Balthasar felt in his pockets and pouch for what scraps and food and money he had left and tossed them in the poor creature’s direction. Not that he imagined that such material things would be of much use in this city, but what else could he do? He was turning and pondering if he was likely to find a place to sleep when a preternaturally long arm extended to grab the edge of his robe.
He allowed himself to be pulled back. The man had large brown eyes. He might once have been beautiful, if you ignored the flies and the sores and the rank and terrible smell which emanated from him. He licked his scabbed lips and looked up at Balthasar.
“You know who I am?” he asked in a voice which was a faint whisper, yet echoed in Balthasar’s mind.
Just as in the temple, Balthasar knew and understood. “You are the Christos, the Christ—the same Christ, and yet a different one—as the Christ I have just witnessed perform many wonders in this temple.”
“There is only one Christ,” the man muttered, glancing around at the crowds which were already gathering around them, then up at the various angels which had started to circle overhead. “I am always here.”
“Of course, my Lord, you are all-powerful,” the theologian in Balthasar answered. “You can thus be in many places at once. And in many forms.”
“I can be everywhere, and everything,” Jesus agreed with a slow smile, bearing what teeth he possessed within his blackened mouth. “What I cannot be is nowhere. Or nothing at all.”
Balthasar nodded. The crowd around them was still growing. “Do you remember me, my Lord? I and two of my friends, we once journeyed ...” He trailed off. Of course Jesus knew.
“You brought that deathly unguent as your gift. Perhaps instead of asking me why you did so, Balthasar, as you were thinking of doing, you should ask yourself.”
“My Lord ... I still do not know.”
“Why should you?” Jesus shifted his crouch on the temple steps, hooking his thin arms around his even thinner legs as the flies danced around him in a humming cloud. “Any more than you should know why you chose to return. After all, you are only a man.”
Balthasar was conscious of the murmurs of the watching crowd—He is Here. It is as they say. Sometimes He comes in pitiable disguise—and the knowledge that Jesus already understood far more about his thoughts than he was capable of expressing. “I returned, my Lord, simply because I am a man. And because you are a god.”
“The God.”
“Yes.” Balthasar bowed. His voice trembled. “The God.”
“So ... Why do you doubt?”
“I do not—”
“Do not try to lie to me!” Suddenly, Jesus the Christ’s voice was like the rumble of rocks. The sky briefly darkened. The circling angels moaned. “You doubt, Balthasar of Persia. Do not ask me why, but you doubt. You look at Me in awe but you cannot see what I am, for if you did, if all was revealed, your mind would be destroyed ... Yet, even then, I wonder if you would believe in that instant of knowing? Or even after a million eternities lived amid glories which would make this city seem squalid as the stables in which I was born. Would you believe then?”
“I am sorry, Lord. I simply do not know.” Balthasar blinked. His eyes stung. Terrible though it was, he knew that everything Jesus had said was true. Without this accursed doubt which even now would not leave him, he could not be Balthasar at all.
“I came to this world to bring eternal peace and salvation,” Jesus was saying. “Not just for the Jews, but for all humanity. I was born as you witnessed. My parents fled Herod’s wrath, and I was raised almost as any human child, waiting for the time of my ministry arrive. And when that time came ...” He brushed the re-gathering flies from around his eyes. “When it came, I sought knowledge and solace in the wilderness for forty days, just as any penitent would ...
“I fasted. I prayed. I knew I could bring down the walls of this world, rip the stars from the heavens—indeed, just as you have imagined, Balthasar, in your wilder dreams. Or I could have entered this city as pitiably as you see me now, or as some holy buffoon riding on an ass. I could have done all these things and many others. If, that was, I wished to discover how little compassion the men and women who populate this earth possess. Or perhaps ... I could ...” The flies were buzzing thicker. The stench seemed to have grown. A different emotion, which might almost have been interpreted as fear, played across the crawling blackness of Jesus’ face. “I could, perhaps, have gathered a small band of followers, performed small deeds, and declared myself in ways which the priests would have found easy to challenge. I could have allowed them to bring about my death. All of these things I could have done so that men such as you, Balthasar, might ultimately choose to be redeemed. I could have died in an agony of unheeded screams, Balthasar ...” Jesus smiled a sad, bitter smile. “If that was how your gift to me was intended ...”
