Unholy Night

July 19, AD 64

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.

He and Sela had built a home in the world’s great city, in the very heart of the empire that had once pursued them with everything it had. A city with plenty of pockets to pick and palms to read, although they’d resisted these old temptations and become innkeepers instead — with a rule to never, ever turn any expectant couples away, no matter how full up they were. They’d seen Roman emperors come and go, watched their children grow and have children of their own. The old man in the dream was right, Balthazar would often think. He’d become richer than Herod or Augustus could’ve imagined.

And when the time came, Sela had gone peacefully to her rest. Unlike Herod the Great, who, long ago, had suffered through a slow and painful madness that had stripped away whatever dignity he’d had left before death finally, mercifully overtook him.

Balthazar had mourned his wife quietly, his children and grandchildren by his side. And when night came and they all returned to their homes to leave him to his grief, the man who’d once been known as the Antioch Ghost dressed himself in dark robes and slipped into the night, true to his old moniker. He’d wheeled a small cart through the city and let himself into a vacant villa amid the crowded homes of the wealthy. He’d collected as much firewood as he could find within its walls and built a simple pyre out of it — not in the house’s courtyard, but around the wooden table of its dining room. When he was finished, he’d taken Sela’s body off the cart, washed her, and dressed her in white robes, as was customary. With tremendous effort, he’d placed her on top of the pyre and poured lamp oil around its base.

Before he set it alight, Balthazar had offered a silent prayer for her soul, leaned over and kissed her forehead, and opened a clenched fist, revealing something shiny and gold in his palm.

A pendant.

The one he’d carried for so long. He’d placed it gently in her hands. The cold, wrinkled hands of a woman who, once upon a time, in the land of golden and forever, had sworn that she would burn all of Rome down.

And here it was… burning.

Balthazar watched from the hilltop, his face streaked with tears. He was so old, yet so spry and healthy for his age, almost unnaturally so. Sela had always said that his health was a gift from God, bestowed on him as a reward for all the suffering he’d endured. Maybe it was. Or maybe he was just lucky, though he’d come to doubt the existence of luck.

All he knew was, he’d never been quite the same after those two weeks. Since he’d held that baby to his chest. There’d been an indescribable feeling that had never left him, an energy, like the charge of the air before a lightning strike.

When his boys were little, Balthazar would shepherd them up and down Rome’s colonnaded streets, stopping to watch musicians perform or petting the strange animals that came from beyond the Himalayas. Once in a while, he would even splurge on a handful of cinnamon dates to share between them. Some afternoons, they would find a piece of shade on the banks of the Tiber. And while his sons — the eldest of whom he’d named Abdi — napped, Balthazar would sit and watch the men fish until he dozed off himself. Sometimes he would dream of those two weeks, of his fellow fugitives and the journey that ended on the shores of Egypt.

Balthazar never saw Joseph or Mary again, but he’d felt them in his soul in the years that followed. When word of their son’s arrest and crucifixion reached him from Jerusalem, he’d wept. Not because he adhered to any of the man’s teachings — or even knew what those teachings were, for that matter — but because he’d held him as a baby, because he’d felt him always and still. He’d also wept because he was a father and imagined the pain Joseph and Mary had felt upon his death.

As a young man, when Balthazar had seen that strange star vanish from the skies above Bethlehem, he’d thought, Nothing that bright burns for very long. He supposed the same could be said about the infant.

Fate hadn’t been quite as kind to the other wise men. After slipping out of the Roman camp, Gaspar and Melchyor had fled to the farthest reaches of the empire, never staying in one place for too long, living from one petty crime to the next. They’d been hard, lonely years. Despite the efforts of Herod’s son to sweep the whole embarrassing affair under the rug, word of Balthazar’s escape and defeat of two armies began to spread, and the Antioch Ghost was vaulted from minor infamy to legend. It didn’t take long for word of Gaspar and Melchyor’s betrayal to spread among the criminal class, either. Everywhere they went, the two men found themselves hunted by authorities and cast out by crooks.

In the end, they’d been caught right back where it all began: in the Great Temple in Jerusalem, trying to steal the same golden censer that had landed them in Herod’s dungeons thirty years earlier. This time, with no one to devise a daring escape, Gaspar and Melchyor had gone to their punishment as scheduled — crucified and left to rot in the sun outside the city walls.

As they’d hung there, dying, they’d spoken with the stranger who hung between them: the one with the plaque affixed to his cross: King of the Jews. Tears had fallen down Gaspar’s and Melchyor’s aging faces when they realized who the man was and what it meant that they’d been brought here to die beside him. They’d been waiting, after all, almost hoping to be punished for their betrayal all those years ago. They’d carried its guilt and suffered its consequences for too long. True to form, the carpenter’s son forgave them both before he died. Balthazar supposed he forgave them too. They’d been dead a long time.

He climbed onto the camel and watched the city burn below him a few moments longer.

“Forever,” he said to himself, then dug his heel into the animal’s side, just like he had in days of old, leaving Rome and its ashes behind. He would never see them again.

An ibex lifted its sleepy head off the desert floor, roused by the beating of feet. It was the only one of its herd to sense the faint trembling, and while the others slept, unaware, it watched a tiny, moonlit cloud of dust move across its field of view, dust kicked up by a galloping camel carrying an old man on its back. After watching them a moment, the ibex laid its head back down and closed its eyes, convinced there was no danger to itself or the herd. There were only two of them, after all. And besides, they weren’t headed this way…

They were riding toward that strangely bright star in the east.