Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  “I was?” Rachel asks.

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that before? You sing in your sleep.”

  “I do?”

  The Grandma nods. “You’re a very strange little girl, you know,” she says.

  Rachel chews the gingerbread face and sighs.

  “Now what do you suppose this is all about?”

  The Grandma stands next to the Christmas tree, looking out the window. Rachel gets off the couch and squeezes between the Grandma and the tree. A gray cat meanders down the crooked sidewalk in front of the house. In its mouth it holds a limp mouse. Walking behind the cat is a straggling line of children in half-buttoned winter coats and loosely tied scarves, tiptoeing in boots and wet sneakers, not talking to each other or catching snowflakes on their tongues, only intently watching the cat with their bright eyes.

  “Like the Pied Piper,” the Grandma says.

  Rachel shrugs and goes back to the couch. “It’s just a bunch of the little kids,” she says. “Who’s the Pied Piper?”

  The Grandma sighs. “Don’t they teach you anything important these days?”

  Rachel shakes her head.

  “Well, it looks like I’ll have to,” the Grandma says.

  And she does.

  Translated literally from the original Greek, the Gospel of Matthew relates how magi (the plural of a word most commonly translated as magician, although the meaning would have also included practitioners of astrology, alchemy, and those with other forms of esoteric knowledge) from the rising [of the sun]—showed up in Jerusalem seeking a child who had been born King of the Jews. In Orson Scott Card’s story we find—among other things—they may have come from very far away, indeed, and why they choose to make gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

  Wise Men

  Orson Scott Card

  I got control of Lytrotis, a half-Greek adviser to King Herod of Judea, in the year 734 of the Roman Republic. It was the 27th year of the Peace of Augustus. It was the last year of Herod’s life.

  My control over Lytrotis was complete. He had thought I was a god, and that I would make him great—never guessing that the only power I had was the power to take control of his body, shunting him aside.

  He discovered how I had lied to him within moments of my taking possession, but it was too late for him then. I was too strong for him, too experienced. He screamed with all his might, he wrestled with me day and night, and to me his screams were the bleating of a lamb, and his writhing was the fluttering of a moth.

  Eloi, my enemy, had given poor Lytrotis what he had denied to me: a featherless biped body to dwell in, with all its pleasures and pains, with those clever little hands, with eyes that saw so clearly and yet saw nothing at all, and with a mouth to speak . . . so that lies could be told.

  Lies! Ah, how sweet to tell lies again. During my time between bodies I felt like a prisoner, able to communicate only as we evyonim do in our bodiless state, showing memories to each other, utter truth, so that we stand exposed before each other, all our memories and motives known.

  As I stood exposed before Eloi on that terrible day six thousand years before, when he cast us down into the Earth. The featherless bipeds had already spread themselves throughout the world, had already acquired the rudiments of language and the making of tools. They were ripe to be possessed by us, the evyonim, the massless wanderers through the darkness of spacetime, but Eloi had a plan to make these bipeds immortal, the bonds between beast and evyon permanent.

  “They are not to be exploited,” he said, “they are to be elevated. Your bodiless aeons are over. It is time for you to become like me, if you can—tied to the physical world again, yet masters of all things. If you can.”

  His plan was a foolish one. Full of chances for failure. The bodies were too delicious. Once we had tasted them, we would not want to let them go. Yet most of us would lose them. I had seen it before, hadn’t I? On the world of the cherubim, the world of the seraphim, the world of the nagidim, the world of the yaminim—only a tiny fraction of the evyonim were able to keep the beast they rode, and all the rest were given a stunted, crippled, broken version . . . because that’s all that Eloi thought that they deserved.

  “This time,” I said, “we will do it my way. I will not discard them the way you do. I will save them all.”

  How they rejoiced! But Eloi only looked at his beloved, his darling of darlings, his chosen one, his Beyn, he whose real name I am incapable of saying and whose face I am forbidden to see.

