the wound shut with a bone needle and flax thread. It was healing nicely, thanks in part to the myrrh the patient had been traveling with.
Balthazar was sitting up on his own. His color had returned, and his appetite with it. Zachariah sat at his bedside in the glow of a candle. The house quiet around them. He watched the patient drink from the cup in his hands, wipe his mouth, and politely say no to the question he’d asked moments before.
“Please,” said Zachariah, “tell me what you saw.”
“I told you… I don’t want to talk about it. It was just a dream.”
Balthazar had mumbled in his sleep. Mumbled about flying. About the moon, and the pink walls, and the roots of a tree being ripped from the earth. Zachariah had seen other patients do this over the years, and he’d always found their visions fascinating. The way their minds interpreted what was happening to their bodies. Their vividness.
“Even if it was strange or absurd. Tell me what you saw.”
Balthazar looked at the bearded old man. The man not unlike the one in his dream. The man who’d saved his life. He supposed that he owed him at least that much. It was just the two of them, after all. The others were asleep.
And so he did. He told him about flying over the desert. About the mountain and the people dancing around the great golden something. He told him about his body tearing itself apart and falling down the side of the pyramid. About the statues on the shores of the Nile. He told him about the fish going belly-up in a river of blood, the moon breaking apart into pieces and falling from the sky. About the room with pink and purple walls and the man with the wooden staff who offered him a drink and told him to go to Egypt.
But not about the Man With Wings. That he kept to himself.
When he was done telling his story, Zachariah sat silently for a long time. Thinking. Balthazar thought he saw the old man’s eyes filling with tears.
“I believe,” said Zachariah at last, “that you have been chosen by God.”
In the two days since the surgery, Zachariah’s house had been full of storytelling. He’d learned who his patient really was. How he and the other fugitives had run into Joseph and Mary in the stables. How he’d saved them when Herod’s men had stormed into Bethlehem. His niece, Mary, had told him about visions of the angel Gabriel and her miraculous pregnancy. This had prompted Zachariah’s wife to admit something she’d kept from him for six years: that the same angel had visited her during her own miraculous pregnancy and told her that their son, John, would be the Messiah’s prophet. And now, Zachariah had just been told about the most astonishing dream. A dream he believed to be a message from God himself.
“I believe,” he said, “that you have been instructed to walk the path that Moses walked. The path of Exodus. I believe that you have been chosen to take the child and his parents to Egypt.”
It made sense. Egypt was relatively close, and beyond Herod’s political or military reach. And while it had technically been a Roman province for the last thirty years, the Romans had little influence over local affairs.
“Do you want to know what I think?” asked Balthazar. “I think I had a bad dream.”
“Will you take them?”
The voice hadn’t come from Zachariah. Balthazar turned toward the door and saw a boy. He had no idea who this boy was or how long he’d been standing there.
“Will you take them?” the boy repeated. “Take them to Egypt?”
“My son,” said Zachariah. “You must forgive him. He sometimes mistakes himself for a grown man.”
Balthazar didn’t like children, generally speaking. He especially didn’t like the way this one looked at him. There was no fear in his eyes.
“If I take them,” he said, turning back to Zachariah, “it’s only because I’m headed in the same direction. Not because I believe that some god sent me a message.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe or not,” said Zachariah. “As long as God believes in y — ”
“Stop.”
He wasn’t about to hear any more of that zealot garbage. Not even from the man who’d saved his life.
“I said I’ll think about it.”
It was nearly 200 miles to Egypt if they took the route Balthazar had in mind. South past Aijalon, then through the desert to Hebron, where they would rest and resupply before making the final push south to Egypt. Normally, he could make a trip like that in five days. But with his current entourage, and the fact that they’d have to stay off the main roads, he expected it to take nearly twice as long.
It had been five days since the surgery, and Balthazar was beginning to feel like his old self again. Up, around, and ready to go. Gaspar and Melchyor had seen to it that the camels were fed and watered. They’d packed as much food as they could carry. Their robes were new, their bodies were bathed, and their bellies were full. They were ready.
And they were waiting.
Waiting because the Jews were inside, performing another one of their ancient, pointless rituals.
With everything that’d happened, Joseph and Mary had almost forgotten that it had been eight days since their baby’s birth. In accordance with Jewish law, males were circumcised and named on their eighth day. Normally, the bris would’ve been performed by a mohel — an elder designated by the father, usually a rabbi. But under the circumstances, an old physician with shaking hands would have to suffice. Joseph and Mary held hands as they watched Zachariah wield his scalpel and lean over the baby.
Both of them said a silent prayer asking God to guide his hand.
7
The Gift of the Magi
“I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins.”
I
For a moment, it seemed like Herod was done screaming. Then he began again.
What came out of his diseased mouth was less a collection of words and more a series of sharp, anguished notes. Tired lungs forcing bursts of air through bloodied vocal cords. Sounds with no shape or rhythm. The improvisations of a madman. Herod’s courtesans had taken refuge behind their pillars once again. His advisors and servants pressed their backs against the walls of the sunlit throne room, trying to make themselves as small as possible as their king circled, tearing and kicking at any object that dared cross his path, spewing those frightening, senseless sounds.
A body lay in the center of Herod’s harried orbit — the body of a giant whose legs had been shredded by the enemy in Bethlehem and whose throat had more recently been cut by friends in Jerusalem.
It was the body of the soldier Balthazar had spared.
He’d been led in to see his king only moments before, two fellow soldiers helping him along as he limped down the length of the throne room, helping him down as he knelt before Herod on broken knees. With his head bowed and his body shaking from fright, the giant had delivered the news: They’d failed to kill all the male children of Bethlehem. His captain was dead, and many men with him.
