It didn’t matter, he supposed. What mattered was that no city or village was safe from now on. No road passable. No strangers could be trusted to keep their secret. Not with the Romans looking for them in such numbers. They wouldn’t be able to stop again. Not until they reached Egypt. But they wouldn’t make the Egyptian border without supplies. They’d have to take a different route. An unexpected route. They wouldn’t be able to venture out in public anymore, not even in disguise. It was too dangerous.
What they needed was a place to hide for a while. Resupply. Somewhere unexpected. Somewhere safe. And despite every oath he’d ever sworn to himself, Balthazar knew exactly where they needed to go.
9
The Return
“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: but it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.”
I
The door opened, and there she was, as wickedly beautiful and dangerous as he remembered.
“Hello, Sela,” he said.
How long had it been, eight years? No, it has to be more. Could it be more? Balthazar was too tired to tax his mind with the math. Besides, it didn’t matter how long it’d been. Here they were, and here she was — a sight for six pairs of sore eyes. Here was the face they’d all crossed an ocean of sand to find, without food or rest, leaving Hebron with their camels in a full gallop, as day became freezing night became glaring morning and scorching day. Here was the reason they’d kept riding, half dead, toward the promised land of Beersheba, the last waypoint of note before the Judean Desert’s long march into Egypt. The last chance to replenish. Riding with nothing to guide them but the faint hope that Balthazar’s information was up to date. That the rumors he’d held on to were true. And always with the knowledge that the Romans weren’t far behind.
But on reaching the city walls, the fugitives had found the promised land of Beersheba a wasteland. At first they thought the Romans might’ve beaten them again, for there was hardly a man or woman to be seen on the streets. Fires had been left to burn themselves out, and malnourished dogs roamed the streets in search of scraps. But it was famine, not Roman swords, that had laid waste to Beersheba. For its crops had been decimated by the only thing farmers feared more than drought:
Locusts.
They’d come as a black cloud. A living storm, half the size of Judea, eating its way across North Africa. Tens of millions of soulless eyes and insatiable mouths, flying from field to field, leaf to leaf, consuming everything they touched. And though months had passed since they’d come through Beersheba, leaving ruin in their wake, the ground was still littered with their withered molts. The dead shells that each locust had cast off, renewing itself before moving on, leaving the city a dead shell, suddenly and totally transformed but not renewed.
The once-vibrant streets were now eerily quiet. Empty. With the crops had gone the traders and merchants, and with the traders and merchants had gone the slaveholders and their slaves. They’d all moved on in search of food and commerce, leaving only a skeleton crew of faithful denizens behind. Seeing all of this on their arrival, Balthazar’s faint hope had just about snuffed itself out:
She won’t be here. She’ll have moved on like the others.
But here she was.
Here she was, standing at the door of a two-story house, its smooth white walls and red-tiled roof distinctly Roman. Here she was, clearly stunned to see his face.
Of course she’s stunned. Here I am, after all this time, after what happened, after the way it ended.
Sela stared back at him for what seemed like ages, her expression unchanging. Her hair black as ink. Her body long and lean, with skin a polished copper, same as her eyes. Ten years. No, it’s definitely ten. She would be twenty-four now, give or take a year, but she looked almost exactly as he’d left her.
Balthazar smiled. That sad smile she used to love. The one she could never resist. Not for all her anger, not for all her sadness and distrust. Those things had never mattered when it came to Balthazar. They’d always just seemed to melt away when she looked at him. Back when they were young, and in the kind of love that only the young can be in. The first love. The sick-to-your-stomach, lying-awake-all-night-counting-the-hours-until-you-saw-each-other-next kind.
Did she ever think this day would come? Did she half expect to see me standing here every time she opened this door? Has she thought of me as often as I’ve thought of her? Has there ever been someone else? More than one someone? Is there someone now?
Balthazar opened his mouth to pay her a compliment. It wasn’t fully formed yet, but he was leaning in the direction of praising her beauty. Something like, “The years have been kind.”
No, that’s stupid. Of course they haven’t been kind.
“You haven’t aged a day” popped in next, but it lacked the poetry he was going for.
“You’re just like I remember?” No, that evokes the past, and we definitely don’t want to bring up the past.
With his mouth fully open and his time up, Balthazar settled on the innocuous but safe, “It’s good to see you.”
But before the words could roll off his tongue, a fist was in his mouth.
It was driven there with so much force that his own teeth were briefly weaponized and turned against him, cutting clean through his top and bottom lip from the inside. Balthazar nearly passed out as his brain rattled around in his skull, and he staggered backward into the cobblestone street, struggling to keep his balance.
At first he didn’t realize he’d been hit. There’d been no windup, no change of expression to warn him it was coming. One minute she’d been there, beautiful and clear, and the next, there’d been three of her — her faces floating behind a thick sheet of cloudy glass. By the time the first packets of pain began to arrive from his mouth, slicing their way through the fog, he’d been hit again. First with another fist, and then with the bottom of a sandal, as Sela kicked him square in the throat.
For a moment, it had all been beauty and reminiscence. The music of love’s long-delayed reunion. Now Balthazar was clutching his throat, gasping for breath and barely clinging to consciousness, fists and feet coming at him without mercy. His arms hung stupidly at his side as his face was struck again and again. Fist, sandal, sandal, fist. The only thing keeping him from passing out was curiosity. His mind was so wrapped up in trying to sort out just what the hell was happening, that it refused to shut down. Even as another kick found his chin, snapping his head back violently and sending Balthazar to the ground with a dull thud.
Somewhere, across a shapeless, cavernous space, the others were looking down at him, stunned and silent. One of them was yelling something. Something like “Wait!” or “Stop!” or “What are you doing?”
Is that the carpenter? Is that the carpenter telling her to stop? I can’t te — gahhhhhh, my face hurts…
With Balthazar rolling on his back, clutching at his already-swollen lips and nose, Sela finally stopped and got a good look at the other people outside her front door: three men, a girl, and an infant. All of their jaws hanging open. All of them looking at her, wondering if they were next. With her chest rising and falling with each heavy breath, Sela brushed aside the hair in her eyes, and said, “Come in.”