With the others making their hasty retreat south behind him, Balthazar turned back to the mass of hideous rotted flesh. There were about forty of them, he guessed, less than fifty yards away. He saw one corpse dragging itself along the ground with long yellowed fingernails, having lost its legs in life or death. Another’s torso had been horribly twisted, forcing it to move backward—which didn’t really matter, since it didn’t have eyes anyway.
They don’t need to see, thought Balthazar. Something else is doing the seeing for them.
Sela was right, of course. He was as good as dead. If for no other reason than he had no idea how to kill what he was about to fight. For all he knew, his blade would bounce off these creatures like they were made of stone. For all he knew, he would burst into flames the moment his skin met theirs. Nothing would surprise him. Nothing could anymore. But it didn’t matter. Even if it meant the most painful, hideous death a human being had ever experienced, they weren’t getting the baby, and they weren’t getting her. Twenty yards…
He gripped the handle of his sword tightly…breathed deep of the desert air.
Okay, Balthazar…let’s die.
He charged. And as he neared them, and their faces came into crystal focus, Balthazar saw just how wretched they were: pockets of embalming fluid trapped under their hardened skin, the black rot of their teeth, the patches of hair clinging to their scalps in grays and blacks and browns.
Upon meeting the leading edge of the swarm, he was greeted with good and bad news: the bad news was, these creatures were faster and stronger than they looked from a distance. The good news was, his sword seemed to work just fine.
He went to work, chopping away at limbs and necks. Hacking away at the leathery skin and hardened sinew that held them together and trying not to focus on the terrible, chemical smell of the long and leathery dead—at the demons grabbing at him with their dry fingers. Their bones cracking, their skin ripping as they moved.
He was suddenly twelve again. Back in the shallow Roman graves, digging up the freshly slain bodies. Looting them. Fighting off the fear, the terrifying, almost real visions of the bodies coming to life. Visions of the dead grabbing at his clothes and hair. Pulling him down into the graves with them. But those had only been visions. The monsters were real now. They moved without blood in their veins, without hearts in their chests. They had no lungs or vocal cords, yet they each emitted a strange sound. A wheezing, guttural moan that sounded to Balthazar like an endless last gasp. Together, they created a chilling chorus.
There’s something about that baby.
Maybe he would find out what it was on the other side of death. Something waiting for him. And what of the dreams he’d had when he lay dying from a stab wound? What of those strange visions of old men in pink and purple rooms? And what of the Man With Wings? The man whose face had made Balthazar weep at the sight of it?
Abdi’s face.
That’s who it’d been, hadn’t it? Abdi, the grown man he never got to be? A man with wings, holding on to his big brother and soaring over the desert of Judea? Guiding him through an ocean of time and space? Balthazar had thought of them as visions. Nothing but the vivid dreams of a dying mind. But now, staring death both literally and figuratively in the face, he accepted that they might have been something more. In fact, he hoped they were.
Balthazar slashed and kicked and pushed at the corpses, but they were massing around him faster than he could fight them off. One terrible face after another. One brittle set of mummified fingers after the next—their ancient fingernails scratching at him. Grabbing at his clothes. If I only had a torch, I could set them alight. They’re so dry that they’d go up like a sun-baked grass roof. But all he had was a sword and a pair of quickly tiring arms to wield it with.
They’re winning.
There was no doubt about it. And as they swarmed over him, Balthazar screamed. Not from any fear but from knowing that this was his moment—his last chance to make his presence known on this earth. He screamed until he could taste blood in the back of this throat as the swarm of dead fully enveloped him.
Peace at last…
And as he screamed, the dead suddenly and uniformly dropped to the ground, as if the strings holding their limbs aloft were cut in one swoop. And with a dull, dusty thud, they were nothing but sinew and bone again. Silent. Balthazar stood there, breathing heavily. In awe of the sight. Somewhat in awe of himself.
He’d won.
By some miracle, he’d been spared. Just as he’d predicted, some unseen force had smiled down on him at the last possible moment. If the Jews called it God, so be it. Whether it was God, or luck, or something else, it didn’t matter. What mattered were the others. He could catch up to them now. Take them the rest of the way to Egypt and be done with this. Thank God. Or whatever.
But just as he was allowing himself one little victory, one little moment of open-mindedness, another sort of rumbling shook the optimism right out of him. Balthazar looked around, sure that he was about to catch sight of a second wave of rotting beings emerging from their tombs. But there was nothing. Nothing except the rumbling. A different kind of rumbling, now that I think about it. A much more…familiar…kind of—
It was the beating of hooves against the desert floor.
Balthazar looked past the lifeless bodies on the ground before him—up, up—until he saw what seemed like a thousand horses riding at him down the center of the narrow valley from the north. He couldn’t see the faces of the men on those horses, but he imagined most of them bore the smug, self-satisfied look of men who’d pulled off another clever ruse.
The Romans were coming.
