The Immortal Nicholas Read online

  Let them take it.

  The days blurred into an endless weariness as Agios traveled on, never knowing or caring where his legs were taking him. But he couldn’t outwalk memory, or the physical ache of his longing, or ease the feeling that something stronger than rope bound him to the mountain glen where he had buried his wife and sons. The cords drew tighter and tighter, a noose around his heart.

  Agios dulled the pain with drink. Sometimes the homemade wine was premature and thin, the alcohol weak. Other times he could convince the merchant to lace it with something stronger. Occasionally the wine brought fleeting oblivion. A month went by, and then another, and still Agios could not sleep without wine—for if he tried, Philos came to him in dreams, silent but staring at him with reproachful eyes.

  So Agios drank every night and woke every morning with wine still blurring his mind and pain throbbing in his temples. In a way, he wasn’t at all surprised when one dawn he awakened to the cold sharp press of a spear point beneath his chin.

  Fuzzy from sleep and still muddled by the contents of the empty jar beside him, Agios was nonetheless a fighter. The second the blade touched his skin he was awake, every nerve alive and flickering. This, he thought in the moment of first awareness, this is what I’ve been waiting for. He lay with eyes still closed, pretending to sleep on.

  A man spoke, words in a language he did not know, and then in his own tongue someone else asked, “Is he alive?”

  The first one, the one with the spear, grunted, and the second said, “Get him up.”

  Two men grabbed his arms and hauled him to his feet. He opened his eyes then and saw they were tall, well-muscled, and wearing leather armor.

  The one with the spear stepped back and spat. With an unfamiliar accent, he said, “Still drunk. No threat.”

  It was nearly true, and Agios blearily looked around. Four men held him captive: the one with the spear, a shorter and older man in a sunset-colored robe who seemed to be in command, and the two armored guards who pinioned him. Beyond them—well, beyond them milled a crowd, men and camels and donkeys and three colossal gray beasts, a kind of animal he had never seen before.

  “A caravan?” he asked, his tongue deliberately thick. He realized he was still too unsteady to fight well, and yet a part of him ached to fight. To die fighting.

  The spearman said, “Let us kill him.”

  Agios felt the grip on his arms tighten.

  “What did I do?” he demanded, making his voice more slurred than necessary. Could he fight, could he land a few blows that would make him feel he was striking back against the injustice that had stripped from his life everything good and beautiful?

  His speaking had given them pause. The two men who flanked him looked dangerous and powerful, but they were bare-handed. The spearman, the one who had called for his death, had rested his spear and had drawn a dagger and looked eager to use it—but the leader was holding up his hand, as if undecided.

  Agios pretended to lose his footing, as if he were about to topple into unconsciousness, and the guard on his right shifted to support him. With a sudden twist, Agios wrenched his arm free and went for his own dagger.

  “Watch him!” the older man warned, stepping back. The guards were good. They took his dagger before he had the chance to use it, but he struck hard with his fists, connecting more than once. He blacked one man’s eye and bloodied another’s nose, but the two guards took the blows, then wrestled him facedown to the ground and pressed him hard, twisting his arms in a painful lock.

  “Go ahead,” Agios said, hard gravel pressing into his cheek, his nose smarting as he breathed in dust. “Use your dagger.”

  But nothing came. No kick to the head or side, no angry cries calling for someone to spill his rebellious blood.

  Then the older man said, “They will release you. Don’t put up a fight. I have no wish to see you die.”

  The voice was close, and when they let Agios go, he rose to his hands and knees and saw the leader, whose face was sun-darkened and seamed like old leather, kneeling close to him. He held a faint smile on his face and a honeyed nugget of frankincense in his fingers. Agios realized with a start that it must have been dislodged from the folds of his robe.

  “I want to ask you about this,” the man said. “However”—he stood up—“I don’t have the time at the moment, and you are still drunk. Later, then.” He delivered the kick that Agios had been waiting for, and the world went dark.

  Chapter 2

  Agios woke to pain pulsing in his temple and bolting through his swollen jaw, but when he tried to lift a hand to assess the damage, he found that manacles and chains bound his wrists and ankles, and he lay in the dust with his tongue thickening in the heat of the day. His entire body ached for one sip of water. He raised his head and saw that he had been left on a heap of stone and dirt not far from the milling men and beasts of the caravan. His stomach muscles ached—they must have slung him over the back of an animal. He had a vague sense that they had traveled many miles since he had been kicked unconscious.

  Why were they keeping him alive?

  No guard stood over him. Probably they thought him harmless, chained as he was. That might work to my advantage, he thought.

  Some distance away a dozen or more of the brightly dressed members of the caravan reclined in the shade of some roadside acacia trees, but a smaller group had clustered around one of the hulking gray animals. The creature stood patiently as the men yammered and gestured over—something—that lay in pieces on the ground. “Never seen such a thing, barbarian? The beast comes from India. It’s called an elephant.”

  Agios hadn’t realized that someone had come up behind him. Twisting around, he saw the speaker—one of the two heavyset guards, the one with the black eye. He sat on some kind of folded pad, just out of arm’s reach, holding a dagger and idly scratching at the soil with the tip.

