"Ford,.Michael.Curtis.-.Gods.&.Legions.-.A.Novel.Of.The.Roman.Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ford Michael Curtis)
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?'
Sallustius shook his head in frustration and raised the subject no more. The barbarians were continuing to mass in the East, Chonodomarius was still at large, and our work had just begun.
III
As for Helena, it was as if the thirty days' siege of Sens had not even occurred, for she neither left her rooms nor acknowledged Julian's daily visits to her. Since the baby's death, she had maintained her own apartments, and had now become a virtual stranger to her husband, locked away in her own mute misery, accompanied only by an ancient Gallic slave woman. Julian had at first tried to bring her comfort--insisting they would have another child, that it was the fault of the evil midwife, that families even of the Roman elite often required the birth of eight or ten children to ensure the survival of even one to adulthood. The Emperor and Empress themselves, he pointed out, were unable to conceive at all. But Helena was inconsolable, half-mad from the loss of the infant she had carried for nine months and loved as her child even while in her womb. She constantly recalled the look of accusation that Julian had cast at her upon realizing the baby had died, when Flaminia had blamed her for smothering her own flesh and blood.
Oribasius had been assigned to Helena's care, but was at a loss when faced with her indifference to life. The physician hovered about her in frustration, offering various potions and herbal extracts, burning incense to the healing god Asclepius, and finally despairing as Helena began even to refuse food. At this he took me aside and asked my counsel.
'Caesarius, perhaps your methods would have some effect where mine have failed? I am losing my patient.'
I shrugged. 'What ails the Princess is a sickness of the soul. For that I am as helpless as you are. Have you brought in a priest to talk with her?'
Oribasius shrugged in turn. 'That was the first step I took. He confessed her--strange custom you Christians have--which seemed to comfort her for a day or two, but she relapsed afterwards. Since then she has treated even the priests with the same indifference as she does the rest of us.'
I considered this. In Milan, the prescribed remedy for cases of severe melancholy is a trip to a healthier clime outside the hot, dusty city. Ironically, the preferred destination is often Gaul, where the mineral springs and the cool mountain air are considered ideal. Here Helena was, in just such an environment, but suffering from the same distraction as I had seen among wealthy matrons in the court of Milan. Perhaps it was a problem not of place, but of people.
'The Princess hasn't seen her brother and friends for over a year now,' I offered. 'She's in a foreign land, surrounded by war, with a husband away half the year campaigning and obsessed with training even when at home; she's just lost her first child, to apparent murder. Even low-ranking officers are entitled to a leave of absence once a year; perhaps the Princess would benefit from a return to her family for a short time?'
Oribasius thought this an excellent idea, if only, it occurred to me, because it would remove the blame that would fall to him if a royal patient were to die while in his care. I raised the idea with Julian the very night he was informed of Marcellus' escape.
He thought carefully. 'A coincidence you should raise the subject, Caesarius,' he said. 'In fact, Eutherius is just now preparing a trip.'
I looked at him questioningly, for Julian was highly dependent upon the old eunuch for keeping his household affairs in order, supervising everything from the quality of the cooking to the legibility of the accountants' figures. Julian would not be sending him away lightly.
'Marcellus is heading straight for Rome, where Constantius and the Empress are spending the winter. He will no doubt bring charges against me, that I have improperly usurped his powers as commander of the army. His version of events must not be the only one to reach the Emperor's ears. There is no one in my circle more well-spoken than Eutherius, nor more highly trusted by the Emperor, so I have asked him to go and to explain Marcellus' conduct. Not only would it be convenient for Eutherius to take Helena with him, but her views would bolster his defense before the Emperor--she, too, witnessed the siege.'
Although I doubted very much that mute, stricken Helena would be of much assistance to anyone, I heartily concurred with his idea of allowing the Princess to accompany Eutherius on his mission. Within two days a proper traveling party had been arranged, the dazed Princess's luggage packed, her now considerably depleted bulk eased into a sedan chair, and Julian's blessing bestowed upon her. She seemed not to know, or even care, where she was being taken. The party was accompanied by a hundred cavalry and six hundred heavy infantry, sufficient to dissuade all but the most vigorous of barbarian attacks.
