Unholy Night

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.

III

He 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