Nicholas and the Grain Ships

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The mast is making a noise that masts are not supposed to make.

It is a long, low groan, like a very old door in a very large house. The ship is lying over on her side, and the sea is coming across the deck in cold green sheets. The sail was taken in an hour ago, or what was left of it. The rope that held the steering oar has snapped, and the oar is swinging loose, and nobody, nobody at all, can hold it.

The captain is a short, round, stubborn man, and he has stopped giving orders, because there is nothing left to order. He has his arm hooked around the mast, and his eyes shut, and he is saying every prayer he knows, which is not many, and one of them is a prayer he has never actually said before. It goes: help.

And then he opens his eyes.

There is a man at the steering oar.

An old man, or nearly. Grey beard, bare head, a plain dark cloak that ought to be soaked through, and somehow is not. He has one hand on the oar, and the oar is still. He is not looking at the captain. He is looking ahead, into the dark, the way you look down a road you know very well.

The captain has never seen him before in his life. He is quite sure of that. He would remember.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the second night with Saint Nicholas of Myra, taken from the old lives of the saint, the best known of them written by a Greek monk called Michael in the ninth century, and the sailors, the captains and the clerk are our own invention, as are most of the small conversations, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

If you were here for the first night, you will remember a young man with a great deal of money, three bags of gold, and a talent for being somewhere else when somebody wanted to say thank you. This is the same man, a good many years later. He is no longer young. He is the bishop of Myra now, and he has been the bishop for a long while, and the thing he has become best known for, in a town that sits on the edge of the sea, is not gold. It is that he is the sort of person you go to when something is going wrong.

So let us start with where Myra is, because the whole of tonight's story is arranged around it.

Myra is in Lycia, which is the bulge of land on the south coast of what is now Turkey, where the mountains run straight down into the sea. In the days of this story the town is a few miles inland, on a plain, with the usual theatre and market and a great many tombs cut into the cliff above it, a bit like a block of flats for the dead. Down on the coast, a short walk away, is its harbour, called Andriake. It is a long, narrow, sheltered inlet, and it is one of the busiest little ports in the whole eastern Mediterranean, for one very simple reason. Everyone who sails along that coast has to go past it.

Now. Sailing, in the ancient world, was a very different business from sailing today, and it helps to have a picture of it.

The ships were wide, deep, wooden things with one big square sail, and a couple of long steering oars at the back, one on each side, because the rudder as we know it had not been invented yet. They could not sail very close to the wind. They went where the wind pushed them, or they did not go at all. And the winds of the eastern Mediterranean, in summer, mostly blow from the north-west. So if you are in Alexandria, in Egypt, and you want to go to Rome or to Constantinople, you have a problem, which is that the wind blows from exactly where you are trying to go.

The solution was to go the long way round. You sailed north from Alexandria, with the wind behind you, until you hit the coast of Lycia. And then you crept along the southern coast of Turkey, hugging the shore, where the land breezes and the currents help you a little, hopping from harbour to harbour. Myra was one of the best of those harbours. If you read the Acts of the Apostles, you can see this happening. In the twenty-seventh chapter, Paul is a prisoner on his way to Rome, and the ship he is on puts in at Myra, and the centurion looks about and finds another ship, from Alexandria, bound for Italy, and puts everyone aboard that. A ship from Alexandria, bound for Italy, in those days, was almost certainly carrying wheat.

That is the other half of Myra's story. Egypt grew the wheat. Rome had eaten it for centuries. And after the Emperor Constantine founded his new capital, Constantinople, the great state grain fleet carried Egypt's harvest there too. Thousands of ships. A whole fat, wallowing fleet of them, moving up the coast every summer, belonging not to merchants but to the emperor, loaded to the gunwales with the bread of a huge city. And at Andriake, the emperor Hadrian had built a granary, an enormous long stone building, still standing, with room for mountains of grain. It looks like a cathedral that someone built for bread. I rather like that.

Hold on to the grain ships. They are going to matter.

