by the colors and the clarity of things, and I thought perhaps all I had just heard had been a dream, a terrible dream. If only, I thought, if only I had been born at Mount Atlas of ancient legend, where dreams are said to be unknown. Then I looked to the side, where again I saw the grizzled old Gaul slowly limping toward me from behind the rubbish pit. I stared at him, more in my own inner confusion and shock than at anything specific about him. He stopped at a distance when he saw me, then slowly raised an earthen jug from behind his back in a kind of salute, and grinned at me with rotting, blackened teeth.
III
Julian suffered a terrible blow at discovering the Empress's unspeakable treachery. Out of naivete or pure blindness, he had failed to recognize what everyone else in the Empire knew: that any son of the Caesar would be heir to the throne, and would thus endanger childless Eusebia's position. For rather than accepting Julian's son as his heir, the Emperor could simply declare a divorce and take a new wife who could produce a son — hence her betrayal.
Julian bid me tell no one of what I had learned from Matilda. I lied, or rather told only part of the truth in response to Eutherius' questioning, when I said simply that the girl had died of natural causes, and that her case was closed. The shrewd old eunuch suspected something more was amiss, I'm sure, but said nothing. Julian, though shaken, remained outwardly composed and efficient, with a face that had seemingly become granite. His path, however, was to descend from one hell to another, for the week after my return from Sens, news arrived that certain enemies of Julian's in the Emperor's court, including Florentius, Pentadius, and Paul the Chain, had succeeded in gaining Sallustius' recall to Rome, on the grounds that he was exciting Julian against the Emperor. Sallustius was said to be spreading the word that the Caesar, not the Augustus, was the greatest military and civil leader of the Empire, and that he alone was the savior and restorer of Gaul.
The charges were ridiculous, of course, as silent Sallustius rarely expressed a personal opinion on anyone or anything, much less the Emperor himself. The Emperor's sycophants, however, jealous of Julian's success against the Germans as well as within Gaul against the ancient and hidebound Roman bureaucracy, attributed his effectiveness to Sallustius' efforts. Indeed, they saw no better way to trip the Caesar up than to remove his access to his longtime adviser and friend. Their clever accusations to the suspicious and paranoid Emperor, couched in the form of eloquent praise and eulogies of Julian's abilities, had the effect of coarse sea salt being rubbed into an open wound.
Julian received the news at first with shock, which was reciprocated by Sallustius in the form of an even moodier silence than usual. The latter, however, even knowing he was being sent to his death rather than to the honorable and wealthy retirement he deserved for his long years of service to the state, kept his chin high, and within a day had packed a few belongings in a leather soldier's kit, slung it on his shoulder, and arrived to bid farewell. Julian was disturbed at the alacrity of his departure and the simplicity of his belongings, and delayed an additional day to arrange an escort of thirty mounted legionaries and a gift of his own personal armor, hurriedly refitted by the city's best smith, with a small coffer filled with gold Julians. When all was finally ready, however, and Sallustius had sorrowfully mounted his horse to depart, Julian's expression became surprisingly placid. Sallustius looked at him suspiciously.
'Julian,' he said, 'I forbid you to take any action on my account. I'll not have you endanger yourself, or the province, by angering Constantius in this affair.'
'Not to worry, old friend, not to worry. I seek only the good of Rome.'
Sallustius continued to stare at him. 'It's precisely words like that that make me worry.'
Julian smiled sadly, and slapped the horse's haunches lightly. 'Off you go, Sallustius. Stay alive.' He paused as the horse began to trot off. 'We will meet again.' The older man turned and glared at him from the saddle.
During these dark times, Julian had few comforts and motivations — indeed, if one were to quantify them, there would be at most three, by my count. The first and most fundamental, indeed the very salvation of his soul, was in stripping down his life to its most austere, to its barest core. While other men under such circumstances might seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, or mountains, and though he might have desired these things very much, Julian was of the opinion that such external needs were altogether a mark of a common, shallow type of man. Indeed, he prided himself on his power to retire into himself whenever he wished. Nowhere, he said, does a man retire with more quiet or freedom from trouble than into his own soul, particularly when he has within himself a store of thoughts that by looking into them, he may immediately fall into perfect calm.
As a physician, I would concur and go even further, by noting that such perfect calm is nothing more than a good ordering of the mind. Just as physicians always have their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so too does a man require principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest thing, with a recollection of the bond that unites the divine and human to each other. A man can do nothing well that pertains to himself without at the same time having a reference to things divine. And falling back on his fundamental principles, Julian was able to cleanse his soul and arrange his life to be free of clutter and distraction, allowing him to focus clearly now on developing the plan that would take him so high, and sink him to such depths.
In this he continued with his routine of before, yet now with a severity and dedication that rivaled that of the most rigorous ascetics. He slept for only moments at a stretch, waking spontaneously without urging, and when fatigued would lie down again, not on a feathered bed or brightly colored silk spreads, but on a coarse woven mat which the local Gallic peasants called a susurna, under a worn, woolen soldier's blanket or, like Diognetus, with a mere plank bed and skin. Alexander the Great, it is said, used to keep his arm outside his bed over a bronze basin, holding a silver ball in his hand, so that when he fell asleep and his muscles relaxed he might be awakened by the sound of the ball's dropping. Julian, however, needed no such artificial devices to wake him whenever he willed.
He was utterly indifferent to cold or warmth; just as he ignored whether he was drowsy or satisfied with sleep, or whether he was spoken ill of or praised. I would go so far as to suspect that he would take only a mild interest even in whether he was dying or doing something else, for to his mind, dying was simply one of the acts of life, and it would have been sufficient to him merely to do it well, if that is what he had undertaken. His moderation in eating was legendary, limited mostly to a vegetarian diet, and he would sometimes go the entire day eating naught but a soldier's biscuit, as if the notion of feeding himself had simply slipped his mind. The common practice among banqueters of inducing vomiting in order to eat more, even during solemn occasions, was one in which he never indulged, nor would he countenance it in others in his presence.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the physical rigors to which he voluntarily submitted, I never saw him become ill, except on one occasion when he was nearly killed by a brazier that had been brought into his room. The winter had been severe, particularly in light of the normally mild climate of Paris, and the Seine was raising slabs of ice like marble, almost to the point that they could join and form a continuous path to bridge the river. Julian normally was strict in refusing to allow his domestics to heat his room, feeling that stuffiness and warmth induced drowsiness, which he could not abide, given all the other demands on his energies and time. On this night, when he relented and finally permitted them to bring in a few coals, his fears were realized, and he fell asleep. With the windows shuttered, he quickly became poisoned by the fumes, and it was only by a happy coincidence that a scribe reporting to him for duty discovered him sprawled on the floor, pale and scarcely breathing. By the time I arrived, he had recovered his senses and weakly waved me away, swearing he would never allow heat in his room again.
His quarters he decorated sparingly, a cross on the west wall to catch the light of the rising sun, and various dusty archaeological artifacts in which he had taken a recent interest heaped in the corners — strange, stonelike bones of giant creatures, shells of unknown mollusks that had been found on mountaintops, and, most especially, heads, torsos, and other body parts of various idols that had been found beneath the ground's surface when his engineers were excavating for new walls and buildings. Once, upon surveying an especially large deposit of what appeared to be pieces of sarcophagi littering his hallway and anteroom, I lost patience with — I'm not sure with what exactly, Brother, perhaps with what I viewed as merely the frivolity and futility of collecting and storing such vestiges of dead, or rather never-existent, gods.
'Julian,' I said, striving to maintain a neutral but pointed tone to my voice. 'Your collections are becoming a
