Done with his butchering, he wiped spear and knife, took the decoy apart, repacked everything, and hefted the sack. He started back up the slope. He realized then how little time the whole act of slaughter and butchery had taken. The sun still rested on the very rim of the world, just below the far edge of the snow clouds, and a strip of red sky made everything the color of bronze.
Before Agios cleared the last oaks, he heard sounds that made his heart thud and yanked him from his reverie: yelps and frenzied snarls, barks of defiance and shrieks of wounded dogs. He had seen no sign of—wolves!
Agios dropped the pack, slashed the lashings of his snowshoes, and broke into an adrenaline-fueled run, making straight for the sledge, both spear and knife gripped in his bare hands. His heart pounded harder when, in the softer snow, he spotted a confusion of fresh tracks.
Yes. Wolves!
Cold burned his lungs as he clambered up the steepest part of the slope, the shortest route. He met one of his dogs, its left hind leg bloody and trailing. It whimpered.
Agios burst into the sheltered place where he had left the sledge. It had been dragged some distance and lay overturned, the pelts scattered. Four of his dogs lay ripped and bloody, dead on the snow.
The pup was gone.
Agios reeled, hands to his head as he absorbed this fresh loss. If there was one thing that he had learned in his weary pilgrimage, it was that death followed him wherever he went. It was why he hadn’t spoken to a person in more years than he could count. He wasn’t entirely sure his voice still worked or how to address another human being. He had become wholly and unconditionally alone in a world that had utterly forsaken him. His last connection to human feeling was his attachment to his animals.
Agios couldn’t hold the cry that welled up in his throat, born of grief that stretched back over two hundred years, to a life he remembered like a bad dream. Had he dreamed it, the nightmare of loss and death?
When he screamed, he sounded exactly like a tormented wild animal. Injured, broken—but unable to die.
Surely, that was the worst fate of all.
Chapter 16
Agios left the mountains. Four or six or more generations of men ago, he had banished himself from the world, trying to find peace, but now . . . With his three surviving dogs he journeyed over treacherous mountain passes. Agios felt unworthy of their loyalty, but they flanked him like guards, one on either side, the third bringing up the rear.
Agios had always named his dogs by some descriptive term—Gray Shadow, Trotter, Leaper, Sly, Fighter—and his surviving animals were Tracker, Gentle, and Brave Dog. Brave Dog was his rear guard and he trailed his fingers along Tracker’s head as he walked.
For days they hiked the barren, rocky peaks, hiding under outcroppings in the jagged rock when storms raged overhead. Agios brought down small game for them in the evenings. He was grateful for the warmth of his dogs; their bodies beside him were a comfort. He knew that with or without them he would survive, but the thought gave him no satisfaction.
Agios had somehow been plucked from the human race, set apart for some purpose he could not understand. Why me? he had wondered a million times. Why not Philos or Krampus or . . . Jesus? At first, Agios had even tried to pray, but since he felt no response, he had gradually ceased. What god would do this to him? Curse him with life that would not end, life filled only with two imperatives, survival and regret. He would do so much differently if he had the chance, starting with drinking the water at the Sychar well—and taking Jesus’s words to heart. He could still change, he thought, but no, impossible. He had become too set in his ways, and no god could forgive him for all the mistakes he had made over the years. No god could forgive a man who’d sent his own son to die in unimaginable pain on a tree.
He touched the scar on his cheek, the brand of his shame. I wasn’t worthy of my mission. I failed. And now I’m cursed.
When Agios and his dogs left the snowy passes for a gentler clime, when the earth began to green again and the spindly shrubs of rocky soil became tall pines with long needles the color of spring grass and bay trees thick with their distinctive spearhead leaves, he still had no destination in mind. He was in a country near the sea, he knew that. Maybe eventually he would travel farther south, find himself among men again. Or maybe not. He began to look around for some place to live.