But first, a word about the sea. You and I think of the sea as a thing you look at, or swim in, or take a ferry across if the weather is nice. To sailors in this story, the sea was a thing that could kill you on any given Tuesday. They had no weather forecasts. They had no engines. They had no radio, and no lifeboats worth the name, and no way of telling anyone, ashore, that they were in trouble. Most of them could not swim. And the old ships were rather fond of breaking up. So the sailors were, as a class, a deeply religious sort of people. Every ship had a little altar on board, or a little painted god, or a prayer scratched into the wood. It is not that sailors are better than other people. It is that they have a shorter list of things they can rely on.

And the Psalms knew this. There is a psalm, the hundred and seventh in the Hebrew numbering, the hundred and sixth in the Greek one, which describes exactly the sailors of this story. It says that those who go down to the sea in ships, who do business on the great waters, see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. It says that when the storm rose, they reeled and staggered like drunken men, and were at their wits' end. And it says that they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress, and made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed, and they were glad because they were quiet, and he brought them to their haven.

Keep that psalm in your pocket, too. It is the oldest version of tonight's story, and it was old before anyone had heard of Nicholas.

Here is a morning in Myra, in the part of the story that is entirely invented, so that you can see what sort of bishop we are dealing with.

It is early. It is a grey, damp sort of dawn, with a little rain coming down so lightly that it is mostly an opinion. The bishop is already up. He is always already up. He has said his prayers, and eaten a piece of bread and four olives, which is his breakfast every day and has been for years, and he is sitting on a bench outside the church with a cup of something hot, watching the town wake up.

A woman comes across the square toward him. She is carrying a basket in front of her with both arms, the way you carry something that is heavy, or something that matters. Her name is Eupraxia, and she sells fish at the harbour, and she has a loud voice and a face like a clenched fist. She does not walk up to the bishop. She marches.

"My brother is at sea," she says.

"Good morning, Eupraxia," says the bishop.

"Good morning. My brother is at sea. He went out with the grain fleet, he's on a ship called the Dolphin, and it was supposed to be back in Alexandria by the end of the month, and I have heard nothing. Nothing. And the wind went round to the south two nights ago, and the whole harbour says that's bad."

"It can be," says the bishop.

"I don't want you to say that it can be. I want you to pray."

"I was going to anyway," says the bishop, mildly. "I have been praying for your brother since before you got here. I do that for everyone's brother. It takes up a lot of the morning." He moves along the bench and makes room for her. "Sit down. Tell me what he's like."

"He's a fool," says Eupraxia at once. "He's the best man I know. He can't swim, he sings at the wrong moments, and he cries at weddings."

"Then he sounds exactly like the sort of man who ought to be on a ship," says the bishop. "God likes those."

And Eupraxia, who has been holding herself together with both fists since yesterday, sits down on the bench, and laughs, and then, unexpectedly, cries, and the bishop says nothing at all and holds the basket for her until she is finished.

That is the sort of bishop he is, in the version of the story I am telling you. Not a wonder-worker who strides about. A man who knows the names of the people whose brothers are at sea.

The old lives never tell us about this particular morning, I should say. I made it up. But I do not think I made up the bishop. Whoever wrote down the stories of Saint Nicholas, over the five hundred years after he died, kept coming back to the same picture of him: someone to whom people in trouble ran. And the sea was where a great many people in Lycia got into trouble.

Now. The storm.

The old story, as Michael the Archimandrite tells it, goes like this. Some sailors, in a ship, out on the open sea, were caught in a dreadful storm. The mast was cracking. The waves were breaking over the ship. They believed they were going to die. And in their terror, they remembered that there was a bishop at Myra, Nicholas, a servant of God, of whom they had heard great things, and they called out to him by name. They said, in so many words, "Servant of God, Nicholas, if the things we have heard about you are true, let us find out now."

And that, in the old account, is when it happened. A figure appeared, the shape of the man they had called on, and stood among them, and helped them take in the ropes, and put the ship to rights. The storm went down. And when they came, a few days later, to Myra, the sailors went straight to the church to give thanks, and there, in the church, was the bishop, and they recognised him, the very same man, and they fell at his feet.