The small horde of dead had been replaced with a gigantic horde of the living. It wasn’t an improvement—not numerically, anyway. But at least Balthazar knew how to kill the things riding toward him. Once again, he raised his sword and readied himself for a reckless, suicidal charge, all in the name of buying his friends—now there’s a word that just popped in there and I didn’t expect but seems fitting—a little time.
Let’s die…
He was done running. He’d spent so much time moving from place to place—searching for the pendant, stealing to survive, killing to live. It was good to die. If his death could buy his friends a little time, then so be it. You deserve to die, after all the things you’ve done. After all the lives you’ve taken. After all the things you’ve stolen—the objects, the futures.
He would meet them head-on, take as many of them as he could. For the second time in as many minutes, Balthazar charged toward certain death, his sword held high. Screaming. For the second time in as many minutes, he crashed headlong and hopelessly into a tidal wave of bodies. Into the blinding wall of flailing limbs and clanging armor.
The last thing he remembered was a brief struggle, a sharp pain.
Then…peace at last.
And Abdi with his arms around him, telling him it was going to be all right.
11
No Accidents
“I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you—when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you.”
—Proverbs 1:26–27
I
Herod reclined with his eyes closed, enjoying the gentle swaying motion of his traveling chair. A baby being rocked to sleep. He was on his way to his summer palace, a favorite retreat on the shores of the Mediterranean, where the onshore breezes carried the cooling mist of crashing waves, and the songs of seabirds calmed any nerves that might have been frayed in the lion’s den of Jerusalem. And though he couldn’t hear the waves beating against coastal rocks just yet, Herod knew they were getting close, for he could already smell the salt in the air. He breathed deeply of it. Savored it. It was, perhaps, the sweetest thing he’d ever smelled.
All was right with the world.
Somewhere, on the other side of his chair’s wine-colored curtain
s, the prisoner was being dragged across the desert, naked. Humiliated and bloodied. He was being urinated on by Roman soldiers as his body scraped over grains of sand and patches of dry grass. He was being pelted with rocks and insults alike. Soon, he would be submitted to the most unimaginable suffering the empire could conjure, before being exiled to the wasteland of death. The “Antioch Ghost” would be just that. And this was good. Without their protector, the remaining fugitives would soon be captured. And this was also good. But it wasn’t nearly as good as what was going on inside Herod’s traveling chair. Inside, something extraordinary was happening.
A miracle. That’s the only way to describe it.
For the first time in years, Herod the Great was getting…better. He could feel it happening by the minute, mile by mile. The oozing lesions of his skin—those old familiar bloody scabs and pus-filled nodules—were receding with unnatural speed, and his skin had begun to trade its sickly pallor for a healthy olive hue. His hearing was clearer, his muscles stronger, his hair already a shade darker, his teeth a shade whiter, and his mind a notch sharper. His eyes, clouded over for so long, were suddenly as clear and wet as the day he’d taken the throne.
I was blind, but now I see.
It was a miracle. But not a miracle of any god. This was the magic of man, freeing him from the false imprisonment of nature. It was more than a miracle; it was a confirmation of everything Herod believed. Confirmation that the time of the old myths and old gods was at an end. That the New World was a place where miracles would be performed by men.
A world in which there was no more need for gods.
Back in the Roman camp, Herod had approached the magus with a simple proposition. One that had popped into his head, as if in a dream.
His decision to involve Rome in his domestic troubles had turned disastrous. But there was an opportunity in every crisis, and once again, Herod’s mind had revealed the silver lining in the clouds around him. He’d been careful to make this proposition away from the eager ears of Pontius Pilate—for Herod knew that the faithful Roman imperator wouldn’t like what he had to say.
Unaccompanied by his usual cadre of courtesans and guards, Herod had let himself into the magus’s large, lush tent. There, he’d found the dark priest alone in his sleeping gown, sitting with his back facing the tent flap, lit by the glow of oil lamps and engaged in the rather unmagical act of stuffing his face with cooked lamb.
“Augustus doesn’t appreciate you,” Herod began.
The magus stopped in midbite. He dabbed his mouth and turned toward Herod, slowly. Yes…be sure and turn slowly, for I’ve caught you being human, and you need to reassert that mystique.
“Don’t take it personally,” said Herod when the magus had completed his slow, mystical turn. “He doesn’t appreciate me, either.”
He stepped all the way inside and let the flap close behind him.
“I’m not saying I blame him. Let’s be clear about that. It’s not an easy thing for a powerful man to put his faith in others. Even I can be too self-reliant at times, too stubborn. It’s part of being a leader of men. But the Romans…the Romans have a particular gift for believing themselves superior to all men. Look at their myths. Even their gods can’t help falling in love and bedding down with them. It’s obnoxious.”
He stepped closer, hoping to better gauge the magus’s expression through his cloudy eyes. But there was no expression to gauge. The magus remained statuesque and cautious.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Herod.
The magus gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod.
“Then you know how much I have to lose by saying what I’m saying.”
The magus studied him a moment or two, and then gave another, even smaller nod. Herod smiled and helped himself to a seat, taking extra care to steady himself this time. No signs of weakness…not now.
