Chapter 17
Agios hoped—though he wouldn’t have admitted it—that he would see Nicholas again. That night he began carving another gift for this boy who was the closest thing to a friend that he had encountered in too many weary years. Something inside Agios had awakened in the presence of the child. Maybe it was his memory of Philos, or Krampus, or even Jesus. No matter. Agios bitterly reminded himself that those he let himself care for always died.
Still, he set to work carving a trio of camels, one bending to drink at an invisible oasis, a second arching its neck proudly, and the third with legs splayed in a wild, desert run. Why these? he wondered, and the answer came from somewhere: Because Nicholas seems to be a seeker, like Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. But like them and all men, he is doomed to disappointment.
Two months later, near the end of the grazing season, Agios walked by moonlight to the same place where he had left the carved ewe and set down the camels. Let the boy find them and play. Growing up would gradually rob him of the wonder and joy that Agios had heard in his voice. Let him at least have pleasant times to remember.
The shepherds and their flocks returned the following spring, and Agios felt his heart lift at the sight of sheep once again in the valley. It was the third year that they had graced his mountain, and if Agios remembered correctly, Nicholas would be twelve years old— or almost.
Agios didn’t approach them, but he couldn’t help hoping against his will—and his warning—that maybe his path would cross Nicholas’s again.
A morning came when Agios sat outside the cave, in the shade of a dwarfish fig tree, carving a fisherman who would, when finished, hold and cast a small net woven of woolen strands. He was working on the figure’s face, which demanded concentration and a steady hand. In the same moment he became aware of someone watching him, he also realized that the boy, standing quiet on the edge of his vision, had probably been there for a long time.
He glanced up, his white beard barely concealing a smile. “Hello, Nicholas.”
“Hello,” the boy said. He stood to one side, silent as a stone, and he carried a bundle tied with crisscrossing twine. He held it out. “This is for you. Because you helped me that time when the lamb ran off.”
“Oh, that was nothing. I didn’t want any reward for that,” Agios said, but now he couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the boy’s earnest face and serious voice.
Nicholas looked a little downcast at Agios’s refusal. He held the bundle out farther and said more softly, “Please, take it. I meant it for you.”
“Well, well, let’s see what it is.” Agios carefully set aside his knife and the figure he was carving and took the bundle. Someone had done an expert job of binding it with the tied twine, and he quickly undid the knot. He shook it out and found it was a knee-length jacket, woven of wool and dyed red, trimmed with white. Agios smiled and shook his head. “Nicholas, I just took a short walk up the mountain with you. This is too much to repay such a small favor.”
“No,” Nicholas insisted. “It was my grandfather’s, but it was too big for my father to wear and it’s just been folded in a chest for years. My mother said I could give it away to someone who needed it. I thought you—might get cold in the winter sometimes.”
Agios stood and tried on the garment. It was a perfect fit. He took it off again and held it out, admiring it. “Well. Sometimes the winter winds are sharp here. It’s a very good coat. Thank you, and thank your mother for me. I can’t go hunting in this, though. The quarry would spot me from miles off, this red color against the brown of the mountains.” When Nicholas looked disappointed, Agios added, “I’ll always wear it when I’m not hunting, though, and the north wind is blowing cold. It’ll be welcome then. How is your lamb?”
“He’s a yearling now,” Nicholas said, looking happier. He sat on a stone near Agios, his face lit up with enthusiasm. Brave Dog, feeling his years, came halting out of the cave—he must have scented or heard Nicholas—and settled at the boy’s feet. Nicholas leaned to pat him as he continued: “He’s a lot bigger than he was. His horns are coming in nicely and he’s already butting heads with other little rams. What are you making now?”
Agios picked up the little figurine he’d been working on. “This will be a fisherman. When I finish, he’ll be able to hold on to a fishing net. You can flick a lever in his back and he’ll toss the net out. I mean to carve three little fish that he can catch, too.”
“I will make you fishers of men,” Nicholas said absently, studying Agios’s fine handiwork.
Agios felt as if he had been struck. Something about those words was a blow to his soul. “What did you say?” he asked, but his breath was gone in his chest and he barely wheezed the words.
Nicholas looked up and wrinkled his nose impishly. “Just something my uncle read to me,” he said. Then, oblivious to Agios’s discomfort, he prattled on, “I’ve seen fishermen. Every day they go out in boats from the port. I’ve never fished, though. Have you?”
“Not in the ocean,” Agios managed. He forced himself to focus on the carving in his hands. He sighed and added, “I’m pretty good at spearing them in the mountain pools, though.”
“I’ve never done that, either,” Nicholas told him. “Some of the other shepherds do, but not me.”
“Anyone could teach you.”
The boy thought about this. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “I don’t think I’d like killing things, even if they’re just fish. I don’t help out when the sheep have to be slaughtered because I don’t like it. But I eat fish and mutton. Is that wrong?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” Agios told him. “Their purpose in life is to be food.”
They were silent for a few moments while Agios picked up his tools again and resumed careful work on the fisherman. He let Nicholas crane his neck and watch, and tilted his hands so that the boy could see the fine detail, the razor-sharp tip of the tiny pick he used to create wrinkles and features in a face as small as his thumb.
“You’re really good at that,” Nicholas said after a while.
Agios didn’t respond. True, he was very skilled. But he had had a very long time to practice. After a while he asked, carefully, “Do you like learning from your uncle?”
He felt rather than saw Nicholas nod. “He’s a good man. I’m named after him, you know.”
Agios didn’t know, but he didn’t point that out.
“Uncle Nicholas says that God has a plan for me.”
Agios caught Nicholas’s eye and smiled. It didn’t matter what he personally believed or didn’t believe about God. This child was a wonder. “I’m sure he does. A magnificent plan.” He just doesn’t have one for me. The thought came unbidden and Agios had to fight the wave of sadness that washed over him.
“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.”
&
nbsp; 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: