Two servants ushered them into a banquet hall far too large for four men, and serving girls brought them dishes of honey, loaves of bread, figs, olives, dates, and pomegranates. They poured a strong red wine into golden cups. Agios, who usually ate only with Krampus, stood near the doorway, but Melchior told him to sit with the scholars and join in the feast. He ate, but he drank no wine.
“You don’t like it?” Balthasar asked, holding up his cup.
“Wine makes me foolish,” Agios said. “Unless I mingle it with a great deal of water, I prefer not to drink it.”
One of the serving girls brought him a pitcher of water, and then he did drink, splashing only a taste of the wine into the cup. “This is too fine a vessel for a hunter,” he murmured, holding up the cup.
“You have become more than a hunter,” Melchior told him.
“Have I?” Agios asked.
They finished the meal, then waited. Caspar paced the floor, shaking his head with impatience. “The kings in these over-civilized parts of the world take too long in making up their minds,” he said. “In the desert, we see a need and we move!”
At last in the midafternoon a guard summoned them back into the presence of Herod. The king had changed his robes and now wore one of splendid purple, a color reserved only for the highest royalty. He gestured them back to their seats and said, “I have heard all about the new star now. My scholars tell me it is possibly an omen, though they admit they can’t interpret its meaning, as you seem to think you have done. When did you first notice it, now, I wonder?”
“The first time for me,” Melchior said, “was when the star was so faint and dim that anyone else would easily have overlooked it. That was nearly a year ago.” He named the exact date, and Herod called in one of his own scholars to work out how Melchior’s calendar correlated with the Roman one. For some reason, the exact timing of the star’s appearance seemed very important to him.
“Then if your belief is true,” Herod said, “if the star appeared, say, at the time the new king was born, then he must be close to a year old.”
Melchior spread his hands. “Perhaps. Or perhaps the star appeared at his conception, and maybe he is newly born—our knowledge doesn’t extend that far. We will know only when we seek him and find him.”
“But you believe he is a child, an infant.”
“So we believe,” Melchior agreed.
Herod nodded. “Then go to Galilee,” he said. “Find your King of Kings. I give you this commandment, though: when you find the child, return here to my palace and tell me exactly where he is.” When the three visitors did not immediately respond, Herod smiled and said in his smoothest voice, “I wish to worship him, too.”
“Very well,” Melchior replied.
By the time they left the palace night was coming on. “We will find him,” Melchior said, and Agios didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to his friends. “Even if it should take years. We will begin tomorrow—”
But Caspar had stopped in his tracks. “Come,” he said urgently. “Let’s find an open place.” Without explanation, he led them through the streets and finally out into a plaza or square. That was not enough. At the inn, he bargained with the innkeeper, who didn’t understand what he asked for, but who finally provided a ladder, of all things. They used it to climb to the flat roof of the stables. “Look,” Caspar said, pointing upward.
Agios frowned. The western sky showed a bright cluster of stars—but not the great star. “It’s gone!” he said.
“No,” Caspar said, half turning toward the south. “It has moved.”
They gasped. The familiar star, more brilliant than ever, reigned in the southeast. It shot glorious rays of light, beams in all the colors of a rainbow.
“What does this mean?” Balthasar asked.
Melchior spoke, calmly enough, but with an edge of excitement in his voice: “It means that we will leave Jerusalem tonight. It means that we must follow the star.”
Chapter 7
During daylight hours, the broad plaza outside the Bethlehem Gate bustled and buzzed as farmers hauled in produce to sell: lentils, beans, onions, apples, figs, and dates, and many other fruits of the earth, making the air fragrant. Shepherds and goatherds sold bleating lambs and kids. Camels and donkeys and horses brought burdens in from distant lands for trade, and their dung added its smell to the air.
Even at night some merchants lingered there, along with torchlit booths of moneychangers who would, for a fee, exchange the currency of India for that of Rome, or Egyptian money for Persian. Agios led the way through the late crowds, shrugging off the merchants who wished to make one last sale, and once a roaring Krampus frightened away a bold, thieving wench who tried to steal Melchior’s money pouch from his belt.
