Lamb

by Christopher Moore

  “What’s in the bottle, Joy?” I called her Joy. Her full name was too ungainly for conversation, and when I’d tried other diminutives (Tiny Feet, Divine Dance, and Orgasm), she hadn’t responded positively.

  “Poison,” Joy said with a smile. The lips of her smile were shy and girlish, but the eyes smiled a thousand years sly.

  “Ah,” I said, and I tasted the tea. It was rich and fragrant, just as it had been before, but this time there was a hint of bitterness.

  “Biff, can you guess what your lesson is today?” Joy asked.

  “I thought you would tell me what’s in that house of doom room.”

  “No, that is not the lesson today. Balthasar does not wish you to know what is in that room. Guess again.”

  My fingers and toes had begun to tingle and I suddenly realized that my scalp had gone numb. “You’re going to teach me how to make the fire-powder that Balthasar used the day we arrived?”

  “No, silly.” Joy’s laugh had the musical sound of a clear stream running over rocks. She pushed me lightly on the chest and I fell over backward, unable to move. “Today’s lesson is—are you ready?”

  I grunted. It was all I could do. My mouth was paralyzed.

  “Today’s lesson is, if someone puts poison in your tea, don’t drink it.”

  “Uh-huh,” I sort of slurred.

  “So,” Balthasar said, “I see that Tiny Feet of the Divine Dance of Joyous Orgasm has revealed what she keeps in the little bottle around her neck.” The magus laughed heartily and leaned back on some cushions.

  “Is he dead?” asked Joshua.

  The girls laid my paralyzed body on some pillows next to Joshua, then propped me up so I could look at Balthasar. Beautiful Gate of Heavenly Moisture Number Six, who I had only just met and didn’t have a nickname for yet, put some drops on my eyes to keep them moist, as I seemed to have lost the ability to blink.

  “No,” said Balthasar, “he’s not dead. He’s just relaxed.”

  Joshua poked me in the ribs and, of course, I didn’t respond. “Really relaxed,” he said.

  Beautiful Gate of Heavenly Moisture Number Six handed Joshua the little vial of eye drops and excused herself. She and the other girls left the room. “Can he see and hear us?” Joshua asked.

  “Oh yes, he’s completely alert.”

  “Hey Biff, I’m learning about Chi,” Joshua shouted into my ear. “It flows all around us. You can’t see it, or hear it, or smell it, but it’s there.”

  “You don’t need to shout,” said Balthasar. Which is what I would have said, if I could have said anything.

  Joshua put some drops in my eyes. “Sorry.” Then to Balthasar, “This poison, where did it come from?”

  “I studied under a sage in China who had been the emperor’s royal poisoner. He taught me this, and many other of the magics of the five elements.”

  “Why would an emperor need a poisoner?”

  “A question that only a peasant would ask.”

  “An answer that only an ass would give,” said Joshua.

  Balthasar laughed. “So be it, child of the star. A question asked in earnest deserves an earnest answer. An emperor has many enemies to dispatch, but more important, he has many enemies who would dispatch him. The sage spent most of his time concocting antidotes.”

  “So there’s an antidote to this poison,” Joshua said, poking me in the ribs again.

  “In good time. In good time. Have some more wine, Joshua. I wish to discuss with you the three jewels of the Tao. The three jewels of the Tao are compassion, moderation, and humility…”

  An hour later, four Chinese girls came and picked me up, wiped the floor where I had drooled, and carried me to our quarters. As they passed the great ironclad door I could hear scraping and a voice in my head that said, “Hey kid, open the door,” but the girls made no notice of it. Back in my room, the girls bathed me and poured some rich broth into me, then put me to bed and closed my eyes.

  I could hear Joshua enter the room and shuffle around preparing for bed. “Balthasar says he will have Joy give you the antidote to the poison soon, but first you have a lesson to learn. He says that this is the Chinese way of teaching. Strange, don’t you think?”

  Had I been able to make a sound, I would have agreed, yes, indeed it was strange.

