Pergamum

In Pergamum the fires never go out. They burn on the great terrace above the lower town, in the healing sanctuary a mile to the south, on the altar of every guild in the city — and Epiktetos, a bronze-caster in the metalwork quarter, has fed them all his life without once asking what they are for. His father poured the libation. He pours it. It is simply where a man stands.

Then a traveller comes up from Ephesus to his table, the dinner runs long past midnight, and it does not end where anyone expected.

His wife sets a small lamp on the workshop table where the letters are read. The casters' quarter-feast is coming round. And for the first time in twenty years, Epiktetos does not know whether he will go.

Every morning, before the first patient, Lukas pours a small cup of wine at the altar of Asclepius — as every physician of the great healing sanctuary at Pergamum does, and has done for a hundred years. It is form. He has told himself so for fifteen years, and in fifteen years the telling has never once failed him.

Antipas told himself nothing of the kind. Antipas sat in the corner of the assembly and listened and argued with nothing; and when the city asked of him the one thing he would not give, he refused, and it killed him.

The corner chair is empty now. And Lukas, who has grieved his friend honestly and properly, finds underneath the grief a small unbearable thing he has no name for: relief.