coreligionists, took himself far too seriously for polite company.
I strode down the corridor in a blind rage, turning corners at random, entering empty halls, until I arrived at last at a tiny peristyle built into an unused space between two wings, a small, bubbling fountain in the middle embellished with a mosaic portrait of Jesus surrounded by the twelve Apostles. A small shaft of sunlight beamed down diagonally from the skylight onto one of the peristyle's fluted columns, illuminating the delicate pink and yellowish veins in the finely polished marble, showing it for all the world like a pale human limb, drained of blood and with the skin carefully peeled back as in an autopsy, each artery and vessel exposed for the physician's examination.
I walked to the column in a daze and stood staring at it, willing myself to clear away the rushing thoughts and confusion crowding upon my brain, focusing my eyes on the bright, sunlit stone, forcing myself to concentrate only on the essential of life. Emptying my mind, I brought my face closer to the stone, tracing with my eyes the meandering, bifurcating pink and yellow lines, following each to its tiny, indistinct end and then retracing my steps along the capillary until my vision began to blur from the strain and intensity of my focus and the sweat from my forehead burned my eyes. I closed them, and pressed my cheek, my whole body against the marble, which was cold except for the thin, narrow stripe that had been warmed by the beam of sun, and suddenly all the rage and frustration that had been built up in me by Julian's words and actions over the past year broke out. Struggling for control, I slid slowly down the veiny marble, sinking to my knees, still grasping the column with my arms for support, the trail of living perspiration on the fluting glistening and marking the path of my decline and redemption.
For a brief moment only, before it dried, the moisture lent an aspect of life and suffering to the cold, dead skin of the stone, and then even it evaporated and was gone.
After Caesarius' courageous but ineffectual debate with the Emperor, he returned home to us at Nazianzus, a beaten, tired man. For many days after his arrival he scarcely moved, sitting despondently in the kitchen or praying for hours on end in the tiny chapel I had built on one end of our modest dwelling. Caesarius was so quiet, and moved so rarely, that though the house was small for three grown men and a woman, his presence was barely felt.
In time, he roused himself, seeming to have put behind him the events of Gaul and his long accompaniment of the Antichrist Emperor. He even began to apply some of the considerable medical skills he had acquired, treating the maladies of the poor folk and lepers of the town, bringing babies to light, even curing lame farm stock, though this was more of a psychological need for him than a financial one — he had returned from Constantinople bearing a considerable quantity of gold from his long service with two emperors, and over the previous few years had sent back even more to our father, who had distributed all but a few pennies of expenses to the poor. Caesarius resolved to settle down to the career of a small-town physician and, it was my fondest hope, eventually prepare himself for a life of holiness and meditation within a religious community, for which I believed he would be extremely well suited.
During that time he ignored what little news of the outside world filtered through to our small town — and such news was far from comforting. Julian moved his court to Antioch, and in an effort to purge himself of the mystic sign of God's promise he had received at his baptism, he washed his entire body in the blood of a bull during the diabolical rite of the taurobolium, pledging fealty to the false god Mithras. Daily, it was said, he participated in ghastly sacrifices, slaughtering countless dozens of animals with his own hands, wrenching out their inner organs for interpretation by the seers of the gods' intent, reveling in the blood and gore of the foul ceremonies.
And his apostasy was not limited merely to his own practices: for though professing freedom of religion for all in the Empire, he devised peculiarly clever atrocities to inflict on Christians. All religious sites, he decreed, were to be returned to their founding sect — which meant, in almost all cases, that converted Christian churches were to be restored to temples of the false pagan gods. Equally insidious was his conclusion that since Christians did not believe in the truth of the Greek gods, Christian instructors should be forbidden from teaching, and therefore profaning, any of the ancient Greek works of literature. He gave orders that Christians could not serve in the army, nor be appointed to government positions except at the personal whim of the Emperor himself. The ultimate intent was to remove Christians from the Empire's mainstream culture and political movements, resulting in a burdensome intellectual sterility and making our work much more difficult. So too did he permit open persecution of our faith. Churches in Syria and Phoenicia were desecrated by anti-Christian mobs. Priests were tortured, virgins violated. Victims had their abdomens slit open and filled with barley, after which the suffering martyrs were given to the pigs as living feed troughs.
