Ephesus

Ephesus stands at the height of its confidence — the crowded harbour, the great temple on the hill, the craftsmen's quarter loud with a pilgrim city's trades. Philaretos copies the binding-names of the old Ephesian art: the curse-scrolls and healing-charms people pay good silver for. His is the surest hand in the quarter. Whether a name answers, once cut, was never the copyist's part.

Then a teacher new to the city argues, in a borrowed lecture-hall, that the names are no keys at all — and a wrongness he cannot reason away settles into his work. His old mentor offers the sensible course: keep the scrolls, let two kinds of power coexist. A kind argument, and a good living.

But a man cannot go on copying words he has stopped believing — and a day is coming when he must decide what the scrolls in his chest are worth.

Ephesus is the greatest city in Roman Asia — its harbour slowly silting, its temples gilded, its great church the most defended in the province. For thirty years Nikolaos has been that church's guardian: patient, tireless, unbeaten by any false teacher or any pressure of Rome. The assembly is proud of him. He is proud of it.

But his wife prays alone now, in the light of a lamp he has stopped tending. A young convert who came to him burning has gone quiet and cold. And Niko's own prayers have begun to feel like a duty done well and felt not at all.

A man can be right about everything and still lose the one thing being right was for. Offshore, on Patmos, a letter is being written to the seven churches of Asia — and Ephesus is the first name on it.