that such philosophies were unworthy of an enlightened Caesar in the new Christian age. God, however, he had relegated to a tier far down on his list of priorities, as he attended Communion services only when required for reasons of state, and read Scripture almost never. It was almost as if, rather than seeking out comfort from Christ during times of torment, he avoided Him out of a sense of betrayal. I often kept Julian company during his long hours in the dark library, distressed that the jewel-encrusted, illuminated codex of the Gospels Eusebia had sent him that winter as a gift had been carelessly relegated to a corner shelf. On several occasions I artfully arranged to leave it lying open to passages I thought might be appropriate to his mood that day, but he ignored or refused the hint, impatiently returning the heavy volume back to its place.

By February, after almost six months of turmoil and movement among the armies of Rome in Gaul and the West, Julian and Sallustius finally seemed satisfied with the arrangement of their forces and their preparations for the spring campaign. The barbarians had begun testing the resolve and strength of the Romans with predatory raids in eastern Gaul, but had been repulsed by the reinforced garrisons on every occasion, confirming Julian in his thinking that he had effectively anticipated the strengths and weaknesses of both his and the enemy's forces.

And then disaster struck.

Stupidly, blindly, he had been so focused on building effective bulwarks for the Empire against the Alemanni massing on the far side of the Rhine that he had neglected his own base of operations. The local commander at Sens had not been subjected to the exhaustive weeks of probing and discussion that every other commander in the province had suffered. The city's walls were collapsing in some points, and crumbling nearly everywhere else; worst of all, the local garrison had been reduced through reassignments, leaving Julian even without the services of the scutarii and gentiles in his personal bodyguard, the shield-bearing Gallic infantrymen and mounted lancers who were traditionally assigned to support high-ranking Romans when visiting Gaul. Only his Acolytes and a skeleton garrison remained in the city.

And the Beast noticed.

He arrived on precisely one of the endless nights that I have described for you, Brother, just before Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingers to light the face of the heavens, the coldest part of the night when even the sentries on watch are beginning to nod in their drowsiness. An arrow, whizzing silently through the frigid air in the midst of a cloud of such angry missiles, slammed into the face of one of the watchmen, an enormous man and a crack wrestler from Phrygia nicknamed Helix, 'the Creeper.' The arrow pierced his cheekbone and knocked him off the wall, but incredibly, the man survived the twenty-foot fall with full consciousness, and true to his name, he crawled to the next sentry post dragging a broken leg behind him, the arrow shaft lodged deep in his face, and sounded the alarm.

The Acolytes were immediately roused, as were the two hundred men of the garrison, and Julian, who was naturally already awake, quickly called the city magistrate and ordered him to summon the local militia. The old man did so immediately, gathering together a thousand merchants, tradesmen, and farmers lodging within the walls for the morrow's weekly market to assist in defending the city. It was only with great difficulty, and the loss of some forty Acolytes and garrison soldiers, that we were able to repel the fierce barbarian attack that night. I confess that our success in doing so was due not so much to our own skills and training as to the barbarians' astonishing misfortune: During a clever feint on our main gate, they had sent a large body of crack assault troops to a point on the other side where our walls had crumbled so far that the local urchins routinely climbed through the rubble to steal fruit from the orchard on the other side. It was only by the merest chance that one small boy happened to be doing just that when he spied the band of barbarians assembling for the rear attack. The brave lad was able to rush back and sound the alarm in time for Julian to divert his forces to that sector, and thereby save the city.

Daylight revealed our precarious situation. Sens had been ripe for a bold stroke, for the barbarians to effect a lightning raid to capture the Caesar and all his staff in one fell swoop. God's grace had prevented this for the time being, but when I peered over the walls that morning I surveyed ten thousand Alemanni massing just out of our arrow range, their officers racing and prancing up and down the lines on their horses. In their midst was a single, enormous German, shirtless in the cold and brandishing a harpoon, as my old acquaintance at the palace in Milan had put it. My blood ran cold. All I could think of was the fate of Lucius Vitellius and his men at Cologne, and I sought out Julian to inform him that his prayers had been granted: he was about to face the Beast.

