Unholy Night (15 page)

A
fellowship of six fugitives rode south from Emmaus, divided among the backs of three camels: Gaspar alone in front, Melchyor and Joseph in the middle, and Balthazar, Mary, and the child in back. They moved slowly over the sand, far from the roads and the prying eyes of soldiers, their mouths dry and canteens nearly empty. There were no debts of honor binding them together. No pledges of friendship or shared beliefs. Balthazar had saved the lives of his companions, and they’d saved his in return. They were square in the eyes of the desert. All that united them now was a common need to escape Herod’s grasp.

As the heat of the day reached full bloom on their backs, the child woke and began to cry, and Balthazar realized this was the first time he’d heard his voice since they’d escaped Bethlehem. Given everything he had been through in the last few days, the infant had remained strangely calm, strangely silent. Now his sharp, short wails rang in his ears, waking the headache he’d almost managed to forget. He was parched, fatigued, and half starved. Sharp pain pulsed from his stitches and through his body with each of the camel’s footfalls. And now a baby was screaming at the back of his throbbing head.

“We have to stop,” said Mary.

“We can’t,” said Balthazar.

“But he’s hungry.”

“We’re all hungry.”

“I have to feed him.”

“Then feed him while we ride. I won’t look.”

“I can’t. Not with the camel moving up and down like this.”

“Then I guess he’ll starve.”

How could he say that so dispassionately?

“You would deny a hungry baby his mother’s milk?” she asked.

“No, I’d deny Herod’s men a better chance of catching us. We find food or water? That’s when we stop. Otherwise, you’re the woman—you figure it out.”

“But—”

“Look, I’ll gladly let you climb down and feed him, but I won’t wait behind while you do.”

Mary thought about appealing to Gaspar or Melchyor, but it was useless. They’d simply tell her the same thing. She thought about calling ahead to her husband and begging his help in convincing Balthazar to stop. But she knew it wouldn’t make any difference what Joseph said. She felt tears welling up in her eyes and hated herself for it. Who were these men they’d entrusted with their lives? With their child’s life? But her frustration gave way to dread when she realized the baby had stopped crying.

Maybe he’s too exhausted to cry. Too dehydrated. Too hungry and weak. Maybe this is how the end begins. Maybe I have no idea what I’m doing. Maybe we should never have left Emmaus. Maybe this was all a—

“Look!”

The voice had come from up ahead. Gaspar had stopped his camel and was pointing at something on the ground. Something in the sand, catching the sunlight. It was a stream—a tiny sliver of life trickling across the desert, a foot in width and only a few inches deep. It ran from left to right, as far as the eye could see in both directions, and from what they could tell, it was almost perfectly straight.

Balthazar had traveled this section of desert many times before, but he had no recollection of there ever being a stream. In fact, he had no recollection of ever seeing water move over the sand in such a way, flowing over it, without being absorbed into the grains. He would have thought it impossible. Yet here it was, running clear and cool, from horizon to horizon.

“What do we do?” asked Gaspar.

Balthazar took in the strange sight a moment longer, then turned back to Mary.

“We stop.”

T
he young Roman officer knew an opportunity when he saw it.

It was one of his gifts. The gift of being able to sit, and watch, and wait—letting others pick the low-hanging fruit, until the right, ripe opportunity presented itself. The gift of knowing when to get aggressive. And when aggressive wasn’t enough, knowing when to get ruthless.

This self-discipline was a skill in its own right. But when coupled with naked ambition, it became a thing of beauty, a weapon, which had seen this particular officer rise through the ranks faster than almost any in Rome’s history. Rising through lieutenant, then captain, until he was made imperator at the age of twenty-two. Most of the recruits under his command were older than he was, but this didn’t bother the officer in the least. He was comfortable with power. He’d been born to wield it.