And he lifted them up, and he said, quite firmly, that it was not he they had to thank. They should thank God. And then, the story says, he told them to go on their way, in peace, and to look after their souls.

Let me tell it the long way, with names, because I would like to see it properly. The names are mine. Everything else is the old story, as far as I can follow it.

The ship is called the Swallow. The captain is a man called Zosimos. He is not a bad captain, but he is a nervous one, and a nervous captain is much better than a brave captain, in the opinion of everyone who has ever been aboard a ship. He has a mate called Kallinikos, who is enormous, and silent, and rather good at ropes. He has a crew of eleven. And he has a ship's boy called Dorotheos, who is twelve, and who has stowed away on this particular voyage because, he says, he wants to see the world.

"You have seen the world," says Zosimos, on the third day out, pulling him out of a coil of rope by the ear. "It is that. It is grey. It is wet. There is a lot of it."

"There's more of it than I thought," says Dorotheos, in a small, thrilled voice.

They are three days out of Alexandria, loaded with wheat, bound north for the Lycian coast, when the weather turns. It happens the way these things do, which is slowly, and then all at once. First there is a high, thin cloud, the colour of old milk. Then the wind drops. Then there is no wind at all, and the sea goes flat and oily, and the sailors, who are not stupid, do not like the look of it. Kallinikos stands at the bow for an hour, with his arms crossed, looking at nothing, and then walks aft without a word and begins to check all the ropes a second time.

And then the wind comes. From the south. It comes with a long, heavy howl, like something very large waking up and finding it is cross.

I will not describe the storm in detail, because it is bedtime, and also because I do not know what a storm at sea is really like. I have only read about it. But I will tell you what the old writers say. The sea rose up in great hills, grey-green, with white on top. The Swallow climbed each one with a long groan, and tipped over the top, and slid down the other side, and every time the whole ship shuddered like a horse. The sail split from top to bottom with a noise like a gunshot, and they cut it away, and it went off in the dark like a great pale bird. The mast began to crack. The steering oar broke loose. Water came in through the planks, and the men baled with buckets, and with helmets, and with their hands.

And Dorotheos, the boy, who has never been so frightened in his life, is crouched in the bottom of the ship, with his back against the grain sacks, saying, over and over, a thing he heard in the harbour at Alexandria, from a woman selling dried figs.

"Nicholas of Myra," he is saying. "Nicholas of Myra. Nicholas of Myra."

"What are you doing?" says Zosimos, who has staggered over to him, hanging on to whatever he can reach.

"She said," says Dorotheos. "The fig woman. She said if you're in trouble on the sea, you ask the bishop at Myra to pray for you."

"The bishop at Myra," says Zosimos, "is six hundred miles away, asleep in a bed, and does not know that we exist."

"She said that doesn't matter," says Dorotheos.

There is a pause. The ship rolls. A wave goes over them both, and they come up spluttering. And Zosimos, who is an honest man, and who has run out of every other idea he has ever had, looks up at the black sky, and says in a cracked voice, "Well. Nicholas of Myra. If you are what they say you are. Now would be a good time."

Which is not much of a prayer. It is, I think, a perfectly good one. It is very like the prayer in the psalm. They cried out to the Lord in their trouble.

And this is the point where the old story goes quiet and strange, as the old stories do. It does not say there was a flash of light. It does not say there was a choir. It says that, in that moment, there was a man at the oar.

Zosimos sees him first. Just a figure, in the dark, at the back of the ship, where the steering oar is swinging loose. An old man, with a grey beard and a bare head and a plain cloak. He takes hold of the oar. He sets his feet. And the oar stops swinging.

"Who is that?" shouts Zosimos. "Kallinikos! Who is that?"

Kallinikos, who has not said a word in two days, looks across the heaving deck, and looks back, and says in a quiet, strained voice, "I do not know."

