Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Chapter 9

I should have had a plan before I tried to escape from the hotel room, I see that now. At the time, dashing out the door and into the arms of sweet freedom seemed like plan enough. I got as far as the lobby. It is a fine lobby, as grand as any palace, but in the way of freedom, I need more. I noticed before Raziel dragged me back into the elevator, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process, that there were an inordinate number of old people in the lobby. In fact, compared to my time, there are inordinate numbers of old people everywhere—well, not on TV, but everywhere else. Have you people forgotten how to die? Or have you used up all of the young people on television so there’s nothing left but gray hair and wrinkled flesh? In my time, if you had seen forty summers it was time to start thinking about moving on, making room for the youngsters. If you lasted to fifty the mourners would give you dirty looks when they passed, as if you were purposely trying to put them out of business. The Torah says that Moses lived to be 120 years old. I’m guessing that the children of Israel were following him just to see when he would drop. There was probably betting.

If I do manage to escape the angel, I’m not going to be able to make my living as a professional mourner, not if you people don’t have the courtesy to die. Just as well, I suppose, I’d have to learn all new dirges. I’ve tried to get the angel to watch MTV so I can learn the vocabulary of your music, but even with the gift of tongues, I’m having trouble learning to speak hip-hop. Why is it that one can busta rhyme or busta move anywhere but you must busta cap in someone’s ass? Is “ho” always feminine, and “muthafucka” always masculine, while “bitch” can be either? How many peeps in a posse, how much booty before baby got back, do you have to be all that to get all up in that, and do I need to be dope and phat to be da bomb or can I just be “stupid”? I’ll not be singing over any dead mothers until I understand.

The journey. The quest. The search for the Magi.

We traveled first to the coast. Neither Joshua nor I had ever seen the sea before, so as we topped a hill near the city of Ptolomais, and the endless aquamarine of the Mediterranean stretched before us, Joshua fell to his knees and gave thanks to his father.

“You can almost see the edge of the world,” Joshua said.

I squinted into the dazzling sun, really looking for the edge of the world. “It looks sort of curved,” I said.

“What?” Joshua scanned the horizon, but evidently he didn’t see the curve.

“The edge of the world looks curved. I think it’s round.”

“What’s round?”

“The world. I think it’s round.”

“Of course it’s round, like a plate. If you go to the edge you fall off. Every sailor knows that,” Joshua said with great authority.

“Not round like a plate, round like a ball.”

“Don’t be silly,” Joshua said. “If the world was round like a ball then we would slide off of it.”

“Not if it’s sticky,” I said.

Joshua lifted his foot and looked at the bottom of his sandal, then at me, then at the ground. “Sticky?”

I looked at the bottom of my own shoe, hoping to perhaps see strands of stickiness there, like melted cheese tethering me to the ground. When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument. “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean the world is not sticky.”

Joshua rolled his eyes. “Let’s go swimming.” He took off down the hill.

“What about the God?” I asked. “You can’t see him.”

Joshua stopped halfway down the hill and held his arms out to the shining, aquamarine sea. “You can’t?”

“That’s a crappy argument, Josh.” I followed him down the hill, shouting as I went. “If you’re not going to try, I’m not going to argue with you anymore. So, what if stickiness is like God? You know, how He abandons our people and leads them into slavery whenever we stop believing in Him. Stickiness could be like that. You could float off into the sky any time now because you don’t believe in stickiness.”

“It’s good that you have something to believe in, Biff. I’m going in the water.” He ran down the beach, shedding his clothes as he went, then dove into the surf, naked.

Later, after we’d both swallowed enough salt water to make us sick, we headed up the coast to the city of Ptolemais.

“I didn’t think it would be so salty,” Joshua said.

“Yeah,” I said, “you’d never know it by looking at it.”

“Are you still angry about your round-earth-stickiness theory?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, sounding very mature, I thought. “You being a virgin and all.”

Joshua stopped and grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to wheel around and face him. “The night you spent with Maggie I spent praying to my father to take away the thoughts of you two. He didn’t answer me. It was like trying to sleep on a bed of thorns. Since we left I was beginning to forget, or at least leave it behind, but you keep throwing it in my face.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I forgot how sensitive you virgins can be.”

Then, once again, and not for the last time, the Prince of Peace coldcocked me. A bony, stonecutter’s fist just over my right eye. He hit harder than I remembered. I remember white seabirds in the sky above me, and just a wisp of clouds across the sky. I remember the frothy surf sloshing over my face, leaving sand in my ears. I remember thinking that I should get up and smite Josh upside the head. I remember thinking then that if I got up, Josh might hit me again, so I lay there for a moment, just thinking.

“So, what do you want?” I said, finally, from my wet and sandy supinity.

He stood over me with his fists balled. “If you’re going to keep bringing it up, you have to tell me the details.”

“I can do that.”

“And don’t leave anything out.”

“Nothing?”

“I’ve got to know if I’m going to understand sin.”

“Okay, can I get up? My ears are filling with sand.”

He helped me to my feet and as we entered the seaside city of Ptolomais, I taught Josh about sex.

Down narrow stone streets between high stone walls.

“Well, most of what we learned from the rabbis was not exactly accurate.”

Past men sitting outside their houses, mending their nets. Children selling cups of pomegranate juice, women hanging strings of fish from window to window to dry.

“For instance, you know that part right after Lot’s wife gets turned to stone and then his daughters get drunk and fornicate with him?”

“Right, after Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.”

“Well, that’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said.

We passed Phoenician women who sang as they pounded dried fish into meal. We passed evaporation pools where children scraped the encrusted salt from the rocks and put it into bags.

“But fornication is a sin, and fornication with your daughters, well, that’s a, I don’t know, that’s a double-dog sin.”

“Yeah, but if you put that aside for a second, and you just focus on the two young girls aspect of it, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds initially.”

“Oh.”

We passed merchants selling fruit and bread and oil, spices and incense, calling out claims of quality and magic in their wares. There was a lot of magic for sale in those days.

“And the Song of Solomon, that’s a lot closer, and you can sort of understand Solomon having a thousand wives. In fact, with you being the Son of God and all, I don’t think you’d have any problem getting that many girls. I mean, after you figure out what you’re doing.”

“And a lot of girls is a good thing?”

“You’re a ninny, aren’t you?”

“I thought you’d be more specific. What does Maggie have to do with Lot and Solomon?”

“I can’t tell you about me and Maggie, Josh. I just can’t.”

We were passing a lick of prostitutes gathered outside the door of an inn. Their faces were painted, their skirts slit up the side to show their legs glistening with oil, and they called to us in foreign languages and made tiny dances with their hands as we passed.

“What the hell are they saying?” I asked Joshua. He was better with languages. I think they were speaking Greek.

“They said something about how they like Hebrew boys because we can feel a woman’s tongue better without our foreskins.” He looked at me as if I might confirm or deny this.

“How much money do we have?” I asked.

The inn rented rooms, stalls, and space under the eave to sleep. We rented two adjacent stalls, which was a bit of a luxury for us, but an important one for Joshua’s education. After all, weren’t we on this journey so he could learn to take his rightful place as the Messiah?

“I’m not sure if I should watch,” Joshua said. “Remember David was running over the roofs and happened onto Bathsheba in her bath. That set a whole chain of sin in motion.”

“But listening won’t be a problem.”

“I don’t think it’s the same thing.”

“Are you sure that you don’t want to try this yourself, Josh? I mean, the angel was never clear about your being with a woman.” To be honest, I was a little frightened myself. My experience with Maggie hardly qualified me to be with a harlot.

“No, you go ahead. Just describe what’s happening and what you’re feeling. I have to understand sin.”

“Okay, if you insist.”

“Thank you for doing this for me, Biff.”

“Not just for you, Josh, for our people.”

So that’s how we ended up with the two stalls. Josh would be in one while I, along with the harlot of my choice, instructed him from the other in the fine art of fornication.

Back out at the front of the inn I shopped for my teaching assistant. It was an eight-harlot inn, if that’s how you measure an inn. (I understand that now they measure inns in stars. We are in a four-star inn right now. I don’t know what the conversion from harlots to stars is.) Anyway, there were eight harlots outside the inn that day. They ranged in age from only a few years older than us to older than our mothers. And they ran the gamut of shapes and sizes, having in common only that they were all highly painted and well oiled.

“They’re all so…so nasty-looking.”

“They’re harlots, Biff. They’re supposed to be nasty-looking. Pick one.”

“Let’s go look at some different harlots.” We had been standing a few doors down from the harlots, but they knew we were watching. I walked over and stopped close to a particularly tall harlot and said, “Excuse me, do you know where we might find a different selection of harlots? No offense, it’s just that my friend and I…”

And she pulled open her blouse, exposing full breasts that were glistening with oil and flecks of mica, and she threw her skirt aside and stepped up so a long leg slid behind me and I could feel the rough hair between her legs grinding against my hip and her rouged nipples brushed my cheek and in that instant profound wood did from my person protrude.

“This one will be fine, Josh.”

The other harlots let loose with an exaltation of ululation as we led my harlot away. (You know ululation as the sound an ambulance makes. That I get an erection every time one passes the hotel would seem morbid if you didn’t know this story of how Biff Hires a Harlot.) The harlot’s name was Set. She was a head and a half taller than me, with skin the color of a ripe date, wide brown eyes flecked with gold, and hair so black that it reflected blue in the dim light of the stable. She was the perfect harlot design, wide where a harlot should be wide, narrow where a harlot should be narrow, delicate of ankle and neck, sturdy of conscience, intrepid and single-minded of goal once she was paid. She was an Egyptian, but she had learned Greek and a little Latin to help lubricate the discourse of her trade. Our situation required more creativity than she seemed accustomed to, but after a heavy sigh she mumbled something about “if you fuck a Hebrew, make room in the bed for his guilt,” then pulled me into my stall and closed the gate. (Yes, the stalls were used for animals. There was a donkey in the stall opposite Josh’s.)

“So what’s she doing?” Josh asked.

“She’s taking off my clothes.”

“What now.”

“She’s taking off her clothes. Oh jeez. Ouch.”

“What? Are you fornicating?”

“No. She’s rubbing her whole body over mine, sort of lightly. When I try to move she smacks me in the face.”

“How does it feel?”

“How do you think? It feels like someone smacking you, you twit.”

“I mean how does her body feel? Do you feel sinful? Is it like Satan rubbing against you? Does it burn like fire?”

“Yeah, you got it. That pretty much has it.”

“You’re lying.”

“Oh wow.”

Then Josh said something in Greek that I didn’t catch all of and the harlot answered, sort of.

“What did she say?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know, you know my Greek is bad.”

“Mine isn’t, I couldn’t understand what she said.”

“Her mouth is full.”

Set raised up. “Not full,” she said in Greek.

“Hey, I understood that!”

“She has you in her mouth?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s heinous.”

“It doesn’t feel heinous.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, Josh, I gotta tell you, this really is—oh my God!”

“What? What’s happening?”

“She’s getting dressed.”

“Are you done sinning? That’s it?”

The harlot said something in Greek that I didn’t understand.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said that for the amount of money we gave her, you’re finished.”

“Do you think you understand fornication now?”

“Not really.”

“Well then, give her some more money, Joshua. We’re going to stay here until you learn what you need to know.”

“You’re a good friend to suffer this for me.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“No, really,” Joshua said. “Greater love hath no man, than he lay down for his friend.”

“That’s a good one, Josh. You should remember that one for later.”

The harlot then spoke at length. “You want to know what this is like for me, kid? This is like a job. Which means that if you want it done, you need to pay for it. That’s what it’s like.” (Joshua would translate for me later.)

“What’d she say?” I asked.

“She wants the wages of sin.”

“Which are?”

“In this case, three shekels.”

“That’s a bargain. Pay her.”

Much as I tried—and I did try—I didn’t seem able to convey to Joshua what it was he wanted to know. I went through a half-dozen more harlots and a large portion of our traveling money over the next week, but he still didn’t understand. I suggested that perhaps this was one of the things that the magician Balthasar was supposed to teach Joshua. Truth be told, I’d developed a burning sensation when I peed and I was ready for a break from tutoring my friend in the fine art of sinning.

It’s a week or less by sea if we go to Selucia, then it’s less than a day’s walk inland to Antioch,” Joshua said, after he had been talking to some sailors who were drinking at the inn. “Overland it’s two to three weeks.”

“By sea, then,” I said. Pretty brave, I thought, considering I’d never set foot in a boat in my life.

We found a wide-beamed, raised-stern Roman cargo ship bound for Tarsus that would stop at all the ports along the way, including Selucia. The ship’s master was a wiry, hatchet-faced Phoenician named Titus Inventius, who claimed to have gone to sea when he was four and sailed to the edge of the world twice before his balls dropped, although what one had to do with the other I never figured out.

“What can you do? What’s your trade?” Titus asked, from under a great straw hat he wore while watching the slaves load jars of wine and oil onto the ship. His eyes were black beads set back in caves of wrinkles formed by a lifetime of squinting into the sun.

“Well, I’m a stonemason and he’s the Son of God.” I grinned. I thought that would give us more diversity than just saying we were two stonemasons.

Titus pushed the straw hat back on his head and looked Joshua up and down. “Son of God, huh? How’s that pay?”

Joshua scowled at me. “I know stone work and carpentry, and we both have strong backs.”

“There’s not a lot of call for stone work aboard a ship. Have you been to sea before?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Joshua said.

“He was sick that day,” I said. “I’ve been to sea.”

Titus laughed. “Fine, you go help get those jars on board. I’m taking a load of pigs as far as Sidon, you two keep them calm and keep them alive in the heat and by that time maybe you’ll be something of use to me. But it costs you as well.”

“How much?” Joshua asked.

“How much do you have?”

“Five shekels,” I said.

“Twenty shekels,” Joshua said.

I elbowed the Messiah in the ribs hard enough to bend him over. “Ten shekels,” I said. “Five each, I meant before when I said five.” I felt as if I was negotiating with myself, and not doing that well.

“Then ten shekels plus any work I can find for you. But if you puke on my ship, you’re over the side, you hear me? Ten shekels or not.”

“Absolutely,” I said, pulling Joshua down the dock to where the slaves were loading jars.

When we were out of earshot of Captain Titus, Joshua said, “You have to tell him that we’re Jews, we can’t tend pigs.”

I grabbed one of the huge wine jars by the ears and started to drag it toward the ship. “It’s okay, they’re Roman pigs. They don’t care.”

“Oh, all right,” Joshua said, latching onto a jar of his own and hoisting it onto his back. Then it hit him and he set the jar down again. “Hey, wait, that’s not right.”

