by Brian Godawa
Balthazar held a sacrificial dagger to a goat laid upon a stone horned altar. The sanctuary was lit from several rays of the sun leaking through its small windows. One of those rays landed upon the goat’s terrified eyes as Balthazar drew the blade across its throat.
The goat gurgled and kicked but Balthazar held it firm until it relaxed in his arms. Its life bled out of it onto the altar and down the blood channels.
Two other magi stood in prayer beside Balthazar. These were Melchior, the eldest of the three, and Gaspar, pudgy with bright eyes. They prayed to the image of Marduk, a large stone statue of the king of the gods carved out of hard black obsidian stone. The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic poem of creation, told the story of how Tiamat, the sea dragon of chaos, threatened to destroy the other gods of the pantheon. None could stop her, until Marduk the god of vegetation and storm accepted the challenge. But he imposed one condition. If he returned victorious, the rest of the pantheon would submit to him as king. The gods accepted his terms and he went out to battle.
Tiamat called up many powerful monsters to fight Marduk, but he won the war with his battle net, mace and bow, crushing the skull of the sea dragon. He then tore Tiamat’s body in half to create the heavens and the earth. He set all the stars in their place, the astral gods, to rule according to his sovereign will. And that was how Marduk became the king of the gods as well as the patron deity of the city of Babylon.
That divine statue looked down upon the magi priests. Marduk was adorned in his battle skirt with perfectly coifed square beard, horned headdress of deity, and carrying his battle net and mace.
The purpose of cult images was not to be worshipped as gods. Rather, the devotees believed they were representations of the god’s presence that operated as windows of access to the deity. They performed ceremonies to “call down the breath” of the god into the image, so as to establish a connection for communication.
Balthazar raised his hands toward the black image and said, “Mighty Marduk, accept this sacrifice on behalf of General Xeneotas. Have mercy upon him. Grant him a quick death.”
Gaspar lit several censors of incense whose smoky haze began to fill the room.
Suddenly, everyone was aware of an odor. But it was not the incense. It was a distinctly repugnant odor. One they were all familiar with.
Melchior, the thinner magus, gave a dirty look to the squat Gaspar, who glanced guiltily back at him. Gaspar whispered, “I am sorry. You should not have used those herbs in the meal. They do not agree with me.”
Melchior hissed, “Brother, can you not hold it in during sacred devotions?”
Gaspar whispered back, “Brother, you know onions do not sit well with my digestion.”
Melchior rolled his eyes.
“Quiet, you two,” whispered Balthazar. “And thank the gods for the overbearing scent of the incense.” His remarks were punctuated with a wily upturn of his lips.
He returned to his prayers.
They all became lightheaded as the smell of the incense now took over their olfactory senses. The room filled with a haze of trance-like ecstasy.
Melchior welcomed the vision-inducing incense as a diversion to his depressing life. A chance to forget the world around him, a world of disappointment. He had studied the philosophy of sages to discover their secret wisdom, but all it had produced in him was despair. For this was a world of power, not ideas. Men of power and action ruled and shaped the world to their whims. Men of ideas could only hope to influence men of power, as Aristotle did Alexander, but they could not be the instrument of change.
Melchior’s only hope for such influence was to become the next high priest, a position that had been slated for the son of the high priest, Balthazar. After Balthazar turned it down, the position was now an open consideration for other magi in the order. Melchior wanted it, but knew his standing was not favorable among the other magi. He had been too pushy with his intellectual agenda and some of the order resented him for it. They would most likely never vote him high priest of the magi. So Melchior let the incense carry him away in escape from his hopeless desires.
Balthazar breathed in the fumes deeply. As a devoted magus priest, he embraced whatever helped to release himself from the earth and connect with the heavenly realm. He had a deeply Platonic view of reality. This world and all its physicality and power was a mere shadow of the true world of the ideal forms. The pursuit of the perfect, unchangeable eternal truth was what drove him, not the ever-changing vicissitudes of a world drunk on worldly power. He felt the only way he could achieve his spiritual quest was to renounce this world and its physical imperfections. It was why he had already rejected the opportunity to become the next high priest of the magi. Because his own father was in that position and had become so thoroughly corrupted by the power that Balthazar had turned it down when it was offered him upon his father’s recent death. Balthazar sought virtue, not power.
Gaspar considered the incense a necessary annoyance that obscured his ability to think clearly, something he preferred not to experience. He had experimented with many substances so he knew what physical results they created in the worshippers. In fact, his experimental knowledge was a kind of curse to him, because it gave him doubts about spiritual realities. His studies of the sciences of astrology, sorcery, and military technologies, made him a man of the physical world. And that world operated with a consistency and uniformity that lent itself more to the nature of laws than gods. Such profane thoughts were not acceptable in this world, so he aspired to the office of high priest, where he thought he might gain enough respect to institute reforms without being tried for apostasy. So when Balthazar had rejected the position, Gaspar placed his hopes upon his achievements of invention as granting him an advantage for the post. For instance, he had created the fire balls of death used in the battle against Molon. Unfortunately, though the sorcery worked quite well, Xeneotas had lost that battle, which significantly reduced the odds of gaining the necessary notoriety for Gaspar.
