Unholy Night Read online

  The young officer reached the large double doors at the end of the corridor, each of them twenty feet high, plated with silver and decorated with gold embellishments. A golden eagle, the symbol of Rome’s military might, dominated these adornments—its outstretched wings spanning the entire width of both closed doors. The officer and his lieutenants saluted the guards who stood on either side of it. The guards saluted in return and stepped aside, ready to open the doors to the throne room. But the officer held up a hand: Not yet.

  He paused a moment. Took a breath, composed himself. He wanted to make this entrance count. After all, he was about to ask the ruler of the world to go to war with an infant and a thief. When he felt sufficiently prepared, the young officer addressed one of the guards: “Tell the emperor that Pontius Pilate is here to see him…”

  Augustus Caesar was the most powerful human being who had ever drawn breath, though he was only “human” in the strictest sense of the word.

  To his subjects, he was a god. It was reflected in the way they revered him. Feared him and worshipped his likeness, whether it was stamped on the face of a gold coin or chiseled into marble. He was in his sixties, twice the average life expectancy. But he’d aged gracefully and still projected a stately, if graying sense of power. The very name his subjects had bestowed on him, Augustus, meant “Illustrious One,” and when he appeared in public, protocol demanded that he be introduced with a number of platitudes, which included:

  He who is beyond the reach of the gods! He before whom all kings kneel! Before whom even the mountains bow their heads!

  His kingdom reached every corner of the known world: from Hispania in the west to Syria in the east, from the tip of Africa below to northernmost Gaul above. At his command were the greatest army and navy the world had ever known. The best-prepared soldiers, with the finest weaponry the collective taxes of the earth could buy.

  But all that power was nothing without vision.

  It was lack of vision that had doomed his uncle, Julius. For all his military prowess, all his strategic genius, Julius Caesar had lacked vision.

  Fate had delivered the world into the palm of his hand, but he hadn’t been man enough to wrap his fist around it, to take it all for himself. He’d tried to be a man of the people. He’d tried to share his power with the senate. And for his troubles, he’d been stabbed twenty-three times by the very senators he’d reached out to. Stabbed in the back as he slipped on his own blood, trying to flee. Left to rot on the steps of the senate for three hours before anyone even bothered to cover his body. That had been his reward for being a man of the people.

  To think he could have stopped it all, if only he’d been willing to use the weapon…

  The world knew that Julius Caesar had transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. They knew that he was a skilled orator and general. But of those closest to Julius, only a few—including his beloved nephew, Augustus—knew the dark secret behind his power. The weapon that had given him the confidence to march on Rome and seize the empire for himself:

  The magi.

  Julius had come to possess this weapon during his conquest of Gaul, but not by stealing it from another ruler or by constructing it from his own blueprints. He’d come to possess it because the weapon had chosen him. As Julius explained in a letter to fellow general and confidant Pompey:

  The campaign had been going badly. The Gauls had beaten us into retreat. One night, as I conferred with my officers, the guards presented a visitor. A short, frail man in a black robe, with a gray beard, sunken eyes, and bald head. He looked some fifty years in age, though he walked with the wooden staff of a much older man, topped with a coiled brass snake. Clearly he was some kind of priest, though I had never seen a priest who looked quite like this one. His skin was covered with strange designs rendered in black ink, and his arms bore the scars of many burns, both old and new.

  “I have foreseen that the name ‘Caesar’ shall ring through the ages,” he said. “That he shall be worshipped as the gods are worshipped. I come to offer him my talents. My loyalty and protection. In return, I ask only a modest share of his spoils.”

  “And why do I need the protection of a priest?” I asked. “I have four legions under my command.”

  “Because,” he said, “for all your legions, you find yourself on the brink of defeat. Chased off by farmers armed only with rocks and sticks.”

  My officers rose and drew their swords. To speak to a general in such a way was unthinkable. Punishable by death.

  “Are you mad?” I asked.

  A strange smile came across the priest’s face, as if he had intended such a reaction. As if he had wanted such a question asked.

  “I am a magus,” he said.

  The magi were an ancient cult. Masters of a magic that had all but vanished from the earth. They’d come to power in the Age of the Scriptures, back when angels and mystical beasts had walked side by side with man, when the battles of heaven and hell had been waged on the plains of Galilee and in the hills of Hebron. The world had been different then. Time had barely begun, and the gods still mingled freely with man, whether they were the many gods of Mount Olympus or the lonely God of Abraham. And while most men lived in fear and reverence of their gods, a few sought to wield that power for themselves.

  At their height, they’d numbered in the thousands, hidden away in monasteries, studying the higher forces that ordinary men feared. The dark forces. Learning how to control them, master them, exploit them. It was said that a magus could summon fire from thin air. Turn statues into living men, and living men into stone. It was said they could see things that had not yet come to pass, and influence the thoughts of men half a world away. For thousands of years, they were treated as living gods—revered, feared, and rarely seen outside their monastery walls.

  But over the centuries, the Age of Miracles had given way to the Age of Man, and their numbers had dwindled, until—more than 10,000 years after the first man had called himself “magus”—only one remained, wandering a world ruled not by gods but by Romans. The last of his kind, the bearer of a forgotten gift that no longer had any use.