  “I will live and die for them,” he said. “I will save all who master the beasts and then live to serve the good of all.”

  “The weak, you mean,” I said. “The ones who cower. When I have mastered my beast, I will not cower.” I was so brave, and all who saw my courage were rapt with admiration.

  In that moment the evyonim chose, and because we cannot lie, Eloi could sort us all at once. One-third of them were mine, two-thirds his. But even if nine-tenths had chosen me, he would have done the same, for the evyonim are nothing to him unless they grovel to him. He cast me down, and my one-third with him, and kept the rest as his darlings, and then he gave them beasts to ride, one by one as they were born.

  But they were weak and I was strong. I took whatever beast I wanted. I could not expel the darlings whose beast I usurped—they remained there, watching me with terror and admiration as I rode the beast the way it was meant to be ridden. And when I was done with it, I discarded it—they could have the ruins of it for whatever days or weeks or years it might have left. They had seen what greatness could do with a featherless biped; their own life was pitiful by comparison.

  Yet every beast I used, I knew I could not keep. The day would come when all his darlings had their beasts, and then he would bind them, the ones he chose: evyon to biped, inseparable, immortal, filled with irresistible power, and yet still the pitiful, cowering, subservient, rule-bound darling without a spark of self-will in it.

  And I would have nothing.

  One chance I had, and it was now. For I saw the preparations—they could not be hidden from me. The bodiless darlings who sang to the shepherds, unable to hide their joy. The baby that plunged into the world. I knew who it was inside the little beast. He was here to do what he had promised—live and die for them, and then rise with the power to make the beasts immortal and bind it to the evyon, so it was no more hungry, but filled now; not evyon but immortal and inseparable ish, beynim like the Beyn.

  The despicable darlings.

  But if he failed, then all of them were broken, all of them were lost.

  When he cast me down everyone thought that I was finished. But he hasn’t the power to destroy us. He can deprive us, cut us off, leave us hungering forever, but he cannot make us cease to exist, just as he can’t create a single one of us. We can only be found and named, located and led, linked to beasts and thus empowered. We don’t belong to him! We are not his property!

  I was cast out, but I knew that when they all saw the failure of his plan—not just the evyonim, but all the ones he had made immortal, who carried out his orders—they would see that he was wrong.

  It is the thing they will not bear, you see. They will not follow him then, if his plan fails. It all falls apart. Chaos is reborn out of his miserable, pinched-off order when they cease to trust in him.

  And so I watched and waited all those centuries, until the time came at last. I watched the starships dart between the worlds, the convergence of the beynim. I saw how it all led to now, to here, to Judea, to the people he had fooled into thinking they were chosen but had really enslaved to his niggling laws and then abandoned.

  I stood afar off, unable to look directly at the entry of the Beyn into this world. But I knew the nature of the beast.

  A baby. Weak. Killable.

  Now that Eloi was committed, there was no second chance. This was the only body that his beloved Beyn could ever bind with. If I killed it early, before it came into its power, then his darlings could never be bound
. Their beasts would stay in their graves. None would rise. They would be lost forever.

  Like me.

  Eloi knew the danger, of course. And so he hid his Beyn from me. Somewhere in Judea. Somewhere in the lands ruled by Herod. That’s all I knew.

  So I came to Lytrotis and studied him, all his desires and dreams. Then I began to reach inside him and kindle little fires, wakening and strengthening the hopes and wishes that were useful to me. He felt my presence and thought that all those fires were promises. Did he want a little power? I showed him his own dreams of taking life and giving death. Did he want honor? I showed him his own face wearing the majesty of kings. He wanted all of it. I never lied to him. I showed him his own darkest desires and he lied to himself, convincing himself that if he let me in, I would give it all to him. I never said.

  Fool, Lytrotis! Let me in, and your beast will have it all, but I will be the rider. Are there pleasures? Yes, you’ll feel a pale echo of what I, the master of this body, feel. But the choices are all mine, until I tire of this beast and let you have it back.

