Immortal (27 page)

“You'll see,” Nicholas assured him, his eyes sparkling.

When he was alone, Agios wondered,
Should I just leave now? Nicholas needs a father, and I—I need a son. But how can I be a father to him when all my sons die?
And how could he tell Nicholas the truth about himself—that he was a cursed man who could not die?

I couldn't save Philos, or Krampus— or Jesus! I swore to protect him, and I couldn't save him! How can I tell Nicholas of my curse?

With despair, Agios bowed his head. “I think I believe,” he murmured. “Help me to believe! Let me know— did you make others like me? If you did—are we blessed or cursed? Help me understand.”

No answer came, and Agios could only hope that, somehow, from somewhere, one would come.

Father Eudemus came again that morning, and Agios thanked him. The priest said, “I think you've been good for Nicholas.”

“The other way around,” Agios said. “He's been good for me.”

Nona laughed at this, throwing back her head in delight. “That boy influences everyone he meets!” she cried. “I bet he hasn't told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Nona, please,” the younger Nicholas warned, giving his caretakers a look of distress.

“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” the priest told him. Then he turned to Agios. “Our Nicholas said to me he wants to distribute every coin of his inheritance among the poor. He quoted the scripture to me.”

Nona said, “ ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.' That's what Jesus said.”

Agios recognized the passage. He had read it more than once during his long night. “Matthew?” he guessed.

Nicholas shrugged. “Or Mark or Luke. The story is recorded in all three, but the message is always the same: Jesus knew how easily our hearts were corrupted.”

“So many in town are needy after the plague,” the priest said. “It's a wonderful gift, Nicholas.”

“I'm going to be a priest anyway,” Nicholas mumbled, clearly embarrassed. “What need do I have for money?”

But there was no diminishing what Nicholas had done. Agios felt his heart swell with pride as if the boy were his own son. He had squandered his life searching and hungering, killing and carving a way for himself in the world. Even at such a young age, Nicholas lived another way. What was the difference?

Jesus
.

Agios felt his voice waver as he said, “I told you not so long ago that you will be a fine man, Nicholas. I think I was wrong. I think you already are a fine man.”

The priest and Nona promised to care for Nicholas—“I won't let him become entirely poor until he joins the priesthood,” Eudemus assured Agios with a twinkle.

Agios bade them farewell. Without the boy, the trip back to the cave was rapid, but all the same, Agios was surprised when he reached the meadow where Nicholas grazed his flock every spring well before sundown. He climbed the slope quickly, hurrying although nothing awaited his care. Surely weeds hadn't sprung up to overtake the garden in one night. And he had nothing worth stealing.

As he often did when troubled or worried, Agios stepped into his little storage room and selected some good oak, the pure white heartwood shading into a thick layer of fine-grained tan. His carving tools were in a relatively new goatskin satchel and he slung the strap over his shoulder, wondering for the first time at his need for a new pouch, but not new blades.

Crouching near his fire pit, Agios unrolled the kit and looked at the small precise instruments. When had he last sharpened them? He could no longer remember. They should have dulled with use, or they should have rusted to pieces. Agios had ceased to count the years, but in Nicholas's home he had learned the date. It had been almost three hundred years since Gamos had made a gift of these exact tools for him. Three hundred years.

And yet they kept their edge, always ready to do their work, seemingly immune to age and blunting and rust. It sent a little chill down his spine.

What had he prayed? All those . . . centuries ago?

Let me serve him until his mission is completed
.

Agios began to carve, not consciously planning on the result, but letting his hands do the work automatically.

We have only one life. We may waste it, or we may use it to learn of God and what God wants for us. And we all make mistakes. Only one life.

Except for me. I've been cursed—

No. Blessed. I've been blessed with many lifetimes—and I've wasted too many in regrets and blame and guilt
.

As he carved, he prayed: “Forgive me for not knowing you were with me the whole time—Krampus understood that. I should have known when I first saw the infant Jesus, or when I heard his words at the well.”

He began to shake and with a broken voice added, “I should have known at the cross! Forgive my stubbornness. Give me the water of life. I will drink!”

The sky was darkening to purple when he realized that the figure taking shape beneath his agile fingers was Jesus. But this time, he wasn't a baby. He was grown, God and man, triumphant in robes of white and holding high—in blessing, in welcome—his beautiful, nail-scarred hands.

And Agios wept.

S
ometimes, transformation is quick. A rock dropped in a quiet pool disturbs the surface into ripples. An unexpected thunderstorm blows up out of nowhere in the middle of a sunny summer day.

Sometimes, though, transformation comes slowly. It's the air warming a little every day, pools of water forming on the surface of an icebound lake. Then drops cascade from trees, creating rivulets on cracking ground that become streams and rivers and rushing waterfalls. Brown grasses turn green by degrees, brightening as the sun warms the earth and coaxes buds to emerge from branches and turn their plump faces to the sun. The world becomes utterly different, wholly unrecognizable from the place it once was, and yet the process is always a surprise. To the sleeping heart, one day it is winter. And the next, spring.

But it's never that straightforward.

