Unholy Night (13 page)

“We…we were ordered…”

“You were WHAT?”

“We were ord-ordered to do it, by Herod himself.”

“Ordered to do what?”

“To…k-kill all the male infants of Bethlehem.”

Balthazar raised the sword above his head and held it there. He gripped the handle’s leather straps so tightly that his entire arm shook.

“Any man who follows an order like that doesn’t deserve to walk the earth.”

Balthazar brought it down and struck the soldier’s face with the broad side of the blade. The first blow broke the soldier’s nose, cracking a dam behind his nostrils and sending a flood of red over his chin. The second broke his left eye socket and all but liquefied the eye inside it. Before Balthazar could land a third blow, the soldier’s instinct finally caught up with his shock, and he held his hands out to protect himself. Balthazar pulled the sword back and swung across his body, striking the soldier’s left wrist. The hand attached to it fell toward the road but was caught by a few strands of sinew and skin before it landed. Balthazar resumed striking him in the face, again and again and—

His jaw’s broken you should probably stop hitting him he’s unconscious Balthazar you can stop hitting him now his teeth are shattered stop Balthazar he’s dead he has to be dead by now what are you doing Balthazar why are you still hitting him there go the brains out the top of his skull stop Balthazar he’s not the one who did it I know but he’s the same he’s just like the one who killed—

A hand grabbed Balthazar’s wrist from behind as he raised the sword for another strike. He spun around, ready to kill whoever dared touch him. Ready to bash their brains right out of their ears.

But it wasn’t a Judean soldier. It was the carpenter, looking down at him from the back of Melchyor’s camel.

“He’s dead.”

They were all looking down at him. All but Mary, who’d turned away from the gruesome sight with the baby held tightly to her chest. Balthazar yanked his wrist out of Joseph’s grasp.

“Others will be coming,” said Joseph. “We have to go.”

Once again, he knew. He knew they had to go…but he couldn’t get his feet to move. In fact, he couldn’t get anything to move. Balthazar was having trouble catching his breath. He felt faint. Weak. They were all looking at him with strange expressions.…

“Balthazar…you’re bleeding.”

Who’d said that? The carpenter? Gaspar?

He looked down at his robes. There was a growing patch of blood on the right side of his chest. He pulled them apart and saw the wound. A puncture from a sword between his ribs. With his every breath, minuscule air bubbles formed in the bright, rich blood running from the wound.

The soldier hadn’t missed.

The sun had barely crested the eastern hills, but Balthazar could feel it setting already. Night was coming, and with it, some much-needed rest. For a moment, he thought that the strange, brilliant star in the east had returned.

This time, he was the only one who saw it.

“Get up,” he said. “Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

—Matthew 2:13

S
ix fugitives rode east, into the rising desert sun. Only four of them were conscious.

They rode over a lifeless planet of rocky hills and jagged ravines, of beiges and browns tangled together in a senseless embrace, blending into one as they approached a horizon they would never reach. It was a place devoid of vibrancy. A place where joy had been banished. Even the cloudless blue sky seemed drained of its color.

Balthazar was draped facedown over the back of Gaspar’s camel. He was pale, drenched in sweat. Blood continued to seep from the hole in his chest and pool on the animal’s fur. Gaspar kept one hand on his reins and one hand on Balthazar’s back, trying to keep him from bouncing off as he led the party over uneven terrain. Melchyor rode behind them, a sword hanging at his side, the blood of five men still wet on his robes. Joseph was last, with Mary behind him, cradling the sleeping baby in her left arm and clinging to her husband’s robes with her right.

Gaspar didn’t know the way to Qumran. He didn’t know the Judean Desert very well at all, just the roads that had been beaten through it by time and desire. The roads that connected Jerusalem to Jericho, Jericho to Antioch, Antioch to the rest of the known world. But the desert was a different story.

Out here, spinning columns of dust could rise without warning, dancing across the earth and blinding all they touched. Out here, scorpions and snakes waited to poison the unfortunate souls who crossed their path, and the nearest water was often days away. Heat, exhaustion, and thirst had a way of burrowing under a man’s skin. Of eating away at his will, until the urge to lie down and sleep in the blinding sun seemed rational. The urge to remove those stifling robes and walk naked seemed wise. There were countless stories of men drinking mouthfuls of sand, tearing at their own flesh and cupping mouthfuls of blood to their cracked lips to quench the thirst that had driven them mad. There was a saying in Judea: “The desert is filled with the bones of strong men.”

The hills became steeper as the fugitives continued west. The desert slowly rose up on either side, enveloping them in rock. Swallowing them. Like drops of water being squeezed out of an ocean and into a narrow channel, the fugitives were funneled into a ravine—a giant fracture in the bones of the earth, twisting its way through the twisted beiges and browns.

