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.
BOOK THREE
Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae et servare modum rebus sublata secundis!
How ignorant are men's minds, of fate
And of their destinies; how loathe to keep