How long does it take for us to truly understand? How can we look right past a simple truth that is plain to any child?

Agios would continue to find his role. His metamorphosis would stretch over centuries, though its essentials were already set: He had a father's loving heart and a strong man's tender hands. The hard years had taught him perseverance, and he had always been generous. Others had seen it—Philos, certainly, and Gamos, Caspar, the others . . . Krampus. In the end, the last person to accept the truth about him was himself.

Nicholas took up his studies in Myra, a town not too far from his birthplace of Patara. And because Agios was ready for a life beyond the isolation he had known for so long, because he knew that he was teetering on the edge of something so much greater than himself—belief!—he visited his young friend often.

Several times a year, Agios left his cave and made the journey to Myra—a trek insignificant for a man of his stature and energy—and learned at the feet of his young friend, his new son. Agios couldn't get enough of the stories and teachings of the man he so openly loved, for even the name
Jesus
was enough to bring a smile to his craggy face.

“More,” he would plead with Nicholas. “Tell me more.”

And the boy, who had grown into a man, obliged.

Nicholas had other lessons to teach. When he became a priest, he felt keenly the need of the poor people of Myra, those the Romans spurned. Agios learned that Nicholas worked hard to learn of poor people who deserved help—and to give it to them. However, he gave secretly, never revealing himself. “Why?” Agios asked him once.

“Well,” Nicholas said seriously, “I think that all good gifts come ultimately from God. It wouldn't do for the messenger to take credit for his master's work.”

He recalled a mountain, and a distant figure in white preaching to a multitude.
Give your gifts secretly and don't seek glory from them. God, who sees all secrets, knows what you have done and will reward you
.

Oh, Agios remembered. All that became real one cool night. Agios had come in late on one of his trips to the city, and Nicholas, expecting him, had waited for hours to meet him near the gates. Then as Agios and Nicholas walked the streets of Myra, deep in conversation, they turned a corner and Agios felt Nicholas grip his arm above the elbow. “Look there,” Nicholas said quietly.

Ahead of them in an empty lot, three people clustered around a small fire. They were poorly dressed—a man, a woman, and a little girl of six or seven. They leaned toward the warmth and the light of the humble fire they had built in an out-of-the way spot, a walled garden that had become overgrown with weeds.

Something came over Agios the moment he saw them.
All good gifts come from God
.

A voice, or just in his head?

Agios reached into his pack and brought out a doll, one that he had cleverly fitted with joints so its limbs and head could move. Its eyes even opened and closed. He held it up so that Nicholas could see, and his friend smiled and nodded.

Agios jerked his head, and he and Nicholas backed around the corner again. He knelt and placed the doll on the pavement, just where the girl might see it. As he began to rise, suddenly Nicholas bent and placed a little jingling bag of coins next to the doll. “They will need food and shelter as well,” Nicholas said softly.

Agios stepped out. He wore the same red garment that Nicholas had given him years ago. He stood until the girl glanced up and saw him, and then he beckoned, pointed down, and then walked away, Nicholas falling into step beside him. “You wish no credit for your art?” Nicholas asked.

“The only one who should know about it does know,” Agios replied. Behind them, he heard the man cry out in astonished delight. He felt warm and did not look back.

“That was kind of you,” Nicholas said.

“Son, you taught me that giving is a way of serving God,” Agios said. “I'd like to help you in your works of charity, if you'll let me.”

That moment changed everything for Agios. The next time he traveled to Myra he crammed as many trinkets as he could into his sack, along with dried goat's meat, a bag of coins—the last remnants of the scholar-kings' reward to him—a warm cloak he had traded for, as well as a sack of oranges that he had harvested from a grove a half day's journey away.

He told Nicholas, “I was wrong to think I could earn redemption.”

Nicholas, now a middle-aged man and an honored priest, murmured, “No one can do that, father. God's forgiveness is a gift.” He added warmly, “You of all men should surely understand the nature of a gift!”

Agios sighed. “All those years I lived without hope, with guilt and bitterness boiling in my heart. I never paused to think of all the others who were even worse off. I could have helped so many times and didn't.”

“Hope,” Nicholas murmured. “That is the greatest gift you offer others.”

Distributing the goods was a delight. Just as in the days when Agios left his carvings for children to find, he had the distinct pleasure of giving gifts without his recipient knowing the origin. A woman toiled over a pot of lentils and broth until Agios slipped past and there was suddenly—miraculously almost—mutton on her table. A young scholar walked home from classes, his head heavy and shoulders hunched until a perfect orange appeared on the ground before his shuffling feet.

“They're talking about you, you know,” Nicholas told him once.

More years had passed, thought it felt like a mere season to Agios. A bearded Nicholas wore the robes of a bishop —red, like the coat that Nicholas had given Agios on the mountain, but a rich brocade, long and tasseled and trimmed in gold and white.

Nicholas's robes weren't the only thing that had changed in the decades since Agios had first met him. Eudemus had been right: the emperor Diocletian had turned against the Christians with violence and the force of Roman law. In parts of the Roman Empire churches were razed, scriptures burned, Christians tormented and executed.