Short Story

FOLLOWING THE STAR

by

Jim Boring
 

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

(from "Journey of the Magi, " T.S. Eliot)

Well, Misha, I think it is time to tell you the story of how we followed the star. The ache in my chest tells me that it may be now or never. Come sit beside me. Bring me that wine flask. No, no, don't make faces at me, the wine can't hurt me now - it helps ease the pain. Sit. Sit.

It begins in Damascus We had convened the first formal meeting of what were then known as Magi. There were Stoics and Epicureans and Cynics and Skeptics from Greece, and camp followers from Rome; there were sorcerers from Cilicia, astrologers from Syria, conjurers from Egypt. It was wonderful. We talked about physics and philosophy and magic and entertained each other with tales of manipulating rulers and common men alike.

It was during these discussions that I first met Balthazar and Melchior. Balthazar was the blackest man I have ever seen. He was an Ethiopian, tall and regal looking, a man of the desert but also very much a man of the world. His robes were as black as his skin and trimmed in gold. He wore an emerald the size of a shekel in his turban, which was also black and gold. An impressive man at first sight and even more impressive once fully known. As black as Balthazar was, that was how white Melchior was. He had no pigmentation to his skin at all. His eyes were pink and his hair was as white as his skin. Melchior was a man of the night. The stars were more familiar to him than the sun. Outside during the day he wore gloves of the finest silk from his home in Babylon and his strange eyes peered intently from the slit of the white turban he kept wrapped securely around his face. At night, however, Melchior would unwrap himself in great relief. He would unwind his turban and wear it like a long scarf over his robes. The gloves would be put away and his hands and face would almost glow in the moonlight.

What brought the three of us together was the natural bond of a common interest -- the stars. Balthazar practiced a form of astronomy unknown to either Melchior or me. It took us a while to become oriented to the differences in our various symbols and classifications. We spent many a late night spinning tales of astral discoveries and laughing together at the absurdities of some of our former beliefs. Thank god for the wandering Greeks, if we hadn't the language they strewed about so indiscriminately in their travels, we would never have been able to talk to each other.

Melchior was the most accomplished of us. He seemed to live in the stars. During the day he would assiduously write down his most minute observations from the night before. He had a double tent, a tent within a tent that screened the sun sufficiently for him to work in comfort.

The ostensible reason we studied the stars was to better understand the will and the ways of God. The real reason was because we found the stars themselves so interesting. If there was a God behind them that was fine with us, if not, the stars justified themselves. Misha, my fawn, please don't turn away. I have lived long enough to know that whoever God is, He has a very high tolerance for foolishness on the part of his creatures. If He can put up with Caligula, I feel pretty safe from his wrath. Come, little one, sit next to me again.

Where was I? Ah, the wine flask. At any rate, the three of us became friends--talking and studying and drinking and arguing together. Very enjoyable. Our natures were to be solitary men -- alone with the stars and our speculations. So it was a rare privilege for us to find kindred spirits. When the gathering of the Magi concluded and, one by one, the other magi and their followers went their separate ways, we lingered on, unwilling to put our conversation to an end. Our retinues attended us and muttered among themselves about the increasing time away from their families.

At last all the others, save one, had left us. This man seemed to stay behind more of weariness than interest in us or our discussions. He was a Semite, worn and old, dressed in tattered rags and the goatskin favored by ascetics. His name, we had learned, was Antiochus and his science was not one of observation or study but rather one of offering himself as an object of study to his God. He was a stylite, a man who lived alone in the desert, sitting endlessly on a pillar, naked to the sun and the wind. As we laughed and drank and argued, he sat as a kind of silent rebuke to us. This was not someone you would invite to enliven a party. No, no, Misha, I mean no disrespect. I am in awe of the degrees to which man will go to seek what truth there is in the world. Who am I to mock their methods? All I meant was that our innocent gambols seemed like the orgies of Gomorrah next to this man. He never spoke to us, but he did speak. He spoke, we thought, to God. It was hard to tell. He mumbled and the language he spoke was a form of Hebrew dialect that none of us recognized. He kept his face upturned and his long beard blew about his ravaged face in the wind. He was a sight to see, a terrible, somehow inspiring sight.

