Anatolia
The journey to Myra seemed to last forever. The first few days out from Blasios’ cave, the weather was cool but mild, and Mari’s high spirits and Menas’ tales kept everyone moving. Then, without warning, winter came. It hit like a tempest, plummeting the temperatures to a frigid cold and bringing a rage of snow in its wake.
Jurian had heard horror stories about the winters in central Anatolia from the Legionaries who had the misfortune to make that march, but he’d always assumed they were exaggerating to impress their friends.
They hadn’t been.
For a while they walked in the shelter of the low mountains, but eventually the snow and the wind seemed to forget about things like windbreaks and swirled all through the valleys, driving white drifts into every crevice and hollow. When Jurian spotted a narrow cave in one of the rocky mountainsides, they holed up for warmth for a day until the blizzard passed, eating dried meat and raisins and lamenting the lack of a fire.
“This isn’t the worst I’ve seen,” Menas said mildly.
He sat closest to the cave’s mouth, his cloak over his head and his bulky frame blocking out most of the wind. He crouched awkwardly, trying to wrap his purple, swollen feet in the hem of his cloak for warmth. Only a few scraps of daylight slipped in past his shoulders, leaving the tiny shelter a confusion of shadows.
“What was the worst?” Mari asked.
She sat huddled against Jurian’s side, her wool cloak pulled up over her nose. Jurian wrapped his own cloak around both of them, still afraid that she would fall ill again at any minute.
“Well, that would be, hmm, five years ago, I suppose? I was walking up from Myra, and had just come into the mountains when the snow came. It got so cold I had to look to make sure the sun still existed, but of course, the sky was so full of snow that I couldn’t see the sun at all. Needless to say, that didn’t improve my mood. But the snow kept coming until I couldn’t even see the hand in front of my face, and my eyes burned so badly from the cold that I thought they’d crack and fall out if I stared too long anyway. Then, without warning, I hit the edge of a ridge and fell a clear fifty feet before I hit the ground.”
“Fifty!” Mari interrupted, laughing. “Not likely.”
“Well, maybe it was closer to forty.”
Jurian cocked a brow at him.
“Well, maybe thirty. Anyway, it was a long drop. And I landed right in a drift of snow. Surprisingly, though, it felt a bit warm in there, so I just wrapped up in my cloak and went to sleep. Slept for three months, just like a bear, and came out when the snow started melting.”
“Three months!”
He winked at her. “Three blessedly warm, quiet months.”
“Days?” Jurian asked.
Menas coughed.
“Hours?” Mari asked, a note of despair in her voice.
“All right, three hours. But it felt like months. And I suppose I climbed out again before it melted. It was like climbing a mountain! The snow had piled up ten times my own height.”
By then Mari couldn’t stop laughing long enough to protest, but Jurian was almost more entertained by the satisfied smirk on Menas’ face. The giant had obviously been a bit lonely in his travels. Jurian wondered how he could have survived so long without an audience for his stories.
Thinking about that, he asked, “Do you escort many people through this region?”
Menas grew thoughtful. “Oh, quite a lot. Once I carried ten people across the same river, all in the same week.” His eyebrows shot up and he jutted a lip, adding, “And once I carried ten people across a river…all at the same time.”
“No you didn’t!” Mari laughed.
“Well, it felt like I did,” he huffed.
“You were going to tell us that story, Menas,” Jurian said. “About the heaviest burden you ever carried.”
Menas hunched his shoulders, letting a thin whimper of wind into the cave. “Do you know what it was?”
They shook their heads, Mari enraptured, Jurian curious.
“A child.”
Mari looked like she wanted to laugh again, but then seemed to realize that Menas wasn’t embellishing this time. “A child?” she murmured.
“It was not long after…after the devil had left me. I was on the river, fishing for my dinner, when I looked up and saw this beautiful little child, only about three or four years old, standing on the riverbank across from me like he’d been there forever. I was afraid he would wander into the water, so I rushed across the river toward him.”
“Where were his parents?” Mari asked, horrified.
“That’s what I asked him. He just fixed his gaze on me with the faintest smile on his lips, and didn’t say a word. That child’s eyes…” His voice drifted away and he stared a while into the shadows. “Like the night sky. You know how it seems so close but so far away, so clear but so fathomless? His eyes were like that. He just stared up at me, like he could see right through me, see all I had ever done, and yet he looked at me without fear, without hatred. Like I meant something to him.” He bowed his head, threading his fingers through the length of his beard. “I asked him if he wanted to cross the river. He said yes, so I knelt and lifted him onto my shoulder. He was the first person I ever carried across a river. I wasn’t worried. The boy was tiny and light, and he didn’t move at all. I was afraid he would start wiggling as we got into the water, and make us both fall.”