The next morning we sailed with the tide. Joshua, me, a crew of thirty, Titus, and fifty allegedly Roman pigs.

Until we cast off from the dock—Josh and I manning one of the long oars—and we were well out of the harbor; until we had shipped the oars and the great square sail was ballooned over the deck like the belly of a gluttonous genie; until Joshua and I climbed to the rear of the ship where Titus stood on the raised deck manning one of the two long steering oars and I looked back toward land, and could see not a city but a speck on the horizon; until then, I had no idea that I had a deep-seated fear of sailing.

“We are way too far away from land,” I said. “Way too far. You really need to steer closer to the land, Titus.” I pointed to land, in case Titus was unsure as to which way he should go.

It makes sense, don’t you think? I mean, I grew up in an arid country, inland, where even the rivers are little more than damp ditches. My people come from the desert. The one time we actually had to cross a sea, we walked. Sailing seemed, well, unnatural.

“If the Lord had meant us to sail we would have been born with, uh, masts,” I said.

“That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said,” said Joshua.

“Can you swim?” asked Titus.

“No,” I said.

“Yes he can,” Joshua said.

Titus grabbed me by the back of the neck and threw me over the stern of the ship.

Chapter 10

The angel and I had been watching a movie about Moses. Raziel was angry because there were no angels in it. No one in the movie looked like any Egyptian I ever met.

“Did Moses look like that?” I asked Raziel, who was worrying the crust off of a goat cheese pizza in between spitting vitriol at the screen.

“No,” said Raziel, “but that other fellow looks like Pharaoh.”

“Really?”

“Yep,” said Raziel. He slurped the last of a Coke through a straw making a rude noise, then tossed the paper cup across the room into the wastebasket.

“So you were there, during the Exodus?”

“Right before. I was in charge of locusts.”

“How was that?”

“Didn’t care for it. I wanted the plague of frogs. I like frogs.”

“I like frogs too.”

“You wouldn’t have liked the plague of frogs. Stephan was in charge. A seraphim.” He shook his head as if I should know some sad inside fact about seraphim. “We lost a lot of frogs.

“I suppose it’s for the best, though,” Raziel said with a sigh. “You can’t have a someone who likes frogs bring a plague of frogs. If I’d done it, it would have been more of a friendly gathering of frogs.”

“That wouldn’t have worked,” I said.

“Well, it didn’t work anyway, did it? I mean, Moses, a Jew, thought it up. Frogs were unclean to the Jews. To the Jews it was a plague. To the Egyptians it was like having a big feast of frog legs drop from the sky. Moses missed it on that one. I’m just glad we didn’t listen to him on the plague of pork.”

“Really, he wanted to bring down a plague of pork? Pigs falling from the sky?”

“Pig pieces. Ribs, hams, feet. He wanted everything bloody. You know, unclean pork and unclean blood. The Egyptians would have eaten the pork. We talked him into just the blood.”

“Are you saying that Moses was a dimwit?” I wasn’t being ironic when I asked this, I was aware that I was asking the eternal dimwit of them all. Still…

“No, he just wasn’t concerned with results,” said the angel. “The Lord had hardened Pharaoh’s heart against letting the Jews go. We could have dropped oxen from the sky and he wouldn’t have changed his mind.”

“That would have been something to see,” I said.

“I suggested that it rain fire,” the angel said.

“How’d that go?”

“It was pretty. We only had it rain on the stone palaces and monuments. Burning up all of the Jews would sort of defeated the purpose.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“Well, I’m good with weather,” said the angel.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. Then I thought about it a second, about how Raziel nearly wore out our poor room service waiter Jesus delivering orders of ribs the day they were the special.

“You didn’t suggest fire, initially, did you? You just suggested that it rain barbecued pork, didn’t you?”

“That guy doesn’t look anything like Moses,” the angel said.

That day, thrashing in the sea, trying to swim to catch the merchant ship that plowed through the water under full sail, I first saw that Raziel was, as he claimed, “good with weather.” Joshua was leaning over the aftrail of the ship, shouting alternately to me, then to Titus. It was pretty obvious that even under the light wind that day, I would never catch the ship, and when I looked in the direction of shore I could see nothing but water. Strange, the things you think of at times like that. What I thought first was “What an incredibly stupid way to die.” Next I thought, “Joshua will never make it without me.” And with that, I began to pray, not for my own salvation but for Joshua. I prayed for the Lord to keep him safe, then I prayed for Maggie’s safety and happiness. Then, as I shrugged off my shirt and fell into a slow crawl in the direction of the shoreline, which I knew I would never see, the wind stopped. Just stopped. The sea flattened and the only sound I could hear was the frightened cries of the crew of Titus’s ship, which had stopped in the water as if it had dropped anchor.

“Biff, this way!” Joshua called.

I turned in the water to see my friend waving to me from the stern of the becalmed ship. Beside him, Titus cowered like a frightened child. On the mast above them sat a winged figure, who after I swam to the ship and was hoisted out by a very frightened bunch of sailors, I recognized as the angel Raziel. Unlike the times when we had seen him before, he wore robes as black as pitch, and the feathers in his wings shone the blue-black of the sea under moonlight. As I joined Joshua on the raised poop deck at the stern of the ship, the angel took wing and gently landed on the deck beside us. Titus was shielding his head with his arms, as if to ward off an attacker, and he looked as if he were trying to dissolve between the deck boards.

“You,” Raziel said to the Phoenician, and Titus looked up between his arms. “No harm is to come to these two.”

Titus nodded, tried to say something, then gave up when his voice broke under the weight of his fear. I was a little frightened myself. Decked out in black, the angel was a fearsome sight, even if he was on our side. Joshua, on the other hand, seemed completely at ease.

“Thank you,” Josh said to the angel. “He’s a cur, but he’s my best friend.”

“I’m good with weather,” the angel said. And as if that explained everything, he flapped his massive black wings and lifted off the deck. The sea was dead calm until the angel was out of sight over the horizon, then the breeze picked up, the sails filled, and waves began to lap at the bow. Titus ventured a peek from his cowed position, then stood up slowly and took one of the steering oars under his arm.

“I’m going to need a new shirt,” I said.

“You can have mine,” Titus said.

“We should sail closer along the coast, don’t you think?” I said.

“On the way, good master,” Titus said. “On the way.”

“Your mother eats the fungus from the feet of lepers,” I said.

“I’ve been meaning to speak to her about that,” Titus said.

“So we understand each other,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Titus said.

“Crap,” Joshua said. “I forgot to ask the angel about knowing women again.”

For the rest of the journey Titus was much more agreeable, and strangely enough, we didn’t have to man any of the huge oars when we pulled into port, nor did we have to help unload or load any cargo. The crew avoided us altogether, and tended the pigs for us without our even asking. My fear of sailing subsided after a day, and as the steady breeze carried us north, Joshua and I would watch the dolphins that came to ride the ship’s bow wave, or lie on the deck at night, breathing in the smell of cedar coming off the ship’s timbers, listening to the creaking of rope and rigging, and trying to imagine aloud what it would be like when we found Balthasar. If it hadn’t been for Joshua’s constant badgering about what sex was like, it would have been a pleasant journey indeed.

“Fornication isn’t the only sin, Josh,” I tried to explain. “I’m happy to help out, but are you going to have me steal so I can explain it to you? Will you have me kill someone next so you can understand it?”

“No, the difference is that I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you again. You got your loins, and she’s got her loins. And even though you call them both loins, they’re different—”

“I understand the mechanics of it. What I don’t understand is the feeling of it.”

“Well, it feels good, I told you that.”

“But that doesn’t seem right. Why would the Lord make sin feel good, then condemn man for it?”

“Look, why don’t you try it?” I said. “It would be cheaper that way. Or better yet, get married, then it wouldn’t even be sin.”

“Then it wouldn’t be the same, would it?” Josh asked.

“How would I know, I’ve never been married.”

“Is it always the same for you?”

“Well, in some ways, yes.”

“In what ways?”

“Well, so far, it seems to be moist.”

“Moist?”

“Yeah, but I can’t say it’s always that way, just in my experience. Maybe we should ask a harlot?”

“Better yet,” Joshua said, looking around, “I’ll ask Titus. He’s older, and he looks as if he’s sinned a lot.”

“Yeah, well, if you count throwing Jews in the sea, I’d say he’s an expert, but that doesn’t mean—”

Joshua had run to the stern of the ship, up a ladder to the raised poop deck, and to a small, open-sided tent that acted as the captain’s quarters. Under the tent Titus reclined on a pile of rugs, drinking from a wineskin, which I saw him hand to Joshua.

By the time I caught up with him Titus was saying, “So you want to know about fucking? Well, son, you have come to the right place. I’ve fucked a thousand women, half again as many boys, some sheep, pigs, a few chickens, and the odd turtle. What is it you want to know?”

“Stand away from him, Josh,” I said, taking the wineskin and handing it back to Titus as I pushed Joshua back. “The wrath of God could hit him at any moment. Jeez, a turtle, that’s got to be an abomination.” Titus flinched when I mentioned the wrath of God, as if the angel might return to perch on his mast any second.

Joshua stood his ground. “Right now let’s just stick with the women part of it, if that’s all right.” Joshua patted Titus’s arm to reassure him. I knew how that touch felt: Titus would feel the fear run out of him like water.

“I’ve fucked every kind of woman there is. I’ve fucked Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Ethiopians, and women from places that haven’t even been named yet. I’ve fucked fat ones, skinny ones, women with no legs, women with—”

“Are you married?” Joshua interrupted before the sailor started into how he had fucked them in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse…

“I have a wife in Rome.”

“Is it the same with your wife and, say, a harlot?”

“What, fucking? No, it’s not the same at all.”

“It’s moist,” I said. “Right?”

“Well, yes, it’s moist. But that’s not—”

I grabbed Joshua’s tunic and started to drag him away. “There you have it. Let’s go, Josh. Now you know, sin is moist. Make a mental note. Let’s get some supper.”

Titus was laughing. “You Jews and your sin. You know if you had more gods you wouldn’t have to be so worried about making one angry?”

“Right,” I said, “I’m going to take spiritual advice from a guy who fucks turtles.”

“You shouldn’t be so judgmental, Biff,” Joshua said. “You’re not without sin yourself.”

“Oh, you and your holier-than-thou attitude. You can just do your own sinning from now on if that’s how you feel. You think I enjoy bedding harlots night after night, describing the whole process to you over and over?”

“Well, yeah,” Joshua said.

“That’s not the point. The point is, well…the point is…well. Guilt. I mean—turtles. I mean—” So I was flustered. Sue me. I’d never look at a turtle again without imagining it being molested by a scruffy Phoenician sailor. That’s not disturbing to you? Imagine it right now. I’ll wait. See?

“He’s gone mad,” Titus said.

“You shut up, you scurvy viper,” Joshua said.

“What about not being judgmental?” Titus said.

“That’s him,” Josh said. “It’s different for me.” And suddenly, having said that, Joshua looked as sad as I had ever seen him. He slouched away toward the pigpen, where he sat down and cradled his head in his hands as if he’d just been crowned with the weight of all the worries of mankind. He kept to himself until we left the ship.

The Silk Road, the main vein of trade and custom and culture from the Roman world to the Far East, terminated where it met the sea at the port city of Selucia Pieria, the harbor city and naval stronghold that had fed and guarded Antioch since the time of Alexander. As we left the ship with the rest of the crew, Captain Titus stopped us at the gangplank. He held his hands, palm down. Joshua and I reached out and Titus dropped the coins we’d paid for passage into our palms. “I might have been holding a brace of scorpions, but you two reached out without a thought.”

“It was a fair price to pay,” Joshua said. “You don’t have to return our money.”

“I almost drowned your friend. I’m sorry.”

“You asked if he could swim before you threw him in. He had a chance.”

I looked at Joshua’s eyes to see if he was joking, but it was obvious he wasn’t.

“Still,” Titus said.

“So perhaps you will be given a chance someday as well,” Joshua said.

“A slim fucking chance,” I added.

Titus grinned at me. “Follow the shore of the harbor until it becomes a river. That’s the Onrontes. Follow its left bank and you’ll be in Antioch by nightfall. In the market there will be an old woman who sells herbs and charms. I don’t remember her name, but she has only one eye and she wears a tunic of Tyran purple. If there is a magician in Antioch she will know where to find him.”

“How do you know this old woman?” I asked.

“I buy my tiger penis powder from her.”

Joshua looked at me for explanation. “What?” I said. “I’ve had a couple of harlots, I didn’t exchange recipes.” Then I looked to Titus. “Should I have?”

“It’s for my knees,” the sailor said. “They hurt when it rains.”

Joshua took my shoulder and started to lead me away. “Go with God, Titus,” he said.

“Put in a good word with the black-winged one for me,” Titus said.

Once we were into the wash of merchants and sailors around the harbor, I said, “He gave us the money back because the angel scared him, you know that?”

“So his kindness allayed his fear as well as benefiting us,” Joshua said. “All the better. Do you think the priests sacrifice the lambs at Passover for better reasons?”

“Oh, right,” I said, having no idea what one had to do with the other, wondering still if tigers didn’t object to having their penises powdered. (Keeps them from chafing, I guess, but that’s got to be a dangerous job.) “Let’s go find this old crone,” I said.

The shore of the Onrontes was a stream of life and color, textures and smells, from the harbor all the way into the marketplace at Antioch. There were people of every size and color that I had ever imagined, some shoeless and dressed in rags, others wearing expensive silks and the purple linen from Tyre, said to be dyed with the blood of a poisonous snail. There were ox carts, litters, and sedan chairs carried by as many as eight slaves. Roman soldiers on horseback and on foot policed the crowd, while sailors from a dozen nations reveled in drink and noise and the feel of land beneath their feet. Merchants and beggars and traders and whores scurried for the turn of a coin, while self-appointed prophets spouted dogma from atop the mooring posts where ships tied off along the river—holy men lined up and preaching like a line of noisy Greek columns. Smoke rose fragrant and blue over the streaming crowd, carrying the smell of spice and grease from braziers in the food booths where men and women hawked their fare in rhythmic, haunting songs that all ran together as you walked along—as if one passed his song to the next so you might never experience a second of silence.

The only thing I had ever seen that approached this was the line of pilgrims leading into Jerusalem on the feast days, but there we never saw so much color, heard so much noise, felt so much excitement.

