Unholy Night

they’re not here for us.

Somehow, he knew. The strange, almost blinding comet in the sky above Bethlehem. The clear, cool stream in the barren desert. A swarm of locusts, beating back the Roman Army. On their own, any one of these events was strange. Any two were nearly impossible. All three? Almost too much for even the staunchest realist to ignore. It was an interesting feeling, watching something that couldn’t possibly be real. And Balthazar reveled in it for a moment, watching the screaming Romans, before sense caught up with his senses, and a single word struck him with the force of a fist from the clouds above:

Go.

10 The Dead

“Dry bones… I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life.”

 — Ezekiel 37:4–6

I

They’d all lived through sandstorms, had all felt the stinging of fine grains against their skin, the dry desert blowing over squinting eyes. But this was unlike anything they could’ve imagined.

This storm was alive.

Each grain of sand had been replaced by a locust. Their eyes lifeless and black, their spindly legs and hard shells the color of desert sand. The bugs flew at them like debris in a tornado, their bodies forming a cloud that surrounded the fugitives, blinding in its density, deafening from the fluttering of its millions of wings. And while at a distance it seemed like the locusts were flying under their own power, in the cloud it was clear they were being blown along by something powerful. Something angry.

Balthazar’s hunch had proven right so far. The locusts didn’t seem interested in the five of them. Not directly, anyway. Not in the way they’d been interested in the Romans, choking them with their bodies, biting at their eyes and flesh. But while they weren’t the target of its wrath, the fugitives still had to contend with the millions upon millions of bugs flying past them toward Beersheba, pelting them like living hail and leaving marks on their arms and faces as they marched against its current. This continued until the darkness of the locusts around them began to give way to the darkness of the sky, and the cloud evaporated at last.

As the sun vanished behind the horizon, painting the last of itself in the pale sky, the fugitives stopped to rest and take stock of what they’d seen. Joseph cradled a bundled robe beneath his head, grabbing a few precious minutes of sleep on the ground. Mary, in turn, cradled the baby, feeding him beneath her robes.

Sela sat a stone’s throw from them, drinking from a canteen and looking at her arms and legs in the fading light. Examining the small bruises from the constant beating of tiny bodies against her skin, and examining the thoughts that had been beating against the inside of her skull for days now.

Here I am.

Once again, Balthazar had managed to turn her life upside down. The first time, he’d done it by leaving. This time, he’d done it by showing up.

She’d been perfectly unhappy in Beersheba. Perfectly alone. Now that her misery had company, she was worse off than ever: stuck in the desert without a possession left in the world. Stuck with two strangers, a baby, and an old flame she’d learned to hate in the absent years. Even if she could go back to Beersheba, what was there to go back to? Her home had been burned. Her city abandoned. If they were caught, the Romans would kill her just as quickly as the others. She was one of them now, like it or not. A fugitive. And while there’d been a time when she would’ve found that a romantic, adventurous notion, now it was only deeply annoying and troubling.

Sela took another drink, sifting through her limited options. She would go to Egypt with them, yes. Going south made sense, and besides, there was safety in numbers — even if they weren’t the numbers you would’ve picked if given the chance. But she wouldn’t linger there. She would continue on by herself. Maybe across the north of Africa to Carthage or across the sea to Greece.

You rebuilt your life once before; you can do it again.

She had no interest in playing odd woman out to a Jewish couple. Nor did she have much interest in hanging around with the man formerly known as the love of her life. From the looks of it, Balthazar had no interest in her, either. He was off on his own, watching —

A herd of ibex grazed in the distance. It was a smaller herd, only a dozen or so. Not the hundred or more they’d spotted outside Hebron as they walked into an ambush. Balthazar sat a good distance from the others, watching the ibex mindlessly, stupidly chew their cud. Taking comfort in it.

Blissful, simple little things.

They spent their abbreviated lives flitting around, moving from place to place, taking what they needed to survive. Always searching for the next little patch of green to keep them going, always running away when it got too dangerous, never stopping until they were either hunted down or simply faded into nothing. Forgotten.

Balthazar could think of a million explanations for what they’d seen in Beersheba, none of which made much sense. Just as he could think of a million reasons why a stream might appear out of nowhere in the desert or a riot might break out at exactly the moment they needed it to. But he could no longer outrun the nagging feeling that had been following him through the desert for days:

There’s something about that baby.

There had to be. Why else would all these people want him dead? A tiny, brand-new creature who had never so much as uttered a word. A creature who still bore the half-open eyes and misshapen head of his birth. And why did the child always seem so calm? Like it knew exactly what was going on? Why had the old man in his dream shown him an image of Egypt? Why did nature itself seem to come to their rescue when they were in need? And how?

Balthazar was filled with new questions. New doubts. Doubts of his old doubts. And this swirling pool of questions and doubts made him confused. And being confused made him angry. And here he was, sitting apart from the others, watching the sky slowly darken over the desert. Angry and alone.

Sela had been watching him sit there for some time, when a disembodied voice gave her misery more unwanted company:

“Why don’t you go and talk to him?”

She turned to her left and found Mary walking toward her. The baby still feeding beneath her robes.

“Sorry, what?”

“Why don’t you go over there?” said Mary, sitting beside her. “Sit with him. Talk to him.”

“And why would I do that?”

Mary looked confused. Isn’t it obvious?

“Because… you love him.”

Sela was sure she’d gone cross-eyed. Love him?

“Did you see the way I greeted him when he showed up at my door?”

“Yes. And if you didn’t care, you would’ve turned your back on him. Closed the door in his face. But the very sight of him made you angry. Violent. Those are passionate feelings. You don’t feel those things if you don’t care about someone.”