Immortal (11 page)

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 coming 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.

Shops lined two other sides of the square, and an inn took up the remaining side, opposite the Roman temples. The star beamed down from directly above the inn.

The sprawling building stood revealed in the radiance. Everything else lay in the shadows and the reflected glow. As they approached, with a suddenness that Agios could not at first comprehend, the star went out.

One moment its light poured down; the next it had vanished, with no sound, with no whisper of a breeze. Overhead the other stars shone in a clear sky.
The
star, though, for the first time in nearly a year, according to Melchior, had disappeared. He could hear no night sounds, no animals murmuring as they settled to sleep, no twitter of bats or swallows, no human footfall or voice.

“What does this mean?” Agios asked, and even in his own ears his voice seemed unusually loud.

Melchior said, “It means the star's task is finished,” he said. “Look there.”

Someone stood in the arched doorway of the inn yard. It was difficult to see in the sudden darkness, and Agios, remembering Matthias's story of the angels, felt his heart speed up.

However, the figure lifted a lamp, and it was only a man, somewhere between thirty and forty, with gray just beginning to streak his hair and his beard. He stepped toward the approaching strangers and waited. When they came near, he said, “I have been expecting you.”

“Expecting us?” Melchior asked, sounding puzzled. “How could that be?”

“A messenger said you would come,” the man said, using the same word,
malakh
, that the shepherd had.

Agios whispered to Melchior, “
Angelos
. The messenger he speaks of is an angel.”

“Is—is the child—?” Melchior's voice choked in his throat.

The man smiled. “Come with me and see. My name is Joseph.”

T
hey were not rich folk. The room they had been given was small and cramped, barely large enough for husband, wife, and child. The three scholar-kings crowded it, and Agios stood outside the doorway. Though he knew seeing the infant king would remind him of Philos—and though he dreaded it—he found himself drawn to the light that spilled from the small room. He had to restrain Krampus, who would have followed the scholars in. The misshapen man drew as close to the door as he could—and suddenly fell to his knees, staring.

Agios watched in puzzlement, feeling strangely disturbed. He got only occasional glimpses of the mother and her child, because the three men kept bending to gaze at them, blocking Agios's line of sight. To him the baby looked exactly like a baby, healthy enough, not much more than a month old, swaddled in plain linen and cradled asleep in his mother's arms. The small head was crowned with curly brown hair, the cheeks were pink, the features delicate.

Agios saw only a baby, not a king. And yes, he thought of Philos as he had been on the day of his birth, cradled in Weala's arms as she crooned to him. Agios's throat tightened.

Krampus rocked from side to side and made an inarticulate sound, a sound of yearning and of awe. Agios softly called him, but Melchior glanced back with a smile—and with tears shining on his face—and shook his head gently. Agios let Krampus stay where he knelt.

He stood near the doorway with his back to the room and listened as Caspar and Balthasar haltingly complimented the child, begged that their unworthy gifts be accepted by the parents, and knelt to honor the baby.

The child's mother spoke to them with great gentleness in her voice. They might have been her children, too —she had that air of motherhood about her, the kind of loving concern that Agios remembered seeing so often in Weala's eyes. In plain and homely language, Joseph thanked them for their kind words.

Then Melchior offered his praise and his adoration. When he rose to his feet, the kings presented their gifts, one after the other, and the mother wept and thanked them humbly.

Joseph had said her name was Mary, and the infant's name was Yeshua—Jesus, in the common tongue. Caspar and Balthasar murmured together of ancient prophecies. Agios caught the word “Immanuel,” an old Hebrew word meaning “God is with us.”

Melchior asked the couple if he and his friends might hear the account of the child's birth. Joseph said, “You tell them, Mary.” In a soft and rather shy voice, she told a strange story—a story of being visited by, yes, an angel, who had told her she would give birth to a son, whom she must name Jesus. She was a virgin then, she told them, though betrothed to Joseph. The angel had said that the son she was to bear would be the son of God Himself.

Joseph took up the story: He, too, had been visited by the angel, who told him the truth of Mary's pregnancy, not a disgrace but an honor to her. He did not break their engagement, but married her, knowing she carried a child like no other in the world.

“I'm a carpenter in Nazareth,” he finished. “But I'm of the house of David, and when we were ordered to register for the census, we had to come here to Bethlehem, the home of my ancestors. It was a difficult journey. Mary's time was close, and once here we could find nowhere to stay—the town was so crowded. No one had room.”

Mary said, “Until the keeper of this inn, out of kindness and pity, said we might stay in the stable. It was a roof over our heads, and it was warm.”

Joseph resumed: “And so our child was born in the manger of this inn. We saw signs and wonders at the time of his birth, and we know the story the angel told us is true.”

They would have talked on, far into the night, but Melchior rose and urged his friends out. “They need their rest. Time enough tomorrow,” he said. As he left, he turned back and said to Joseph, who stood in the doorway, “We have been commanded by King Herod to let him know of the child. The king himself!”

Joseph smiled. “We are going to Jerusalem in two days. The time has come for Mary's purification and for the child to be presented in the Temple there. If King Herod wishes, he can see Jesus then.”

Melchior bowed and said, “We would consider it an honor to make the journey with you.”

Joseph thanked him and then looked past Melchior and said, “Do you wish to see the baby?”

Krampus rose, turned, and shambled over to crouch behind Agios. He put his hand to his face and shook his head, weeping. Standing in the darkness, Agios felt his face grow hot. “He thinks he's too ugly,” he explained. “He thinks he might frighten the child.” He turned away quickly.