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.