“But you cannot die, my Lord.”
“No ...” Jesus picked at a fly from his lips and squashed it between ruined nails. “But I can feel pain. I could have passed through this world as lightly as the wind passes over a field of barley. And human life would have continued almost as you know it now—and worse. Armies would march. People would suffer and starve and doubt my existence whilst others fought over the meaning of my words. Cities of stone and glass even more extraordinary than this one you see around you would rise and fall. Clever men like you, Balthasar, would learn how to fly just as you see these angels flying. Yes, yes, it’s true, although I know it sounds extraordinary. Men would learn how to pass even beyond the walls of this Earth, and how to poison the air, and kill the living waters of the oceans. And all for what, Balthasar? What would be accomplished, other than many more lifetimes of pointless striving?”
“I do not know, my Lord.”
“Indeed.” Jesus shook his head. Then he laughed. It was a terrible, empty sound, and the flies stirred from him in a howling cloud. “Neither did I, Balthasar. Neither did I. And I was hungry in that wilderness, and I was afraid. There were snakes and there were scorpions ... And there were other things ...” Jesus shuddered. “Far worse. It was in those last days of my torment when it seemed that the very rocks taunted me to transform them into bread, that I finally understood the choice I had to make. I saw all the kingdoms of this Earth spread below me, and I knew that I could take dominion of them. All I had to do was to show myself, cast myself from a high point of a temple so that all the angels in the heavens might rescue me. After all ...” Jesus shrugged. “I had to make my decision. And this ...” He looked around along the marble steps at the awestruck crowd, then around at the incredible spires and domes, then up at the heavenly skies. “... is the world I have made.”
Even as Jesus the Christ spoke these last words, Balthasar and the crowd around him could see that he was fading. With him departed the droning flies, and the pestilential stink was replaced by the heady, sacred scents of the temple. He would be somewhere else, or had been in many other places already. Appearing as a glowing vision on some hillside, or leading with a tongue of swords at the front of one of his many armies. All that was left of the Christ now was what Balthasar had once feared he might be—just a trick of the light, a baseless hope turned from nothing more than shadow, and a last few droning flies.
Balthasar pushed his way down the steps and out of the crowd. He walked the golden streets of Jerusalem alone. He’d been thinking before of sleep, but now he knew that he would never find sleep, or any other kind of rest, within this city. It was all too much. It was too glorious. And he was still just a man. Perhaps he would just crumble to dust when all the rest of the believing, undoubting multitudes were resurrected. Sacrilegious though the thought was, it felt welcoming. He passed through one of the city’s twelve great gates almost without realizing, and found his way through the encamped battalions as they joined with choirs of angels in celebration of their inevitable victory. Looking back at the city as the land finally darkened and rose, he wondered once again why an all-powerful God should feel the
need to protect it with such large and elaborate defenses. Still questions, Balthasar ... Pointless doubts and questions ... Walking on and away from the blazing light, he realized that what he needed was solitude, silence, clarity.
He was almost sure that it was night now, for his tired eyes caught something resembling the glint of stars in a blessedly black firmament. The ground was rough and dry and dusty. He began to stumble. He grew dizzy. He fell, and lost track of time until light came over him, and he winced and cried out and covered his face in awe, only to discover that it was merely the harsh blaze of the sun. This place truly was a wasteland, and in its way it was terrible. But it was beautiful as well, in the deathless heat-shimmer of its emptiness.
