by J M Fraser
Enough! She’d left her emotions behind. The path she now followed was a righteous one. And if she’d turned at the wrong fork here in Judea, she could travel further back, to Moses. Or perhaps forward a bit. She’d try over and over again, because she was…
Playing God?
No. No. No. No. No.
Following God’s direction.
She turned to the scene behind her.
Deep within a mighty palace, King Herod the Great rolled over and continued his nap in the peace and contentment of a protected man. The mile-long wall protecting his palace stood tall enough to discourage the fiercest army. The masonry rose twenty feet above the ground, and sentry towers soared three times as high.
Fiercest army be damned. Breaching the fortification would be mere child’s play.
Gabriella hypnotized the guards into opening the gate and then rendered them asleep, along with everyone in the palace who hadn’t already settled down for a midafternoon nap.
She stepped into Herod’s dream.
History and legend tell many tales about kings heeding messages received in their sleep, but Herod had an inkling of his madness and never trusted his dreams. Therefore, Gabriella settled on a different strategy for communicating with the man. Since he claimed to be a Jew but hedged his bets by harboring a secret belief in mythology, best to have him perceive her as a goddess visiting his waking life from the heavens. He didn’t need to know he was sleeping, now did he?
She set the king into a sleep walk.
Herod slipped into a white tunic and threw a silk robe over his shoulders. He fitted an emerald-studded leather band around his head. Then he stepped to a marble table and preened in the reflection of a washbasin. Advancing years and desert sun had bleached the man’s beard, sideburns, and hair but spared his brows their darkness. They enhanced the brooding madness in his eyes.
Gabriella led the king out of his bedchamber, across the decorative marble tiles of a hallway, and into a lounge where servants, guests, and soldiers lay scattered about, all having been rendered fast asleep. She and Herod stepped around those who’d collapsed to the bare floor. Upon reaching a glistening pool in the center of the room, she awakened him.
While the king splashed water on his face, Gabriella admired the great artwork surrounding them. Intricate clusters of circles, squares, and curlicues adorned the floor and walls. An Egyptian fresco had been painted across the high ceiling to please the eyes of guests awakening from their naps. The eastern décor reflected the influence of Cleopatra, the lover of Herod’s best friend, Marcus Antonius.
Eventually, the king turned from the pool and gasped at the sight of those lying senseless at his feet.
The time had come for the game to begin. Gabriella came up behind him. “They say you are the king of the Jews.”
Herod spun around, reaching for the dagger sheathed beneath the folds of his robe. But the panic in his face evaporated at the sight of her.
Gabriella had arrived wearing a 1940s skirt and blouse—a wildly provocative outfit for this biblical time. And the king loved young flesh. His second wife, Miriamne, had been but fourteen when they married.
If Herod’s bulging eyes were any indication, Gabriella had his rapt attention. But could she hold it? History remembered the king as a madman for good reason. She found only chaos and bursts of uncontrolled laughter echoing within his head. There would be no reading his mind.
“What maiden dares address a king?”
She folded her arms, pressed her lips together, and glared. When playing the role of goddess, one must show a king who is boss. She strolled to a cushion and settled onto it.
“My name is Gabriella, and I come from on high. Perhaps you know my homeland as Olympus.” While she couldn’t tell a direct lie and refer to an actual goddess’s name—the inability to fib is a cross all angels had to bear—she’d always been able to misdirect with ease. Roman and Greek mythology included countless gods and goddesses. The king couldn’t have kept up with every one of them.
“Gabriella, you say.” Herod moved his hand to his chin.
She nodded.
“I know of no such goddess.”
She shrugged.
After a long staring match, he motioned across the room. “You struck down these others?”
“Only you are worthy to cast eyes on me, Herod. They’ll awaken after I depart.” She patted the cushion beside her.
The king sat and wasted no time petting the flesh above her knee.
Gabriella brushed his grubby fingers away. “I’ve come from the future.”
“What manner of goddess can do such a thing?”
“Think of me as a messenger, if goddess doesn’t suit you. Where I come from, we have a revered book called the New Testament, and within that treasure, the scribe Matthew tells of you.”
“Ah, history remembers me.”
“Not fondly, I’m afraid.”
Herod gripped her leg.
She swatted his hand. “Matthew spoke of a plot you uncovered.”
“A plot?”
“Yes, involving a pretender to the throne. The locals claimed a new king of the Jews had been born, and according to Matthew, you sent three trusted men to determine the infant’s location.”
Herod returned his hand to his chin and looked past her with cunning in his sharpened eyes. “Tell the rest of this Matthew’s story. Do I succeed in killing the child?”
“His reference to the three Magi was accurate?”
“A goddess from the future should know.”
The king would have been shocked by Gabriella’s limited store of firsthand knowledge. During Christ’s years on earth, she had lived in Ethiopia, oblivious to the events unfolding in Judea. But she did know the Bible. “According to Matthew, someone advised the three Magi to remain silent. You haven’t heard from them, have you?”
Herod burst off the cushions. He paced in front of her, muttering to himself. Back and forth, back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. “I’ll send my soldiers to hunt the pretender down!”
