Immortal (25 page)

“I'm going to be a bishop one day and tell people the Good News.” The boy whispered the words as if they were a secret, but he sat up a little straighter, his eyes shining.

Agios had heard enough to know that the God Nicholas spoke of was the Hebrew God, and he wanted to hear no more about the one who had filled him with such hope—and then allowed Jesus to die so cruelly on a cross.

Nicholas said he had to go. Agios walked partway down the mountain with him, and when they reached a stand of black pines, he paused and said, “Again, I thank you for the gift, young Nicholas. But it would be better if you didn't come back. Bad things happen to the people I . . .” Agios faltered and then began again. “Bad things always happen to the people I care about.”

“I'm not afraid,” Nicholas assured him with a broad smile, and then he went on his way, pausing once to wave farewell.

Months after that, in the high blaze of a summer day, Brave Dog barked, drawing Agios's attention to someone who was climbing the mountainside. The man did not seem used to the mountains. He toiled his way up the steep track, leaning on a stick of wood he had picked up somewhere, and as he came closer, he held out a scrap of parchment. “Nicholas, the son of Epiphanius, sent me to you with this,” he said. “I left yesterday morning and got here hours ago, but I couldn't find your cave.”

“Who are you?” Agios repeated, taking the parchment from him.

“I was a helper of the shepherd Nicholas the Priest,” the stranger told him, crossing himself.

“Was?”

The man looked ready to weep. “He's dead. I have to go.” He started away, then turned for a moment to look back. “There's a plague in the town,” he said. “I don't dare return there. I'll camp in the fields where the sheep graze in spring.”

Agios looked at the words written on the parchment. The message was short but urgent:
Please come
.

No name, but the words were in an unformed, childish handwriting: Nicholas.

Agios hurried back to the cave, took a few of his belongings in a sack, and then went out and opened the pen so the goats would be able to find pasturage. He left food and water for Brave Dog. It was after sunset when he set off on the long journey to Patara. All night he walked, and for some reason this time he felt his years. Perhaps, he thought, the dread of what he might find in the town pressed on him.

A lone guard stood at the town gate as Agios approached in the coolness of dawn. When the man challenged him, Agios said, “I mean no harm. There is sickness in the town. I have come to offer what help I can.”

The guard hesitated, but then waved him in and told him where to find the house of Epiphanius.

It was earliest morning, but few stirred in Patara. As he walked through the streets, Agios heard again and again the muffled sounds of wailing. He saw people kneeling on the steps of a church and heard the murmur of their prayers.

Agios found the home of Epiphanius and knocked on the door, but no one appeared to let him in. He tried the door and found it unlocked. Young Nicholas, his face tight with strain, his eyes dark with lack of sleep, met him in the hallway and said, “My mother and father are very sick.”

He led Agios to their bedroom. They lay together in one bed, neither of them fully conscious, both burning with fever. Agios said, “I'll do what I can.” He led Nicholas to the front door and took the boy by the shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said, looking into the tired eyes. “I want you to go to my cave and stay there. You'll find plenty of food. The goats will need milking and tending, and Brave Dog will need to be fed. Do this for me, and if I can, I'll help your parents.”

“So many people are sick,” Nicholas said miserably. “My uncle—” He gulped and pointed at a closed door. “He's in there. He's dead.”

“Say prayers for him and your parents,” Agios said urgently. “But go now. Do as I say and you'll be safe. I'll bring you word as soon as I can. Hurry!”

Nicholas looked frightened, but he nodded and ran.

None of the servants had stayed in the house of sickness, not one. Agios managed everything himself, and when he heard a bell ringing outside, he went into the street and found a funeral procession, a priest leading a small party of mourners and a shrouded body lying on a cart. “Is one of you a priest?” he asked.

The funeral party stopped, and one of the men stepped forward. “Yes. I am,” he said.

“Then when you have buried the dead, return here. We need you.”

Before the priest returned, and before the hour passed, Johanna died. Agios lifted her—he did not fear the disease himself, for what could it do to a man who could not die?—and carried her body to the room where the corpse of Nicholas the priest lay.

Not long after that, the priest who had led the funeral procession knocked at the door. Agios let him in. “I'm Agios, a friend of this family,” he told the priest.

“I'm Father Eudemus,” the man said—a young man, with a tonsure shaved in his hair, like Nicholas and his uncle.

“Father?” Agios asked, surprised.

The priest nodded. “Do you not know Christian customs? ‘Father' is a title we give to priests. How is the family?”

“Nicholas the priest and Johanna are dead,” Agios told him. “Epiphanius has a bad fever and seems in pain.”

They sponged the suffering man while Father Eudemus explained the course of the illness: It had come, he said, over the sea, aboard a ship from Tyre. The disease had broken out among those who worked in or lived near the harbor. From there it had spread like a wildfire.

Father Eudemus lamented the death of Nicholas the priest. “He was a good man and a brave one. When few of us dared to go among the ill to offer help and prayer, he was the first. Surely Jesus will welcome him home.”

