Julian stared at me bug-eyed, and I held his gaze a long moment, until finally, shaking his head groggily, he burst out laughing. A hard, brittle laugh that sounded alone and hollow against the smooth plaster walls of the dining hall as he looked down both sides of the room with humorless eyes. After a moment several of his tablemates joined him with hearty guffaws, and with the precedent set, all those present joined in, their hooting and coughing swirling around me like so many pestering starlings. I sat motionless and expressionless until he finally calmed himself and wiped a tear from one eye.
'So,' he gasped, as the noise died away immediately, some of the men still with expressions on their faces indicating puzzlement as to what they were actually laughing about. 'Our silent Christian has balls after all, and a religion, he says, that is the rival of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle combined! Caesarius, my man of reason, my camp alchemist and anatomist, now professes faith over science. I'm not sure what to make of your medicine now, dear friend — perhaps it would be put to better use serving my horse rather than my own pagan heart and lungs!'
Here again he broke into another round of uncontrollable snorts and cackles, the others also joining in with their own strained and delayed versions of his mirth, some of them looking at me with dismay and, I believe, pity. I had had enough of Julian's public humiliation of me. I rose slowly from the table and addressed him with as much coolness and dignity as I could muster.
'My lord,' I said deliberately, 'I am not a trained philosopher or rhetorician as are you. Since it is God we are speaking of, we do not understand it. If we could understand it, it would not be God. We seek one unknowable, God, with another unknowable, ourselves, which in the end is impossible, a tautology that even a pagan philosopher can see: we cannot be understood, even by ourselves, because we are made in God's image. I limit myself to being an interested observer of the physical world and of men's actions within it, rather than of the obscure thoughts and reasons men may have for such actions. By attacking me this way, you attack the Church itself, and therefore you commit an unspeakable evil.'
Julian's eyes narrowed. 'And by killing my father and my brothers, by killing my wife and my son, by doing all in their power to do me in as well, what have the Christians done to me? That, too, was evil.'
I recoiled, that he could attribute his family tragedy to Christians. 'What Constantius did to you was not done in Christ's name, but rather in his own madness. You cannot blame his faith for his evil. You would certainly not allow me to blame the excesses of Hellenism on your… lapses. He will be judged by God. Vengeance on innocent Christians is not yours to take.'
'Nor is your blind faith mine to have.'
I knew then, Brother, that in the thickness of my tongue I had failed in the most important discussion of my entire life. I was through with that dinner, through with Julian's friendship, through with his obsession with Maximus, and if I had not been so blinded and distracted over the past year by all the events that had transpired, I would have recognized the irreparable breach that had opened between us long before, on that cold mountain pass in Thrace.
'My lord,' I said coldly, rising from my seat, 'I refuse to be party to further mocking or abuse. I therefore beg to be excused from this dinner, as well as from my professional duties as your physician.'
With that I stepped over my couch, nodded curtly, and strode calmly down the side of the long table to the door at the far end of the room, feeling every eye upon me, the very silence of the room seeming to magnify the soft, shuffling sound of my sandals on the clean-swept floor. It was the longest walk I ever made, a walk encumbered by the emotions roiling within me, of fury at the ordeal to which Julian had publicly subjected me, of pride at leaving the table and my position at the Emperor's side for the sake of principle, of relief at ending the confusion I had been suffering by serving a man whom I increasingly viewed as an enemy to Christianity — and of worry about my physical safety and that of my family, at turning my back on the most powerful man in the world.
As I reached the door, I looked back briefly and saw that Julian was smiling, and already leaning over to Maximus, engaged in a lighthearted conversation, while all along the table the conversation was beginning again to be animated. The clink of knives on serving plates resumed, and I knew that within a moment my presence would scarcely be missed, and it would be as if the dispute had never taken place — a dispute which to me had meant the end of a career, possibly the end of my life had it been carried to its logical extreme, but which to Julian and the rest at the table was merely a heated discussion abruptly cut off by an overwrought Christian zealot who, like all his coreligionists, took himself far too seriously for polite company.
I strode down the corridor in a blind rage, turning corners at random, entering empty halls, until I arrived at last at a tiny peristyle built into an unused space between two wings, a small, bubbling fountain in the middle embellished with a mosaic portrait of Jesus surrounded by the twelve Apostles. A small shaft of sunlight beamed down diagonally from the skylight onto one of the peristyle's fluted columns, illuminating the delicate pink and yellowish veins in the finely polished marble, showing it for all the world like a pale human limb, drained of blood and with the skin carefully peeled back as in an autopsy, each artery and vessel exposed for the physician's examination.
I walked to the column in a daze and stood staring at it, willing myself to clear away the rushing thoughts and confusion crowding upon my brain, focusing my eyes on the bright, sunlit stone, forcing myself to concentrate only on the essential of life. Emptying my mind, I brought my face closer to the stone, tracing with my eyes the meandering, bifurcating pink and yellow lines, following each to its tiny, indistinct end and then retracing my steps along the capillary until my vision began to blur from the strain and intensity of my focus and the sweat from my forehead burned my eyes. I closed them, and pressed my cheek, my whole body against the marble, which was cold except for the thin, narrow stripe that had been warmed by the beam of sun, and suddenly all the rage and frustration that had been built up in me by Julian's words and actions over the past year broke out. Struggling for control, I slid slowly down the veiny marble, sinking to my knees, still grasping the column with my arms for support, the trail of living perspiration on the fluting glistening and marking the path of my decline and redemption.
For a brief moment only, before it dried, the moisture lent an aspect of life and suffering to the cold, dead skin of the stone, and then even it evaporated and was gone.
After Caesarius' courageous but ineffectual debate with the Emperor, he returned home to us at Nazianzus, a beaten, tired man. For many days after his arrival he scarcely moved, sitting despondently in the kitchen or praying for hours on end in the tiny chapel I had built on one end of our modest dwelling. Caesarius was so quiet, and moved so rarely, that though the house was small for three grown men and a woman, his presence was barely felt.
In time, he roused himself, seeming to have put behind him the events of Gaul and his long accompaniment of the Antichrist Emperor. He even began to apply some of the considerable medical skills he had acquired, treating the maladies of the poor folk and lepers of the town, bringing babies to light, even curing lame farm stock, though this was more of a psychological need for him than a financial one — he had returned from Constantinople bearing a considerable quantity of gold from his long service with two emperors, and over the previous few years had sent back even more to our father, who had distributed all but a few pennies of expenses to the poor. Caesarius resolved to settle down to the career of a small-town physician and, it was my fondest hope, eventually prepare himself for a life of holiness and meditation within a religious community, for which I believed he would be extremely well suited.