“How far to Galilee?” Balthasar asked.
Agios didn’t know, but he spoke to some of the travelers who had come by camel until he found one who did. He told Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior, “It’s to the north, they say, many leagues away. If we go there, we turn our backs on the star.”
“We will follow the star,” Melchior said firmly. “The king springs from Galilee, but he might not be born there. We will go toward the star, traveling by night.”
Caspar grunted in a discontented way.
“What’s wrong, my friend?” Melchior asked him.
The desert scholar sounded troubled: “I don’t trust Herod. He’s . . . I can’t say exactly. Too smooth. He’s like a small mound of glittering sand, bright in the moonlight, under which lies a coiled viper.”
The others were silent, but Agios agreed with Caspar. Herod’s casual exercise of power hadn’t been cruel, exactly, but it had been self-satisfied, as though he alone deserved to give orders and be obeyed. Caspar said, “Let’s find the child and then we’ll worry about Herod and his commands.”
The others agreed. Agios spoke to more of the travelers in the plaza. The Romans said little, dismissing him as if he were a beggar. One old man, though, spoke of a census that had taken place over the past year. “Everyone had to go to the home of his forefathers to be registered,” he said.
Melchior reflected, “Then our king’s family may have come south from Galilee for the census.”
“I trust the star,” Balthasar said, and Caspar agreed.
All that night they took a tortuous path winding through a mountainous landscape. Toward dawn a thin layer of cloud crept in, hiding all stars but theirs. Its glow shone through, steady and sure.
Even when dawn came the three scholars and their two guards did not stop. They continued on a road that led between dry, dusty hills. In the forenoon they came to a wayside inn and paused to rest. “Where are we?” Agios asked the innkeeper. He told him, and Agios passed the news along to the others: “Not far to the south is a place where a holy woman named Rachel is buried. Beyond that is a town called Bethlehem. Then farther on—”
Caspar smiled and said, “Bethlehem! ‘You, O Bethlehem, though little among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall come forth unto me he who is to rule in Israel!’ ” When Agios stared at him blankly, Caspar explained, “It is an ancient prophecy.”
“Could it be so near?” Melchior asked.
Balthasar put a hand on his shoulder. In a voice trembling with emotion, he said, “We must wait until nightfall. Surely the star will lead us. If he is in Bethlehem, we will see him this night.”
The three men embraced and wept. They did not notice when Agios and Krampus left to put away the camels and donkeys in the inn stables. As they fed and watered the animals, Agios felt troubled. It had been nearly a year since Philos had died. In some ways it felt like a lifetime ago, a time that belonged to another man. But the wound was still fresh and bleeding. Just the thought of new life, of a child so pure and full of potential, filled Agios with a sort of longing dread. Leaving his carvings for the children of Jerusalem was one thing, but Agios was not sure he could face an infant, much less a newborn king, an extraordinary child.
&nb
sp; He did not go back into the inn, but in an unused stable he found a pile of sweet-smelling straw and lay on it, trying to get a little rest. Krampus sat close by, facing the open doorway, his back against a shaded wall and his bent, long arms wrapped around his knees. People passing the stables sometimes pointed at him and muttered, but with Agios there none of them taunted Krampus, and the ugly man fell into a doze. For Agios, sleep did not come. He had caught the excitement of the three wise kings, perhaps, or maybe he simply dreaded dreams of Philos.
None of the people who came into the stables spoke to him or bothered him. The time crept slowly by, and the heat grew. Agios thought of the high mountains where he had been born and raised, where he had married and fathered a child, of how desolate they could be in winter, how fresh and green in the spring. His heart ached, and he did not quite know why.
Late in the afternoon he finally drowsed. Then, suddenly, he woke all at once, fully aware, not slowly rising from sleep. His old hunting instincts kept him from moving. He heard breathing and cracked an eyelid.