  So you know:

  Balthasar’s concubines were eight in number and their names were:

  Tiny Feet of the Divine Dance of Joyous Orgasm,

  Beautiful Gate of Heavenly Moisture Number Six,

  Temptress of the Golden Light of the Harvest Moon,

  Delicate Personage of Two Fu Dogs Wrestling Under a Blanket,

  Feminine Keeper of the Three Tunnels of Excessive Friendliness,

  Silken Pillows of the Heavenly Softness of Clouds,

  Pea Pods in Duck Sauce with Crispy Noodle,

  and Sue.

  And I found myself wondering, as a man does, about origins and motivations and such—as each of the concubines was more beautiful than the last, regardless of what order you put them in, which was weird—so after several weeks passed, and I could no longer stand the curiosity scratching at my brain like a cat in a basket, I waited until one of the rare occasions when I was alone with Balthasar, and I asked.

  “Why Sue?”

  “Short for Susanna,” Balthasar said.

  So there you go.

  Their full names were somewhat ungainly, and to try to pronounce them in Chinese produced a sound akin to throwing a bag of silverware down a flight of steps (ting, tong, yang, wing, etc.) so Joshua and I called the girls as follows:

  Joy,

  Number Six,

  Two Fu Dogs,

  Moon,

  Tunnels,

  Pillows,

  Pea Pods,

  and, of course,

  Sue,

  which we couldn’t figure out how to shorten.

  Except for a group of men who brought supplies from Kabul every two weeks, and while there would do any heavy moving, the eight young women did everything around the fortress. Despite the remoteness and the obvious wealth that the fortress housed, there were no guards. I found that curious.

  Over the next week Joy tutored me in the characters that I would need to know to read the Book of the Divine Elixirs or the Nine Tripods of the Yellow Emperor, and the Book of Liquid Pearl in Nine Cycles and of the Nine Elixirs of the Divine Immortals. The plan was that once I became conversant in these two ancient texts, I would be able to assist Balthasar in his quest for immortality. That, by the way, was the reason that we were there, the reason that Balthasar had followed the star to Bethlehem at Joshua’s birth, and the reason that he had put Ahmad on notice to look for a Jew seeking the African magus. Balthasar sought immortality, and he believed that Joshua held the key to it. Of course we didn’t know that at the time.

  My concentration while studying the symbols was particularly acute, helped by the fact that I could not move a muscle. Each morning Two Fu Dogs and Pillows (both named for their voluptuousness, which evidently came with considerable strength) would pull me from bed, squeeze me over the latrine, bathe me, pour some broth into me, then take me to the library and prop me in a chair while Joy lectured on Chinese characters, which she painted with a wet brush on large sheets of slate set on easels. Sometimes the other girls would stay and pose my body into various positions that amused them, and as much as I should have been annoyed by the humiliation, the truth be told, watching Pillows and Two Fu Dogs jiggle in paroxysms of girlish laughter was fast becoming the high point of my paralyzed day.

  At midday, Joy would take a break while two or more of the other girls squoze me over the latrine, poured more broth into me, and then teased me mercilessly until Joy returned, clapped her hands, and sent them away well scolded. ( Joy was the bull-ox concubine of them all, despite her tiny feet.)

  Sometimes during these breaks, Joshua would leave his own lessons and come to the library to visit.

  “Why have you painted him b
lue?” asked Joshua.

  “He looks good blue,” said Pea Pods. Two Fu Dogs and Tunnels stood by with paintbrushes admiring their work.

  “Well, he’s not going to be happy with this when he gets the antidote, I can tell you that.” Then to me Joshua said, “You know, you do sort of look good blue. Biff, I’ve appealed to Joy on your behalf, but she says she doesn’t think you’ve learned your lesson yet. You have learned your lesson though, haven’t you? Stop breathing for a second if the answer is yes.”

  I did.

  “I thought so.” Joshua bent and whispered in my ear. “It’s about that room behind the iron door. That’s the lesson they want you to learn. I got the feeling that if I asked about it I’d be propped up there next to you.” He stood up. “I have to go now. The three jewels to learn, don’t you know. I’m on compassion. It’s not as hard as it sounds.”

