Balthazar knew many of the Essenes by name. He also knew they could be trusted to keep his whereabouts a secret. Most important of all, he knew that Herod’s men wouldn’t dare disturb such a sacred Jewish settlement. That was one of the great things about the Judean Army. It was made up almost entirely of Jews.
After the trail was sufficiently cold, Balthazar would cut his loyal servants loose and disappear with the seven winds. He didn’t like traveling companions. It was one of the reasons he never worked with partners. Partners couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing a hundred percent of the time. They slowed you down. They had differing opinions. When you enlisted them to help you pick pockets, they screwed up spilling wine on your targets and got you chased across aqueducts. Partners were bad news, even when they were in your debt.
The wise men were less than a mile from Bethlehem when the first whispers of trouble reached their ears. A faint rumble from the half-darkness ahead. A growing rumble, like the beating of hooves against earth. With it, the clanging of armor growing sharper against the air.
“What is that?” asked Gaspar.
Balthazar knew at once. Even before he saw the first shapes crest the hill on the road ahead, before he saw the outlines of swords and spears against the faint desert sky, he knew. They were finished.
Herod’s troops were galloping south toward Bethlehem. Dozens of them, from the sound of it. Without discussion, Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchyor veered their camels off of the road and into the desert on their right, making way for the approaching horsemen. They lifted the fronts of their shemaghs to cover their faces. This, Balthazar realized, was a useless piece of instinct.
“What do we do?” asked Gaspar. “There must be a hundred of them. We have no weapons.”
Balthazar was suddenly struck by how stupid they’d been to stick together. The soldiers would be looking for three men, and here they were, three of them. They’d been stupid to stop in Bethlehem. It was too close to the city. They should’ve gone into the desert. Yes, that star had made the night almost as bright as the day, but there was a lot more desert to cover than villages to search. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Why hadn’t they kept riding? Because they’d been tired? Was being tired worse than being dead?
“Balthazar, what do we do?”
If they took off now, they were sure to draw the army’s attention. Running was an admission of guilt, an invitation to be chased. The only shot they had — and it was an absurdly long shot — was that the soldiers hadn’t spotted them yet. That they’d be missed in the relative darkness of dawn.
“Keep riding.”
“But — ”
“If they see us, we take off in different directions. Understand? Split them up, try and lose them in the desert. Melchyor? Do you understand?”
“Lose them in the desert… ”
He wasn’t listening. He was focused on the armored men riding south, kicking up a cloud of dark dust. The men who would reach them in a few seconds and tear them to pieces.
“Not yet,” said Balthazar. “Nobody take off yet. Not unless they see us… ”
Of course they were going to see them. They were barely fifty feet from the road, and silhouetted against the eastern sky, which was growing brighter by the minute.
The army galloped by to their left. There was no question they were close enough to make out the shapes of the wise men, no question that some of the soldier’s helmets were turning toward them — their eyes focusing in like arrows on a stretched bow. Balthazar gripped his camel’s reins tightly, readied his right leg to deliver a swift kick to its side as soon as the first horse turned in his direction.
But none of them turned. They just kept on riding south toward Bethlehem. Balthazar couldn’t believe it. They’d seen them; he was sure of it. They’d seen three wise men riding along the road at a strange hour, yet they hadn’t even stopped to question them.
As the rumble of hooves passed by and grew weaker behind them, the wise men stopped and pointed their camels south. They watched in silent disbelief as that dark, dusty mass of horses and men, that creature, crawled along the road, toward the smoke of cooking fires and clay ovens in the distance.
“I don’t understand,” said Balthazar.
“What is there to understand?” asked Gaspar. “The Fates are with us!”
“But… they saw us.”
“We can discuss it on the way to Qumran! Let us go, now!”
Balthazar watched the creature slither along the road toward the north of Bethlehem, the dark blue of the heavens growing lighter by the second. For some reason, he could hear the faint, raspy voice of Herod in his skull. Raging at his advisors, shaking the walls of his throne room.
“Balthazar — to Qumran, quickly!”
Gaspar was right. What was there to understand? They’d been lucky, that’s all. They could sit here and wonder why, or they could take advantage of that luck. The wise men pointed their camels north and rode toward their freedom, even as that faint voice echoed in Balthazar’s brain. Deep down in the smooth-walled, iron-barred dungeons, where all the bad things belonged. He knew they’d been spotted. He’d felt those eyes on him. Those arrows…
They’d gone only a few feet when they heard something on the air. Something distant and shrill. Something that could almost be mistaken for the howl of a wild dog. But it was a scream. A woman’s scream. Then another.
The wise men turned back and found the road empty, all traces of the creature gone. It had been absorbed into the village. Absorbed like blood into cloth. And somewhere beneath the smoke of cooking fires and clay ovens, it was making a woman scream.
“Balthazar… you don’t think… ”
Herod was many things, but a murderer of infants? No. No man was capable of that. Not even the twisted, decayed wisp of a man he’d come face-to-face with at the palace. And even if he was capable, he was too smart. There would be riots in the streets if word got out. A civil war. Herod was many things, but he was a politician first. He knew better.
But the voice… that voice faintly raging in the depths of Balthazar’s brain told him otherwise.
“We’re going back,” he said.
“Are you mad?”
“I just want to have a look, that’s all.”
“The Judean Army is out there looking for us, and you want to go look for — ”
“They saw us, Gaspar. They saw us and they weren’t interested.”
“So?”
“They should’ve been. Three men on camels? Three men with their faces covered? They should’ve — ”
He was cut off by another scream. Gaspar and Balthazar turned away from each other and looked back toward the village. This had been a different scream. The same woman, maybe — but a different scream altogether.
“Just a look,” said Balthazar. “That’s all.”
Balthazar kicked the side of his camel and took off down the road to Bethlehem. Gaspar and Melchyor shared a look behind his back, then followed. They were in his debt, after all.
The sun had finally pushed its head above the crest of the eastern hills — beginning a journey that would see it reach the pinnacle of the heavens before growing old and dying peacefully in the west. Its orange light spilled onto the wise men’s backs as they looked down from a ridge on the east side of Bethlehem. From here, they could see down some of the wider cobblestoned streets in the village’s center. But where those streets had been full and awake with the activities of daily life, they were now suddenly, eerily empty.
Empty except for a woman in dark robes, running barefoot toward them down one of the cobblestoned