  Until that day, Lytrotis had been a hanger-on, one that Herod tolerated because he was a flatterer and because he was young and attractive. But now, with me inside and in control, with a tongue, with language, I began to be able to lie in earnest. Not flattery, but good advice, based on my thousands of years of learning how the darlings can be controlled.

  Herod had long felt his kingdom slipping away. The Romans loomed and circled like vultures: Die, Herod, they seemed to say, and your kingdom will drop into our hands, no matter how you buttress it.

  Herod built the Jews a temple, and they still despised him. He built cities and filled them with Greeks, and they looked down on him. He killed his wife and three of his sons when they conspired against him and still he was not safe. As his body aged and sickened, he had nothing left.

  Then I took over the body of this sycophant and suddenly Herod began to hear wisdom.

  The good news I promised him came true. My warnings saved him several times. All I said to Herod was the purest truth. The only lie was this: that he could trust me.

  “In my old age, to have such an adviser as you,” he said once. “If I had known you earlier . . . ”

  But if I had known earlier that this was the time and place, the kingdom would have been mine, and Herod a discarded corpse somewhere.

  As for taking him over—what good would that have done me? He was nearly a corpse already. Sick, in constant pain. His beast would die too soon. I had to use Herod’s power to kill the Beyn, and Lytrotis gave me the means to do it. Herod listened to me. Herod trusted me. Herod did what I told him to do.

  I set his agents to searching Judea from end to end—as well as other places heavily infested with Jews, like Galilee and Syria and Egypt. I learned when the baby had been born, but no names, and the parents could have taken it somewhere else by now, for all I knew. Then Eloi tipped his hand.

  Three travelers came into Judea, and my agents brought me word before Herod knew of them.

  “They’re strange men,” said Jerubbel. “I thought that they were kings, but they claim not to be. Merely educated men. Sages.”

  “But strange—what do you mean by that?”

  “Foreign, but not from any place we know of. None of the kingdoms of Parthia—they speak Persian and Aramaic, but they aren’t from any place in Parthia. Names of farther places have been spoken to them, but they claim not to be from any of them. Not India or China, not Samarkand or the Isles of the Sea. ‘From the East,’ is all they say.”

  “What do they look like?”

  Jerubbel shook his head. “I stare at them intently, but at once my gaze shifts away and I can’t remember what I saw. When I don’t focus my eyes on them, I can see that there are three—two tall, one short. They ride on dromedaries, with six more camels behind them, laden with supplies. They have servants who can be looked at—ordinary men. Those I can tell you about; I talked to them. Two Assyrians, a Babylonian, an Elamite, an Armenian. But they all say the same: I don’t know what they look like, or where they’re from, or what the language is that they speak among themselves.”

  “Aren’t the servants afraid to be with such strange men?” I asked.

  “They are,” said Jerubbel. “But the pay is good, and these ‘wise men’ are mild-tempered and never beat them. So the servants stay, and talk of these marvels to men like me.”

  “Take this report to Herod as soon as you can,” I said, “but don’t speak to him of how you can’t actually look at them. That will frighten him, and he’ll either want to kill them or refuse to see them. Speak to him when I am at his side.”

  Jerubbel did what I asked, and when Herod heard of these wise men from unknown lands, he sat in thought.

  “What a great opportunity,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “They come from lands that Rome has never heard of,” I said. “And yet they came to you.”

  “But they haven’t come to me.”

  “They entered Judea,” I said. “You are king here. Send for them. They will come.”

  “I don’t want to see them,” he said. For sometimes Herod had more wisdom than was useful to me. “They don’t belong here.”

  “They don’t belong here,” I agreed, “which is why you must meet them, so you can learn their business. How can a king be safe with strangers in the land?”

  So Herod’s men went out and within two days the Wise Men walked into his court and I laid eyes on them for the first time.

  I almost laughed aloud.