  Two days later Joy came to my room in the morning with some tea. She pulled the tiny bottle from inside her dragon robe and held it close in front of my eyes. “You see the two small corks, a white one on one side of the vessel and a black one on the other? The black one is the poison I gave you. The white one is the antidote. I think you’ve learned your lesson.”

  I drooled in response, while sincerely hoping she hadn’t mixed up the corks.

  She tipped the little bottle over a teacup, then poured some tea down my throat, with half of it going down the front of my shirt as well. “That will take a while to work. You may experience some discomfort as the poison wears off.” Joy dropped the little bottle down into its nest of Chinese cleavage, then kissed me on the forehead and left. If I could, I would have snickered at the blue paint she had on her lips as she walked away. Ha!

  “Some discomfort,” she had said. For the better part of ten days I’d had no sensation in my body at all, then suddenly things started to work again. Imagine rolling out of your warm bed in the morning into—oh, I don’t know—a lake of burning oil.

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Joshua, I’m about to crawl out of my skin here.” We were in our quarters, about an hour after I’d taken the antidote. Balthasar had sent Joshua to find me and bring me to the library, supposedly to see how I was doing.

  Josh put his hand on my forehead, but instead of the usual calm that accompanied that gesture, it felt as if he’d lain a hot branding iron across my skin. I knocked his hand aside. “Thanks, but it’s not helping.”

  “Maybe a bath,” Joshua suggested.

  “Tried it. Jeez, this is driving me mad!” I hopped around in a circle because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Maybe Balthasar has something that can help,” Joshua said.

  “Lead on,” I said. “I can’t just sit here.”

  We headed off down the corridor, going down several levels on the way to the library. As we descended one of the spiral ramps I grabbed Joshua’s arm.

  “Josh, look at this ramp, you notice anything?”

  He considered the surface and leaned out to look at the sides of the tread. “No. Should I?”

  “How about the walls and ceilings, the floors, you notice anything?”

  Joshua looked around. “They’re all solid rock?”

  “Yes, but what else? Look hard. Think of the houses we built in Sepphoris. Now do you notice anything?”

  “No tool marks?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks staring at walls and ceilings with nothing much else to look at. There’s not the slightest evidence of a chisel, a pick, a hammer, anything. It’s as if these chambers had been carved by the wind over a thousand years, but you know that’s not the case.”

  “So what’s your point?” Joshua said.

  “My point is that there’s more going on with Balthasar and his girls than he lets on.”

  “We should ask them.”

  “No, we shouldn’t, Josh. Don’t you get it? We need to find out what’s going on without them knowing that we know.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why? Because the last time I asked a question I was poisoned, that’s why. And I believe that if Balthasar didn’t think you had something that he wants, I’d have never seen the antidote.”

  “But I don’t have anything,” said Joshua, honestly.

  “You might have something you don’t know you have, but you can’t just go asking what it is. We need to be devious. Tricky. Sneaky.”

  “But I’m not good at any of those things.”

  I put my arm around my friend’s shoulders. “Not always so great being the Messiah, huh?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I could kick that punk’s punk ass,” the angel said, jumping on the bed, shaking a fist at the television screen.

  “Raziel,” I said, “you are an angel of the Lord, he is a professional wrestler, I think it’s understood that you could kick his punk ass.” This has gone on for a couple of days now. The angel has found a new passion. The front desk has called a dozen times and sent a bellman up twice to tell the angel to quiet down. “Besides, it’s just pretend.”

  Raziel looked at me as if I had slapped him. “Don’t start with that again, these are not actors.” The angel back flipped on the bed. “Ooo, ooo, you see that? Ho popped him with a chair. Thaz right, you go girl. She nasty.”

  It’s like that now. Talk shows featuring the screaming ignorant, soap operas, and wrestling. And the angel guards the remote control like it’s the Ark of the Covenant.

  “This,” I told him, “is why the angels were never given free will. This right here. Because you would spend your time watching this.”

