Unholy Night Read online

  “You said it yourself,” said Mary. “You’re in his debt. We all are.”

  Balthazar broke the silence with another fit of coughing. Gaspar looked at him. The mighty Antioch Ghost. The man who’d saved his neck.

  II

  Balthazar was suddenly aware of being carried. Held aloft by a pair of arms wrapped around his chest, held by a man with broad white wings that beat in a gentle rhythm above. A man whose face he couldn’t see but somehow knew. There was no fear of this stranger, no fear of being dropped. There was only the wind in his ears and the beating of wings.

  There was a city below them in the desert. A city of tents, gathered at the base of a great mountain. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands of people—moving around in a circle, dancing. They danced around something large, something shining and gold. Balthazar wanted nothing more than to be one of them. To have a closer look at the large, shiny golden thing and see if there were pieces to be pulled off and hidden in his robes. But this wasn’t where the Man With Wings was taking him.

  They flew past the great mountain and its dancing masses, descending closer to the desert’s surface, until sand became sea in the blink of an eye. Not the strange, endless sea of time and space that Balthazar had seen the universe reflected in, but an actual, earthly body of water. They moved over the face of this water, faster than Balthazar thought it possible for men to move without having their bodies ripped apart by the force of the wind.

  They flew until the water became shore, and shore became desert, and desert became a gleaming city of the sun. A city of hieroglyphs and temples, of obelisks and pyramids. He’d seen this place with his living eyes, too. He’d looked up at these three sisters—these pyramids that made fools of empires with their splendor. But he never imagined he’d be looking at them from above as he did now.

  The Man With Wings set Balthazar gently down on the top of one of these pyramids, the largest of the three. The tallest structure in the world, as it had been for more than 2,500 years. But the pyramid was falling apart, the white stones of its four sides having crumbled away over the centuries. Some sections were still perfectly smooth. Others had broken loose and tumbled into the sands below, exposing the darker stone blocks beneath.

  When those white wings settled and tucked behind his back, Balthazar saw the man’s face for the first time. The strength in his legs left him at the sight. He wept, his body shuddering with his sobs. Balthazar couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried this hard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything so beautiful.

  “How?” he asked through his tears.

  The Man With Wings extended his arms and held his hands out for Balthazar to see. The hands he’d been holding Balthazar with. They were stained red.

  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 bir
th 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.

  Fingertips.

  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.

  One by one, fish began to float to the surface—some thrashing and panicked, others simply belly-up. Before Balthazar could process what this was, one of the fishermen, who’d been wading in the river up to his knees, suddenly let out a scream and hurried back to the shore. Balthazar could see blisters on his legs when he emerged, just as he could see steam rising from the water’s surface. The river was beginning to boil. Tigerfish, catfish, and perch floating to the surface by the hundreds. Cooked alive by the river itself.

  Night was falling unnaturally fast, the sun retreating toward the west, frightened off by what it saw below. The world was growing dark before Balthazar’s eyes, and the Nile with it. But not for lack of light. The river was turning dark because it was bleeding.

  A red river.

  Only the moon loomed above now, casting its full gray glow over Egypt. But there was something different about it tonight. Something wrong. There were strange lines in its surface, and they were growing wider.

  The moon was breaking apart.

  Like a gray plate slowly shattering against a black marble floor, pieces began to break off and fall from the heavens, each shard the size of a mountain. The pieces began to rain down on the opposite bank—whole cities falling from the sky, making the earth tremble with each impossible impact. Terrified fishermen ran for their lives as one of the pieces crashed down, less than a mile from where they stood. But Balthazar didn’t move. He knew. He knew this was all just an illusion. There was no need to run, not even as another sliver grew bigger in the night sky above his head.

  Trust yourself, Balthazar.

  And he did. But when the sliver was close enough for Balthazar to see the outlines of craters in its surface, his feet overruled his brain and began to move on their own. Slowly at first, then into a full sprint, up the riverbank and into the desert beyond.