Balthazar had among his entourage a man who cared for and trained birds and animals that through chance or deliberate capture had come into his keeping. Trained creatures like these, Misha, are always a good way of breaking the resistance of audiences -- royalty and common folk alike. When they see a wolf lie down with a lamb, they tend to listen more closely to the one who has made the seeming miracle. In this man's keeping was a crow that had been trained to bring bits of food to Balthazar -- to fly to him, perch on his shoulder and place the particles directly into Balthazar's mouth. Now the crow was taught to bring food to the stylite. It would swoop down on Antiochus straight out of the sun, land on one of the man's skeletal legs and drop food into the clay bowl that nestled against his shriveled scrotum. Misha! Please, sit down. All right, I won't say scrotum. I'm sorry. The old man never moved, never stopped his mumbling to God, never even seemed to notice the bird, even when it pecked at him to get his attention. Very strange. But much stranger things were yet to come.

It was the fourth or fifth night of our lingering conversation. We had allowed our fire to go out and we lay in a row together, our heads pillowed in our bundled turbans, Melchior glowing between Balthazar and me. It was the night of the new moon and the stars lit up the sky in what seemed to us to be the playful exuberance of children loosed from the domination of their austere mother, the moon. We could hear Antiochus murmuring in the dark, we could hear the wind rustling the palms around the rancid oasis, and we could hear the frogs in that pungent water, calling to each other.

Balthazar told us that his people had an interesting belief about frogs. He said that in Ethiopia the frog was honored as a cleansing spirit, that its song brought the rain that washed the earth and that the rain not only cleaned the earth and drove down the dust but that it also washed away the sins of the people. Good for the frogs, I said. Good for the people, Melchior added. And then we were silent as we thought about the story and watched the stars.

After a while Melchior spoke. Without preamble he said, we have a similar legend. Ours concerns dragonflies, which we believe have the power to transform illusion into reality and reality into illusion. Both Balthazar and I expressed our approbation of this wonderful belief. Illusion into reality and reality into illusion we exulted. The perfect emblem of the magi, Balthazar said. Iridescent, elusive, faster than the eye can follow, I said, we should officially adopt the image. Our vote was unanimous and we took Antiochus's mumbling for assent. That is why you see the dragonfly woven into my robes, Misha. Had I told you about the dragonfly? Oh. Ah, well. Please, the flask. Thank you. It was late, the pauses in our conversation lengthened; only Antiochus murmured endlessly on. And then suddenly we were fully awake. Antiochus began a strange keening sound that rose and fell in a kind of -- how can I describe it -- a kind of strangely joyful song. This weird music coming from that ravaged, hairy instrument was accompaniment to the most amazing sight any of us had every seen. Our fingers pointed simultaneously toward the heavens.

A star had appeared in the eastern sky -- a new star. Oh, Misha, how can I describe our excitement? It was beautiful, a distinct white globe from which long, lovely spikes of illumination extended. It was a jewel and also unmistakably a herald, a sign of things to come. We laughed, we wept, we danced to the tune of old Antiochus. We knelt and prayed, with sincerity we prayed to our various gods and to the universe itself. We prayed in thanks and in fear and we prayed for wisdom in interpreting this singular event. None of us had ever seen such a thing before. Yet, surely, we would be the authority to which people would turn to explain the phenomenon. What would we say? When we had exhausted ourselves we sank down again into our orderly little row and thought a long while in silence. The song of Antiochus went on unabated, it seemed now to somehow accompany the song of the frogs, there was a harmonic quality to their music, they seemed to be aware of each other and to be synchronizing their individual vocalizations into a larger chorale.

Imagine us, Misha, there in the deep desert night -- a man of such blackness he merges with the dark; a man so white he glows; a man almost not a man, body and soul scoured and scourged by sand and a desperate seeking after God, a blazing new star that dwarfs anything else in the sky -- and me, small and trembling in a mixture of fear and anticipation. Oh, it was a night, Misha. It was a night.

