It didn’t matter, he supposed. What mattered was that no city or village was safe from now on. No road passable. No strangers could be trusted to keep their secret. Not with the Romans looking for them in such numbers. They wouldn’t be able to stop again. Not until they reached Egypt. But they wouldn’t make the Egyptian border without supplies. They’d have to take a different route. An unexpected route. They wouldn’t be able to venture out in public anymore, not even in disguise. It was too dangerous.
What they needed was a place to hide for a while. Resupply. Somewhere unexpected. Somewhere safe. And despite every oath he’d ever sworn to himself, Balthazar knew exactly where they needed to go.
9
The Return
“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: but it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.”
—Psalms 55:12–13
I
The door opened, and there she was, as wickedly beautiful and dangerous as he remembered.
“Hello, Sela,” he said.
How long had it been, eight years? No, it has to be more. Could it be more? Balthazar was too tired to tax his mind with the math. Besides, it didn’t matter how long it’d been. Here they were, and here she was—a sight for six pairs of sore eyes. Here was the face they’d all crossed an ocean of sand to find, without food or rest, leaving Hebron with their camels in a full gallop, as day became freezing night became glaring morning and scorching day. Here was the reason they’d kept riding, half dead, toward the promised land of Beersheba, the last waypoint of note before the Judean Desert’s long march into Egypt. The last chance to replenish. Riding with nothing to guide them but the faint hope that Balthazar’s information was up to date. That the rumors he’d held on to were true. And always with the knowledge that the Romans weren’t far behind.
But on reaching the city walls, the fugitives had found the promised land of Beersheba a wasteland. At first they thought the Romans might’ve beaten them again, for there was hardly a man or woman to be seen on the streets. Fires had been left to burn themselves out, and malnourished dogs roamed the streets in search of scraps. But it was famine, not Roman swords, that had laid waste to Beersheba. For its crops had been decimated by the only thing farmers feared more than drought:
Locusts.
They’d come as a black cloud. A living storm, half the size of Judea, eating its way across North Africa. Tens of millions of soulless eyes and insatiable mouths, flying from field to field, leaf to leaf, consuming everything they touched. And though months had passed since they’d come through Beersheba, leaving ruin in their wake, the ground was still littered with their withered molts. The dead shells that each locust had cast off, renewing itself before moving on, leaving the city a dead shell, suddenly and totally transformed but not renewed.
The once-vibrant streets were now eerily quiet. Empty. With the crops had gone the traders and merchants, and with the traders and merchants had gone the slaveholders and their slaves. They’d all moved on in search of food and commerce, leaving only a skeleton crew of faithful denizens behind. Seeing all of this on their arrival, Balthazar’s faint hope had just about snuffed itself out:
She won’t be here. She’ll have moved on like the others.
But here she was.
Here she was, standing at the door of a two-story house, its smooth white walls and red-tiled roof distinctly Roman. Here she was, clearly stunned to see his face.
Of course she’s stunned. Here I am, after all this time, after what happened, after the way it ended.
Sela stared back at him for what seemed like ages, her expression unchanging. Her hair black as ink. Her body long and lean, with skin a polished copper, same as her eyes. Ten years. No, it’s definitely ten. She would be twenty-four now, give or take a year, but she looked almost exactly as he’d left her.
Balthazar smiled. That sad smile she used to love. The one she could never resist. Not for all her anger, not for all her sadness and distrust. Those things had never mattered when it came to Balthazar. They’d always just seemed to melt away when she looked at him. Back when they were young, and in the kind of love that only the young can be in. The first love. The sick-to-your-stomach, lying-awake-all-night-counting-the-hours-until-you-saw-each-other-next kind.
Did she ever think this day would come? Did she half expect to see me standing here every time she opened this door? Has she thought of me as often as I’ve thought of her? Has there ever been someone else? More than one someone? Is there someone now?
Balthazar opened his mouth to pay her a compliment. It wasn’t fully formed yet, but he was leaning in the direction of praising her beauty. Something like, “The years have been kind.”
No, that’s stupid. Of course they haven’t been kind.
“You haven’t aged a day” popped in next, but it lacked the poetry he was going for.
“You’re just like I remember?” No, that evokes the past, and we definitely don’t want to bring up the past.
With his mouth fully open and his time up, Balthazar settled on the innocuous but safe, “It’s good to see you.”
But before the words could roll off his tongue, a fist was in his mouth.
It was driven there with so much force that his own teeth were briefly weaponized and turned against him, cutting clean through his top and bottom lip from the inside. Balthazar nearly passed out as his brain rattled around in his skull, and he staggered backward into the cobblestone street, struggling to keep his balance.
At first he didn’t realize he’d been hit. There’d been no windup, no change of expression to warn him it was coming. One minute she’d been there, beautiful and clear, and the next, there’d been three of her—her faces floating behind a thick sheet of cloudy glass. By the time the first packets of pain began to arrive from his mouth, slicing their way through the fog, he’d been hit again. First with another fist, and then with the bottom of a sandal, as Sela kicked him square in the throat.