He marched down the central corridor of the emperor’s palace, flanked by two of his lieutenants. Heels clopping against the marble floor, helmets held firmly on their hips, swords rattling against their sides. In his hand, the young officer held the letter that had been delivered by a rider from the East that very morning. A letter that bore the seal of Judea’s king.

In that letter was one of those juicy pieces of fruit. The young officer had known the moment he’d read it. A piece worth getting aggressive over. Here was a chance to catch someone called “the Antioch Ghost.” A middling pest who’d caused the Roman Army no shortage of headaches over the past decade. More important, here was a chance to further impress his beloved emperor and further secure his future. He would be a general, of course. There could be no doubt. And before his thirtieth birthday, at this rate. After that? A senator, perhaps. Or a provincial governor. But those pieces of fruit were still ripening on the vine. He would pick them all in due time.

The young officer reached the large double doors at the end of the corridor, each of them twenty feet high, plated with silver and decorated with gold embellishments. A golden eagle, the symbol of Rome’s military might, dominated these adornments—its outstretched wings spanning the entire width of both closed doors. The officer and his lieutenants saluted the guards who stood on either side of it. The guards saluted in return and stepped aside, ready to open the doors to the throne room. But the officer held up a hand:
Not yet
.

He paused a moment. Took a breath, composed himself. He wanted to make this entrance count. After all, he was about to ask the ruler of the world to go to war with an infant and a thief. When he felt sufficiently prepared, the young officer addressed one of the guards: “Tell the emperor that Pontius Pilate is here to see him…”

Augustus Caesar was the most powerful human being who had ever drawn breath, though he was only “human” in the strictest sense of the word.

To his subjects, he was a god. It was reflected in the way they revered him. Feared him and worshipped his likeness, whether it was stamped on the face of a gold coin or chiseled into marble. He was in his sixties, twice the average life expectancy. But he’d aged gracefully and still projected a stately, if graying sense of power. The very name his subjects had bestowed on him, Augustus, meant “Illustrious One,” and when he appeared in public, protocol demanded that he be introduced with a number of platitudes, which included:

His kingdom reached every corner of the known world: from Hispania in the west to Syria in the east, from the tip of Africa below to northernmost Gaul above. At his command were the greatest army and navy the world had ever known. The best-prepared soldiers, with the finest weaponry the collective taxes of the earth could buy.

But all that power was nothing without vision.

It was lack of vision that had doomed his uncle, Julius. For all his military prowess, all his strategic genius, Julius Caesar had lacked vision.

Fate had delivered the world into the palm of his hand, but he hadn’t been man enough to wrap his fist around it, to take it all for himself. He’d tried to be a man of the people. He’d tried to share his power with the senate. And for his troubles, he’d been stabbed twenty-three times by the very senators he’d reached out to. Stabbed in the back as he slipped on his own blood, trying to flee. Left to rot on the steps of the senate for three hours before anyone even bothered to cover his body. That had been his reward for being a man of the people.

To think he could have stopped it all, if only he’d been willing to use the weapon…

The world knew that Julius Caesar had transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. They knew that he was a skilled orator and general. But of those closest to Julius, only a few—including his beloved nephew, Augustus—knew the dark secret behind his power. The weapon that had given him the confidence to march on Rome and seize the empire for himself:

The magi.

Julius had come to possess this weapon during his conquest of Gaul, but not by stealing it from another ruler or by constructing it from his own blueprints. He’d come to possess it because the weapon had
chosen
him. As Julius explained in a letter to fellow general and confidant Pompey:

The magi were an ancient cult. Masters of a magic that had all but vanished from the earth. They’d come to power in the Age of the Scriptures, back when angels and mystical beasts had walked side by side with man, when the battles of heaven and hell had been waged on the plains of Galilee and in the hills of Hebron. The world had been different then. Time had barely begun, and the gods still mingled freely with man, whether they were the many gods of Mount Olympus or the lonely God of Abraham. And while most men lived in fear and reverence of their gods, a few sought to wield that power for themselves.

