They hasten down the shaded side of the crooked line of dwellings. Some have come outside to see the commotion and watch without comment this elderly caravan of men pass. A woman cradles a basket in her arm, considers Papias, whose bitten ear sings redly. With the old apostle on his arm, he looks away from her. They cannot move quickly enough. Danil leads, then comes Papias guiding John, with Eli, Meletios, and Lemuel behind.
The Apostle's gait is uneven and uncertain. The stones of the street catch his toes; he stumbles and sways and is borne upright on the strong arm of the youth. This is a new dark. In the years John spent on Patmos — first seeing, then blind — the geography of the island he took inside himself. He knew how each path ascended from the sea, which rock-way crossed to the altar stone and which to the well. Each crag and slope, each fissure, terrace, and fall of ground, he knew as one might come to know as an intimate the features of a prison. The island became to him an inner as well as outer place, in time first familiar and then even — though it went unsaid — in some manner, comfortable. To leave it was a considerable challenge to all, but to him whose blindness had become lessened with acquaintance it was an arduous decision.
So he finds the way troublesome. John has never set foot before on Ikaria. He has no sense of the street, its upwards slope, its crooked turnings. He does not know where they take him, nor what figures watch from doorways. Dimmest blurrings of light he catches if he turns his face full to the heavens, as though the blue above is thickly veiled. He knows the earth and the sky, but little more. He is made breathless with their flight out of the village.
'None are behind us,' Danil says. 'We can stop.'
'Here, rest here, these rocks.'
John's right hand reaches down, Papias guides it to the rock.
When they are sat there none speak. They are like ones that bear the pieces of a broken vase.
It is the afternoon of the day. Behind them the land greens with April. Olive trees are in bud. The sea air is softer than on Patmos, and the springtime of the year is everywhere. But the disciples are spirit-wounded and sit slumped in recovery. In each is the need to reassemble the idea of the world they go to meet. It is an old story, the misunderstanding, then the hatred and the persecution. And though their experience thus far is of only one, this fat trader Cenon, it has echoes in a hundred memories. Silently they chastise themselves for the simplicity of their hope, and then must rebuild it stronger. They must believe in a new world. They must believe in it strongly so to accept that the last vestiges of the old one, the age of intolerance and hatred, are still present, but that it is also about to end, and that they return not only as heralds, but as architects of the time of love and forgiveness.
It is an onerous and intricate spirit-labour. They sit in silence. Some pray. An hour falls past them, another.
In the changing light, a thin figure approaches. Papias gets quickly to his feet. The others stir. The figure comes the dry dusty road very slowly. He is in the sunset and they see only the silhouette. Soonest to defend them, Danil rises and stands before the Apostle. They are old men for fighting now but if needs be will give their lives for John. The figure stops. Only now has he seen them by the side of the road. There is a moment of delay, a brief interlude in which the figure must consider their number and strength, and then he comes forwards.
Where the road turns him out of line of the sun, he is shown as himself. Papias knows him at once.
'It is the boy from the village,' he says, 'the boy who threw the stones.'
He is sallow-faced, a thin, wide-browed youth with intense eyes. He comes to within ten feet of them and stops. He looks with cool regard, as if they are species beyond catalogue in his experience.
'For what have you come, boy?' asks Danil.
The boy turns. Only then does Danil see the stone in his right fist held loosely down by his side. The boy does not answer directly. It may be he is himself trying to answer, For what have I come? What reason underlies the reason?
'For what have you come?' Danil asks him again.
The boy studies his questioner closely. He seems so intent on the disciple's face that it is as if he expects understanding to be found there. There is further delay, time fragmented, the boy still and profoundly serious. For what has he come? He holds the stone tightly. They are near about him. Is he the emissary of hate? Does he come to win praise by wounding them, these old men and one youth? Is this his reason?
Papias steps forward, puts his hand on the boy's shoulder, who turns to face him.
'You are forgiven,' he says. 'We bear you no ill.'
'Truly,' says the short, stout figure of Danil.
The stone slips to the ground. The boy opens his mouth and makes a guttural noise from below his broken tongue. It is expression in no language, a low choke sound the mute boy can make. He stands amongst them, reading their lips, and coming to a first understanding of the question Danil asked.
'Go, go with our blessing,' Meletios says to him.
'Go with the blessing of our Lord and Saviour,' Papias urges, and pats the boy's shoulder.
He turns away from them and walks back a small distance. He stops and sits by the roadside.
He remains as the evening comes. He is there as the disciples realise they will not sail from Ikaria that day and must make bedding beneath the spring stars. He is there as they pray together before nightfall.
The Apostle tells them, 'Jesus said, "Verily, verily, I am the door of the sheep. I am the door, by me if any man enter in he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture." '
He pauses, tracing back through a vast terrain to find the place and time again. Then he says, 'Jesus said, "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is a hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth, and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd and know my sheep, and am known of mine."'
Again he pauses. The disciples wait, uncertain if he will continue. Darkness is fallen.
Sorrow rises in John's throat. He touches his lips together where a tremble moves in them. He swallows loss and the suffering of love. It would be easier not to recall. Knowing the outcome, knowing the end of Jesus's days with him, it would be easier if afterwards his mind had been taken, if in his great age he had forgotten all. But he remembers. A light shines inside him. He raises again his voice: ' "And other sheep I have which are not of this fold," Jesus said. "Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd." '
The disciples nod. They think of what lies ahead in Ephesus, of the other sheep that are not of this fold. By the words, by the enduring presence of the old apostle, they are consoled. They barely hear the whisper on which he finishes: ' "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.
He lowers his head. He hears the words as if spoken for the first time. Rising around them is the memory of after and those turning against Jesus, of fierce debate and anger and accusation from the Pharisees.
John remembers. He remembers Jesus slipping away before they would stone him, and he a youth following, protective, moving to the street and hastening from there by the side of Jesus until they were again beyond Jordan and into the place where John the Baptist had begun. A return to the beginning, he remembers. And the time that they abode there when peace was, and when John wished they might have stayed living in tranquillity with the disciples, out of Judea, in the simplicity of love. The time they were by the river is in memory sunlit and golden. A time out of time. Though he knew then it could not continue, nonetheless he wished it so with all the fervency of his young heart. And they did stay on, and Jesus stayed among them there, until a man came walking with the news from Martha that Lazarus was sick.