II
He was fourteen when he first saw her. Only two years older than he’d been when he’d robbed his first grave, but 100 years wiser.
He could remember the day, the hour, her clothes, the light. He’d been walking home from the forum, where he once picked pockets amid the noise and madness, risking so much for such paltry rewards. But not anymore. Things were different now. There was no need to pick pockets, to pay off accomplices and reward tips with part of the profits. These days, Balthazar visited the forum to spend, not earn. And there was plenty to spend, thanks to his stroke of genius, his realization that it was easier to steal from the dead than the living.
Nearly every night after that first plunder, Balthazar had waded through the dark water, returning to the shallow Roman graves on the far side of the Orontes. Nearly every night, so long as the moon hadn’t been too bright or the sentries too close, he’d dug up the freshly buried corpses of the condemned. He’d been frightened at first, yes, especially when he unearthed some of the more gruesome specimens. Those who’d been beheaded or stoned to death. Being so recently buried, their blood was often wet, the expressions on their faces still fresh. Alone in the dark, Balthazar’s young imagination had gotten the best of him in the early weeks: He’d seen their eyes pop open, felt their cold fingers grab at his arms. But as the months wore on, these hallucinations had grown less frequent, and the fear had grown weaker and weaker, until one day, he realized it had disappeared altogether.
In the two years since his stroke of genius, Balthazar had gotten so fast that he could process ten corpses in a single night, assuming the executioners had been that busy — digging them up, looting them, and returning them to the desert without the Romans ever knowing he’d been there. Filling his pockets with their rings and necklaces, with their silver and gold and silk. And all without a single accomplice. So much more reward, with only a fraction of the risk.
A month after he began operations, Balthazar had stolen enough to move his family into a new neighborhood. A year after that, he’d moved them again — this time into a house that had once belonged to a Roman nobleman. His sisters had new fabrics to sew. Abdi had new clothes and toys. And his mother had everything a mother could want: a new house to care for, plenty of food to cook, a new stove to cook it in, rugs to sit on, oil lamps to light her way. And while Balthazar knew she had her suspicions about their newfound wealth, she never asked him where the money came from or where he disappeared to each night. The closest she ever came was just before they moved into the nobleman’s house. Upon seeing it for the first time, Balthazar’s mother pulled him aside, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “Before I sleep under this roof, promise me one thing.”
“Anything, Mama.”
“Promise me that our happiness doesn’t come at the expense of another’s.”
He looked at her for a moment, silently wrestling with the prospect of lying to his mother’s face. More specifically, wrestling with how he was going to do it convincingly. On one hand, their happiness was certainly coming at another’s expense. If you wanted to get right down to it, people had paid for their happiness with their lives. On the other hand, she’d left him a fairly sizable loophole. Technically speaking, he was taking valuables from people who no longer had any use for them. Having a necklace or a gold ring wasn’t going to change the fact that they were dead, was it? He wasn’t making them any less happy than they’d been when they died, was he? Therefore, he could technically say in all honesty, “I promise.”
Balthazar had been tempted to tell her, just as he’d been tempted to tell his fellow thieves. But he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t spoken a word of his dealings with the dead. Not to his family and especially not to his fellow pickpockets. It wasn’t that he feared their condemnation, although he knew that some would surely condemn him for violating the old superstitions. What he really feared was their competition. Balthazar knew he wasn’t the only boy who’d be able to see his way past a few social mores and dead bodies. Not when there was that much money just sitting there in the sand, ready for the taking.
No, he’d stumbled onto a treasure vault that constantly replenished itself, and he wasn’t about to share it. Not when the Romans were sending so many men and their jewelry to the executioner. Not when everything was going so perfectly.
And then he saw her, and it all went to hell.
He’d been walking home from the forum, carrying a bag of grain along the cobblestone streets of his new neighborhood. A neighborhood that was home to the “better” families of Antioch. Families like ours. Typically, he spent these walks staring at his feet, his mind wandering through a series of disconnected thoughts and images.
Something funny Abdi said it’s cloudy out today bodies will there be tonight my feet are killing father felt anything when he died.
But on this day, at this moment, he decided to look up. And when he did, he was struck by an otherworldly image. At first he thought it was a ghost. The ghost of a beautiful girl, rendered as real as the hallucinations he used to have in the graves. She was sitting alone on the front stoop of a one-story brick villa — one of the nicer homes in the neighborhood.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and she was crying her eyes out.
The most unlikely little sliver of sunlight had cut through the clouds and fallen on her back, making the edges of her black hair burn and giving her that ghostly, otherworldly look. She was a native Syrian, like him. But Balthazar knew at once that she wasn’t like him at all. This was a girl who hadn’t grown up stealing for a living. Who’d never known hunger.
But you haven’t had it easy, either. No, you’ve had a terrible time on this earth. And somehow that makes you twice as beautiful, although I’m not sure why, or even if it’s possible for you to be ANY more beautiful than you already are.
As it happened, Sela looked up at precisely the same time and found a boy standing in the middle of the street with a bag of grain over his shoulder, staring at her like a dumb animal. His body frozen, his mouth hanging open as he watched her cry.
“What are you looking at?”
“I… uh — ”
“You think it’s funny, standing there and looking at me?”
“No! No, I — ”
“Leave me alone!”
She turned away, crossed her arms, and waited for the boy to leave. And waited.
“No,” he said.
Later, Balthazar would only remember pieces of what happened next: Sela looking up and glaring at him through her tears, wickedly beautiful and dangerous. He remembered dropping his bag on the ground and working up the courage to sit beside her. He remembered asking her what was wrong. He remembered her resisting, then relenting. And once she began to tell him everything, he remembered that she didn’t stop until long after night had fallen. It was a variation of a story he’d heard so many times before. Another tale of woe at the hands of the Roman occupiers.
Sela was an only child, her mother having died when she was very young. Too young to remember her face, her voice, or her touch. But her father, a successful importer, was able to provide her with a comfortable upbringing. He was a quiet, kind man. And though he never spoke of his departed wife aloud, Sela knew that he never stopped mourning her. He doted on his only daughter, and, in turn, she devoted herself to his happiness — eschewing the usual childhood pursuits to be by his side. It was all very pleasant-sounding, Balthazar remembered now. Pleasant days passing pleasantly by, blending together until they formed a relatively pleasant, if uneventful childhood.