Unholy Night

great victory… assuming God would help him just a little more. Once again, Peter appealed to the Lord.…

Give me a sign, Heavenly Father. Help me bring this murderous thief to justice. Help me to protect the children of Israel and uphold your law, O God.

Of course, he left out the part about being rewarded with money and land and slaves, but that wasn’t important. Once again, God delivered. For no sooner had Peter finished his prayer than a sound reached his ears. A beautiful sound that meant glory was at hand:

Muffled screams coming from the bathhouse.

The head landed in the water, its eyes still blinking as it sank to the bottom, and the women finally released their pent-up screams. They climbed over each other, trying to get out of the bath as a dark red cloud spread through it.

Balthazar had waited until the advancing soldiers were within arm’s length before jumping out from behind the robes and swinging at the closest man. It’d been one of those lucky swings — one in a hundred, really — where the blade had hit the neck just right, between the vertebrae, and gone clean through. Before the first soldier’s head had even splashed down, Bal­thazar had kicked the second in the chest, knocking him onto his back. Then, just as the first screams began to echo through the room, he’d run the third soldier through the belly and out the back. He’d held the soldier — who wasn’t much more than a boy — up with his blade, watching his face drain from pink to ash white, then yanked it out, spilling his blood and entrails onto the tiled floor.

By this point, the second soldier had managed to get back to his feet. But it was only a brief stay. Balthazar swung again and cut his throat. The soldier dropped his sword and clutched at the wound — the blood pouring through his fingers in sheets. His face turned that same shade of white, wore that same mask of fear as he came to that same old, dreadful realization. The one Balthazar had seen so many other men come to: This can’t be happening. This can’t be the day I die. And then it was done. The soldier fell face-first into the bath, his blood mixing with the other’s. Naturally, this only served to elicit more screams from the already- screaming women.

Those screams will bring more soldiers any second now. Time to go.

He stood for a moment, mourning the days and weeks he’d spent working to fill those saddlebags. Mourning the lost fruits of his labor. Then, another brief grieving period over, he ran like hell again.

Failure is a pile of bodies and no profit… and this is shaping up to be a dismal failure.

Balthazar ran out the rear of the building and into the small, dirt-lined courtyard, enclosed by a six-foot wall and a wooden gate that led into the street. It was empty, save for a massive brick furnace that abutted the bathhouse. This furnace, Balthazar knew at once, was the source of the white smoke he’d seen earlier. A male slave stood beside its open iron door, stoking the raging fire inside. Its hot air channeled into a system of ducts under the bathhouse floor, keeping the water nice and warm for the nude elite. Even where Balthazar stood, ten feet away from the flames, the heat was almost too much to bear, and the noise of crackling wood and rushing air was almost deafening. As such, the slave had been oblivious to the screams coming from the bathhouse and the shouts of Judean soldiers swarming outside. But now, as he looked up from his work and found himself face-to- face with a blood-spattered, sword-wielding Syrian, he abandoned his post and ran for his life — out the open wooden gates and into the streets. Balthazar was about to do the same thing when a disembodied voice cried, “Stop where you are!”

He turned and saw a lone, boyish Judean soldier standing in the bathhouse’s rear doorway, his sword trembling in his hands.

“OVER HERE!” he shouted to his comrades. “OVER HERE! I’VE FOUND HIM!”

Balthazar wasn’t about to be held prisoner by a lone soldier with a trembling sword. And he certainly wasn’t going to wait around for others to arrive. He started toward the wooden gate.

“Stop!”

The soldier lifted his sword and held it out in front of his body, exactly as he’d been trained to hold it. He charged at Balthazar, exactly as he’d been trained to charge. But as he prepared to run his enemy through, just as he’d been trained to do, the soldier experienced something he was entirely unequipped and unprepared to handle: Balthazar rolled onto his back and used his legs to launch him into the air —

 — and into the open furnace.

The soldier heard the clang of the iron door slam behind him. He heard the latch close. He tried to stand, but there wasn’t enough room to do more than crouch. Instinct grabbed hold of him, and he tried to push the flames away with his hands, but they were already burning. He could see his flesh blistering and blackening, sliding off of his bones like wax down the side of a candle. He could feel his clothes burning against his body, becoming one with his skin, his hair melting against his scalp.

Balthazar could hear his screams through the iron door. He closed his eyes and turned away as the pounding of fists rattled it from the other side. When he opened them, there were ten soldiers standing in front of him.

“Drop your sword!” one of them yelled.

Faced with the idea of taking them all on, Balthazar placed the sword in his mouth — its blade still dripping with blood — turned back, and climbed the brick wall of the bathhouse. He could always fight his way across the rooftops, jumping from building to building until he found a horse, or a camel, or anything better than fighting ten men at once.

But when he pulled himself onto the arched roof and got to his feet, he felt the hope run out of his body like blood from a severed head. There were nearly a hundred men in the square below, plus the corpse of his miraculous camel. The Cloud of Undetermined Wrath had become a crowd of very determined soldiers, and Balthazar had to face the fact that he was completely, hopelessly surrounded.

His options were thus: He could fight to the death and take as many of these emperor-worshipping bastards as possible with him. Result? One hundred percent chance of death. Or, he could surrender and be all but certainly executed. Result? Ninety-nine percent chance of death.

It was a no-brainer.

Balthazar’s wrists had been bound firmly behind his back, his clothes meticulously searched for contraband. With a soldier holding his arms on either side, he was marched across the square to where Peter waited with a deeply satisfied smirk on his face. The victorious captain hesitated a moment, taking it all in. Relishing it. He was face-to-face with the end to all his troubles.

“The Antioch Ghost,” he said at last. “Scourge of Rome.”

“You forgot ‘plunderer of the Eastern Empire,’” said Balthazar.

Here it comes…

Sure enough, Balthazar was rewarded with a jaw-rattling punch for daring to speak. But snide remarks were just about all he had left in his arsenal. For the first time he could remember, he couldn’t see a way out. There was no hidden weapon to pull at the last second. No well-timed distraction on the way. His fate was completely out of his hands now. He’d risked everything on a 1 percent chance of survival.

“On your knees,” said Peter, drawing his sword.

Oh well… it was worth a try.

Balthazar didn’t budge, so the soldiers helped him, pushing down on his shoulders and making him kneel in the dirt. He braced himself, wondering if he would feel his spine break or feel the blade tear through his neck and throat. He wondered if he would still be able to see as his head fell to the ground and rolled across the sand. What a strange sight that would be… rolling along with no breath or body, fading to nothing as the blood ran out of me…

Balthazar examined the faces of the Judean soldiers closest to him, felt the binds on his wrists with the tips of his fingers, smelled the desert air. He looked at the sand beneath his feet and the sky above his head, taking it all in. Relishing it. Here it was, the sum of his twenty-six years. He would die on his knees in Bethel — or “Beit El.” Or whatever the hell they called it. His blood would run into the dirt. The soldiers would spit on his corpse, hack it to pieces, and leave it to the dogs. And that would be that.

Lesser men would’ve prayed at a moment like this. Would’ve begged God’s forgiveness as they were