John (20 page)
He is crouched there, dousing, land-drowning, with no relief, drinking near an hour later when a fisher's boy comes and stands watching the strange Christian, the left side of whose back is bloodied with raw wounds, as though seized from above by a claw.
A new time begins, Matthias thinks. He steps on to the shore. His eye wound stings, but he displays nothing of the pain. He wears a tight smile of tolerance moving amongst the crowds. I have forgotten the common ignorance of the world. So many without so much as a drop of purity. Bodies only, brute as beasts.
The holy are different as fish from dogs.
A grizzled trader with stink breath approaches. He stops Matthias with a hand, rough-coaxes toward his wares. At once Auster comes forward. 'Do not hand him! Leave off.' he cries. There is brief jostle and commotion. The trader unsnaps dogs of curses, but Matthias stands unmoved, unassailable, smiling his one-eyed smile.
A new time indeed.
At first light on the third day Ioseph hears Lemuel ring the bell. He opens his eyes, pauses before stirring from the bed mat, into his heart a seep of sorrow. They will pray before leaving, he knows. They will pray for safe voyage, and for he and Simon, and that all may be cradled in the hands of God. In the moment before he moves, the loss of the community flows darkly into him. In an hour they will be gone. The greater part of his life he has lived in the company of many like-minded disciples. He has the idea of a shared soul, as though each grows to become part of the whole, and is both one and many. Now there is to be only him and poor Simon. He feels the sundering. What happens when the community is so broken? First the death of Prochorus, the going out of Matthias and the others, and now this last, each a blow. Ioseph cannot deny the course of grief, the aloneness he feels. The Apostle would have had them stay to attend Simon, but Simon would not have allowed it. He would have drowned himself in the sea rather than risk them. And so now, now there are to remain on the island only two.
Ioseph moves his thin legs stiffly, rises from the rush mat. Simon lies in a shuddering sleep by the wall.
He sees the spreading light of dawn. The sea is calm. He draws slow, full breath, then kneels down on the stones to pray for Simon's health and for the community's safe passage to Ephesus.
After, he comes back inside and prepares a new poultice for Simon's arm. There is a mortar and pestle, herbs and oils. He works in the half-light. When the remedy is prepared, he draws the stool to the other and sits. Simon's eyes startle wide.
'I am sorry to have woke you.'
'In my dreams I heard a bell ringing, Ioseph. Calling me. Is it calling me to death? Am I at death now?'
'Calm yourself, Simon. You are not at death. It was Lemuel ringing the dawn bell. Be at ease, Simon. I have a fresh poultice made.'
'They are going now?'
'Soon.'
Simon sits upright. He is thinning by the hour. Lengths of white hair lie on the sacking of the pillow. His brow, fretted with a lifetime's worry, he palms tenderly like an egg.
'It was ringing in my dream, too,' he says. 'Or I lose my wits, Ioseph. Do I? Did Prochorus go mad? He didn't, did he?'
'Calm, Simon. It is all right. You are fighting the illness. You will defeat it. I will be here with you.'
Simon lowers his eyes. 'You should go,' he says unconvincingly.
'I am not going until you are well.'
'What if I give you the, the, this?' He holds out his arm. The sores worsen. What was red is blackened now and smells putrid.
'Then I will have it with you, and we will cure together.'
'Agh!' Simon turns toward the wall. 'You are losing your wits already,' he says.
'Perhaps.'
'You have a last chance. You should go now. Take the boat.'
'I am staying.'
Simon's eyes burn as he turns back. 'What if this is my punishment? What if I am meant to be left alone here, to die alone? Have you considered? What if it is the Lord's plan? It will not be so easy to care for me. I am not . . . I won't be . . . accepting.'
'I know.'
'I will say things I shouldn't. I may cry out against the Lord, against you. I know myself, I am weak. You must think of the days ahead, Ioseph. When the illness ravages not only my body, but my mind. Ioseph, kind Ioseph, go. Go with my blessing. Take the boat.'
Ioseph's chin rests on the bridge of his hands. He considers the urgent face of his old friend, the prominence of the cheekbones now, the pallor of flesh, the eyes aswim. The first signs of rash are progressing faceward from the left ear. Simon seems to have grown smaller in sleep, frailty making him a thin, ancient boy.
'I am staying,' Ioseph says. 'It is decided. Now be still and I will apply the dressing.'
Simon's chin trembles; he presses his lips tightly. His arm he extends, his head he turns away.