We stopped at a stand and bought a hot black drink from a wrinkled old man wearing a tanned bird carcass as a hat. He showed us how he made the drink from the seeds of berries that were first roasted, then ground into powder, then mixed with boiling water. We got this whole story by way of pantomime, as the man spoke none of the languages we were familiar with. He mixed the drink with honey and gave it to us, but when I tasted it, it still didn’t seem to taste right. It seemed, I don’t know, too dark. I saw a woman leading a nanny goat nearby, and I took Joshua’s cup from him and ran after the woman. With the woman’s permission, I squirted a bit of milk from the nanny goat’s udder onto the top of each of our cups. The old man protested, making it seem as if we’d committed some sort of sacrilege, but the milk had come out warm and frothy and it served to take away the bitterness of the black drink. Joshua downed his, then asked the old man for two more, as well as handing the woman with the goat a small brass coin for her trouble. Josh gave the second drink back to the old man to taste, and after much grimacing, he took a sip. A smile crossed his toothless mouth and before we left he seemed to be striking some sort of deal with the woman with the goat. I watched the old man grind beans in a copper cylinder while the woman milked her goat into a deep clay bowl. There was a spice vendor next door and I could smell the cinnamon, cloves, and allspice that lay loose in baskets on the ground.

“You know,” I said to the woman in Latin, “when you two get this all figured out, try sprinkling a little ground cinnamon on it. It just might make it perfect.”

“You’re losing your friend,” she said.

I turned and looked around, catching the top of Joshua’s head just as he turned a corner into the Antioch market and a new push of people. I ran to catch up to him.

Joshua was bumping people in the crowd as he passed, seemingly on purpose, and murmuring just loud enough so I could hear him each time he hit someone with a shoulder or an elbow. “Healed that guy. Healed her. Stopped her suffering. Healed him. Comforted him. Ooo, that guy was just stinky. Healed her. Whoops, missed. Healed. Healed. Comforted. Calmed.”

People were turning to look back at Josh, the way one will when a stranger steps on one’s foot, except these people all seemed to be either smiling or baffled, not annoyed as I expected.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Practicing,” Joshua said. “Whoa, bad toe-jam.” He spun on his heel, nearly turning his foot out of his sandal, and smacked a short bald man on the back of the head. “All better now.”

The bald guy turned and looked back to see who had hit him. Josh was backing down the street. “How’s your toe?” Joshua asked in Latin.

“Good,” the bald guy said, and he smiled, sorta goofy and dreamy, like his toe had just sent him a message that all was right with the world.

“Go with God, and—” Josh spun, jumped, came down with each hand on a stranger’s shoulder and shouted, “Yes! Double healing! Go with God, friends, two times!”

I was getting sort of uncomfortable. People had started to follow us through the crowd. Not a lot of people, but a few. Maybe five or six, each of them with that dreamy smile on his face.

“Joshua, maybe you should, uh, calm down a little.”

“Can you believe all of these people need healing? Healed him.” Josh leaned back and whispered in my ear. “That guy had the pox. He’ll pee without pain for the first time in years. ’Scuse me.” He turned back into the crowd. “Healed, healed, calmed, comforted.”

“We’re strangers here, Josh. You’re attracting attention to us. This might not be safe…”

“It’s not like they’re blind or missing limbs. We’ll have to stop if we run into something serious. Healed! God bless you. Oh, you no speak Latin? Uh—Greek? Hebrew? No?”

“He’ll figure it out, Josh,” I said. “We should look for the old woman.”

“Oh, right. Healed!” Josh slapped the pretty woman very hard in the face. Her husband, a large man in a leather tunic, didn’t look pleased. He pulled a dagger from his belt and started to advance on Joshua. “Sorry, sir,” Joshua said, not backing up. “Couldn’t be helped. Small demon, had to be banished from her. Sent it into that dog over there. Go with God. Thank you, thank you very much.”

The woman grabbed her husband by the arm and swung him around. She still had Joshua’s handprint on her face, but she was smiling. “I’m back!” she said to her husband. “I’m back.” She shook him and the anger seemed to drain out of him. He looked back at Joshua with an expression of such dismay that I thought he might faint. He dropped his knife and threw his arms around his wife. Joshua ran forward and threw his arms around them both.

“Would you stop it please?” I pleaded.

“But I love these people,” Josh said.

“You do, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“He was going to kill you.”

“It happens. He just didn’t understand. He does now.”

“Glad he caught on. Let’s find the old lady.”

“Yes, then let’s go back and get another one of those hot drinks,” Joshua said.

We found the hag selling a bouquet of monkey feet to a fat trader dressed in striped silks and a wide conical hat woven from some sort of tough grass.

“But these are all back feet,” the trader protested.

“Same magic, better price,” said the hag, pulling back a shawl she wore over one side of her face to reveal a milky white eye. This was obviously her intimidation move.

The trader wasn’t having it. “It is a well-known fact that the front paw of a monkey is the best talisman for telling the future, but the back—”

“You’d think the monkey would see something coming,” I said, and they both looked at me as if I’d just sneezed on their falafel. The old woman drew back as if to cast a spell, or maybe a rock, at me. “If that were true,” I continued, “I mean—about telling the future with a monkey paw—I mean—because he would have four of them—paws, that is—and, uh—never mind.”

“How much are these?” said Joshua, holding up a handful of dried newts from the hag’s baskets. The old woman turned to Josh.

“You can’t use that many,” the hag said.

“I can’t?” asked Joshua.

“These are useless,” said the merchant, waving the hind legs and feet of two and a half former monkeys, which looked like tiny people feet, except that they were furry and the toes were longer.

“If you’re a monkey I’ll bet they come in handy to keep your butt from dragging on the ground,” I said, ever the peacemaker.

“Well, how many do I need?” Joshua asked, wondering how his diversion to save me had turned into a negotiation for newt crispies.

“How many of your camels are constipated?” asked the crone.

Joshua dropped the dried newts back into their basket. “Well, uh…”

“Do those work?” asked the merchant. “For plugged-up camels, I mean.”

“Never fails.”

The merchant scratched his pointed beard with a monkey foot. “I’ll meet your price on these worthless monkey feet if you throw in a handful of newts.”

“Deal,” said the crone.

The merchant opened a satchel he had slung around his shoulder and dropped in his monkey feet, then followed them with a handful of newts. “So how do these work? Make them into tea and have the camel drink it?”

“Other end,” said the crone. “They go in whole. Count to one hundred and step back.”

The merchant’s eyes went wide, then narrowed into a squint and he turned to me. “Kid,” he said, “if you can count to a hundred, I’ve got a job for you.”

“He’d love to work for you, sir,” Joshua said, “but we have to find Balthasar the magus.”

The crone hissed and backed to the corner of her booth, covering all of her face but her milky eye. “How do you know of Balthasar?” She held her hands in front of her like claws and I could see her trembling.

“Balthasar!” I shouted at her, and the old woman nearly jumped through the wall behind her. I snickered and was ready to Balthasar! her again when Josh interrupted.

“Balthasar came from here to Bethlehem to witness my birth,” said Joshua. “I’m seeking his counsel. His wisdom.”

“You would hail the darkness, you would consort with demons and fly with the evil Djinn like Balthasar? I won’t have you near my booth, be gone from here.” She made the sign of the evil eye, which in her case was redundant.

“No, no, no,” I said. “None of that. The magus left some, uh, frankincense at Joshua’s house. We need to return it to him.”

The old woman regarded me with her good eye. “You’re lying.”

“Yes, he is,” said Josh.

“BALTHASAR!” I screamed in her face. It didn’t have the same effect as the first time around and I was a little disappointed.

“Stop that,” she said.

Joshua reached out to take her craggy hand. “Grandmother,” he said, “our ship’s captain, Titus Inventius, said you would know where to find Balthasar. Please help us.”

The old woman seemed to relax, and just when I thought she was going to smile, she raked her nails across Joshua’s hand and leapt back. “Titus Inventius is a scalawag,” she shouted.

Joshua stared at the blood welling up in the scratches on the back of his hand and I thought for a second that he might faint. He never understood it when someone was violent or unkind. I’d probably be half a day explaining to him why the old woman scratched him, but right then I was furious.

“You know what? You know what? You know what?” I was waving my finger under her nose. “You scratched the Son of God. That’s your ass, that’s what.”

“The magus is gone from Antioch, and good riddance to him,” screeched the crone.

The fat trader had been watching this the whole time without saying a word, but now he began laughing so hard that I could barely hear the old woman wheezing out curses. “So you want to find Balthasar, do you, God’s Son?”

Joshua came out of the stunned contemplation of his wounds and looked at the trader. “Yes, sir, do you know him?”

“Who do you think the monkey’s feet are for? Follow me.” He whirled on his heel and sauntered away without another word.

As we followed the trader into an alley so narrow that his shoulders nearly touched the sides, I turned back to the old crone and shouted, “Your ass, hag! Mark my words.”

She hissed and made the sign of the evil eye again.

“She was a little creepy,” Joshua said, looking at the scratches on his hand again.

“Don’t be judgmental, Josh, you’re not without creepiness yourself.”

“Where do you think this guy is leading us?”

“Probably somewhere where he can murder and kill us.”

“Yeah, at least one of those.”

Chapter 11

Since my escape attempt, I can’t get the angel to leave the room at all. Not even for his beloved Soap Opera Digest. (And yes, when he left to obtain the first one, it would have been a good time to make my escape, but I wasn’t thinking that way then, so back off.) Today I tried to get him to bring me a map.

“Because no one is going to know the places I’m writing about, that’s why,” I told him. “You want me to write in this idiom so people will understand what I’m saying, then why use the names of places that have been gone for thousands of years? I need a map.”

“No,” said the angel.

“When I say the journey was two months by camel, what will that mean to these people who can cross an ocean in hours? I need to know modern distances.”

“No,” said the angel.

(Did you know that in a hotel they bolt the bedside lamp to the table, thereby making it an ineffective instrument of persuasion when trying to bring an obdurate angel around to your way of thinking? Thought you should know that. Pity too, it’s such a substantial lamp.)

“But how will I recount the heroic acts of the archangel Raziel if I can’t tell the locations of his deeds? What, you want me to write, ‘Oh, then somewhere generally to the left of the Great Wall that rat-bastard Raziel showed up looking like hell considering he may have traveled a long distance or not?’ Is that what you want? Or should it read, ‘Then, only a mile out of the port of Ptolemais, we were once again graced with the shining magnificence of the archangel Raziel? Huh, which way do you want it?”

(I know what you’re thinking, that the angel saved my life when Titus threw me off the ship and that I should be more forgiving toward him, right? That I shouldn’t try to manipulate a poor creature who was given an ego but no free will or capacity for creative thought, right? Okay, good point. But do please remember that the angel only intervened on my behalf because Joshua was praying for my rescue. And do please remember that he could have saved us a lot of difficulty over the years if he had helped us out more often. And please don’t forget that—despite the fact that he is perhaps the most handsome creature I’ve ever laid eyes on—Raziel is a stone doofus. Nevertheless, the ego stroke worked.)

“I’ll get you a map.”

And he did. Unfortunately the concierge was only able to find a map of the world provided by an airline that partners with the hotel. So who knows how accurate it is. On this map the next leg of our journey is six inches long and would cost thirty thousand Friendly Flyer Miles. I hope that clears things up.

The trader’s name was Ahmad Mahadd Ubaidullaganji, but he said we could call him Master. We called him Ahmad. He led us through the city to a hillside where his caravan was camped. He owned a hundred camels which he drove along the Silk Road, along with a dozen men, two goats, three horses, and an astonishingly homely woman named Kanuni. He took us to his tent, which was larger than both the houses Joshua and I had grown up in. We sat on rich carpets and Kanuni served us stuffed dates and wine from a pitcher shaped like a dragon.

“So, what does the Son of God want with my friend Balthasar?” Ahmad asked. Before we could answer he snorted and laughed until his shoulders shook and he almost spilled his wine. He had a round face with high cheekbones and narrow black eyes that crinkled at the corners from too much laughter and desert wind. “I’m sorry, my friends, but I’ve never been in the presence of the son of a god before. Which god is your father, by the way?”

“Well, the God,” I said.

“Yep,” said Joshua. “That’s the one.”

“And what is your God’s name?”

“Dad,” said Josh.

“We’re not supposed to say his name.”

“Dad!” said Ahmad. “I love it.” He started giggling again. “I knew you were Hebrews and weren’t allowed to say your God’s name, I just wanted to see if you would. Dad. That’s rich.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “and we are certainly enjoying the refreshments, but it’s getting late and you said you would take us to see Balthasar.”

“And indeed I will. We leave in the morning.”

“Leave for where?” Josh asked.

“Kabul, the city where Balthasar lives now.”

I had never heard of Kabul, and I sensed that was not a good thing. “And how far is Kabul?”

“We should be there in less than two months by camel,” Ahmad said.

If I knew then what I know now, I might have stood and exclaimed, “Tarnation, man, that’s over six inches and thirty thousand Friendly Flyer Miles!” But since I didn’t know that then, what I said was “Shit.”

“I will take you to Kabul,” said Ahmad, “but what can you do to help pay your way?”

“I know carpentry,” Joshua said. “My stepfather taught me how to fix a camel saddle.”

“And you?” He looked at me. “What can you do?”

I thought about my experience as a stonecutter, and immediately rejected it. And my training as a village idiot, which I thought I could always fall back on, wasn’t going to help either. I did have my newfound skill as a sex educator, but somehow I didn’t think there’d be call for that on a two-month trip with fourteen men and one homely woman. So what could I do, what skill had I to gentle the road to Kabul?

“If someone in the caravan croaks I’m a great mourner,” I said. “Want to hear a dirge?”

Ahmad laughed until he shook, then called for Kanuni to bring him his satchel. Once he had it in hand, he dug inside and pulled out the dried newts he’d bought from the old hag. “Here, you’ll be needing these,” he said.

Camels bite. A camel will, for no reason, spit on you, stomp you, kick you, bellow, burp, and fart at you. They are stubborn at their best, and cranky beyond all belief at their worst. If you provoke them, they will bite. If you insert a dehydrated amphibian elbow-deep in a camel’s bum, he considers himself provoked, doubly so if the procedure was performed while he was sleeping. Camels are wise to stealth. They bite.

“I can heal that,” Joshua said, looking at the huge tooth marks on my forehead. We were following Ahmad’s caravan along the Silk Road, which was neither a road nor made of silk. It was, in fact, a narrow path through the rocky inhospitable highland desert of what is now Syria into the low, inhospitable desert of what is now Iraq.

“He said sixty days by camel. Doesn’t that mean that we should be riding, not walking?”

