John

'You will stay!'John's voice is louder, greater than himself. Linus is startled back a step and looks to Ioseph then says: 'You may fall, Master, Ioseph is old and infirm. I can follow at ten paces and. .'

'A third time: you will stay, Linus. You will not follow. I command it.'

In Linus's chin a pulse of muscle trembles. His pale eyes are a thin metal of disdain. His face is hotly reddened. How dare the old man talk to him so.

The two elders walk past him and go outside. It is after the midday and the sun has not broken the cloud. Disappointed grey light falls. In the sombre sea down the pathway below them short combed waves are whipped and swallowed. There is a salt tang on the wind. The two men proceed along a route of broad stone to a place where there is natural seating of sun-and-rain-flattened rock.

'He is not behind us?'

'No, Master. He has stayed.'

'Good. Here, then, let us sit.'

John feels with his hand the smooth rock. Always in his touching a tapping, slight, quick, light, as though he affirms the real by his fingertips and knows only then that he is in it. They face the western shore, the Apostle's face tilted to receive what light may be.

'This death has touched me closely,' Ioseph says. 'I sin of despair.'

'You are not alone, Ioseph. It has touched us all.'

'I fear. .' The elder disciple pauses, presses his palms together.

'Tell me.'

'I fear myself. I fear my weakness. Today I have thought I will die here on Patmos, like Prochorus, waiting for the Lord, when before I had supposed I would live until the day. I know this is vanity. What am I that is different from others? Why should I endure when others perish? For what reason? Because I have believed? Others have believed and been crucified. Because I have lived this long with you, old Master, because we have walked together in lands as far as Phenice and Antioch before banishment here, and because I believe the Lord watches over you and all of us? That you will live until he comes again, I am certain. And so have hoped that I, too, might see the glory. This is my first sin, I confess it: this vanity. Then the death of Prochorus has made me chastise myself. He was my friend. Why should he die? And in the darkness of my thinking a serpent has come: we all will die here, it says. We are forgotten and a plague comes now amongst us. I confess it. I have listened to the serpent, and my flesh has grown cold with the thought. I have clung to myself and wept, touched my face to find plague I dreamt would be coming. My prayers ascend not. They lie about my feet like stone birds. I despair.'

The two men sit. Little wind blows. John's face is tilted, his eyelids closed, his grey-white eyebrows lowered. He says nothing. He is a man for whom time itself seems inconsequent. It is as though, some time past, the turning of one hour into the next became to him of no matter and the numbering of one day to another a thing no longer counted. In his darkness, time is without measure of light. When he speaks of the hour that is at hand, it may be yet an age hence. He will wait. So it is, he sits and says nothing in reply for a long time. The two old men look not unlike statues high on the smooth rock. But the Apostle is troubled. He has known Ioseph more than two score years and never felt in him the despair he hears now. What is he to say? Is he to confess his own fears? To tell his old friend that he prayed for Prochorus to be spared? That he mounted high stacks of petition on the shelf of his mind, and yielded to the death only with a weak acceptance of the mystery of the Lord's way? There would be no consolation in this. He cannot tell his own thoughts. Instead, he holds silence, searches in himself for a voice.

Then, loudly the Apostle says: ' "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. And I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand." I heard our Lord Jesus say this with my own ears, Ioseph, in Jerusalem, in the winter, in the time of the feast of the dedication. "And I give unto them eternal life." ' He reaches and finds the other's hands, holds them in his own. 'Old friend, do not despair. Grieve not for Prochorus. He was a loyal servant of our Lord and this day is in the kingdom of heaven. Neither grieve for yourself, Ioseph. For each of us the Lord has his plan. Ours is only to recognise this truth and attend him as servants a master. We wait.'

There are curious seabirds overhead. They watch for fragments of bread, foodstuffs, fish, and cry raucous as though in torment. The sea tumbles. Sky burdened with cloud releases no light. The island seems evermore a prison.

Then John speaks from a psalm. He speaks softly, as if testing that the words like stepping-stones will take him across water.

'When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion,

We were like them that dream.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter

And our tongue with singing.'

He has found the psalm without looking. The words of it are inside him. It may be that in the lifetime of his preaching he is become a living book. The scriptures entire are scratched on his spirit, written with reed pen, dipped and dug into the soft red pulsing of his inner being. Inside him is a scribed record of testament. The voices of Moses, of Joshua, Ruth, Samuel, the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Job, the Psalms and Proverbs, all of these are within him, and so, too, all from the twelve chapters of Ecclesiastes to the Book of Isaiah, from the voice of Daniel to Malachi. He is living book and carries their voices and their telling like a wind ever whispering inside him.

'Turn again our captivity, O Lord

As the streams in the south.

They who sow in tears shall reap in joy.

He who goes forth and weeps bearing precious seed

Shall doubtless come again with rejoicing

Bringing his sheaves with him.'

His voice grows stronger as he recites. Ioseph looks at him and is moved. 'We have missed your preaching,' he says simply.

The seabirds circle, as though chained.

'We would benefit greatly, all of us, if you preached to us again.' Ioseph leans forwards, speaks to the blind face in near whisper. 'I fear among us are heresies.'

A gap of sea sigh and gull cry. Light darkens under cloud.

John says, 'I know there are.'

Across the stony ground of the cliff top and through the scrub of thorn bush and weed where tethered is a thin goat, Papias hurries. He comes down the slope to the place where he buried the children and is relieved to find the rocks unmoved. He prays a short prayer, then continues to the dwelling. He is not sure why he has come. He is afraid of his reasons and leaves them in a corner of his mind. He knocks on the wooden frame. There is no reply. He calls out, but nothing happens. He looks around, behind him, at the desolate waste ground, three crooked sticks where cloths had been hung, a hank of briny rope, a holed bucket. He calls again, then enters.

At first there are only shadows. Papias can make out nothing. There is a stench of rotting, a salt tang of seaweed stewed long ago. He hands the edge of the rough wooden table, holds there briefly, blinks, says, 'It is I, Papias.'

His breath is loud and short. Fear of many kinds is within him. He thinks of the raw red print on Prochorus's face, the rage of the fever, the skin that buckled and bubbled and curled back from the bone blackly as though peeled. Silently he tries to say 'The Lord is my Saviour' over and over even as he breathes the thick grey soup of the air and fears he takes within him the disease. The Lord is my Saviour. He will protect me. I am a fool. I am weak to fear anything. The Lord is my Saviour. He will not let me die. Across the earthen floor a rat scuttles toward him, is apprised by smell or sense, and suddenly turns, darts into the dark. Papias looks down and in the dimness makes out the legs of the woman Marina.