“You won’t find him.”
“I’ve heard he was born in Bethlehem. We’ll kill every infant in the village.”
“Herod.”
“We’ll search Jerusalem, too!”
“Please sit with me. I’ve come to help.” She patted the cushion again.
The king returned. Muttered some more. Quieted. He kept his hands to himself, the threat to his throne having trumped his lechery.
Gabriella met his simmering eyes. “The Magi were warned in a dream. Only an angel could have provided such a signal. Angels are God’s messengers.”
“Which god?”
“The only God. In any event, I no longer believe the angel acted on His behalf. Perhaps she misinterpreted His intentions.” Gabriella suppressed an involuntary shudder. That particular knife could cut both ways.
Herod caressed his beard with spindly fingers. “The gods want me to be king.”
“We can right this wrong.”
“How?”
If she answered his question, she’d be denying the world its messiah.
But the dancing butterflies had pantomimed a clock spinning backward, and Asura had spoken of boulders.
God wanted this.
Didn’t He?
What was she doing? What was she doing? What was she doing?
Gabriella took a deep breath. “Send your soldiers to Egypt. I’ll draw a map of the region where Joseph, Mary, and the young pretender are hiding.”
* * *
Next stop: New York City, August 6, 1945
Gabriella again used the World of Mortal Dreams for passage, returning to the proper date on the calendar. What would she find in the Americas? Would the region even be settled yet? Her heart thumped in her ears.
Perhaps God would reward her. Maybe she’d find the gates of heaven within the forested island, which might not be known now as Manhattan. He might favor her with a seat at His right side. Oh, what a joyous bles
sing that would be. She’d whisper counsel to him. So many ideas floated in her head. She might even—
Wait.
The World of Mortal Dreams waystation at the end of her trip back from Judea, the sleeping mind she now stepped out of, belonged to a vagrant on a bench within a well-known but completely impossible and desperately unwelcome financial district.
She stood in the middle of Wall Street! The towering Chrysler and Empire State buildings still pierced the northern sky, despite the boulder she’d tossed into Herod’s pond.
She blinked.
Taxi cabs honked their horns.
How could this be? Without Christianity, the dominoes should have fallen in a different direction. The Crusades would have been avoided, other wars waged, alliances formed, treaties broken, different babies born, Columbus never conceived.
Gabriella hurried to a specific address, Seventy-nine Broadway. One of the city’s oldest architectural monuments.
Trinity Church still pointed its spire to the heavens.
She caught her breath.
That insane fool of a king hadn’t used the information she provided.
Unless…
Perhaps God had spoken again, this time in anger, using a flick of an almighty hand to deflect her feeble attempt at changing the past.
Gabriella lowered her head, awaiting the inevitable lightning bolt to strike her down.
An airplane buzzed high above. Two children laughed as they played marbles in an alleyway.
Come to me.
God’s anger couldn’t have been clearer. He snapped His consonants and elongated His vowels. The voice she’d waited a thousand lifetimes to hear now seared her heart to blackened coal. She choked back a sob.
Come to me.
He spoke from the direction of the Hudson River. She trudged forward, an ineffective, outcast angel, summoned by a Creator who no doubt despised her now.
Legions of women rushed by, hurrying to offices where they’d been filling the shoes of their overseas men. Vendors hawked their wares. Traffic clogged the streets. Apparently, news about Hiroshima hadn’t reached across the ocean to plunge these people into a mood as dark as hers. But given the lack of proof she’d changed anything, the bomb surely had fallen. Ninety thousand people had perished. Asura was gone.
Come to me.
Perhaps God planned to aim the lightning bolt at the water’s edge so no one else would be hurt when He struck her down.
The crowd thinned in Battery Park. A few sailors loitered with their girlfriends. Two young women pushed buggies side by side, chatting, giggling, unaware a shocking event in Japan surely portended a time of despair for their unborn children. Mankind would never stop with a single bomb. Apocalypse beckoned civilization like a moth to the flame, and her act had done nothing to stop it.
Gabriella reached the shore and waited. Slow minutes passed.
Nothing happened.
She gazed across the brackish waters at the Statue of Liberty in the distance. “How do I even begin to ask forgiveness?”
The statue held her tongue, but a tugboat hauling a battered warship to a repair yard tooted a laugh, and the river stank of fish. These were not favorable signs. She turned away.
A rumble sent her spinning back.
The water bubbled, steamed, and lifted in reaction to something pushing up from below. Only an object of great mass could create such a disturbance—an impossible event, such as a meteor returning to the cosmos as explosively as it had arrived eons earlier.
Although the turbulence roared like a waterfall, no one seemed to notice. Longshoremen used pulleys to load a ship with containers from a nearby dock. Taxicabs beeped their way around Wall Street traffic. The voice of a boy hawking newspapers rose above the clamor.
A shadowy shape far less massive than befit the initial ruckus lifted out of the water. Soon, a mere sheet of smoke hovered a few feet above the surface, rushing from bottom to top with dizzying fury, each end curling into itself like a scroll.
Gabriella trembled.
“Hiroshima!” the newspaper boy hawked.
A tugboat blasted its horn again.
