Immortal (13 page)

Krampus and Agios always loitered some distance away and Agios spoke offhandedly to other travelers at such times: How had the weather been in the north? Was Greek wine selling well in Jerusalem? What about wool?

Casual talk, roadside gossip, often led from one thing to another, from inconsequential things to information Agios really wanted. One man who had been hurrying south but who had stopped to rest spoke in low, anxious tones of King Herod, whose soldiers were asking everywhere about boys born within the past year.

“It's not a normal thing for a king to do,” the man said, shaking his head. “Everyone's wondering what it means, and everyone's alarmed—especially the parents of those boys. Bad enough that the Romans forced everyone to travel to the towns of their ancestors for their census, but now the king of the Jews demands this foolishness.”

He broke off and darted an apprehensive and guilty look at Agios. Such words could be very dangerous, even deadly.

“It's nothing to me. I'm not of this country,” Agios assured him with a shrug. “Just passing through. My friend and I usually work as guards and guides for caravans.”

They camped twice on the way, and camped early, for Mary and Joseph and the child needed the rest. In the long evenings Agios talked with Krampus—or instructed him in speech. Krampus was beginning to talk a little more, and he surprised Agios now and then—he comprehended more than he seemed to. Still he would not mention his family or his home.

On the first night of their camping, Agios asked Krampus to take the first watch and waken him when he wanted to sleep himself. That didn't happen, and Agios woke almost at sunrise to find Krampus still alert. “You let me sleep too long,” he said.

Krampus smiled. “I watch. You sleep. You . . . need sleep more.”

He is trying to give me a gift
, Agios thought. He thanked the big man, but the next night he took the first watch. He woke Krampus at midnight.

They reached Jerusalem the next day, in the middle forenoon. As always, hopeful merchants had set up the usual maze of booths outside the gates and had even spilled some way inside the city. They shouted boasts about their goods, they implored passers-by to pause and look, and they offered everything from food—dried fish and fresh lamb, vegetables and fruits, wine and honey, goat's milk, cow's milk, butter and cheese, grapes, a dizzying assortment in fact—to clothing, shoes, weapons, medicines, magic potions, and more besides.

The noisy, jostling crowd was lucky for them, Agios thought. With all the commotion, the two quiet travelers Joseph and Mary would attract less attention. He and Krampus were some distance ahead of the family and reached the gates first.

The bored Roman guards were letting merchants and shoppers and idlers go in and out freely and didn't do more than glance at Agios and Krampus, but a gray-robed man standing near them, a man with the smugly official look of a king's servant, stopped a couple who were coming in. The woman carried a child, not even an infant but a toddler maybe two years old.

“Boy or girl?” the man asked.

The woman stared at him as if thinking only an idiot would ask that with the child in plain sight. “A girl. Her name is Rachel.”

The official said in a fussy voice, “Show me she's a girl.”

The couple looked at each other, but they seemed too timid to protest. The woman said, “She's just over two years old,” and started to undress the child.

Before she had finished, the man waved them on. “That's enough, you can go. You could have told me sooner how old she was and that she's a girl.”

The couple apologized—
Civilization
, Agios thought with contempt for the officious man with his insulting questions and his conviction that everyone but him was in the wrong—and the mother adjusted her daughter's clothes as they moved along. He muttered to Krampus, “Go and wait for me at the mouth of that alley. Stand quietly, as though waiting for someone, and speak to no one. No matter what you see or hear, wait for me to come to you.”

Krampus shambled along, his robes hiding his ungainly form. He reached the alley and stood in the shade, arms folded, head down, as though patiently awaiting some friend or trader.

By that time Joseph and Mary had almost arrived at the gate, just behind Agios. Agios turned and cried out, “My old friend!” He lurched over to the official, speaking loudly like a lunatic or drunken man and embracing the gray-robed man in a bear hug, forcibly turning him so his back was to the gate. “I haven't seen you in years! You look just exactly the same as you used to. Phidias, how are you?”

