Unholy Night (7 page)

Balthazar had absolutely no idea how he’d caught himself. He hung by little more than the grit beneath his fingernails, pumping his feet. Trying to push against a surface that wasn’t there.
Don’t look down.
It’s very important that you resist the urge to—

He looked down. It was a hundred feet to the hard gravel road below, but it might as well have been a mile. He could see a pile of carved stone blocks beneath him, waiting for their turn to be hoisted up. He could feel himself falling,
smashing
against those blocks. Feel his brains squeezing through the cracks in his sku—

Look up, you idiot!

Balthazar brought his left hand up to the bridge and grabbed on. His skinny arms shook as he pulled, trying to claw his way back to the top, trying to ignore the searing pain he felt in his empty lungs. He swung his legs back and forth, using the force to help propel his body upward. And it did. With each swing, he was able to grab a little more of the canal above with his hands, until at last he managed to get his elbows over the lip and squirm up the rest of the way.

The third miracle…

He rested on his belly for a moment, his face against the stone, catching his breath, unaware of the rat that he’d frightened off. Balthazar got to his feet—chest heaving and fingers bleeding—remembering that his pursuers might be thinking about performing the same rope trick and following him across. But the Greeks were thinking no such thing. They just stood and stared at him from the other side of the unfinished bridge, dumbfounded by what they’d seen.

Balthazar wasn’t sure
why
he did what he did next. Maybe it was the bewildered look on their faces; maybe it was a by-product of fear—but he flashed them a smile. The same confident smile that would infuriate many of his future pursuers, the way it infuriated the Greeks now as he turned and disappeared into the impenetrable fortress of the slums.

T
here were five of them altogether: Balthazar; his mother, Asherah; his younger sisters, Melita and Tanis, twins, both nine; and his baby brother, Abdi, two.

Balthazar was fond of his mother, and on some level—although he had yet to discover where it was—he loved his sisters. But Abdi was his shadow. His audience. His worshipper. The boy who wanted to play with him every waking moment, who laughed at every funny face he made, and who—despite being small for his age—was every bit as brave as his brother. When Balthazar left for the forum each morning, Abdi often ran after him, tugging at his leg and crying, “Bal-faza! Bal-faza! You stay right here!”

On those rare occasions when Balthazar didn’t work, they would spend the day together. Balthazar would carry his brother up and down the Colonnaded Street, stopping to watch musicians perform or petting the strange animals that came from beyond the Himalayas. Once in a while, he would even splurge on a handful of cinnamon dates to share between them, their secret. In the afternoon, Balthazar would take Abdi to the banks of the Orontes and to the shade of their favorite palm tree. The one with the deep gash down the side of its trunk.
The one that looks like a scar.
And there, in the shade of their scarred little tree, Balthazar would sit and watch the men fish as Abdi napped in his arms, running his fingers through his brother’s brown hair. Sometimes he dozed off himself.

At night, with the five of them crowded in a single room, Balthazar would tell Abdi some of the stories he’d loved as a child: the conquests of Alexander the Great and Leonidas, the Battles of Carthage and Salamis. And then the five of them would sleep, each on his own straw mat on the dirt floor.

Until two years ago, there had been six mats.

Balthazar’s father had made his living the same way most of the neighborhood men had: by spending hot, backbreaking days hammering away at stones in a quarry north of the city. It was one of the few jobs deemed acceptable for the Syrian locals. In the old days, they’d been farmers and merchants. But then Rome had descended on Antioch, and they’d been pushed out of the fields and forums and into the slums.

Conditions in the quarry were dangerous. Ropes broke. Hoists toppled. Men were routinely hit by heavy pieces of debris, sliced in half by slivers of rock that broke loose from the walls. Sometimes, like Balthazar’s father, they were simply crushed to death beneath twelve-ton blocks when a wooden hoist failed.

