Gods and Legions (16 page)

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 piercing his thick armor and penetrating all the way through the horse's ribs. The impact was so strong it actually lifted the animal's hindquarters into the air before it fell, the man's near leg pinned to it by the bolt, and his far leg crushed under the fall of the horse. With that, I thanked God that I was not the barbarians' camp physician.

The garrison would be able to hold out for several weeks at full provisioning, twice that long if rationing were imposed, perhaps indefinitely if the civilians were ejected and thrown to their fate with the barbarians. It was simply a matter of waiting for Marcellus to arrive with reinforcements from Reims. But as day after day passed with no signs of salvation from that quarter, and with the barbarians becoming bolder, Julian's confidence in Marcellus' ability to lift the siege began to flag. On the day of the initial attack he had sent several pigeons, with identical messages, ordering Marcellus to bring assistance. He received no response. Runners were then dispatched, a riskier proposition given the likelihood of their being seized and tortured after slipping outside the walls; yet at least two of them successfully made it past enemy lines, as we were informed by the small signal fires they set that night on a vacant ridge just to the northern limits of our view. The messages, however, were as if scattered by the winds of heaven, puffed into the clouds unheard and unread. Marcellus did not arrive, and Julian boiled with anger at the delay, suspecting the worst of the commander.

It was soon apparent, from our vantage point high atop the walls and from the loud, unguarded voices of the barbarians wafting through the still night air, that Chonodomarius would not be able to keep his men in check much longer. When we could see that an all-out attack was being prepared, Julian ordered the city's smiths, both army and civilian, to work night and day on the manufacture of primitive and forgotten devices he recalled from his readings of Plutarch – caltrops. These consisted of iron balls, each fitted with four sharpened spikes a foot or so in length, equidistant from each other on the sphere. They could either be carefully positioned, or simply tossed on the ground from atop the walls; but however a caltrop lands, it always rests upon a firm tripod of spikes, with the fourth aimed straight up in the air. The troops called them the Devil's burrs. Hundreds of the devices were quickly crafted and by darkness strewn thickly on the ground outside the walls around the main gate, and on the narrow stone bridge leading to the entrance, where Julian had judged the enemy's attack would come.

This measure was none too soon, for the very night the caltrops had been placed, the enemy mounted a massive assault. It began with a feint by a smaller detachment that Chonodomarius had shrewdly directed toward a weak point in the walls on the far side of the city opposite our main gate, diverting a large number of our troops to that area. Just as we succeeded in fending them off, however, shouts rose from the sentries manning the entrance and we rushed back, fearing the worst.

The worst had occurred. While the bulk of the Acolytes and the garrison were defending the rear of the city, a half dozen traitors within the walls had made their way to one of the towers at the main gates. There, they overpowered the crew manning the massive oaken gate bars and pulled the winch, raising a beam and allowing one of the two enormous gates to swing open. With thundering, slashing hooves, a squad of torch-wielding Alemanni cavalry plunged toward the open door, followed by a mob of howling infantry, their bodies naked and streaked with flame-colored paint, like that of their barbarous leader. We ran breathlessly along the tops of the walls, still several tower lengths' distant from the defensive bulwarks over the gates, watching their approach in despair. The Germans' terrifying size and the ghastly paleness of their skin, an infernal vision if ever I had seen one, struck all of us with dread; as the ancients knew, in all battles it is the eyes that are conquered first, and if the outcome of this engagement had depended upon what we saw, we would by now all be laboring in some frigid, northern iron mine with brass slave chains pinning our manhood backwards by the foreskin.

As the Germanic horse troops stormed onto the narrow stone bridge, unable to see clearly by their wavering torchlight but trusting in the smoothness of the path that funneled them toward the open gate, the animals caught their hooves in the spikes of the caltrops lying thickly on the flagstones. Screaming in pain, they stumbled and fell, impaling themselves and their riders, raising howls of rage from those falling upon them from behind. We had not yet fired a single shot above the milling, moaning horses, and the barbarian infantry, running just behind the horsemen, must have assumed that the collision and piling were due merely to the riders' incompetence at trying to force too many horses simultaneously onto the narrow bridge. Bellowing in reproach at the writhing cavalry and animals blocking their path to the open entrance, which they could see only yards before them, they swarmed over the mounds of horses and men, leaping down the other side onto the caltrop-studded bridge – and impaled themselves in turn, in the feet and groin, on the evil spiked spheres awaiting them there like patient, ravenous spiders.

The nature of a caltrop, unfortunately, is that it can penetrate only one man, after which it has been neutralized; so by their sheer numbers, the barbarians charging blindly up the mounting piles of dead and wounded soldiers and down the other side were slowly, but effectively, making their way closer to the entrance. The caltrops had bought us sufficient time, however. The traitors wielding the winch that had opened the gate, seeing Julian's troops racing back to the entrance, lost heart in their task and dodged outside the gates to join their fellows. There, they were themselves pierced painfully and fatally through the feet and buttocks by the caltrops placed before the door. The open gate was quickly slammed shut and the Roman troops, taking their customary places on the wall up above, began raining missiles and stones down on the infuriated barbarians below, making short work of those who had had the misfortune to become impaled but had not yet died. The enemy retreated in disarray, and the remainder of that night was filled with the sounds of their howling, in pain and mutual recrimination, with the frustrated bellows of the Beast sounding loudest of all. Again and again he issued his obscenity-laced demands that the Caesar meet him personally to surrender the city. By morning, however, the barbarians had dispersed into the hills, leaving a thousand smoldering campfires as their only trace.

