“Sometimes a pedlar, a friend of my father,“passes this way and we send messages. Always my father says that he is saving to buy me free, to be patient and keep the Law and work well and freedom will come; always I send back a message to say that I am happy and have a good master and mistress. I think sometimes that this is contrary to the Law, “Thou shalt not bear false witness”, but it harms no one and comforts my father and my mother.”
“And observes the Law about honouring them.”
“You know about that,” she said eagerly.
“You know, when you came to drink at the trough, something in my mind said, this is not a beggar, this is a prophet! And it is strange that I should think that, since you are not a Jew. But you know our Law.”
Balthazar nodded.
“A little.” He racked his memory for some words, used by Eliezer, and applicable to this child’s case. He found it.
“Sorrow may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning!”
“Oh,” she said, her ugly little face transfigured, ‘you do know! That
is a saying from–—’ She broke off as a loud,ringing female voice called, “Susannah!”
“I must go. I’ve wasted time …” she said, and limped hastily away.
Balthazar stayed where he was in the sheltered angle between the walls, the hidden place where Susannah came to cry. The meal he had just eaten weighed upon him with a comforting, enervating weight. His wrist, freed of the rough, bloodstained bandage and recently cooled in the trough, hurt less than it had done. He dozed. The somnolent, dead afternoon hour ended with an inrush of travellers, anxious not to be on the road after dark, anxious to secure room for themselves under the tiled awning which sheltered the platform that ran about the enclosure for animals, or, if they were rich a private sleeping chamber and a place at the table where the meal was served for such as could afford it. Balthazar roused himself, not without self-reproach. Indirectly he had justified the Lady’s jokes about eunuchs; out in search of the indescribable, the wonder for which there were no words, he was still a slave to his need to eat and sleep.
He rose and stretched himself and took a step or two out of the secluded corner into the main entry of the yard. He was thirsty again and intended to take another drink from the trough.
He never took that drink, for as he emerged from behind the corner of the house, two men, on camels, sagging, exhausted camels quite unlike those he had seen in his vision, rode into the yard. And their faces, their hats, everything about them, except that they, like the camels, looked utterly exhausted, was exactly as he had seen them in his waking dream. Even the hats, about which there could be no mistake.
He ran forward with all the joy, the incredible excitement of one who finds a dream translated into fact.
“You are those I have been seeking!” he cried, in his weightless tenor voice.
“You follow the star. I beg you, take me with you!”
They looked at him with blank, uncomprehending faces. And of all the bad moments in his life that was quite the worst.
six NAMELESS VILLAGE 500 miles Melchior and Caspar had not been travelling a week before the younger man had learned one very useful lesson—toughness had little to do with appearance. The old man, so frail and thin, was never the one to suggest that they had travelled far enough for one day, and to Caspar, not yet accustomed to the motion of his camel, the days, extending far into the night, seemed very long. In the end he was compelled to protest, not on his own account—that he would have been ashamed to do—but on account of the camels.
“By the sun,” he said, ‘no wonder you lamed your other camel! These will drop dead under us if you go on this way.”
It chanced that he first said this in a desolate place; had it been in a town or a village, Melchior would probably have answered that they could buy fresh camels; but even he could see that here should the camels fail, there would be nothing for it but to go ahead on foot. So he said:
“You were right when you said that I needed a practical man as a companion. I never thought of the camels!”
“But you must yourself be tired,” Caspar said.
“My bones are tired,” Melchior said; ‘but they have been tired for so long that I no longer notice them.”
And when they halted, wherever that might be, by the roadside, to eat food that they carried, or in the crowded caravanserais, the day was still not ended for Melchior; he must take out a chart and make his complicated reckonings, the results of which were never to his liking.
“We must move faster,” was always his verdict. The need for haste obsessed him, and soon another problem arose.
“Night by night,” he said, “I grow more doubtful about our destination;
it lies south of Jerusalem. Of that I am almost sure.“Caspar, who had come out with the intention of seeing Jerusalem, and Herod too, if that could be managed, always tried to console him.
“You told me, on the first day we met that this child was to be born of a royal house; and Herod is King in Jerusalem. It may be that he has a Palace for Winter and a Palace for Summer, or one in the city and one in some quiet place, suitable for a breeding woman.” The Kings of Jexal had owned a Summer Palace, on high ground above the river, and Caspar spoke with some assurance.
“We must make first for Jerusalem, and there ask.”
When he said this for about the twentieth time Melchior, who had never denied that this might be the most sensible thing to do, suddenly said: “And in what tongue?”
The matter of language was becoming a problem in itself. As they moved westwards the dozens of dialects and mutations of the tongue which was common to them and which had been carried by the successive waves of emigrants from their original homeland, had become less and less of service to them, and Melchior had been obliged to fall back upon his book-learned Greek, a language he had never heard used and every word of which he must pronounce in all possible ways before he made himself understood. So long as they were moving, all unknowingly, along the road which Alexander and his men had twice travelled, where wounded men, exhausted men and various camp-followers had stayed and rested, Melchior had managed, not without difficulty to make himself intelligible enough to buy what was needed, to ask a few questions and obtain answers. As they moved south-westwards they had found that nobody at all understood any variation of their common tongue, and fewer and fewer people could understand Melchior’s version of Greek. When Melchior asked, with a slight bitterness, “And in what tongue ?” they had been moving, for several days, through a region where educated people spoke Latin and the common people some form of Aramaic—as varied and as seemingly universal as their own tongue was in the areas reached by successive impacts of the great Mongolian invasions. Caspar answered the question in his usual blunt way:
“That,” he said, “I must leave to you, Melchior. You are the scholar. I am merely the provider.” And that, Melchior realised, was not said as a reproach, it was, like most of Caspar’s statements, plain fact. Food, for man and beast, accommodation, tolls at bridges and ferries, everything had been paid for from Caspar’s pouch. And the man himself was a good fellow-traveller; tireless, uncomplaining. And considerate. Many times he had insisted that in a caravanserai Melchior should occupy a private room. Private rooms were few and costly. Ordinary travellers slept on a kind of platform, sheltered by an awning which ran around the open space where animals jostled and brayed and scratched and moaned. Caspar always, when they slept in a caravanserai, chose to sleep there, not in a private room.
“I like to sleep in the open; but for you I will buy a room,” he would say.
“You have your work to do, and coming back would disturb us all; also, since you sleep so little, you must sleep soundly, undisturbed by a child crying or an ass braying.” In many ways Caspar behaved to Melchior like a son—the son he had never had. They depended upon one another, and it worried Melchior a little that though Caspar’s contribution to their journey, the gold he carried, was acceptable everywhere, his contribution, his book-learned Greek, was becoming less and less of value. Also it was evident to him that Caspar’s goal was Jerusalem.