Balthazar had never seen his father’s body, and he was thankful for this. But he’d heard descriptions of men who’d suffered similar fates—their bodies all but liquefied by the force, and he hadn’t been able to keep himself from imagining what his father had looked like when they finally hoisted that stone off of him: every drop of blood and bile and piss squeezed out of his organs, the contents of his stomach and bowels exploding outward in a grotesque sunburst pattern, his brains forced through his eye sockets, and his skull rendered a mosaic of tiny, shattered tiles. One second, he’d been a hardworking man with a wicked sense of humor, a meticulously trimmed beard, and a love of cinnamon dates. The next, he was a blood-soaked bag of broken tiles. Erased from existence in the blink of an eye. The snap of a rope.

Tragedy had made Balthazar the Man of the House. The sole provider for his mother and three siblings. And while his mother didn’t approve of Balthazar’s methods, she didn’t forbid them, either.

“Stealing is a sin,” she’d told him with a sigh on learning of his pickpocketing, “but starving is an even greater one.”

She
had
drawn the line, however, when she’d learned about one of Balthazar’s self-taught methods: donning a prayer shawl, going into the Jewish temple, and picking men’s pockets while they were deep in prayer.

“It’s an abomination,” his mother had said, “whether you worship the God of the Hebrews or not.”

After paying off his accomplices, rewarding tippers, and doling out the necessary kickbacks, the coins Balthazar nicked from the forum were barely enough to keep them all fed and housed. There was no extra money for extravagances like new clothing, or lamp oil, or sweetmeats. No rugs to sit on or chalices to drink from.

And it was getting harder to provide as time went on. The forum was becoming too dangerous. Balthazar was being recognized, questioned by the Roman soldiers who patrolled the Colonnaded Street. Money changers were getting nervous about offering tips, since capture could mean crucifixion.

But what could he do? Picking pockets was all that Balthazar was good at—today’s fiasco notwithstanding. He knew of some boys, just a few years older than he was, who’d been arrested for murdering a money changer and stealing his inventory. He’d known these boys since he was born. He knew all of their parents and siblings. Like him, they’d started out picking pockets in the forum. Like him, they’d reached a point where they became too recognizable. A point where they’d needed more than a few coins to get by. And so they’d turned to another method. And for that, they’d all been put to death. Strung up by the Romans and thrown in a ditch on the other side of the Orontes.

And
that’s
what had first given him the idea.

Every day, men were rounded up by the Romans for any number of reasons—including no reason at all—and put to death. Every day, their bodies were carried to an unmarked field on the other side of the Orontes and buried. And with their bodies went their rings and bracelets and necklaces. Yet it never occurred to the Romans to take that jewelry for themselves. And why not? Because of the one thing the Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Indians, Chinese, and even his fellow Syrians had in common:
religion
. They were all superstitious. Frightened of the unknown. Sufferers of a mass delusion, a hysteria of genuflection, ritual sacrifice, and old words. Not even the Romans, for all their Imperial brutality, would dare defile a dead body. But religion wasn’t a hysteria Balthazar suffered from.

He never had. Not for lack of instruction. His father, like most Syrians, had worshipped the old pagan gods. And his mother, while not overtly religious, was one of the world’s most superstitious women. Balthazar had simply never found a use for it. He was more concerned with feeding his family than throwing himself at the feet of some statue, more concerned with tomorrow than the rants of a prophet who’d lived a thousand years before his birth. A prophet who never heard of Rome or Herod. He found nothing abominable about eating certain foods on certain days or wearing this kind of hat versus that kind of hat, or even—
God forbid
—no hat at all. Beliefs like that put you in a cage.

And Balthazar was going to set himself free.

H
e waited on his belly, wet and alone in the dark. To the east, the lights of the city danced off the waters of the Orontes. To the west, nothing but desert. Balthazar had decided to avoid the bridge and swim across. You never knew when you were going to run into a Roman patrol. And he was paying for that caution by shivering in the cold desert air.