For a moment, it had all been beauty and reminiscence. The music of love’s long-delayed reunion. Now Balthazar was clutching his throat, gasping for breath and barely clinging to consciousness, fists and feet coming at him without mercy. His arms hung stupidly at his side as his face was struck again and again. Fist, sandal, sandal, fist. The only thing keeping him from passing out was curiosity. His mind was so wrapped up in trying to sort out just what the hell was happening, that it refused to shut down. Even as another kick found his chin, snapping his head back violently and sending Balthazar to the ground with a dull thud.
Somewhere, across a shapeless, cavernous space, the others were looking down at him, stunned and silent. One of them was yelling something. Something like “Wait!” or “Stop!” or “What are you doing?”
Is that the carpenter? Is that the carpenter telling her to stop? I can’t te—gahhhhhh, my face hurts…
With Balthazar rolling on his back, clutching at his already-swollen lips and nose, Sela finally stopped and got a good look at the other people outside her front door: three men, a girl, and an infant. All of their jaws hanging open. All of them looking at her, wondering if they were next. With her chest rising and falling with each heavy breath, Sela brushed aside the hair in her eyes, and said, “Come in.”
II
He was fourteen when he first saw her. Only two years older than he’d been when he’d robbed his first grave, but 100 years wiser.
He could remember the day, the hour, her clothes, the light. He’d been walking home from the forum, where he once picked pockets amid the noise and madness, risking so much for such paltry rewards. But not anymore. Things were different now. There was no need to pick pockets, to pay off accomplices and reward tips with part of the profits. These days, Balthazar visited the forum to spend, not earn. And there was plenty to spend, thanks to his stroke of genius, his realization that it was easier
to steal from the dead than the living.
Nearly every night after that first plunder, Balthazar had waded through the dark water, returning to the shallow Roman graves on the far side of the Orontes. Nearly every night, so long as the moon hadn’t been too bright or the sentries too close, he’d dug up the freshly buried corpses of the condemned. He’d been frightened at first, yes, especially when he unearthed some of the more gruesome specimens. Those who’d been beheaded or stoned to death. Being so recently buried, their blood was often wet, the expressions on their faces still fresh. Alone in the dark, Balthazar’s young imagination had gotten the best of him in the early weeks: He’d seen their eyes pop open, felt their cold fingers grab at his arms. But as the months wore on, these hallucinations had grown less frequent, and the fear had grown weaker and weaker, until one day, he realized it had disappeared altogether.
In the two years since his stroke of genius, Balthazar had gotten so fast that he could process ten corpses in a single night, assuming the executioners had been that busy—digging them up, looting them, and returning them to the desert without the Romans ever knowing he’d been there. Filling his pockets with their rings and necklaces, with their silver and gold and silk. And all without a single accomplice. So much more reward, with only a fraction of the risk.
A month after he began operations, Balthazar had stolen enough to move his family into a new neighborhood. A year after that, he’d moved them again—this time into a house that had once belonged to a Roman nobleman. His sisters had new fabrics to sew. Abdi had new clothes and toys. And his mother had everything a mother could want: a new house to care for, plenty of food to cook, a new stove to cook it in, rugs to sit on, oil lamps to light her way. And while Balthazar knew she had her suspicions about their newfound wealth, she never asked him where the money came from or where he disappeared to each night. The closest she ever came was just before they moved into the nobleman’s house. Upon seeing it for the first time, Balthazar’s mother pulled him aside, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “Before I sleep under this roof, promise me one thing.”
“Anything, Mama.”
“Promise me that our happiness doesn’t come at the expense of another’s.”
He looked at her for a moment, silently wrestling with the prospect of lying to his mother’s face. More specifically, wrestling with how he was going to do it convincingly. On one hand, their happiness was certainly coming at another’s expense. If you wanted to get right down to it, people had paid for their happiness with their lives. On the other hand, she’d left him a fairly sizable loophole. Technically speaking, he was taking valuables from people who no longer had any use for them. Having a necklace or a gold ring wasn’t going to change the fact that they were dead, was it? He wasn’t making them any less happy than they’d been when they died, was he? Therefore, he could technically say in all honesty, “I promise.”
Balthazar had been tempted to tell her, just as he’d been tempted to tell his fellow thieves. But he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t spoken a word of his dealings with the dead. Not to his family and especially not to his fellow pickpockets. It wasn’t that he feared their condemnation, although he knew that some would surely condemn him for violating the old superstitions. What he really feared was their competition. Balthazar knew he wasn’t the only boy who’d be able to see his way past a few social mores and dead bodies. Not when there was that much money just sitting there in the sand, ready for the taking.
No, he’d stumbled onto a treasure vault that constantly replenished itself, and he wasn’t about to share it. Not when the Romans were sending so many men and their jewelry to the executioner. Not when everything was going so perfectly.
And then he saw her, and it all went to hell.
He’d been walking home from the forum, carrying a bag of grain along the cobblestone streets of his new neighborhood. A neighborhood that was home to the “better” families of Antioch. Families like ours. Typically, he spent these walks staring at his feet, his mind wandering through a series of disconnected thoughts and images.
