But she had gone away to the Land of the Dead, and Eilan had left him for the Goddess she served, and now Julia was withdrawing from him as well. Would there ever be anyone, he wondered, who could simply love without trying to change him, whose love would endure?
Then Gaius would remember how he had felt when he held his son in his arms. But whenever he began planning how to find the boy, he would flinch from the possibility that when they did meet, his son would not care after all. And so he did nothing.
One day when Gaius was riding out after the wild pigs that had been rooting in his gardens he realized that he had reached the woodland above the Forest House where Eilan had given birth to their son and found himself reining his horse down the path. He knew that Eilan would not be there, but perhaps there was someone who could give him news of her. Even if she hated him, she could hardly refuse to give him news of their son.
At first he thought the place deserted. The promise of spring was blushing in the branches with their hard buds of green, but the thatched roof of the hut was ragged and weather-bleached, and the ground littered with sticks blown down in the last storm and last year’s dead leaves. Then he saw a thin haze of smoke filtering up through the thatching. His pony snorted as he reined in and a man peered out at him. “Welcome, my son,” he said, “Who are you and why have you come?”
Gaius gave his name, eyeing the fellow curiously. “And who might you be?” he asked. The man was tall, with a sun-browned face and night-dark hair, dressed in a coarse goat-hair robe above an untidy straggle of beard.
Gaius wondered if he were some homeless wanderer who had taken refuge in the unused building; then he saw the crossed sticks that hung from the man’s neck on a thong and realized he must be some kind of Christian, perhaps one of those hermits who were, in the last two or three years, springing up from one end of the Empire to the other. Gaius had heard of them in Egypt and Northern Africa, but it was strange to see one here. “What are you doing here?” he asked again.
“I have come to minister to God’s lost ones,” the hermit answered. “In the world I was known as Lycias; now I am called Father Petros. Surely God has sent you to me because you are in need. What can I do for you?”
“How do you know it was God who sent me to you?” Gaius asked, amused in spite of himself by the man’s simplicity.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” asked Father Petros.
He shrugged and Petros went on. “Believe me, my son, nothing happens without the knowledge of the God who set the stars in their places.”
“Nothing?” Gaius said with a bitterness that surprised him. He realized that at some point during the past three years, perhaps when he heard of the death of Agricola, or perhaps while he was watching Julia’s suffering, he had ceased to believe in the gods. “Then perhaps you can tell me what kind of deity would take a son, and a daughter, from a mother who loved them?”
“Is that your trouble?” Father Petros pulled the door wider. “Come in, my son. Such matters are not explained in a breath, and your poor beast looks tired.”
A little guiltily, Gaius remembered how far the pony had carried him. When he had tethered the animal with a long enough lead to let it reach the dry grass, he went in.
Father Petros was setting out cups on a rough table. “What can I offer you? I have beans and turnips and even some wine; the weather is such, here, that I cannot fast as often as I did in a warmer climate. I drink nothing but water, myself, but I am permitted to offer these worldly things to such guests as come to me.”
Gaius shook his head, realizing he had happened upon a philosopher. “I will try your wine,” he said, “but I tell you plainly; you will never convince me your god is either all-powerful or good. For if he were all-powerful, why can he not prevent suffering? And if he can and does not, why should men worship him?”