Gods and Legions (36 page)

The entire reconstruction plan was couched in the form of a restoration of friendly ties between Rome and the Jews and in November of that year he invited me to travel with him to Jerusalem to witness the ceremonial unveiling of the temple's new principal gate, the area around which had been recently cleared of debris, and with the erection of new columns and porticos about to be completed. Already he had received encouraging news of the temple's progress; how at the announcement that rubble was to be cleared for the start of the construction, Jews of every age and from every region had set aside their disputes and converged on the holy mountain of their fathers to witness and assist in the great event. Men forgot their haughtiness and women their fragility; spades and axes were donated by rich benefactors, and rubble was carried by hand, even in mantles of silk. Purses opened up and the region's entire population was enthused by the pious commands of their new monarch.

Despite my mixed feelings as to his true motives, I eagerly assented to the trip, for I had never before been to Jerusalem and was delighted at the opportunity to visit the Holy City before the start of the Persian campaign in the spring. The night before we were scheduled to depart, however, a Roman naval trireme pulled silently into the port outside Antioch and disembarked its sole passenger, Alypius of Antioch, the former governor of Britain whom Julian had assigned to overseeing the rebuilding of the temple. He had left Jerusalem only three days before, paying bribes amounting to half his estate in gold to secure a fast ship that would take him to Antioch before our departure, and practically flogging the captain the entire journey to push the rowers to move faster. As Alypius rushed into the palace, accompanied by two sturdy, barefoot sailors who looked about in wonder and awe, I noticed that his face was ashen and his manner almost panicky. Julian was summoned, and in the moments before he arrived, I quickly poured out a large draught of uncut wine and offered it to the trembling architect to calm him, which he drank down gratefully in a single gulp. He then explained the reason for his hurried journey from Jerusalem.

'Your Highness,' he stammered, until Julian ordered him to stand at ease. 'All was prepared for your arrival and for the reception in a few days – indeed, lengths of sailcloth had even been draped over the new gate, ready for you to give the tug on a string we had rigged, which would send the entire veil billowing to the ground to expose the loveliest temple entrance in the East—'

'What is it, man?' Julian barked impatiently. 'Get on with it!'

'There was a tremor.'

'What?' I said. 'An earthquake? We've heard nothing about one. Was there any damage?'

'Not to the city, no, my lord,' the poor man answered me, afraid to look anyone in the eye.

'What then?'
Julian roared in exasperation.

'My lord,' the hapless architect moaned, 'the entire portico collapsed. Twenty workmen who were rigging the veil were buried in the rubble, and the remainder were only able to save themselves from the falling stones by taking refuge in a nearby...' He stopped, as if unable to go on.

Julian stared at him, motionless.

'A nearby
what?
' he asked, quietly and menacingly.

'A church,' Alypius whispered.

'A church,' Julian repeated, before spinning on his heels and storming out of the anteroom, muttering threateningly under his breath and gesturing with his arms, though there was no one nearby.

'What am I to do now?' the wretched Alypius asked me after a moment, staring around at the priests and guards who surrounded him, and at the malevolent Maximus, who had watched the entire exchange in silence. I had noticed, since my return to service, that Maximus' rash, if that was what you could call it, had spread several inches further and now engulfed most of the left side of his face and disappeared into the collar of his tunic, which he was constantly tugging and adjusting in his discomfort.

'I suggest you return to the trireme and await the Emperor's orders,' I told the man gently. He looked at me as if I had just passed his death sentence, as in fact I very well may have, for he was jailed that next morning and killed later in the week by a fellow prisoner, a madman, apparently, who had become enraged at the unfortunate architect for reasons I never learned.

'It doesn't matter,' Julian told me over breakfast two days later, in a calm after his earlier rage. 'I will order the cleanup and lay the cornerstone of the reconstructed temple myself.'

But the journey to lay the sacred stone was not to be. During the next several weeks, frightful reports filtered up to us from Jerusalem's temple district, which at first he dismissed in contempt, then noted in some disbelief. Finally, after summoning the Roman governor of Jerusalem himself to the palace at Antioch to give account for the strange happenings, he listened to them in utter astonishment. It appears that although at first the project to clear the temple site of the centuries-old accumulation of debris had been pursued with great vigor, not a workman in the entire city, Jewish, pagan, or Christian, could now be persuaded to set foot within a hundred yards of the site, for fear of divine punishment. During the first week after the initial collapse of the portico, as workmen had been in the process of removing the great stones and columns that lay in a chaotic heap, a series of terrible balls of flame had burst forth from the temple's ancient foundations, charring men into blackened skeletons. The fire had then disappeared without trace of an odor or a lingering flame.

