He stood at the rail and there was no land.
There had been land his whole life. A ridge. A lake a man could see across on a clear morning. A road that went down to Jerusalem and came back up. Now the water ran out to the edge of the world on every side, and the edge was farther off than Galilee was wide, and past the edge there was more water, and past that the cities he had heard named in other men’s mouths since he was a boy and had never thought to seek for himself. Alexandria. Rome. Athens. One he had known too young to remember. The others he knew only as names. The boat was taking him to all three.
The Mediterranean was dark and loud. The wind had dropped at sundown and the sea had risen since. Something far out was moving toward them. The ship ran with the swell, and the sailors did not look up from their work, and that told him more than the sky did.
He had not slept since Caesarea. Two nights. The first night the harbor lamps had still been behind them, and he had watched them go under the curve of the water one at a time, and when the last one went he had kept watching the place where it had been. Tonight there was nothing behind them to watch. He stood at the rail because lying down had become a thing that other men did.
Until Caesarea every road he had taken outside Galilee had already been a road home. The roof of the workshop. The roof of the house. The ridge. The mat in the room he had outgrown twice over. Every board and stone of that country had known him before he knew himself, and a man could be no one in a place like that. He had been no one in it for twenty-five years. It had been the long work of his life, the being no one, and he had been good at it, and the ground that let him do it was a long way under the water now.
He held the rail.
Behind him the boy slept on a coil of rope, and his book had slid off his chest onto the wet deck, open, the pages turning themselves in the wind.
Yeshua crossed and picked it up. He did not read it. He had been raised not to read what a man set down private, and a boy’s book was as private as a thing got. He laid it back on the boy’s chest, and the boy’s hand came up in his sleep and closed over it.
The boy had been sick the first morning out and had decided, in the flat way he decided things, that he would not be sick again. He had not been. He was twelve. Asok said he had kept a book since he was nine and that he guarded it from the rest of the family.
A sailor stopped behind Yeshua.
“Where you from.”
Greek, in a dialect with a lilt under it that he had not heard since he was three years old and could not remember hearing.
“Nazareth.”
“Nazareth.” The sailor said the name back once and let it go. It was a town he had heard of and would not trouble to learn. He was small and near fifty, two fingers gone from his left hand. “What is the wood there.”
“Cedar. Olive. Some sycamore.”
“What is the bread.”
“Wheat.”
The sailor nodded, as if the wood and the bread had told him the thing the name had not.
“Your Greek is bad.”
“I learned this dialect as a child. In Galilee they speak it differently.”
“You speak ours like the child who left us. Four years old. We have a long way to go and I will not listen to a four-year-old the whole of it.” He held up the ruined hand and counted on what the sea had left him. “Rope. Sail. Wind. Water. Bread. Five words. You have them by morning or you do not eat the fifth.”
He went off down the deck. The carpenter found he was smiling, which he had not done at a stranger’s words in longer than he could say, and he took the smile off his face before it could be seen to have cost him anything. Even here, with the people who knew his old life already so far behind him, the habit held.
Asok was at the rail beside him, and he had not heard the man come up.
Asok moved low and easy, weight in the knees, leaning into the swell before it came. They stood a while. The wake went out behind them pale where the oars broke it, and past the pale the water was the color of oil, with a cold light down in it that the hull stirred loose and the wind carried off.
“I have not asked you anything yet,” Asok said.
“No.”
“I waited.”
“For what.”
“To see what kind of man says no. If you were going to say it to my son, I wanted to watch you do it before I trusted you near him.”
“I have not said no to anything.”
“You have not said yes either. You came to the door. You came to the ship.” Asok watched the water. “A man can be carried the whole width of the world and never once decide to go. I have shipped cargo that traveled farther than I have.”
Yeshua looked at him. Asok did not look back.
“My son writes you down,” Asok said. “Every night. He has shown me one line of it in his life, one, and only because he could not work out what it meant and thought I might.” He let the swell lift them and set them down. “He wrote that you have not unpacked your bag.”
“And what did you tell him it meant.”
“That I did not know. I still do not.” Asok turned from the rail at last. “He sees the thing before he has the word for it. That is why I am carrying him across the world to men who keep the words. I am afraid that one day he will see a thing that no man anywhere has a word for, and that it will be true, and that he will be alone with it for the rest of his life.”
Behind them the boy slept on, dead to the wind.
“What god do you serve,” Asok said.