Balthazar noticed first. It is moving, he said. We watched a while. It was moving we agreed. But not with the rest of the sky, Melchior said. We watched again awhile. It goes its own way, I said, very strange. We watched the whole night. When the sun broke the horizon all the stars fled but the new arrival. Even in daylight it shone brightly enough that the sun could not blot it from the sky. We wondered at that and what it implied about the quality of the blue dome of the daylight sky. Was the star behind the blue and shining through it? Was it beneath the blue? What was going on?

Antiochus was gone -- nowhere to be seen. In our preoccupation he must have shouldered his squat pillar and disappeared into the desert. Melchior withstood the sun as long as possible and then reluctantly took to his tent. We joined him there.

You know what we must do, I said to the others. They nodded in agreement. We have to, Melchior said, it is our duty. It seems to be heading southwest toward the land of the Hebrews, Balthazar observed. But, he added, does it have a destination or only a direction? What do the prophecies say about a star? Anything? Melchior seemed to remember something about a prophecy concerning the birth of a Hebrew messiah being announced by a new star, but couldn't remember the origin of the prophecy. I was no help, my own opinion of ancient prophecies being that since anything of significance could be traced back to a prophecy, they weren't of much value.

Misha, please! Don't get so upset -- everything isn't sacrilege. If you don't learn to think for yourself you're of no more value to God than your parakeet is to you -- just an amusing pet. We are here to help God find the truth, Misha, not merely to accept the truth someone else has found. Each of us must add our small finding to the whole, and the whole is still a long way off. This is a noble task, Misha -- and you cannot avoid it by a slavish obedience to the law or to custom -- you have to do the work yourself. Now, give me the flask again and sit down, there is more.

We began to follow the star. Not knowing how long this journey might take we each sent most of our entourage home on short rations and added theirs to our supplies. We traveled mostly at night to accommodate Melchior's tender skin, although if we thought we were falling behind the star we would try to get a couple of early morning hours before Melchior had to take to his tent.

On the first night we came on Antiochus. We could hear him singing before we saw him, legs crossed, arms raised, sitting on his ridiculous pillar with the wind blowing his dirty hair and goatskin vest and the sand encrusted on his face and beard. Each morning he was gone and each evening we came upon him. He had no camel, no food supplies; he might as well have been naked to the sun and the wind -- I don't know how but each day he covered as much distance as we did. We continued the practice of sending Antiochus food through the services of the crow. The smell of the man and his potential as a carrier of some leprous desert disease made us keep him at a distance. One day the crow refused to leave Antiochus. Balthazar tried everything to get him to return but the bird only cawed and strutted about the stylite's pillar and walked across his legs and perched on his head. He had clearly chosen a new master. I remember telling Balthazar he had lost a bird. But he shook his head and said that the bird knows where it belongs.

We marked the days and nights of our journey and the position of the star on our sky charts. There was no retrograde motion to the star; it kept to its course as if steered by a heavenly hand. To see such a wonder even once in a life is a rare privilege. We felt it so. Our nightly rides were mostly silent except for the snorting and shuffling of the camels. We each fell into the rhythmic, rolling motion of the animals and dwelt in our own individual reveries regarding the star. During the day we discussed our thoughts and compared our speculations. Just us, three men who knew how little we knew, despite our reputations, talking together. There was no hypocrisy in Melchior's double tent where we gathered each morning and in which we had all taken to sleeping together. We were engaged in direct exposure to a mysterious and wonderful event. It may have good or terrible consequences. Our plan, such as it was, was not to explain it yet but only to observe it and catalog its actions and its characteristics. The simplicity and the beauty of our role in relation to the star humbled us all. It made us feel like true scientists. We owed nothing to our patrons or to the public -- we were a band of brothers on a noble quest for whatever truth we might puzzle out together from this gift of the gods. One morning Balthazar said he had been thinking about the dragonfly legend. Odd, said Melchior, last night I was thinking of your frogs. Why did these stories come to our attention on this occasion, Balthazar asked. Do they have something to do with the star? When did the stories come to us, I asked. On the night the star appeared, just before we saw the star we shared those stories, Melchior answered. A coincidence probably, I said. Or a key to understanding the star, he replied. The star and the stories appeared together, Balthazar mused. Together. We lapsed into our usual silence as we thought about the possibilities in this pairing.

