“You tell Herod,” said Balthazar to the bigger man, “that the Antioch Ghost is laughing at him.”
The soldier’s already fearful eyes grew even wider.
“You tell him I’m laughing.… You tell him I’ll stand over his grave.”
The soldier considered this, then ran back toward the village, determined to fight another cowardly day. Balthazar watched him go a moment — a giant running on shredded legs — then turned his attention to the soldier squirming below him. The soldier pulling himself along the ground despite the deep gashes in his limbs. He was trying to get away, and yet he knew there was no chance of that happening.
“We… we were ordered… ”
“You were WHAT?”
“We were ord-ordered to do it, by Herod himself.”
“Ordered to do what?”
“To… k-kill all the male infants of Bethlehem.”
Balthazar raised the sword above his head and held it there. He gripped the handle’s leather straps so tightly that his entire arm shook.
“Any man who follows an order like that doesn’t deserve to walk the earth.”
Balthazar brought it down and struck the soldier’s face with the broad side of the blade. The first blow broke the soldier’s nose, cracking a dam behind his nostrils and sending a flood of red over his chin. The second broke his left eye socket and all but liquefied the eye inside it. Before Balthazar could land a third blow, the soldier’s instinct finally caught up with his shock, and he held his hands out to protect himself. Balthazar pulled the sword back and swung across his body, striking the soldier’s left wrist. The hand attached to it fell toward the road but was caught by a few strands of sinew and skin before it landed. Balthazar resumed striking him in the face, again and again and —
A hand grabbed Balthazar’s wrist from behind as he raised the sword for another strike. He spun around, ready to kill whoever dared touch him. Ready to bash their brains right out of their ears.
But it wasn’t a Judean soldier. It was the carpenter, looking down at him from the back of Melchyor’s camel.
“He’s dead.”
They were all looking down at him. All but Mary, who’d turned away from the gruesome sight with the baby held tightly to her chest. Balthazar yanked his wrist out of Joseph’s grasp.
“Others will be coming,” said Joseph. “We have to go.”
Once again, he knew. He knew they had to go… but he couldn’t get his feet to move. In fact, he couldn’t get anything to move. Balthazar was having trouble catching his breath. He felt faint. Weak. They were all looking at him with strange expressions.…
“Balthazar… you’re bleeding.”
Who’d said that? The carpenter? Gaspar?
He looked down at his robes. There was a growing patch of blood on the right side of his chest. He pulled them apart and saw the wound. A puncture from a sword between his ribs. With his every breath, minuscule air bubbles formed in the bright, rich blood running from the wound.
The soldier hadn’t missed.
The sun had barely crested the eastern hills, but Balthazar could feel it setting already. Night was coming, and with it, some much-needed rest. For a moment, he thought that the strange, brilliant star in the east had returned.
This time, he was the only one who saw it.
6
The Dream
“Get up,” he said. “Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
I
Six fugitives rode east, into the rising desert sun. Only four of them were conscious.
They rode over a lifeless planet of rocky hills and jagged ravines, of beiges and browns tangled together in a senseless embrace, blending into one as they approached a horizon they would never reach. It was a place devoid of vibrancy. A place where joy had been banished. Even the cloudless blue sky seemed drained of its color.
Balthazar was draped facedown over the back of Gaspar’s camel. He was pale, drenched in sweat. Blood continued to seep from the hole in his chest and pool on the animal’s fur. Gaspar kept one hand on his reins and one hand on Balthazar’s back, trying to keep him from bouncing off as he led the party over uneven terrain. Melchyor rode behind them, a sword hanging at his side, the blood of five men still wet on his robes. Joseph was last, with Mary behind him, cradling the sleeping baby in her left arm and clinging to her husband’s robes with her right.
Gaspar didn’t know the way to Qumran. He didn’t know the Judean Desert very well at all, just the roads that had been beaten through it by time and desire. The roads that connected Jerusalem to Jericho, Jericho to Antioch, Antioch to the rest of the known world. But the desert was a different story.
Out here, spinning columns of dust could rise without warning, dancing across the earth and blinding all they touched. Out here, scorpions and snakes waited to poison the unfortunate souls who crossed their path, and the nearest water was often days away. Heat, exhaustion, and thirst had a way of burrowing under a man’s skin. Of eating away at his will, until the urge to lie down and sleep in the blinding sun seemed rational. The urge to remove those stifling robes and walk naked seemed wise. There were countless stories of men drinking mouthfuls of sand, tearing at their own flesh and cupping mouthfuls of blood to their cracked lips to quench the thirst that had driven them mad. There was a saying in Judea: “The desert is filled with the bones of strong men.”
The hills became steeper as the fugitives continued west. The desert slowly rose up on either side, enveloping them in rock. Swallowing them. Like drops of water being squeezed out of an ocean and into a narrow channel, the fugitives were funneled into a ravine — a giant fracture in the bones of the earth, twisting its way through the twisted beiges and browns.
They’d followed the ravine for just over a mile, steering their camels through its jagged walls, when the baby started crying, and Mary realized that it had been hours since he’d been fed.
They stopped and sat in the shade offered by the rock walls around them — Mary with the infant hidden beneath her robes, Joseph beside her, taking small sips from a stitched leather canteen. Gaspar had lowered Balthazar to the ground, washed his wound out with water. But no sooner had he wiped away the clot than blood began to run out of the puncture again. It was hopeless.
None of them spoke a word. Melchyor sat cross-legged, drawing pictures in the sand with his sword. If he felt any lingering effects of what he’d just seen, any remorse over the lives he’d taken, his face didn’t betray it. He seemed completely divorced from the world around him, completely at peace with his situation.
Gaspar, however, was clearly distressed. Not by the visions of slaughtered infants. He’d stored those away