Krampus was on his left, still sitting drawn up against the wall, now snoring gently. On Agios’s right, not far from him, someone sat on his haunches, a man poorly dressed in a frayed woolen robe. He had a mop of black curly hair and he stared at Agios with brown, watchful eyes. As Agios raised himself up, the young fellow held up both hands as if in apology. “I did not mean to alarm you. I’m not a thief.”
Agios rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not alarmed.”
The man—just a boy, really, in his late teens—blinked in surprise at hearing his own language spoken by a foreign-looking stranger. In nearly a whisper, maybe to avoid disturbing Krampus, he asked seriously, “Do you and your friends seek the—” He spoke a word that Agios had never heard before, one whispered so softly and reverently that he did not quite catch it.
“I don’t understand that word,” he said, rising up to sit on the straw. Despite the young man’s assurances, Agios remained wary of him.
Slowly the young fellow said, “Messiah.” He strung the word out a syllable at a time, but even though he struggled just to speak it clearly, his voice still held admiration, respect, maybe even awe.
“Messiah,” Agios repeated after him. “What does it mean?”
With a shy smile, the stranger said, “I’m only a shepherd. I don’t know how to teach words to a stranger. But Messiah, it is”—he waved his hands as though trying to catch a meaning in midair—“the promised one. A savior. The one who . . . rescues us from evil.”
Agios said, “My friends have come many weary leagues to find the King of Kings.”
The young shepherd’s face nearly lit up with confidence and joy. “Ah. They seek the Messiah, then. Tell them Bethlehem. They must look in Bethlehem.”
Agios could not help smiling at this ignorant boy’s cheerful confidence. Had this shepherd solved the riddle that three great scholars still puzzled over? Unlikely. But Agios said in a friendly tone, “You sound very certain.”
The young man paused for so long that Agios thought he would not speak again, but then he said softly, “I am certain.” Agios felt something strange—the hair on his neck prickled, as it had done often enough when an elusive quarry was within sight. His heart felt strangely light. He caught his breath as the young man continued slowly, “I have seen him, the Messiah, the King of Kings. My friends and I have all seen him.”
For some reason Agios’s voice came hoarse: “Tell me.” He spoke more loudly than he had meant to do, and Krampus murmured and stirred.
The shepherd gasped as Krampus looked up, revealing his misshapen features. Krampus gazed from the shepherd to Agios and back and made an inquiring rumble in his throat.
“It’s all right, Krampus,” Agios told him. “This man has a story that I’m interested in hearing.”
The shepherd looked away, his face red. “You would never believe me.”
“Tell us anyway,” Agios said gently, in the same voice he had sometimes used to urge Philos to try something difficult. “We won’t laugh at you.”
Still not looking at Agios or Krampus directly, the shepherd boy took a deep breath. “It began,” he said, “on a dark night. My friends and I were almost asleep, with two awake, watching over the sheep, the rest of us lying on our blankets under the sky.”
He glanced back at Agios, who said, “I’m listening. Go on.”
With a nod, the young man continued: “The older shepherds talked of this and that, the way they always do, about the price of wool, and complained about the Roman taxes, talked of the crowds of people registering for the Roman census. And then . . .”
His voice trailed off, and his face took on a yearning look, as if he had something tremendous to say but could not find suitable words. Agios waited him out, and at last the young shepherd said, “There appeared a man among us. He . . . he shone like the light of the stars. I can’t describe him. He had a glow about him. I know it sounds crazy.”
When he didn’t speak for long moments, Agios asked, “A vision?”
“If it was some dream or vision, it was a very strange one, because we all shared it. Those of us who had been lying on our blankets leaped up. We were all afraid. The glowing man who had simply appeared among us . . . the malakh, you understand?”
“The messenger?” Agios asked. That was what the Aramaic term commonly meant, but an ordinary messenger would not cause such confusion, such reluctance, even in an uneducated shepherd boy.