“What happened?” Jurian asked.
“Well…that was the most dangerous crossing I’ve ever made. I thought I was going to drown. I thought I would die.”
Mari straightened up, frowning. “But if he was so small and light…was the river too deep?”
“No,” Menas said, a strange smile flickering in his eyes. “No, the river was quite shallow. It barely reached my chest. But as I came to the middle of the river, the weight on my shoulder grew heavier and heavier. It pressed me down, bowing me over, crushing my legs. I was sure I would collapse and get swept away, and that would be the end of me and the child. A last frail remnant of the old me whispered that I could save myself if I left the child, but I refused. I would carry that child safely even if I died at the end of it. Finally, when my legs had nearly failed me, I cried out to the child. I think I said, ‘You are too great a burden.’ That same moment, the weight became bearable again. I made it the rest of the way as carefully, but as fast, as I could, and set the child down on the riverbank.”
A shriek of wind tore past Menas, blowing his hood over his face and scattering snow over Jurian and Mari. Mari drew back into her cloak, batting the wet flakes off her face.
“Did you find out why he was so heavy?” Jurian asked.
Menas smiled, slowly. “I did. I said to the boy, ‘I’ve never carried a burden as heavy as you.’ The child said, ‘You have seen this burden before. It stood at the side of a road, and even then, it brought you to your knees.’ It seems foolish now, but at first all I could think was how strange it was that the child could talk to me like a grown adult. Then I realized that the child wasn’t a child, but a man, his forehead bruised and pierced, wounds in his hands and in his feet, and eternity in his eyes.”
Mari gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth, and, more slowly, Jurian caught the implication. He stared at Menas, bewildered, uncertain, but nothing in Menas’ face seemed to suggest he was teasing them. Instead, his eyes glittered with the strangest light—wistful sadness mixed with deepest joy. Jurian shifted his gaze away after a moment. He didn’t understand that look. Part of him wondered if he ever would.
Menas added, “He told me that the weight I had carried across the river was the weight He had carried up the mountain, the weight of all the sins of the world. I know I didn’t feel the full burden of it. He spared me that, on account of my weakness. So that was how I found my answer. I had been searching and searching for this Lord of the Cross, and in the end, He found me when I was least expecting Him.”
After a week of hard traveling, the snows gave way to a milder climate, the air growing warmer the farther south they walked. Finally, mid-afternoon on the eighth day, they reached the top of a low ridge and saw the great sea sprawled beneath them in a chaos of grey and azure. Mari turned to stare at the march of snow-crested mountains behind them, as if they belonged to some other world. Hunger, cold, and exhaustion gave Jurian little patience to enjoy the beauty, and Menas seemed to agree; his gaze was fixed on the city at the water’s edge—and the curls of smoke that suggested a thousand cooking fires.
They had all felt the pangs of the rough travel. Their clothes were meant for warmer climates, and miles of trekking across rocky ground had shredded the leather soles of their shoes long before they hit the numbing wetness of the snow. Food was even worse. Blasios had provisioned them with some dried fruit and nuts, and Jurian had done his best to hunt along the way, but with the deep snow he’d found little game. In the end, all he’d accounted for were an unfortunate rabbit and one lone mountain goat, neither of which stretched very far with Menas in their group. Still, though they all looked a bit worse for wear, they’d survived, and now had the prospect of warmth and comfort spreading below them.
“Come on,” Menas said, grinning broadly at Jurian and Mari. “I need to pay a visit to a dear friend.”
“Saints, I hope there’ll be food at the end of it,” Mari sighed, one hand clamped around her waist.
“Nikolaos isn’t a wealthy man, but somehow he always has enough to share,” Menas said.
By early evening they had reached the outskirts of the city. They skirted a massive necropolis of brightly painted tombs cut in the cliffside and passed under the shadow of the Temple of Artemis Eleutheria. Mari stared; Jurian wasn’t surprised. From what Menas had told him, everything in Myra was Greek but the laws, even more than in the Legion town of Satala.
Menas led them into a humbler quarter of the city, nearer the Andriake port with all its traffic, noise, and filth. The sea wind carried the sharp smell of brine and fish. Mari had a strange look on her face, and Jurian chuckled as he realized she was trying—unsuccessfully—to breathe without smelling the stench. She glanced skeptically at him as they followed Menas through the mazy streets, but Jurian just shrugged. If Menas’ friend lived in one of these hovels, who was he to scoff?
