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“Bit of a trek just to make a burnt offering unto the LORD, eh?”
Aziraphale looked to his left and right, but there was no one else in the desert except the man, the boy, and the other attendant. Then he thought to look down, and that was when he saw the snake, gleaming in the sand.
“Oh, you. I remember you. Crawly, was it?”
“That’ssss me!” said Crawly, proudly. “Haven’t seen you since the Flood. You alright?”
“Divine,” he said, and then, out of morbid curiosity and a pathological need to be polite, asked, “What have you been up to?”
“Very little,” said Crawly. “Oh! You know what? I invented beer. Well, I say invented—more like kept a couple of key taverns from going under. Not much, but it’s dishonest work.”
“Drunkenness,” sniffed the angel.
“Sure, originally, but the buggers found other uses for it almost immediately. Can’t blame them. It’s quite good. Have you had it?”
The angel said nothing.
“You have, haven’t you?”
“Wine makes glad the heart of man,” said Aziraphale. “Through the transitive property, I am sure the same also applies to beer.”
Snakes always look like they’re smiling, but this one somehow managed absolute self-satisfaction. “It’s nice when someone appreciates your work,” he said. He flicked his tail at the little party. “They could do as much for you, you know. Give you a raise. What’s the point of dragging you all the way out here to cook a meal you won’t even get to eat?”
“If you must know, I’m here on official business,” said Aziraphale. “The LORD told that man to take his son to Moriah and perform an offering; details to follow. I am witnessing it, to make sure it’s all done to His specifications. No laws yet, in this lawless land, but Gabriel’s a stickler, and it’ll save me the clay if they use an approved procedure.”
“And that’s all worth tramping about in the wilderness for two days?” asked Crawly. “If it were me, I’d stay back at base, gab with the wife, and file a report when the big man came back. Offering’ll get done anyway, and nobody ever bothers to check.”
“And that is why one of us walks upright, and the other crawls along on his belly,” said the angel.
The snake fell quiet. Aziraphale bit the inside of his cheek and felt his insides slough off in embarrassment—what a rude thing to say. What a very unkind thing to say. Was it not said that showing kindness to one’s enemy was to heap hot coals upon his head? He’d had an opportunity to push back against the forces of Satan, and he’d gone and bunged it up and hurt Crawly’s feelings, and it was going to be a long, awkward time before they got back to Hebron…
“‘Least my feet don’t get tired!” cackled Crawly, and Aziraphale sighed in relief.
They continued northward. When the sun set, they all made camp and had a dinner of bread, cold mutton, and Crawly’s invention. The mortal men were quiet—it had been a very long, hot journey. But it would be over soon. They would spot the place the LORD intended in the morning, Aziraphale suspected. The morning of the third day. He often expressed His will in threes.
Crawly gnawed on his mutton in a way terribly unbecoming of a snake. He liked threes because He had difficulty counting any higher, he said.
Aziraphale threw a rib bone at him. To Hell with politeness.
At dawn the next day, the man pointed out a round mountain on the horizon. This was the place the LORD had told him, he said. He took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon his son, and bid the attendant to wait there with the donkey, while they continued on to worship.
“Wait, they’re not taking the donkey with them?” asked Crawly. “Are they not offering up the donkey?”
“Donkeys aren’t standard sacrificial fare,” said the angel. “They’re unclean.”
“I’m well aware. But they didn’t bring any other animals with them, and I highly doubt His Holiness will be happy with fruit and veg—you remember what happened to Cain. So what’re they sacrificing?”
Aziraphale was about to tell him that he didn’t know, he hadn’t been told, so bloody shut up and let him work, when the boy turned to his father and said,
“Behold the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
The man looked for a long, heavy moment at his son. He said, very calmly almost dreamlike: “The LORD will provide the lamb.”
Aziraphale’s blood ran cold.
They were halfway up the mountain. The attendant and the donkey were a little gray speck a long way down. Aziraphale had a sudden bout of vertigo and had to squat in the dirt until he regained his composure.
“He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t,” he said to Crawly. “That child is his heart-wish. The LORD wouldn’t take away such a wonderful gift so cruelly.”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered the snake.
“There are grand plans for him. Descendants more numerous than the stars—I’ve read the reports. He sent three archangels to Earth to tell his father and mother. Why would He go to that much effort only to take him back to glory?”
“Sodom and Gomorrah were roasted and salted about then, weren’t they?”
Aziraphale looked askance at Crawly, but said nothing. The two of them let the wind whip by for a little bit, while father and son clambered on. When they were far enough away that catching up to them would require a light jog, the snake wound his way up Aziraphale’s side and nudged him in the ribs.
“Come on—you’ve got a job to do.”
Aziraphale sighed like a boulder rolling down a hill. He put his head between his arms.
“Aren’t you meant to foment evil?”
“I’ll figure something out,” said Crawly. “You’re going to carry me up the rest of the way.”
The angel fixed him around his neck like a collar, and together they set off.