The stranger does not say anything. He looks the way an old shepherd looks, at the edge of a field, when a dog has got into the sheep. Patient. Not frightened of any of it. He leans on the oar, and the ship comes round, slowly, and puts her bow to the waves, and the next one comes over the bow instead of the side, and the Swallow lifts. And lifts. And does not fall.

The men take heart. They find the ropes. They find the strength to bale. And somewhere in the next hour, the wind, which had been a roar, becomes a wail, and then a mutter, and then a sort of grumble, and the great grey hills begin to lose their white tops. The rain thins. A grey light comes up in the east, as it will, and shows them a sea that is still rough, still wet, and perfectly ordinary. Not hostile. Just the sea.

And Zosimos turns to thank the stranger at the oar. And there is no one there.

Just the oar. Moving gently, in the swell, on its broken rope.

"Where did he go?" says Dorotheos.

"Overboard?" says someone.

"He didn't go overboard," says Kallinikos. He has tears running down his big plain face. He does not seem to have noticed them. "He wasn't that kind of man."

It takes them four days to reach Myra, limping on a jury-rigged sail made out of two blankets and somebody's tunic. They come into the long grey inlet of Andriake on a bright clean morning, with the harbour full of washing and fish and gulls, and Eupraxia, on the quay, selling her catch at the top of her voice. The moment the Swallow is tied up, Zosimos steps ashore, and falls on his knees on the stones, and kisses them, which is a thing sailors do, and which the dockers have seen a thousand times.

"Are you well?" says Eupraxia.

"We have been saved," says Zosimos.

"From what?"

"From the sea." He gets up. He looks round the harbour, and up the hill to the town, and he says, rather vaguely, "There was a man. I do not know who he was. He was, I think, a bishop. We prayed to a bishop, and then there was a man at the oar. Is there a bishop here?"

"There is," says Eupraxia. And a curious expression comes over her face. "Come on."

They go up through the town, the whole damp crew of them, in a straggling line, with the boy Dorotheos at the back, and arrive at the church just as the morning prayers are ending. People are coming out. And there, in the doorway, with a cup of something hot in his hand, and talking to two old women about their roof, is a grey-bearded man in a plain dark cloak.

Zosimos stops dead.

"That's him," whispers Dorotheos.

"It can't be," says Zosimos.

"That's him," says Kallinikos, in his huge, quiet voice, and all at once, in front of the whole of Myra, the biggest man on the Swallow goes down on his knees.

The bishop looks up. He sees the line of salt-stained sailors, and the huge man kneeling in the road, and the little round captain going rather pale, and he says, "Oh dear."

"Father," says Zosimos. "We were in the storm. We called your name. Our ship was breaking up. And you came."

"I have been here all week," says the bishop, apologetically. "Ask these ladies. We have been talking about the roof."

"It was you," says Zosimos. "I saw your face."

The bishop is quiet for a moment. He is not a man who lies. He is also not a man who says things that are not his to say. And the old story, as far as I can read it, is carefully silent about how it happened. It does not claim that he had been carried across the sea. It does not claim that he had two bodies. It says only that the sailors saw him there, and that the storm stopped. We are not told what the bishop thought about that. I like to imagine he thought, quietly, that God has ways of answering a prayer that the person asked to pray does not always know about.

"Get up, my friend," he says to Kallinikos, and takes his arm, and helps him. "Please. All of you. It is very kind. But it is not me you should be thanking."

"Then who?"

He looks at them, the whole worn, wet, grateful lot of them. And he points, not at the sky exactly, but past it. "Come in," he says. "You have had a long voyage. And there is something I think you would like to say to Someone."

And so the crew of the Swallow, who have never been inside a church in their lives, except to get out of the rain, follow the bishop in, and stand at the back, awkwardly, with their caps in their hands, while the choir finishes a psalm. It happens to be, if you want it to be, the one about those who go down to the sea in ships. They do not know that. But the boy Dorotheos, at the back, who has been listening hard, whispers, "That's us."

And the bishop, who has very good ears, smiles and does not turn round.