He found a cave eroded into the side of a squat mountain. Agios had lived in many caves in the weary decades and even centuries after the death of Jesus, and he made quick work of domesticating this one. Sand floor, low ceiling, drafty but safe. He gathered wood, swept pine needles into a bed, and dug a fire pit, lining it with flat stones. An oil lamp he hung on a spiked rock near the door, and his tools he laid carefully in the back corner. He had not lighted the lamp for many years—for no olives grew in the farthest north—but he had seen wild olive trees in this southern countryside, and the light would be welcome.
The dogs ranged around the mountainside, full of life and excited by the green surroundings. They were used to a harsher world, and to be in a place where warmth replaced cold, and life took the place of barrenness, seemed to please them. Yes, this would do for a while, anyway.
That night Agios lit a small fire in the pit outside his cave and with his dogs at his side studied the stars. He scanned the skies for something different, but no new star had appeared in nearly three hundred years. No angelic light shone for him. The world had changed. The stars and Agios had not. But as Agios watched, a single point of light shimmered bright and broke loose from the canvas of the night, streaking across the darkness like a banner. What did it proclaim?
Maybe something was about to change after all.
Because Agios had lived so very many days, they blended in with each other and seemed to pass quickly. How long was a week, a month, a year? The twinkling of an eye to Agios. And so time passed in his cave with the same immeasurable consistency. Seasons came and went, though Agios barely marked them. He hunted and gathered, eventually tilling and tending a small garden that he protected from foragers with a low rock wall. Tracker and Gentle grew old and died, and Agios buried them beyond the garden and marked their graves with stones. Brave Dog was the only companion that Agios had left in the world. Still, he didn’t leave the mountain to seek out other people.
Then one spring, the verdant valley below his home became grazing fields for a small herd of sheep. The first morning that Agios awoke to find the landscape dotted with their white, woolly forms, his heart leaped into his throat. Go, he thought, for when he thought he was near men, his immediate impulse always turned to flight.
But in the distance he saw a shepherd—only a little boy—who waved to him from perhaps two thousand yards away. Almost against his will, Agios raised his hand in greeting, too. There was no danger, so long as the shepherd stayed away.
All that spring the little shepherd tended his sheep, letting them graze on the lower shoulders of the mountain during the day and collecting them safely together at night. His camp was out of sight, but every morning he returned to the valley. He had two dogs, similar in size and appearance to Brave Dog, and Agios could tell that his own companion longed to go make friends. But Brave Dog was too well trained. He wouldn’t leave Agios’s side.
And one morning as summer blazed hot the shepherd did not come, nor did his flocks.
Agios didn’t mean to grieve. What had he lost? They had never even exchanged a word. But all the same, the night after his young neighbor had gone away, Agios sat alone at his fire with a knife in his hand. He carved a perfect sheep. A pair of them, actually: a pretty little ewe with wide, doe eyes and a ram with proudly curved horns. Agios’s hands had gained cunning over the long years, and these were beautiful creatures. He set them gently on a stone shelf in his cave.
The shepherd came back with the turn of the next winter to early spring. It was around noon on a beautiful, sun-bright day when the first sheep wandered into view. Agios was weeding his garden, and when he stood to stretc
h his back and caught sight of the familiar puff of white against the new green grass, he felt his heart swell. Ridiculous, he chastised himself. Foolish to be so smitten with a lamb. However, the shepherd, not his sheep, was what made his heart beat faster. Agios was reluctant to admit it, but he longed for human contact.
That night, when the shepherd and his flock were sleeping, Agios crept down the slope. In each hand he carried a humble offering. Just as in the old days, he didn’t wish to give his gift outright. Instead, he found a wide, flat rock under a tree where he had often seen the boy rest in the midday heat. There he placed the ram and his ewe, head to head as if nuzzling each other. A smile shadowed his face as he returned to his cave.
Then three days later Agios brought a burden home, a load of wood—some of it fuel for his fire, some carefully selected material for his carving. He dumped the wood into a lidless bin he had shaped from dry-laid stone. He lit the oil lamp—he cultivated and pressed olives now, more for their oil than for their value as food—and the yellow glow brightened the recesses of the cave. Then he sorted out the carving wood into a separate stack, and at last straightened and dusted his hands.
