A Quick Misstep

He Followed a Star

     The yellow starlight that had led him here had only grown brighter as Daniel rode over the unfamiliar road, but now he saw for certain that it was no star. A great torch was burning, as he'd begun to suspect as he neared this place and had been confirmed by his stop in the city just beyond the brook. Every night's brightness was bought with a morning of smoke, and yesterday had been black until the afternoon.

     Here was the source of it all, though--hidden in a grove of towering pines and cedars was the root of the blaze that had been lighting the sky since the start of summer. It had been a faint star for the people of the village where he'd started, a new sun for the people in the towns in-between, but the truth was known to the people in Wayford, the bustling city just a mile yonder through these hills. They told him the priests did their magic here.

     Daniel lulled the horse when he came beneath the fire, and he looked down at the dance happening in the valley below. Red and yellow-robed priests in carved, painted masks were singing and skipping around a jutting spire in the valley, tossing some sauced-up piece of deer or rabbit between them.

     He swung down off his racer, and Daniel didn't bother roping the beast up. Dovestep wouldn't run, and the stallion knew to make noise if robbers were around.

     Instead, Daniel crept close. He had left town on a whim, because everyone was making up stories about the star, but he wanted to know for himself, so he packed the saddlebags and set off running. This had been a long, lonely summer, and the heat was too much. He needed a little wind on his skin, and here, like this, he felt like a new man. Dovestep hadn't run like this since the last time Greeks tried invading the Holy Land, when Judge Gad roused all the able-bodied folk and Daniel had gotten to sling stones and throw spears.

     Now he was in their land, and these Greeks looked very strange. At least they weren't Mesopotamian, those savages whose kings coupled with priestesses out in the street for anyone to see, with all their shameful nakedness made plain. Daniel was a good Jew, and he had never bared himself to anyone except to his wives. Like Jacob the Patriarch, he had two, and both had given him strong sons with the curls of their mothers and the eagle face of their father. They were in the Holy Land, though, not exploring a strange land without either of the friends he'd started with. All he had left of them were their purses, which he would pass on to their families if he ever made it home.

     These Greeks had tight, cruel faces, and they bobbed around like snakes, hissing their secret song to one another as they played where no one else could find them, despite the light they were giving out to all the world.

     He came closer, creeping at first but then striding, deciding mid-step to come in as a man bereaved on the road. Greek priests had to grant sanctuary to travelers; that was their code. They would host him for three days, long enough for him to get his bearings again, and then they'd send him away after he explained himself, on that third and final day of parting.

     They looked angry when they saw him, though.

     "Who is this?" one cried. "Who could disturb--"

     "What god would allow an outsider to find the holy place? They have abandoned us; we are forsak--"

     "I come in the name of the God of Solomon," Daniel explained to them. At first he'd told people on the road that he worshiped the God of David, but people were more familiar with the son than the father, though it was David the conqueror who won his City of Peace, with a bright, red, and bloody sword. Solomon the Wise ruled it after, and built the temple there; that was the name the people of the world associated with the Lord of the Hebrews.

     "Outsider," that first voice shouted. She was a big-breasted woman, with thick-thighs that each supported an animal. A black viper had wrapped around one, while the other hosted a brown, furred spider. All eight of its eyes were orange and peering, hungry to weave a web big enough for Daniel to fall into. That snake's eyes were radiant yellow orbs blemished only by the black crack running down each, and as Daniel spoke, it flicked a tongue out, like to taste his words.

     "I seek xenia," he cried. "I have been to Olympia and seen the eyes of your great Lord Zeus flash red." Daniel had never see any such thing, but he knew the Greeks were very proud of their great god-king's statue, whose eyes were famous for flashing bright when the priests at the temple asked for a sign. "My way has been hard, and I see you warm and happy and comfortable. Can I share the space beside your fire?" He looked up. "And what a fire it is."

     He was properly underneath the great fuel-less miracle now, in the depths of the valley where the undergrowth was thick here, with furry green moss that tickled at his toes through his sandals and more junipers now than pine. They were slick with oil now, in late summer, the oil that could cure diseases of the skin. It was one of the few things Jerusalem imported regularly from whichever one of the Greek kings was most favored at present, because whatever juniper secreted the oil refused to grow in the capital.

     A normal bonfire would have been fed by all this timber, but like the pillar of flame that led Moses by night it burned bright in the sky. Some god had done this.

     "Do you see a camp here?" seethed another priest. He was a great bull of a man, with walls of obvious muscle under those robes. His mask was a red and angry face, which matched the one underneath as the man pulled it off. "We have no shelter to give. Run off now, Jew boy, before we kill you for being where you really shouldn't be."

     "Let's kill him anyway," said another woman, a mother with the stretch marks to prove it. She alone was naked, disrobed with her curls undone and free for all these believers to see, and she alone carried a weapon, though the rest of their staves were propped on nearby trees. Hers was in her hand, a long black rod of oak topped with a flaming pinecone.

     Daniel shook his head, but the woman was their leader, or near enough to it. The rest of them were decided if she was.

     She threw the meat, whatever it was, to another man, and then he saw it wasn't a meat dripping sauce; they were tossing a child between themselves. An infant, dead but still bleeding, was flying between them, and as another priestess caught it, the woman took a bite.

     He had wandered into a den of sinners, of child-slayers and cannibals. Daniel had heard of people doing this before, sacrificing a child to release all their potential in a wild blast of luck for their city and family, but people only spoke of it as a relic of a more brutal age, of men with more brutal gods. He assumed the gods of today had defeated all those evil gods alongside their wicked traditions, but here was yet more proof that the soldiers of Yahweh had further to go in their fight to bring light.

     All of them came, howling and spitting.

     He almost dropped to his knees to pray, but something in his mind said to run as fast as he could, and Daniel listened when he heard the voice of the Lord. If God told him that his feet would bring him safely back, then he would listen to Him.

     Dovestep was waiting, and Daniel leapt up. He was happy the horse hadn't been tied up when he was back in the saddle with no knot to undo, because the priests were fast, and only a step behind.

     All was well, though--until his stallion screamed, and they both came tumbling down.

     They had tripped over a yew, a great tumbling thing, with long lazy branches and roots that grew gnarled and far, invisible by night. Dovestep tumbled, and Daniel landed on his right hand. He heard it snap, and he screamed alongside the horse.

     The Greeks found him then. They all had their staves then, and he felt the bludgeons first, but it was the snake that killed him. Its long, oiled body tied itself tight around his neck, and it sank its teeth into his eye. He spasmed once, and then he was done.