The startled official struggled in Agios's strong grip. “Let go of me! I'm not—”

Agios spun him around in a quarter-turn as Joseph and Mary walked past just steps away. “Let me look at you!” Agios laughed, lifting the furious official momentarily off his feet, an outraged squirming fellow with all his attention on this bear of a bearded barbarian.

Agios set him down and pretended to brush dust from the shoulders of his robe. “You don't even recognize me, do you? No wonder! I was so thin in those days. And just look at how stout I am, and look at my beard! I didn't have this when we sat together on the seat of a Roman galley, did I? But tell me about yourself. You're so well-dressed, Phidias! You must've done well in the world, my old friend! How did you get your freedom?”

The man's face was scarlet. “I've never been a galley slave!”

“No shame in having once pulled an oar, Phidias!” Agios bellowed, laughing and thumping him on the shoulder so hard he made the official stagger. “Once you earn your freedom, you're equal to any Roman citizen! By Jove, Phidias, I can see you've done well! A rich man, I'll wager. My old friend! Say, buy a drink for an old shipmate, will you?”

The two Roman guards were laughing. They sauntered over and one said, “Be off with you, fellow. You've made a mistake. This is a man from Herod's court, not a former slave.”

Agios blinked as though trying to work that out. He saw that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were now safely past and in the street, turning to the right and vanishing among the crowds. “Not Phidias Simonides? You look so much like him—no, I suppose he'd be much older than you are, not as good-looking. What a fool I've been! A thousand pardons, noble sir. Forgive a poor man's honest mistake. I meant no disrespect.” He bowed low and stumbled off, the guards' laughter and the official's muttered curses following him.

As soon as he was out of sight of the gate, Agios picked up his pace, threaded his way through the crowds, and beckoned to Krampus. “You did well to keep your place, friend,” he told the big man. “Come on.” The two hurried through the crowds and came within sight of the small family Agios had sworn to protect. He trailed in their wake as they walked uphill to the Temple quarter of the city, where the enormous Second Temple dominated everything.

Agios saw Joseph and Mary approach its looming walls and speak to a man dressed in dark robes—a priest, he supposed. After a brief murmured conversation, he conducted them and the child up a broad sweep of steps on which hundreds of people milled, and then priest, husband, wife, and child vanished from Agios's sight as they went through a double gate.

Agios looked up—and up again, to the gilded roof far overhead.

“What?” Krampus asked him.

“This is the temple of their God,” Agios explained. “Up there, somewhere, there's a special room, the Holy of Holies they call it. That's what I've heard from Jews I met in the caravans, anyway. It's so hallowed by their God that only priests can enter. They tell me that once it held a sacred relic.”

“What is relic?” Krampus asked, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

“I don't know. Anyway, the Jews say the first Temple that stood here was built by a king of old, a wise man like our three kings, a man named Solomon. The Babylonians, they say, sacked that temple and took away the treasures. This temple was built by Herod's father. Now the Holy of Holies has no treasure to protect.”

Krampus grunted. “Holds memory,” he said.

Agios stared hard at the misshapen man. Sometimes his simplemindedness had almost the sound of wisdom.

They waited. Agios didn't understand the rituals that the family would undertake, except that Jesus, as firstborn son, was to be consecrated to the Lord. So Agios and Krampus kept their peace and shifted their position often, not wanting to attract any guard's attention.

Agios didn't speak to anyone, and if anyone spoke to him, he returned only a polite greeting and a nod. Agios was a nonbeliever, and he didn't know how strict the rules might be for a non-Jew. Maybe they would object to his being so close to the Temple. As for Krampus, he seemed to be invisible to the passers-by—that, or some indefinable threat about his gigantic stature and his muffled form made them keep their distance.

A man in a crowd who does not talk overhears many things. Agios listened to fearful low conversations about Herod and his census of childbirths—what could it mean? Were the Romans behind it? More trouble for the city? No one knew for sure.

