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

“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?

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.