In fury they fled east before him to the Rhine, where they resolved to make their pitched stand; yet in Julian's cunning, he had sent divisions of troops racing ahead of them through the Vosges mountains to intercept them before their arrival at the river, preventing them from consolidating their forces into a beachhead. The barbarians fled across the river in disarray, commandeering any available vessels, sometimes riding nothing more than logs paddled out into the stream for the current to take them away, anywhere, as long as it was far from the Caesar's fury. After every victory, large or small, he ordered an immediate count and inspection of the enemy dead, even before the Roman victims themselves were buried, and it was always the same question he anxiously put to Sallustius:
'What of Chonodomarius, the Beast? Has he been captured? Killed?'
Sallustius would carefully scan the ledgers prepared for him by the parties detailed to strip the enemy dead, seeking any description that might indicate great physical size, or armor or body ornamentation more elaborate than that of the typical barbarian soldier — even evidence that uncommonly large weapons had been retrieved — but his answer was always the same.
'No, Caesar, I fear he was absent from the battle.'
What Sallustius failed to mention was that his conclusion had already been drawn long before the accountants had calculated the numbers of enemy dead. For Chonodomarius' absence in a battle was simply assumed by default, by dint of the fact that the barbarians had retreated. The enormous king had seemingly vanished without a trace, like an ephemeral spirit, into the vast, black forests beyond the Rhine. Though the Alemanni were losing battles, Chonodomarius was holding back — feeding our confidence, lulling us, perhaps, waiting for the time when he could organize his hordes into the crushing blow he was surely planning in his dark, wooded fortresses.
Fall approached, the time for returning to winter quarters, and the cornered barbarians, we knew, would soon be breathing sighs of relief; still, Julian did not abate in his fighting. Upon reaching the left bank of the Rhine, the current speckled with barbarians fleeing in their makeshift craft, he paused no more than a day, just long enough to let his troops relish their triumph. He then struck north, aiming at the great Roman cities that had been lost over the past decade, and which he had resolved to regain for Rome. He met no resistance at shattered Coblenz, the city which since earliest antiquity had been known as the Confluence because of its location at the juncture of the Moselle and Rhine rivers. Tens of thousands of displaced barbarian farmers and soldiers retreated in terror and surrendered the entire city to a dozen of Julian's advance scouts before the main forces of his army had approached within twenty miles of the city walls.
Arriving effortlessly at Cologne, the city which only a year before had been a source of nightmares and terror upon his first learning of its fall to the barbarians, he gathered together at the single tower still left standing with the representatives of the united barbarian tribes. There, he dictated to them conditions that would maintain their peace and subjection through the winter, after which, he made it clear, his campaign would begin anew until all of Rome's former territory in Gaul had been returned to the Emperor's domains.
Leaving garrisons to man the cities and towns he had reconquered, he marched back to Reims with a skeleton force consisting largely of his Acolytes, as a personal guard. He gave an account of his actions to Ursicinus and the surly Marcellus, and then coolly retired to his winter quarters at Sens, which he had chosen in large part for the reputed vastness of its governor's library, and for the healing qualities of the sulfur baths to be found in the vicinity, which he felt would be comforting to Helena when recovering from the birth of her child. The library did not disappoint, though Julian's information on the baths was apparently out of date, having been gleaned from an ancient commentary on Julius Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars. The springs, it seems, had been dry for three centuries.
BOOK THREE
Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae et servare modum rebus sublata secundis!
How ignorant are men's minds, of fate
And of their destinies; how loathe to keep
Due measure when uplifted by success.
I
God, Brother, is not to be found in the bronze statues of Zeus and Apollo in the temples of Athens, which you, of course, will be the first to assert; nor residing on the heights of Olympus or in a palace in the depths of the wine-dark sea, or skulking in a cave surrounded by voiceless wraiths deep beneath the earth, all of which you again will laughingly dismiss as unworthy even of your briefest consideration. Nor, however, is He to be found in the tear-stained icon adorning the wall of the anchorite's cell, nor even in any of the myriad splinters and shards of the True Cross reverently traded by wealthy pilgrims and Desert Fathers alike, in such quantities that they would be capable of rebuilding the entire Ark of Noah. And it is only among those of the deepest faith in the Mystery of Mysteries that God may be found in the morsel of bread and drop of wine in the Eucharist. Among the vast majority of lesser mortals, belief in His presence therein ebbs and flows, rising and falling like the tides, with the swelling and shrinking of our faith, dependent as it is on the circumstances of our own lives and fortunes. I say this not to denigrate those favored ones, like yourself, who have been graced with the gift of unquestioning belief, but rather to acknowledge the reality facing the rest of humankind, who struggle daily in the quest for God and meaning in their lives.
For at the risk of descending into the bathos that the Greek tragedians so wished to avoid, God is to be found not in so many exotic and obscure locations as remote mountaintops, or in the preserved finger joints of centuries-dead martyrs. Rather, He is here before us, every day, in the birth and miraculous presence of a baby, in man's constant capacity for redeeming the errors of his existence and creating himself anew, in a perfect, unstained, and sinless regeneration of himself, without lust or ambition or evil intent, a confirmation of the image in which he was created, and of his ultimate rightness with God. Chastise me if you will for my heresy, Brother, but I knew, as I saw Julian that evening by the flickering firelight, holding and gazing in rapture at the son that was the guarantor of his immortality, that God had descended into our midst as surely as He had in Bethlehem three and a half centuries before, as surely as He does so briefly and mysteriously into the Sacred Host that is the very lifeblood of our faith.
'What age so happy brought thee to birth? How worthy thy parents to have begotten such a creature!'
Still softly murmuring the lines from Virgil, Julian handed his son, only minutes old, back to Helena's midwife Flaminia, a well-known Gallic birther who had tended her and accompanied her on the journey north from Vienne. The midwife took the baby to a corner, carefully rewrapped him in his swaddles, and carried him into Helena's bedchamber. Oribasius, who as a rule disliked births, had scuttled back to his quarters as soon as the procedure was complete, leaving Flaminia to perform the cleanup and postpartum care, along with her daughter, who was assisting her. I waited where I sat, in the candlelit anteroom outside the chamber, hearing Julian's low voice as he talked softly to his sleepy and satisfied wife, and to the cooing of the midwife as she deposited the young prince onto Helena's soft breast. Matilda, the daughter, remained in the anteroom with me, waiting for her mother to emerge so they could return home. She was a frail, jittery lass, scarcely out of girlhood, yet unlike her thoroughly professional mother she seemed unable to sit still, constantly fidgeting with her hands and face, picking at her chewed cuticles. I observed her calmly, noting that with a disposition like hers, it seemed doubtful she would ever make a skilled midwife, as her mother was training her to be. My attempts at conversation were fruitless — it was difficult for her to remain on a topic, her Latin was halting, and even her Gallic, though fluent, was tinged with an odd accent. Her father, apparently, was a Germanic immigrant and the girl spoke his dialect at home.