Unholy Night

streets. Running faster than she’d ever run in her life, because nothing in her life had ever been as important. From their perch, Balthazar and the others could see why:

There was a baby in her arms.

Naked. Tiny. Held to its mother’s breast as she ran from the horse. The black horse galloped after them with a soldier on its back, his armor clanging around him, his sword drawn.

Balthazar could hear that faint voice in the dungeon growing louder with each fall of the horse’s hooves. He could hear the diseased rants of a king obsessed with power. A king who had once ordered his own wife and children put to death. Who’d turned on his own blood. Why wouldn’t he? If a man could murder his own children…

The soldier swung his blade and struck the woman in the back. She fell forward, and though she tried with all of herself to hold on, the baby flew out of her grasp. It landed on the cobblestones and rolled for a few feet, too fragile, too new to brace itself against the impact. It came to a stop on its back, lay silent for a moment, then let out a terrible shriek, its lungs doing their work brilliantly. Its eyes shut. The woman responded with a shriek of her own, crawling toward it as the soldier dismounted and walked over to where the infant lay crying. Crying out for its mother’s comforting touch.

The soldier stood over the baby a moment, then ran his sword through its belly.

The soldier ran his sword through its… the soldier ran his —

Stop.

It didn’t happen that way at all. Balthazar’s eyes had betrayed him. He was back in the world of infinite oceans and distant visions. No, it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Only… the cold, sick water in his blood told him that it was. That familiar feeling. The one that had sent him chasing after the flittering gold pendant.

The baby’s cries sharpened, then stopped. Its arms and legs flailed weakly for a moment… then it was still. The soldier withdrew his blade. Wiped it on the bottom of his sandal.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead…

The mother was still crawling across the cobblestones toward her son — screaming her throat raw. The soldier walked back to her casually — you coward, you dog… you won’t do it, I’ll kill — and ran the blade through her back. But she kept crawling. Crawling toward her son, so the soldier ran her through again. Her body tensed briefly and was still.

Gaspar and Melchyor couldn’t believe their eyes. They were criminals. All of them, criminals. They’d seen their share of murder and cruelty. God knew they had.

But neither of them had ever seen anything like this. Neither of them had ever imagined it possible. They’d been rendered mute by the sight.

Balthazar’s teeth clenched so tightly around his lower lip that blood had begun to pool in his mouth.

This simply wouldn’t do.

The hell with Qumran. The hell with all of it. He decided to kill them. All of them. He was going to snuff out every one of their worthless lives, stand over every one of their dismembered bodies. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, seeing as he didn’t have any weapons and was outnumbered at least twenty to one, but he knew. His being was overflowing with something. Not rage. Something stronger than rage. Something more powerful and just.

The woman lifted her head as she lay dying in the street. The black horse was leaving with the man on its back. Riding away. Leaving them both to bleed in the street. She held her head up as high as she could, determined to look at her son one more time before she left this life.

The sun was rising. Its hard orange light had caught some of the infant’s fine hair. Hair whose color would never change. His eyes closed, his chest no longer rising or falling. His hands. Tiny, delicate, cold. But there was something else. Something above him. Above all of Bethlehem in the early light. The woman thought she saw the shapes of three men on camelback, but it was hard to tell. The sun was directly behind them, creating a blinding halo around their heads. With her last thought, she wondered if they’d come to welcome her into the next world.

When Balthazar spoke at last, he had to will every syllable into existence.

“The two of you are in my debt?”

“Yes,” said Gaspar, “but you can’t be think — ”

“The two of you are in my debt?”

Gaspar hesitated. He knew what was coming next.

“Yes… ”

“With me.”

Balthazar kicked the side of his camel and rode down into the village. In accordance with the law of the desert, but against every one of their instincts, Gaspar and Melchyor followed him.

Joseph and Mary could hear the screams too. And though they didn’t dare leave the stables to see, they knew. They knew it was happening. Right now. Right here in Bethlehem. They could hear the hooves beating against the road, the clanging of armor as it entered the village. It was too late to run. There were too many of them out there.

Joseph hurried Mary and the baby into one of the stable’s tiny stalls. A black-and-white spotted goat protested as Joseph shoved it aside to make room for his wife, who lay beside it in the fetal position, the baby beside her. Joseph covered them with as much hay as he could — much of it matted together with dry manure. There was barely enough of it to cover them both, but it would have to do.

Having hidden them as best he could, Joseph slammed the stall shut and tried to look like he belonged, grabbing his old friend the pitchfork and pretending to clean up the stable. If the soldiers barged in, they’d see a man going about his work, nothing more. They’d leave him alone and look elsewhere. But if they didn’t — if for some reason they decided to look around, God forbid, he could use the pitchfork to buy Mary a little time.

Joseph waited and prayed. Prayed that the soldiers wouldn’t bother with the stable at all. Why would they? It doesn’t make sense. Stables are for animals, not infants. He prayed that the shepherd who’d taken pity on them — who’d given them their lodging in the first place — wouldn’t give them up now. Mostly, Joseph prayed that the baby wouldn’t start crying. So far, remarkably, it had stayed happy and calm as it had been covered with hay and manure.

A lone soldier chased a twelve-year-old boy over the cobblestones near the village center. Not to slaughter him, but the baby brother he held in his arms. The baby he’d snatched away from his mother, certain that he could ran faster than she could. And he’d been right to do it. He was faster than she could have ever hoped to be. But he wasn’t faster than the black horse with the clanging man on its back.

The soldier drew his sword as he closed in on the boy’s back, unaware that three men on camels were currently chasing him down the same street. Unaware that the Antioch Ghost was almost on him, kicking the side of his camel harder than he’d ever kicked anything in his life. Harder than he’d kicked his ill-fated camel in the Judean Desert. Faster you piece of shit. Gaspar and Melchyor riding close behind him…

The camel responded, galloping across the cobblestones and pulling up just behind the black horse. Close enough to strike with a sword, if he’d only had one. Balthazar settled for the next best thing: He grabbed the back of the soldier’s collar and yanked him off his saddle and onto the cobblestones, where he was promptly trampled by Gaspar’s and Melchyor’s camels. They hadn’t meant to run him over — they simply couldn’t stop in time. But now they did, pulling up on their reins and circling back to inspect the damage.

Balthazar stopped his own camel and watched the soldier’s horse gallop on for a hundred more feet, stop, then trot in a circle, unsure what to do with itself. He watched as the boy kept on running with the infant in his arms, unaware that the menace behind him was gone.

Run, boy, and don’t stop running until you drop from exhaustion.

The soldier was lying motionless on his back, a deep dent in his breastplate where a camel’s foot had struck his chest. He was older than most men of his lowly rank, a tinge of gray at his temples. He was coughing up blood, the result of a splintered rib cage and torn organs, Balthazar guessed. Good. His left arm had been mangled beneath another camel foot, flattened below the elbow and rendered useless. He writhed, moaned.