Unholy Night Page 6

  So here he was, pushing his twelve-year-old legs well beyond their intended use, with two much bigger Greeks chasing him—their feet stained red with wine, yelling, “Stop that boy! He’s a thief!”

  If they caught him, it would mean the loss of both hands, at a minimum. More likely, he’d be put to death, either by stoning or by beheading. Pickpocketing had become an epidemic all along the Colonnaded Street and in the forum, and the Romans were cracking down. There was no place for rampant crime in a Roman city. Just as there seemed to be no place for its native Syrians.

  He ran east along one of the canals that carried fresh water into the center of the city—part of the network of channels, tunnels, and pipes that made up the aqueducts built by the Romans. This particular canal was dry at the moment, littered with dirt and sticks and garbage. And that was exactly why Balthazar was following it.

  The neighborhood—if I can make it to the neighborhood, I’ll be safe…I’ll be able to disappear.

  There were dozens of small villages packed together on the outskirts of Antioch, so dense that they formed a sort of second wall around the already walled city. There were incredibly rich sections, marginally rich sections, middle-class sections, and poor sections. And then there were the Syrian slums. The slums toward which Balthazar now ran with death nipping at his heels.

  “Syrian filth!” he heard one of the Greeks yell behind him. “I’ll tear your arms out of their sockets myself!”

  Balthazar knew every inch of the four square blocks that made up the section called Platanôn—a maze of tiny, tightly packed houses and narrow, unpaved streets where most of the city’s native Syrians lived. He knew every face on those streets, every name of every resident of every house. And he knew that he could rely on any one of them to keep him safely hidden from the Greeks. But first he had to get there—and that was going to take a minor miracle.

  Actually, three minor miracles.

  As Balthazar ran along the dry canal, the wide cobblestone streets and gleaming colonnades of the city dissolved away, becoming the narrower streets and houses of a poor suburb. Ahead, the houses abruptly stopped at the edge of a hundred-foot ravine, but the canal kept going, continuing across a narrow, unfinished bridge.

  The old bridge had collapsed during a recent earthquake, one of the unpleasant realities of living in Syria. Roman engineers had shut off the water while they built a new one. One team had started on the near side of the ravine, another team on the far side. The plan was to have the two halves of the bridge meet in the middle, and they were almost there, only twenty feet to go. A wooden crane sat on the edge of both sides, each of their outstretched arms supporting the ropes used to hoist stone blocks to the top—the ropes Balthazar hoped would carry him to freedom in a few seconds.

  The first of Balthazar’s three minor miracles occurred: the bridge wasn’t under construction today, though this barely qualified as a “miracle,” given the notoriously relaxed pace of Roman construction. The second miracle occurred immediately after: the rope hanging from the crane on the near side was within his reach. Now all he needed was a third miracle: to grab on to the hanging rope and swing safely across.

  When he neared the edge of the ravine, Balthazar diverted off the road, down into the canal, and out onto the unfinished bridge, the men nearly close enough to touch the back of his clothes.

  You can make it.

  He ran with every bit of speed he could squeeze out of those spindly legs as he closed in on the edge of the bridge and the hanging rope. You can make it, Balthazar. And with a last leap, he grabbed on to the rope and swung off the end. You can make it. Just don’t look down and you’ll—

  There was no way he was going to make it. As soon as Balthazar swung out over the ravine, he knew he was in trouble. The distance between the two sides was twice what it’d looked like from the bridge, and the drop twice as far. Worse yet, the top of the crane he was swinging from wasn’t centered between the two bridge sections—it was much closer to the side he’d started on. As he approached the bottom of his arc, Balthazar suddenly found himself with two unsavory options: He could either hold on to the rope and return to the side he’d swung from—the side where two big men were waiting for him—or he could let go and jump. Either way, there would be no more miracles today.

  He let go.

  Once again, it was a decision met with instant regret. He wasn’t going to make it across. Not on his feet, anyway. There was a chance—a sliver of a chance—that he could reach the edge of the other bridge with his fingertips. Balthazar pumped his exhausted legs as he flew, as if running on air would propel him farther.