  He felt the earth shake as the sliver collided with the desert behind him, just like the earthquakes he remembered in Antioch, only a thousand times more powerful. Behind him, a wave of debris lifted off the desert floor, carried by the shock wave of the impact. There were many things a man could outrun, especially a man of Balthazar’s speed. But a shock wave of the moon and earth colliding wasn’t on the list. The only thing Balthazar could do was hit the ground and try to ride it out. He dove onto his belly and lay as flat as he could against the sand, covering the top of his head with his arms.

  The first flecks of debris pelted his legs from behind. The stinging grains of the sandstorms he’d weathered before. And then the wave. Slamming into him like a giant fist. The noise deafening. The debris tearing away at his clothes and skin.

  The pressure sucking the air out of his lungs. If there was a God, this would be the sound of his voice.

  Then it was gone. And the desert with it.

  Balthazar lifted his head and found himself in a vast room of brightly colored walls, their surfaces smoother than he thought possible. Smoother even than glass. Three of those walls were purple: the ones behind him, in front of him, and to his left. The wall on his right, however, was pink. A color he’d rarely seen in the empire, except on the blushing faces of a few fair-skinned Roman women. The floor was an untarnished white. A white table before him, a white chair beneath him, and a white ceiling high, high above him.

  A man stood on the far side of the room with his back to Balthazar. A man with long gray hair and matching gray robes. He looked to be pouring something from a clay jug with his left hand and holding a wooden walking staff in his right.

  The gray-haired man turned, a wooden cup of water in his left hand. His face was older than Balthazar had expected. Almost unnaturally old, with deep bags beneath his cloudy eyes. His skin had clearly seen its share of sun over the years; his hands had known their share of labor. The old man shuffled across the clean white floor and took a seat across the table. He searched Balthazar with those cloudy eyes for a moment, then slid the cup across the table.

  “Drink.”

  He did. The cool, clear water was, perhaps, the best he’d ever had. And when he’d had his fill, Balthazar wiped his mouth and spoke. “Who are you?”

  “A messenger.”

  “Whose?”

  The old man smiled at him. It was a familiar smile. One Balthazar loathed more than any other. The smug, self-satisfied smile of a man who thinks himself wise.

  “Fine,” said Balthazar. “Then what’s the message?”

  “You mustn’t leave the child to die.”

  After being torn inside out on top of a pyramid, seeing fish boil in a river of blood, and running from the shattered moon, Balthazar had almost forgotten about the baby.

  “I didn’t leave him. I saved him.”

  “Not yet. You have to stay with him a while longer.”

  “I don’t ‘have’ to do anything.”

  The old man considered him through those cloudy eyes.

  “If you do, you will never have to steal again, so long as you live. You will be
wealthy.”

  What’s that—a bribe? Dangle a little gold in front of the thief and watch him run? If you think I can be tempted that easily, you’re—

  “How wealthy?”

  “Wealthier than Herod. Wealthier than Augustus himself.”

  You must think I’m stupid. No man could ever be that rich. And even if he could, there’s no way you could possibly make a promise like—

  “How long do I have to stay with him?”

  The old man smiled. “Until you let him go.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “What I’m asking isn’t easy. Armies will come after you.”

  “I can deal with armies.”

  “Not just the armies of man.”

  Balthazar furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. “What other armies are there?”

  The old man smiled again. But this one was different. Less smug, more ominous. A “you’ll see” sort of smile. Balthazar changed his mind. He hated this smile the most.

  “I said what other type of armies?”

  “Why don’t you have another drink?”

  Balthazar stared the old man down. He didn’t like being toyed with. Then again, another drink of that cool, clear water sounded like the cure for all that ailed him. He looked down at the half-empty cup on the white table. But when he reached for it, it was with someone else’s hands. Hands that were covered in brown spots, with dark blue veins bulging beneath thin, baked skin. Balthazar startled—pushing his chair away from the table and trying to stand. But his body was weak. Old. When he looked up for an explanation, the old man was gone.

  He looked down at his hands again, shaking and discolored. His eyes barely able to see beyond the length of his arm. There was something in his right hand. Something gold. Balthazar raised his arm, slowly. He knew what it was, but he didn’t dare believe it. Not until it became clear in the palm of his shaking hand. Not until he saw the thing he’d spent half his life searching for.