  “I’m supposed to keep you alive,” the man said with a grin. “If I had my own way, I’d gut you.” With the dagger point he flicked a pebble. Agios twitched away, taking it on the cheek instead of in the eye.

  “Do it, then,” Agios said.

  “Can’t. You have something they want.”

  The frankincense. Wherever it grew, some ruler claimed it—and men who did not recognize any king or emperor took it. That was why he had kept the location of the grove he had discovered secret, why he had put adders there to guard it. He had spread tales among traders, too, of curses and demonic serpents that protected any libanos tree. “I had one piece of it,” Agios said, his throat so parched his voice rasped.

  The guard rose and took the folded pad from beneath him. It was Agios’s cloak, ripped to pieces, all the hidden pockets cut open. All the frankincense was gone. “You’re no merchant,” the guard said. “You know where it grows. We want more.”

  Agios said, “You took all I had.”

  “But you know where there is more. My masters want you to gather it for them.”

  “If I do this for you?” Agios whispered.

  “I can’t understand you.”

  “Dry,” Agios croaked.

  The man reached beneath his robes and produced a leather wineskin. “Open your mouth, barbarian.”

  Agios rolled onto his back, and the guard opened the wineskin and let a thin warm stream—water, not wine—flow. It splattered on Agios’s forehead before finally, blessedly, it found his mouth. He gulped until the guard tilted the wineskin, cutting off the flow. “Better?”

  Agios nodded. “If I do what your masters want, what will I get for it?”

  The guard shrugged. “We might let you live.”

  The squabbling men near the elephant raised their voices in a furious gabble. Agios did not recognize their language.

  “What are they angry about?”

  The guard glanced over. “An accident. The howdah is destroyed. They are blaming each other.”

  “Howdah?”

  “A—like a—it’s a platform the elephant carries—a bar
barian wouldn’t understand.”

  “I am good with my hands. I have been a woodcarver and carpenter. Let me have a look. Maybe I can help.”

  The guard walked away, toward a tent. A few moments later he came back. “I’m told you can look at it. Come.” He leaned down, grasped the chain linking the manacles, and with easy strength pulled Agios to his feet. “Can you stand?”

  Agios stood unsteadily. He was sober now, but cramped and aching, and the chains that bound his ankles together shortened his step. The guard steadied him by the arm as he shuffled toward the elephant. “You were the one who tried to catch me when I fell,” Agios said.

  The guard grunted. “If I had known how hard you could hit, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  The quarreling men, faces red with rage, fell sullenly silent as they approached. The guard spoke to them in their language, they complained, but then one of them led a second elephant over, one with a howdah still girthed onto its broad back. Agios studied it and the broken pieces of the one that had been shattered. It looked beyond repair.

  Agios squatted to examine the splintered ruin and then stood and looked again at the intact howdah. “Could they take that one off so I can see it better?”

  Again the guard spoke, again the men complained, but they had the elephant kneel. Agios put out his chained hands to feel the hot, leathery skin, wondering at the bulk of the animal. He realized that the damage looked much worse than it actually was and said slowly, “I think I can repair this.”

  One of the elephant drivers snorted and said in Agios’s language, “This uncouth being is insolent. Is he a man? Does he have a name?”

  “Agios,” he said, standing over the broken howdah and noting what would be needed.

  “Agios,” said the guard, pronouncing it AH-gee-ohs.

  “Ah-GEE-ohs,” Agios corrected. “It’s my name. At least say it right.”

  The guard laughed. “Agios,” he said, struggling with the word but coming close. “Lord Agios of the Frankincense. Tell these men what you can do.”

  “Well, to begin with I will have to find some good hard wood. And then I’ll need tools—you probably have what I need.” Agios knelt and pointed, explaining what he would do to repair the howdah. The men grew interested.

  When Agios finished, one of the men said eagerly to the guard, “Let him do this. I will pay you if he can repair it. Without it, I’ll lose a third of my profit! What is he, a slave?”

  “Captive,” the guard said. He turned to Agios. “My master said to let you do what you could. Tell these men what tools you need.”

  Agios recited the list: saw, auger, a hammer, an awl for the leather, a knife. The elephant’s owner sent a man running to fetch them. Agios held up his wrists, the chain jangling. “Remove these.”

  The guard shook his head. “You can work with them on.”

  “I can’t,” Agios said. “Leave on the leg shackles, but I need both hands.”

  “I’d like to see what he can do,” a voice said from behind them. Agios saw it was the man in the red robe. “Release him from his bonds, Gamos. You have complained about his hitting you. You may guard him and use what force you like to prevent him from escaping.”

  Gamos bowed and unbolted the wristlets. “I will have to find wood,” Agios told the man in the robe.

  “If I swear to you that you will not be harmed by any of us, will you in turn swear to return here after finding what you need?”

  “I swear it.”

  “Go with him, Gamos. If he does anything he shouldn’t, hurt him.” The man smiled without real humor. “I don’t distrust your oath, Agios, but I’m no fool, either.”

  Agios did not respond, but noticed the man at least pronounced his name correctly.