They’d followed the ravine for just over a mile, steering their camels through its jagged walls, when the baby started crying, and Mary realized that it had been hours since he’d been fed.

They stopped and sat in the shade offered by the rock walls around them—Mary with the infant hidden beneath her robes, Joseph beside her, taking small sips from a stitched leather canteen. Gaspar had lowered Balthazar to the ground, washed his wound out with water. But no sooner had he wiped away the clot than blood began to run out of the puncture again. It was hopeless.

None of them spoke a word. Melchyor sat cross-legged, drawing pictures in the sand with his sword. If he felt any lingering effects of what he’d just seen, any remorse over the lives he’d taken, his face didn’t betray it. He seemed completely divorced from the world around him, completely at peace with his situation.

Gaspar, however, was clearly distressed. Not by the visions of slaughtered infants. He’d stored those away in a place where they could never be found, down in the tombs where he kept all the wretched things he’d seen and done. Rather, he was distressed by facts.

The fact that no road in Judea was safe to travel. The fact that he didn’t know the desert well enough to disappear into it or survive off of it. The fact that his best chance of escape was currently lying on the ground, dying. The fact that they would run out of water in a matter of hours.

And then what? The carpenter and his wife would only slow them down. The baby would die from exposure or dehydration within a day or two, followed by the girl, until all that was left were three madmen cupping mouthfuls of blood to their cracked lips—that was, assuming Herod’s men didn’t find and slaughter them first, which was more likely than any other scenario. It was hopeless. All of it.

It was Balthazar who finally broke the silence with a series of wheezing, unconscious coughs. When the fit was over, Joseph could see blood running from his mouth. His color was getting worse. He was beginning to shiver.

“Is he going to die?” asked Joseph.

“Yes,” said Gaspar.

Joseph was struck by his matter-of-factness. It was as if he’d asked about the color of Balthazar’s robes, and not his life.

“‘Yes’? That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t there something we can do?”

“I have seen men with this wound before. There is nothing that can be done. He will not live to see nightfall.”

“But he saved our lives. All of our lives. We’re in his debt.”

“And that is why I carry him with me, instead of leaving him to die alone.”

“Carrying him on the back of a camel isn’t going to help him. There has to be something we can—”

“I told you he is DEAD!”

The word bounced off the walls of the ravine and into the unknown twists ahead. It was followed by another considerable silence. Only the sounds of the camels shifting their weight on their feet, of Melchyor scraping his sword through the dirt.

“After what we have done,” said Gaspar, “Herod will send all of Judea after us. He is dead, and we are alive. We still have a chance. He does not.”

“No,” said Mary.

Gaspar had almost forgotten the girl was there. He considered her with his deep-set eyes. She was so slight, so weak. He could break her arms and legs like pieces of charred firewood if he wanted to.

“He came back for us,” she said. “I won’t just sit here and watch him die.”

“I told you…there is nothing we can do for him.”

“Yes,” said Mary, “there is.”

Gaspar had no idea what she meant. Joseph wasn’t sure either, until she turned to him and said, “Zachariah.”

When Mary was very young, her uncle Zachariah had been a physician—sewing up wounds and treating coughs in the little village of Emmaus, ten miles northwest of Jerusalem. He was in his seventies now, enjoying a quiet life with his wife, Elizabeth, and their young son. To Mary’s knowledge, he hadn’t so much as wrapped a bandage in over ten years. And his own health had been in decline. But they had to try.

Mary turned back to Gaspar. “I know someone who might be able to help him. A physician. A relative who can be trusted.”

“Where is he?”

“In Emmaus.”

Gaspar shook his head.

“It is too far.”

“We can be there in two hours if we take the roads.”

“The roads? Have you not listened? Every soldier in the Judean Army will be on the roads looking for us.”

“The roads leading in and out of Bethlehem, yes. And when they don’t find us there, they’ll start looking on the other roads and in the desert. But not in a little village like Emmaus. Not yet.”

I could break your bones like charred firewood.…

“We can stay out here until we’re dead, or we can try to reach Emmaus—where there’s food and water. Where there’s a place to hide and a chance to save him.”

“If we do not get killed first.”

“Just get us that far. Get us to Emmaus. We can take care of ourselves from there.”

Gaspar tried to think of a better option. But he knew she was right. If they hid in the desert, they’d all be dead in a matter of days. If they tried to reach the village, there was a very good chance they’d run into soldiers on the roads. But at least they’d have a fighting chance.

“You said it yourself,” said Mary. “You’re in his debt. We all are.”

Balthazar broke the silence with another fit of coughing. Gaspar looked at him. The mighty Antioch Ghost. The man who’d saved his neck.