“You’re missing your camel pals, aren’t you?” Josh grinned, that snotty, Son-o’-God grin of his. Maybe it was just a regular grin.

“I’m just tired. I was up half the night sneaking up on these guys.”

“I know,” said Joshua. “I had to get up at dawn to fix one of the saddles before we left. Ahmad’s tools leave something to be desired.”

“You go ahead and be the martyr, Josh, just forget about what I was doing all night. I’m just saying that we should get to ride instead of walking.”

“We will,” Josh said. “Just not now.”

The men in the caravan were all riding, although several of them, as well as Kanuni, were on horses. The camels were loaded down with great packs of iron tools, powdered dyes, and sandalwood bound for the Orient. At the first highland oasis we crossed, Ahmad traded the horses for four more camels, and Joshua and I were allowed to ride. At night we ate with the rest of the men, sharing boiled grain or bread with sesame paste, the odd bit of cheese, mashed chickpeas and garlic, occasionally goat meat, and sometimes the dark hot drink we had discovered in Antioch (mixed with date sugar and topped with foaming goat’s milk and cinnamon at my suggestion). Ahmad dined alone in his tent, while the rest of us would dine under the open awning that we constructed to shelter us from the hottest part of the day. In the desert, the day gets warmer as it gets later, so the hottest part of the day will be in the late afternoon, just before sundown brings the hot winds to leach the last moisture from your skin.

None of Ahmad’s men spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, but they had enough functional Latin and Greek to tease Joshua and me about any number of subjects, their favorite, of course, being my job as chief camel deconstipator. The men hailed from a half-dozen different lands, many we had never heard of. Some were as black as Ethiopians, with high foreheads and long, graceful limbs, while others were squat and bowlegged, with powerful shoulders, high cheekbones, and long wispy mustaches like Ahmad’s. Not one of them was fat or weak or slow. Before we were a week out of Antioch we figured out that it only took a couple of men to care for and guide a caravan of camels, so we were perplexed at why someone as shrewd as Ahmad would bring along so many superfluous employees.

“Bandits,” Ahmad said, adjusting his bulk to find a more comfortable position atop his camel. “I’d need no more than a couple of dolts like you two if it was just the animals that needed tending. They’re guards. Why did you think they were all carrying bows and lances?”

“Yeah,” I said, giving Joshua a dirty look, “didn’t you see the lances? They’re guards. Uh, Ahmad, shouldn’t Josh and I have lances—I mean, when we get to the bandit area?”

“We’ve been followed by bandits for five days now,” Ahmad said.

“We don’t need lances,” Joshua said. “I will not make a man sin by committing an act of thievery. If a man would have something of mine, he need only ask and I will give it to him.”

“Give me the rest of your money,” I said.

“Forget it,” said Joshua.

“But you just said—”

“Yeah, but not to you.”

Most nights Joshua and I slept in the open, outside Ahmad’s tent, or if the night was especially cold, among the camels, where we would endure their grunting and snorting to get out of the wind. The guards slept in two-man tents, except for two who stood guard all night. Many nights, long after the camp was quiet, Joshua and I would lie looking up at the stars and pondering the great questions of life.

“Josh, do you think the bandits will rob us and kill us, or just rob us?”

“Rob us, then kill us, I would think,” said Josh. “Just in case they missed something that we had hidden, they could torture its whereabouts out of us.”

“Good point,” I said.

“Do you think Ahmad has sex with Kanuni?” Joshua asked.

“I know he does. He told me he does.”

“What do you think it’s like? With them I mean? Him so fat and her so, you know?”

“Frankly, Joshua, I’d rather not think about it. But thanks for putting that picture in my head.”

“You mean you can imagine them together?”

“Stop it, Joshua. I can’t tell you what sin is like. You’re going to have to do it yourself. What’s next? I’ll have to murder someone so I can explain what it’s like to kill?”

“No, I don’t want to kill.”

“Well, that might be one you have to do, Josh. I don’t think the Romans are going to go away because you ask them to.”

“I’ll find a way. I just don’t know it yet.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if you weren’t the Messiah? I mean if you abstained from knowing a woman your whole life, only to find out that you were just a minor prophet?”

“Yeah, that would be funny,” said Josh. He wasn’t smiling.

“Kind of funny?”

The journey seemed to go surprisingly fast once we knew we were being followed by bandits. It gave us something to talk about and our backs stayed limber, as we were always twisting in our saddles and checking the horizon. I was almost sad when they finally, after ten days on our trail, decided to attack.

Ahmad, who was usually at the front of the caravan, fell back and rode beside us. “The bandits will ambush us inside that pass just ahead,” he said.

The road snaked into a canyon with steep slopes on either side topped by rows of huge boulders and wind-eroded towers. “They’re hiding in those boulders on top of either ridge,” Ahmad said. “Don’t stare, you’ll give us away.”

Joshua said, “If you know that they’re going to attack, why not pull up and defend ourselves?”

“They will attack one way or another anyway. Better an ambush we know about than one we don’t. And they don’t know we know.”

I noticed the squat guards with the mustaches take short bows from pouches behind their saddles, and as subtly as a man might brush a cobweb from his eyelash, they strung the bows. If you’d been watching them from a distance you’d have hardly seen them move.

“What do you want us to do?” I asked Ahmad.

“Try not to get killed. Especially you, Joshua. Balthasar will be very angry indeed if I show up with you dead.”

“Wait,” said Joshua, “Balthasar knows we are coming?”

“Why, yes,” laughed Ahmad. “He told me to look for you. What, you think I help every pair of runts that wander into the market at Antioch?”

“Runts?” I had momentarily forgotten about the ambush.

“How long ago did he tell you to look for us?”

“I don’t know, right after he first left Antioch for Kabul, maybe ten years ago. It doesn’t matter now, I have to get back to Kanuni, bandits scare her.”

“Let them get a good look at her,” I said. “We’ll see who scares who.”

“Don’t look at the ridges,” Ahmad said as he rode away.

The bandits came down the sides of the canyon like a synchronized avalanche, driving their camels to the edge of balance, pushing a river of rocks and sand before them. There were twenty-five, maybe thirty of them, all dressed in black, half of them on camels waving swords or clubs, the other half on foot with long spears for gutting a camel rider.

When they were committed to the charge, all of them sliding down the hillsides, the guards broke our caravan in the middle, leaving an empty spot in the road where the bandits’ charge would culminate. Their momentum was so great that the bandits were unable to change direction. Three of their camels went down trying to pull back.

Our guards moved into two groups, three in the front with the long lances, the bowmen just behind them. When the bowmen were set they let arrows fly into the bandits, and as each fell he took two or three of his cohorts down with him, until in seconds the charge had turned into an actual avalanche of rolling stones and men and camels. The camels bellowed and we could hear bones snapping and men screaming as they rolled into a bloody mass on the Silk Road. As each man rose and tried to charge our guards an arrow would drop him in his tracks. One bandit came up mounted on a camel and rode toward the back of the caravan, where the three lancers drove him from his mount in a spray of blood. Every movement in the canyon was met with an arrow. One bandit with a broken leg tried to crawl back up the canyon wall, and an arrow in the back of his skull cut him down.

I heard a wailing behind me and before I could turn Joshua rode by me at full gallop, passing the bowmen and the lancers at our side of the caravan, bound for the mass of dead and dying bandits. He slung himself off his camel’s back and was running around the bodies like a madman, waving his arms and screaming until I could hear the rasp as his throat went raw.

“Stop this! Stop this!”

One bandit moved, trying to get to his feet, and our bowmen drew back to cut him down. Joshua threw his body on top of the bandit and pushed him back to the ground. I heard Ahmad give the command to hold.

A cloud of dust floated out of the canyon on the gentle desert breeze. A camel with a broken leg bellowed and an arrow in the eye put the animal to rest. Ahmad snatched a lance out of one of the guard’s hands and rode to where Joshua was shielding the wounded bandit.

“Move, Joshua,” Ahmad said, holding the lance at ready. “This must be finished.”

Joshua looked around him. All of the bandits and all of their animals were dead. Blood ran in rivulets in the dust. Already flies were collecting to feast. Joshua walked through the field of dead bandits until his chest was pressed against the bronze point of Ahmad’s lance. Tears streamed down Joshua’s face. “This was wrong!” he screeched.

“They were bandits. They would have killed us and stolen everything we had if we had not killed them. Does your own God, your father, not destroy those who sin? Now move aside, Joshua. Let this be finished.”

“I am not my father, and neither are you. You will not kill this man.”

Ahmad lowered the lance and shook his head balefully. “He will only die anyway, Joshua.” I could sense the guards fidgeting, not knowing what to do.

“Give me your water skin,” Joshua said.

Ahmad threw the water skin down to Joshua, then turned his camel and rode back to where the guards waited for him. Joshua took the water to the wounded bandit and held his head as he drank. An arrow protruded from the bandit’s stomach and his black tunic was shiny with blood. Joshua put his hand gently over the bandit’s eyes, as if he were telling him to go to sleep, then he yanked out the arrow and tossed it aside. The bandit didn’t even flinch. Joshua put his hand over the wound.

From the time that Ahmad had ordered them to hold fire, none of the guards had moved. They watched. After a few minutes the bandit sat up and Joshua stepped away from him and smiled. In that instant an arrow sprouted from the bandit’s forehead and he fell back, dead.

“No!” Joshua wheeled around to face Ahmad’s side of the caravan. The guard who had shot still held the bow, as if he might have to let fly another arrow to finish the job. Howling with rage, Joshua made a gesture as if he were striking the air with his open hand and the guard was lifted back off his camel and slammed into the ground. “No more!” Joshua screamed. When the guard sat up in the dirt his eyes were like silver moons in their sockets. He was blind.

Later, when neither of us had spoken for two days, and Joshua and I were relegated to riding far behind the caravan because the guards were afraid of us, I took a drink from my water skin, then handed it to Joshua. He took a drink and handed it back.

“Thank you,” Josh said. He smiled and I knew he’d be all right.

“Hey Joshua, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Remind me not to piss you off, okay?”

The city of Kabul was built on five rugged hillsides, with the streets laid out in terraces and the buildings built partly into the hills. There was no evidence of Roman or Greek influence in the architecture, but instead the larger buildings had tile roofs that turned up at the corners, a style that Joshua and I would see all over Asia before our journey was finished. The people were mostly rugged, wiry people who looked like Arabs without the glow in their skin that came from a diet rich in olive oil. Instead their faces seemed leaner, drawn by the cold, dry wind of the high desert. In the market there were merchants and traders from China, and more men who looked like Ahmad and his bowmen guards, a race whom the Chinese referred to simply as barbarians.

“The Chinese are so afraid of my people that they have built a wall, as high as any palace, as wide as the widest boulevard in Rome, and stretching as far as the eye can see ten times over,” Ahmad said.

“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking, you lying bag-o’-guts.

Joshua hadn’t spoken to Ahmad since the bandit attack, but he smirked at Ahmad’s story of the great wall.

“Just so,” said Ahmad. “We will stay at an inn tonight. Tomorrow I will take you to Balthasar. If we leave early we can be there by noon, then you’ll be the magician’s problem, not mine. Meet me in front at dawn.”

That night the innkeeper and his wife served us a dinner of spiced lamb and rice, with some sort of beer made from rice, which washed two months of desert grit from our throats and put a pleasant haze over our minds. To save money, we paid for pallets under the wide curving eaves of the inn, and although it was some comfort to have a roof over my head for the first time in months, I found that I missed looking at the stars as I fell asleep. I lay awake, half drunk, for a long time. Joshua slept the sleep of the innocent.

The next day Ahmad met us in front of the inn with two of his African guards and two extra camels in tow. “Come on, now. This may be the end of your journey, but it is merely a detour for me,” Ahmad said. He threw us each a crust of bread and a hunk of cheese, which I took to mean we were to eat our breakfast on the way.

We rode out of Kabul and into the hills until we entered a labyrinth of canyons, which meandered through rugged mountains that looked as if they might have been shaped by God out of clay, then left to bake in the sun until the clay had turned to a deep golden color that reflected light in a spray that ate up shadows and destroyed shade. By noon I had no sense whatsoever of what direction we were traveling, nor could I have sworn that we weren’t retracing our path through the same canyons over and over, but Ahmad’s black guards seemed to know their way. Eventually they led us around a bend to a sheer canyon wall, two hundred feet tall, that stood out from the other canyon walls in that there were windows and balconies carved into it. It was a palace hewn out of solid rock. At the base stood an ironclad door that looked as if it would take twenty men to move.

“Balthasar’s house,” Ahmad said, prodding his camel to kneel down so he might dismount.

Joshua nudged me with his riding stick. “Hey, is this what you expected?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what I expected. Maybe something a little—I don’t know—smaller.”

“Could you find your way back out of these canyons if you had to?” Joshua asked.

“Nope. You?”

“Not a chance.”

Ahmad waddled over to the great door and pulled a cord that hung down from a hole in the wall. Somewhere inside we heard the ringing of some great bell. (Only later would we learn that it was the sound of a gong.) A smaller door within the door opened and a girl stuck her head out. “What?” She had the round face and high cheekbones of an Oriental, and there were great blue wings painted on her face above her eyes.

“It’s Ahmad. Ahmad Mahadd Ubaidullaganji. I’ve brought Balthasar the boy he has been waiting for.” Ahmad gestured in our direction.

The girl looked skeptical. “Scrawny. You sure that’s the one?”

“That’s the one. Tell Balthasar he owes me.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“That’s his stupid friend. No extra charge for him.”

“You bring the monkey’s paws?” the girl asked.

“Yes, and the other herbs and minerals Balthasar asked for.”

“Okay, wait here.” She closed the door, was gone only a second, then returned. “Send just the two of them in, alone. Balthasar must examine them, then he will deal with you.”

“There’s no need to be mysterious, woman, I’ve been in Balthasar’s house a hundred times. Now quit dilly-dallying and open the door.”

“Silence!” the girl shouted. “The great Balthasar will not be mocked. Send in the boys, alone.” Then she slammed the little door and we could hear her cackling echo out the windows above.

Ahmad shook his head in disgust and waved us over to the door. “Just go. I don’t know what he’s up to, but just go.”

Joshua and I dismounted, took our packs off the camels, and edged over to the huge door. Joshua looked at me as if wondering what to do, then reached for the cord to ring the bell, but as he did, the door creaked open just wide enough for one of us to enter if we turned sideways. It was pitch black inside except for a narrow stripe of light, which told us nothing. Joshua again looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“I’m just the stupid no-extra-charge friend,” I said, bowing. “After you.”