He knew how to speak to these mystics. On the outside, they wore their piety like a crown, eschewed the trivial pleasures of earthly life and cultivated an air of mystery around themselves. Take the magus. He didn’t speak—not for some ailment or want of a tongue, but for the aura it created around him. Yes, there was all that nonsense about ancient vows of silence and keeping one’s voice pure for spells and so on. But really, being a mystic was no different than being a king: The more powerful people believed you were, the more powerful you were. And this little gimmick worked, because most men were weak-minded. Most men were sheep.
But not Herod.
Yes, the magus knew a few tricks. Yes, it seemed that he could bend the rules of nature to his will. And there was value in that. But in the end, he was a man—and men were men. They had the same weaknesses and desires, whether they wore the robes of kings, peasants, or priests.
“You and I,” said Herod. “We’re men the world no longer needs.”
He waited for a reaction. A raised eyebrow, a squint of puzzlement. Anything. But the magus gave him nothing.
“The world doesn’t care about magic anymore,” he continued. “It doesn’t care about priests or withered old kings and their little kingdoms. All it cares about is Rome and its emperor. The world exists to serve him. We exist to serve him. And so long as we do, whatever power we have belongs to him.”
There was no going back now. This was treasonous territory.
“Alone,” Herod continued, “the two of us, we’re…nothing. Me, a king who’s lived through two Caesars, who’s ruled my little kingdom with Rome’s permission. You, a conjurer who’s been kept locked away like a suit of armor. Trotted out only when Augustus needs protection from his enemies. But neither of us were ever allowed to test the limits of our powers, and certainly never allowed to use them for our own benefit. No, such a thing would be a threat to the emperor’s own power. Alone, a king and a conjurer are nothing compared to Rome. But together…”
Here it comes…make him see it. Make him understand how glorious it could be.
“My kingdom? Your talents? Together, we could build something glorious. A force that could challenge Rome. Perhaps even become the new empire of the East. An empire ruled by two kings—you and I, side by side. Augustus might not appreciate you, but I do. He fears your power; I welcome it.”
He went on, flattering the magus’s mastery of the elements, promising him the things that all men wanted: power, wealth, sex. And above all, recognition. A chance to step out from the emperor’s shadow, from behind the veils of secrecy and piety. When he sensed the magus was thoroughly enticed—which was only a guess, really, for he gave no outward sign of enticement—Herod went for the close:
“Everything I have is yours, if you’ll take it. My crown, my army, my fortune, my palaces, and all the treasure and women in them.
“Rule with me. Rule with me, and we can both free ourselves from servitude. We can build something that will echo through the ages.”
The magus took this all in for what seemed an age. Then, his mind made up, he turned back to his dinner without so much as a shake of his head. For a moment, Herod felt it all slip away.
I’ve overreached…
Now, not only would Herod be denied what he’d come for, but he would also be branded a traitor to the emperor and exiled to the wasteland of death. Thankfully, it wasn’t cold lamb that the magus had turned back for—it was parchment. Herod watched anxiously as he scribbled something down, turned back, and passed the sheet to him.
And for you?
“All I desire is your partnership,” said Herod.
The magus pointed to each of the three words again, emphasizing each one with a tap of his finger on the parchment.
And. For. You?
Herod smiled. He liked this little priest. No bullshit; no games. Herod took a moment before he gave his real answer. He almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. They were only two little words, but there was so much attached to them. So much…hope. The wine of the weak. What if the magus was unable to do what he asked? What if he simply said no? Then the last of Herod’s options woul
d be exhausted, and his vision would have failed him.
“My health,” he said at last. “In return, I ask for my health—that is, if you’re powerful enough to give it back to me.”
Now it was the magus’s turn to smile, for he’d known, of course. He’d known since the minute the puppet king of Judea had begun his pitch. He rose to his modest height, fixed his gown, closed his eyes, and muttered an incantation under his breath. A chain of indecipherable words in some long-dead language.
A moment later, Herod was hit with strange, invisible energy, a rush of warm air from a nearby fire that wasn’t there. It moved through him, circulating through his body along with the diseased blood that coursed in his veins. When the warmth reached his head, he was overcome by dizziness. A brief bit of nausea.
When it passed, he was born again.
Herod examined the backs of his hands, and though he couldn’t see any immediate change to their twisted shape or scabbed surfaces, something told him he would. Something told him he’d been cured. He felt his eyes well up with tears. It was all too much, too quickly. And despite whatever duplicitous schemes he’d brought into the magus’s tent, he couldn’t help but be truly touched at a moment like this.
“There are no accidents in this life,” he said as a tear escaped bondage and streaked down his wretched face. “The Fates have brought us together, you and I. And great things will come of it.”
The magus offered Herod the slightest hint of a smile in return.…
Herod was feeling much better indeed. Something like his old self. And so long as he had the magus by his side, he would only get better. Stronger. Who could say? Perhaps he needn’t hand over power to his son as soon as he’d thought. Perhaps he never needed to hand over power at all. If he kept getting better—if this warm, strange feeling continued to trickle through his veins—then who was to say how long he would live? How much more he could build?
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