Agios started at the name, but clamped his lips tightly. This was no time for questions. Epiphanius weakened through the day. In his fever he babbled and murmured bits of prayers, calling on Jesus. The priest asked Agios to step outside while he heard the dying man's last confession.

Nicholas's father lasted only about another hour after that. Almost at sunset he opened his eyes and saw Agios. “The man with the white beard. My son spoke of you,” he croaked. Though he was still in the grip of a burning fever, he shivered and murmured something too softly for Agios to hear. “Listen—take the Gospel scrolls for him. Father Eudemus will show you where they are.” He murmured something too low for Agios to hear.

“Say it again,” Agios told him gently, bending to bring his ear close to the dying man's lips.

“Be a father to my son,” Epiphanius whispered, and then he was gone. The priest made the sign of the cross over his body—as he had done for Johanna and Nicholas the elder—and said, “Now they are with God.”

Agios remained in town even after their funerals, helping as much as he could. The plague raged for ten further days. On the third, Father Eudemus himself fell ill, and Agios took the care of his sick parishioners on himself. Many died, but others lived. Father Eudemus was one of the fortunate ones.

The new infections began to trail off on the fifth day, and by the ninth only those who had caught the illness earlier lingered. The next morning Agios told Father Eudemus, who was still not strong enough to get out of bed, that he was going to see about young Nicholas. He packed a bag with the scrolls that the priest showed him—they reminded him of the scholar-king Caspar—and then set out.

He found Nicholas weeping. Brave Dog had stopped eating. He thumped his tail once when Agios knelt by him. “He is very old,” Agios said. “He knows it's his time to—go and join his brothers. Nicholas, I have something to tell you.”

Nicholas wept again at the news. Agios embraced him. At last the boy fell into a fitful sleep. When he woke, it was just in time to come and sit beside Agios as Brave Dog slipped away. “He was a good animal,” Agios said, a silent tear running down his cheek. He gave the sack to Nicholas. “Here. Your father gives these to you.”

“The Gospels,” Nicholas said quietly. He swallowed and said, “I'll see my father and mother and uncle again one day. They're with Jesus now.”

“Jesus is dead,” he said softly. He placed both hands on Nicholas's shoulders, rooting him to the ground. “He died on a cross.” Agios didn't say
I saw it happen
, for who could believe such folly? Nicholas would think he was insane.

“No,” Nicholas said, and the hint of a smile touched his lips. “He's not dead at all. On the third day he rose, Agios. He
rose
.”

Agios's breath stuck in his chest. The words were so uncomplicated, so sweet and life-giving.
He rose
.

Wasn't it what he had longed for to ease all his terrible grief ? For his beautiful wife, who had died far too early, to rise again, and their poor stillborn second son? For Philos, taken dead and bleeding from the libanos tree, to live again? For Krampus, gentle friend, his second son, to overcome death? The thought that Jesus had done what surely only he could do, that he had defeated even death and turned the world upside down, was a hope that floated from deep inside Agios and lifted his head to the heavens.

Nicholas looked up at him, smiling through his tears. “They will live forever now. The Gospels promise that.”

Jesus had said it!
“The water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

“I want to bury Brave Dog,” he said, choking on his own rising hope. “Then—then I want you to explain these Gospels to me.”

When they had covered Brave Dog's grave—Agios dug it between those of Tracker and the dog he had named Gentle for her sweet disposition—Nicholas took hold of his hand, offering comfort.

In the following days Agios felt poised between new hope and old despair. Nicholas read passages to him from the scrolls, and the boy obviously believed what they said. Was it true? Had Jesus truly risen again from the tomb? Was he waiting in heaven to reward those who believed in him and his Father?

“I go and prepare a place for you. And if I go, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

Agios wept as he remembered Jesus's assurance to the thief crucified beside him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Nicholas helped in every way he could, tending the flocks, even cooking. Then one day he came shyly to Agios and said, “This time I've made a gift for you.” He offered it to Agios, and when the old man didn't reach for it, Nicholas took his friend by the hand and placed the object in his palm.

Agios examined the crude carving, turning it over and over in his fingers. The world had gone eerily quiet; the songs of the morning birds were silenced in his ears. He felt numb, as though swaddled in blankets so thick he could hardly feel the edges of the small block of wood in his hands. His mind simply couldn't comprehend what he was seeing.

The carving wasn't as good as his own, obviously a beginner's attempt, but there was no mistaking what it was. A baby. In a manger.

It was Jesus.

“Believe in him,” Nicholas said gently.

It welled up within Agios then, all the longing, all the loss. Weala and the stillborn child, Philos, Jesus . . . and yes, Krampus, whispering with his dying breath that same word:

Believe
.

Agios couldn't reply.

A
gios had questions that Nicholas could not answer, so Agios consented to accompany his young friend to his father's home in Patara. He didn't want to leave this place of refuge, this place where he had opened himself up to friendship again, but one of Nicholas's answers had cut him to the core.

“Why did you not tell me earlier you followed Jesus?”

Nicholas looked genuinely confused. “We are a persecuted people, Agios. I've been dropping hints—fishers of men? Talk of the creator? Plans for hope and a future?—but I never dared to say anything outright. But you did a Christian thing in caring for my parents.”