That is the first story. And it is why, ever since, sailors from the Greek islands to the Baltic have prayed to Saint Nicholas, and put his icon on their ships, and built little chapels to him on headlands and in harbour towns, all along the coasts of Europe. In a Greek fishing boat, even now, you will sometimes find a small icon of Nicholas tucked up by the wheel. It was always God who stilled the sea. The old writers knew that quite well. They just thought the sailors were right to ask the bishop to pray.

Now, the second story. For this one we need to move forward to a bad year.

The old lives do not give the year. They say only that there was a famine in Myra, and in the country around it. A famine in the ancient world was a slow thing, and a quiet one. There was no single day on which it began. The harvest failed, one summer, for the usual reasons, drought or blight or too much rain at the wrong time, and the granaries ran down, and the prices went up, and the people who had been eating a little began to eat less, and the people who had been eating less began to eat very little indeed. Small children first. Old people next. The bakeries opened later and closed earlier. Soup became thinner. The talk in the market got quieter.

Nicholas the bishop saw all of this. He had a church to feed, and he did, to the limit of what the church had, which was not much. He emptied the church's own storeroom. He sent out the deacons with baskets. Some of the richer families in Myra quietly sent grain to the church for him to give away, and he gave it away, and did not say who it came from. But by the middle of that winter, as the old story tells it, there was not enough. Not nearly enough.

And then, one morning, Eupraxia the fish-seller came running up the hill from the harbour, with her skirts held in both hands, and found the bishop in the church.

"Father," she said. "Come down to the harbour. Come now."

"What is it?"

"Ships," said Eupraxia. And she was laughing, and furious, both at once. "The grain fleet. It's put in at Andriake for the weather. They're sitting down there, six of them, as low in the water as eggs in a bucket, and I have walked past them every day for a week, and the sailors are eating bread. Real bread. They're throwing the crusts to the gulls."

The harbour at Andriake, that morning, is exactly as she described it. Six great ships of the imperial fleet, side by side along the quay, loaded with Egyptian wheat from stem to stern. They sit so deep that the water is almost at their rails. Their sails are furled, their gangplanks are down, and along the quay, in front of the long stone granary, a crowd has begun to gather, not quite sure what it wants.

And at the top of the gangplank of the nearest ship, with his arms folded, stands a man in the uniform of the imperial service. His name, in our story, is Antiochos. He is a clerk. He has a wax tablet in one hand, and a stylus behind his ear, and an expression of deep, settled, professional pessimism. He has been up and down the Mediterranean for twenty years, and he has been offered, at one time or another, every sort of bribe, every sort of sob story, and one live goat.

The bishop comes down the quay, through the crowd, which parts for him. He stops at the foot of the gangplank. He bows to the clerk, a little.

"Good morning," says the bishop. "Are you the officer in charge of the grain?"

"I am the officer in charge of the paperwork about the grain," says Antiochos. "It is not the same thing, and I would be grateful if you would remember it. What can I do for you, Father?"

"There is a famine in Myra."

"I had heard."

"People are starving. Children."

"That is dreadful," says Antiochos, and he means it. He is not a hard man. He has simply seen where this conversation goes. "I am very sorry. But whatever you are about to ask me, I cannot do."

"I have not asked you yet."

"No, but you are going to ask for grain. Everyone does. Every harbour on this coast asks. And I have to tell all of them what I am going to tell you." He taps the tablet. "Every sack in these ships was counted at Alexandria. It was weighed. It was written down. It will be weighed again at Constantinople, in the emperor's storehouses, by men who do not know me and do not like me, and they will check it against this tablet, to the last measure. And if the numbers are short by so much as a bucket, someone is going to be asked why. That someone will be me. And then, depending on the mood of the official, it will be my wages, or my position, or." He draws a finger across his throat, and then looks apologetic, because there is a bishop present. "Forgive me. But it is a serious matter."

The bishop nods, slowly, as if this is perfectly reasonable. Which it is.

"I understand," he says. "It is your word, and it is your head. I would not ask you to risk either one lightly."

"Thank you," says Antiochos, relieved.

