The chant began growing louder, more urgent, and I looked at him impatiently. 'Julian,' I said more insistently, 'they're calling for you. The city is in turmoil, something must be done.'
But he was as if in a trance, a half-smile on his face, staring straight past me as if it were I who was the shade, not the phantasm by which he was haunted. 'She spoke to me, Caesarius, for the first time she spoke, and her voice was like light, like enchantment, but I didn't so much hear it as felt it, penetrating into me, and though she was rebuking me, her words felt comforting, as sweet as honey…'
I saw by now that he was beyond me, that there was no dissuading him from this madness, and that the quickest way of addressing the urgent business of the mob outside was to encourage him to spill out his words as fast as he could.
'What did she tell you?'
'She scolded me, as a mother would a young and flighty son. 'Julian,' she said, 'long have I watched you in secret, wishing to raise you higher, but always being rebuffed. If even now I am unwelcome, I shall go away sad and dejected.''
'I don't understand — ' I began.
'That's not all she said,' he continued, and I began to despair as the chant grew louder, more desperate, and the previously unintelligible syllables began to form words and meaning. 'She said, 'Do not forget, Julian: if you reject me again this time, I shall dwell with you no longer.''
'It was only a dream, a puzzling dream,' I said.
'No, my friend, it was not, it was a vision, not puzzling in the slightest, as clear as any I have had yet. Listen!'
And for the first time I realized that he too was aware of the rising chant, the fearful sound, which had begun to make its way through and around the palace, rolling and echoing through the corridors and anterooms, gaining strength like a wave rushing unimpeded over an open beach, as more and more voices picked up the refrain. Within moments the sound was bellowed deafeningly from a hundred thousand tongues, roared from every street and corner of the city within a mile of the palace, torches and clubs rising and falling in unison with the rolling vowels of his name and the terrifying, traitorous suffix they had appended to it, to which only the Supreme Emperor was entitled: 'Ju-li-an Augustus! Ju-li-an Augustus!' The thought of rebellion against Constantius was madness, it was suicide, for despite the might and loyalty of the Gallic army Julian had built over the past five years, it was but a small thing compared with the forces the Emperor could martial from his legions of the Danube and the East with a mere twitch of his finger. Julian, however, was unperturbed, and as he passed out of his state of halfsleep, half- wakefulness, I saw his expression take on a hard, alert cast and he listened more closely to the shouts from outside.
The crowds roared his name and the forbidden title, they would not be put off. Within moments two officers burst into the room, begging Julian to address the troops and the camp followers from the balcony before the city was destroyed. The women, they reported, had begun dismantling the palace from the outside stone by stone, and in their frustration at being unable to reach the wall, the latecomers and soldiers in the back of the crowd had begun tearing up flagstones in the streets, and tiles and gutters from the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Paris was being taken apart, piece by piece.
He listened in silence, and nodded his assent. With the two officers flanking him he strode out of the room and down the corridors, followed by a small detachment of Petulantes archers who had also forced their way into the building. I walked behind, to the grand balcony overlooking the forum, where he was accustomed to receiving and greeting dignitaries and addressing the crowds for great proclamations and religious occasions. Throwing open the wide double doors, he was practically pushed out to the stone railing of the balcony by his increasingly nervous guard, who then retreated and stood at attention behind him as if preventing the escape of a prisoner, though escape was far from his intention at the moment. We were met with an extraordinary sight.
The forum was filled from wall to wall, the front half with thousands of women, their crying, tearstained children hoisted onto their shoulders and heads, away from the pressure of the surging crowds but into the danger of the waving, thrusting torches. The women peered up in exhaustion, their faces pale and haggard in the torchlight, hair disheveled and greasy, lips dry from three days of standing in the square with only such food and water as they were able to beg from sympathetic residents and bystanders. Behind them, filling the far end of the forum and spilling into every street and alleyway beyond, were the auxiliary legions, their pennants flying almost as if the troops had marched in unison to join the riots. Men hung precariously on drain pipes and downspouts, clambering and crowding onto the roofs far over the crowds, clinging even to rough spots on the sides of the walls that could afford a finger- or toe-hold to the most intrepid, all of them roaring the fearful chant as if with one voice: 'Ju-li-an Augustus! Ju-li-an Augustus!'