  “Really?” Raziel said, and he muted the TV for what seemed like the first time in days. “Then tell me, Levi who is called Biff, if by watching this I am abusing the little freedom I’ve been given while carrying out this task, then what would you say of your people?”

  “By my people you mean human beings?” I was stalling. I didn’t remember the angel ever making a valid point before and I wasn’t prepared for it. “Hey, don’t blame me, I’ve been dead for two thousand years. I wouldn’t have let this sort of thing happen.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the angel, crossing his arms and striking a pose of incredulity that he had learned from a gangster rapper on MTV.

  If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes. Oh, that and don’t piss off Salome, that was a big one too. “Okay, we’ve fucked up,” I said.

  “Thaz whut I’m talkin’ about,” said the angel, entirely too satisfied with himself.

  Yeah? Where was he when we needed him and his sword of justice at Balthasar’s fortress? Probably in Greece, watching wrestling.

  Meanwhile, when we got to the library, Balthasar was sitting before the heavy dragon table, eating a bit of cheese and sipping wine while Tunnels and Pea Pods poured a sticky yellow wax on his bald head, then spread it around with small wooden paddles. The easels and slates from my lessons had been stacked out of the way against the shelves full of scrolls and codices.

  “You look good blue,” Balthasar said.

  “Yeah, everybody says that.” The paint, once set, didn’t wash off, but at least my skin had stopped itching.

  “Come in, sit. Have wine. They brought cheese from Kabul this morning. Try some.”

  Joshua and I sat in chairs across the table from the magus. Josh, completely true to form, disregarded my advice and asked Balthasar outright about the iron door.

  The aspect of the jolly wizard became suddenly grave. “There are some mysteries one must learn to live with. Did not your own God tell Moses that no one must look upon his face, and the prophet accepted that? So you must accept that you cannot know what is in the room with the iron door.”

  “He knows his Torah, and Prophets and Writings too,” Joshua said to me. “Balthasar knows more about Solomon than any of the rabbis or priests in Israel.”

  “That’s swell, Josh.” I handed
him a hunk of cheese to keep him amused. To Balthasar I said, “But you forget God’s butt.” You don’t hang out with the Messiah for most of your life without picking up a little Torah knowledge yourself.

  “What?” said the magus. Just then the girls grabbed the edges of the hardened wax shell they’d made on Balthasar’s head and ripped it off in one swift movement. “Ouch, you vicious harpies! Can’t you warn me when you’re going to do that? Get out.”

  The girls tittered and hid their satisfied grins behind delicate fans painted with pheasants and plum blossoms. They fled the library leaving a trail of girlish laughter in the hall as they passed.

  “Isn’t there an easier way to do that?” asked Joshua.

  Balthasar scowled at him. “Don’t you think that after two hundred years, if there was an easier way to do it I would have found it?”

  Joshua dropped his cheese. “Two hundred years?”

  I chimed in. “You get a hairstyle you like, stick with it. Not that you could call that hair, per se.”

  Balthasar wasn’t amused. “What’s this about God’s butt?”

  “Or that you could call that style, for that matter,” I added, rising and going to a copy of the Torah that I’d seen on the shelves. Fortunately it was a codex—like a modern book—otherwise I’d have been unwinding a scroll for twenty minutes and the drama would have been lost. I quickly flipped to Exodus. “Right, here’s the part you were talking about. ‘And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.’ Right? Well, then God puts his hand over Moses as he passes, but he says, ‘I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’”

  “So?” said Balthasar.

  “So, God let Moses see his butt, so using your example, you owe us God’s butt. So tell us, what’s going on with that room with the iron door?” Brilliant. I paused and studied the blueness of my fingernails while savoring my victory.

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Balthasar. His momentary loss of composure was replaced by the calm and slightly amused attitude of the master. “What if I told you that it is dangerous for you to know about what is behind that iron door now, but once you have training, you will not only know, but you will gain great power from the knowledge? When I think you are ready, I promise to show you what is behind that door. But you must promise to study and learn your lessons. Can you do that?”