Unholy Night

see.

Only it wasn’t the Antioch Ghost’s head.

Just as it hadn’t been Melchyor’s or Gaspar’s.

The crowd kept cheering, and Antipas kept smiling — neither aware of what the Antioch Ghost actually looked like… or that this wasn’t, in fact, him.

But Herod knew.

From high up in his perch, he knew. He knew that the Antioch Ghost had beaten — no, humiliated — him. Humiliated him in front of his people. He felt such a rage crawling up his back, such an urge to scream. But he couldn’t find the voice. He was powerless. A powerless king, trapped in a tower named for the wife who’d humiliated him. Trapped in a body that humiliated him. He could only watch as his stupid, grinning son held the wrong head in the air.

II

Three wise men walked east across Jerusalem as the sun went down. Each with his head wrapped and his face covered. Each wearing the robes of a dead man.

Once again, Balthazar had relied on religion to set him free. It had never occurred to the dungeon guards that anyone, even notorious murderers, would harm a priest. It hadn’t occurred to the guards to remain in the cell, to protect their king’s religious advisors while they offered comfort to the condemned. Nor had it occurred to the guards to get a good look at the three wise men when they knocked on the cell door and announced they were ready to come out — their head coverings reconfigured to hide their faces.

The guards weren’t alone in their assumptions. It hadn’t occurred to Balthazar that three innocent men would pay for his freedom with their lives — struggling, screaming through their hoods and gags, and pissing themselves. His plan had merely called for overpowering the wise men, stealing their robes, binding and gagging them up with strips of fabric ripped from their own garments, and slipping out of the palace before anyone noticed the switch. He’d been sure that an alarm would go up when the guards reentered the cell and found the wise men bound, gagged, and half naked inside. Only it hadn’t occurred to Balthazar that they might not be the same guards.

In fact, the men who returned to the cell, the men who fit the bound and gagged prisoners with their execution hoods and led them to the chopping block, had no idea what Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchyor looked like, because they’d been on duty for less than an hour. In the end, the real wise men had been doomed by a shift change.

In the excitement of the execution, no one had noticed that the little round Greek was no longer quite as little or round or that the tied hands of the Ethiopian called “Gaspar” were no longer the same color. Just as no one had questioned the three wise men as they’d made their way out of the dungeon in their nobleman’s robes, through the palace, and across the courtyard. The guards had dutifully opened the north gate without a second glance, and the prisoners had simply slipped into the square, where the masses were beginning to gather for the execution of the year.

They walked as slowly as they could, given the fear and excitement beating through their bodies. There was only a street and the desire to keep following it. The desire to get as far away from Herod’s Palace as they could. They continued clear across the city, until they reached the Pool of Bethesda, where the people of the surrounding suburbs bathed, and Balthazar stopped to have the biggest drink of water any human being had ever had.

The pool was adjacent to a market that ran along the north wall of the Great Temple — a collection of merchants and vendors that stretched several blocks. His thirst mercifully quenched, Balthazar finally had the wits to form another plan.

First, he put his old sleight of hand skills to use, walking from one end of the market to the other, stealing coins from the pockets of passersby and trinkets from the merchants who hadn’t yet closed up shop for the execution. He took small pieces of gold jewelry, frankincense. Things they’d be able to trade for food and favors in the coming days.

Next, he’d used some of the stolen coins to buy as much food and water as he and the others could carry. Balthazar also bought a little myrrh to dress his wounds with — a trick he’d learned from the Asian traders in the forum as a boy. A little of that stolen jewelry was used to buy a camel for each of them. Camels they rode south past the temple walls. The men had no idea where they were headed, and they didn’t care, just as long as it was far away from Jerusalem.

If Gaspar and Melchyor had harbored any doubts that their companion was, in fact, the Antioch Ghost, the chatter on the streets of Jerusalem put them to rest. The whole city seemed to be talking about the execution. The Antioch Ghost was on every tongue. Balthazar had saved these thieves’ lives, and they were in his debt. In accordance with tradition, they were his servants until that debt was repaid in kind. It was a code as old as the desert, and it applied to career criminals just as much as any other man. Even Balthazar, who never met a tradition he didn’t despise, had honored this one in the past. It wasn’t a tradition in the religious sense, like eating this animal versus that, or wearing this hat or that hat or no hat at all. It was simply common sense.

Every service had a price. Every object a value. If someone made you a sword, you paid him the appropriate amount or traded something of equal value with him. If a man saved your life, you either paid him the amount you considered that life worth, or you saved his in return. Until either of those things was transacted, you were in his debt. It was business. And if Balthazar believed in anything with religious fervor, it was that.

Everything had a price. And though he didn’t yet know that his freedom had cost the wise men their heads, Balthazar knew he’d just upped the price on his.

III

Screaming echoed through Herod’s throne room. The servants had made themselves scarce, fearful that they’d be condemned to death for some unperceivable transgression. Advisors kept to the corners of the room — away from the warm, flickering glow of the torches, away from the cooler moonlight that streamed in through the windows with unusual intensity. They cowered in the shadows, even hid behind the rows of columns that ran along either wall.

The king paced in front of the steps of his throne, his body hunched forward. Three Judean generals stood before him, their helmets tucked beneath their arms and their tails between their legs.

“I don’t care if you have to burn this entire city to the ground to find him! I won’t be made a fool of by a common thief!”

His already raspy voice had been strained to its limits. He’d spent the last hour cursing anyone who dared to come into his field of view. Demanding the heads of everyone who’d played even the slightest role in his humiliation: the dungeon guards, the north gate guards, even the executioner. All dead.

“I want every legion, every last man, every horse, and every sword hunting him down, and I want him brought to me alive!”

Even his beloved son, Antipas, had disappeared in the wake of this disaster. He knew better than to put himself in the path of his father’s rage.

“And if a word — if one WORD — of this is spoken outside these walls, I’ll have all of you and your families put to death! None of your men are to know who they seek! As far as they and all of Judea are concerned, the Antioch Ghost is dead! Do you understand?”

The three generals all nodded. Even a simple “yes, Your Highness” could be misinterpreted in this situation.

“Good… now go find him.”