Immortal (10 page)

“Oh, Galilee.” Herod sounded amused. “It's a big enough place to make your search difficult. And it may disappoint you. Do you know that Galilee is where many pretenders have sprung up, many so-called magicians and prophets? You will not find a true king in Galilee.”

Caspar, who could not follow the conversation easily, looked to Agios, who bent toward him and quietly explained what he had understood. Caspar said, “Tell the king that we have seen evidence. Speak of the star.”

Agios asked for permission to speak, and when Herod granted it, he translated Caspar's words: “In the East we have seen his star. It is a wondrous sign, one that no human could imitate or cause to appear. It is surely the work of God. That is why we have come to worship the King of Kings.”

“The star again?” Herod asked. He summoned one of his servants and had a whispered talk with him. While the travelers waited uneasily, Herod called in a white-bearded elderly man and murmured questions that the old man answered. At length Herod waved him away.

Then he said, “I have heard something of a new star, a strange star, from this man, one of my many scholars. I will consult them. You may have a meal and wait while I confer with them. I don't wish you to leave the palace yet, for this news interests me. My servants will attend you while I speak to my astrologers.”

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.”

D
uring 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.

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.