  But Julius Caesar found a use for it.

  With the last of the magi at his side, he’d turned his campaign in Gaul around. And when he was finished, he’d turned against his allies and taken all of Rome’s glory for himself.

  As emperor, Julius learned to rely on the dark priest’s ability to see into the future. In his ability to uncover an enemy’s secrets through a kind of deep meditation and summon nature to Rome’s aid, conjuring wind and lightning to drive out surrounding armies, commanding beasts to betray their masters. Even invading the minds of senators and influencing their votes. With the magus at his side, Julius had been elevated from a general to a god. But over time, he’d begun to fear his secret weapon. In another letter to Pompey, he wrote:

  There is a darkness about him that unnerves me. If he is able to read the thoughts of others, what is to stop him from reading mine? If he can summon bolts of lightning from the heavens, what is to stop him from using one to strike me down? What good is a weapon if one cannot command it without fear?

  Paranoid, Caesar ordered his “weapon” sent away in 44 BC. But before his exile, the magus gave him one last piece of advice: “The Ides of March,” he’d said. “Beware the Ides of March.”

  Caesar ignored the warning. And that very year, on the fifteenth day of the third month, he was stabbed to death on the senate floor. In the end, he’d been too afraid to wield the weapon that had sought him out. Too weak.

  But this was a weakness Augustus didn’t share. On learning of his uncle’s murder, Augustus had summoned the magus at once and demanded his loyalty. Slowly, deliberately, he’d consolidated his power in the empire—using the magus’s insight and influence to battle his rival, Marc Antony, and the Egyptian whore, Cleopatra. Using the magus’s power to beat them back, until they had no choice but to take their own lives in shame. And to make sure that no further challeng
es to his supremacy emerged, Augustus had ordered their children put to death.

  With vision and cunning, he’d succeeded where his uncle had failed. He’d taken all of Rome’s glory for himself. And so long as the magus remained sequestered in Rome, Augustus Caesar knew that the empire would never fall.

  But that was all in the past now, and the past was where small minds dwelled.

  The future had just walked into Augustus’s throne room. Here was Pontius Pilate, kneeling before him, his bowed head reflected in the polished marble of his floor.

  Handsome Pilate. Loyal, beloved Pilate, bearing the request of a sickly, traitorous old king.

  Herod “the Great.” The name had always elicited a sneer from Augustus, even before he’d become master of the world. Who was this “great” man but a servant of Rome? A torturer of his own people and murderer of his own children? Yes, Augustus had ordered children put to death. But they were the children of his enemies. To murder one’s own children? It was barbaric.

  He listened as Pilate relayed the message. Something about a baby. A prophecy. Someone called “the Antioch Ghost.” When Pilate was finished, Augustus considered it all for a moment, then said, “He wants me to send an army across the water…to kill a child?”

  “The Antioch Ghost is the true prize, Caesar. He’s stolen untold riches from your provinces. Killed untold numbers of your men. If we—”

  Augustus held up a hand. Stop.

  “You said the people of Judea think this ‘Ghost’ is already dead, did you not?”

  “Yes, Caesar.”

  “Pilate…what good is it to kill a man who is already dead? Where is the glory for Rome?”

  Pilate couldn’t help but smile. He knew his emperor well. After pausing for effect, he uttered the sentence he’d carefully crafted on his way to the palace. The one he knew he’d have to utter after being challenged on this point:

  “With all respect, Caesar, this is less about Rome’s glory and more about sending a message to Judea’s king.”

  Augustus shifted on his throne, thinking. He didn’t like the idea of all this fuss over a thief and a baby.

  But Pilate is right…there is an opportunity in this.

  “Very well,” said Augustus. “I will catch Herod’s infant and his thief. But not because Herod requests it, and not because they have wronged Rome. I will catch them because Herod cannot. And in doing so, I will remind our sickly friend how small he really is.”

  An ordinary emperor would have sent troops and left it at that. But Augustus had no interest in being ordinary. He would do more than send troops. He would make a real show of his power. Put the fear of death in the puppet king of Judea.

  He would send the magus.

  IV

  Melchyor and Joseph watered the camels and filled the canteens in the desert stream, while Mary sat on the sand with the child under her robes. Balthazar knelt a ways downstream, cupping handfuls of water—first to his mouth, then over his face and chest, washing away the blood that continued to seep through his stitches.

  “This is madness,” said Gaspar, who’d come to kneel beside him. “We have the entire Judean Army after us, yet we play wet nurse to a baby. We could have been halfway to Egypt by now if we were not dragging them with us. It is too dangerous, Balthazar. We must think of ourselves.”

  “I am thinking of myself. I was thirsty. We found water. I stopped.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know,” he said, cupping another handful to his wound. “I also know what I saw in Bethlehem. What all of us saw. You want to leave them to Herod’s men?”

  “Yes, I saw. And the same will happen to us if we are captured. I did not escape certain death to throw my life away for strangers.”

  “I don’t like it either, okay? But I didn’t go back for that baby just to dump him in the desert to rot. Once we cross the border, we go our separate ways. Until then, we play wet nurse.”