Illusion and reality, Melchior began in the kind of condensed manner we often used to spark a train of thought. Cleansing and purification, I said to extend the thought. To cleanse is to clarify, Balthazar said and added, and to clarify is to cut through illusion to reality. Another silence ensued. We took our separate thoughts into our separate sleep. The silence continued through the night as we traced our narrow track on the earth beneath the moving star.

This thing is what it is, I thought, yet it is also what we make it. We project our purposes and our hopes onto it. Is that illusion? It is if it obscures the reality of the star. Is it metaphor? It is if it clarifies an aspect of our own purpose. But is even a clarifying metaphor an illusion? What do you think, Misha? No, no, don't tell me what you have read. What do you think? Ah, that's all right, child -- it will come, it will come. And it comes the way it did that night -- slowly as you talk to yourself, as you question yourself, as you test your integrity against questions posed by the stars, as you ask yourself to be truthful, to not pretend, to be what man was meant to be -- the explainer and the appreciator of all things. We are both dragonfly and frog. In one role we clean the lens of our mind's eye and look on the world without the filtering influence of opinion or custom or law. In the other we recognize the illusory quality of the things we see, how reality often hides itself in mystery, how mystery seduces our intellect into the search for truth and how clarity and illusion and truth form a bond of enticement and reward that keeps both our heart and our mind engaged in the quest. Ha, too much, I see. You want the story of the star and I give you lectures. Forgive me, Misha. My flask.

After over a month following the star, Misha, my little orthodox treasure, it had become as familiar to me as the shaggy, undulating behind of Balthazar's camel. The trek we undertook in awe and wonder had taken on some aspects of a duty. Not that we were discouraged or contemplating breaking off our great quest -- still, not to put too fine a point on it, we were bored. Eventually even the extraordinary lapses into ordinary. So it was as our journey passed its second fortnight.

A wind from the southwest, the direction we were traveling, had been blowing for six days. The wind made conversation difficult, it kept our heads down into our turbans and our bodies hunched over our saddle horns as we rode. We struggled to keep the star in sight through the blowing sand and the racing clouds. Even during the day the wind seemed to sap our strength and our will to talk. A quiet, almost morose pall seemed to have settled on us. The wind was relentless and each night when we would come upon Antiochus and the crow, the sand would have mounded up around the pillar and in Antiochus's lap and the crow would be huddled out of the wind, nestled behind Antiochus. With the wind in our faces we could hear the stylite's strange song well before we could see him in the blowing sand. On the seventh night the wind simply stopped. It did not abate gradually it just stopped. The moon came out full and luminous. The star shone in all its glory and we followed it easily. An hour later Melchior said, It has stopped. Yes, I said in agreement, and not a moment too soon, it was beginning to blow the marrow from my bones. Not the wind, Melchior said, the star.

We halted our camels. We watched for nearly an hour. It had stopped. Beyond a dune we could hear Antiochus singing. Where are we, I asked. Near a town called Bethlehem as far as I can tell, said Melchior. I suggested we cross the dune and camp near Antiochus and we did. The old man and the crow were as we always found them, Antiochus arranging himself in a lotus position on his pillar, his arms laid loosely across his legs, his palms upward, his interminable song droning on and on -- even in his sleep. The crow flapping about on the gaunt shoulders of his master, seeming to dust him at day's end -- then squatting and settling down for the remainder of the night.

We watched awhile, speculating on the meaning of the halt in the star's progression, then, too tired to think or talk more we retired to Melchior's tent and fell quickly asleep. It must have been near midnight when the crow started cawing. All of us half-woke and grumbled about it. What's got into the crow, Balthazar asked, it has never done anything like that before. Then, as though the sun had risen suddenly to its midday height, the tent was flooded with light. The three of us thrashed about in our bedclothes trying to disentangle ourselves and get to our feet. We rushed out of the tent into a sight even more amazing than the star itself.