Julian, however, was not to be delayed by my morbid warnings; the man had become a tornado. Despite having taken no sleep the night before, he and scowling Sallustius seemed to be everywhere. The city's gates had attracted his first attention, just as the attack was getting under way, and were barricaded in time. Sections of the walls that were threatening breach were immediately repaired as well, though not without loss of a considerable number of men to arrow wounds, as they were forced into exposed positions low on the walls to replace the missing stones. For two days and nights he stalked the ramparts ceaselessly, pressing into service every man and woman in the city above the age of twelve. The youngest and least skilled he assigned to the menial tasks of hauling hods of mortar and collecting spent barbarian arrows from the streets; the oldest men and women were made to prepare food in their own kitchens for the soldiers and workers so they would not have to take the time to do so on their own. Within two days, two normal weeks of defensive works had been accomplished, and Julian, at my persistent urging, allowed himself to take a nap, one of an unthinkable duration for him, five hours — at which point he rose, refreshed, and recommenced his urgent pacing of the walls.

Night and day he strode the battlements and ramparts, grinding his teeth in fury at his stupidity in retaining for himself such meager numbers of troops, which prevented him from breaking the siege. Below the walls fumed Chonodomarius, in equal rage that his plans for a swift blow against the Caesar had been thwarted, and that he was now reduced to besieging a large, walled town with troops that were insufficient in either number or patience to do so successfully. For hours every night we could hear him bellowing in pidgin Latin in his great voice, taunting Julian with harsh words:

'Come down, little Greek, and fight like a man! Come down, you show me what Greeks are made of, you tiny-dicked dog! A pole I have for your comfort, great Caesar, as big as my own, the same pole that Lucius enjoyed…!'

I raged loudly at his obscene prattling, but Julian merely stared from the tops of the walls, his eyes glinting murder and hatred, his expression reflecting the frustration he felt at having the killer of his son so close as to see his very face, to hear his voice — yet to be unable to emerge from his own harried defenses. He forced himself to study the maneuvers of the attackers, occasionally commenting to Sallustius on the discipline and arrangement of the Alemanni forces. It took a supreme effort of will to prevent the Beast's taunts from rattling him.

He later told me that he concluded the barbarian's bluster was less for the sake of rankling us than for maintaining the cohesiveness of his own restless forces. Chonodomarius was the leader of a huge collection of families and clans, but the ties of fraternal kinship among barbarians extend only so far, and in that, Brother, the Alemanni are not much different from us civilized men, truth be told; for just as the sons of the Emperor Constantine slaughtered each other mercilessly, real love between brothers is a rare occurrence indeed. Whether this is because of the sins of Adam or, what is more likely, the effects of primogeniture and the inheritance laws, I cannot say. The Beast's strengths, to us, appeared formidable, but within his own clans his position could be precarious.

Fortunately, Sens was well stocked, due to the fresh influx of supplies for the farmers' market to have been held the day of the attack; and water was abundant, from the large number of springs and fountains inside the city walls. Defensive weapons, too, were readily available, for Sens had long been a regional distribution center for military provisions. Apart from each soldier's plentiful complement of arrows, bows, javelins, and spears, the walls were well supplied with more powerful devices, often requiring several men to operate: 'wolves,' which are a type of crane set up over gates, with tongs for grasping the head of a battering ram as it strikes, and a winch to haul it sideways; 'scorpions,' portable devices designed to hurl stones by applying the crank-twisting and sudden release of a rope of hemp or human hair; and 'wild asses,' which are rather larger and more unwieldy scorpions.

It was the catapult that was particularly fearful, from the standpoint of damage to humans and animals. The device is a huge mechanical bow designed with grooves fitted with thick bolts with wooden fletching, which can be shot with murderous force. It is operated by three men, one the 'spotter' to sight the target and place the bolt in the horn groove, while the two others wind the crank. The spotter then releases the catch and fires the heavy bolt to astonishing effect, at such a speed that no sloping of the arrow over distance even needs to be taken into account. On one occasion I watched as a barbarian cavalry officer was selected as the target. The spotter took careful aim, and upon firing, the bolt whizzed invisibly across the field and slammed into the officer's thigh, neatly

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