The sun had set when they reached a sparsely inhabited district of the city. They had left the last shops some time ago. Here there were a few small houses, but the road was no more than a dirt track. Menas pointed out their destination—a simple house of Greek design at the end of the road, with a carving of a fish at the doorway instead of the customary statue of Hermes.
“Fish?” Jurian murmured to Mari.
She shrugged. “Maybe he likes fish.”
Menas rapped at the door, the sound echoing through the inner courtyard. A moment passed, then the latch lifted and a pool of lamplight spilled over the threshold. Jurian blinked in the sudden brightness. The person who opened the door was even shorter than Mari, and at first Jurian thought they were being greeted by a child. Then the lamp shifted aside and Jurian saw a young man, completely bald though he looked no older than thirty, with a curly black beard and deep complexion. His dark eyes shone almost golden in the lamplight, and for some reason he was grinning as if he’d just won a bet.
“Well, it’s about time,” he said with a bright laugh. “Did you get sidetracked? I was afraid the meat might get overdone.”
They stared at him. Then Menas gave a deep, rumbling laugh and crushed the man in an embrace, all the more comical because of the enormous difference in their heights.
“All right, yes, I’m here,” the man said, eyeing him sidelong. “You giants are all the same. Sentimental and overly dramatic.”
Jurian’s brows shot up, but the man glanced at him and gave him a faint wink.
“How’d you know to expect us?” Jurian asked, folding his arms, even though something about the man made trusting him feel instinctive. “We didn’t even know we were coming before we decided in the wilderness.”
“Details,” the man said, and waved them into the inner courtyard. He squared his slim shoulders, tipping his head to study them. “Eh, you’re all tall! That’s to be expected, I suppose. I’m Nikolaos, if you didn’t know that already.”
Jurian nodded, accepting the man’s hand. “Jurian. This is my younger sister, Mariam.”
Nikolaos clasped her hand briefly and beamed a warm smile at them. “Any friend of Menas is welcome here,” he said. “Well, come on. You look half-starved, the lot of you. I’ve got a little feast prepared. Nothing as fine as tomorrow’s will be, but I thought you would appreciate it.”
Menas and Mari followed him eagerly, but Jurian hesitated near the door, bewildered.
“How—” he started but no one was there to hear him, so he flung his hands in the air and strode after them.
Mari had already ducked into the tiny kitchen to offer her help to Nikolaos. The warm aromas of roasting pork and honey drifted out through the narrow doorway with a stream of golden light, and Jurian’s stomach complained in answer. He leaned against the doorframe across from Menas, arms crossed.
“Can you explain this?” he asked, nodding at the small man inside the kitchen.
Menas grinned and drew a deep, noisy breath, taking in the cooking smells. “I’ve missed this place. Nikolaos always knows how to entertain a guest, though half the time I’ve no idea where his food comes from.”
“Who is he, though?”
Nikolaos laughed. “This kitchen is not that large, son.”
Son, Jurian scoffed. He’s younger than Menas!
Nikolaos glanced at Menas and they exchanged some wordless communication, ending with Menas nodding solemnly.
Nikolaos’ smile flashed again and he said, “I’m a presbyter.”
“You’re a priest!” Mari gasped. “Did you know Eugenius?”
Nikolaos hesitated. “There aren’t many of us yet, but I haven’t met all my brother priests. I never met your Eugenius, but I know him.”
Jurian pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. And I thought Menas was bad.
“No need to weep, daughter,” Nikolaos said to Mari, seeing the grief in her eyes. “All is well with him. He does not need our tears now.”
He served them slabs of pork coated with honey and roasted nuts, with olives and crumbling goat cheese, and they sat down to eat on bronze benches near a coal fire in the courtyard. There was bitter wine mixed with water and spices in the Greek fashion, but only Menas seemed to actually enjoy it. Jurian and Mari chose to drink water instead.
“This feast was amazing,” Mari said, cleaning honey off her fingers. “What did you mean about tomorrow being better?”
“You…don’t know what day it is,” Nikolaos said, flatly.
“We’ve been walking a long time. The days all sort of…run together,” Menas said.
Nikolaos leaned back, folding his arms on his narrow chest with a look that Jurian would have called smug, except that there was nothing arrogant about Nikolaos. “Well,” he said. “Tomorrow is the eighth day from the kalends of Ianuarius.”
“Jurian!” Mari exclaimed. “That’s the day you were born. Mother always said so.”
Nikolaos regarded Jurian curiously.
