Satan in Black Silk Sent Nimrod's Army

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Silk on the Throne Room Floor

The stranger came the length of the throne room in black silk and went down flat on his face, and no dust came off the cloth when it hit the stone. Nimrod had not slept properly in weeks. The prophecy had been going around his city the way a fever goes around a house, passed from a priest to a steward to a woman selling barley: a child was coming who would break the king's authority. So when the man on the floor asked leave to speak, Nimrod told him to get up and say it.

The stranger did not bring a new fear into the room. He tidied the one already in it. Arm the kingdom, he said. Take the troublesome child into servitude now, while he is small enough to carry. Do not wait for the boy to grow into the size of the prophecy.

Nimrod listened the way a man listens when he has already decided and only wants a witness. His own priests had hedged for months, because priests who guess wrong get buried, but this one asked for nothing and hedged nothing. So the king believed him. He sent out a great armed force, spears and shields and captains with orders, to bring in one boy.

The Dust Before the Spears

Abraham saw the dust before he saw anything that made it. It came up off the plain in a long brown wall, and under it the light kept catching and dropping, catching and dropping, which is what a moving column of iron does at a distance.

He was sore afraid, in the plain sense of it: his mouth went dry and his legs went useless and he started to cry. He had no plan and no second plan and nowhere on that flat ground to put himself. So he turned his face up and asked God for help, out loud, the way a child asks.

God heard him. The answer did not arrive as a voice out of the sky. It arrived as Gabriel, standing on the dirt in front of him, close enough to be heard over the noise coming down the road. "Be not afraid," Gabriel said. "God is with thee. He will rescue thee out of the hands of all thine adversaries."

The Dark That Took the Road

Then God gave the order and Gabriel set thick dark clouds between the boy and the host.

The captain at the front had his arm halfway down for the order to close. He saw the boy standing alone at the end of the field, small, not even running. Then he saw grey where the boy had been, and then he saw nothing: not the field, not the man riding at his knee, not his own hand when he put it up in front of his face. The horses knew first, because horses always know first, and they went sideways into each other while the men were still shouting for a line that had stopped existing.

Nobody argued theology with the weather. The clouds did not push the army back or strike it down. They took away the road, and an army without a road is only a crowd standing in the dark holding sharp things. They turned and ran, and running blind through their own baggage train did more damage than the thing they were running from.

What They Told the King

They came back to Nimrod with the story already going soft in their mouths. Let us depart, they said, and leave this realm. They could not describe what had been behind the darkness, because none of them had seen it, and a captain who cannot name the thing that beat him has nothing to offer a king but his own face.

Nimrod did not argue with them. He agreed, which was the first honest thing he had done since the man in silk stood up off his floor. Then he had the treasury opened and gave money to his princes and to his servants, all of them, because a court that is leaving at short notice has to be paid to leave quietly. Carts were loaded in the dark. The whole household went out of the city with the king in the middle of it, on the road to Babylon.

The Plain Afterward

The clouds thinned the way weather does, without ceremony, and the plain came back. It was scattered with what men drop when they run: a shield, somebody's sandal, a spear standing up out of the ground where it had been thrown down.

The king who had armed a kingdom against him was already half a day gone toward Babylon with his treasury in carts and his princes paid. The boy was still standing where the darkness had left him, in a field, with his face wet.