"I only wish to ask a smaller thing," says the bishop. "Out of each of your six ships, one hundred measures. That is all. Perhaps half a ton of wheat from each. For a city that is hungry."

"Six hundred measures," says Antiochos, who can do sums very quickly. "That is a great deal of bread."

"It is a great deal of children," says the bishop, quietly.

Now. I want to say something here, which the old story does not say, but which I think is in it. The clerk is right. He really is. He is not the villain. If I were the bishop, and the emperor's grain were sitting in the harbour, I might very well have been tempted to say that the people mattered more than the paperwork. But the bishop does not say that. He does not say that the emperor does not need all of it. He does not threaten, and he does not shame, and he does not argue. Because he does not want the clerk to do something wrong, or to be afraid. He only wants him to do something kind. That is a different request, and it asks for a different kind of courage.

And so he says the thing that, in the old life, is the heart of the story.

"I will tell you what I think," says Nicholas. "I do not think you will lose a single measure."

"That is not how arithmetic works, Father."

"No," says the bishop. "It is how God works. I cannot explain it better than that. But I am asking you to trust me. Give us a hundred measures from each of your ships. And when you come to the emperor's storehouse, and they weigh your cargo, I promise you that you will find it exactly as it was when you left Egypt."

There is a long silence on the quay.

Antiochos looks at the bishop. He looks at the crowd, which has gone very quiet. He looks, last of all, at a small thin girl in the front, about six years old, who is holding her mother's hand, and who is staring, not at the bishop, or the clerk, but at the open hold of the ship behind him, where the grain is stacked up in great golden heaps, in the dim light, like something out of a story.

And the clerk, who has been offered a goat, and has not been moved, breathes out slowly.

"If they find the tablet is wrong," he says, "I will say it was your fault."

"That is entirely fair," says the bishop.

"Four hundred measures," says Antiochos. "Not six hundred. I have three other captains who will say no, and I am not going to be able to talk them out of it."

"Then it will be four hundred," says the bishop. "And I thank you. And I think that the other captains, when they see, will find it harder to say no than you think."

And he is right. This is the part of the old story that is easy to miss. It does not say that there was a bolt of lightning, or that the grain multiplied in the hold. It says that when the first captain gave, the others gave. By the end of the day, all six ships had opened their hatches, and the people of Myra, who had been standing at the quay all morning, with their baskets and their sacks and their hands, came forward in a long, quiet line, and carried the grain up the hill.

It is a strange thing, the second half of that day, and I think it is the part that I like best.

There is no feast. There is no procession. The bishop does not make a speech. He sits at a table, in front of the church, with the deacons, and the grain is brought in, sack by sack, and weighed out, fairly, into baskets, one for every household in Myra, rich and poor alike, according to how many mouths there were to feed. A baker is found. Another baker is found. Ovens that have been cold for weeks are lit. By evening, there is a smell over the whole town that nobody has smelled since the autumn, and people come out of their doors and stand in the street with their faces up, like flowers.

And at the back of the line, with a basket, comes Eupraxia, who has brought no fish.

"I am not a poor woman," she says to the bishop, a little stiffly. "I can pay."

"I know you can," says the bishop. "Take it anyway. Give it to someone on your street who cannot. That's the whole of the trick."

She takes the basket. She stands there for a moment. "My brother came home," she says. "Did I tell you? The Dolphin. Two weeks after you prayed. Fell off the quay, the first thing, with joy. He's got a broken arm, he sings all day, he is unbearable."

"I'm very glad."

"He wanted to come and thank you. I told him you'd run away."

The bishop smiles. "I only run from the ones with gold," he says.

And now, because the old story would be a very incomplete story if it stopped here, we must follow the grain ships.

They sail the next morning. The wind is fair. The six ships go out of Andriake in a line, and turn west along the coast, and then north through the islands, towards the narrow sea, and at the head of it, the great city, Constantinople. It takes them a month. And all the way, in the stern of the first ship, the clerk Antiochos sits with his wax tablet on his knee, and does not sleep very well.

