He never had. Not for lack of instruction. His father, like most Syrians, had worshipped the old pagan gods. And his mother, while not overtly religious, was one of the world’s most superstitious women. Balthazar had simply never found a use for it. He was more concerned with feeding his family than throwing himself at the feet of some statue, more concerned with tomorrow than the rants of a prophet who’d lived a thousand years before his birth. A prophet who never heard of Rome or Herod. He found nothing abominable about eating certain foods on certain days or wearing this kind of hat versus that kind of hat, or even — God forbid — no hat at all. Beliefs like that put you in a cage.
And Balthazar was going to set himself free.
III
He waited on his belly, wet and alone in the dark. To the east, the lights of the city danced off the waters of the Orontes. To the west, nothing but desert. Balthazar had decided to avoid the bridge and swim across. You never knew when you were going to run into a Roman patrol. And he was paying for that caution by shivering in the cold desert air.
He’d seldom been on this side of the river. There wasn’t much to see other than a few hermits and fields of shallow graves, one of which he now observed from afar. He watched as four slaves worked together to bury the day’s victims, supervised by a single Roman soldier. Two of them used shovels to dig a knee-deep trench, another transferred bodies from a wheeled cart and placed them in, and the fourth filled in the dirt on top of them.
He hadn’t told a soul about his plan. No one could know — not his oldest, most trusted friends from the slums. Not his accomplices from the forum. No one. Picking pockets was one thing. Even murders could be forgiven. But this…
He was tampering with the unspeakable.
Balthazar dug with his bare hands. It had taken another miserable, shivering hour, but the slaves and their cart had finally gone, and the soldier with them. Now it was just him, alone in a field of bodies, kneeling over a fresh grave in the dark of night. As he dug, Balthazar told himself to breathe. Relax. Superstition was for the weak-minded, right? Of course it was. He told himself to think of the spoils. All the gold and silver waiting under this loose dir —
Was that something moving?
He could’ve sworn something had brushed against his finger beneath the dirt…
No, it wasn’t “something moving.” There’s nothing “moving” out here because dead things don’t m —
A hand burst through the dirt and grabbed Balthazar by the throat. Then another — unnaturally strong, squeezing his windpipe. It pulled him toward the loose dirt. Pulled him down into the gra —
No, it didn’t. Stop being a baby…
But he had felt something.
It was the familiar shape of a hand, a hand unlike any he’d ever touched. A hand no warmer than the dirt it was buried in, its skin rigid and leathery. Balthazar suddenly realized something. Something he really wished he’d considered earlier: he’d never touched a dead body.
He’d seen them, sure. You couldn’t get to be twelve years old in the slums of Antioch without seeing a dead body. But when it came to dead bodies, seeing and touching were oceans apart. Still, he took a breath and brushed the last of the dirt aside…
Here was a man — barely twenty, from the looks of him. Judging by the dark red line around his neck and the unnatural angle of his head, he’d been hung. For what, Balthazar would never know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the pendant around that neck. A gold pendant on a leather string.
All I have to do is reach out and take it.
No matter what tricks his young imagination played on him — no matter how real it seemed when the man’s bloodshot eyes snapped open and his hands reached for Balthazar’s throat, it wouldn’t be. People didn’t come back to life. There was no God to fear, no sins to commit. There were nothing but superstitions and the rants of long-ago prophets.
All he had to do was reach out and take it…
Balthazar returned home that night filthy beyond comprehension, and rich beyond his wildest imagination. He promptly informed his mother that they were moving to a better neighborhood.
It had been a bigger haul than he’d ever dreamed. In one night, he’d raided nine bodies. And from those nine bodies, he’d netted a total of six rings (four gold, two silver) and four pendants (three gold, one silver). All told, it had taken less than three hours. Three hours! Balthazar would have been lucky to pick one pocket in the same amount of time. And with pickpocketing there were the risks, the payoffs, the kickbacks. No, this was the answer. This was the way. He had the whole west bank of the Orontes to himself. And the best part was, there was no end in sight. As long as the Romans kept putting men to death, Balthazar would keep finding uses for their unused valuables.
The next morning, he took Abdi into the city, and the two of them ate cinnamon dates until they were nearly sick. And when they rested beneath their favorite tree on the Orontes — the one with the scar down its side, not far from where Balthazar had entered the water the night before — he presented his brother a little present from his first plunder of the dead. A keepsake. It was a gold pendant on a leather string, a thin, coin-shaped wafer bearing the likeness of the god Plutus on one side.
“The god of wealth,” said Balthazar as he hung it around Abdi’s neck.
The only god worth worshipping.
The pendant flittered in the afternoon sun, spinning round and round as Abdi jumped and laughed along the riverbank, proud of his gift — but more proud of the fact that his big brother had given it to him. Balthazar watched from the shade of the scarred tree, smiling from ear to ear, a gold disk of reflected light sweeping across his face every so often. The light from his brother’s pendant. The pendant he would spend much of his life searching for.
4
A Strange Eastern Light
“During the time of King Herod, Wise Men from the east came and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’”
I
Herod smiled, the tips of his blackened teeth showing through thin lips. He’d been right, of course. The one thing people loved more than an outlaw was seeing him punished.
Thousands had turned out to witness the death of the Antioch Ghost. Contrary to the fears of his advisors, there were no protests or demands for his release, no weeping in the streets of Jerusalem over his imminent demise. There was only a sea of people waiting anxiously in the square outside the palace’s north gate, all of them crowded around a small wooden platform that had been erected in its center. A sea of people waiting anxiously for their glimpse of a minor legend. More specifically, for a glimpse of his blood.
Herod stood high above them in the Tower of Mariamne, watching it all through a small widow but taking care to keep his diseased face hidden from view. His soldiers had spent the day canvassing every square inch of Jerusalem, from the poorest suburbs to the porticos of the Great Temple, spreading the word that the famed murderer — the demon known as “the Antioch Ghost” — was going to be executed outside the palace at sundown. Across the city, merchants had closed their shops early. Prophets had canceled their afternoon street sermons. Weary travelers had even given up their places in long census lines and diverted to the square. Herod had expected big crowds, and his expectations had been exceeded.