Joshua moved though the door and I followed. When we were inside only a few feet, the huge door slammed with a sound like thunder and we stood there in complete darkness. I’m sure I could feel things scurrying around my feet in the dark.

There was a bright flash and a great column of red smoke rose in front of us, illuminated by a light coming from the ceiling somewhere. It smelled of brimstone and stung my nose. Joshua coughed and we both backed against the door as a figure stepped out of the smoke. He—it—stood as tall as any two men, although he was thin. He wore a long purple robe, embroidered with strange symbols in gold and silver, hooded, so we saw no face, only glowing red eyes set back in a field of black. He held a bright lamp out as if to examine us by the light.

“Satan,” I said under my breath to Joshua, pressing my back against the great iron door so hard that I could feel rust flakes imbedding in my skin through my tunic.

“It’s not Satan,” Joshua said.

“Who would disturb the sanctity of my fortress?” boomed the figure. I nearly wet myself at hearing his voice.

“I’m Joshua of Nazareth,” Joshua said, trying to be casual, but his voice broke on Nazareth. “And this is Biff, also of Nazareth. We’re looking for Balthasar. He came to Bethlehem, where I was born, many years ago looking for me. I have to ask him some questions.”

“Balthasar is no more of this world.” The dark figure reached into his robe and pulled out a glowing dagger, which he held high, then plunged into his own chest. There was an explosion, a flash, and an anguished roar, as if someone had killed a lion. Joshua and I turned and frantically scratched at the iron door, looking for a latch. We were both making an incoherent terrorized sound that I can only describe as the verbal version of running, sort of an extended rhythmic howl that paused only when the last of each lungful of air squeaked out of us.

Then I heard the laughing and Joshua grabbed my arm. The laughing got louder. Joshua swung me around to face death in purple. As I turned the dark figure threw back his hood and I saw the grinning black face and shaved head of a man—a very tall man, but a man nonetheless. He threw open the robe and I could see that it was, indeed, a man. A man who had been standing on the shoulders of two young Asian women who had been hiding beneath the very long robe.

“Just fuckin’ with you,” he said. Then he giggled.

He leapt off of the women’s shoulders and took a deep breath before doubling over and hugging himself with laughter. Tears streamed out of his big chestnut eyes.

“You should have seen the look on your faces. Girls, did you see that?” The women, who wore simple linen robes, didn’t seem as amused as the man. They looked embarrassed and a little impatient, as if they’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything but this.

“Balthasar?” Joshua asked.

“Yeah,” said Balthasar, who stood up now and was only a little taller than I was. “Sorry, I don’t get many visitors. So you’re Joshua?”

“Yes,” Joshua said, an edge in his voice.

“I didn’t recognize you without the swaddling clothes. And this is your servant?”

“My friend, Biff.”

“Same thing. Bring your friend. Come in. The girls will attend to Ahmad for the time being.” He stalked off down a corridor into the mountain, his long purple robe trailing behind him like the tail of a dragon.

We stood there by the door, not moving, until we realized that once Balthasar turned a corner with his lamp we’d be in darkness again, so we took off after him.

As we ran down the corridor, I thought of how far we had traveled, and what we had left behind, and I felt as if I was going to be sick to my stomach any second. “Wise man?” I said to Joshua.

“My mother has never lied to me,” said Josh.

“That you know of,” I said.

Chapter 12

Well, by pretending to have an overactive bladder, I’ve managed to sneak enough time in the bathroom to finish reading this Gospel of Matthew. I don’t know who the Matthew is that wrote this, but it certainly wasn’t our Matthew. While our Matthew was a whiz at numbers (as you might expect from a tax collector), he couldn’t write his own name in the sand without making three mistakes. Whoever wrote this Gospel obviously got the information at least secondhand, maybe thirdhand. I’m not here to criticize, but please, he never mentions me. Not once. I know my protests go against the humility that Joshua taught, but please, I was his best friend. Not to mention the fact that this Matthew (if that really is his name) takes great care in describing Joshua’s genealogy back to King David, but after Joshua is born and the three wise men show up at the stable in Bethlehem, then you don’t hear from Joshua again until he’s thirty. Thirty! As if nothing happened from the manger until John baptized us. Jeez.

Anyway, now I know why I was brought back from the dead to write this Gospel. If the rest of this “New Testament” is anything like the book of Matthew, they need someone to write about Joshua’s life who was actually there: me.

I can’t believe I wasn’t even mentioned once. It’s all I can do to keep from asking Raziel what in the hell happened. He probably showed up a hundred years too late to correct this Matthew fellow. Oh my, there’s a frightening thought, edited by the moron angel. I can’t let that happen.

And the ending? Where did he get that?

I’ll see what this next guy, this Mark, has to say, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

The first thing that we noticed about Balthasar’s fortress was that there were no right angles, no angles period, only curves. As we followed the magus through corridors, and from level to level, we never saw so much as a squared-off stair step, instead there were spiral ramps leading from level to level, and although the fortress spread all over the cliff face, no room was more than one doorway away from a window. Once we were above the ground level, there was always light from the windows and the creepy feeling we’d had when we entered quickly passed away. The stone of the walls was more yellow in color than the limestone of Jerusalem, yet it had the same smooth appearance. Overall it gave the impression that you were walking through the polished entrails of some huge living creature.

“Did you build this place, Balthasar?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said, without turning around. “This place was always here, I simply had to remove the stone that occupied it.”

“Oh,” I said, having gained no knowledge whatsoever.

We passed no doors, but myriad open archways and round portals which opened into chambers of various shapes and sizes. As we passed one egg-shaped doorway obscured by a curtain of beads Balthasar mumbled, “The girls stay in there.”

“Girls?” I said.

“Girls?” Joshua said.

“Yes, girls, you ninnies,” Balthasar said. “Humans much like yourselves, except smarter and better smelling.”

Well, I knew that. I mean, we’d seen the two of them, hadn’t we? I knew what girls were.

He pressed on until we came to the only other door I had seen since we entered, this one another huge, ironclad monster held closed with three iron bolts as big around as my arm and a heavy brass lock engraved with strange characters. The magus stopped and tilted an ear to the door. His heavy gold earring clinked against one of the bolts. He turned to us and whispered, and for the first time I could clearly see that the magus was very old, despite the strength of his laugh and the spring in his step. “You may go anywhere you wish while you stay here, but you must never open this door. Xiong zai.”

“Xiong zai,” I repeated to Joshua in case he’d missed it.

“Xiong zai.” He nodded with total lack of understanding.

Mankind, I suppose, is designed to run on—to be motivated by—temptation. If progress is a virtue then this is our greatest gift. (For what is curiosity if not intellectual temptation? And what progress is there without curiosity?) On the other hand, can you call such a profound weakness a gift, or is it a design flaw? Is temptation itself at fault for man’s woes, or is it simply the lack of judgment in response to temptation? In other words, who is to blame? Mankind, or a bad designer? Because I can’t help but think that if God had never told Adam and Eve to avoid the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that the human race would still be running around naked, dancing in wonderment and blissfully naming stuff between snacks, naps, and shags. By the same token, if Balthasar had passed that great ironclad door that first day without a word of warning, I might have never given it a second glance, and once again, much trouble could have been avoided. Am I to blame for what happened, or is it the author of temptation, God Hisownself?

Balthasar led us into a grand chamber with silks festooned from the ceiling and the floor covered with fine carpets and pillows. Wine, fruit, cheese, and bread were laid out on several low tables.

“Rest and refresh,” said Balthasar. “I’ll be back after I finish my business with Ahmad.” Then he hurried off, leaving us alone.

“So,” I said, “find out what you need to from this guy, then we can get on the road and on to the next wise man.”

“I’m not sure it’s going to be that quick. In fact, we may be here quite some time. Maybe years.”

“Years? Joshua, we’re in the middle of nowhere, we can’t spend years here.”

“Biff, we grew up in the middle of nowhere. What’s the difference?”

“Girls,” I said.

“What about them?” Joshua asked.

“Don’t start.”

We heard laughter rolling down the corridor into the room and shortly it was followed by Balthasar and Ahmad, who threw themselves down among the pillows and began eating the cheeses and fruits that had been set out.

“So,” Balthasar said, “Ahmad tells me that you tried to save a bandit, and in the process blinded one of his men, without so much as touching him. Very impressive.”

Joshua hung his head. “It was a massacre.”

“Grieve,” Balthasar said, “but consider also the words of the master Lao-tzu: ‘Weapons are instruments of misfortune. Those who are violent do not die naturally.’”

“Ahmad,” Joshua said, “what will happen to the guard, the one I…”

“He is no good to me anymore,” said Ahmad. “A shame too, he was the best bowman of the lot. I’ll leave him in Kabul. He’s asked me to give his pay to his wife in Antioch and his other wife in Dunhuang. I suppose he will become a beggar.”

“Who is Lao-tzu?” I asked.

“You will have plenty of time to learn of master Lao-tzu,” said Balthasar. “Tomorrow I will assign you a tutor to teach you qi, the path of the Dragon’s Breath, but for now, eat and rest.”

“Can you believe a Chinaman can be so black?” laughed Ahmad. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”

“I wore the leopard skin of the shaman when your father was just a twinkle in the great river of stars, Ahmad. I mastered animal magic before you were old enough to walk, and I had learned all the secrets of the sacred Egyptian magic texts before you could sprout a beard. If immortality is to be found among the wisdom of the Chinese masters, then I shall be Chinese as long as it suits me, no matter the color of my skin or the place of my birth.”

I tried to determine Balthasar’s age. From what he was claiming he would have to be very old indeed, as Ahmad was not young himself, yet his movements were spry and as far as I could see he had all of his teeth and they were perfect. There was none of the feeble dotage that I’d seen in our elders at home.

“How do you stay so strong, Balthasar?” I asked.

“Magic.” He grinned.

“There is no magic but that of the Lord,” Joshua said.

Balthasar scratched his chin and replied quietly, “Then presumably none without his consent, eh, Joshua?”

Joshua slouched and stared at the floor.

Ahmad burst out laughing. “His magic isn’t so mysterious, boys. Balthasar has eight young concubines to draw the poisons from his old body, that’s how he stays young.”

“Holy moly! Eight?” I was astounded. Aroused. Envious.

“Does that room with the ironclad door have something to do with your magic?” Joshua asked gravely.

Balthasar stopped grinning. Ahmad looked from Joshua to the magus and back, bewildered.

“Let me show you to your quarters,” said Balthasar. “You should wash and rest. Lessons tomorrow. Say good-bye to Ahmad, you’ll not see him again soon.”

Our quarters were spacious, bigger than the houses we’d grown up in, with carpets on the floor, chairs made of dark exotic hardwoods carved into the shapes of dragons and lions, and a table that held a pitcher and basin for washing. Each of our rooms held a desk and cabinet full of instruments for painting and writing, and something neither of us had ever seen, a bed. A half-wall divided the space between Joshua’s room and mine, so we were able to lie in the beds and talk before falling asleep, just as we had in the desert. I could tell that Joshua was deeply troubled about something that first night.

“You seem, I don’t know, deeply troubled, Josh.”

“It’s the bandits. Could I have raised them?”

“All of them? I don’t know, could you?”

“I thought about it. I thought that I could make them all walk and breathe again. I thought I could make them live. But I didn’t even try.”

“Why?”

“Because I was afraid they would have killed us and robbed us if I had. It’s what Balthasar said, ‘Those who are violent do not die naturally.’”

“The Torah says, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They were bandits.”

“But were they bandits always? Would they have been bandits in the years to come?”

“Sure, once a bandit, always a bandit. They take an oath or something. Besides, you didn’t kill them.”

“But I didn’t save them, and I blinded that bowman. That wasn’t right.”

“You were angry.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“What do you mean, that’s no excuse? You’re God’s Son. God wiped out everyone on earth with a flood because he was angry.”

“I’m not sure that’s right.”

“’Scuse me?”

“We have to go to Kabul. I need to restore that man’s sight if I can.”

“Joshua, this bed is the most comfortable place I’ve ever been. Can we wait to go to Kabul?”

“I suppose.”

Joshua was quiet for a long time and I thought that he might have fallen asleep. I didn’t want to sleep, but I didn’t want to talk about dead bandits either.

“Hey Josh?”

“What?”

“What do you think is in that room with the iron door, what did he call it?”

“Xiong zai,” said Josh.

“Yeah, Xiong zai. What do you think that is?”

“I don’t know, Biff. Maybe you should ask your tutor.”

Xiong zai means house of doom, in the parlance of feng shui,” said Tiny Feet of the Divine Dance of Joyous Orgasm. She knelt before a low stone table that held an earthenware teapot and cups. She wore a red silk robe trimmed with golden dragons and tied with a black sash. Her hair was black and straight and so long that she had tied it in a knot to keep it from dragging on the floor as she served the tea. Her face was heart-shaped, her skin as smooth as polished alabaster, and if she’d ever been in the sun, the evidence had long since faded. She wore wooden sandals held fast by silk ribbons and her feet, as you might guess from her name, were tiny. It had taken me three days of lessons to get the courage up to ask her about the room.

She poured the tea daintily, but without ceremony, as she had each of the previous three days before my lessons. But this time, before she handed it to me, she added to my cup a drop of a potion from a tiny porcelain bottle that hung from a chain around her neck.

“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 blue?” 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 13

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

“You haven’t noticed that one of us will never spend two nights in a row with Balthasar, or that we don’t speak with him beyond what is required for our duties and lessons?”

I had noticed, but it never occurred to me that there was something out of the ordinary. We hadn’t gotten to the chapter on wizard—concubine behavior in the book yet. “So?”

“So I think he is falling in love with Joshua. That is not good.”

“Well, I’m with you on that one. I wasn’t happy the last time someone fell in love with him. But why does it matter here?”

“I can’t tell you. But there has been more commotion coming from the house of doom,” said Joy. “You have to help me. If I’m right, we have to stop Balthasar. We’ll observe them tomorrow while we adjust the flow of Chi in the library.”

“No, Joy. Not library Chi. The stuff in the library is too heavy. I hate library Chi.”

Chi or Qi: the breath of the dragon, the eternal energy that flows through all things; in balance, as it should be, it was half yin, half yang, half light, half dark, half male, half female. The Chi in the library was always getting fucked up, while the Chi in the rooms with just cushions, or with lightweight furniture, seemed well adjusted and balanced. I don’t know why, but I suspected it had a lot to do with Joy’s need to make me move heavy things.

