Lamb

by Christopher Moore

  “Are you forbidding us to ask questions?” asked Joshua.

  “Oh no, I’m simply denying you some of the answers for the time being. And trust me, time is the one thing that I have plenty of.”

  Joshua turned to me. “I still don’t know what I am supposed to learn here, but I’m sure I haven’t learned it yet.” He was pleading me with his eyes to not push the issue. I decided to let it drop; besides, I didn’t relish the idea of being poisoned again.

  “How long is this going to take?” I asked. “These lessons, I mean?”

  “Some students take many years to learn the nature of Chi. You will be provided for while you are here.”

  “Years? Can we think about it?”

  “Take as long as you like,” Balthasar stood. “Now I must go to the girls’ quarters. They like to rub their naked breasts over my scalp right after it’s been waxed and is at its smoothest.”

  I gulped. Joshua grinned and looked at the table in front of him. I often wondered, not just then, but most of the time, if Joshua had the ability to turn off his imagination when he needed to. He must have. Otherwise I don’t know how he would have ever triumphed over temptation. I, on the other hand, was a slave to my imagination and it was running wild with the image of Balthasar’s scalp massage.

  “We’ll stay. We’ll learn. We’ll do what is needed,” I said.

  Joshua burst out laughing, then calmed himself enough to speak. “Yes, we will stay and learn, Balthasar, but first I have to go to Kabul and finish some business.”

  “Of course you do,” said Balthasar. “You can leave tomorrow. I’ll have one of the girls show you the way, but for now, I must say good night.” The wizard stalked off, leaving Joshua to collapse into a fit of giggles and me to wonder how I might look with my head shaved.

  In the morning Joy came to our rooms wearing the garb of a desert trader: a loose tunic, soft leather boots, and pantaloons. Her hair was tied up under a turban and she carried a long riding crop in her hand. She led us through a long narrow passageway that went deep into the mountain, then emerged out of the side of a sheer cliff. We climbed a rope ladder to the top of the plateau where Pillows and Sue waited with three camels saddled and outfitted for a short journey. There was a small farm on the plateau, with several pens full of chickens, some goats, and a few pigs in a pen.

  “We’re going to have a tough time getting these camels down that ladder,” I said.

  Joy scowled and wrapped the tail of her turban around her face so that only her eyes showed. “There’s a path down,” she said. Then she tapped her camel on the shoulder with her crop and rode off, leaving Joshua and me to scramble onto our animals and follow.

  The road down from the plateau was just wide enough for a single camel to sway his way down without falling, but once down on the desert floor, much like the entrance to the canyon where the fortress’s entrance lay, if you didn’t know it was there, you would never have found it. An added measure of security for a fortress that had no guards, I thought.

  Joshua and I tried to engage Joy in conversation several times during the journey to Kabul, but she was cranky and abrupt and often just rode away from us.

  “Probably depressed that she’s not torturing me,” I speculated.

  “I can see how that might bring her down,” said Joshua. “Maybe if you could get your camel to bite you. I know that always brightens my mood.”

  I rode on ahead without another word. It’s wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

  Once in Kabul, Joy led the search for the blinded guard by asking every blind beggar that we passed in the marketplace. “Have you seen a blind bowman who arrived by camel caravan a little more than a week ago?”

  Joshua and I trailed several steps behind her, trying desperately to keep from grinning whenever she looked back. Joshua had wanted to point out the flaw in Joy’s method, while I, on the other hand, wanted to savor her doofuscosity as passive revenge for having been poisoned. There was none of the competence and self-assured nature she showed at the fortress. She was clearly out of her element and I was enjoying it.

  “You see,” I explained to Joshua, “what Joy is doing is ironic, yet that’s not her intent. That’s the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.”

  “No kidding?” said Josh.

  “Why do I waste my time with you?”

  We indulged Joy’s search for the blind man for another hour before directing her inquiries to the sighted, and to men from the camel caravans in particular. Once she started asking sighted people, it was a short time before we were directed to a temple where the blinded guard was said to have staked his begging territory.

  “There he is,” said Joshua, pointing to a ragged pile of human being beckoning to the worshipers as they moved in and out of the temple.

  “It looks like things have been tough on him,” I said, amazed that the guard, who had been one of the most vital (and frightening) men I’d ever seen, had been reduced to such a pathetic creature in so short a time. Then again, I was discounting the theatrics of it all.

  “A great injustice has been done here,” said Josh. He moved to the guard and gently put his hand on the blind man’s shoulder. “Brother, I am here to relieve your suffering.”

  “Pity on the blind,” said the guard, waving around a wooden bowl.

  “Calm now,” said Joshua, placing his hand over the blind man’s eyes. “When I remove my hand you will see again.”

  I could see the strain in Joshua’s face as he concentrated on healing the guard. Tears trickled down his cheeks and dripped on the flagstones. I thought of how effortless his healings had been in Antioch, and realized that the strain was not coming from the healing, but from the guilt he carried for having blinded the man in the first place. When he removed his hand and stepped away, both he and the guard shivered.