  I’m descending.

  He reached his arms out in front of him as the uneven, unfinished stones of the other bridge rushed at him. But it was his chest that hit first, smacking against the bottom of the other canal and knocking the air from his lungs.

  The impact startled a rat that had been picking through litter on the other side of the canal. It looked up, a half-chewed maggot in its mouth, and saw a human boy clinging to the edge of the waterway, struggling to pull himself up. It was a brief struggle, for the boy began sliding back toward the drop almost immediately. The rat watched as the boy’s fingers grabbed at the bottom of the stone channel, trying to hold on. After a brief but valiant effort, the boy disappeared over the side. The rat, who assumed the human had fallen to his death, went back to its rummaging.

  Balthazar had absolutely no idea how he’d caught himself. He hung by little more than the grit beneath his fingernails, pumping his feet. Trying to push against a surface that wasn’t there. Don’t look down. It’s very important that you resist the urge to—

  He looked down. It was a hundred feet to the hard gravel road below, but it might as well have been a mile. He could see a pile of carved stone blocks beneath him, waiting for their turn to be hoisted up. He could feel himself falling, smashing against those blocks. Feel his brains squeezing through the cracks in his sku—

  Look up, you idiot!

  Balthazar brought his left hand up to the bridge and grabbed on. His skinny arms shook as he pulled, trying to claw his way back to the top, trying to ignore the searing pain he felt in his empty lungs. He swung his legs back and forth, using the force to help propel his body upward. And it did. With each swing, he was able to grab a little more of the canal above with his hands, until at last he managed to get his elbows over the lip and squirm up the rest of the way.

  The third miracle…

  He rested on his belly for a moment, his face against the stone, catching his breath, unaware of the rat that he’d frightened off. Balthazar got to his feet—chest heaving and fingers bleeding—remembering that his pursuers might be thinking about performing the same rope trick and following him across. But the Greeks were thinking no such thing. They just stood and stared at him from the other side of the unfinished bridge, dumbfounded by what they’d seen.

  Balthazar wasn’t sure why he did what he did next. Maybe it was the bewildered look on their faces; maybe it was a by-product of fear—but he flashed them a smile. The same confident smile that would infuriate many of his future pursuers, the way it infuriated the Greeks now as he turned and disappeared into the impenetrable fortress of the slums.

  II

  There were five of them altogether: Balthazar; his mother, Asherah; his younger sisters, Melita and Tanis, twins, both nine; and his baby brother, Abdi, two.

  Balthazar was fond of his mother, and on some level—​although he had yet to discover where it was—​he loved his sisters. But Abdi was his shadow. His audience. His worshipper. The boy who wanted to play with him every waking moment, who laughed at every funny face he made, and who—despite being small for his age—was every bit as brave as his brother. When Balthazar left for the forum each morning, Abdi often ran after him, tugging at his leg and crying, “Bal-faza! Bal-faza! You stay right here!”

  On those rare occasions when Balthazar didn’t work, they would spend the day together. Baltha
zar would carry his brother up and down the Colonnaded Street, stopping to watch musicians perform or petting the strange animals that came from beyond the Himalayas. Once in a while, he would even splurge on a handful of cinnamon dates to share between them, their secret. In the afternoon, Balthazar would take Abdi to the banks of the Orontes and to the shade of their favorite palm tree. The one with the deep gash down the side of its trunk. The one that looks like a scar. And there, in the shade of their scarred little tree, Balthazar would sit and watch the men fish as Abdi napped in his arms, running his fingers through his brother’s brown hair. Sometimes he dozed off himself.

  At night, with the five of them crowded in a single room, Balthazar would tell Abdi some of the stories he’d loved as a child: the conquests of Alexander the Great and Leonidas, the Battles of Carthage and Salamis. And then the five of them would sleep, each on his own straw mat on the dirt floor.