Yeshua did not answer at once. A traveling musician had taught him a word once, a Greek word, for the rate at which a plucked string comes into agreement with the air around it. As a boy he had tried the word under his breath against something warm in his chest that had never had a name, and the word had not fit it, and he had kept the word, because nothing in any language he had since learned had come closer.
“My father’s god,” he said.
“What is his name.”
“My people do not say it.”
“Why.”
“Because the saying is not the thing.”
Asok was quiet a long moment. “In my country there is a god whose name we also do not say, and for the same reason. To say it is to start believing the saying is the thing.” He dipped his head once, the single nod. “Yes.”
“Yes.”
“My son also wrote that you might be afraid to unpack,” Asok said. “He could not choose between the two, so he wrote both.”
“He should write a third.”
“What third.”
“That a man does not set his pack down until he knows the floor will take the weight.”
“You set it down at a door in Galilee. You came.”
“I came. The ground at that door had my whole life in it. It knew my name before I did.” The dark water went by under them. “I have not stood on ground like that since. Not this deck. Not the road that carried me to it.”
“And when you find it again.”
“Then I will unpack.”
Asok studied him past the point where it was comfortable to be studied.
“Or you will not,” he said, “and the boy will write that down too, and in the end one of us will have been right about you.” He pushed off the rail. “Sleep, carpenter. The man with the short hand says weather tomorrow, and you will want to meet it from the far side of a night’s sleep.”
When Vidar woke at the turn of the watch, the two men were seated by the mast. The boy came and sat between them, his head to Yeshua’s shoulder.
He looked at the water a while without speaking.
“It is bigger than I thought it would be,” the boy said.
“It is bigger every night,” said his father.
“At home the lake is the most water I have ever seen at once,” Yeshua said.
“This is more than the lake.”
“I can see that.”
The boy turned the matter over, put it somewhere in himself, and came back with the next thing.
“What were you two saying.”
“Names,” Asok said.
“What about them.”
“The ones we do not say.”
Vidar thought, and nodded once, his father’s nod, the boy not yet knowing it had ever belonged to anyone but him. Then he looked up.
“Joshua has one too,” he said. He said the name his own way, the hard edges of it worn round to the shape of his country. It was not the name’s name. It was the boy’s.
“Yes,” Asok said.
The boy looked back at the water, and after a while he asked his question, which was always the real one, arriving plainly after the others had cleared the road for it.
“Why are you here.”
“My first question is for your father,” Yeshua said.
“Then ask him.”
He looked at Asok. “Why are you here.”
Asok did not move for a moment.
“On this ship,” he said, “or on this earth.”
“Either.”
“On the ship, to take my son to his teachers and to see what he becomes.” The wake glowed and went dark. “On the earth I was certain, until I put a man from a village on a boat and watched him not sleep for two nights over a bag he will not open. Now I am less certain than I was, and I am too old to be made less certain by a carpenter, and here we are.”
“Is that an answer,” Yeshua said.
“It is a true one.”
“I will take a true answer over a clear one.”
Vidar said nothing, and after a while he got up from the two of them and went to the rail.
Asok watched him go. “He has kept that book since he was nine,” he said to the carpenter, low, so it would not carry over the wind. “The names. What each country calls its god, a page for each. He means to have every one there is.” He was quiet a moment. “And there is a line ruled across the top of the first page, above all the others, that he keeps empty. For the highest name. The one over the rest.”
He watched the boy a while. Then he said the thing a man only says at night, over deep water, to someone he had known only since the last port. “Sometimes I think it stays empty. That he is chasing a thing no country has, and I am the old fool who spends good coin to carry him on to look for it.”
The carpenter did not answer. He watched the boy at the rail, small against the whole grey reach of the water, and he held still, and said nothing, and after a while Asok stopped waiting on him and went to send the boy to his sleep.
Behind them the boy’s book lay shut on the coil of rope, over the one line he had kept empty since he was nine.
In the morning the gulls were gone.
He marked it before he understood it. The ship had carried a loose company of them since Caesarea, riding the air off the stern, dropping for the cook’s leavings. Now the sky behind the ship was empty, and the sea had a long slow shine on it like hammered tin, and the man with the short hand was looking west at a low shelf of cloud that sat on the water like a wall a builder had walked away from.
“Rope,” the sailor said, passing with an armful of line.
“Schoinion.”
“Sail.”
“Histion.”
“Wind.”
The sailor stopped. He looked at the cloud and not at the carpenter.
“That one you learn properly tonight,” he said, and went aft to begin lashing the world down.
