Unholy Night

a minor miracle.

Actually, three minor miracles.

As Balthazar ran along the dry canal, the wide cobblestone streets and gleaming colonnades of the city dissolved away, becoming the narrower streets and houses of a poor suburb. Ahead, the houses abruptly stopped at the edge of a hundred-foot ravine, but the canal kept going, continuing across a narrow, unfinished bridge.

The old bridge had collapsed during a recent earthquake, one of the unpleasant realities of living in Syria. Roman engineers had shut off the water while they built a new one. One team had started on the near side of the ravine, another team on the far side. The plan was to have the two halves of the bridge meet in the middle, and they were almost there, only twenty feet to go. A wooden crane sat on the edge of both sides, each of their outstretched arms supporting the ropes used to hoist stone blocks to the top — the ropes Balthazar hoped would carry him to freedom in a few seconds.

The first of Balthazar’s three minor miracles occurred: the bridge wasn’t under construction today, though this barely qualified as a “miracle,” given the notoriously relaxed pace of Roman construction. The second miracle occurred immediately after: the rope hanging from the crane on the near side was within his reach. Now all he needed was a third miracle: to grab on to the hanging rope and swing safely across.

When he neared the edge of the ravine, Balthazar diverted off the road, down into the canal, and out onto the unfinished bridge, the men nearly close enough to touch the back of his clothes.

You can make it.

He ran with every bit of speed he could squeeze out of those spindly legs as he closed in on the edge of the bridge and the hanging rope. You can make it, Balthazar. And with a last leap, he grabbed on to the rope and swung off the end. You can make it. Just don’t look down and you’ll —

There was no way he was going to make it. As soon as Balthazar swung out over the ravine, he knew he was in trouble. The distance between the two sides was twice what it’d looked like from the bridge, and the drop twice as far. Worse yet, the top of the crane he was swinging from wasn’t centered between the two bridge sections — it was much closer to the side he’d started on. As he approached the bottom of his arc, Balthazar suddenly found himself with two unsavory options: He could either hold on to the rope and return to the side he’d swung from — the side where two big men were waiting for him — or he could let go and jump. Either way, there would be no more miracles today.

He let go.

Once again, it was a decision met with instant regret. He wasn’t going to make it across. Not on his feet, anyway. There was a chance — a sliver of a chance — that he could reach the edge of the other bridge with his fingertips. Balthazar pumped his exhausted legs as he flew, as if running on air would propel him farther.

I’m descending.

He reached his arms out in front of him as the uneven, unfinished stones of the other bridge rushed at him. But it was his chest that hit first, smacking against the bottom of the other canal and knocking the air from his lungs.

The impact startled a rat that had been picking through litter on the other side of the canal. It looked up, a half-chewed maggot in its mouth, and saw a human boy clinging to the edge of the waterway, struggling to pull himself up. It was a brief struggle, for the boy began sliding back toward the drop almost immediately. The rat watched as the boy’s fingers grabbed at the bottom of the stone channel, trying to hold on. After a brief but valiant effort, the boy disappeared over the side. The rat, who assumed the human had fallen to his death, went back to its rummaging.

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.

II

There 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