He’d seldom been on this side of the river. There wasn’t much to see other than a few hermits and fields of shallow graves, one of which he now observed from afar. He watched as four slaves worked together to bury the day’s victims, supervised by a single Roman soldier. Two of them used shovels to dig a knee-deep trench, another transferred bodies from a wheeled cart and placed them in, and the fourth filled in the dirt on top of them.

He hadn’t told a soul about his plan. No one could know—not his oldest, most trusted friends from the slums. Not his accomplices from the forum.
No one
. Picking pockets was one thing. Even murders could be forgiven. But
this
…

He was tampering with the unspeakable.

Balthazar dug with his bare hands. It had taken another miserable, shivering hour, but the slaves and their cart had finally gone, and the soldier with them. Now it was just him, alone in a field of bodies, kneeling over a fresh grave in the dark of night. As he dug, Balthazar told himself to breathe.
Relax.
Superstition was for the weak-minded, right? Of course it was. He told himself to think of the spoils. All the gold and silver waiting under this loose dir—

Was that something moving?

He could’ve sworn something had brushed against his finger beneath the dirt…

No, it wasn’t “something moving.” There’s nothing “moving” out here because dead things don’t m—

A hand burst through the dirt and grabbed Balthazar by the throat. Then another—unnaturally strong, squeezing his windpipe. It pulled him toward the loose dirt. Pulled him down into the gra—

No, it didn’t. Stop being a baby…

But he
had
felt something.

It was the familiar shape of a hand, a hand unlike any he’d ever touched. A hand no warmer than the dirt it was buried in, its skin rigid and leathery. Balthazar suddenly realized something. Something he
really
wished he’d considered earlier: he’d never touched a dead body.

He’d seen them, sure. You couldn’t get to be twelve years old in the slums of Antioch without seeing a dead body. But when it came to dead bodies, seeing and touching were oceans apart. Still, he took a breath and brushed the last of the dirt aside…

Here was a man—barely twenty, from the looks of him. Judging by the dark red line around his neck and the unnatural angle of his head, he’d been hung. For what, Balthazar would never know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the pendant
around
that neck. A gold pendant on a leather string.

All I have to do is reach out and take it.

No matter what tricks his young imagination played on him—no matter how real it seemed when the man’s bloodshot eyes snapped open and his hands reached for Balthazar’s throat, it wouldn’t be. People didn’t come back to life. There was no God to fear, no sins to commit. There were nothing but superstitions and the rants of long-ago prophets.

All he had to do was reach out and take it…

Balthazar returned home that night filthy beyond comprehension, and rich beyond his wildest imagination. He promptly informed his mother that they were moving to a better neighborhood.

It had been a bigger haul than he’d ever dreamed. In one night, he’d raided nine bodies. And from those nine bodies, he’d netted a total of six rings (four gold, two silver) and four pendants (three gold, one silver). All told, it had taken less than three hours.
Three hours!
Balthazar would have been lucky to pick one pocket in the same amount of time. And with pickpocketing there were the risks, the payoffs, the kickbacks. No, this was the answer. This was the way. He had the whole west bank of the Orontes to himself. And the best part was, there was no end in sight. As long as the Romans kept putting men to death, Balthazar would keep finding uses for their unused valuables.

The next morning, he took Abdi into the city, and the two of them ate cinnamon dates until they were nearly sick. And when they rested beneath their favorite tree on the Orontes—the one with the scar down its side, not far from where Balthazar had entered the water the night before—he presented his brother a little present from his first plunder of the dead. A keepsake. It was a gold pendant on a leather string, a thin, coin-shaped wafer bearing the likeness of the god Plutus on one side.

“The god of wealth,” said Balthazar as he hung it around Abdi’s neck.

The only god worth worshipping.

The pendant flittered in the afternoon sun, spinning round and round as Abdi jumped and laughed along the riverbank, proud of his gift—but more proud of the fact that his big brother had given it to him. Balthazar watched from the shade of the scarred tree, smiling from ear to ear, a gold disk of reflected light sweeping across his face every so often. The light from his brother’s pendant. The pendant he would spend much of his life searching for.