The site foreman had at first attributed the phenomenon to some seepage of the black bitumen found in such abundance in the area of the Dead Sea, the ancient name of which, in fact, is the Lake of Asphalt because of the masses of that substance that periodically detach themselves from the bottom and float to the surface. A careless laborer, he concluded, might have ignited a pool of it when heating his supper in the shelter of the rocks, and thereby started the conflagration. He therefore sent a number of workers carefully into the underground vaulted cellars of the temple, some of which were still intact after the old Roman destruction, to investigate the matter further.

The second series of flames lit the evening sky like a lightning strike in a Dacian forest, and indeed many in the city of Jerusalem at first looked up to the heavens in surprise to see if they were about to be caught in the rain. They were even further surprised when the entire city was pelted with a barrage of dust, sand, and small pebbles. If only it had rained true water, it might have sooner ended the suffering of those poor ten or twelve souls among the cellar explorers who were still left alive after the explosion. They had rushed from the underground caverns shrieking and raving, their hair and extremities burned from their bodies. Most of them died hours or days later.

As I wrote earlier in this treatise, I have heard of fire issuing forth from dead bodies, and I myself have witnessed fire bursting from the storage of ice. Never, however, have I encountered fire emanating from cold, dressed stone, and I hope I may never live to see such a phenomenon myself. The rationalists among Julian's court speculated that terrible gases had somehow been released from where they had been building deep within the earth, perhaps from faults that had developed in the ground following the tremor that had first toppled the structure, and that these gases had, in turn, been ignited by the spark of a workman's chisel or the sputtering of an oil lamp. Others spoke more darkly of the wrath of the gods, be they the ancient ones of Greece jealous of Julian's favor to the Jews, or the mysterious bovine deities of Persia, infuriated at Rome's imminent march against the King of Kings. The Christians in the street claimed it as holy retribution against the Emperor for daring to question their Savior's divinity, while Maximus and the haruspices attributed it to still insufficient attention to placating Rome's guardian spirits through additional sacrifices.

I shall leave any final interpretation to you, Brother, for Julian wisely diverted his attention and energies elsewhere.

II

I have aged, Brother, faster even than the days that are passing me by, which tear the years off my life as does an infant the leaves of a book that has been left within its grasp. Over the past five years I fear I have aged ten, and over the next five years it will be twenty, and at this rate I shall soon catch up and pass you, and give even Father a good run for his money. Yet it is not in physical years that I am becoming elderly; by many standards I would still be considered a relatively young man, and indeed though my hair is thinning and growing gray at the temples, still my waist is trim, my bowels strong, my pace rapid, and my ability to turn a maiden's head now and then undiminished, though the desire to even tempt such a distraction is another matter indeed. No, of course it is not by fleshly standards that I am growing old, for all flesh must follow the laws of nature and only the steady passage of the days and nights can contribute to one's physical aging. I am growing old inside, for my spirit is tired, bone tired, if you will forgive the mixing of a spiritual metaphor with a carnal one, and this exhaustion, which does not leave me even now, began to be felt the day I arrived in Antioch and confirmed Julian's designs against the Persians. Despite the jauntiness of the soldiers, the cockiness and profanity of the sailors, the laughter and jests of Julian, and even the occasional excited grin from the pustulant mouth of Maximus, I felt a foreboding, a sadness about the expedition, perhaps as a result of the shallowness of its motives. As we prepared for the march, I felt like an old man with a very long way to travel.

The campaign against the Persians, let it be said, was entirely unnecessary. Even Sallustius had tried to dissuade Julian, to no avail.

'He believes it will resurrect Rome's ancient glory,' the adviser muttered, when I once cautiously asked him Julian's motives.

'So he told me, too. And will it?' I countered.

Sallustius grimaced, and sidestepped the question. 'He's following his vision, his goddess, and Maximus encourages him. You know Julian as well as I do, physician. You cannot talk him out of something he feels is his destiny. And Persia, he says, is his destiny.'

'Every Roman emperor for four centuries has believed that. Some have won battles, even wars, but none have truly conquered Persia. Surely he doesn't believe Maximus' claims for his "destiny."'

'Oh, he believes,' Sallustius said resignedly, turning back to the army's preparations for the march. 'He truly believes.'

King Sapor was no fool. Indeed, I would even venture that he was the wiliest monarch any Roman emperor had ever faced. Though now in the thirtieth year of his reign, he was still a young man, since by a strange fluke he had held the title of Great King for longer than he had actually been alive. His father, King Hormouz, had met an untimely death while his wife was pregnant with their first child, which had excited the ambitions of other princes in the royal family who aspired to the enormous empire. To forestall civil war, Hormouz' widow arranged immediately to crown the prospective heir, even before knowing the infant's sex. An enormous royal bed was constructed in the coronation hall for the ceremony, on which the queen lay in state in the presence of all the courtiers and nobles. A magnificent diadem was balanced on the spot assumed to conceal the head of the future king, and all the satraps present threw themselves prostrate before the queen's majestic belly and its royal contents. The infant ruler Sapor, with his official title of King of Kings, Partner of the Stars, and Brother of the Sun and Moon, was delivered several weeks later, and by that time his accession to the throne was a foregone conclusion.

