Upon the arrival of the welcome gift of scrolls and codices, Julian wrote a letter to her expressing his gratitude, and requesting an audience with her, if not with her husband. This he handed to the eunuch who had been the most frequent conveyor of the Empress's letters, and who upon receiving it handled it gingerly between two fingers, with as much distaste as if it had been spat upon by a leper. He set it quickly upon a marble hallway table while he pretended to tighten his sandal strap, and there it was left for Julian to rediscover, many days later, after much wondering and bewilderment at the Empress's stony failure to respond to his request. It was not until I myself informed him that it would have been a grave violation of palace protocol for him to have corresponded with the Empress at all before obtaining leave from the Emperor, that he understood the eunuch's sensitivity to receiving such a document. For this very reason, an audience with Eusebia was completely out of the question for the time being; indeed, outsiders, even relatives, were rarely allowed in the gynaeceum, the women's quarters, a fact that I had forgotten, or never actually assimilated, given my own unimpeded access to the royal family by virtue of my capacity as official physician.
IV
At this point, Brother, I must recount for you an extraordinary incident which, although not involving Julian directly, goes far in explaining many of the later events that affected both him and me so significantly.
I had been attending Constantius with the rest of his courtiers at one of his interminable strategizing sessions at the palace. Such meetings involved the Emperor's summoning several of his chief advisers simultaneously to the vast throne room on the ground floor of the palace in Milan, whom he would proceed to line up in a loose row, with their various subadvisers and lackeys behind them. He would then stalk up and down the line, followed by his own tripping, mincing crowd of eunuchs and sycophants, grilling and haranguing each adviser until by dint of pure luck and guesswork they were all forced to come to the same conclusion — the one at which Constantius had already arrived before he had summoned them in the first place. From the graveled patio I heard faint shouting and the galloping hoofbeats of a single horse, and bored and disgusted with Constantius' farcical planning exercises, I wandered over to an open window and peered outside.
An exhausted, dusty courier had been practically yanked off his horse at the palace gates and was being led straightaway up the massive colonnaded balustrade and through the iron doors. He had not even been given the customary goblet of wine to cool his parched throat, and the splash of cold water over his face and neck to calm his labored breathing. He glanced longingly at the bubbling fountains and pools he passed in the courtyard, and he marched limping in pain, his riding togs filthy, the battered leathern pouch slung carelessly over his neck and shoulder by one precariously threadbare strap. The sweat from his lank, uncut hair dripped steadily into the weeks-old growth of beard and thence to the polished marble floor of the steps, leaving a treacherous, slippery trail in his wake.
I turned back away from the window. The Emperor, whose face in fact was a close image of Julian's, though much doughier and with more of an expression of suspicion or cunning about the eyes, was pacing angrily up and down before a small knot of whispering courtiers. The jiggling rolls of flab at his lower back struggled to keep up with their firmer, more disciplined brethren at his belly, as if in a contest of extraneous tissue, the entire sordid battle visible beneath the fine, rapidly dampening linen fabric of his tight ceremonial toga. I shook my head in disgust at this line of thinking, one that could only have been possible to a bored and underworked imperial physician, until I was interrupted by the messenger's arrival. The Emperor had been in an agony to hear the news personally ever since the first cryptic indications of the disaster had been received in Milan four days before, over the series of coded signal flares erected on mountains and watchtowers the length and breadth of the Empire.
When the man burst into the room flanked by two beefy guards, Constantius waddled up to him with a speed and energy astonishing for one of his ponderous girth.
'Out with it, man — is it true? What of Cologne!'
The courier stopped short, barely into the doorway, and took a moment to get his bearings as he found himself unexpectedly gazing straight into the angry eyes of the Emperor.
'I don't know what you have been told, Your Highness,' he said simply. 'I know only that five days ago Cologne fell to the barbarians. All are dead, and it is only by the grace of God that I myself was able to escape and reach Milan by the post road relays. Chonodomarius is a devil.' The man swayed and blanched a sickly pale, and I feared he might collapse at the Emperor's feet in his exhaustion.
Constantius glared at the man in a rage, almost as if he would strike him, and the messenger shrank back slightly, his mouth working as if he were about to tell something more — but what more could he say? Finally the Emperor muttered at him, 'Tell no one of this,' whirled, and stalked back to the throne set in the middle of the room, where courtiers and aides had gone silent as they watched the proceeding. His face reddening in deep anger, he immediately began issuing orders to his generals and advisers. Eunuchs scurried in all directions, and I rose and sidled along the walls to the bewildered courier, who now stood abandoned and silent, looking ill, and seemingly wishing to shrink into the very cracks of the stonework.
'Come, soldier,' I said, touching his elbow gently.
He started, then looked at me with unutterable relief at hearing his first friendly words in possibly months.
I led him down a back passage to my rooms, where he collapsed on my couch, and I offered him some cold meat and stale bread left over from my breakfast that morning. He wolfed it down gratefully, though wincing at a stomach pain, which he attributed to cramps from this being the first meal he had eaten in three days. He also said it was the first food lacking in maggots that he had eaten in a month. Brother, what kind of a physician am I that I accept a patient's own diagnosis unquestioningly? I was ashamed at my employer's rudeness in not having attended to the poor soldier upon his earliest arrival, and embarrassed at my own lack of provisions to offer, for the only other nourishment I had in my store was a bruised apple, which he also gulped down in three or four bites, core and all. I rang for a slave and demanded more food and some uncut wine. While we awaited the servant's return I asked the messenger to relate his story.
'For months,' he said, 'the Cologne garrison has been under siege by the Alemanni. Their king is Chonodomarius; we call him "the Beast." He's leading them personally. Our garrison commander, Lucius Vitellius, sent runners asking the Emperor and the legions of Gaul to send reinforcements, but got no answer. We figured the messengers had been captured.'
I said nothing at this, but I knew the messages to Constantius had indeed arrived. The Emperor, dismissing the situation in far-off Germany as inconsequential compared with his more urgent concerns in the Empire's tinderbox Eastern regions, refused to transfer troops to the suffering garrison, believing that his commanders in Gaul and Britain would find the wherewithal to lift the siege.
'We finally broke, five days ago. The men were starving, sir, and the barbarians had poisoned the city's water supply. I think we might've been able to hold out a few more days, but we broke when the Beast started raining heads down on us.'
'Soldier,' I said, 'I've never been to war, but I've heard that this is often a tactic of the besiegers — to place the heads or even the bodies of their captured enemies onto the engines and launch them into the fortifications to demoralize the defenders. Surely you expected something of the sort.'