Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“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.