Balthazar looked down through his tears and found the robes above his chest drenched in dark blood. He pulled them apart, panicked, sure he’d find a grotesque wound beneath. But there was nothing. Nothing but a small scratch in the center of his chest. He looked up to see if the Man With Wings had any explanation. But he was gone. Not a trace of him in the sky. Balthazar was alone on top of the world.
Something hit his foot. A droplet.
He looked at his chest again. The scratch was beginning to bleed. Just a few drops, like the remnants of the tears on his cheeks. But it was growing. Growing into a slow trickle, then a steady stream — the blood running down his chest onto his stomach, pooling in his navel and spilling over. A red river.
The scratch was slowly ripping itself open. Skin tearing itself apart like a leather hide, exposing muscle and ribs and lungs. Tearing away until his heart could be seen beneath, beating faster… faster. Balthazar grabbed the two halves of his chest, trying to pull them back together. Trying to keep everything where it belonged.
“No!”
His ribs began to splay open, each one awakening and extending outward like the legs of a white spider. Balthazar let go of his skin and tried to hold them down. If the ribs went, then the organs would follow. Everything would come spilling out of him, and he would be left here for all time — a pile of bones and organs and loose skin on top of the world. He pushed down as hard as he could, but the spider wouldn’t be denied its freedom. As he pushed, Balthazar saw his fingernails begin to lift themselves out of their beds and the skin on his fingers peel away, leaving the arteries beneath naked and pulsing with each beat of his heart.
He could feel the same thing happening to his toes… his feet. He could feel his eyelids peeling back and could see the blood begin to run over his corneas.
Balthazar was falling down the side of the great pyramid. Tumbling down, just as so many smooth pieces of stone had over the centuries, leaving a trail of muscle and sinew and blood and bone as he broke apart. Every vein unraveling as he went, pulling free of his body like the roots of a great tree torn out of the earth.
By the time he reached the sand, there was nothing left but his clothes.
Zachariah was far too old to be cutting into people. Too old to perform the kind of surgery this man required. His vision wasn’t what it used to be. His hands shook. But what choice was there? What other surgeon could see him in time or be trusted to harbor the fugitives who brought him in?
Joseph held the lamp over the man’s chest. The Ethiopian and the Greek sat near the door, ready to help if Zachariah needed them. His niece, Mary, waited in the next room with the baby. She wasn’t one for the sight of blood, and there was a lot of it here. The man had been stabbed, and the blade had gone into his right lung.
“Is he suffocating?” asked Joseph.
“Drowning,” said Zachariah as he worked.
“Drowning? But how can he be — ”
“Air seeps in through the wound, air presses down on the lung, blood gets trapped in the lung and drowns him from the inside. We drain the air? The lung inflates, the blood drains and maybe, maybe, maybe he lives. Now be quiet and let me work.”
His wife, Elizabeth, assisted her husband as he worked, just as she had twenty years ago, when he’d been a spritely fifty-seven and she’d been a thirty-six-year-old widow. Brown eyed with hair to match. Childless and beautiful. Meeting her had been the wonder of Zachariah’s life. A miracle. And though the years had proven her barren, he’d treasured every moment of their marriage — happy to have a companion in his dwindling years.
But then, seven years ago, when he was seventy and she forty-nine, Elizabeth had become pregnant. Zachariah had been doubtful at first. Slow to receive the gift that God had given him. But her belly had continued to grow, and she’d given birth to a healthy baby boy, despite the fact that she was beyond the childbearing age. Another miracle. A miracle they’d named John.
Zachariah slowly, carefully inserted a small metal tube into the wound — every ounce of his concentration devoted to keeping his hands steady. These were the dangerous seconds. The ones that would determine whether the patient lived or died. Do it right, and a hiss of air would escape through the tube, followed immediately by a good deal of blood. With the lung reinflated, the patient could be sewn up and — God willing — returned to health. Do it wrong, and you only made him drown faster.
Elizabeth kept a cloth pressed firmly around the tube, soaking up what little blood trickled out. She’d seen her husband try this only once before, on a local man who’d been stabbed by a Judean officer for spitting in the street. That had been fifteen years ago, before Zachariah’s hands shook. Before his eyes had become clouded over. And that patient had died right here in this room. On this table.
She’d been happy when he’d decided to give up medicine, to live these last years for himself. For his family. She was happy that John still had a father who could impart wisdom. Teach him how to be a man. Especially since she alone knew that her son was different. That he was destined to do something extraordinary.
Shortly before John was born, a man with glorious white wings had come to her in a dream. He’d told her that her conception was indeed a miracle and that her child’s birth would herald the coming of the Messiah. “The son of God shall walk the earth,” he’d said, “born of another in your house. And your son shall be his prophet.”
John waited outside with Mary. She sat on a small bench near the closed door. John stood beside her, staring at the swaddled infant in her arms. The infant was staring back, looking up with his new, blue eyes. Eyes that couldn’t make out anything beyond the length of his arms. Yet he stared intently at the face over him now. Fascinated by it. Drawn to it. John stared back with equal fascination. He’d seen other babies before. He had other cousins. But there was something different about this one. He felt a strange, powerful kinship with it. A vague sadness too.
“May I hold him?”
Mary wasn’t sure. He was too young to be trusted with something so fragile. But there was something about him. Something that seemed older than his six years.
“Very carefully, and only for a minute.”
She handed him over, gently, and John took him with equal care. He cradled the infant. Held him up to his shoulder and rubbed his hand on his back. He rocked the baby gently back and forth, just as his mother had taught him to do. And when the infant rested his head against his shoulder, John tilted his own to meet it.
It was the same head that Herod’s son, Antipas, would order cut off decades later, when he was known as John the Baptist. But there was none of that now. None of the toil and death that would follow both of them in days both near and distant. None of the fame and famine. There was only the quiet of their breath and the sound of the unconscious man gasping for his in the next room.
Balthazar opened his eyes and screamed, but the sound was choked back by water; the air in his lungs carried in bubbles. He was drowning. Struggling to reach the sunlight that filtered down through the silt. With a last kick of his legs, he broke the surface and sucked in a mix of water and air, which brought sharp, painful coughs but gave him the strength to swim to the nearest bank. He dragged himself onto the sand with his fingertips, still coughing up the water in his lungs.
Balthazar examined his hands, expecting to see the skin peeled away and the veins unraveled. But they were whole. Every part of him was. With his breath coming steadily again, he lifted his head and took in his surroundings through strands of wet, black hair. Above him, only feet from the river’s edge, were rows of towering columns and stone pharaohs — each one intricately carved, each telling a different story about the triumphs of a different pharaoh.
To his left, Balthazar could see a wooden barge sailing down the Nile in the midday sun, loaded with goods. On the opposite bank, he could see fishermen casting their lines, some of them resting in the shade of palm trees, just as he and Abdi had years ago.
“Hey!” he shouted across the river. “Hey, over here!”
Though they were well within range of his voice, the fishermen ignored the soaked man standing on the opposite bank, just as they’d ignored him when he was drowning.
But they didn’t ignore the fish.