“I have no tongue to speak!” the shepherd wailed. “The Greeks say angelos—angel, a messenger, yes, but from God!” Now, as though a dam had broken, his words gushed out: “The angel spoke to us and told us not to fear. Calm flowed from his voice like honey, sweet to our souls, and we lost our terror. We all fell to our knees on the grass. And then he told us a child was born in Bethlehem, a savior, the Christ whose birth was foretold long ago.”
His voice caught, and he began to weep, tears pouring down his cheeks. For a time he could not speak, but shook his head as though pleading for breath enough to tell his story. Yet his expression was exalted.
With a catch in his words, he finally continued: “And—and then—oh, then, in the sky—oh, how can I tell you? We saw there, among the stars, a hundred, a thousand angels, singing of peace and of a king!”
Krampus whimpered, a strange sound, like a child seeing something that awed and fascinated him. Agios shushed him and said, “Go on, lad.”
The shepherd strove to control himself and finally, humbly, he nearly whispered, “And so we all, oldest to youngest, went into town and found the child in a manger, for his family could find no room. We, the shepherds, the least of men, were the first to see the child and to worship him. We returned to our fields. Not a sheep had strayed. The lambs slept as though protected by God himself.” His face shone again. “And we had seen the King of Kings.”
Absurd, some would have said. A dream, or an outright lie. Agios, though, felt a strange assurance that every word the young man had said was true. “You have to tell the others.”
And so Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar heard the shepherd’s story, told in detail to the very placement of the animals around the manger. None of them laughed, but all caught something of the young man’s joy.
He said his name was Matthias, and since the time of his visit to the child—some month and a few days earlier, he thought, though he didn’t know exactly—he had told the story to many people who had scoffed at him and made fun of him. “I’m not a crazy man,” he said defiantly. “I am not a drunkard. I saw the things I saw and in my heart I know they’re true.”
He told them where to find the inn. “But,” he added, “the baby will surely no longer be there in the manger. By this time the census crowds have thinned, and some innkeeper or some kind person must have given them a place to live.”
Melchior offered Matthias a reward for his information, but this the young shepherd refused. “I’ve had my reward,” he said softly. Sunset was comin
g on, and he said he had to return to the fields. “One of us comes to the inn every day,” he told them. “We speak of what we have seen. Today it was my turn. Thank you for believing me.” He said farewell to them— even to Krampus, who stared at him as though the shepherd were some strange being that he did not quite recognize—and then the young man took up his shepherd’s hook and walked away toward the hills.
The three kings were on fire to go, even before the star showed in the sky. Agios and Krampus barely had time for a hurried meal before they pushed on. A half-hour after sunset, the star glowed again, brighter than ever, though somehow it had changed.
It no longer looked like a star, Agios thought. It was almost like a human form, standing, impossibly, in the heavens. That might have been only illusion, though, for its radiance was such that he could glance at it only indirectly. It seemed lower, and, no question about it, the star moved. It went before them in the sky, floating as it seemed, leading them onward, always within sight above the roofs of the little town.
Not long after dark they arrived at the wall around Bethlehem. The Roman guards grumbled at them for arriving so late, but accepted a small bribe and grudgingly allowed them to pass through the gate. The guards took no notice of the star at all—perhaps, thought Agios, it was meant to be seen only by people looking for it.
They found themselves in a maze of narrow streets with modest buildings of stone or stone-and-plaster. The houses presented mostly sand-colored fronts broken only by a single doorway.
Agios supposed they would stop to ask directions.
He was wrong. Somehow they never lost sight of the star.
At last they came to an open market square with a trickling fountain at its center. Agios recognized on one side two Roman temples. Caspar saw him staring at them and explained, “One’s dedicated to Jove, the chief Roman god. The other is a pantheon, a temple for worshipping all the others.” Dim lights shone through the colonnades of both, eternal lamps kept at the altars by the priests and priestesses.
In the light of the star the temple lamps faded to gloom.