me, but this time it was — empty.'

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

  He considered this for a moment. 'The ancients say there are two gates of Sleep: the first is of common horn, through which all spirits easily pass. The second is of flawless, gleaming ivory, pure white — yet through this gate false dreams are sent by wicked shades, to torment us in the upper world. Through which gate did my dream come to me?'

  I waited for him to say more, but he fell silent, and when I turned to look at him he appeared exhausted and small, his shoulders slumped, his face discouraged.

  'Tomorrow,' I said firmly, 'you will do what you must to protect the safety of the army.' He sighed wearily, and looked at me in resignation.

  'Caesarius, pardon me for mocking you in the tent a few minutes ago,' he said after a moment. 'You know I consider no man braver than you, either on or off the battlefield. Stay close beside me tomorrow.'

  May the Lord forgive me for obeying his order. To Julian's great loss, I stayed with him to the end.

  VII

  The next day witnessed Sapor's treacherous elephant attack, which I have already recounted for you, Brother. As the furious Gauls clambered over the dead and dying animals and raced after the Persians in retaliation, I bent to my task, feverishly extracting the long iron spear tip from where it had embedded itself in Julian's rib, breaking the bone in the process. Hesitating, I held the point of the weapon up before my face, viewing its symmetrical, deadly outline against the pale sky. For a long moment I stared at the tip, at its beautifully cast smoothness and blackness, the carefully balanced barbs, the razor sharpness of its point and edge undulled by its recent impact with hard bone, its effectiveness unimpeded, its deadly potential yet unfulfilled.

  Christ on the desert mountaintop was offered the opportunity to change the entire course of history by committing one small, degrading act. The motive for such an act was unworthy and carnal, and He Himself was divine, and He refused. By contrast, my own motive was divine, but it was I who was carnal. I accepted the trade, though at the time no such complicated considerations, such weighing and balancing, passed through my head. Looking down at the unconscious Julian, I saw that he bore the same drawn, anguished expression as he had when I had first found him dreaming of devils and Christians in his tent, and I simply obeyed the Spirit that impelled me to do what had first come to my mind that night. I bent back down, and I fulfilled the bloody potential that had been hammered and filed into that carefully cast spear tip by an anonymous blacksmith who would never know the feat his work had accomplished.

  As I stood up, I summoned the squad of horse guards to rush Julian to the cluster of hospital tents that had been set up by the quartermaster. No one had suspected that the fallen would include the Emperor himself. After they left, I groped around in the weeds and ashes of the battlefield, picking up the medical bags and instruments I had dropped when treating him, and then climbed stiffly onto my own horse and galloped behind.

  When I arrived a few moments later, filthy and caked with dirt-streaked sweat from the day's riding and fighting, I found that he had already been lifted from the horse and carried inside the tent. Outside, the guards exclaimed loudly in rapid, Gallic-inflected camp Latin that I could barely understand. I shooed away the clamoring knot of men that was beginning to form around the tent door, stooped, and entered. Julian had been laid in a clean camp cot and was being gingerly undressed and washed.

  Oribasius looked up briefly as I approached. 'Thank the gods you were with him when he fell, Caesarius,' he said. 'Wash quickly, and come assist me. The spear point has penetrated his liver.'

  'I was afraid of that,' I muttered, and stepped away to find a skin of water.

  'Were you indeed?' asked a cold voice.

  I stopped and turned back. I had not noticed him when I entered, but now he moved forward out of the shadows and advanced to Julian's side, though his eyes did not leave mine.

  'Good day, Maximus,' I said evenly. 'I hadn't seen you here.'

  He ignored my greeting, and spoke to me in his high-pitched, condescending voice.

  'The guards who brought him in said the javelin had been stopped by his ribs. Yet here we find it in his liver.'

  I scoffed. 'The guards know nothing of medicine.'

  'Ah, but you do. And yet you did not attempt to pull it out?'

  I paused. Maximus had still not looked down at Julian, though he was standing next to him. Oribasius was bent over the wound, holding a poultice of dittany, but had stopped his probing, listening to the conversation.

  'When I saw that the point had penetrated past the barbs, I felt it would be better to bring him into camp to remove it,' I said cautiously.

  'I see,' Maximus replied, and looked down thoughtfully, glancing at Julian's wound for the first time. Only the thin iron shank emerged from his side; the spearhead was completely buried in the flesh, which prevented one from even seeing whether or not it had barbs. I realized my mistake in stating that it did. 'I'm not familiar with this type of spear,' Maximus continued slowly, 'but apparently you are. It's remarkable that you already knew that this spearhead, so deeply embedded in his liver, was barbed rather than smooth-cast.'

  I held his gaze steadily and forced myself to remain calm, to speak simply. 'It's a standard-issue infantry javelin, used by both sides. I've seen many such injuries among the men during the march.'

  A flicker of disappointment passed across Maximus' face. Still, he was undeterred from his sly questioning. 'And these cuts on his hands — the guard said he had grasped the point so tightly that it sliced his fingers. Yet despite his Herculean efforts, he was unable to extract it, even though it is merely embedded in the soft tissue.'

  No matter what Maximus says, even when he is silent, my jaw clenches in anger and the sweat begins trickling down my sides.

  'The Emperor must have cut his hands on his own blade when he fell off his horse,' I answered, 'and was too weak from the fall to pull out this shaft himself. As you can see, he is still unconscious.'

  Maximus glared, his eyes smoldering, and I stalked out of the tent.<
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  That night Julian distributed his worldly possessions among his friends, pointedly refused to assign a successor to command, and in his last moments sought to engage Maximus and grief-stricken Oribasius in a discussion on the nature of the soul, to pass the time and distract his mind. He talked a great deal, and much rumor has been spread about the wisdom and depth of his dying speech, his alleged acknowledgment of the victory of Christ, his reflections on the curious nature of death and the calmness with which Socrates and Seneca and other heroes of philosophy accepted their own fates. All of those speculations are false, for in truth the man was raving and incoherent, as would be anyone pierced in the liver and surrounded by a hostile army.

  Just before dawn, with a tremor and a groan of pain, Julian died. Oribasius was in attendance, Sallustius and Maximus watching silently at the foot of the bed, the deaf-mute boy sitting wide-eyed and silent in the corner. I sat vigil at his side, staring at his drawn face, tormented at both his suffering and the sheer enormity of the act I had committed, until the very moment he was finally taken. It was only a little over three months since the army had departed Antioch on its conquering march.

  The five of us gazed at the body in silence. It was a moment of calm before word of his death spread throughout the camp, generating fear and lamentation among the men. Maximus bent his scaly face down to Julian's, his long, wiry beard brushing the motionless chest, his eyes peering deep into the unblinking, stony depths of the dead man's orbs, glassy as beads. We all held our breath, watching, and then with a sigh, Maximus slowly leaned back again.

  'His soul has gone to the Underworld,' he pronounced, turning away and beginning to leave the tent. 'It is gone.'

  There was silence, and Oribasius looked curiously at me. I hesitated, then said a prayer over the body, commended him to God, and made the sign of the cross. Maximus stood in the door of the tent watching, his lip curling contemptuously. I finished my prayer and shouldered wearily past him to return to my own quarters, but he departed the tent behind me, quickened his step, and sidled up to me.