King Sapor's spies in Antioch soon informed their employer of Julian's preparations. The King was well apprised of the extent of the military forces and foreign alliances being arrayed against him, and, most important, of the quality of its leader, the young, energetic emperor who had decimated the barbarians of the Rhine, crossed the Roman Empire like a lightning bolt, and seized the capital without spilling a drop of Roman blood. When Julian's preparations were confirmed, Sapor dropped all pretense at haughtiness and sent a polite letter to the Emperor, claiming kinship with him in their mutual capacity as great leaders, and suggesting that they negotiate their differences in a friendly manner.

Yet Julian's qualities and reputation, which had so terrified the King of Kings into suing for peace, were the same ones that prevented him from changing his course of action, despite the clear advantages and the saving of treasure and men. Julian's energetic efforts over the past year in Antioch had yielded an army of sixty-five thousand Roman legionaries, plus that number again of Arabian, Scythian, Goth, and Saracen auxiliary troops; an alliance with King Arsaces of Armenia to hold another sixty thousand Armenian troops in readiness to tie down the Persians on their northwestern front; a river fleet awaiting him on the Euphrates under the command of Count Lucillianus, consisting of a thousand transport ships laden with arms and provisions of every sort; and fifty massive ships of war for fighting, with an equal number of engineering barges for bridge-building and other riparian works. The wooden vessels, covered with raw hides and laden to the gunwales with an inexhaustible supply of arms, utensils, provisions, and engines, were so numerous that they crowded the entire Euphrates River from bank to bank. With a commitment such as that, what answer could possibly be given to King Sapor's diplomatic letter, offered in all humility by the lavishly arrayed uncle of the King himself, who presented rich presents, a fine Arabian stallion, the granting of territories Rome had long coveted, and peaceful coexistence between the two mighty empires as long as both rulers should live?

Unfortunately, in presenting the letter, the King's uncle did not stop with his humble entreaty, as a wise man would have. He also pointedly reminded Julian of the misfortunes of his predecessor, the elderly Valerian, during his own Persian expedition a century earlier, when he was captured and flayed and his wrinkled skin displayed as an 'eternal trophy' at the Persian court. As Julian sat seething, the dim-witted ambassador went on to blithely describe the debacle of Galerius, so recent that it was still fresh in the minds of older veterans. His army had been almost destroyed and the general himself had barely managed to return to Antioch alive. Julian's eyes flashed in anger as he listened to the diplomat drone on.

And then he tore up the letter.

With a sneer, he flung the scraps in the face of the King's astonished uncle. 'Tell your sovereign,' he snarled, 'to take heed, that I, Julian, Supreme Pontiff, Caesar, Augustus, servant of the gods and of Ares, destroyer of the barbarians and liberator of the Gauls, recognize no man's superiority over me, nor any empire's over Rome. Hasten, man, warn him, for I intend to deliver confirmation to him personally, at the head of my army!'

War was now not only possible, but inevitable, and the only conceivable destination for Julian's huge army was Ctesiphon, the royal capital of Persia itself.

The massive collection of troops set out on the fifth of March, a time that had been carefully planned to take advantage of the season, which was still sufficiently cool for comfortable marching. The normally arid, barren hills were this time of year still green with pasturage and liberally watered by a multitude of small streams. Our route took us due east across Syria, through the towns of Litarbae and Beroea, and on to Hierapolis, an important caravan center for the region, where additional troops and provisions were being assembled to join with us upon our arrival.

The omens were not good, however, and I am ashamed to say that perhaps because of my constant proximity to Julian and his augers, even I was beginning to take an interest in such signs. They would have been difficult to ignore by even Bishop Athanasius himself, however. Our entry into Hierapolis was staged to represent a triumphal march, preceded as we were by the vast arrays of colorful foreign troops marching in perfect unison, their polished armor gleaming in the bright sunlight. Just as we entered, however, a massive stone colonnade at the very gates of the city fell, narrowly missing Julian's chariot, which had just passed under. It killed fifty soldiers and severely injured untold numbers of civilians who had been standing near or climbing upon it, which was no doubt the cause of its toppling. Julian, however, unable to focus on any thought but the destruction of Persia, scarcely seemed to notice, even when the entire city threw itself into a frenzy of wailing and mourning for its dead. It was only with the greatest of efforts that he was convinced by Sallustius to pay a courtesy visit to the soldiers injured in the catastrophe, the first casualties of his campaign. His mind, however, was elsewhere, on troop counts and supply lines, negotiations with allies and terms of surrender for the Persians. He had no emotion to spare for the dead and injured.