When the balcony doors burst open and Julian emerged, the chant exploded and washed over us like a sudden downpour, and all faces turned toward us in the firelight. The crowd took a moment to realize who it was that had appeared on the balcony, and with cries of recognition and triumph, the people suddenly heaved forward, even though a moment before one would have thought them to have been already packed so tightly as to be unable to move. Scattered cries and gasps of pain rose to our ears from the stone walls below the balcony, out of our line of vision, but sufficiently close as to hear the agony of those being crushed below.
The chant rose to a deafening pitch, and the very walls seemed to shake with the reverberations. Julian stared out at the crowd, and though I was unable to see his face from my position behind him, I knew, as if I had been looking at him directly, that he had applied his inscrutable military leader's expression and was now surveying the crowd with an impassive face. As word of his arrival spread to the farthest corners of the forum and back into the side streets and alleys beyond our vision, the noise level initially increased. The mob's excitement rose to a fever pitch, and all shouted and pointed in the direction of the balcony. Within moments, however, as Julian stood frozen, staring at the crowd, a hush fell, broken only by the scattered and distant wailing of the frightened children held over their mothers' heads.
'The duty of a soldier is to obey his general,' he pronounced in measured Latin, without preliminaries, in a clipped voice that carried easily over the heads of the silent crowd and resounded off the smooth stone walls of the buildings surrounding the space. 'This my soldiers have always done, and they have been rewarded in their faithfulness to me by becoming the finest fighting force in the Western Empire, invincible, conquerors of the Germans and of all the barbarian peoples of the north.' Scattered cheers erupted from the farthest corners of the forum, where the soldiers had gathered. Most, however, stood as immobile as Julian, waiting to see what further words he might have. The women beneath the balcony, filling the entire front half of the forum, wore expressions at best slack and unimpressed, at worst hostile.
'The duty of the people is to obey its Caesar,' he continued, and now I saw where he was moving — testing the waters, as does a trained rhetorician, unsure of the level of attention or the sympathies of his crowd. 'In this, too, the people of the Western Empire have acquiesced, building here for themselves Paris, the grandest city of Gaul, renowned for its libraries and public buildings and its complete and utter fealty to Rome…'
A murmur rose from the crowd, not yet loud enough or urgent enough to give one a precise idea of where they stood or where they might be led, but rather as of a rising tension, an anticipation for what they knew would be the concluding statement to come, the final installment of the trilogy of duty he was describing for his subjects.
'And the duty of the Caesar' — the crowd held its breath — 'is to honor and obey the Emperor Constantius Augustus.'
A roar ripped through the mob, high-pitched at first as the women nearest responded most quickly to his words, but expanding in volume and depth of tone as it surged to the back of the forum and Julian's words reached the ears of the soldiers and merchants whose lives most depended upon his acts. It was a bellow of fury, of exasperation and impotence, and the crowd surged forward and then swayed back as people tried to move, to run, to take some action, somehow, but were prevented and hemmed in by the press of the unwashed, cursing, roaring masses around them. Objects began to be hurled through the air — at first fruit, bread, bits of clothing and offal from the streets, but soon, as more rioters clambered to the tops of the buildings around the square and began ripping apart the rooftops and walls, more dangerous matter — clay tiles, bricks, and broken pieces of stone — began flying like missiles. Screams of pain and fury filled the air, and the women below looked up at us with expressions of terror.
'Julian,' I shouted, pushing forward through the guards and onto the balcony. The majestic bronze statue of Julius Caesar in the middle of the forum begin to sway ominously on its pedestal. 'They are destroying the city, and