And then he heard it: a clattery little sound, the sound of wood clicking on wood.
It came from within the side cavern where he stored his carvings. In the year since he had carved the ewe and ram, he had revived his old pastime. He had stored scores of carvings there, all done since he had first carved the sheep. Quietly, his footfalls silent on the sandy floor, Agios crossed, ducked low at the arched entrance, and looked in.
A black-haired boy in shepherd’s clothes—a plain knee-length tunic of brown wool and sandals—sat cross-legged on the sandy ground, pushing a carved wagon along the floor. The wheels turned, and the oxen’s legs moved. Brave Dog lay on his stomach nearby, his tail thumping. The boy was so engrossed in the toy that he didn’t even glance around.
It was his shepherd, the boy on the hill who had waved the first day they spotted each other over a year earlier. Agios felt his chest fill with conflicting emotions: dread that the child had reached out, elation that he was here. Fear and surprise. Joy.
Agios cleared his throat. “Who are you?” he asked in Aramaic. His own voice was rough and unfamiliar in his ears.
In the dim light that filtered in from the main cave, the boy looked around over his shoulder, his brown eyes wide with surprise. He had a shy smile. In Koine Greek, he said, “Hello. I’m Nicholas. Who are you?”
Agios nodded at the wagon and answered in the boy’s language: “I’m the man who made that.”
“It’s beautiful,” Nicholas said, reaching over to scratch Brave Dog’s ears. “Did you make the ewe, too? And the ram?” He stood up and produced the carvings from his pockets.
Agios nodded, noticing the top of the boy’s head was bald.
Very seriously, the boy asked, “Sir, have you seen a lamb? He’s about three months old, and I’ve lost him. He’s white. I mean, well, of course he’s white. After all, he’s a lamb.”
Agios shook his head, though his mouth wanted to twitch into a smile at the boy’s grave words and attitude. How old was the lad? Eight? Nine? Very young indeed. “I’ve seen no lamb. What happened to your hair?”
Nicholas smiled and touched the spot with his fingers. “It’s a tonsure. My uncle—his name is Nicholas, too —is a priest and he hopes I’ll be one. He did this when I came to stay with him and learn from him. All priests have their heads shaved like this.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be a priest?” Agios asked curtly.
The boy tried to stand taller. “I’m almost eleven!”
Agios asked, “Where’s your uncle?”
Nicholas pointed, though he probably had no real sense of direction here in the inner cave. “He’s about two miles away, with the other shepherds. Down lower. There’s more grazing in the foothills.”
Agios frowned. “He’s a shepherd? I thought you said he was a priest.”
“And a shepherd, too,” the boy said. He sighed. “It’s my fault, losing the lamb. I felt drowsy and closed my eyes and when I woke up, all the sheep were there but that one. I shouldn’t have let the lamb get away. Now I’ve got to find it and bring it home.”
“So much trouble over one lamb,” Agios said.
“But it’s my lamb. It’s my responsibility,” the boy replied.
Agios stooped to pick up the wagon and its oxen. “Then I suppose we’d better go look for it.”
The boy sounded discouraged. “I can’t find any sign of him, and I’ve already looked all the way up to this meadow. He’s been gone since dawn, and it’s after noon now.”
“What makes you think he’d be here?”
“He’s a climber,” Nicholas said. “He likes to be in high places. My uncle says he’s part mountain goat. I think he’d go uphill, that’s all.”
Agios thought that the boy should know his own sheep well enough to be right about that. He said, “We’ll start here, then, and look a little harder. Are you hungry?”
“No,” the boy said, but his voice was hesitant.
“You can’t go hunting on an empty stomach.”
“I have nothing to pay you with.”
Agios shook his head at that and gave him some food anyway, a small bowl full of a cold stew of goat’s meat, lentils, and onions, and Nicholas wolfed it down as Brave Dog ate his own meal. When he finished, Agios said, “Let’s go. Stay, Brave Dog.”