  Balthazar stood, shook the water from his hands, and dried them on his robes.

  “Why does the Antioch Ghost care if an infant lives or dies?” asked Gaspar.

  It was a stupid question, of course. The obvious answer was, “Because I still have a shred of decency,” or “The real question is, why don’t you care?” But Balthazar didn’t say either of these things, because as obvious as those answers were, they weren’t the real answers.

  Go on, tell him, Balthazar. Tell him why you care so much. Why you hate so much, kill so much, search so much, as if any of it will bring him—

  “Ask yourself,” said Gaspar, shaking Balthazar out of his trance, “would you give your life to protect theirs?”

  Balthazar looked back at Joseph and Melchyor wrestling with their camels. At Mary sitting on the ground, feeding the baby beneath her robes.

  “Not if I can help it,” he said, and walked away.

  Pontius Pilate stared ahead at the open water of the Mediterranean. Only hours after kneeling in the emperor’s throne room, he found himself standing on the bow of the Heptares—a heavy warship carrying over 1,000 men, leading an armada of smaller triremes from Rome. He’d never seen water rush by a bow so fast or known a sail to be fuller than the one above him. Normally, the hundreds of men sitting belowdecks would be rowing across the sea one stroke at a time. But today they could only sit with their oars on their laps, as a steady tailwind sped them along faster than mortals could ever hope to row.

  Pilate wasn’t sure, but he had a good idea of where this strange, steady wind was coming from. The magus was onboard the Heptares with them, tucked comfortably in his private quarters below. And though his cabin door was closed, he could be heard muttering to himself on the other side. Praying in some strange mix of Latin and other languages, repeating the same phrases over and over like a chant. Pilate hadn’t been able to make all of it out, but as he’d pressed his ear curiously to the magus’s door, he’d heard one word repeated among the others: ventus.

  Wind.

  The emperor had taken Pilate into his confidence in Rome, sharing the secret history of the Caesars and the magi, his powers and the role they’d played in creating the present-day empire, and what was known of their cult’s origins and demise. And when he’d finished, Augustus had summoned the magus to his palace and introduced him to the young officer.

  Pilate had done his best to hide his dread at meeting such a strange, dangerous little man. He’d been prepared for the oddity of the magus’s appearance, but nothing had prepared him for the feeling of seeing those piercing black eyes for himself. He’d felt those eyes look right through him, felt as if they were peeking into his head. His thoughts. Most unnerving was the fact that the magus looked just as Julius Caesar had described him in his letter forty years earlier.

  That he hadn’t aged a day in all that time only unnerved Pilate more.

  “He doesn’t speak,” Augustus had said, “but he will tell you everything you need to know. Listen to him, Pilate, and return him to me unharmed. I’m trusting you with my most prized possession.”

  And here he was, alone on the bow of Heptares, the sole commander of 10,000 men and one mystic. Pilate could feel himself getting closer with every mile. Closer to his prize, his destiny. That’s all this was, after all—just destiny, playing itself out, mile by mile. There were no accidents in this life. Pilate believed that the gods had a plan for all of us. And no matter which turns he took, he believed that his life would intersect greatness sooner or later. His name would ring through the ages, immortal.

  Usually, if the sea smiled on you, it took seven days for a ship to sail from Rome to Judea. At this rate, Pilate would intersect his greatness in less than two.

  Mary rode behind a terrible man. Yes, he’d come back for them, saved them from Herod’s men, and she was grateful for that. Grateful enough to risk everything to save his life in return. But Mary was eager to reach Egypt and be rid of him forever.

  The sun was growing blessedly lower in the sky, though the heat still radiated of
f the sand, baking them from the bottoms of their feet to the tops of their headdresses. At least the baby seemed full and happy for the moment, his blue eyes blinking up at her, the lids above them growing heavy. She poured water from her canteen onto her hand and ran it over the baby’s scalp to keep it cool. She adjusted her robes, trying to keep the sun off of his face, while whispering one of her favorite stories from the Scriptures to nudge her son closer to the sleep his body craved:

  And a great cry went up to Moses. “Why have you led us here?” they said. “Were there no more graves in Egypt? Have you brought us into the desert to wither and die?” And Moses said, “I was commanded by the Lord to lead you here, for you were the slaves of a cruel pharaoh—and it is better to die in the desert than die a slave.”

  When she was little, Mary had whispered these stories to herself at night—a way to quiet her restless mind, to comfort herself when she was frightened or anxious. She envisioned the Scriptures as a bottomless well of these stories. A place from which she could always draw nourishment, even here in the desert.

  As a woman, she was forbidden from studying the scrolls on which they were written. But she was permitted to sit in the rear of the synagogue, listening to the men read them aloud. She’d been transported by those stories as a young girl: Jonah in the belly of the whale, the folly of building a tower to heaven, Noah’s test of faith before the Great Flood. And though she would never say so aloud, she prided herself on being able to quote these passages better than many of the men who fanned themselves in the heat of the synagogue and stole naps beneath their shawls. This one had popped into her head out of nowhere.