B
althazar was suddenly aware of being carried. Held aloft by a pair of arms wrapped around his chest, held by a man with broad white wings that beat in a gentle rhythm above. A man whose face he couldn’t see but somehow
knew
. There was no fear of this stranger, no fear of being dropped. There was only the wind in his ears and the beating of wings.

There was a city below them in the desert. A city of tents, gathered at the base of a great mountain. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands of people—moving around in a circle, dancing. They danced around something large, something shining and gold. Balthazar wanted nothing more than to be one of them. To have a closer look at the large, shiny golden thing and see if there were pieces to be pulled off and hidden in his robes. But this wasn’t where the Man With Wings was taking him.

They flew past the great mountain and its dancing masses, descending closer to the desert’s surface, until sand became sea in the blink of an eye. Not the strange, endless sea of time and space that Balthazar had seen the universe reflected in, but an actual, earthly body of water. They moved over the face of this water, faster than Balthazar thought it possible for men to move without having their bodies ripped apart by the force of the wind.

They flew until the water became shore, and shore became desert, and desert became a gleaming city of the sun. A city of hieroglyphs and temples, of obelisks and pyramids. He’d seen this place with his living eyes, too. He’d looked up at these three sisters—these pyramids that made fools of empires with their splendor. But he never imagined he’d be looking at them from above as he did now.

The Man With Wings set Balthazar gently down on the top of one of these pyramids, the largest of the three. The tallest structure in the world, as it had been for more than 2,500 years. But the pyramid was falling apart, the white stones of its four sides having crumbled away over the centuries. Some sections were still perfectly smooth. Others had broken loose and tumbled into the sands below, exposing the darker stone blocks beneath.

When those white wings settled and tucked behind his back, Balthazar saw the man’s face for the first time. The strength in his legs left him at the sight. He wept, his body shuddering with his sobs. Balthazar couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried this hard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything so beautiful.

“How?” he asked through his tears.

The Man With Wings extended his arms and held his hands out for Balthazar to see. The hands he’d been holding Balthazar with. They were stained red.

Balthazar looked down through his tears and found the robes above his chest drenched in dark blood. He pulled them apart, panicked, sure he’d find a grotesque wound beneath. But there was nothing. Nothing but a small scratch in the center of his chest. He looked up to see if the Man With Wings had any explanation. But he was gone. Not a trace of him in the sky. Balthazar was alone on top of the world.

Something hit his foot. A droplet.

He looked at his chest again. The scratch was beginning to bleed. Just a few drops, like the remnants of the tears on his cheeks. But it was growing. Growing into a slow trickle, then a steady stream—the blood running down his chest onto his stomach, pooling in his navel and spilling over. A red river.

The scratch was slowly ripping itself open. Skin tearing itself apart like a leather hide, exposing muscle and ribs and lungs. Tearing away until his heart could be seen beneath, beating faster…faster. Balthazar grabbed the two halves of his chest, trying to pull them back together. Trying to keep everything where it belonged.

“No!”

His ribs began to splay open, each one awakening and extending outward like the legs of a white spider. Balthazar let go of his skin and tried to hold them down. If the ribs went, then the organs would follow. Everything would come spilling out of him, and he would be left here for all time—a pile of bones and organs and loose skin on top of the world. He pushed down as hard as he could, but the spider wouldn’t be denied its freedom. As he pushed, Balthazar saw his fingernails begin to lift themselves out of their beds and the skin on his fingers peel away, leaving the arteries beneath naked and pulsing with each beat of his heart.

He could feel the same thing happening to his toes…his feet. He could feel his eyelids peeling back and could see the blood begin to run over his corneas.

Balthazar was falling down the side of the great pyramid. Tumbling down, just as so many smooth pieces of stone had over the centuries, leaving a trail of muscle and sinew and blood and bone as he broke apart. Every vein unraveling as he went, pulling free of his body like the roots of a great tree torn out of the earth.

By the time he reached the sand, there was nothing left but his clothes.

Zachariah was far too old to be cutting into people. Too old to perform the kind of surgery this man required. His vision wasn’t what it used to be. His hands shook. But what choice was there? What other surgeon could see him in time or be trusted to harbor the fugitives who brought him in?

Joseph held the lamp over the man’s chest. The Ethiopian and the Greek sat near the door, ready to help if Zachariah needed them. His niece, Mary, waited in the next room with the baby. She wasn’t one for the sight of blood, and there was a lot of it here. The man had been stabbed, and the blade had gone into his right lung.

“Is he suffocating?” asked Joseph.

“Drowning,” said Zachariah as he worked.

“Drowning? But how can he be—”

“Air seeps in through the wound, air presses down on the lung, blood gets trapped in the lung and drowns him from the inside. We drain the air? The lung inflates, the blood drains and maybe, maybe, maybe he lives. Now be quiet and let me work.”