  Until two years ago, there had been six mats.

  Balthazar’s father had made his living the same way most of the neighborhood men had: by spending hot, backbreaking days hammering away at stones in a quarry north of the city. It was one of the few jobs deemed acceptable for the Syrian locals. In the old days, they’d been farmers and merchants. But then Rome had descended on Antioch, and they’d been pushed out of the fields and forums and into the slums.

  Conditions in the quarry were dangerous. Ropes broke. Hoists toppled. Men were routinely hit by heavy pieces of debris, sliced in half by slivers of rock that broke loose from the walls. Sometimes, like Balthazar’s father, they were simply crushed to death beneath twelve-ton blocks when a wooden hoist failed.

  Balthazar had never seen his father’s body, and he was thankful for this. But he’d heard descriptions of men who’d suffered similar fates—their bodies all but liquefied by the force, and he hadn’t been able to keep himself from imagining what his father had looked like when they finally hoisted that stone off of him: every drop of blood and bile and piss squeezed out of his organs, the contents of his stomach and bowels exploding outward in a grotesque sunburst pattern, his brains forced through his eye sockets, and his skull rendered a mosaic of tiny, shattered tiles. One second, he’d been a hardworking man with a wicked sense of humor, a meticulously trimmed beard, and a love of cinnamon dates. The next, he was a blood-soaked bag of broken tiles. Erased from existence in the blink of an eye. The snap of a rope.

  Tragedy had made Balthazar the Man of the House. The sole provider for his mother and three siblings. And while his mother didn’t approve of Balthazar’s methods, she didn’t forbid them, either.

  “Stealing is a sin,” she’d told him with a sigh on learning of his pickpocketing, “but starving is an even greater one.”

  She had drawn the line, however, when she’d learned about one of Balthazar’s self-taught methods: donning a prayer shawl, going into the Jewish temple, and picking men’s pockets while they were deep in prayer.

  “It’s an abomination,” his mother had said, “whether you worship the God of the Hebrews or not.”

  After paying off his accomplices, rewarding tippers, and doling out the necessary kickbacks, the coins Balthazar nicked from the forum were barely enough to keep them all fed and housed. There was no extra money for extravagances like new clothing, or lamp oil, or sweetmeats. No rugs to sit on or chalices to drink from.

  And it was getting harder to provide as time went on. The forum was becoming too dangerous. Balthazar was being recognized, questioned by the Roman soldiers who patrolled the Colonnaded Street. Money changers were getting nervous about offering tips, since capture could mean crucifixion.

  But what could he do? Picking pockets was all that Balthazar was good at—today’s fiasco notwithstanding. He knew of some boys, just a few years older than he was, who’d been arrested for murdering a money changer and stealing his inventory. He’d known these boys since he was born. He knew all of their parents and siblings. Like him, they’d started out picking pockets in the forum. Like him, they’d reached a point where they became too recognizable. A point where they’d needed more than a few coins to get by. And so they’d turned to another method. And for that, they’d all been put to death. Strung up by the Romans and thrown in a ditch on the other side of the Orontes.

  And that’s what had first given him the idea.

  Every day, men were rounded up by the Romans for any number of reasons—including no reason at all—and put to death. Every day, their bodies were carried to an unmarked field on the other side of the Orontes and buried. And with their bodies went their rings and bracelets and necklaces. Yet it never occurred to the Romans to take that jewelry for themselves. And why not? Because of the one thing the Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Indians, Chinese, and even his fellow Syrians had in common: religion. They were all superstitious. Frightened of the unknown. Sufferers of a mass delusion, a hysteria of genuflection, ritual sacrifice, and old words. Not even the Romans, for all their Imperial brutality, would dare defile a dead body. But religion wasn’t a hysteria Balthazar suffered from.