After, wordless, in the dull tranquillity that follows acceptance, they go together outside. Though he needs it not yet, Simon uses a stick of olive wood slightly curved. His head is lowered near his hand-grasp. They come some fifty paces, no further, to a little platform of the rock. Light is risen. Gulls and other birds cross the wind. Side by side the disciples stand and watch below the small remnant of their community progress across the shore to a fishing boat with cream-coloured sail. They watch, unspeaking. Lemuel helps the Apostle to step from the water onboard. Then Papias, Danil, Eli, and Meletios, are by turns hand-pulled up. It is done in moments. Then the fisherman turns the sail and swiftly the boat slaps away into the shallow waves.
They watch it go like a candle flame, bright above the darker water, but with each instant diminishing further into the distance, until at last they can see it no more. Neither man moves. For a long time they watch the nothing that remains of it on the horizon. Then Ioseph sees that Simon's hand shakes badly where it holds the stick, and for support he places his arm under the other disciple and leads him across the silent island to a rock where the sun warms.
The fishing boat cuts quickly into the water. The disciples do not speak. Each carries jumbled burdens of anxiety, uncertainty, caution, of regret as well as hope, but these remain unvoiced. They look to the Apostle, who sits in the prow, his blind head aslant to the sky. Then, each to their fashion, they try and lighten their spirits. Sand-haired Meletios looks back at the island, as if it is part of himself that retreats now. He sees its contour and dimension for the first time and is astonished that it seems so small. How can this have been where such faith was? How can this mound of grey rock have been home to the entire community? It looks no more than a dark fragment, fallen off, adrift from the greater mainland, rocky anchorage of a lesser God. The years they have spent there grow small even as the island does. All that time, the day after day of waking to the dawn bell, the rituals of their faith, the silent enduring through harsh winters, blazing summers, seems in some manner diminished as the boat pulls away. Will none of it matter if in Ephesus they are not received? Will the world be ready for the Word? Meletios holds his hands tightly. The island gone, he lowers his head, and is like Danil and Eli across from him, bowed over a stomach tangle of questions.
Lemuel the bell ringer is not so. He stands by the mast, his face turned upwards in a smile. His eyes shine. In the slap and roll of the sea beneath him he delights. He is remade a boy and opens his mouth with surprise at the strength of the wind, the crack it sounds in the sail. He bounces six steps down the boat following a high wave, and though the others wish he would sit, they don't say. The voyage to him is a wonder. He leans to the side to see the Aegean depth, what fish silver the under-boat, what brown-and-white gleams flash past and sink into sea ink. A wave crashes the old salt timber of the bow, and the splash rises to his face. He cries out and the others look up, but for a moment only. Lemuel laughs. He laughs full-mouthed with head back and hands by his side. Great whoops of joy escape him. His eyes are blue of lapis; he is in his fifth decade but in dripping seaspray is giddied back to an earlier self, awe-filled, juvenate. He cannot sit down. The fisher captain shakes his head. This is the sea-madness of the Aegean, the sometime elation that takes hold of a soul skimming over such blue. Sky and sea alike are
ultra,
are blue beyond blue. The whitecaps of the waves arise like rapture. Lemuel bends across the side, his heels out of his sandals, his head and shoulders out of sight where he reaches to put his hand in the moving tide. He five-fingers the flow, watches the eddy about his white hand. There is such pull, such energy of motion, such elemental force. Lemuel lets his hand get pulled away from him through the water, then tugs back through the wake. What it would be to slip over into the current now, what easeful peace to be carried swiftly away in the blue.
'Lemuel.' Papias places his hand on the bell ringer's back. 'Be careful.'
The other moves back from where he hangs overboard. He looks at the younger disciple and beams.
'It is dangerous, Lemuel.'
'I am filled with joy.'
'God is with us. He brings us out of exile.'
Lemuel smiles. He cannot keep a smile from his round features.
'We might best to sit,' Papias suggests, but Lemuel shakes his head. 'This flowing of the sea, it moves me, Papias. I have forgotten.' He smiles again and turns back to the slap and splash of the side, the fishing boat tilting now in meeting currents, angling over deep into a seam in the sea, then righting as it seals up beneath them. Lemuel stands and rocks, in the slow rhythm of the Aegean not imagining water sprites, sea serpents, or other of the vast population of mer-creatures mythic and storied, but only as it comes to him a memory he does not know he has remembered: in his mother's womb, the sea, and he a sail.
