He was entering a green land now. It was fertile and busy. The creeks bubbled with water so pure and sweet that feared both he and his camel would never stop drinking. The roadside bloomed with flowers more abundant than those tended in his own place 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 tall golden statute until he realised 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 travellers 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 night was coming from the darkening of the eastern sky behind him, by 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 Saviour spread. Their eldest son was fighting in the armies of Jesus the Christos, which they knew that he 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 odour, 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 softness 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 the old woman, happily calling with emptied lungs for her resurrection from undecayed death. In the morning, Balthasar felt refreshed for all his restlessness, and beast the family led from their stables was barely recognisable 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 creature to speak to him, or join with this family as they broke into song and 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 greats 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 sceptres; 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 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 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 dropped 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 recognised the faces and languages of Rome, Greece and Egypt amid the local Aramaics. Yet even when strange pilgrims of the 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 Sabb
ath 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 realised, 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 jasper 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 bejewellings 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 most vast and impressive building of all. Great blocks of crystal so sheer you could almost walk into them formed turrets which seemed 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 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 of the crowd. 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 spirits collapsed as if dead. Then, without the Christos having come close to Balthasar, a clamour 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 realised, of 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.
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 voice 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 blackened teeth he possessed. “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 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 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…”
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 11