It was a stable, at the back of the cheapest and most overcrowded of all the inns. They would have been sent away entirely had not Melchior known to ask as the door was being slammed in their faces about a family from a town called Nazareth. So they had reached the place toward which the star and the prophecies had long been leading them, on the darkest and most hopeless of nights, and in coldest time of the year. There was mud, of course, and there was the ordure. There was little shelter. Precious little warmth, as well, apart from that which came from the fartings and breathings of the animals. The woman was still exhausted from birth, and she had laid the baby amid the straw in a feeding trough, and the man seemed ... not, it struck Balthasar, the way any proud husband should. He was dumbstruck, and in awe.
They should, by rights, have simply turned and left. Offered their apologies for the disturbance, perhaps, and maybe a little money to help see this impoverished family toward their next meal. Balthasar thought at first that that was all Melchior planned to do when he stepped forward with a small bag of gold. But then he had fallen to his knees on this filthy floor before the child in that crude cot. And Gaspar, bearing a bowl of incense, did the same. These were the gifts, Balthasar now remembered, that his two friends had always talked of bearing. Now, he felt he had no choice but to prostrate himself as well, and offer the gift which he had never imagined he would be called to present. Gold, for a king, and frankincense, for a man of God—yes, those gifts were understandable, if the prophecies were remotely true. But myrrh symbolized death, if it symbolized anything at all. Then the baby had stirred and, for a moment, Balthasar had felt he was part of something. And that something had lingered in his mind and his dreams through all the years since.
He had spoken about that moment with Melchior as he lay on his deathbed back in Persia. Yes, his old friend agreed in dry whisper, perhaps a god really had chosen to manifest itself in that strange way, and in that strange place. Perhaps he had even moved the heavens so that they could make that long journey bearing those particular gifts. But Melchior was fading rapidly by then, falling into pain and stinking incontinence which the castings of spells and prayers could no longer assuage. As his friend spasmed in rank gasps, Balthasar couldn’t bring himself to frame the other question which had robbed him of so many nights of sleep. For if that baby really was the manifestation of an all-powerful god, why had that god chosen to make them the instruments of the terror which happened next?
The three magi had left the stable at morning under a sky doused with rain, and they knew without speaking that they must return quietly and secretly to Persia, and should spread no further word. But, through their vain discussions in Herod’s opulent palace, it was already too late. Rumors of a boy king was the last thing this restless province needed, and the remedy which Herod enacted was swift and efficient in the Roman way. Word came like a sour wind after the three supposedly wise men that every male child recently born in Bethlehem had been slaughtered, and they returned to their palaces in Persia half-convinced that they had seen the manifestation of a great god, but certain that that god was dead.
So it had remained in all the years since, through Balthasar’s increasing decrepitude, and the loss of his wives, and deaths of his oldest friends. But then had come rumor from that same territory in the west of a man said to have been born in the very place and manner which they had witnessed, who was now performing great miracles, and proclaimed himself King of the race the Romans called the Jews. It had been four years, as Balthasar calculated, since this man had emerged as if from the same prophesies which Melchior had once shown him on those ancient scrolls. And it seemed to Balthasar now that this last journey had always been predestined, and that the only thing which he had been waiting for was the imminence of his own death.
He was entering a green land now. It was fertile and busy. The creeks bubbled with water so pure and sweet that he feared both he and his camel would never stop drinking. The roadside bloomed with flowers more abundant than those tended in his own palace grounds. Fat lambs baaed. The air grew finer and clearer with every breath. All the dust and pain and disappointment of his journey was soon cleansed away.
The first angel Balthasar witnessed was standing at a crossroads, and he took it at first to be a tall golden statute until he realized that it wasn’t standing at all. The creature hovered two or three spans in the air above the fine-set paving on four conjoined wings flashing with many glittering eyes, and it had four faces pointing in each of the roadway’s four directions, which were the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Its feet were also those of an ox. Somehow Balthasar knew that this creature belonged to the first angelic order known as Cherubim. There was a singing in his ears as he gazed up at the thing, which was too beautiful to be horrible. He didn’t know whether to bow down in tears, or laugh out loud for joy.
“Old man, you have come as a pilgrim.” It was merely a statement, sung by a roaring choir. “You may pass.”
This land of Israel truly was a paradise. He had never seen villages so well tended, or lands so fecund. Trees bowed down with fruit even though it was too early in the season. Lambs leapt everywhere. The cattle were amiable and fat. He felt, amongst many other feelings, ridiculously hungry, but withheld from plucking from the boughs of the fig trees until he saw the many other travelers and pilgrims feasting on whatever took their fancy, and farmers freely offering their produce—plump olives, fine pomegranates, warm breads, cool wines, glistening haunches of meat—to all.