  Of course they could not be looked upon by these beasts. They were not of this species of featherless biped, not even of this planet, and did not want to be known for what they were. A seraph, a yamin, a nagid. The seraph’s wings were hidden under a cloak, but I could see them moving as he walked; the yamin’s nearly spineless movements made him seem to seep across the floor like something liquid; the nagid hobbled, trying not to move in the great two-footed hops that are native to his race.

  All of them chosen as beasts for evyonim to bind with because they were like enough to Eloi: A large brain, language, hands that made tools. All of life on every planet bent itself to creating beasts that Eloi could employ as mounts for those who served him, as Eloi himself once mounted such a beast on yet another world, and bound to it, and made the thing immortal.

  It stops here, I thought, as seraph, yamin, and nagid approached. I was not bound to Lytrotis’s beast, so I was not blinded as Eloi’s darlings were, seeing only the beast-face and never the evyon within. I could not be deceived by their fendings and shadowings. I was not yet trapped within the brain.

  The seraph was the one called Asdruel. The yamin was not known to me, but that is because they are not comfortable at such low gravity and rarely come to the world where I have been imprisoned. The nagid was a little pest named Lemuel who liked to write sentimental poetry and have it translated into every language he could find. Such vanity—supposedly against the rules, but apparently his poems pleased Eloi and so the poems continued to slither their way into every culture.

  And because of who they were, and what they were, I knew why they were here. The Beyn would not have power to raise his body from the dead unless they began the transformation now, the deep binding that no other of Eloi’s darlings was pure enough to undergo without destroying the body in the process. It had to happen before the baby came into its language, preferably before he began to walk upright. They would have the chemicals, the bioforms, or as these bipeds would say, the potions and the spells.

  They would also have the little baby’s home address.

  No, I could not follow them. They would know me then. But here in Herod’s court, I could hide inside Lytrotis and not be recognized.

  I could see that Herod was in a mood to be surly and abrupt, but oil was what we needed now, not vinegar. “Be kind and helpful to them, my king,” I whispered in his ear, “and they will tell us all we need to know.”


  By now Herod took my counsel almost before I gave it.

  “Why do such esteemed ambassadors come to my poor kingdom?” asked Herod, his voice soft and meek.

  Ah yes, thought I, this is the Herod who somehow got both Octavian and Antony to back him, so he could keep his kingdom no matter which of them might triumph in their civil war.

  “We come in search of him who is born king of the Jews,” said Asdruel, for his mouth was best suited to framing the speech of these bipeds. Herod understood him easily, as did all the court; only I could hear how strained his voice was to make such difficult sounds.

  “You may speak to me in Greek,” said Herod. “Or Aramaic.”

  “It is Hebrew in which the prophecies were written,” said Asdruel. “We saw the star of the newborn king blaze brightly in the east, and we have come to add our poor selves to his worthship.”

  “Judea we knew,” added Lemuel, his voice squeaking. No one seemed to notice, or if they did, they did not care. Always these “wise men” deflected from themselves whatever they did not want the bipeds to notice. But I was not deflected. I could not be fooled. “Judea, but not where in the land. It is larger than we thought.”

  I leaned to Herod’s ear. “Your own wise men will search out the answer.”

  “Small compared to Rome,” said Herod. “Towns and villages, where Rome is nations and cities. Yet we also have the Law and the Prophets, and men skilled in the searching of them. Perhaps we have a book you have not read, a prophecy you do not know. Stay here and dine, and wash yourselves from your journey. Before your meal and bath are over, we will have whatever answer can be found.”

  I was amused at the thought of a yamin washing in plain water—it would osmote every vital mineral right out of his body. So defenseless, the yaminim. Not that he could die—these three were already dead and then restored, made immortal on their own worlds. But the water would boil away from him and it might be hard to conceal completely from the bipeds.

  “We will eat, and bathe,” said Asdruel. “And eagerly we await your counsel.”