He counts. He cannot help it. He counts the sacks that are left. He does the sum, over and over, in his head, and every time it comes out to the same answer, which is four hundred measures short. He rehearses what he will say. He rehearses it in the morning, and at noon, and in the evening, and in his sleep. "A famine in Myra, honourable sir. A bishop. A promise." It sounds worse each time. He is a sensible man, and he can hear how it sounds.

"You are making yourself ill," says the captain, whose name in this story is Zosimos, and who, as it happens, is a friend of the bishop's by now, and has been on the quay at Andriake that week, and knows exactly what sort of man they are dealing with. "Let it go. He said it would be well."

"He said arithmetic would be different," says Antiochos.

"And I have been alive in this world a good while," says Zosimos, "and I have seen a man at the oar of a ship that no one was steering. I am not going to start arguing sums with him."

And at last the fleet passes through the straits, and comes into the Golden Horn, and ties up beneath the walls of the imperial city, which is a thing of towers and domes and gold and a very great deal of noise. And in the early morning, the officers of the emperor's storehouses come down to the quay, in a body, with their ledgers, and their weights, and their long grave faces, and begin to count.

Antiochos stands at the head of the gangway and holds the tablet in both hands. His knuckles are white.

They weigh the first ship. They write it down. They weigh the second. They write it down. They weigh them all, one after another, slowly, with the particular patience of men who are paid to doubt. It takes the whole morning. And at last the senior official, a long, dry, yellow-faced man, comes up the gangplank, with a clerk behind him carrying a ledger, and holds out his hand for the tablet.

He reads it. He reads it again. He runs a finger down the column, and compares it to his own. He frowns. He asks for the figures to be checked, and they are checked. He goes aside, and consults. He comes back. And in the whole of the harbour, there is not a sound but the water.

"It is correct," says the official.

"It is," says Antiochos, in a very small voice, "what?"

"It is correct. The full quantity, to the last measure, as loaded at Alexandria." The official sounds mildly irritated, as if it had been a lot of trouble to check. "It is a model cargo. You will receive a commendation. Good day."

He goes down the gangway. And Antiochos, the clerk, the pessimist, the man who was once offered a goat, sits down quite suddenly on a coil of rope, and puts his face in his hands, and after a time, to the great interest of the sailors, begins to laugh. He cannot stop. He laughs until he is crying, and then he is crying, really, and then he stops, and wipes his face with the back of his hand, and looks out across the water, at the sea he has crossed.

"Four hundred measures," he says, to no one. "Where did they go?"

"Where they were needed," says Zosimos, and puts a hand on his shoulder. And the two of them stand there, the nervous captain and the ruined clerk, in the early light, looking south.

Back in Myra, the old story says, the grain lasted. It was only four hundred measures, which is not very much for a city. But according to the old writers, the people ate from it for two whole years, and had enough left over to sow the fields. The harvest that came after was a good one. And nobody in Myra, then or afterwards, could explain how it had been done. There were those who said the bishop had prayed. There were those who said it was a miracle of the loaves, like the one in the Gospel, when the Lord himself fed the crowd on the hillside, and there were baskets left over. And the bishop himself said very little about it at all.

The old life gives him no speech about it. If I had to guess what he would have said, to anyone who asked, I think it would be that bread is a gift, meant to be shared. That last part is my guess, and not the old writers'.

I should say, here, as I always should, that this is a story told about Saint Nicholas, and not a record kept by someone who was there. The earliest writers who tell it lived hundreds of years after him. A careful historian will tell you that stories like this one, of a saint feeding the hungry from a ship's cargo, were told about several saints, in several places, and that the grain ships may well have become Nicholas's by being passed from mouth to mouth. That may be so. We cannot prove otherwise. What we can say is that the people of Myra loved it, and the Church has kept it, and it fits the man we meet in the one thing that is solid, which is the way people remembered him. As someone to whom hungry people and frightened people ran, and who did not turn them away.

So, what became of the bishop?