Together with Krampus, Agios moved from place to place, gazing around while keeping one eye on the Temple steps. From here he could see much of the city of Jerusalem, its newest buildings toward the north. Looking east he saw hills—though he overheard a man, showing the place to visitors from out of town, call them mountains. One he heard called the Mount of Olives, a roundish mound planted thick with the fanlike shapes of olive trees. Its height made it little more than a knoll to Agios, nothing to the towering rugged mountains where he had been born and raised.

They waited until the hour before sunset, with Agios starting to worry that something had gone wrong. Then with great relief he recognized Joseph, and then beside him Mary, carrying her child. They were coming slowly down the wide steps, an old man at Joseph's elbow, taking only one slow step down at a time. Agios saw that he trembled as he walked—but then he realized that the old man was also weeping, blinded with tears.

Agios did not so much as look twice at Joseph and Mary, but he fell in not far behind them. The old man—Agios heard Joseph call him “Simeon”—was saying, “Now the Lord may let me go in peace. He promised me that I would not die until I had seen and held in my arms this child, who will bring salvation to Israel and to the Gentile world alike.” He murmured prayers of thanks and blessing and said his farewell as Joseph and Mary left the temple gates.

When Agios was certain that no one was paying the least attention—crowds still thronged the streets in the fading heat of the long day—he came up behind Joseph and said, “Don't look around, Joseph. I'm one of the friends Melchior promised would help you. Have you performed all of your rites?”

“Yes,” Joseph said, not even twitching his head to look.

“Then leave the city now. Herod is searching for your child. There is a stable on the left a few yards past the Bethlehem Gate. I'll hurry ahead there, and when you come to it, ask and they will have animals ready for you. If you're asked about the child, tell them the baby is a newborn, just three days old. Say you're from some other town, not Bethlehem or Nazareth, and that the child wasn't born in Galilee.”

Agios took Krampus's arm as they came to a side street and pulled him down it. They threaded their way to the gate and then out into the market plaza. Agios estimated that they had only minutes to make things ready. Agios paused to make hurried purchases at the booths—bread, dried fruit and meat, warm blankets, and other goods. Then they reached the stable, where business was slow, and Agios called the owner aside and bargained.

Dipping into the purse of money that Melchior had given him, Agios bought two healthy-looking mules, one for Joseph to ride and one to bear supplies, as well as blankets and a packsaddle. He and Krampus loaded the pack mule with the food and other supplies. While Agios and Krampus had waited near the Temple, he had learned from people he asked casually that the best way to Egypt was the Sea Road, one of the Romans' splendidly engineered routes.

He wondered if the family would be safe going that way, or even after they arrived. Egypt, of course, was still part of the Roman Empire—along the shores of the Mediterranean there was no escaping Roman control—but it was at least far beyond the limits of Herod's power. Hoping that Herod did not wield enough influence to pursue them beyond the boundary of Judea, Agios pointed out Joseph and Mary to the stable owner as the couple came into view, still within the gates.

The fussy government official whom Agios had hailed as his old friend was no longer on duty, but another, older and fatter but otherwise almost interchangeable with him, stood in his place, shifting from foot to foot as if he had grown tired of this duty.

“Where is your home?” the man asked Joseph in an officious voice.

Joseph's reply was too soft for Agios to hear. He and Krampus sauntered toward the gate, just in case.

But scrutiny of those leaving the city was not as strong as it was for arrivals, and the official gestured for Joseph and Mary to go on. They made their way out of the gate, saw the stable, and made their way over to it. The owner, aware that Agios and Krampus loitered nearby, gave them the animals that Agios had purchased.

Mary looked frightened and held the child close to her heart.

Then the family moved on, out to the southbound road, Joseph riding the saddled mule and leading the second one, loaded with enough provisions to see them well away from the city.

Mary's sturdy donkey set the steady pace southward. They continued that first night until even Joseph looked ready to drop from exhaustion, and then they found refuge with shepherds who had camped on a hillside nearby. Agios and Krampus passed the shepherd camp and stopped for the night beneath a cluster of date palms not far off the road.