What we are.
What little we are, we are for you.
We who have remained and come now as witness.
In fellowship.
John prays. His prayers take mixed form, both the ancient texts of the psalms, scripture he has known since a child, and short simple phrases addressed to Jesus. He converses as though certain he is heard, though he hears no reply. He says all silently. He sits hunched down in the front of the boat, a small white form with blanket about him. Strands of his hair fly about. Spray saddles his shoulders darkly. The fisher captain offers him sea grass to suck, but he declines. In the blind dark where he is, John is far in contemplation. The physical world is gone. What is prayer and what is thought are not delineated. He has lived so long distant from the measure of time, the reality of the body, that he is as might be imagined a spirit, a portion of light in the corner of a fishing boat.
The sea moves past. Adjudging the spring currents treacherous, the fisher captain sails them northwesterly. They leave behind them the Dodekanisos, the twelve, heading in the direction of the island of Ikaria, where they will pass the first night out of exile. The fisherman has a cousin in Agios Kirykos. The small boat is borne swiftly, a ragged banner of the gulls of Patmos overhead. Other boats cross before them, fisherboys and men eyeing the strange crew of Christians who cast no nets. Lemuel waves to them. Wind flaps and cracks in the sewn sail.
'Are you well, Master?' Papias asks. 'I have water if you thirst.'
The pale face turns upward to the voice. 'Thank you, good Papias; no, I thirst not.'
'We are away from Patmos.'
'Yes.'
'I had forgotten what it feels to move freely.'
Though he has not indicated fear, the Apostle says to him, 'Be not afraid, Papias.'
The youngest disciple sits by John. He drinks the water himself. In the sea he feels still an unslaked thirst.
They sail on in silence, the disciples burdened each by fear and hope alike. Do they come in triumph now? Is this at last the time for salvation, the age of Jesus Christ the Lord and Saviour come now, and they its harbingers? It is long since they have walked in a busy street, had casual converse before a trader's stall, laughed at wit or anecdote, dwelled in the flux of everyday that the ordinary is to be extraordinary for them, and as such holds a fascinating terror.
How shall it be?
As the boat puts Patmos behind them, with every moment the world draws nearer. Danil looks up at the sail, tight with wind, and wishes the breeze might lessen for a time. Might not the breath of the sky be stilled awhile? Sudden change in sea condition is not unheard of; wind as easily goes as comes. Why not now? Why not a brief respite, and they to be left adrift mid-sea, meandering the blue waters for a time until their hearts were ready? It has been too quick, Danil thinks. Three days to change a lifetime. To turn around to face the world. Would it have been so terrible to have waited a week? Even a month? What is a month to the Lord, who has all time unto eternity?
The wind does not lessen. It sits in the sail like a chest-proud athlete pressing forwards. Hunched against the creaking, salty timber, shut-eyed, Meletios rocks softly to the rise and fall of the southern Aegean. Next to him, Eli knots his fingers, knucklebones a rough bridge beneath his chin, and stares at nothing. Lemuel alone looks at the world approach.
In the proximate noon of the day, the bell ringer at last sits and then kneels in the bow, and the others do likewise. As has been their way for years, they pray the twelfth hour, and, bent in the boat travelling the sea waves, are as in the side gallery to an invisible altar.
The blue is unbroken above them.
Seeing them so the fisher captain is moved and steadies the sail. Abashed by the reverence and being witness to the peculiar intimacy, he looks away into the wake. In the trailing white water he sees a silver school offish. It glitters just below surface, a great wide V, following, fleet, as if pulled in undertow. In all his years of throwing nets he has never seen so great a number. He studies the waters about them, what might betoken this uncaught catch, what manner of thing is happening. But the sea on all sides is as ever and reveals nothing. He takes a step on to some wooden crating for a better view outwards and down. In the full scope of his vision, as far as the furthest ripple they have left in the sea, is this gleaming arrow of fish. It comes in their after-waters catching light, then shadow, then light again. Though the boat moves cross-current toward Ikaria, the fish follow, a silent suite, opaque as souls, profound as mystery. Such might last a moment, might in ordinary fish life be the happenstance of tide and timing, a brief meeting of man and creature in the sea hectic, but this is something other. The fish follow. While the disciples pray, bowed in the boat, the multitudinous school swims after and grows greater until it seems a portion of light itself fallen from above and by means unknown attached to this strange cargo of Christians.
