Helena, who herself drifted in and out of lucidity in her madness and grief. The only thing worse was the sudden silence from the cellar shortly after sunrise, almost at the peak of one of Flaminia's screams, leaving only the howling of the men, which itself was cut just as abruptly, one by one, moments later.
Oribasius looked at me and sighed, realizing the implications as well as I. We had just finished our own investigation and now walked slowly down the long hall to Julian's office, the same anteroom where I had left him the night before. He sat disheveled, his clothes unchanged, his face unwashed, a few of the candles still sputtering on the sills where he had left them lit, most of them dissolved into stinking masses of tallow. Papers and books were strewn on the floor where he had swept them off the tables in his misery and fury. Muffled sobs could be heard from the adjacent room where Helena lay, mixed with the soft voice of her Gallic nurse attempting to soothe her. In the midst of the chaos stood Paul the Chain, clean, freshly shaven, with a hint of perfumed scent and a faint, condescending smile on his lips as he calmly surveyed our rumpled clothes and hollow-eyed faces. He was flanked on either side by Pentadius and Gaudentius, looking somewhat less prim.
'The court physicians have arrived, Your Majesty,' he said unctuously, though Julian scarcely looked up from his vacant stare at the wall. Then casting an apologetic glance at us, he continued, 'I was just about to report the results of my investigation into the mat-'
'Our suspicions were confirmed, Caesar,' I hastily interrupted, wanting to avoid hearing the details of Paul's report. 'The child was murdered, by the midwife. If you wish me to explain how, I will be happy to do so.'
There was a long pause, during which the silence was broken only by the unremitting, choking sobs emerging from behind the thick oaken door of the next room. 'I do not,' Julian finally replied almost inaudibly, without moving. 'It is enough for me to know that she has been found and caught, the murderous bitch. Now all others involved in the conspiracy must be uncovered.'
At this Paul, as if on cue, stepped forward. 'Indeed, Caesar, they already have.'
Julian slowly turned his head, not yet facing us, for like anyone who has suffered a soul-crushing loss, he was not yet capable of looking another man directly in the face. He maintained his silence, however, and Paul continued.
'The midwife's husband was a German, who though a permanent immigrant to these parts was clearly bent on revenge at your defeat of his people. He was assisted by several Germanic cronies, relations of his, and they had infected the woman Flaminia with their hatred for Rome. Obviously they were in the pay of Chonodomarius' agents. Their gold, which the woman was carrying, has been sent to the imperial treasury, and the woman, her husband, and their collaborators… dispatched. We are still seeking the daughter.' Pentadius and Gaudentius, silent as leeches, nodded vigorously.
Julian remained motionless for some time, looking as wretched and careworn as any man I had ever seen, having aged twenty years in a night. Finally, he stood up with a motion slow and deliberate, facing us all and straightening his shoulders from their habitual slump with what seemed a mighty effort.
'Chonodomarius will die for this. Slowly and painfully. I shall make it not only my personal goal, but the mission of the entire Western Empire, and this I pledge: Chonodomarius will die.'
Matilda, the daughter, was captured several weeks later, purely by accident, when she was recognized begging in the city by one of the palace staff — she had returned after her escape, knowing of no safe place to hide. Since Paul had by then been recalled to Milan, and Julian could not be approached about the matter, Sallustius ordered that she be quietly executed. At my remonstrance, however, as to her youth and to the fact that the wretched girl was probably innocent of her parents' crimes, he shrugged dismissively and demanded simply that she be imprisoned outside the city walls, away from our sight. She was, and promptly forgotten.