He knew that night was coming from the darkening of the eastern sky behind him, but the west glowed far too bright for any visible sunset to occur. A happy kind of tiredness swept over him. Here, he would merrily have cast himself down in these hedgerows, which would surely be soft as a feather bed. But a farmer came running to him from out of the sleek blue twilight, and insisted on the hospitality of his home. It was a square building, freshly whitened, freshly roofed. Olive lamps glittered, and the floor inside was dry and newly swept. He had never encountered somewhere so simple, yet so beautifully kept. The man himself was beautiful as well, and yet more beautiful were his wife and children, who sang as they prepared their meal, and listened gravely to Balthasar’s tale of his journey and the terrible things he had witnessed, yet laughed when he had finished, and hugged him, and broke into prayer.
All he was seeing, they assured him, were the sad remnants of a world which would soon be extinguished as the Kingdom of their Savior spread. Their eldest son was fighting in the armies of Jesus the Christos, which they knew would be victorious, and they did not fear for his death. Even in a house as joyous as this, that last statement struck Balthasar as odd, but he kept his council as they sat down to eat on beautifully woven rugs, and the meal was the best he had ever tasted. Then, there was more song, and more prayer. When the man of the house finally beckoned Balthasar, he imagined it to show him the place where he would bed. Through a small doorway, and beyond a curtain there was, indeed, a raised cot, but a figure already occupied it; that of an elderly woman who lay smiling with hands clasped and eyes wide open as if gripped in eager prayer.
“Go on, my friend,” Balthasar was urged. “This is my grandmother. You must touch her.”
Balthasar did. Her skin was cold and waxy. Her eyes, for all their shine, were unblinking. She was plainly dead.
“Now, you must tell me how long you think she’s been thus.”
Troubled, but using his not inconsiderable knowledge of physic, Balthasar muttered something about three to four hours, perhaps less, to judge by the absence of odor, or the onset of rigor in the limbs.
The man clapped his hands and laughed. “Almost two years! Yet look at her. She is happy, she is perfect. All she awaits is the Lord’s touch to bring about her final return in the eternal kingdom which will soon be established. That is why we Christians merrily do battle against all who oppose us, for we know that we will never have to fear death ...”
That night, Balthasar laid uneasily in the softnes
s of the rugs the family had prepared for him, and was slow to find sleep. This clear air, the happy lowing of the cattle, the endless brightness in the west ... And now the family were singing again, as if out of their dreams, and joined with their voices came the softer croak of older woman, calling with emptied lungs for her resurrection from undecayed death. In the morning Balthasar felt refreshed for all his restlessness, and the beast the family led from their stables was barely recognizable as the surly creature which had borne him all the way from Persia. The camel’s pelt was sleek as feathers. Its eyes were wise and brown and compassionate in the way of no beast of burden Balthasar had ever known. He almost expected the creature to speak to him, or join with this family when they broke into song as they waved him on his way.
Thus, laden with sweetmeats and baked breads, astride a smooth, uncomplaining mount on a newly softened saddle, Balthasar completed the last leg of his strange second journey to Jerusalem. The brightness before him had now grown so intense that he would have feared for his sight, had that light come from the sun. But he could see clearly and without pain—see far more clearly than he had ever seen, even in the happiest memories of his youth.
The encampment of a vast army lay outside the great city’s gleaming jasper walls. Angels of other kinds to the creature he had first witnessed—some were six-winged and flickered like lampflames and were known as the Seraphim; others known as the Principalities wore crowns and bore scepters; stranger still were those called the Ophanim, which were shaped like spinning wheels set with thousands of eyes—supervised the mustering and training with the voices of lions. The soldiers themselves, Balthasar saw as he rode down among them, were like no soldiers he had ever seen. There were bowed and elderly men. There were limping cripples. There were scampering children. There were women heavy with child. Yet even the seemingly lowliest and most helpless possessed a flaming sword which could cut as cleanly through rock as it did though air, and a breastplate seemingly composed of the same glowing substance which haloed the city itself. Seeing all these happy, savage faces, hearing their raucous song and laughter as they went about their everyday work, Balthasar knew that these Christian armies wouldn’t cease advancing once they had driven their old overlords back to Rome. They would turn east, and Syria would fall. So would Egypt, and what was left of Babylon. Persia would come next, and Bactrai and India beyond. They would not cease until they had conquered the furthest edges of the world.
He entered the city through one of its twelve great, angel-guarded gates. The paving here was composed of some oddly slippery, brassy metal. Dismounting from his camel, Balthasar stooped to stroke its surface just as many other new arrivals were doing. Like all the rest, he cried out, for the streets of this new Jerusalem truly were paved with gold. The light was intense, and there were temples everywhere, as you might find market stalls, whorehouses or watchman’s booths in any other town. He doubted if it rained here, but the golden guttering ran red with steaming gouts of blood. The fat lambs, cattle and fowls seemed not to fear death as they were led by cheering, chanting crowds toward altars of amethyst, turquoise and gold. Balthasar, who had drooped his camel’s rein in awed surprise, looked back in sudden panic. But it was too late. The crowds were already bearing the happily moaning creature away.
Most of the people here in Jerusalem wore fine but anonymous white raiments, some splattered with blood, but Balthasar recognized the faces and languages of Rome, Greece and Egypt amid the local Aramaic. Yet even when the strange pilgrims of darker and paler races he encountered spoke to him, he discovered that he understood every word.