  Joy stepped away from us and covered her face as if to ward off bad air.

  The guard stared into space just as he had while he had been begging, but his eyes were no longer white.

  “Can you see?” Joshua said.

  “I can see, but everything is wrong. People’s skin appears blue.”

  “No, he is blue. Remember, my friend Biff.”

  “Were you always blue?”

  “No, only recently.”

  Then the guard seemed to see Joshua for the first time and his expression of wonderment was replaced by hatred. He leapt at Joshua, drawing a dagger from his rags as he moved. He would have split my friend’s rib cage in a single swift blow if Joy hadn’t swept his feet out from under him at the last second. Even so, he was up in an instant, going for a second attack. I managed to get my hand up in time to poke him in the eyes, just as Joy kicked him in the back of the neck, driving him to the ground in agony.

  “My eyes!” he cried.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Joy kicked the knife out of the guard’s reach. I put an arm around Joshua’s chest and pushed him back. “You need to put some distance between you and him before he can see again.”

  “But I only meant to help him,” said Joshua. “Blinding him was a mistake.”

  “Josh, he doesn’t care. All he knows is that you are the enemy. All he knows is that he wants to destroy you.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. Even when I try to do the right thing it goes wrong.”

  “We need to go,” said Joy. She took one of Joshua’s arms while I took the other and we led him away before the guard could gather his senses for another attack.

  Joy had a list of supplies that Balthasar wanted her to bring back to the fortress, so we spent some time tracking down large baskets of a mineral called cinnabar, from which we would extract quicksilver, as well as some spices and pigments. Joshua followed us through the market in a daze until we passed a merchant who was selling the black beans from which was made the dark drink
we’d had in Antioch.

  “Buy me some,” Joshua said. “Joy, buy me some of those.”

  She did, and Joshua cradled the bag of beans like an infant all the way back to the fortress. We rode most of the way in silence, but when the sun had gone down and we were almost to the hidden road that led up to the plateau, Joy galloped up beside me.

  “How did he do it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I saw him heal that man’s eyes. How did he do it? I know many kinds of magic, but I saw no spells cast, no potions mixed.”

  “It’s very powerful magic all right.” I checked over my shoulder to see if Joshua was paying attention. He was hugging his coffee beans and mumbling to himself as he had for the whole trip. Praying, I presume.

  “Tell me how it’s done,” Joy said. “I asked Joshua, but he’s just chanting and looking stunned.”

  “Well, I could tell you how it’s done, but you have to tell me what’s going on behind the ironclad door.”

  “I can’t tell you that, but perhaps we can trade other things.” She pulled the tail of her turban away from her face and smiled. She was stunningly beautiful in the moonlight, even in men’s clothes. “I know over a thousand ways to bring pleasure to a man, and that’s only what I know personally. The other girls have as many tricks that they’d be willing to show you too.”

  “Yeah, but how is that useful to me? What do I need to know about pleasing a man?”

  Joy ripped her turban off her head and smacked me across the back of the head with it, sending a small cloud of dust drifting into the night. “You’re stupid and you’re blue and the next time I poison you I will be sure to use something without an antidote.”

  Even the wise and inscrutable Joy could be goaded, I guess. I smiled. “I will accept your paltry offerings,” I said with as much pomposity as an adolescent boy can muster. “And in return I will teach the greatest secret of our magic. A secret of my own invention. We call it sarcasm.”

  “Let’s make coffee when we get home,” said Joshua.

  It was some challenge to try to drag out the process of how Joshua had returned the guard’s sight, especially since I hadn’t the slightest idea myself, but through careful misdirection, obfuscation, subterfuge, guile, and complete balderdash, I was able to barter that lack of knowledge into months of outrageous knob polishing by the beauteous Joy and her comely minions. Somehow, the urgency of knowing what was behind the ironclad door and the answers to other enigmas of Balthasar’s fortress abated, and I found myself quite content pursuing the lessons the wizard assigned me during the day, while stretching my imagination to its limit with the mathematical combinations of the night. There was the drawback that Balthasar would kill me if he knew that I was availing myself of the charms of his concubines, but is the pilfered fruit not sweetened by the stealing? Oh, to be young and in love (with eight Chinese concubines).

  Meanwhile Joshua took to his studies with characteristic zeal, fueled in no little bit by the coffee he drank every morning until he nearly vibrated through the floor with enthusiasm.

  “Look at this, do you see, Biff? When asked, the master Confucius says, ‘Recompense injury with justice, and kindness with kindness.’ Yet Lao-tzu says, ‘Recompense injury with kindness.’ Don’t you see?” Joshua would dance around, scrolls trailing out behind him, hoping that somehow I would share his enthusiasm for the ancient texts. And I tried. I really did.

  “No, I don’t see. The Torah says, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ that is justice.”

  “Exactly,” said Joshua. “I think Lao-tzu is correct. Kindness precedes justice. As long as you seek justice by punishment you can only cause more suffering. How can that be right? This is a revelation!”

  “I learned how to boil down goat urine to make explosives today,” I said.

  “That’s good too,” said Joshua.

  It could happen like that any time of the day or night. Joshua would come blazing out of the library in the middle of the night, interrupt me in the midst of some complex oily tangle of Pea Pod and Pillows and Tunnels—while Number Six familiarized us with the five hundred jade gods of various depths and textures—and he’d avert his eyes just long enough for me to towel off before he’d shove some codex in my hand and force me to read a passage while he waxed enthusiastic on the thoughts of some long-dead sage.

  “The Master says that ‘the superior man may indeed endure want, but the inferior man, when he experiences want, will give into unbridled excess.’ He’s talking about you, Biff. You’re the inferior man.”

  “I’m so proud,” I told him, as I watched Number Six forlornly pack her gods into the warmed brass case where they resided. “Thank you for coming here to tell me that.”

  I was given the task of learning waidan, which is the alchemy of the external. My knowledge would come from the manipulation of the physical elements. Joshua, on the other hand, was learning neidan, the alchemy of the internal. His knowledge would come from the study of his own inner nature through the contemplation of the masters. So while Joshua read scrolls and books, I spent my time mixing quicksilver and lead, phosphorous and brimstone, charcoal and philosopher’s stone, trying somehow to divine the nature of the Tao. Joshua was learning to be the Messiah and I was learning to poison people and blow stuff up. The world seemed very much in order. I was happy, Joshua was happy, Balthasar was happy, and the girls—well, the girls were busy. Although I passed the iron door every day (and the niggling voice persisted), what was behind it wasn’t important to me, and neither were the answers to the dozen or so questions that Joshua and I should have put to our generous master.

  Before we knew it a year had passed, then two more, and we were celebrating the passage of Joshua’s seventeenth birthday in the fortress. Balthasar had the girls prepare a feast of Chinese delicacies and we drank wine late into the night. (And long after that, and even when we had returned to Israel, we always ate Chinese food on Joshua’s birthday. I’m told it became a tradition not only with those of us who knew Joshua, but with Jews everywhere.)

  “Do you ever think of home?” Joshua asked me the night of his birthday feast.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “What do you think of?”

  “Maggie,” I said. “Sometimes my brothers. Sometimes my mother and father, but always Maggie.”

  “Even with all your experiences since, you still think of Maggie?” Joshua had become less and less curious about the essence of lust. Initially I thought that his lack of interest had to do with the depth of his studies, but I then realized that his interest was fading along with the memory of Maggie.

  “Joshua, my memory of Maggie isn’t about what happened the night before we left. I didn’t go to see her thinking that we would make love. A kiss was more than I expected. I think of Maggie because I made a place in my heart for her to live, and it’s empty. It always will be. It always was. She loved you.”

  “I’m sorry, Biff. I don’t know how to heal that. I would if I could.”

  “I know, Josh. I know.” I didn’t want to talk about home anymore, but Josh deserved to get off his chest whatever it was that was bothering him, and if not to me, to whom? “Do you ever think of home?”

  “Yes. That’s why I asked. You know, the girls were cooking bacon today, and that made me think of home.”

  “Why? I don’t remember anyone ever cooking bacon at home.”

  “I know, but if we ate some bacon, no one at home would ever know.”

  I got up and walked over to the half-wall that divided our rooms. There was moonlight coming through the window and Joshua’s face had caught it and was glowing in that annoying way that it sometimes did.

  “Joshua, you’re the Son of God. You’re the Messiah. That implies—oh, I don’t know—that you’re a Jew! You can’t eat bacon.”

  “God doesn’t care if we eat bacon. I can just feel it.”

  “Really. He still feel the same way about fornication?”

  “Yep.�
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  “Masturbation?”

  “Yep.”

  “Killing? Stealing? Bearing false witness? Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, et cetera? No change of heart on those?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just bacon. Interesting. You would have thought there’d be something about bacon in the prophecies of Isaiah.”

  “Yeah, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re going to need more than that to usher in the kingdom of God, Josh, no offense. We can’t go home with, ‘Hi, I’m the Messiah, God wanted you to have this bacon.’”

  “I know. We have much more to learn. But breakfasts will be more interesting.”

  “Go to sleep, Josh.”

  As time passed, I seldom saw Joshua except at mealtimes and before we went to sleep. Nearly all my time was taken up with my studies and helping the girls maintain the fortress, while nearly all of Joshua’s time was spent with Balthasar, which would eventually become a problem.

  “This is not good, Biff,” Joy said in Chinese. I’d learned to speak her language well enough that she seldom spoke Greek or Latin anymore. “Balthasar is getting too close with Joshua. He seldom sends for one of us to join him in his bed now.”

  “You’re not implying that Joshua and Balthasar are, uh, playing shepherd, are you? Because I know that’s not true. Joshua isn’t allowed.” Of course the angel had said he couldn’t know a woman, he hadn’t said anything about a creepy old African wizard.

  “Oh, I don’t care if they’re buggering their eyeballs out,” said Joy. “Balthasar mustn’t fall in love. Why do you think that there are eight of us?”

  “I thought it was a matter of budget,” I said.