All day the crew worked and did not hurry, and the carpenter understood that, because he had worked beside men his whole life, and these men all had tasks. They brought the yard to half. They doubled the lashings on the water jars and ran a line waist-high the length of the deck. At midday the cook drowned his fire and went round with bread and dried fish, and told Vidar to eat the lot, because supper was canceled on account of weather.
Yeshua spent the afternoon learning the new line by hand, where it was made fast and what it was for, and found in it an old splice somebody had rushed years before, and sat and reworked it without being asked. The man with the short hand watched him do it from twenty feet off and said nothing, and did not need to.
It came after dark.
The wind arrived ahead of the rain, all at once, the way a door comes open when the bar breaks. The ship leaned hard and held there, and the sea stopped being a thing under the ship and became a thing among them, over the rail, on the deck, in the air a man tried to breathe.
There was a great deal of shouting and none of it was panic. It was men telling each other where they were.
He had the boy by the back of the tunic before he knew he had moved. He set him against the mast where Asok already had his arms braced, put the boy’s hands on the lashings, put his mouth to the boy’s ear.
“Hold this. Count.”
“Count what.”
“Waves. In Greek. Loud as you can.”
The boy counted. His voice went under the wind and came up on the far side of it. Heis. Duo. Treis. The world went white and black and white.
No man could stand, so no man stood. They went bent double along the waist-line, hand past hand, and he went where the hand ahead of him went and hauled when it hauled. The water came over warm and ran down his back cold. Somewhere in the black the man with the short hand was on the same line, screaming Greek at him between seas.
“WHAT IS THIS.”
“Schoinion.”
“WHAT HOLDS IT.”
“I DO.”
“GOOD ANSWER.”
The yard had to come the last of the way down and would not, and three men fought the halyard while the wind tried to take the whole sail out by the root. The carpenter got in under the heel of the yard where it crossed the mast and put his bare hand flat on the wood, and felt the grain run through the wet, and felt where the wood had gone tired, and the place it would split.
“NOT THERE,” he shouted. “IT GOES AT THE FISH. BIND THE FISH FIRST.”
The sailor looked at him the length of one wave.
Then he screamed it at the others, and they bound the splinted place first, and when the yard came down hard the last few feet it groaned at the fish-piece and held and did not split, and four men sat on it at once to keep it down.
After that there was only the bailing, and the count. Heis. Duo. Treis. The boy’s voice from the mast, gone to rags and going on, his father’s arm locked over him. The bailers found the count and threw to it, and the night ran a long way inside that one rhythm, water and number, water and number, until the wind came down from a fist to a hand and from a hand to a weight, and the rain came on steady and almost soft.
He carried the last buckets up himself, and walked the waist-line once with the sailor to check it, and then his body sat him down on the coil of rope by the stern where the boy had slept the night before, and the rain came down on him, and he slept.
He slept through the tail of it. He slept through the rain stopping and the watch changing and the cook coaxing his fire back at first light and cursing a gull, because the gulls had come back. He slept with his head against the rail of a moving ship on open water, the first sleep since Caesarea, and the crew worked quiet around him the whole morning and let him have it.
The man with the short hand came past at midmorning, looked at him a moment, took up a fold of spare sailcloth, and laid it over the sleeping man without any ceremony, and went back to work.
Vidar sat down cross-legged a few feet off, soaked and twelve and unable to stop being awake, and opened his book, and wrote a long while.
Nobody asked him what.
The sun came back in the afternoon and the wind held steady out of the east, and the ship ran before it, west and south, toward Egypt.
He woke past midday and ate the fifth word he had earned. At dusk the sailor found him at the rail. The sea had gone long and easy, the swells far apart, the ship walking now instead of running, and a long low light in the west that put the men quiet without their deciding to be.
“Two days,” the sailor said. “Less, with this wind. You will see the light tower a day out. There is nothing like it on the earth.”
“Nothing.”
“Wait.”
The sailor leaned on the rail beside him. “You were a child in that city. Alexandria. I hear it in your Greek, under the bad. The bad part is Galilee. The part underneath is us.”
“I was three when we left.”
“What do you remember.”
He looked at the water a while.
“A doorway,” he said. “And a game on the ground. Nothing else.”
The sailor nodded, and pushed off the rail, and went aft to his watch.
The light went off the water slow. Below, the cook sang to his fire in a tongue the carpenter did not have. Vidar was asleep early, worn through with surviving. Asok sat near him with his back to the mast, his eyes open, counting the first stars as they came, out of a habit older than the road.
Yeshua went to the bench where his bag was stowed against the hull, packed, and lay down beside it.
He slept with his hand on the strap.