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

“Well, you are truly a magus, now, Biff. I’m impressed.”

“Joshua, you healed a hundred people today. Half of them were probably dying. I did some sleight of hand.”

My friend’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “What’s the red stuff, pomegranate juice? I can’t figure out where you concealed it.”

“No, actually I was going to ask you about that.”

“What?”

I held my arm up and showed Joshua where I had slashed my own wrist (the source of blood for the show). I had been holding it against my leg and as soon as I removed the pressure the blood started spurting again. I sat down hard on the sandstone and my vision began to tunnel down to a pinpoint. “I was hoping you could help me out with this,” I said before I fainted.

“You need to work on that part of the trick,” Joshua said when I came to. “I might not always be around to fix your wrist.” He was speaking Hebrew—that meant for my ears only.

I saw Joshua kneeling above me, then beyond him the sky was blotted out by curious brown faces. The recently murdered Nagesh was in the front of the crowd. “Hey, Nagesh, how’d the rebirth go?” I asked in Sanskrit.

“I must have strayed from my dharma in my last life,” Nagesh said. “I have been reincarnated, once again, as an Untouchable. And I have the same ugly wife.”

“You challenged master Levi who is called Biff,” I said, “of course you didn’t move up. You’re lucky you’re not a stink bug or something. See, destruction isn’t the big favor you all thought it was.”

“We brought the things you asked for.”

I hopped to my feet feeling incredibly rested and energized. “Nice,” I said to Joshua. “I feel like I just had one of those strong coffees you used to make at Balthasar’s.”

“I miss coffee,” said Josh.

I looked at Nagesh, “I don’t suppose you…”

“We have swill.”

“Never mind,” I said. Then I said one of those things that as a boy growing up in Galilee, you never think you’ll hear yourself say: “Okay, Untouchables, bring me the sheep bladders!”

Rumi said that the goddess Kali was served by a host of black-skinned female demons, who sometimes during the feast would bring men to corners of the altar and copulate with them as blood rained down from the goddess’s saw-tooth maw above.

“Okay, Josh, you’re one of them,” I said.

“What are you gonna be?”

“The goddess Kali, of course. You got to be God last time.”

“What last time?”

“All of the last times.” I turned to my intrepid minions. “Untouchables, paint him up!”

“They’re not going to buy that a burr-headed Jewish kid is their goddess of destruction.”

“O ye of little faith,” I said.

Three hours later we were again crouched beneath a tree near the temple of Kali. We were both dressed as women, covered from head to toe by our saris, but I was looking much lumpier under mine due to Kali’s extra arms and garland of severed heads, played tonight by painted sheep bladders filled with explosives and suspended around my neck by long strands of elephant tail hair. Any observers who might get close enough to notice my protrusions were quickly deterred by the smell coming off of Joshua and me. We had used the goo from the bottom of Rumi’s pit to paint our bodies black. I didn’t have the courage to ask what the substance had been in life, but if there was a place where they allowed vultures to ripen in the sun before pounding them into a smooth paste and mixing it with just the right amount of buffalo squat, then Rumi called it home. The Untouchables had also painted huge red rings around Joshua’s eyes, fitted him with a ropey wig of oxtails, and affixed to his torso six pert little breasts fashioned from pitch.

“Stay away from any open flame. Your tits will go up like volcanos.”

“Why did I have to have six and you only had to have two.”

“Because I am the goddess and have to wear the garland of skulls and the extra arms.”

We’d made my arms from rawhide, using my primary arms as models, then drying the molded arms in place over the fire. The women made a harness that held the extra arms in place under my own, then we painted the arms black with the same black goo. They were a little wobbly, but they were light and would look realistic enough in the dark.

It was still hours from the height of the ceremony at midnight, when the children would be hacked to death, but we wanted to be there in time to stop the revelers from cutting off the children’s fingers if we could. Now, the wooden elephants were empty on their turntables, but the altar of Kali was already filling with gruesome tribute. The heads of a thousand goats had been laid on the altar before the goddess, and the blood ran slick over the stones and in the grooves that channeled it into large brass pots at the corners of the altar. Female acolytes carried the pots up a narrow ladder at the back of the great statue of Kali, then dumped them through some sort of reservoir that fed it through the goddess’s jaws. Below, by torchlight, worshipers danced in the sticky shower as the blood flowed down upon them.

“Look, those women are dressed like me,” Joshua said. “Except they only have two breasts each.”

“Technically, they’re not dressed, they’re painted. You make a very attractive female demon, Josh. Did I tell you that?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“Of course it’s going to work.”

I guessed that there were already ten thousand worshipers in the temple square, dancing, chanting, and beating drums. A procession of thirty men came down the main boulevard, each carrying a basket under his arm. As they reached the altar, each man dumped the contents of the basket over the rows of bloody goat heads.

“What are those?” Joshua asked.

“Those are exactly what you think they are.”

“They’re not the heads of the children?”

“No, I think those are the heads of strangers who happened down the road we were on before Rumi came along to pull us into the grass.”

After the severed heads were dispersed across the altar, the female acolytes came out of the crowd dragging the headless corpse of a man, which they laid on the steps leading to the altar. Each one mimed having intercourse with the corpse, then rubbed their genitalia against the bloody stump of its neck before dancing away, blood and ochre dripping down the insides of their thighs.

“There’s sort of a theme developing here,” I said.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Joshua said.

“Mindful breath,” I said, using one of the phrases that Gaspar was always barking at us when we were learning meditation. I knew that if Joshua could stay with the yeti for days at a time without freezing to death, he could certainly conjure up the bodily control to keep from throwing up. The sheer magnitude of the carnage was all that was keeping me from vomiting. It was as if the atrocity of the whole scene couldn’t fit in my mind all at once, so I could only see just enough for my sanity and my stomach to remain intact.

A shout went up in the crowd now and I could see a torch-lit sedan chair being carried above the heads of the worshipers. On it reclined a half-naked man with a tiger skin wrapped around his hips, his skin painted light gray with ashes. His hair was plaited with grease and he wore the bones of a human hand as a skullcap. Around his neck hung a necklace of human skulls.

“High priest,” I said.

“They aren’t even going to notice you, Biff. How can you even get their attention after they’ve seen all this?”

“They haven’t seen what I’m going to show them.”

As the sedan chair emerged from the crowd in front of the altar, we could see a procession following it: tied to the back of the sedan chair was a line of naked children, most of them not more than five or six, their hands tied together, a less ornately dressed priest on either side of them to steady them. The priests began to untie the children and take them to the great wooden elephants lining the boulevard. Here and there in the crowd I could see people beginning to brandish edged weapons: short swords, axes, and the long-bladed spears Joshua and I had seen over the elephant grass. The high priest was sitting on the headless corpse, shouting a poem about the divine release of Kali’s destruction or something.