At their height, they’d numbered in the thousands, hidden away in monasteries, studying the higher forces that ordinary men feared. The dark forces. Learning how to control them, master them, exploit them. It was said that a magus could summon fire from thin air. Turn statues into living men, and living men into stone. It was said they could see things that had not yet come to pass, and influence the thoughts of men half a world away. For thousands of years, they were treated as living gods—revered, feared, and rarely seen outside their monastery walls.

But over the centuries, the Age of Miracles had given way to the Age of Man, and their numbers had dwindled, until—more than 10,000 years after the first man had called himself “magus”—only one remained, wandering a world ruled not by gods but by Romans. The last of his kind, the bearer of a forgotten gift that no longer had any use.

But Julius Caesar found a use for it.

With the last of the magi at his side, he’d turned his campaign in Gaul around. And when he was finished, he’d turned against his allies and taken all of Rome’s glory for himself.

As emperor, Julius learned to rely on the dark priest’s ability to see into the future. In his ability to uncover an enemy’s secrets through a kind of deep meditation and summon nature to Rome’s aid, conjuring wind and lightning to drive out surrounding armies, commanding beasts to betray their masters. Even invading the minds of senators and influencing their votes. With the magus at his side, Julius had been elevated from a general to a god. But over time, he’d begun to fear his secret weapon. In another letter to Pompey, he wrote:

Paranoid, Caesar ordered his “weapon” sent away in 44 BC. But before his exile, the magus gave him one last piece of advice: “The Ides of March,” he’d said. “Beware the Ides of March.”

Caesar ignored the warning. And that very year, on the fifteenth day of the third month, he was stabbed to death on the senate floor. In the end, he’d been too afraid to wield the weapon that had sought him out. Too weak.

But this was a weakness Augustus didn’t share. On learning of his uncle’s murder, Augustus had summoned the magus at once and demanded his loyalty. Slowly, deliberately, he’d consolidated his power in the empire—using the magus’s insight and influence to battle his rival, Marc Antony, and the Egyptian whore, Cleopatra. Using the magus’s power to beat them back, until they had no choice but to take their own lives in shame. And to make sure that no further challenges to his supremacy emerged, Augustus had ordered their children put to death.

With vision and cunning, he’d succeeded where his uncle had failed. He’d taken all of Rome’s glory for himself. And so long as the magus remained sequestered in Rome, Augustus Caesar knew that the empire would never fall.

But that was all in the past now, and the past was where small minds dwelled.

The future had just walked into Augustus’s throne room. Here was Pontius Pilate, kneeling before him, his bowed head reflected in the polished marble of his floor.

Handsome Pilate. Loyal, beloved Pilate, bearing the request of a sickly, traitorous old king.

Herod “the Great.” The name had always elicited a sneer from Augustus, even before he’d become master of the world. Who was this “great” man but a servant of Rome? A torturer of his own people and murderer of his own children? Yes, Augustus had ordered children put to death. But they were the children of his enemies. To murder one’s
own
children? It was barbaric.

He listened as Pilate relayed the message. Something about a baby. A prophecy. Someone called “the Antioch Ghost.” When Pilate was finished, Augustus considered it all for a moment, then said, “He wants me to send an army across the water…to kill a child?”

“The Antioch Ghost is the true prize, Caesar. He’s stolen untold riches from your provinces. Killed untold numbers of your men. If we—”

Augustus held up a hand.
Stop.

“You said the people of Judea think this ‘Ghost’ is already dead, did you not?”

“Yes, Caesar.”

“Pilate…what good is it to kill a man who is already dead? Where is the glory for Rome?”

Pilate couldn’t help but smile. He knew his emperor well. After pausing for effect, he uttered the sentence he’d carefully crafted on his way to the palace. The one he knew he’d have to utter after being challenged on this point:

“With all respect, Caesar, this is less about Rome’s glory and more about sending a message to Judea’s king.”