His wife, Elizabeth, assisted her husband as he worked, just as she had twenty years ago, when he’d been a spritely fifty-seven and she’d been a thirty-six-year-old widow. Brown eyed with hair to match. Childless and beautiful. Meeting her had been the wonder of Zachariah’s life. A miracle. And though the years had proven her barren, he’d treasured every moment of their marriage—happy to have a companion in his dwindling years.

But then, seven years ago, when he was seventy and she forty-nine, Elizabeth had become pregnant. Zachariah had been doubtful at first. Slow to receive the gift that God had given him. But her belly had continued to grow, and she’d given birth to a healthy baby boy, despite the fact that she was beyond the childbearing age. Another miracle. A miracle they’d named John.

Zachariah slowly, carefully inserted a small metal tube into the wound—every ounce of his concentration devoted to keeping his hands steady. These were the dangerous seconds. The ones that would determine whether the patient lived or died. Do it right, and a hiss of air would escape through the tube, followed immediately by a good deal of blood. With the lung reinflated, the patient could be sewn up and—God willing—returned to health. Do it wrong, and you only made him drown faster.

Elizabeth kept a cloth pressed firmly around the tube, soaking up what little blood trickled out. She’d seen her husband try this only once before, on a local man who’d been stabbed by a Judean officer for spitting in the street. That had been fifteen years ago, before Zachariah’s hands shook. Before his eyes had become clouded over. And that patient had died right here in this room. On this table.

She’d been happy when he’d decided to give up medicine, to live these last years for himself. For his family. She was happy that John still had a father who could impart wisdom. Teach him how to be a man. Especially since she alone knew that her son was different. That he was destined to do something extraordinary.

Shortly before John was born, a man with glorious white wings had come to her in a dream. He’d told her that her conception was indeed a miracle and that her child’s birth would herald the coming of the Messiah. “The son of God shall walk the earth,” he’d said, “born of another in your house. And your son shall be his prophet.”

John waited outside with Mary. She sat on a small bench near the closed door. John stood beside her, staring at the swaddled infant in her arms. The infant was staring back, looking up with his new, blue eyes. Eyes that couldn’t make out anything beyond the length of his arms. Yet he stared intently at the face over him now. Fascinated by it. Drawn to it. John stared back with equal fascination. He’d seen other babies before. He had other cousins. But there was something different about this one. He felt a strange, powerful kinship with it. A vague sadness too.

“May I hold him?”

Mary wasn’t sure. He was too young to be trusted with something so fragile. But there was something about him. Something that seemed older than his six years.

“Very carefully, and only for a minute.”

She handed him over, gently, and John took him with equal care. He cradled the infant. Held him up to his shoulder and rubbed his hand on his back. He rocked the baby gently back and forth, just as his mother had taught him to do. And when the infant rested his head against his shoulder, John tilted his own to meet it.

It was the same head that Herod’s son, Antipas, would order cut off decades later, when he was known as John the Baptist. But there was none of that now. None of the toil and death that would follow both of them in days both near and distant. None of the fame and famine. There was only the quiet of their breath and the sound of the unconscious man gasping for his in the next room.

Balthazar opened his eyes and screamed, but the sound was choked back by water; the air in his lungs carried in bubbles. He was drowning. Struggling to reach the sunlight that filtered down through the silt. With a last kick of his legs, he broke the surface and sucked in a mix of water and air, which brought sharp, painful coughs but gave him the strength to swim to the nearest bank. He dragged himself onto the sand with his fingertips, still coughing up the water in his lungs.

Fingertips.

Balthazar examined his hands, expecting to see the skin peeled away and the veins unraveled. But they were whole. Every part of him was. With his breath coming steadily again, he lifted his head and took in his surroundings through strands of wet, black hair. Above him, only feet from the river’s edge, were rows of towering columns and stone pharaohs—each one intricately carved, each telling a different story about the triumphs of a different pharaoh.

To his left, Balthazar could see a wooden barge sailing down the Nile in the midday sun, loaded with goods. On the opposite bank, he could see fishermen casting their lines, some of them resting in the shade of palm trees, just as he and Abdi had years ago.

“Hey!” he shouted across the river. “Hey, over here!”

Though they were well within range of his voice, the fishermen ignored the soaked man standing on the opposite bank, just as they’d ignored him when he was drowning.

But they didn’t ignore the fish.

One by one, fish began to float to the surface—some thrashing and panicked, others simply belly-up. Before Balthazar could process what this was, one of the fishermen, who’d been wading in the river up to his knees, suddenly let out a scream and hurried back to the shore. Balthazar could see blisters on his legs when he emerged, just as he could see steam rising from the water’s surface. The river was beginning to boil. Tigerfish, catfish, and perch floating to the surface by the hundreds. Cooked alive by the river itself.