  He and Gamos left the trail together and walked a few miles to a forest standing in the foothills. Gamos carried his spear, but Agios wouldn’t have tried to run even without the threat of being impaled. He had always been like that when a job lay before him: he did what had to be done, and then moved on to the next thing.

  They didn’t speak much, but at one point Gamos said, “You’re a strong man. And quick. I didn’t expect that blow.”

  “You thought I was drunk,” Agios said. “That gave me an advantage.”

  “Not much of one,” Gamos said.

  “No,” Agios admitted. “I was pretty drunk.”

  They reached the trees, stunted ones in this arid countryside, and although Agios did not recognize them, he found some that reminded him of white acacia. Gamos didn’t know what the trees were, either, but they found one that had fallen and had not rotted. Agios had carried a leather pouch with tools inside. He took out a saw and cut the trunk into manageable pieces, roughing out boards large enough for his purposes.

  The sun had sunk low when he and Gamos returned to the encamped caravan. Agios put down the wood and the tools and asked for food—he was ravenous—and water. They brought him bread and dried goat’s flesh, and he ate. “Now let me work,” he said.

  He ran his hands over the pieces of the howdah. Agios loved the feel and texture of wood, and he saw that he could salvage nearly all of the broken device. He removed three crucial pieces, fitted them together, and used them as a pattern.

  Night fell and he worked by torchlight, carving the replacement pieces. He liked the unfamiliar wood: with its fine dense grain, it shaped well, and it had a springy strength and a pleasing spicy scent. He ignored the onlookers—none of them seemed to want to go to bed—until, when it was nearly midnight, he secured the new pieces into place.

  The owner of the elephant inspected it, clapped his hands, and said, “Ah!”

  The animal’s handlers deftly restrung the straps and harnesses and replaced the split girth with another length of leather. The animal knelt, they placed the howdah on the beast’s back, cinched and fastened it. And then, the elephant rose—wondrous! Both animal and its burden looked as good as new. The elephant’s owner made an elaborate speech, punctuated with gestures, none of which Agios understood.

  After a long time, when the man had finally finished, Gamos said drily, “He thanks you.” Then he added, “And he says you stink.”

  They had crossed a small stream during their excursion to find wood, and the next morning Gamos took Agios back there to bathe. The had reached a tentative understanding while Agios had worked on the howdah, so Gamos stood guard casually as Agios stripped and stepped into the waist-high water. However, Gamos still kept one hand on his spear and the other near the hilt of his dagger.

  Agios didn’t care. The cool water seemed to return him fully to himself. Grief was still a phantom that clung to his shoulders, but the wine was finally gone from his head. He wondered what it would be like to return to his mountain, to visit the graves, and the thought stabbed into him. He scooped up sand from the riverbed and used it to scrub his skin until it was red and raw. Then Agios dipped beneath the water and ran his hands through the tangle of his hair and his long beard.

  They walked back to the caravan without speaking, but Agios sensed that Gamos was thinking carefully about something the entire way.

  “Am I to be chained again?” Agios asked when they were near the road. He held out his arms as if welcoming the possibility, but Gamos took one look at his bloodied wrists and shook his head.

  “If you run I’ll hunt you down.”

  “I won’t run.”

  “I know.”

  The caravan was already on the move. They traveled until nearly sunset, when they camped again beside the track. Some erected tents, others spread blankets on the ground. Now that they didn’t hang back from him, Agios saw that some women were among the men. “No prostitutes,” Gamos told him with a sad shake of his head. “These are wives. A caravan takes years to go, years to return. Sometimes children are born along the way. By the time they return home with their parents they can walk on their own.”

  Agios tried to close his heart and his mind to the memory of Philos’s birth. Those early yea
rs when his son was as fragile as a bird and just about as big. The day he first toddled across the cabin floor. How Philos would have loved to see the elephants!

  Soon, Agios thought as pain stabbed through him. My son, I’ll find death soon.

  Agios’s father had taught him that after death, men’s spirits lived on. He had never seen a spirit and did not much believe in them—but if he could see his son again, and his wife—

  No, let me stop thinking.

  Gamos mistook Agios’s solemnity for hunger and motioned for him to sit near a fire where a leg of mutton was turning slowly on a spit. “I’d starve you,” Gamos told him cheerfully, “but then you might not be able to complete your task.”

  “And what is my task?”

  “To gather the frankincense, of course.”

  If I don’t tell them where I gather it, Agios thought, they will keep me alive. “Who wants it so badly?”

  As Gamos considered the question, a woman came, carrying a flat board with the roasted mutton steaming on it. Gamos took out his dagger and cut off two pieces. He handed the smaller portion over slowly, as if he was still deciding whether Agios deserved food. “It’s to be a gift,” he said finally, and for a moment Agios wasn’t sure if he was talking about the mutton or the frankincense. “A gift for a king.”

  “Can’t a king buy his own frankincense?” Agios tore off a hunk of meat and tried to eat it slowly, even though his stomach was hollow and aching.

  Gamos grinned and grease trickled into his beard. “Not this one. He is newly born. Or soon will be.”

  Before he could say more, someone in camp shouted frantically. In an instant, Gamos sprang to his feet, dropping his share of mutton. “Bandits!”