The smoke drifted toward her.
The hand of God?
CHAPTER 3
Tense moments later, still in Manhattan, August 6, 1945
No sulfurous hell fires.
Gabriella savored the aroma of fish in the Hudson, car exhaust, factory smoke, hot dogs, and a hundred other city smells. God hadn’t struck her down with an angry hand.
She turned her back on the roiling curtain of smoke and headed uptown, if not walking with a spring in her step, at least enjoying a strong measure of relief. But anguish over the day’s earlier events soon closed in on her again, tightening her throat and watering her eyes. She walked faster. To where, she didn’t have a clue. Away.
The smoke tagged after her like a lonely puppy. Just as before, nobody noticed an impossible, three-foot-high column softly murmuring like a distant waterfall. Not the sailors on leave in their smart white uniforms, the women hurrying this way and that in a city whose young men were still mopping up the war overseas, the shoe-shine boy beckoning customers, or the street vendor lording over a steaming cartful of hot dogs. In the chaos of New York, was almost anything taken in stride?
No. More than likely, she was dealing with somebody’s idea of a joke meant only for her. In Gabriella’s worries over retribution for a failed blow against Christianity, she’d mistaken simple illusions for a heaven-sent message. A prankster toyed with her.
Henry Stoddard came to mind.
Like those few others of his kind, Stoddard spent most of his time living as a hermit in the World of Mortal Dreams. His breed of wise men—some might say sorcerers, but she knew better—possessed three gifts that set them apart from ordinary mortals. And these were grand gifts, indeed. Each of these men knew how to freely travel back and forth between the waking world and the World of Mortal Dreams without losing awareness of one side while visiting the other. Each enjoyed an excessively long lifespan. And each had the ability to draw on the collective imagination stored in mankind’s infinite collection of dreams to create staggering illusions.
Gabriella had a destination now. Not Uptown or Midtown or across the river to the next borough. Not inside or outside or up or down. Within. She closed her eyes, freed her mind, and crossed from the waking realm to the World of Mortal Dreams.
Henry Stoddard kept his castle where most dreamers didn’t tread. Gabriella trudged across a forbidding fantasy of badlands and cliffs, her unwelcome smoke cloud in tow, until she caught sight of the white tower rising above the rocky hills.
She hesitated. The wise man hadn’t welcomed her into his castle since the days of the Puritans. Although the Salem witch trials had ended over three hundred years ago, he still harbored a grudge over her small role in the matter—a few whispered suggestions gone awry. Why was an angel always to blame? People made their own choices. She hadn’t forced anyone to follow her wishes.
But perhaps the smoke breathing down her neck was Henry’s awkward attempt at extending an olive branch after all these years. What better time than this? After losing Asura, she surely needed a friend.
Gabriella found him puttering in a garden outside the castle walls. The man stood as tall as ever and still cut a handsome profile in a rugged sort of way, despite the toll of centuries. He’d shaved his beard and trimmed his dark mop of hair to a civilized length since the last time she’d seen him. Now he looked like just another ordinary, suntanned fellow who happened to rival Moses, Abraham, or Noah in lifespan.
Henry glanced up from a bush he’d been pruning and stared at her for a long moment. “Well, look who the wind blew in.” Not smiling, exactly, but not frowning, either. He set his shears on a worktable beside an assortment of roses.
The flowers might have been meant for Sarah. He’d been visiting his wife’s grave for centuries. Or perhaps he’d found a new love interest at last. Gabriella would have probed Stoddard�
�s mind, but the man had a sixth sense for detecting such an invasion, and he always got grumpy over it. He’d extended an olive branch. Improper behavior on her part could set their relationship back another three hundred years.
“What have you got following you?” Henry had humor in his voice. A fine start.
“You tell me.”
He stepped up to the smoke, held a hand near it as if testing it for heat, then plunged inside, up to the wrist. He pulled out, none the worse for wear. “How would I know?”
“I thought you conjured it.”
Stoddard glanced from her to the smoke and back again with hand on chin, lips pursed. “To what end?”
He had to be bluffing. Maybe if she just stole a quick peek inside his—
“Are you rooting around in my head, Gabriella?”
Slogging through a morass of irritation would have been a more apt description. She almost tripped over his scowl on the way out. “I’m having a bad day.”
“That’s no excuse.” Whatever friendliness might have been evident in his expression at the start of this conversation had now turned to ice.
Gabriella almost melted into a puddle of tears. She fought them back and shook her fist at the smoke curling from bottom to top in its never-ending rush. “This thing rose out of the Hudson River and decided to shadow me wherever I go.”
“Move along, then.” Henry took up the shears and bent to a bush.
“But I came to see you.”
“Go away. You’re a maloika.”
The scent of flowers brought too sharp an image—a Japanese girl, the shared bite of an apple. The tears were getting harder to hold back. “A what?”
“A maloika. Trouble. The evil eye. You bring bad luck wherever you go.”
She couldn’t stop her shoulders from trembling.
Henry took a step back. “Oh no, you’re not going to—”
The well of tears burst, bringing racking sobs, helpless sobs, lonely sobs.