The next morning Joy and I went to the library to spy on Joshua and Balthasar while we redirected the library’s Chi. Joy carried a complex brass instrument she called a Chi clock, which was supposed to be able to detect the flow of Chi. The magus was noticeably irritated as soon as we entered the room.

“Must this be done now?”

Joy bowed. “Very sorry, master, but this is an emergency.” She turned and barked commands at me like a Roman centurion. “Move that table over there, can’t you see that it rests on the tiger’s testicles? Then point those chairs so they face the doorway, they lie on the dragon’s navel. We’re lucky someone hasn’t broken a leg.”

“Yeah, lucky,” I said, straining to move the huge carved table, wishing that Joy had recruited a couple of the other girls to help. I’d been studying feng shui for more than three years now and I still couldn’t detect the least bit of Chi, coming or going. Joshua had reconciled the elusive energy by saying that it was just an Oriental way to express God all around us and in all things. That may have helped him toward some sort of spiritual understanding, but it was about as effective as trained sheep when it came to arranging furniture.

“Can I help?” Joshua asked.

“No!” shouted Balthasar, standing up. “We will continue in my quarters.” The old wizard turned and glared at Joy and me. “And we are not to be disturbed, under any circumstances.”

He took Joshua by the shoulder and led him out of the room.

“So much for spying,” I said.

Joy consulted the Chi clock and patted a cabinet filled with calligraphy materials. “This most certainly rides on the horn of the ox, it must be moved,” she pronounced.

“They are gone,” I said. “We don’t have to pretend at this anymore.”

“Who is pretending? That cabinet channels all the yin into the hall, while the yang circles like a bird of prey.”

“Joy, stop it. I know you’re making this stuff up.”

She dropped the brass instrument to her side. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are.” And here I thought I’d push my credibility a bit, just to see. “I checked the yang in this room yesterday. It is in perfect balance.”

Joy dropped to her hands and knees, crawled under one of the huge carved dragon tables, curled up into a ball, and began to cry. “I’m no good at this. Balthasar wants us all to know it, but I’ve never understood it. If you want the Elegant Torture of a Thousand Pleasant Touches, I can do it, you want someone poisoned, castrated, or blown up, I’m your man, but this feng shui stuff is just, just…”

“Stupid?” I supplied.

“No, I was going to say difficult. Now I’ve angered Balthasar and we have no way of knowing what is happening between him and Joshua. And we must know.”

“I can find out,” I said, polishing my nails on my tunic. “But I have to know why I’m finding out.”

“How will you find out?”

“I have ways that are more subtle and crafty than all your Chinese alchemy and direction of energies.”

“Now who’s making things up?” I’d lost most of my credibility by dragging out the arcane-Hebrew-knowledge-for-sexual-favors ruse until I had actually claimed credit for receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments as well as constructing the Ark of the Covenant. (What? It’s not my fault. Joshua was the one who would never let me be Moses when we were kids.)

“If I find out, will you tell me what is going on?”

The head concubine chewed at an elegantly lacquered nail as she thought about it. “You promise not to tell anyone if I tell you? Not even your friend Joshua?”

“I promise.”

“Then do what you will. But remember your lessons from The Art of War.”

I considered the words of Sun-tzu, which Joy had taught me: Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby, you can be the director of the opponent’s fate. So after considering strategy carefully, running and rejecting the various scenarios in my head, working out what seemed a nearly foolproof plan, and making sure the timing was perfect, I went into action. That very night, as I lay in my bed and Joshua in his, I called forth all my powers of subtlety and mysteriousness.

“Hey Josh,” I said. “Balthasar sodomizing you?”

“No!”

“Vice versa?”

“Absolutely not!”

“You get the feeling he’d like to?”

He was quiet for a second, then he said, “He’s been very attentive lately. And he giggles at everything I say, why?”

“Because Joy says it’s not good if he falls in love with you.”

“Well, it’s not if he’s expecting any sodomizing, I’ll tell you that. That’s going to be one disappointed magus.”

“No, worse than that. She won’t tell me what, but it’s really, really bad.”

“Biff, I realize you may not think so, but from my way of thinking, sodomizing the Son of God is really, really bad.”

“Good point. But I think she means something to do with whatever is behind the iron door. Until I find out, you have to keep Balthasar from falling in love with you.”

“I’ll bet he was myrrh,” said Josh. “Bastard, he brings the cheapest gift and now he wants to sodomize me. My mother told me the myrrh went bad after a week too.”

Did I mention that Joshua was not a myrrh fan?

Chapter 14

Meanwhile, back at the hotel room, Raziel has given up his hopes to be a professional wrestler and has resumed his ambition to be Spider-Man. He made the decision after I pointed out that in Genesis, Jacob wrestles an angel and wins. In short, a human defeated an angel. Raziel kept insisting that he didn’t remember that happening and I was tempted to bring the Gideon Bible in out of the bathroom and show him the reference, but I’ve just started reading the Gospel of Mark and I’d lose the book if the angel found out about it.

I thought Matthew was bad, skipping right from Joshua’s birth to his baptism, but Mark doesn’t even bother with the birth. It’s as if Joshua springs forth full grown from the head of Zeus. (Okay, bad metaphor, but you know what I mean.) Mark begins with the baptism, at thirty! Where did these guys get these stories? “I once met a guy in a bar who knew a guy who’s sister’s best friend was at the baptism of Joshua bar Joseph of Nazareth, and here’s the story as best as he could remember it.”

Well, at least Mark mentions me, once. And then it’s totally out of context, as if I was just sitting around doing nothing and Joshua happened by and asked me to tag along. And Mark tells of the demon named Legion. Yeah, I remember Legion. Compared to what Balthasar called up, Legion was a wuss.

I asked Balthasar if he was smitten with me,” Joshua said over supper.

“Oh no,” said Joy. We were eating in the girls’ quarters. It smelled really good and the girls would rub our shoulders while we ate. Just what we needed after a tough day of studying.

“You weren’t supposed to let him know we were on to him. What did he say?”

“He said that he’d just come off of a hard breakup and he wasn’t ready for a relationship because he just needed to spend a little time getting to know himself, but that he’d love it if we could just be friends.”

“He lies,” said Joy. “He hasn’t had a breakup in a hundred years.”

I said, “Josh, you are so gullible. Guys always lie about stuff like that. That’s the problem with your not being allowed to know women, it means you don’t understand the most fundamental nature of men.”

“Which is?”

“We’re lying pigs. We’ll say anything to get what we want.”

“That’s true,” said Joy. The other girls nodded in agreement.

“But,” said Josh, “the superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue, according to Confucius.”

“Of course,” said I, “but the superior man can get laid without lying. I’m talking about the rest of us.”

“So should I be worried about this trip he wants me to take with him?”

Joy nodded gravely and the other girls nodded with her.

“I don’t see why,” I said. “What trip?”

“He says we’ll only be gone a couple of weeks. He wants to go to a temple at a city in the mountains. He believes that the temple was built by Solomon, it’s called the Temple of the Seal.”

“And why do you have to go along?”

“He wants to show me something.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” echoed the girls, not unlike a Greek chorus, except of course they were speaking Chinese.

In the week leading up to Joshua and Balthasar’s departure, I managed to talk Pea Pods into taking on a huge risk during her shift in Balthasar’s bed. I picked Pea Pods not because she was the most athletic and nimble of the girls, which she was; nor because she was the lightest of foot and most stealthy, which she was also; but because she was the one who had taught me to make bronze castings of the Chinese characters that were the mark of my name (my chop), and she could be trusted to get the most accurate impression of the key that Balthasar wore on the chain around his neck. (Oh yes, there was a key to the ironclad door. Joy had let it slip where Balthasar kept it, but I was sure that she was too loyal to him to steal it. Pea Pods, on the other hand, was more fickle in her loyalties, and lately I had been spending a lot of time with her on and off.)

“By the time you return, I’ll know what’s going on here,” I whispered to Joshua as he climbed onto his camel. “Find out what you can from Balthasar.”

“I will. But be careful. Don’t do anything while I’m gone. I think this trip, whatever it is that we are going to see, has something to do with the house of doom.”

“I’m just going to look around. You be careful.”

The girls and I stood at the top of the plateau and waved until Joshua and the magus, leading the extra camel loaded with supplies, rode out of sight, then, one by one, we made our way down the rope ladder to the passageway in the cliff’s face. The entrance to the passageway, and the tunnel for perhaps thirty cubits, were just wide enough for one man to pass through if he stooped, and I always managed to bruise an elbow or a shoulder along the way, which allowed me to show off my ability to curse in four languages.

By the time I got to the chamber of the elements, where we practiced the art of the Nine Elixirs, Pea Pods had the small furnace stoked to a red heat and was adding ingots of brass to a small stone crucible. From the wax impression we had made a wax duplicate of the key, from that we’d made a plaster mold, which we’d fired to melt out the wax. Now we’d have one chance to cast the key, because once the metal cooled in the plaster mold, the only way to release it was to break off the plaster.

When we broke off the mold Pea Pods held the end of what looked like a brass dragon on a stick.

“That’s some key,” I said. The only locks I’d ever seen were big bulky iron boys, nothing elegant enough for a key like this.

“When are you going to use it?” asked Pea Pods. Her eyes went wide like those of an excited child. Times like that I almost fell in love with her, but fortunately I was always distracted by Joy’s sophistication, Pillow’s maternal fussing, Number Six’s dexterity, or any one of the other charms that were heaped upon me daily. I understood completely Balthasar’s strategy to keep from falling in love with any one of them. Joshua’s situation, on the other hand, was harder to figure, because he enjoyed spending time with the girls, trading stories from the Torah for legends of the storm dragons and the monkey king. He said that there was an innate kindness born in women that he’d never seen in a man, and he liked being around them. His strength in resisting their physical charms astounded me perhaps even more than the other miraculous things I’d seen him do over the years. I couldn’t relate to the act of raising someone from the dead, but turning down a beautiful woman, that took courage beyond my understanding.

“I’ll take it from here,” I said to Pea Pods. I didn’t want her to be involved any further in case things didn’t turn out well.

“When?” asked Pea Pods, meaning when would I attempt to open the door.

“Tonight, when you have all gone to live in the world of pleasant dreams.” I tweaked her nose affectionately and she giggled. It was the last time I ever saw her in one piece.

At night the halls of the fortress were lit by the ambient light from the moon and the stars that filtered in from the windows. Everywhere we went we carried a clay oil lamp which made the serpentine curves of the passageways seem even more like the inside of a huge creature as they swallowed up the dim orange light. After several years with Balthasar, I could find my way through the main living quarters of the fortress without any light at all, so I carried an unlit lamp with me until I had passed the girls’ quarters, stopping at the beaded doorway to listen for their gentle snores.

Once I was well away from the girls’ door, I lit my lamp using one of the fire sticks that I’d invented using some of the same chemicals we used to make the explosive black powder. The fire stick made a soft pop as I struck it on the stone wall and I could swear I heard it echo from the hall up ahead. As I made my way to the ironclad door I could smell burning brimstone and I thought it strange that the smell of the fire stick had stayed with me. Then I saw Joy standing by the door holding an oil lamp and the charred remains of the fire stick she’d used to light it.

“Let me see the key,” she said.

“What key?”

“Don’t be foolish. I saw what was left of the mold in the room of the elements.”

I took the key from where I’d tucked it in my belt and handed it to Joy. She examined it by lamplight, turning it this way and that. “Pea Pods cast this,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did she take the impression as well?”

I nodded. Joy didn’t seem angry, and Pea Pods was the only one of the girls skilled enough in metallurgy to have done the casting, so why deny it?

“Getting the impression must have been the hard part,” Joy said. “Balthasar is fierce about guarding this key. I’ll have to ask her what she did to distract him. Could be a good thing to know, huh? For both of us.” She smiled seductively, then turned toward the door and pushed aside the brass plate that covered the keyhole. In that second I felt as if a frozen dagger had been dragged over my spine.

“No!” I grabbed her hand. “Don’t.” I was overcome with a feeling of revulsion that wrenched my insides. “We can’t.”

Joy smiled again and pushed my hand away. “I have seen many wondrous things since I came here, but there has never been anything that was harmful. You planned this, you must want to know what is in here as much as I do.”

I wanted to stop her, I even tried to take the key away from her, but she grabbed my arm and pushed into a pressure point that made my whole left side go numb. She raised an eyebrow as if to ask, “Do you really want to try that, knowing what I can do to you?” And I stepped back.

She put the dragon key into the lock and turned it three times. There was a clicking of machinery finer than anything I had ever heard, then she withdrew the key and shot the three heavy iron bolts. As she pulled the door open there was a rush of air, as if something had moved by us very quickly, and my lamp went out.

Joshua told me what had happened later and I put the timing together myself. As Joy and I were opening the room they called the house of doom, Joshua and Balthasar were camped in the arid mountains of what is now Afghanistan. The night was crisp and the stars shone with a cold blue light like loneliness or infinity. They had eaten some bread and cheese, then settled in close to the fire to share the last of a flask of fortified wine, Balthasar’s second that evening.

“Have I told you of the prophecy that sent me in search of you when you were born, Joshua?”

“You spoke of the star. My mother told me of the star.”

“Yes, the three of us followed that star, and by chance we met up in the mountains east of Kabul and finished the journey together, but the star wasn’t the reason we went, it was only our means of navigation. We made the journey because each of us was looking for something at the end.”

“Me?” Joshua said.

“Yes, but not just you, but what it is said was brought with you. In the temple where we travel now, there lies a set of clay tablets—very old—the priests say that they date back to the time of Solomon, and they foretell the coming of a child who will have power over evil and victory over death. They say he will carry the key to immortality.”

“Me? Immortality? Nope.”

“I think you do, you just don’t know it yet.”

“Nope, I’m sure,” said Joshua. “It’s true that I have brought people back from the dead, but never for very long. I’ve gotten better at healing over the years, but my back-from-the-dead stuff still needs work. I need to learn more.”

“Which is why I have taught you, and why I am taking you to the temple now, so you may read the tablets yourself, but you must have the power of immortality within you.”

“No, really, I haven’t a clue.”

“I am two hundred and sixty years old, Joshua.”

“I’ve heard that, but I still can’t help you. You look good though, I mean for two hundred and sixty.”

At this point Balthasar started to sound desperate. “Joshua, I know that you have power over evil. Biff has told me of you banishing demons in Antioch.”

“Little ones,” Joshua said modestly.

“You must have power over death as well or it does me no good.”

“What I am able to do comes through my father, I didn’t bargain for it.”