The story which he heard from all of them was essentially the same. Of how two figures had appeared atop the main tower of what had then been the largest temple in this city on the morning of the Sabbath four years earlier. Of how one of the figures had been dressed in glowing raiments, and the other in flames of dark. And how the glowing figure had cast himself as if to certain death before the gathering crowds, only for the sky to rent from horizon to horizon as many varieties of angels flew down to bear him up. Even the most conservative of the local priests could not deny the supernatural authority of what they had witnessed. When the same figure had arrived the following day at the closed and guarded city on a white horse in blazing raiments and demanded entry, Pilate the Roman prefect, who was subsequently crucified for his treachery, ordered that the gates be flung open before they were broken down.
Everything had changed in the four years since. Jerusalem was now easily the most powerful city in the eastern Mediterranean, and Jesus the Christ or Christos was the most powerful man. If, that was, he could conceivably be regarded as a man at all. Balthasar heard much debate on this subject amid the happy babble as work toward celebrating his glory went on. Man, or god, but surely not both? It was, he realized, the same question he had asked Melchior many times on that earlier journey. He’d never received what he felt was a satisfactory answer then, and the concept still puzzled him now.
The city walls were still being reconstructed in places from more huge blocks of jaspar which angels of some more muscular kind bore roped to glowing clouds. For all the imposing depth and breadth of the finished portions, Balthasar could not imagine that this city would ever be required to defend itself. Many of the buildings, for all their spectacular size and ornamentation, were also works in progress, raised from the support of what looked like ridiculously frail scaffoldings, or perhaps merely faith alone, as new gildings and bejewelings were encrusted over surfaces already bright with gems. The Great Temple, which rose from the site of the far lesser building from which Christ had thrown himself down, was the vastest and most impressive building of all. Great blocks of crystal so sheer you could almost walk into them formed turrets which seemed mostly composed of fire and air.
Controlled and supervised by angels, crowds flooded the wide marble steps beneath arches of sardine and jasper. Most of those who came to worship were whole and healthy, but some, Balthasar noticed, bore terrible injuries, or were leprous. Others, perhaps impatient for the promised resurrection, bore the dead with them on crude stretchers, variously rotted or well-preserved. As was the case throughout the entire city, there were none of the expected smells. Instead, that fragrance which he had first encountered at the site of that battlefield was much stronger still. It was part spiced wine and part the smoke of incense, and part something which your reeling mind told you wasn’t any kind of scent at all. The interior of the temple was, of course, extraordinary, but by now Balthasar was drunk and dizzy on wonders. Like the rest of the crowd, all he yearned for was to witness the presence of Jesus himself.
There he was, beyond all the sacred gates and hallways, enthroned at very furthest of the vast final court of the Holy of Holies, which Balthasar had no doubt was the largest interior space in the entire known world. Angels swooped amid the ceilings, and huge, strange beasts, part-lion and part-bird, guarded a stairway of rainbows, but the eye was drawn to the small-seeming man seated at the pinnacle on a coral, emerald and lapis throne.
In one way, Jesus the Christos seemed frail and small, dwarfed by these spectacular surroundings. You noticed that he wore his hair longer than might seem entirely manly, and that his raiments were no whiter than those worn by many in the crowd. Noticed, as well, his plain leather sandals and how, for all that he was past thirty, he still possessed a young man’s thin beard. But at the same time, you knew without thinking he was the source of all the radiance and power which flooded from this city. At first he sat simply gazing down with a kind of sorrowful compassion at the wild cries, prostrations and offerings. Then he stood up from his throne and walked down the steps into the masses, and absolute silence fell.
A sense of eternity moved amongst them, and everyone in that great space felt humbled, and judged. It really did seem that some of the dead were resurrected with the touch of a hand, a few quiet words, and that the leprous regained their limbs, but equally a few of those who had imagined they had come here in good spiri
ts collapsed as if dead. Then, without the Christos having come close to Balthasar, a clamor of trumpets sounded, and his presence vanished, and the audience was at an end.
Balthasar had come all this way, lived all these years, in search, he now realized, of just one undeniable glimpse of the absolute. Just to know that there was something more than the everyday magic—the dirt and demons—of this world. Some blessed certainty. That was all he’d ever wanted. Or so he’d believed. And now, the presence of a supreme being had been demonstrated to him and ten thousand other witnesses in this city of crystal and gold. So why, he wondered as he left the Great Temple with the rest of the milling crowds, did he feel so let down?
There was no way of telling in Jerusalem whether it was day or night. What stars he could see were probably the auras of angels, or glittered amid the impossible architecture which rose all around. But he noticed that a patch of deeper dark had settled at a corner of the Great Temple’s wide outer steps. People were making a wide berth around it, and as curiosity somehow drew him closer he caught a jarringly unpleasant smell. Swarms of flies lifted and encompassed the shape of what he now saw was a man. Here, he thought, was someone so hopelessly sin-ridden as to be beyond even Jesus’ help.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 7