Something funny Abdi said it’s cloudy out today bodies will there be tonight my feet are killing father felt anything when he died.
But on this day, at this moment, he decided to look up. And when he did, he was struck by an otherworldly image. At first he thought it was a ghost. The ghost of a beautiful girl, rendered as real as the hallucinations he used to have in the graves. She was sitting alone on the front stoop of a one-story brick villa—one of the nicer homes in the neighborhood.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and she was crying her eyes out.
The most unlikely little sliver of sunlight had cut through the clouds and fallen on her back, making the edges of her black hair burn and giving her that ghostly, otherworldly look. She was a native Syrian, like him. But Balthazar knew at once that she wasn’t like him at all. This was a girl who hadn’t grown up stealing for a living. Who’d never known hunger.
But you haven’t had it easy, either. No, you’ve had a terrible time on this earth. And somehow that makes you twice as beautiful, although I’m not sure why, or even if it’s possible for you to be ANY more beautiful than you already are.
As it happened, Sela looked up at precisely the same time and found a boy standing in the middle of the street with a bag of grain over his shoulder, staring at her like a dumb animal. His body frozen, his mouth hanging open as he watched her cry.
“What are you looking at?”
“I…uh—”
“You think it’s funny, standing there and looking at me?”
“No! No, I—”
“Leave me alone!”
She turned away, crossed her arms, and waited for the boy to leave. And waited.
“No,” he said.
Later, Balthazar would only remember pieces of what happened next: Sela looking up and glaring at him through her tears, wickedly beautiful and dangerous. He remembered dropping his bag on the ground and working up the courage to sit beside her. He remembered asking her what was wrong. He remembered her resisting, then relenting. And once she began to tell him everything, he remembered that she didn’t stop until long after night had fallen. It was a variation of a story he’d heard so many times before. Another tale of woe at the hands of the Roman occupiers.
Sela was an only child, her mother having died when she was very young. Too young to remember her face, her voice, or her touch. But her father, a successful importer, was able to provide her with a comfortable upbringing. He was a quiet, kind man. And though he never spoke of his departed wife aloud, Sela knew that he never stopped mourning her. He doted on his only daughter, and, in turn, she devoted herself to his happiness—eschewing the usual childhood pursuits to be by his side. It was all very pleasant-sounding, Balthazar remembered now. Pleasant days passing pleasantly by, blending together until they formed a relatively pleasant, if uneventful childhood.
And then, like a scorpion stinging the foot of a passerby, Sela’s pleasant days had been suddenly and violently ended. Her father had found himself on the wrong side of a business dispute with a member of the Roman provincial authority. An assistant to an advisor to the Roman-appointed governor of Antioch. And while he couldn’t remember the details of the dispute—something about price promised versus price paid—Balthazar remembered the outcome:
Sela’s father had been roused from sleep that night by a banging on his door, dragged from his home as his daughter scratched and pulled at the faceless soldiers around her. That very night, he was sent to the executioner without trial, beheaded and tossed in a shallow desert grave. All on the whim of some nameless, middle-ranking foreign bureaucrat. All over a business dispute. Just like that. That’s how fast these things happened.
Balthazar remembered the chill that had gone from his toes to his fingertips when she’d told him this. And while he would never tell her of his dealings with the dead, not on that or any night, Balthazar would often wonder if her fathe
r had been among the bodies he’d dug up on the other side of the Orontes. If some small part of his happiness had come at her expense.
A year had passed since her father’s death, and here she was. Fourteen. All alone in a big house. Struggling to get by as best as an honest girl could, but not doing a very good job of it. Here she was, wiping away her tears and saying something to a boy she’d only just met. Saying it like she absolutely believed it: “I swear…before I die…I’ll watch all of Rome burn to the ground.”
Balthazar remembered thinking, Now, there’s a nice image…all of Rome in flames. A beautiful girl laughing as she watched it burn from a hill above the city—the warm winds kicked up by the fire below, making her hair dance around her face.
Balthazar said he believed her. Though silently he doubted that any army, let alone a single person, could pull off such a feat. But there was no doubting her resolve. He could feel the anger radiating off her body, just as heat radiates from the stones around a fire, long after the flames have died out. And it was intoxicating, that anger. Anger and beauty, sadness and loneliness, all mixed up in one face.
He remembered a kiss and knowing that he was hopelessly and forever in love.
Pleasant days had blended pleasantly together after that. Balthazar had chipped away at the honest, sheltered girl he’d found on the stoop, teaching her how to fight, how to steal, how to do a better job of getting by. Showing her a side of Antioch she’d never known in the comfort and isolation of her youth. He’d doted on her, provided for her, spending his every free moment by her side, often with Abdi tagging along. Sela, for her part, fell into a familiar role, devoting herself to his happiness. Forcing Balthazar to unfurrow his brow. Forcing him to laugh. Showing him a side of Antioch he’d only recently discovered but never really known.
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