“Joshua, I am preserved by a pact with a demon. If you do not have the powers foretold in the prophecy I will never be free, I will never have peace, I will never have love. Every minute of my life I must have my will focused on controlling the demon. Should my will fail, the destruction would be unlike anything the world has ever seen.”

“I know how it is. I’m not allowed to know a woman,” Joshua said. “Although it was an angel that told me, not a demon. But still, you know, it’s hard sometimes. I really like your concubines. The other night Pillows was giving me a back rub after a long day of studying, and I started getting this massive—”

“By the Golden Tenderloin of the Calf!” Balthasar exclaimed, leaping to his feet, his eyes wide with terror. The old man began loading his camel, thrashing around in the darkness like a madman. Joshua was following him, trying to calm him down, fearing he might have a fit any second.

“What? What?”

“It is out!” the magus said. “Help me pack up. We must go back. The demon is out.”

I stood cringing in the dark, waiting for disaster to fall, for mayhem to reign, for pain and pestilence and no good to manifest, then Joy struck a fire stick and lit our lamps. We were alone. The iron door hung open into a very small room, it too lined with iron. The entire room was just big enough to contain a small bed and a chair. Every span of the black iron walls was inlaid with golden symbols: pentagrams and hex symbols and a dozen others I had never seen before. Joy held her lamp close to the wall.

“These are symbols of containment,” Joy said.

“I used to hear voices coming from in here.”

“There was nothing in here when I opened the door. I could see in the second before the lamp blew out.”

“Then what blew it out?”

“The wind?”

“I don’t think so. I felt something brush me as it passed.”

Just then someone in the girls’ quarters screamed, then a chorus of screams joined in, primal screams of absolute terror and pain. Instantly Joy’s eyes filled with tears. “What have I done?”

I took her sleeve and dragged her down the passage toward the girls’ quarters, snatching up two heavy lances that were supporting a tapestry as we passed and handing one to her. As we rounded the curves I could see an orange light ahead and soon I could see that it was fire blazing on the stone walls from broken oil lamps. The screaming was reaching a higher pitch, but every few seconds a voice was removed from the chorus, until there was only one. As we approached the beaded doorway into the concubines’ chamber the screaming stopped and a severed human head rolled in front of us. The creature stepped through the curtain, oblivious to the flames that licked the walls around it, its massive body filling the passageway, the reptilian skin on its shoulders and its tall pointed ears grating against the walls and ceiling. In its talonlike hand it held the bloody torso of one of the girls.

“Hey, kid,” it said, its voice like a sword point dragged across stone, a yellow light coming from behind its dinner-plate-sized cat’s eyes, “it took you long enough.”

As they rode back to the fortress, Balthasar explained to Joshua about the demon: “His name is Catch, and he is a demon of the twenty-seventh order, a destroyer angel before the fall. As far as I could tell, he was first called up to assist Solomon in building the great temple, but something got out of hand and with the help of a djinn, Solomon was able to send the demon back to hell. I found the seal of Solomon and the incantation for raising the demon almost two hundred years ago in the Temple of the Seal.”

“Oh,” Joshua said, “so that’s why they call it that. I thought it had something to do with one of the barky sea animals.”

“I had to become an acolyte and study with the priests there for years before I was allowed access to the seal, but what is a few years against immortality. I was given immortality, but only so long as the demon walks the earth. And as long as he is on earth he must be fed, Joshua. That’s the curse that goes with being this destroyer’s master. He must be fed.”

“I don’t understand, he feeds on your will?”

“No, he feeds on human beings. It is only my will that keeps him in check, or it was until I was able to build the iron room and put golden symbols on the wall that would hold the demon. I’ve been able to keep him in the fortress I made him build for twenty years now, and it has been some respite. Until then he was with me every minute, everywhere I went.”

“Didn’t that attract enemies to you?”

“No. Unless he is in his eating form, I am the only one who can see Catch. In his noneating form he’s small, the size of a child, and he can do little harm (except for being incredibly irritating). When he feeds, however, he’s fully ten cubits tall, and he can tear a man in half with the swipe of his claw. No, enemies are not a problem, Joshua. Why do you think there are no guards at the fortress? In those years before the girls came to live there, some bandits attacked. What happened to them is legend now in Kabul, and no one has tried since. The problem is that if my will were to fail, he would be set loose again on the world as he was in the time of Solomon. I don’t know what could stop him.”

“And you can’t send him back to hell?” Joshua asked.

“I can with the seal and the right incantation, which is why I was going to the Temple of the Seal. Which is why you are here. If you are the Messiah predicted in Isaiah, and on the clay tablets in the temple, then you are the direct descendant of David, and therefore Solomon. I believe that you can send the demon back and keep me from suffering the fate of his return.”

“Why, what happens to you if he is sent back to hell?”

“I will assume the aspect of my true age. Which I would guess, by this time, would be dust. But you have the gift of immortality. You can stop that from happening.”

“So this demon from hell is loose, and we are returning to the fortress without the Seal of Solomon or this incantation to do exactly what?”

“I hope to bring him back under control of my will. The room has always held him before. I didn’t know, I truly didn’t know…”

“Know what?”

“That my will had been broken by my feelings for you.”

“You love me?”

“How was I to know?” The magus sighed.

And Joshua laughed here, despite the dire circumstances. “Of course you do, but it is not me, it’s what I represent. I am not sure yet what I am to do, but I know that I am here in the name of my father. You love life so much that you would brave hell to hold on to it, it’s only natural that you would love the one who gave you that life.”

“Then you can banish the demon and preserve my life?”

“Of course not, I’m just saying that I understand how you feel.”

I don’t know where she found the strength, but the diminutive Joy came from behind me and hurled the heavy lance with as much power as any soldier. (I felt my own knees starting to buckle in the face of the demon.) The bronze tip of the lance seemed to find its way between two of the monster’s armored chest scales and drove itself a span deep under the weight of the heavy shaft. The demon gasped, and roared, opening his massive maw to show rows of saw-edged teeth. He grabbed the shaft of the lance and attempted to pull it out, his huge biceps quivering with the strain. He looked sadly down at the spear, then at Joy, and said, “Oh, foul woe upon you, you have kilt me most dead,” then he fell back and the floor shook with the impact of his huge body.

“What’d he say, what’d he say?” Joy asked, digging her nails into my shoulder. The demon had spoken in Hebrew.

“He said that you killed him.”

“Well, duh,” said the concubine. (Strangely enough, “duh” sounds exactly the same in all languages.)

I had started to inch forward to see if anyone was still alive in the girls’ quarters when the demon sat up. “Just kidding,” he said. “I’m not kilt.” And he plucked the spear from his chest with less effort than it might take to brush away a fly.

I threw my own lance, but didn’t wait to see where it hit. I grabbed Joy and ran.

“Where?” she said.

“Far,” I said.

“No,” she said, grabbing my tunic and jerking me around a corner, causing me to nearly coldcock myself on the wall. “To the cliff passage.” We were in total darkness now, neither one of us having thought to grab a lamp, and I was trusting my life to Joy’s memory of these stone halls.

As we ran we could hear the demon’s scales scraping the walls and the occasional curse in Hebrew as he found a low ceiling. Perhaps he could see in the dark somewhat, but not a lot better than we could.

“Duck,” Joy said, pushing my head down as we entered the narrow passage that led to the cliff above. I crouched in this passage the way the monster had to crouch to move in the normal-sized halls and I suddenly realized the brilliance of Joy’s choice in taking this route. We were just seeing the moonlight breaking in through the opening in the cliff’s face when I heard the monster hit the bottleneck of the passage.

“Fuck! Ouch! You weasels! I’m going to crunch your little heads between my teeth like candied dates.”

“What’d he say?” asked Joy.

“He says that you are a sweet of uncommon delicacy.”

“He did not say that.”

“Believe me, my translation is as close as you want to the truth.”

I heard a horrible scraping noise from inside the passage as we climbed out on the ledge and up the rope ladder to the top of the plateau. Joy helped me up, then pulled the ladder up behind us. We ran to the stable where the camel saddles and other supplies were normally kept. There were only the three camels that Joshua and Balthasar had taken, and no horses, so I couldn’t figure out why we were taking the time to stop until I saw Joy filling two water skins at the cistern behind the stable.

“We’ll never make it to Kabul without water,” Joy said.

“And what happens when we make it to Kabul? Can anyone there help? What in the hell is that thing?”

“If I knew, would I have opened that door?” She was remarkably calm for someone who had just lost her friends to a hideous beast.

“I guess not. But I didn’t see it come out of there. I felt something, but nothing that size.”

“Act, Biff, don’t think. Act.”

She handed me a water skin and I held it in the cistern, trying to listen for the sound of the monster over the bubbles as it filled. All I could hear was the occasional bleating of the goats and the sound of my own pulse in my ears. Joy corked her water skin, then went about opening the pig and goat pens, shooing the animals out onto the plateau.

“Let’s go!” she shouted to me. She took off down the path toward the hidden road. I pulled the water skin from the cistern and followed as quickly as I could. There was enough moonlight to make traveling fairly easy, but since I hadn’t even seen the road in daylight, I didn’t want to try to negotiate its deadly cutbacks at night without a guide. We had almost made the first leg of the road when we heard a hideous wailing and something heavy landed in the dust in front of us. When I could get my breath again I stepped up to find the bloodied carcass of a goat.

“There,” Joy said, pointing down the mountainside to something moving among the rocks. Then it looked up at us and there was no mistaking the glowing yellow eyes.

“Back,” Joy said, pulling me back from the road.

“Is that the only way down?”

“That or diving off the edge. It’s a fortress, remember—it’s not supposed to be easy to get in and out of.”

We made our way back to the rope ladder, tossed it over the side, and started down. As Joy made it to the ledge and ducked into the cave something heavy hit me on the right shoulder. My arm went numb with the impact and I let go of the ladder. Mercifully, my feet had tangled in the rungs as I fell, and I found myself hanging upside down looking into the cave entrance where Joy stood. I could hear the terrified goat that had hit me screaming as it fell into the abyss, then there was a distant thump and the screaming stopped.

“Hey, kid, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” said the monster from above.

“None of your business,” I said. Joy grabbed the ladder and pulled me inside the cave, ladder and all, just as another goat came screaming past. I fell on my face in the dust and sputtered, trying to breathe and spit at the same time.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten a Jew. A good Jew sticks to your ribs. That’s the problem with Chinese, you eat six or seven of them and in a half hour you’re hungry again. No offense, miss.”

“What’d he say?” Joy asked.

“He says he likes kosher food. Will that ladder hold him?”

“I made it myself.”

“Swell,” I said. We heard the ropes creak with the strain as the monster climbed onto the ladder.

Chapter 15

Joshua and Balthasar rode into Kabul at a time of night when only cutthroats and whores were about (the whores offering the “cutthroat discount” after midnight to promote business). The old wizard had fallen asleep to the rhythm of his camel’s loping gait, an act that nearly baffled Joshua as much as the whole demon business, as he spent most of his time on camelback trying not to upchuck—seasickness of the desert, they call it. Joshua flicked the old man’s leg with the loose end of his camel’s bridle, and the magus came awake snorting.

“What is it? Are we there?”

“Can you control the demon, old man? Are we close enough for you to regain control?”

Balthasar closed his eyes and Joshua thought that he might be going to sleep again, except his hands began to tremble with some unseen effort. After a few seconds he opened his eyes again. “I can’t tell.”

“Well, you could tell that he was out.”

“That was like a wave of pain in my soul. I’m not in intimate contact with the demon at all times. We are probably too far away still.”

“Horses,” Joshua said. “They’ll be faster. Let’s go wake up the stable master.” Joshua led them through the streets to the stable where we had boarded our camels when we came to town to heal the blinded bandit. There were no lamps burning inside, but a half-naked whore posed seductively in the doorway.

“Special for cutthroats,” she said in Latin. “Two for one, but no refunds if the old man can’t do the business.”

It had been so long since he’d heard the language that it took Joshua a second to respond. “Thank you, but we’re not cutthroats,” Joshua said. He stepped past her and pounded on the door. She ran a fingernail down his back as he waited.

“What are you? Maybe there’s another special.”

Joshua didn’t even look back. “He’s a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old wizard and I’m either the Messiah or a hopeless faker.”

“Uh, yeah, I think there is a special rate for fakers, but the wizard has to pay full price.”

Joshua could hear stirring inside of the stable master’s house and a voice calling for him to hold his horses, which is what stable masters always say when they make you wait. Joshua turned to the whore and touched her gently on the forehead.

“Go, and sin no more,” he said in Latin.

“Right, and what do I do for a living then, shovel shit?”

Just then the stable master threw open the door. He was short and bowlegged and wore a long mustache that made him look like a dried-up catfish. “What is so important that my wife couldn’t handle it?”

“Your wife?”

The whore ran her nail across the back of Joshua’s neck as she passed him and stepped into the house. “Missed your chance,” she said.

“Woman, what are you doing out here anyway?” asked the stable master.

Joy scurried out onto the landing and pulled a short, broad-bladed black dagger from the folds of her robe. The ends of the rope ladder were swaying in front of her as the monster descended.

“No, Joy,” I said, reaching out to pull her back into the cave. “You can’t hurt it.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

She turned and grinned at me, then ran the dagger twice over the thick ropes on one side leaving it attached by only a few fibers, then she reached up a few rungs and sliced most of the way through the other side of the ladder. I couldn’t believe how easily she’d cut through the rope.

She stepped back into the passageway and held the blade up so it caught the starlight. “Glass,” she said, “from a volcano. It’s a thousand times sharper than any edge on an iron blade.” She put the dagger away and pulled me back into the passageway, just far enough so we could see the entrance and the landing.

I could hear the monster coming closer, then a huge clawed foot appeared in silhouette in the entrance, then the other foot. We held our breath as the monster reached the cut section of the ladder. Nearly a whole massive thigh was visible now, and one of his talonlike hands was reaching down for a new hold when the ladder snapped. Suddenly the monster hung sideways, swinging from his hold on a single rope in front of the entrance. He looked right at us, the fury in his yellow eyes replaced for a moment by confusion. His leathery bat ears rose in curiosity, and he said, “Hey?” Then the second rope snapped and he plunged out of our view.

We ran out to the landing and looked over the edge. It was at least a thousand feet to the floor of the valley. We could only see several hundred feet down in the dark, but it was several hundred feet of cliff face that was conspicuously monsterless.

“Nice,” I said to Joy.

“We need to go. Now.”

“You don’t think that did it?”

“Did you hear anything hit bottom?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither did I,” she said. “We had better get going.”