They reached the mountaintop late in the morning. The boy and his father were already there, hacking at scrub trees to get better purchase on big, loose stones. Crawly demanded that he be let down, and he climbed up a sickly little bush for a clearer view.
Man and son worked in silence. They piled the stones in a clearing they had made in the thicket, and the stones took the shape of an altar. The boy tried to catch his father’s attention, but in vain—the man had a face of flint, and steel in his eyes, and not a single, stony glance to spare his son.
At last, the altar was ready. The man piled it high with wood and laid his child upon it. From his belt he pulled a knife with a bronze blade and a handle inlaid with ivory—a costly instrument purpose-made for sacrifice.
The boy watched with hawkish intensity and did not say a word. His father still would not look him in the eye.
He raised the knife to shoulder height.
“Aziraphale,” said Crawly.
The man took a deep breath, and courage found Aziraphale. He stepped out of the thicket and shed his Earthly garments, shining so brightly that the sun seemed dim.
“Abraham! ABRAHAM!”
Abraham whirled around, hands trembling so fiercely he nearly dropped the knife. When he spotted the angel, clothed in the raiment of Heaven, the steely look fled his eyes, and his face relaxed into relief and terror.
“Here I am,” he said.
“Thank God,” said Aziraphale, under his breath. To Abraham, he said, “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. You’ve proven your point very clearly, thank you, and I’m sure the LORD will be happy to know that you really do fear Him.”
The thicket rustled, and suddenly there was a snow-white ram, stuck by his horns in the underbrush. It may have been there the whole time.
Abraham praised God, and named the place The LORD Will Provide, and offered the ram up to Him as a sacrifice instead of his son.
It was very dark when Aziraphale and Crawly went back down the mountain. The humans had left once the ram had been fully burnt, but they’d stayed behind to keep watch over the coals. Smoke rose in great curlicues to the sky and floated past the clouds and the firmament. It floated past the moon and the planets and an expanse of nothingness so great humans of the far future would peer curiously over the side of it and weep for want of significance. It floated all the way to God’s nostrils, and He gulped down the smell of death in His name. When the last of the embers winked out and the altar was warm to the touch, they quietly picked their way out of the thicket by the light of a full, bright moon.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Crawly, at the edge of a comfortable silence.
Aziraphale shook his head. “Terrible bargain,” he said. He shook all over, actually, and was not very generous when Crawly pointed it out.
“I was just asking,” said Crawly. “Hey—are you alright?”
“Mhm,” said Aziraphale. “D’you—d’you think God meant for all that to happen?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” said the snake. “You’re the expert on ineffability, here.”
“Only because—because if I’d intervened when I wasn’t supposed to, that’d muck things up. We’d be off the Great Plan before it really kicked into gear.”
Crawly rose up out of the sand. He fixed a yellow eye on Aziraphale.
“You mean to say that you’re having sssecond thoughts about letting that guy off his own kid?”
“Well, no, but if it had been the LORD’s will, then…then. Then it would have been the LORD’s will. And his soul would have returned to Heaven. It would have been fine.”
He paused. “No, that’s not right. He’d have gone to Sheol. Heaven doesn’t open to His chosen until Phase Two.”
He turned to Crawly. “Did you have something to do with it?”
“Me!” Crawly exclaimed. “Angel, I tagged along because I was bored out of my bloody skull in Canaan, and you’re usually down for a good time. I don’t go in for infanticide.”
It was cold comfort. How much simpler it would have been to assign blame to the Enemy—to make Abraham’s caginess and the ambiguity of his own marching orders all the mere product of Hell trying to get one up on God. Thinking through the possible outcomes of a sanctioned child sacrifice did his head in: if the LORD really had wanted a do-over, then Aziraphale had better change his name and set sail for Tarshish. If he’d been right to step in, the LORD had set up an upsetting charade for no clear purpose.
He thought back to the Flood. To Sodom and Gomorrah. To Cain and his unworthy offering. All the fruit the world could ever bear would not satisfy an infinite, eternal, jealous, carnivorous god. He’d cast a third of His Host out of Heaven and His most precious creations out of Eden, into a world in which they suffered and died, and received the love of their Creator as a beetle on the forest floor receives sunlight—indirectly, if at all.
“Oh, Crawly,” he cried. “What if God wanted to kill that boy?”
He stopped and turned back to look at the mountain. The altar was an indelible mark on the cliffside. People would shed an unfathomable amount of blood in the coming millennia just to claim the right to build something there. It was a holy place.
“I haven’t got access to the Heavenly Blueprints,” said Crawly, softly. “But if you want my opinion, I think it was a pretty bad practical joke."
He slithered up to the hem of Aziraphale’s robe.
“Let’s get out of here. If we go west where they went south, we’ll hit the coast by daybreak. There’s some enterprising fishermen’s wives doing absolutely scandalous things to mussels, there. They cook ‘em in beer. What do you say?”
Leviticus hadn’t been invented, yet. Aziraphale nodded, and the two of them set off into the desert night.
And in the sand there was only one set of footprints, because Crawly had made Aziraphale carry him again.