And what of poor Helix, you might ask, Brother? I daresay he is not in heaven, nor is that because he has made his lodgings in hell. After the chaos of the initial attack, he found his way to me with the help of a comrade, for the garrison was so understaffed it did not even have a camp doctor. Appalled at his grisly appearance, with the arrow still emerging two feet from the front of his face, I resigned myself to his imminent death and resolved simply to make his last hours more comfortable. Surprisingly, his greatest source of pain was his broken leg, and seeing that this was also the injury I could most easily fix, I ordered his comrade and a passing slave to hold the man down while I set it and splinted it. This Helix endured with nary a grimace, distracted, no doubt, by the strange sight of the arrow's fletching hovering before his eyes wherever he looked. Then as an academic exercise, I took a closer look at the arrow.

Having apparently been shot from rather a long distance, it had fallen into his face at a downward angle, and was aimed toward a point in the back of his neck. I walked behind him as he sat erect on the stool, and pressing his neck there I could actually feel a hard lump, which made Helix wince in pain as I touched it. Borrowing a pair of tin snips from a smith, I clipped off the shaft close to his nose, and then carefully cutting into the back of the man's neck, I located the arrowhead, grasped it with a pair of surgical pliers, and drew the entire arrow cleanly through, barb and all. Helix fainted from the pain and had to be supported by his comrade, and at first I thought he was dead, as the blood hardly flowed from either hole. Amazingly, however, he came to his senses an hour or two later, sat up in his cot, and weakly asked for water. When I handed him a cup I half expected it to flow out the back of his neck, but it did not, and after I had cleaned and sutured the injuries he stood and limped dazedly out of the room of his own accord, leaning on a crutch. Though weak of leg for many months afterwards, he eventually recovered completely and survived to fight more battles for Julian. As far as I am aware, Helix creeps still.

Julian's first act was to order the arrest of Marcellus. When Sallustius heard this, he was livid, despite Marcellus' undeniable treachery. Striding into Julian's library, where he and I were assessing the procurator's report on the damage to the city, Sallustius closed the door sharply behind him.

'By the gods, Julian!' he protested, waving a copy of Marcellus' arrest order in our faces. 'He was appointed by the Emperor! You may outrank him on paper, but you are defying the Emperor himself by arresting his general! This is
not
your mandate!'

With his face reddening and eyes flashing, Julian stood up slowly and snatched the paper away from his mentor. 'Damn the Emperor!' he said deliberately, with calm but unmistakable fury. We immediately fell silent. After a moment, Sallustius let out his breath.

'I'd advise you to hold your tongue,' the older man said quietly, staring hard at Julian. 'The rank of Caesar has never before stopped Constantius from eliminating a rival who defied him.'

Julian held his gaze, clenching and unclenching his fists in pent-up emotion. 'For a year you've known me, Sallustius,' he said, his voice barely controlled. 'And you, Caesarius, for longer than that. With your help, I have built up the armies of Gaul. I have campaigned from the Atlantic to the Rhine. I have resisted every German assault and we have reconquered territory the barbarians had held for years. I have reformed the tax system, the state's coffers are overflowing, government administration has never been more efficient.'

'This we know,' I interjected. 'Why recite it to us?'

His
eyes
remained locked on Sallustius. 'You tell me,' he said. 'What was my mandate?'

Sallustius glared at him in silence.

'What was my
mandate?
' he roared.

Still we said nothing, though Sallustius dropped his glare.

'By God, my mandate was to do
nothing! To
let the state continue to rot, to see Gaul fall piecemeal to the barbarians while the Emperor's incompetent generals cowered behind their walls. My mandate was to be
a figurehead!
'

Julian strode around the end of the table to Sallustius and laid a hand heavily on his shoulder, placing his face within inches of the older man's.

'
You
trained me, Sallustius!' he shouted hoarsely, his eyes full of emotion. '
You
made me march, up there in the Alps above Vienne!
You
have watched every step I've taken since I arrived in this bloody province! Where in the hell do you think my loyalties lie? With an emperor who would just as soon have me dead as see me take any initiative beyond feasting and protocol? My ruler is Rome itself! Rome! All that I've accomplished, all that
we've
accomplished, Sallustius, has been for the glory of Rome! Caesars are beheaded, emperors die, but Rome lives forever – and Rome will
not
be stymied by a petty general in Reims who refuses to come to the aid of a besieged garrison!'

Sallustius stared thoughtfully at the floor for a moment, then nodded, composed his face, and strode out without a word. In the hallway I heard him barking orders to a centurion of military police to send a squad to Reims immediately to arrest General Marcellus. Julian slumped back down in his seat, exhausted, his hands over his face. I sat in silence for a moment, observing him, then quietly stood to go out myself. Just as I approached the door, however, he stopped me.

'Caesarius,' he muttered, and I turned to face him. 'We are doing right, are we not?'

I thought for a moment before answering. 'Can you have any doubt?' I asked. 'Have faith, in both God and yourself.' I took the heavy codex of the Gospels and set it on the table in front of him. 'Count on this,' I continued. 'And count on me.'

He put his hands down, and his face looked years older from tiredness and strain. He ignored the book I had set in front of him, but instead looked up at me steadily, and smiled with genuine warmth.

'Sometimes,' he said, 'the hardest battles to be fought are within one's own camp.'

When the military police arrived in Reims several days later to discharge their duty, they found that the commander of the Roman army of Gaul had already anticipated them, and fled days before to Rome. By this time, Sallustius' anger had cooled, and he strode into Julian's room to announce the unfortunate news.

'Marcellus has fled to the Emperor, Julian,' he said impassively. 'It is his version of events, now, that the Emperor will hear first, not yours. The first rule in court politics is to control the flow of information – and in this instance we have failed.'

'We have not failed, Sallustius,' Julian said, glancing up from the parchment he was reading. 'We have the power of right and the good of Rome on our side, and with Marcellus gone we now have the entire army of Gaul at our disposal. With assets such as those, are Marcellus and the Emperor really of such concern?'