We’d left the water skins at the top of the plateau and Joy wanted to grab some from the kitchen but I dragged her toward the front entrance by the collar. “We need to get as far away from here as we can. Dying of thirst is the least of my worries.” Once we were in the main area of the fortress there was enough light to negotiate the hallways without a lamp, which was good, because I wouldn’t let Joy stop to light one. As we rounded the stairway to the third level Joy jerked me back, almost off my feet, and I turned around as mad as a cat.

“What? Let’s get out of here!” I screamed at her.

“No, this is the last level with windows. I’m not going through the front door not knowing if that thing is outside it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it would take a man on a fast horse a half hour to make it around from the other side.”

“But what if it didn’t fall all the way? What if it climbed back up?”

“That would take hours. Come on, Joy. We could be miles away from here by the time he gets here from the other side.”

“No!” She swept my feet out from under me and I landed flat on my back on the stone floor. By the time I was on my feet again she had run through the front chamber and was hanging out the window. As I approached her she held her finger to her lips. “It’s down there, waiting.”

I pulled her aside and looked down. Sure enough, the beast was looming in front of the iron door, waiting to grab the edge in its claws and rip it open as soon as we threw the bolts.

“Maybe it can’t get in,” I whispered. “It couldn’t get through the other iron door.”

“You didn’t understand the symbols all over that room, did you?”

I shook my head.

“They were containment symbols—to contain a djinn, or a demon. The front door doesn’t have any on it. It won’t hold him back.”

“So why isn’t he coming in?”

“Why chase us when we will come right to him?”

Just then the monster looked up and I threw myself back from the window.

“I don’t think he saw me,” I whispered, spraying Joy with spit.

Then the monster began to whistle. It was a happy tune, lighthearted, something like you might whistle while you were polishing the bleached skull of your latest victim. “I’m not stalking anyone or anything,” the monster said, much louder than would have been required had he been talking to himself. “Nope, not me. Just standing here for a second. Oh well, no one is here, I guess I’ll be on my way.” He began to whistle again and we could hear footsteps getting quieter along with the whistling. They weren’t moving away, they were just getting quieter. Joy and I looked out the window to see the huge beast doing an exaggerated pantomime of walking, just as his whistle fizzled.

“What?” I shouted down, angry now. “Did you think we wouldn’t look?”

The monster shrugged. “It was worth a try. I figured I wasn’t dealing with a genius when you opened the door in the first place.”

“What’d he say? What’d he say?” Joy chanted behind me.

“He said he doesn’t think you’re very smart.”

“Tell him that I’m not the one who has spent all these years locked in the dark playing with myself.”

I pulled back from the window and looked at Joy. “Do you think he could fit though this window?”

She eyed the window. “Yes.”

“Then I’m not going to tell him. It might make him angry.”

Joy pushed me aside, stepped up on the windowsill, turned around and faced me, then pulled up her robe and peed backward out the window. Her balance was amazing. From the growling below, I gathered that her accuracy wasn’t bad either. She finished and jumped down. I looked out the window at the monster, who was shaking urine from its ears like a wet dog.

“Sorry,” I said, “language problem. I didn’t know how to translate.”

The monster growled and the muscles in its shoulders tensed beneath the scales, then it let loose with a punch that sent its fist completely through the iron skin of the door.

“Run,” Joy said.

“Where?”

“The passage to the cliff.”

“You cut the ladder.”

“Just run.” She pulled me along behind her, guiding us through the dark as she had before. “Duck,” she shouted, just a second after I realized that we’d entered the smaller passageway by using the sensitive stone-ceiling-sensing nerves in my forehead. We made it halfway down the passageway to the cliff when I heard the monster hit and curse.

There was a pause, then a horrible grinding noise so intense that we had to shield our ears from the assault. Then came the smell of burning flesh.

Dawn broke just as Joshua and Balthasar rode into the canyon entrance to the fortress.

“How about now?” Joshua asked. “Do you feel the demon now?”

Balthasar shook his head balefully. “We’re too late.” He pointed to where the great round door had once stood. Now it was a pile of bent and broken pieces hanging on what was left of the huge hinges.

“What in the name of Satan have you done?” Joshua said. He jumped off his horse and ran into the fortress, leaving the old man to follow as best he could.

The noise in the narrow passageway was so intense that I cut pieces of cloth from my sleeves with Joy’s dagger and stuffed them in our ears. Then I lit one of the fire sticks to see what the monster was doing. Joy and I stood there, gaped-jawed, watching as the beast worried away at the stone of the passage, his claws moving in a blur of speed, throwing smoke and dust and stone shards into the air as he went, his scales burning from the friction and growing back as fast as they burned away. He hadn’t come far, perhaps five feet toward us, but eventually he would widen the passage enough and pull us out like a badger digging termites out of the nest. I could see now how the fortress had been built without tool marks. The creature moved so quickly—literally wearing away the walls with his claws and scales—that the stone was polished as it was cut.

We had already made two ascents up what was left of the ladder to the top of the plateau, only to have the monster come around and chase us back down it before we could get to the road. The second time he pulled the ladder up, then returned to the interior of the fortress to resume his hellish digging.

“I’ll jump before I’ll let that thing get me,” I said to Joy.

She looked over the edge of the cliff into the endless darkness below. “You do that,” she said. “Let me know how it goes.”

“I will, but first I’ll pray.” And I did. I prayed so hard that beads of sweat popped out on my forehead and ran over my tightly closed eyes. I prayed so hard that even the constant screeching of the monster’s scales against the stone was drowned out. For a moment there, I was sure that it was just me and God. As was his habit with me, God remained quiet, and I suddenly realized how frustrated Joshua must have been, asking always for a path to follow, a course of action, and being answered by nothing but silence.

When I opened my eyes again dawn had broken over the cliff and light was streaming into the passageway. By full daylight the demon was even scarier. There was blood and gore all over him from the massacre of the girls, and even as he relentlessly wore away at the stone, flies buzzed around him, but as each tried to light on him it died instantly and fell to the floor. The stench of rotting flesh and burning scales was almost overwhelming, and that alone nearly sent me over the side of the cliff. The beast was only three or four cubits out of reach from us, and every few minutes he would rear back, then throw his claw forward to try and grab at us.

Joy and I huddled on the landing over the cliff face, looking for any purchase, any handhold that would get us away from the beast: up, down, or sideways across the cliff face. The fear of heights had suddenly become very minor.

I was beginning to be able to feel the breeze from the monster’s talons as he lunged into the narrow opening at us when I heard Balthasar’s deep bass shout from behind the beast. The monster filled the whole opening so I couldn’t see behind it, but he turned around and his spade-tipped tail whipped around us, nearly lacerating our skin as it passed. Joy drew the glass knife from her robe and slashed at the tail, nicking the scales but apparently not causing the monster enough trouble to turn around.

“Balthasar will tame you, you son of a shit-eating lizard!” Joy screamed.

Just then something came shooting through the opening and we ducked out of the way as it sailed into space and fell out of sight to the canyon floor, screeching like a falcon on the dive.

“What was that?” Joy was trying to squint into infinity to see what the monster had thrown.

“That was Balthasar,” I said.

“Oops,” said Joy.

Joshua yanked the great spade-tipped tail and the demon swung around with a ferocious snarl. Joshua held on to the tail even as the demon’s claws whistled by his face.

“What is your name, demon?” Joshua said.

“You won’t live long enough to say it,” said the demon. He raised his claw again to strike.

Joshua yanked his tail and the demon froze. “No. That’s not right. What is your name?”

“My name is Catch,” said the demon, dropping his arm to his side in surrender. “I know you. You’re the kid, aren’t you? They used to talk about you in the old days.”

“Time for you to go home,” Joshua said.

“Can’t I eat those two outside on the ledge first?”

“No. Satan awaits you.”

“They are really irritating. She peed on me.”

“No.”

“I’d be doing you a favor.”

“You don’t want to hurt them now, do you?”

The demon laid his ears back and bowed his enormous head. “No. I don’t want to hurt them.”

“You’re not angry anymore,” Joshua said.

The monster shook his head, he was already bent nearly double in the narrow passage, but now he prostrated himself before Joshua and covered his eyes with his claws.

“Well, I’m still angry!” Balthasar screamed. Joshua turned to see the old man covered with blood and dirt, his clothes torn from where his broken bones had ripped through them on impact. He was healed now, only minutes after the fall, but not much better for having made the trip.

“You survived that fall?”

“I told you, as long as the demon is on earth, I’m immortal. But that was a first, he’s never been able to hurt me before.”

“He won’t again.”

“You have control over him? Because I don’t.”

Joshua turned around and put his hand on the demon’s head. “This evil creature once beheld the face of God. This monster once served in heaven, obtained beauty, lived in grace, walked in light. Now he is the instrument of suffering. He is hideous of aspect and twisted in nature.”

“Hey, watch it,” said the demon.

“What I was going to say is that you can’t blame him for what he is. He has never had what you or any other human has had. He has never had free will.”

“That is so sad,” said the demon.

“One moment, Catch, I will let you taste that which you have never known. For one moment I will grant you free will.”

The demon sobbed. Joshua took his hand from the demon’s head, then dropped his tail and walked out of the narrow passageway into the fortress hall.

Balthasar stood beside him, waiting for the demon to emerge from the passageway.

“Are you really able to do that? Give him free will?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

Catch crawled out of the passageway and stood up, now just ducking his head. Great viscous tears rolled down his scaled cheeks, over his jaws, and dripped to the stone floor, where they sizzled like acid. “Thank you,” he growled.

“Free will,” Balthasar said. “How does that make you feel?”

The demon snatched up the old man like a rag doll and tucked him under his arm. “It makes me feel like throwing you off the fucking cliff again.”

“No,” said Joshua. He leapt forward and touched the demon’s chest. In that instant the air popped as the vacuum where the demon had stood was filled. Balthasar fell to the floor and groaned.

“Well, that free will thing wasn’t such a great idea,” said Balthasar.

“Sorry. Compassion got the better of me.”

“I don’t feel well,” the magus said. He sat down hard on the floor and let out a long dry rasp of breath.

Joy and I came out of the passage to find Joshua bent over Balthasar, who was actively aging as we looked on.

“He’s two hundred and sixty years old,” Joshua said. “With Catch gone, his age is catching up.”

The wizard’s skin had gone ashen and the whites of his eyes were yellow. Joy sat on the floor and gently cradled the old man’s head in her lap.

“Where’s the monster?” I asked.

“Back in hell,” Joshua said. “Help me get Balthasar to his bed. I’ll explain later.”

We carried Balthasar to his bedchamber, where Joy tried to pour some broth into him, but he fell asleep with the bowl at his lips.

“Can you help him?” I asked no one in particular.

Joy shook her head. “He’s not sick. He’s just old.”

“It is written, ‘To every thing there is a season,’” Joshua said. “I can’t change the seasons. Balthasar’s time has come round at last.” Then he looked at Joy and raised his eyebrows. “You peed on the demon?”

“He had no right to complain. Before I came here I knew a man in Hunan who’d pay good money for that.”

Balthasar lingered for ten more days, toward the end looking more like a skeleton wrapped in old leather than a man. In his last days he begged Joshua to forgive him his vanity and he called us to his bedside over and over to tell us the same things, as he would forget what he’d told us only a few hours before.

“You will find Gaspar in the Temple of the Celestial Buddha, in the mountains to the east. There is a map in the library. Gaspar will teach you. He is truly a wise man, not a charlatan like me. He will help you become the man you need to be to do what you must do, Joshua. And Biff, well, you might not turn out terrible. It’s cold where you are going. Buy furs along the way, and trade the camels for the woolly ones with two humps.”

“He’s delirious,” I said.

Joy said, “No, there really are woolly camels with two humps.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Joshua,” Balthasar called. “If nothing else, remember the three jewels.” Then the old man closed his eyes and stopped breathing.

“He dead?” I asked.

Joshua put his ear to the old man’s heart. “He’s dead.”

“What was that about three jewels?”

“The three jewels of the Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.”

“Sounds wonky,” I said.

“Compassion,” Joshua whispered, nodding toward Joy, who was silently crying over Balthasar.

I put my arm around her shoulders and she turned and sobbed into my chest. “What will I do now? Balthasar is dead. All of my friends are dead. And you two are leaving.”

“Come with us,” Joshua said.

“Uh, sure, come with us.”

But Joy did not come with us. We stayed in Balthasar’s fortress for another six months, waiting for winter to pass before we went into the high mountains to the east. I cleaned the blood from the girls’ quarters while Joy helped Joshua to translate some of Balthasar’s ancient texts. The three of us shared our meals, and occasionally Joy and I would have a tumble for old times’ sake, but it felt as if the life had gone out of the place. When it came time for us to leave, Joy told us of her decision.

“I can’t go with you to find Gaspar. Women are not allowed in the monastery, and I have no desire to live in the backwater village nearby. Balthasar has left me much gold, and everything in the library, but it does me no good out here in the mountains. I will not stay in this tomb with only the ghosts of my friends for company. Soon Ahmad will come, as he does every spring, and I will have him help me take the treasure and the scrolls to Kabul, where I will buy a large house and hire servants and I will have them bring me young boys to corrupt.”

“I wish I had a plan,” I said.

“Me too,” said Josh.

The three of us celebrated Joshua’s eighteenth birthday with the traditional Chinese food, then the next morning Joshua and I packed up the camels and prepared to head east.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right until Ahmad comes?” Joshua asked Joy.

“Don’t worry about me, you go learn to be a Messiah.” She kissed him hard on the lips. He squirmed to get loose from her and he was still blushing as he climbed onto his camel.

“And you,” she said to me, “you will come to see me in Kabul on your way back to Israel or I will put such a curse on you as you’ll never be free of it.” She took the little ying-yang vial full of poison and antidote from around her neck and put it around mine. It might have seemed a strange gift to anyone else, but I was the sorceress’s apprentice and it seemed perfect to me. She tucked the black glass knife into my sash. “No matter how long it takes, come back and see me. I promise I won’t paint you blue again.”

I promised her and we kissed and I climbed on my camel and Joshua and I rode off. I tried not to look back, once again, to another woman who had stolen my heart.

We rode a half a furlong apart, each of us considering the past and future of our lives, who we had been and who we were going to be, and it was a couple of hours before I caught up with Joshua and broke the silence.

I thought of how Joy had taught me to read and speak Chinese, to mix potions and poisons, to cheat at gambling, to perform slight of hand, and where and how to properly touch a woman. All of it without expecting anything in return. “Are all women stronger and better than me?”

“Yes,” he said.

It was another day before we spoke again.