The sky was filled with light and the source of the light was a host of winged figures, half bird, but with bodies of men and women that crowded the night sky. And they were singing beautiful music, the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. They were everywhere, above us high in the sky, around us hovering over the ground. We could make out the features and forms of those closest to us. Naked, their skin glowed every color imaginable. The men's muscles varied in size as much as their colors did. The women were tall and willowy or short and thick, their breasts hung low on their bellies or pointed upward like pastry tops. They were very human but in every way as unlike humans as you can imagine. But one and all they were beautiful beyond anything I have ever seen before or since. And, wonder of magical wonders, there, soaring among them, were Antiochus and the crow. But what an Antiochus, no longer the ravaged madman of the desert but a glowing, glorious vision of perfection. And he was laughing, a full, happy chortle. He beckoned us to him.

Our analytical, scientific natures fell away. In the face of a miracle, Misha, just trust your instincts. We did. Then and there we stripped off our robes and opened our raised arms to the experience. Like leaves lifted by the wind we rose into the heavenly host, soared, laughed and sang with Antiochus and the angels. That is what these creatures were, Misha -- angels. Nothing in our legends or my poor imagination leads to any other conclusion. These angels cavorted in the sky like drunken guests at a wedding dance. As rare and beautiful as they were, they themselves seemed transformed into an even more exalted condition by the event they were celebrating.

For it was true, Misha, a messiah had been born that night in Bethlehem. I know it to be true. For the four of us and the crow soared among the angels with a purpose we only sensed, a purpose that led us to a point high above a shepherd's manger. It was there the star had stopped and now stood flaring a beam of light down into the humble shack where a naked newborn child suckled at its mother's breast and shepherds crowded round and knelt before the child. We stood there in the night sky and saw all this, Misha. We heard the alleluia sung in a mighty chorus and saw the angels weave their voices and their colors in a tapestry of sound and sight that I cannot adequately describe to you. And there was a scent that night, Misha, something delicate, a sort of toasted cinnamon smell -- something that simply lingered in the air like the perfume of heaven. Sometimes it comes back to me. We could see the child. There was nothing godlike about him. He suckled contentedly, his eyes squeezed closed as if to avoid the celestial light, one tiny hand resting near his mother's nipple. Just a child.

And then we rose again as if a volcanic explosion had sent us reeling up and backward from the manger spewing us and music and light high into the sky. Antiochus gently somersaulted, head over heels and his once croaking voice now sang clear and full in a distinct patrician Latin baritone. He sang, "Gloria, gloria, in excelsus Deo," over and over again in wonderful musical variation.

And then we were in our tents asleep. When we woke it was dawn. We looked at each other as though we each had a guilty secret to hide. We didn't know what to say to each other. You could see it in our faces. We were like children who having been left alone by their mother get into some innocent mischief, which they cannot explain. We each dressed quickly and went outside one at a time. The star was gone. It was true, Melchior said. Balthazar and I nodded in agreement. They were here, weren't they? Melchior asked. Yes, we said, they were here and we saw what we saw and did what we did. I don't know what to say, Melchior said. Nor did we. Antiochus was also gone. We don't know where he went but we jokingly speculated that he was probably somersaulting his way across heaven with his angelic friends. We hoped so anyway.

Well, that's the story, Misha. You know the rest of it. How we found Herod and asked for his help in finding the child again. How that madman murdered every child in the area under two years old in order to avoid any possibility of having his miserable throne usurped. How I came back here to Mecca and have spent my life waiting for the messiah to make himself known. Now I am an old man dying. I had hoped that the millennium had arrived and that I would see its fulfillment. But there has been nothing. If the messiah was born that night, Herod must have killed him. Thirty years have gone by and there has not been another sign. Misha, give me the wine flask again; there may be some dregs.

§ § §

Jim Boring lives on the Illinois-Wisconsin border from which vantage point he is able to peer into the woods dark and deep or the city equally dark and deep. He has published in the small press and in the Chicago Tribune Magazine.

He is a Contributing Editor and Marketing Director of Literary Potpourri. You can reach him at JBCCNOW@aol.com. .

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