II
During the winter, the season when officers are most often given leave to attend to their private affairs at home or in Rome, and the common soldiers simply hunker down to rest and recover their strength for the rigorous spring campaigning to come, Julian worked himself brutally, spending the mornings stripped bare to a loincloth in Sens's garrison camp, exercising with his own soldiers. He was completely absent of any shame of the fact that his physical skills and strength in the soldiering arts were barely equal to those of his bottom rankers, but he garnered the admiration of his troops for his relentless determination. His thin, common soldier's cloak, which he wore even in the bitterest wind that whistled down out of the north woods, and his unkempt hair were a familiar and welcome sight around the camp in the mornings. After his strenuous training at swordplay and the lance, and his physical conditioning with a boxing coach, he could often be found limping over to a campfire, throwing a blanket over his shoulders to spend a few moments savoring a bowl of soup and some hardtack like any infantry grunt, listening to the gripes and joking of his men.
In the afternoons he spent long hours huddled in his drafty, unheated quarters with Sallustius. One by one, he summoned each of the commanders of all the garrisons of Gaul and the Transalpine to meet with him personally over the course of several days during the winter. During these private meetings he and Sallustius grilled them mercilessly: What is the disposition of the barbarian troops in your area? Their numbers? Their weaponry? Their training habits and discipline? What is the level of fitness of your own troops? Your garrison's ability to withstand a prolonged enemy siege? Its ability to apply a siege to the enemy? What are the levels of cooperation between you and your neighboring garrisons? Frequency of communications? Sources of rivalry? Instances of incompetence? Each interview ended with the most important question of all: What of Chonodomarius? What of the Beast? But the barbarian king, with his unmistakable weapon and physique, had seemingly disappeared.
Indications of weakness or indecisiveness were immediately seized upon by Julian and derided as unworthy of the magnificent Roman army he was building. Relative troop strength was relentlessly debated, and thousands of men, from Spain to Britain to Gaul, were placed on the march that winter, as he and his advisers identified gaps in defenses that needed to be filled, officers who needed to be retired, dismissed, or promoted, and underutilized garrisons to be scheduled into routine rotation. The icy roads that winter witnessed a constant stream of shifting divisions, shouting officers, and infantrymen shivering and blowing vapor as they marched on the cobbles and flagstones in their standard-issue military tunics and cloaks. Dismissing such garb as impractical for a Roman fighting force, Julian insisted that the men be issued thick, woolen trousers, leather jerkins, and well-tanned ox-hide boots, to be equal to the winter-ready barbarians.
A low pall of smoke hung over the fields as the garrisons and camps on the front lines of the Rhine territories filled with soldiers newly transferred from the reconquered cities in the rear. The forum rang with the men's cheers in response to Julian's patriotic exhortations, and the workshops rang with the sounds of the armorers' anvils as they reshod the long-neglected battle horses, and restocked the quartermasters with spare javelins, swords, shields, and helmets. The smithies created length after endless length of thick, sturdy chain, which we strung across every road and minor river to inhibit the passage of all persons except those authorized by each local garrison commander.
But although he spent his days in constant motion, his nights offered little respite, for in the hours after dark, when the rest of the city and the camp lay in exhaustion from his demands, he paced and watched, preparing himself for the bitter cold of his shirtless morning training sessions with his men, only a few hours away. He never used his bed or even a camp cot anymore, but preferred to take his rest for only an hour or so at a time, his head down on his arms at his study table, or leaning back against the hard stone wall as he sat upright on a stool. Fearing the effect on his health, I would try to force him to rest.
'Rest?' he asked questioningly. 'Impossible. Idle hands are the devil's tools. You know that old saw, Caesarius.'
'And what does that mean? Exhaustion and sickness are the devil's delight as well. You drive yourself too hard.'
He shrugged it off. 'If building an army means losing some sleep, then I will lose sleep. I could not forgive myself if Rome's borders were breached because her Caesar was sleeping. When preparations are complete, then I will slow down.'
His nights he spent with his beloved philosophers, Plato and Marcus Aurelius foremost among them, and passed hours discussing with me the subtleties of thinkers such as Plotinus and Iamblichus. He took much delight in my ability to pick up on the neo-Platonists' closely reasoned arguments, though he laughingly derided my opinion