Balthasar walked on through places of stones and dry bones. Then, as evening came, he sought shelter from the sudden cold in a decayed hole at the edge of the mountains. Others had been in this cave before him. There was a sour stench, and there were carvings on the rocks. Squatting on the dark hard ground inside after willing a few sticks to make a fire, Balthasar traced these marks with his fingers. A babble of symbols in different alphabets honoring different gods, all of which he now knew almost for certain to be misguided. Still, he found these leavings of other seekers after truth oddly comforting.
Some of the most recent markings, he noticed, were written by one hand, and in Aramaic. Studying these scratches more closely in the firelight, he saw that they mimicked the words of the old prophecies which Melchior had once shown him, and he looked around at this squalid place in which he had sought shelter with a different gaze. Somehow, and for all that he had witnessed, it seemed beyond incredible that this decayed hole was the very place in which Jesus Christ had sought shelter in his time in the wilderness. Yet how could he doubt it, after all that he had heard and seen? The writing was loose and ill-composed—you could sense the writer’s anguish—and terminated in a crude series of crosses.
The fire died. Balthasar sat alone in the dark, waiting for the return of the sun, and perhaps for an end to his own torment. He remembered again that first journey he had taken to this land with his two friends, and the subsequent slaughter of the innocents. Jesus had survived to fulfil the prophecies scrawled on these walls, yes. But what of all the others? Was that what his gift of myrrh had foretold, the pointless death of hundreds of children? And why—the question came back to him, although left unasked in Jesus’ presence—had an all-powerful God permitted such a thing to happen? Why had pain and suffering been allowed into this world at all?
In the darkness, Balthasar shook his head. Always the same with you, he heard the Gaspar’s voice saying. You have too many doubts, too many questions. Yet everything he had seen in New Jerusalem had left him unsatisfied.
A slow dawn was coming, rising from the east in gaunt, hot shadow. A cur dog howled. The wind hissed. Looking out across this landscape, Balthasar thought of Jesus squatting in this same cave, and wondered about his last days of torment, and about how he must have felt, and what he had seen. Then, as the heat rose and the sky whitened, Balthasar took a stick of charcoal from the remnants of his fire and began to make his own marks across the rough stone. It had been a long time since he had engaged in the practice of serious magic, but the shapes to make the necessary spell of summoning came to him with astonishing ease.
THE BOWMEN
Arthur Machen
ARTHUR MACHEN (1863-1947) was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones in Wales. He worked as a clerk, teacher, actor and journalist while writing stories of horror and fantasy rooted in the myths of his homeland. H.P. Lovecraft named Machen as one of the four “modern masters” of supernatural horror fiction (alongside Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and M.R. James).
Probably best known for his classic 1894 novella “The Great God Pan” (which Stephen King described as “Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language”) and the short story “The White People,” his novels include The Innermost Light, The Shining Pyramid, The Three Imposters and The Hill of Dreams. His best short stories are collected in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
The first major conflict between British and German forces during the First World War occurred near the French village of Mons in August 1914. The encounter ended with a bloody and humiliating retreat by British troops, and so the following month Machen wrote an unashamedly patriotic piece of fiction for the London newspaper the Evening News, describing how the ghostly intervention of St. George and his Agincourt archers at the Battle of Mons helped the British.
However, not long after the story first appeared, a significant number of anecdotes started to emerge from people who claimed to have really witnessed the ghostly “Angels of Mons.” Despite Machen’s continued assertion that the story had no foundation in fact of any kind, the tale quickly took on the form of an early “urban legend” that has continued into the present day.
“It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories,” recalled Machen. “At first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original ... Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will he noted, has disappeared—he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants—and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think that I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
“I conjecture that the word ‘shining’ is the link between my tale and the derivative from it,” continued Machen. “In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels and nothing else, and must be angels, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become ‘the Angels of Mons.’ In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.”
IT WAS DURING the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five h
undred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.
There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle-song, “Good-bye, goodbye to Tipperary,” ending with “And we shan’t get there.” And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, “What price Sidney Street?” And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.
“World without end. Amen,” said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered—he says he cannot think why or wherefore—a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius—May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass—three hundred yards away—he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King’s ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 8