Helena's absence meant that Julian was no longer fettered with household cares, and he dove into his military duties with a gusto that surprised even his officers. Within a week of her departure he had collected fifteen thousand troops from their winter quarters in the various garrisons, including those of Marcellus' abandoned center of Reims, and had set off for the Vosges mountains. There, a number of recent raids by Alemanni on local farms and villages seemed to foretell a larger, better-planned movement by Chonodomarius in the near future. At the same time, the Emperor informed Julian by letter that he was preparing a new strategy, one that would crush the barbarians once and for all. He would be sending a newly formed army of twenty-five thousand men into Gaul from the southeast, to meet up with our forces at the Rhine. They would sweep the various barbarian tribes before them in a pincer movement, trapping them as if in an enormous net, and then destroy them or roll them up north to the far hinterland, where they would be dealt with by the Huns, never again to pose a threat to Gaul.
Thus, our familiar General Barbatio reentered our lives, he who had previously been the commander of the household guard under Julian's doomed brother, and who had been the officer responsible for Gallus' arrest and murder. At the Emperor's orders, Barbatio advanced through the Alps with his legions as far as Augst. Rather than crossing the Rhine as planned, however, and pushing north to meet up with our troops in the vicinity of Strasbourg, he settled down on the far side of the river to wait. This was either, as he claimed, because of the unexpected resistance of the barbarians opposing his river crossing, or rather (as Sallustius charged) because of his own perverse negligence.
In any event, Julian's intelligence about the barbarians' intent in the Vosges was wrong, for in fact the isolated attacks in the area were nothing more than another of the Beast's diversions. As soon as he saw that the Caesar had committed himself to Strasbourg, and that Barbatio had settled at Augst, Chonodomarius led a flood of barbarians pouring out of the Black Forest directly between the two Roman armies, driving a wedge through them. Moving with the force of a landslide, they raced across the plains of central Gaul to the very walls of Lyons, cutting off all communications with the coast. The gates of the city were barred just in time, however, and Chonodomarius, again thwarted in his plans to take a major city by surprise, in frustration ordered his forces to disperse throughout the region to pillage and plunder.
When word of the debacle reached Julian he reacted swiftly, sending three cavalry squadrons racing south and taking the looters on the flank. The barbarians retreated into the woods and fields, leaving behind some dead and much of the booty. Enormous damage had been done, however. Barbatio's scouts had been watching the operation closely, and the general immediately began sending a series of reports back to the Emperor complaining how easily our lines had been infiltrated by the wave of Laeti storming out from the Black Forest, and how Julian had unwisely split off his cavalry to chase them down. When one of Julian's squadrons pushed even farther south in its pursuit, it was actually stopped by a larger contingent of Barbatio's cavalry, who claimed that the Caesar was not authorized to interfere in the territory assigned to the general. The fleeing barbarians were allowed to melt through Barbatio's lines and escape to the Rhine with impunity, and the general reported to Constantius that the true objective of our cowardly officers was to corrupt the soldiers under his command.
Julian resolved to continue the operation on his own. The barbarians hindered us from chasing them through the already dangerous mountain roads, however, by an ingenious technique: They would first cut a row of enormous trees along our route in such a way that they remained upright, supported by only the slenderest layer of uncut bark. They then moved a hundred feet deeper into the forest and did the same thing with another row of trees, aiming their arc of fall at the first row carefully balanced along the road. Lastly, they hid in silence until our troops passed through the trap on their march, at which point, from deep in the woods, the barbarians used cunningly prepared ropes to pull down the farthest row of trees, which crashed in turn onto the huge trees nearest the road and sent them toppling onto our terrified troops. We lost a large number of men and wasted untold days clearing the roads after several ghostly attacks of this nature before we finally fought through to the Rhine.
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