The three magi floated within their own worlds of thought as they prayed kneeling in the haze with holy obeisance toward Marduk.
Balthazar thought he heard a scraping sound. He opened his eyes.
He blinked several times to make sure he was seeing clearly.
The obsidian image was surrounded by the scented fog. But through the hazy blur, he could swear he saw a figure next to the stone image. It looked exactly like the image. But it looked alive.
Was this the hallucinatory effect of the incense?
The sound of Gaspar and Melchior gasping told Balthazar that they too saw this phantasm. Could it be a mass delusion? Were they all drugged by their own sorcery?
The figure moved toward them, parting the mist.
They all took a step back in fear.
Gaspar began to sweat. Melchior’s mouth went dry.
The great figure was eight feet tall. He strode to the altar and put his hands on the dead goat, while watching the three magi.
He was an awesome being. Frightening to behold. His eyes were lapis lazuli blue, with reptilian thin slivers of pupils. His skin had a sparkling quality like that of burnished bronze that would glitter in the rays of light that leaked in. Balthazar thought, A Shining One. When he spoke, his voice seemed to penetrate into their minds exposing their pathetic existence as finite creatures of flesh.
Marduk was calm but firm. “I will protect Xeneotas. You must prepare for defense. A secret enemy approaches.”
Balthazar thought, A secret enemy approaches? What does that mean? What kind of enemy? From where? From which corner of the earth? Has Molon breached our walls?
Suddenly, the sound of a horned alert bellowed throughout the temple.
Melchior shouted, “The temple is under attack!”
Balthazar drew his sword and shouted as he ran for the door, “The relics! We must protect the relics!”
He opened the door and let the magi brothers leave first. He looked back to see Marduk at the altar, sucking the
blood out of the dead goat’s body.
They had just survived an encounter with the king of the gods.
CHAPTER 5
The three magi, Balthazar, Melchior and Gaspar, sprinted through the dark hallways below the temple altar.
They rounded a corner and slid to a stop behind a contingent of fifteen Seleucid temple guards. Before them were five enemy warriors. Strange foreigners that they had never seen before. They wore small leather platelets draped over them like a long cloak with flowing red robes beneath them. Their swords looked oversized and had open slits in them. They had no helmets. All of them had long black hair that was wrapped up into a bun on the top of their heads. But their eyes were the strangest of all. They were almond-like thin and they lacked eyelids.
Are these monsters of Tiamat? thought Balthazar. Where did they come from? What do they want?
The magi drew their swords. They saw their goal, a door to the archives, that was between them and the intruders.
Melchior said to their guards, “You must push forward. We need to get to the archives!”
The leader of the guard grunted acknowledgment and they moved forward to engage the enemy.
Gaspar added, “We must save the relics.”
“We know, Gaspar,” said Melchior. “No need to repeat the obvious.”
That was when they noticed the leader of the foreign warriors. He stepped forward in such a way that it appeared the other four were merely his backup. He was not a large or burly warrior, but compact, confident and calculated. His strange eyes were fearless, he did not wear armor, but exotic robes. And he carried an eight-foot pole with a sword sized blade at the end of it. The magi had never seen anything like it. Ornate, ceremonial looking. Gaspar thought to himself, Why didn’t I think of inventing a weapon like that? It’s brilliant.
The temple guards attacked.
The single warrior engaged the fifteen Seleucids with his “glaive” pole blade. His moves were more like dance than like battle. Balthazar became so entranced by the beauty of his warrior ballet he forgot his duty.
“Balthazar!” yelled Melchior. “The relics!”
Gaspar and Melchior had drawn their weapons and pushed Balthazar toward the doorway.
The foreign warrior had taken down five of the Seleucids in moments.
Balthazar unlocked the door.
Two more were down. The foreigner jumped and dodged the enemy swords like he was light as a feather. A dancing feather—of death.
They could see he would be to the door in seconds.
Balthazar turned to let the two others in, but Melchior and Gaspar stayed outside and pushed the door shut. Balthazar stumbled backward.
“No!” he screamed and tried to open the door.
Behind it, he heard Melchior yell, “Save the relics!”
Balthazar yelled again, “Melchior!” but he bolted the door behind him, because they had all taken vows to protect the relics above their lives.
Gaspar shouted to Melchior, “I thought you said not to repeat the obvious!”
Melchior ignored it and stepped in front of Gaspar, facing the enemy. “Little brother, I know you want to be the next high priest! Remember my death as making it possible!”
Gaspar nudged him aside. “Not so fast, older brother. You want to be high priest too! You are not going to get the glory this time!”
They lunged forward together to meet their approaching adversary.
Inside the archives room, Balthazar could hear the blades clanging outside. He knew they would not last. His magi brothers were not skilled fighters. And the foreign warrior had preternatural skills. But he prayed they would hold him off just long enough for Balthazar to get the holy relics to safety.
He turned to the library of shelves full of scrolls and tablets. In the center of the wall at the far side was a holy shrine lit by torchlight. He approached it cautiously.