Even old Marcus, Bishop of Arethusa, who thirty years before had rescued the infant Julian when other members of his family were being put to death, was not spared. He was ordered to repair a temple he had allegedly desecrated, but this he refused to do. Julian declined to hand down a death sentence, perhaps out of respect for his old guardian; instead he left Marcus' fate to the citizens of Arethusa. The townspeople, possessed by the devil, applied mob justice, dragging the bishop through the streets by his feet, tearing out his beard and then giving him over to the cunning torment of wicked schoolboys, who amused themselves by skewering him with their styli. Finally, half unconscious and pierced with multiple wounds, he was smeared with honey and exposed in the sun to the stings of insects until dead. Each sting was an accusation against Julian.
Of even more concern were reports of the Emperor's increasingly fragile state of mind. Upon his accession to the throne it had been assumed by all that the era of unstable and paranoid rulers was behind us, and that the Empire would now be led by a rational man who was firm and constant in his philosophy and beliefs. Word began filtering down to us now, however, of the Emperor's wild mood swings and changes of policy; of his petty vindictiveness and an unwonted and unwarranted focus on irrelevancies; of bursts of energy followed by days on end when he could do nothing but bemoan the death of his son and could hardly muster the energy to rise from his bed. Whether this was a result of his persecution of Christ's followers — a kind of divine retribution, if you will — or whether the guilt he felt at such persecution led to his increasingly unstable mind-set, I am unable to say. Which the cause and which the effect? Or for that matter, which the truth and which the lie? Rumor, as Virgil says, has as many mouths and whispering tongues as eyes and waiting ears, bearing falsehood and slander as faithfully as truth. Stories and reports of his actions abounded, and were passed on to us unfiltered by evidence and embellished by wild fancy. As distant as we were from the royal capital, we were helpless to know what to believe.
Thus it was, until the arrival a year later of that obese imposter, the physician Oribasius, who trotted into town one day astride an overburdened, limping army horse, flanked by a dozen bored legionaries and a pair of disgustingly painted eunuchs, who looked around them with distaste at our humble community, and seemed to recoil at the very dust of the street.
This man Oribasius I had never seen in my life, but I had heard of him from the stories told by Caesarius, and recognized him without a moment's hesitation. The same occurred to him as well, for as soon as he spied me in our tiny forum, he hailed me most heartily by name, though lacking in all the respect normally owed to a Christian priest and a bishop, and inquired into the whereabouts of my brother. So astonished was I at this appearance of a vision from Caesarius' past that, lacking in all presence of mind, I gave him directions to our house, for which he thanked me cheerfully. It was only afterwards that I regretted this action and wished I could have ripped my tongue out by the roots for the harm it had begotten. I hastened home as soon as I could to confront the flatulent fraud.
Oribasius was just preparing to leave when I arrived, and after nodding to me curtly, he was heaved onto his suffering horse by the sweating legionaries, and the entire party lumbered off to the east, whence they had arrived scarcely an hour before.
My brother refused to meet my harsh gaze as I demanded the reason for the foul Asclepian's visit. He demurred for a time, and then at my repeated prodding he admitted that Oribasius had, indeed, been sent by Julian, who was requesting, nay pleading, that Caesarius return to his service. The Emperor, in Antioch, was preparing to enter upon another military campaign, the most important of his life, he claimed. Oribasius' skills had apparently served him well during his sedentary court life in Constantinople over the past year, but although the gluttonous demon would be accompanying the army with the baggage train, the Emperor desired that Caesarius ride with him in battle, as he had always done in Gaul in the past.
'Naturally you flatly refused the Antichrist's entreaties,' I said.
'Not… flatly,' he replied.
'Were you merely being polite or does the Emperor's spell still seduce you, Brother?' I asked.
Caesarius lashed out angrily. 'I am under no spell but Christ's,' he retorted. 'If I serve Julian again, it will be for the sake of his immortal soul. Christ said there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over