Jurian shrugged. “She told me that once too. I never saw why it mattered, though.” He frowned at Nikolaos, rubbing a hand through his hair. “You didn’t have to…that is, we never celebrated it before.”
To his surprise, Nikolaos laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed, Jurian. Our feast tomorrow is meant to honor the other nativity we observe on that day.”
“Whose?”
Menas chuckled.
“Oh,” Jurian said, because it was the only thing that would make sense. “You mean Bethlehem? The nativity of the Christ? That was…”
“The same day as yours, apparently.” Nikolaos sighed, staring into the fire. “The pagans just had their mad Saturnalia, but tomorrow is the day the world once bowed in silent adoration before a poor Child in a cave.” For a moment no one spoke, then he slapped his hands on his thighs and leaned forward. “Will you stay and join the feast?”
Jurian finished his barley bread and settled back on the bench. “I think so. But we can’t stay any longer than that. We’ll need to get down to the port tomorrow and see about a ship.”
“Heading to Rome?” Nikolaos asked, staring at his dish.
“How—?”
Nikolaos just gave him a look, and Jurian’s mouth quirked in a smile.
“There’s a merchant ship pilot,” the priest said. “Macarius. He should be able to give you passage. Tell him I sent you.”
Jurian gave Menas a skeptical glance but neither of them said anything. Under the night sky, the air turned dank and chilly, but even the bite of the sea wind felt mild compared to the bitter cold of the mountains. Nikolaos stoked up the fire.
“A family gave me this house to use,” he said. “There are plenty of bed chambers, one there where I usually sleep”—he gestured behind them—“and a few upstairs, all furnished. There should be spare blankets in the chest in the hall if you get too cold. There’s a well near the kitchen and the washroom just beyond it.”
“I’ll just make myself comfortable out here,” Menas rumbled, stretching his toes toward the fire. “I sleep under the stars every night, and I doubt you have a bed large enough to fit me.”
“True,” Nikolaos laughed. “And I’m no Procrustes.” He stood, drawing up his dark hood. “I hope you all sleep well.”
Mari yawned and pushed herself off the bench, murmuring a good night before slipping upstairs. Menas found a large, heavy wool blanket in the storeroom and rolled himself up in it near the fire. Jurian took that as his cue to leave, but, even after so many days of rough journeying, his mind was wide awake. He paced in the courtyard while Menas fell into a deep, sonorous sleep. When the fire started to die he built it up again and sat a while near its warmth, but that didn’t help either.
Finally he slipped out and headed down to the beach, where the surf washed the sand like a slow breath. Low clouds hid the stars, but the night was bright enough to see clearly. Jurian sat on a low sea wall and buried his head in his hands.
When he lifted his eyes, he stood face to face with a massive lion. Panic surged through him with a force like fire, but the lion waited, perfectly still, staring at him through lucid blue eyes. Every instinct told him to run, to get to safety, but his legs wouldn’t move. The lion sidled up and rubbed its head against him like a cat, the muscles in its shoulders rippling as it curled around him.
Blood pounded in Jurian’s ears, so loud he was sure the lion could hear it. Slowly he lowered his gaze. The lion stopped in front of him, close enough that Jurian could feel the heat of its breath on his chest. Its eyes locked with his and its mouth gaped open, wider and wider, its lips peeling back as its cutting teeth stretched into fangs. The tawny fur shriveled to black scales, the tufts of its mane sharpened to spikes, and Jurian found himself staring not at a lion but a leering dragon, its body coiled tight around Jurian’s. He tried to shout but the dragon lunged first, mouth impossibly wide, an inferno blazing in its throat…
“Jurian!”
He stifled a cry of surprise and jerked around, only to find Nikolaos crouched beside him, staring at him in concern.
“Everything all right?”
Jurian scanned the beach frantically but the lion, or dragon, had disappeared.
“It’s nothing,” he said. His voice rasped, hoarse. “Just…a dream, I guess.”
“I know something of those,” Nikolaos said, sitting down on the wall beside him. “Anything you wanted to talk about?”
“It was just a dream,” Jurian repeated, eyeing him skeptically. “It’s not important.”
“Sometimes they are.”
Jurian shook his head and faced the sea. “When my father left with the Legion to fight against Narseh, I dreamed about an eagle devouring a fish. I never thought about it again until the priest Eugenius told me my father had been killed because of his faith. But still, it didn’t completely make sense to me until I saw the sign outside your door.”
Nikolaos leaned onto his knees, his dark eyes bright even in the uncertain light. “The eagle should be careful. A day may come when it stoops to catch a fish and finds it has met its match.”