When he stood before it, he glanced up at a Babylonian brick painting that operated as a backdrop to the shrine. Fired blue brick with scenes of Babylonian past. A victory in the western land of Judea. An exile of a captive foreign peoples. Brought to slavery in the great city during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. And one of the treasures, a large golden candelabra from the enemy’s temple. The story of their captive booty.
He reached down and opened ornately carved wooden doors and pulled out two sacred artifacts. One, a small golden jar, covered, and engraved with a foreign tongue, the other, a crude three foot wooden staff.
These holy relics. Deceptive in their humility. Infused with the magical power of a foreign god. Captured from the very people from whom Balthazar’s own order of magi had long ago learned secrets of the universe. The Hebrews.
When the Hebrew captives returned to their land after seventy years of exile in Babylon, the order of magi retained these relics. They had been removed from a golden box called “the ark of the covenant.” which had been hidden by one of their prophets and never confiscated by the Babylonians. But the magi, under the tutelage of the Hebrew prophet named Daniel, were sworn to guard these retrieved relics with their lives. And so they had through the centuries. It was the only reason Balthazar left his comrades to fight. They all were devoted to a higher cause than their lives.
Balthazar turned a hidden latch and the shrine opened to reveal a secret passageway in the walls.
But before he could make his way, he noticed the sounds of battle had ceased outside the door. No one was trying to break into the archives. Were they gone? Were his fellow magi dead?
He should not have hesitated. But he loved his priestly companions. They were annoying at times, and hardheaded. Endlessly competitive. But he loved them as brothers. They were his spiritual family.
Balthazar held his ear against the door listening for the slightest hint of sound, the barest possibility of subterfuge. He could hear nothing but his own heavy breathing. He wanted to open the door to find out. If he was wrong, he could end up dead.
But he had to find out. He drew his sword, ready to kill. He unbarred the door, and slowly peeked through the crack of an opening with the sound of a creaking hinge.
He saw the bodies on the floor, strewn all about. All the Seleucid temple guards were dead. One of the foreign mercenaries laid near the door, though this one had no battle armor, but wore a white robe with black sash and trimming, now stained with the blood of battle. The robe and sash had strange symbols on them, he had never seen before.
No wait. He had seen them somewhere before. Where was it?
His curiosity got the better of him. He opened the creaking door and presented his arms in defense. There were no warriors in hiding. No one to jump at him with surprise.
But why? Surely, they had seen him enter the room.
And where were Melchior and Gaspar?
One of the temple guards moaned. Balthazar ran to his side. He was barely alive, but would not be for long. Balthazar bent down and cradled the poor soul’s head.
“What happened?”
The guard struggled to get out his last words. “Th-they took them. Melchior and Gaspar. Kidnapped.”
And then the guard relaxed in the arms of death like a human sacrifice for the demands of a foreign god.
Kidnapped? Why? The king must be alerted to this intrusion. It may be a scouting mission for a foreign invasion, thought Balthazar. But first, I have something more important to do.
Balthazar heard a soft moan from the foreigner. He was still alive.
CHAPTER 6
Xeneotas sat in chains in the dreary dungeon cell. He was ragged, beaten, hopeless. But for the first time in his life, he felt free. He had faced his father the king, revealed his secret, and claimed his ancestry. Now, he was going to die.
The sound of an arriving visitor and the clinking of the keys in the lock aroused him. At the dungeon door, a cloaked and hooded figure was escorted by guards. The executioner.
He walked into the cell like a wraith of death, but the guards stayed behind. What was this?
The figure took off his hood. Xeneotas whispered with a gasp, “Balthazar.”
The magus knelt down and described to Xeneotas everything that had just happened at the temple. The alien scouts, the kidnapping of the magi, the possibility of foreign invasion.
Balthazar drew out a metallic pick. He inserted it into Xeneotas’ shackles and they softly clicked open.
“I am here to help you escape,” whispered the magus. “I want you to help me rescue my magi brothers.”
Xeneotas looked at him, “You are mad.”
Balthazar rejoined, “You are the only one I trust. Is our lifelong friendship of no value to you?”
“That is why I refuse,” complained Xeneotas. “I will not let you join me in my death sentence.”
“There is something else I did not tell you,” said Balthazar. “Before the attack, I had a vision of Marduk and he told me he would protect you.”
Xeneotas gave him a scolding look.
Balthazar said, “That is why I did not tell you.”
“And which deity would protect you, my friend?”
“I care nothing for my fate in this world,” said Balthazar. He paused to consider, then said, “I have told you before, but you refuse to believe. The stars predict that one day an emperor will come down from heaven and will rule the world with justice.”
Xeneotas turned sad in his stare. “Balthazar, you run from power to your gods and prophecies. Only human power can bring justice.”
Balthazar disagreed, “Human power leads to tyranny and madness if it is not under the power of heaven.”
Xeneotas could only hang his head as he whispered. “I will not let you rescue me.” He snapped his shackles back together. “I only offer my heartfelt goodbye to a loyal magus and friend.”
Balthazar remained silent, refusing to let him win. But finally, he knew he could not save a man who would not be saved.