Screams filled the throne room as Herod kept swinging his sword at anyone in his path, crying out, “DEATH! Death to all of you!”
Pilate looked at the headless magus a moment longer, then turned and exited, followed by his lieutenants. There was nothing more to do here. He would’ve killed Herod himself if he’d had the authority. The only thing to do was speed back to Rome and tell his emperor what had happened. To beg his forgiveness and let the wrath of a living god come down on Judea’s puppet king.
“DEATH!” cried Herod as he swung away at courtesans and advisors alike. “Death!” he cried as he hacked off the heads and limbs of the wise men and women who dared not fight back.
“Death to all of you!”
And so it continued, until the last of his subjects had either fallen or fled, and Herod collapsed in a heap near the magus’s headless body — his chest rising and falling rapidly, his tired lungs and feeble muscles burning from the effort.
The Hebrew God had made a fool of him. Herod turned his eyes toward the ceiling and shouted at the top of his gravelly voice, “Is this my reward for defending your Jews? For building them great cities? Is this how you repay me?”
The magus was gone. And with him the promise of eternal life, the chance to build an empire. And hope. Worst of all, hope — the wine of the weak.
It was all gone. And in the space of a few brief minutes, it was all over.
Here was Herod the Great, kneeling on the stone floor beside the magus’s headless body… holding his cupped hands beneath the blood that still trickled from his neck… collecting it and drinking it in mouthfuls.
Maybe… maybe if he could just drink enough of it… maybe he could be whole again.
Maybe he could live forever.
Joseph stood on the bow of a thirty-foot Roman trireme, holding the sleeping baby while Mary searched the ship’s depleted stores for food. He looked down at the tiny creature sleeping peacefully in his arms — full and loved and safe. Not yet two weeks old and already the survivor of more peril than most men would ever know in their lives.
The storm had blown itself out, leaving a flat, calm sea and a sky of broken, brilliant red clouds in its wake. The sun had dipped its toes in the western waters and was slowly sliding its way into Neptune’s kingdom for the night. It was glorious, and peaceful, and unbearably sad. For as Joseph looked down at the sleeping child, he knew he would leave him one day.
And sooner than your heart will be able to bear, Joseph.
He would leave and go off into the world, because the world is who he belonged to. His beautiful, sleeping boy.
It’s okay if I call him my son, isn’t it? Surely God will forgive me for that, for I cannot bear to think of him as anything else.
Joseph hoped he would be able to teach the child something about being a man. Teach him the Torah and how to take a piece of wood and craft it into something useful with his mind and his hands. But all that in good time. Right now there was nothing but blessed peace. The sea hadn’t parted for them as it had their ancestors, but it had delivered them all the same.
He wasn’t alone in admiring the evening sky. Balthazar stood at the helm, one hand on the rudder, the other hand clasped in Sela’s. She rested her head softly against his shoulder, both of them in quiet reverence of nature’s power and beauty. In reverence of the moment and the miracles it had taken to get them to it.
Balthazar’s mind was only just beginning to sort through everything that had happened in recent days. Flipping through the unfiltered images of blood and betrayal, of walking corpses and dying kings. But he stopped when he remembered one moment in particular: something the old man in his dream had said when he’d asked how long he had to stay with the infant:
“Until you let him go.”
It was funny — at the time, Balthazar had assumed that the old man was talking about Joseph and Mary’s baby. But now he knew… he’d been talking about Abdi. And when the full weight of that realization hit him, the tears returned to Balthazar’s eyes, prompting Sela to ask, “Balthazar? Are you all right?”
He turned to her and smiled, admiring her beauty, which neither dirt nor dried blood had succeeded in diminishing, and answered honestly, “Yes.”
There was nothing ahead but the flat, calm sea, the whole of the heavens reflected in its shimmering surface. Balthazar didn’t know when they would see land or if that land would be Egypt, or Judea, or even Rome itself. Nothing could surprise him anymore, nor could anything discourage his faith that no matter what storms there were ahead, God, or whatever you wanted to call it, would deliver them.
July 19, AD 64
“When you go into battle against an enemy who is oppressing you, sound a blast on the trumpets. Then you will be remembered by the LORD your God and rescued from your enemies.”
Rome was in flames.
In less than two hours, the fire had spread from a single villa until it had consumed most of the city’s wealthiest district, where senators, generals, and the merely rich lived in the shadow of Emperor Nero’s palace. But the houses were as claustrophobic as they were opulent, crammed tightly together to make the most of precious real estate, and this greedy zoning had doomed the neighborhood. Soldiers and citizens alike ran back and forth along the narrow streets, carrying buckets of water between fountains and bathhouses and the blaze. Owners hurried to pull out whatever valuables they could carry before their homes were engulfed. Many burned alive for their efforts. By the time it was all over, nearly a square mile of Rome would be reduced to ash, and half of Nero’s palace with it.
Though he would be famously remembered as the madman who fiddled while his city burned, Nero was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he’d been so panicked by the sight of the burning city that he’d taken to the streets himself to carry buckets of water and had offered up his own money to those brave enough to fight the flames up close.
In the coming months, as outraged Romans demanded answers and accused the emperor of being behind the blaze, presumably to make room for a bigger palace, Nero would famously and ingeniously scapegoat a small, troublesome cult of fanatics who called themselves “Chrestians” — burning them at the stake, crucifying them, and throwing them to the lions to the delight of the masses. But this would only serve to make these Chrestians martyrs in the eyes of many Romans and speed up their recruitment efforts. In centuries to come, religious scholars would wonder if the tiny cult could have survived without the Great Fire of Rome and the persecution that followed it.
Some would even call it “the spark that set the world on fire.”
But the old man had harbored no such ambitions when he set the blaze. He was merely keeping a promise.
He watched the fire spread from his vantage point, high on a hilltop overlooking Rome, the distant glow of the flames making the wrinkles on his face look deeper than they actually were. A camel hugged the ground behind him, waiting patiently for its old master. The man was too far away and too deaf to hear the panicked shouts in the distance, but he could see fire growing by the minute and the people buzzing about like wasps that have just had their hive knocked from a tree. And this brought the faintest smile to his weathered face.
Balthazar was nearly ninety years old. He’d been blessed with five beautiful children and a long, beautiful life with his one true love. There’d been no more miracles in the six decades that had passed since those two weeks — a time he and Sela would come to think of as the great adventure of their lives. In those sixty-four years, life itself had become the great adventure, their happiness the miracle.