“Can’t he go with us?”
“He’s old and tired and it’s better for him to guard the cave,” Agios said, not mentioning the fact that the dog had accepted Nicholas without trying to frighten him off.
They looked through three of the small, high meadows and saw only a few wild goats, a hare or two, and the soaring eagles that nested in the mountains. Nicholas clearly felt discouraged, but Agios said, “Oh, don’t lose hope, young fellow. The lamb’s had a lot of time to climb, and we have to go slower. We’ll find him, I think.”
In fact Agios, the old hunter, had spotted some signs of the lamb that the boy missed: a little pile of dark greenish droppings, and then later some strands of white wool caught on a briar. Finally he imitated the bleat of a ewe, and they heard a faint, weak voice replying from some way off. “That will be your lamb,” he told Nicholas.
“Why doesn’t he come to us?”
“Maybe he can’t. This way.”
They talked as they searched, and Agios learned a little about the boy: He lived in Patara. His father was Epiphanius and his mother Johanna. Nicholas seemed surprised when Agios gave no sign of recognition. “My parents are well known in town.”
“Why aren’t you with them, then?” Agios asked. The boy squared his narrow shoulders. “In the spring I live with my uncle. He’s my father’s older brother. He’s training me to be a priest. He taught me how to read and write, and I’m studying the scrolls my family owns. It’s really my uncle’s lamb I’m looking for, but he said if I’d raise it I could have it.”
That brought Agios back to the task. He pointed uphill. “From the way he bleats and doesn’t come, I suspect he’s caught in a thicket I know about.”
The ravine would be a torrent in times of flood, but on a dry day it was a crooked gully floored with loose pebbles and tough grass. At the upper end stood a stubborn growth of camelthorn, a snarl more than chest-high to Agios. From inside the thicket came the lamb’s weak, hoarse bleats. The animal had tangled its wool in so many briars that it couldn’t tear loose.
Agios drew his knife from its scabbard and cut the vines, working them free from the lamb’s pelt. “Let him eat and drink and I’ll see you back to your people.”
“You’ve scratched up your hands,” Nicholas said.
The backs of Agios’s hands were crisscrossed with bloody streaks, but they didn’t hurt. The scars he had earned over the long years had been some protection. “They’ll heal,” Agios told Nicholas. “Let’s see if this little fellow can walk.”
Th
e lamb seemed exhausted, staggering and falling to its knees, so Agios picked it up and shouldered it, the animal’s hind legs on his left side and the forelegs on the right, its belly warm against the back of his neck. They reached a trickling stream of good water, and the lamb drank and seemed a little better. Lower still, it grazed for a while on tender new grass, and then Agios picked him up again.
The sun had slipped halfway down the sky by the time they reached the lower meadows. Nicholas was nimble-footed, and they went far down the slopes until Agios saw the blue drift of smoke from a campfire in a green clearing a mile or so away. He set the lamb down, and after its rest on his shoulders, it began to frisk around.
“Watch him closer in the future,” Agios advised.
“Come into our camp,” Nicholas said. “I’m sure my uncle will want to reward you. He’ll feed you, at least.”
The boy’s kindness stabbed Agios, hurting him more than the sharp thorns had. “No, I don’t have good luck among people,” Agios said with a secretly bitter smile. Or among priests, he added mentally.
“Could I come and visit you again?”
“That wouldn’t be wise,” Agios said, trying to sound discouraging. “I’m a hermit, you see, living all by myself. I don’t like company.” When the boy looked disappointed, he relented a little: “Well, I won’t forbid you, but don’t come often. Visiting me can be very dangerous—for reasons you can’t know. Take your lamb and get back to your flocks and your uncle now.”
He turned and walked away with a quick pace and did not pause or look back for a long way. When he scaled a high ridge and stared back down the mountain, he could barely make out the thin wisp of smoke from the shepherds’ campfire, and he saw no sign of Nicholas or his lamb.