Sela watched the girl’s cheeks turn bright red. No… of course you didn’t — that’s why you’re blushing and indignant.
“I read fortunes,” said Sela.
“Oh… ”
“Farmers pay me to predict the weather; women pay me to tell them how many children they’ll have. We sit, I conjure, they pay. Though business has been a little slow since the locusts came. Nobody needs a fortune-teller to tell them things in Beersheba are going to be bad for a long, long time.”
“And you… know these things? These answers they’re looking for?”
“I know what people want to hear.”
The blush drained out of Mary’s cheeks, and she tried to keep her face from betraying her disappointment. Fortune-telling wasn’t much better than prostitution, especially when the “telling” part was outright lying. Religiously speaking, it was worse. The Scriptures expressly forbade such things. In the eyes of God, Sela was a false prophet. And false prophets are heretics. And heretics, well —
“Are you all right?” asked Sela. “You look troubled.”
Mary continued to wash the baby’s skin, staring vacantly off into a dark corner of the room as Sela’s eternal damnation played out in her mind. She suddenly felt as though she were standing across the table from a leper. As if Sela’s sin was contagious. There was a palpable urge to snatch her baby up, to protect him from that sin. To wash it off his body. Given the circumstances, the least offensive thing she could think to say was, “It’s just… I couldn’t lie to people, I guess.”
“Why not? You lied to me.”
Mary looked up sharply. Visions of damnation gone in a flash.
“I did not.”
“Sure you did.”
“Why would you say — ”
“When I told you I wasn’t a whore, that’s exactly what you’d been thinking. But you insisted it wasn’t. ‘No, no, no — I would never think that!’”
Mary blushed again.
“Look at me and tell me I’m wrong.”
“I… I was trying to be polite.”
“Uh-huh. You do it to be polite. I do it to give hopeless people a little hope and make a little money while I’m at it. Either way, we’re both liars.”
Mary didn’t like this woman. She didn’t like being here. She didn’t like any of this. For the thousandth time since she and Joseph had left Nazareth, she felt the pangs of homesickness. She longed for the familiar faces of the village, the foods and sounds and smells. She longed for the comfort of family. For the spiritual lift that came with being surrounded by the fellow faithful. She and her husband were alone in the great big world. A terrible world, filled with murderers and heathens and famine, with bullying thieves and contagious sin. They were alone, and they were the bearers of an impossible burden: to protect the most important thing that had ever lived from the most powerful men in the world. And, God, he was so small.…
IV
Herod looked down at the deathly white body beneath him. Silent and still. Her eyes open and bulging. Spit drying on the corners of her mouth.
It wasn’t your fault, he thought. You were simply in the wrong place when the news reached me. You were simply there when I needed something to kill.
Herod supposed he regretted killing her, if only because he wouldn’t get to enjoy her again. Her wetness and warmth. But he’d done her a service, in a way. Think of all the misery she would be spared. Even if she didn’t eventually grow sick from his touch, think of all the disappointing years that lay ahead. Years of growing older, of taking a husband. Bearing his children. Her body betraying her, her beauty leaving her as she aged. But she would be spared all of that. This little one would be beautiful for all time.
Besides, who could blame him for reacting the way he did? It had been unwelcome news. They’d had them. The Romans had surrounded the Antioch Ghost and the child in Hebron, Herod had been told. They’d had archers lying in wait on the Street of Palms and men hidden on adjacent streets. But when the ambush was sprung, a riot had broken out. Zealots and pilgrims had attacked the Romans as they flooded in, holding them off before they could reach their targets.
Why didn’t they just take them in the open desert? Or arrest them quietly once they entered the city walls? Why do the Romans always have to make such a show of everything?
But as unwelcome as these developments were — as angry as they’d made him — they hadn’t made him kill. No. It was fear, not anger, that had cost this little girl her life. Fear that had summoned Herod’s hands to her throat and made them squeeze the life out, until her bulging eyes glazed over and foam ran red from her mouth. Herod had killed her because for the first time since these troubles began, he was frightened.
To any rational mind, the facts demanded fear. The Romans had been close enough to touch the Antioch Ghost. Close enough to touch the baby’s belly with the tip of their swords. All the might of the empire had descended on a single street, with a single purpose: to kill a wretched little thief and the helpless little infant he harbored. And what had happened? The impossible. One man — one injured, exhausted man — had slipped through their fingers.
When Herod had been told the details of Hebron, he’d known. This was no longer a simple matter of old prophecies and ancient superstitions. This was the God of Abraham taunting the King of Judea. Laughing in the face of Herod’s power. Of Rome’s might. There could be no more doubt: The child was indeed the Messiah. And if allowed to live — if allowed to reach Egypt and disappear beyond the eyes of Judea and Rome — then he would topple the kingdoms of the world. Perhaps even the empire itself.
The emperor won’t believe a word of it, of course. No matter what the evidence is, or how many miracles deliver the fugitives from the hands of his troops. But I know… and it’s time I got directly involved.
Herod thought about his next steps, lying beside a girl who would never know the miseries of age. He would honor her memory somehow. When this was all over, he would do something to make up for his outburst. Perhaps he would order a statue of her made and added to the collection in his courtyard so that he might enjoy her beauty again whenever he went for a stroll outside.
But first, he would enjoy her body one last time.
V
The cool light of early morning invited itself through the windows, the house still quiet and asleep. Balthazar sat alone at the large table downstairs, a knife in his hand. The wound on his chest had finally healed enough for his stitches to come out, and he was carefully cutting them one by one. Pulling the loose threads from his skin, until a shadow cut across the table in front of him, drawing his eyes up.
Sela was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, her hair a mess and her eyes half asleep. But still so beautiful it isn’t fair. She was quick to look away and continue in, as if she’d expected to find him sitting here so early, bare chested and knife in hand. Balthazar, for his part, had been quick to resume cutting his stitches out, pretending she wasn’t there at all.
It had been this way for three days. No words had passed between them since their painful reunion. Balthazar had made a point of avoiding her, keeping mostly to his room upstairs, nursing his swollen eyes and cut lips. Coming down only when he knew she was away or asleep and relying on Joseph to bring him his meals. But with today’s departure weighing heavy on his mind, he’d tossed and turned until it’d become useless to resist. And so he’d come downstairs, thinking he’d be the only one up at this hour.