Here we stayed three days, adjusting formations and marching orders, and then, rather than simply following the Euphrates downstream toward Ctesiphon, as King Sapor might perhaps have expected us to do, we crossed the mighty river on a pontoon bridge in the dead of night, and struck out again across the desert in a series of forced marches, twenty or thirty miles a day in full gear. The route took us through Batnae, where another unfortunate event occurred – a huge stack of grain collapsed at a supply station, burying and suffocating another fifty men who were gathering fodder. Still, however, we paused no longer than it took for Julian to perform a brief sacrifice for the care of the men's souls, a ceremony that left even the most ardent bull worshipers cold with the haphazard and absent way that Julian conducted it. Without lingering, we pushed on to Carrhae, an ancient town memorable as the scene of the destruction of a Roman army under Crassus centuries before. We were well on the road now to the mighty Tigris River, several weeks' journey distant, which also led to the same goal of Ctesiphon.

Ctesiphon had, in fact, been the mark achieved by the Emperor Trajan two and a half centuries earlier, in his victorious campaign against the Parthians. Trajan, however, had started from the north, in Armenia, and marched to the Persian capital along the more favorable course of the Tigris, leaving his secondary army to advance to the capital along the more difficult Euphrates shore. By marching well past the Euphrates and moving toward the Tigris with his huge army, Julian aimed to keep Sapor's spies guessing as to which of the two attack routes he intended to take; and perhaps he himself was unsure at this time which he would choose, as he attempted to monitor Sapor's own forces from afar. Ultimately, he decided to use the pincer tactic that had served Trajan so well in his assault, though with a twist: Julian's secondary force, under the command of his kinsman, General Procopius, would continue east toward the Tigris, joining with Arsaces' Armenians if called upon to do so, and then lay waste the districts along the banks of that river while advancing to Ctesiphon. Julian, meanwhile, with the bulk of the troops and supplies, would double back south to rejoin the massive Euphrates fleet at Callinicum, and then push forward to meet Procopius at Ctesiphon upon his arrival.

At Carrhae I was again party to a perceived good omen involving his horse. Ever since the embarrassing event in Thrace when I had fallen on my face in the mud, I had been particularly cautious, when invited for a ride with Julian, to plant my feet sturdily before assisting him into the saddle Persian-style, if his lance hook was not available. I was unconcerned here, however, for there was no mud.

He had invited me for a short ride to watch a detachment of Scythian slingers and archers at their target practice, and I had gladly joined him, eager for the excuse to leave the confines of the camp. On the way, however, Julian's usual stallion pulled a shoulder, and he borrowed a horse from one of the groomsmen accompanying us. We watched the practice for perhaps an hour, and were just mounting our horses to leave, when suddenly an errant stone from a slipped sling slammed into the side of the borrowed horse's face.

The weapon was not one of the deadly, lead, acorn-shaped missiles that the slingers use in actual battle, but rather simply a round, hard river stone that had been casually picked up by the slinger from the ground where he was practicing. Nevertheless, the speed of its impact knocked the poor beast's head to the side with a spurt of blood that bespattered the surprised Julian, as the stone penetrated its cheek and shattered the molars on that side of its face. The horse fell in agony to the ground, throwing its rider clear, but writhing and rolling in the dirt, its hooves flying in all directions, scattering its priceless silken trappings trimmed with gems and gold.

Julian was red-faced with fury. 'Where is he?' he shouted, stalking toward the dumbfounded centurion who had been training the slingers, the crowd of confused soldiers clustering behind him in terror. 'Where is the ass who felled my horse, and who damn near killed me?'

The centurion looked behind himself in consternation at his squad, wondering what he should do, as the groom and I rushed behind Julian to calm him before any damage was done. Rarely had I seen Julian in such a fury – even when his son had been killed he had been able to control his emotions, but his moods of late, swinging from utter apathy at the death of fifty soldiers, to sputtering rage at a mere injury to his borrowed horse, confounded me. I seized his shoulder to hold him back from launching himself at the centurion. Suddenly one young Scythian, scarcely a boy, stepped out from the crowd of slingers and made his way shakily toward the Emperor.

Julian watched, trembling with rage, and when he had approached near, roared, 'Do you realize what you have done, boy? With your clumsiness, the horse is as good as dead, and it is only by the grace of the gods that I am not too! A fine horse, this... this... damn it all, groom, what was the name of the horse?' he said, whirling around to where I stood next to the trembling stable hand.

'Babylon,' the groom croaked, and as Julian turned back to the boy to continue his tongue-lashing, he suddenly stopped.