The old lives say that he grew old, as bishops do, and tired, and rather slower on the stairs. He still got up every morning before everyone else. He still had bread and four olives. He still sat on the bench outside the church with his cup of something hot, and watched the town wake up, and knew the names of the people whose brothers were at sea. But the walk to the harbour got a little longer each year, and by the end it was a walk he made in his mind.

The old story tells us that when his time came, he was quietly ready. He said the words of the psalm. He was heard to say, in a low voice, a verse about hope in the Lord. And then he went home to God, in his own city, among his own people, on the sixth of December, in a year that nobody wrote down.

They buried him in the church at Myra. And the church, as churches do, grew around him. Pilgrims came. For seven hundred years they came, from Greece and Syria and Italy and Russia, to the tomb in Lycia, and a sweet-smelling liquid, they said, collected there, which was called manna, and was carried away in little flasks. In the end, in the year ten eighty-seven, when Myra had fallen under the rule of strangers, a party of sailors from the Italian town of Bari took the relics, in a hurry, and carried them home across the sea. They were met on the quay by a whole town in tears. There is a great church in Bari today, built over them, and Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims alike come to it, and the Orthodox keep the ninth of May for the day the relics arrived.

I always find that a rather fitting thing for a saint of the sea. After all those years, he was carried across the water once more, in the hold of a ship, with a crew of nervous men who were praying hard to him as they went.

And if you go to Demre, which is what Myra is called now, you can still stand in the old harbour at Andriake. The sea has pulled back a little. The inlet is quiet, and reedy, and full of birds. But the great stone granary is still there, long and plain and strong, with its row of doors, like a cathedral for bread. And on a bright day, if you stand at the water's edge, and look south, you can very nearly see the ships coming in.

The sea comes in. The sea goes out.

And somewhere, a long way out, in the dark, a nervous captain is saying the only prayer he has left. And somewhere, someone is already praying for him.

Some notes for the curious.

Saint Nicholas was a real bishop of Myra, in Lycia, in the fourth century, and his tomb there drew pilgrims from early on. The stories in tonight's episode, though, come from much later. The fullest early account is the Greek life by Michael the Archimandrite, written in the ninth century, roughly five hundred years after Nicholas died. It tells the story of the sailors in the storm and the story of the grain ships. The Golden Legend, put together in Italy in the twelve hundreds by Jacobus de Voragine, repeats both, and adds details of its own. Several of these tales seem to be shared with other saints, in particular with a later Lycian holy man, Nicholas of Sion, and some scholars think they drifted from one to the other. We cannot say for certain which of them first belonged to whom.

The setting, however, is solid. The ports of Lycia really were the great stopping places for the Egyptian grain fleet. Acts chapter twenty-seven shows a ship of Alexandria bound for Italy at Myra in the days of Paul. Andriake, the harbour of Myra, really did have a huge granary, built under the Emperor Hadrian, and the building still stands. The moral of the grain story, that a hard-headed official can be asked for kindness without being asked for dishonesty, is the old story's own. The old life says only that the captains were afraid, and that the bishop promised nothing would be missed.

What we invented tonight: the captain Zosimos and his mate Kallinikos, the ship's boy Dorotheos, the fish-seller Eupraxia and her brother, the clerk Antiochos, the goat, the morning on the bench, and nearly all the conversations. The ship called the Swallow is ours. So is the idea that the captain of the storm should turn up in the second story. If you would like to read more, Charles Jones, in Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan, and Adam English, in The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, are both careful and readable.

That's the story of Saint Nicholas of Myra for tonight. His feast is the sixth of December, in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and the Orthodox also remember him on the ninth of May, for the bringing of his relics to Bari. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a short prayer for tonight, our own, in the spirit of the old prayers for people at sea, and drawing on the psalm.

Lord, you made the sea, and you know every wave of it. Be with all who are out on the dark water tonight, and with all who are waiting for them on the shore. Quiet the storm. Bring them to their haven. Teach us to share our bread, and not to hold it too tightly. And through the prayers of your servant Nicholas, let us rest in peace, and wake in peace. Amen.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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