  He never had. Not for lack of instruction. His father, like most Syrians, had worshipped the old pagan gods. And his mother, while not overtly religious, was one of the world’s most superstitious women. Balthazar had simply never found a use for it. He was more concerned with feeding his family than throwing himself at the feet of some statue, more concerned with tomorrow than the rants of a prophet who’d lived a thousand years before his birth. A prophet who never heard of Rome or Herod. He found nothing abominable about eating certain foods on certain days or wearing this kind of hat versus that kind of hat, or even—God forbid—no hat at all. Beliefs like that put you in a cage.

  And Balthazar was going to set himself free.

  III

  He waited on his belly, wet and alone in the dark. To the east, the lights of the city danced off the waters of the Orontes. To the west, nothing but desert. Balthazar had decided to avoid the bridge and swim across. You never knew when you were going to run into a Roman patrol. And he was paying for that caution by shivering in the cold desert air.

  He’d seldom been on this side of the river. There wasn’t much to see other than a few hermits and fields of shallow graves, one of which he now observed from afar. He watched as four slaves worked together to bury the day’s victims, supervised by a single Roman soldier. Two of them used shovels to dig a knee-deep trench, another transferred bodies from a wheeled cart and placed them in, and the fourth filled in the dirt on top of them.

  He hadn’t told a soul about his plan. No one could know—not his oldest, most trusted friends from the slums. Not his accomplices from the forum. No one. Picking pockets was one thing. Even murders could be forgiven. But this…

  He was tampering with the unspeakable.

  Balthazar dug with his bare hands. It had taken another miserable, shivering hour, but the slaves and their cart had finally gone, and the soldier with them. Now it was just him, alone in a field of bodies, kneeling over a fresh grave in the dark of night. As he dug, Balthazar told himself to breathe. Relax. Superstition was for the weak-minded, right? Of course it was. He told himself to think of the spoils. All the gold and silver waiting under this loose dir—

  Was that something moving?

  He could’ve sworn something had brushed against his finger beneath the dirt…

  No, it wasn’t “something moving.” There’s nothing “moving” out here because dead things don’t m—

  A hand burst through the dirt and grabbed Balthazar by the throat. Then another—unnaturally strong, squeezing his windpipe. It pulled him toward the loose dirt. Pulled him down into the gra—

  No, it didn’t. Stop being a baby…

  But he had felt something.

  It was the familiar shape of a hand, a hand unlike any he’d ever touched. A hand no warmer than the dirt it was buried in, its skin rigid and leathery. Balthazar suddenly realized something. Something he really wished he’d considered earlier: he’d never touched a dead
body.

  He’d seen them, sure. You couldn’t get to be twelve years old in the slums of Antioch without seeing a dead body. But when it came to dead bodies, seeing and touching were oceans apart. Still, he took a breath and brushed the last of the dirt aside…

  Here was a man—barely twenty, from the looks of him. Judging by the dark red line around his neck and the unnatural angle of his head, he’d been hung. For what, Balthazar would never know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the pendant around that neck. A gold pendant on a leather string.

  All I have to do is reach out and take it.

  No matter what tricks his young imagination played on him—no matter how real it seemed when the man’s bloodshot eyes snapped open and his hands reached for Balthazar’s throat, it wouldn’t be. People didn’t come back to life. There was no God to fear, no sins to commit. There were nothing but superstitions and the rants of long-ago prophets.

  All he had to do was reach out and take it…

  Balthazar returned home that night filthy beyond comprehension, and rich beyond his wildest imagination. He promptly informed his mother that they were moving to a better neighborhood.

  It had been a bigger haul than he’d ever dreamed. In one night, he’d raided nine bodies. And from those nine bodies, he’d netted a total of six rings (four gold, two silver) and four pendants (three gold, one silver). All told, it had taken less than three hours. Three hours! Balthazar would have been lucky to pick one pocket in the same amount of time. And with pickpocketing there were the risks, the payoffs, the kickbacks. No, this was the answer. This was the way. He had the whole west bank of the Orontes to himself. And the best part was, there was no end in sight. As long as the Romans kept putting men to death, Balthazar would keep finding uses for their unused valuables.