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

“Here we go,” I said, pulling the black glass dagger from under my sari. “Take this.”

Joshua looked at the blade shimmering in the torchlight. “I won’t kill anyone,” he said. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, drawing long red lines through the black and if anything making him look more fierce.

“That’s fine, but you’ll need to cut them loose.”

“Right.” He took the knife from me.

“Josh, you know what’s coming. You’ve seen it before. Nobody else here has, especially those kids. You can’t carry all of them, so they have to have enough of their wits about them to follow you. I know you can keep them from being afraid. Put your teeth in.”

Joshua nodded and slipped the row of crocodile teeth attached to a piece of rawhide under his upper lip, leaving the teeth to protrude like fangs. I put in my own false fangs, then ran into the dark to circle the crowd.

As I approached the rear of the altar I pulled the special torch I’d made from under my girdle of human hands. (Actually my girdle of human hands was made of dried goat’s udders stuffed with straw, but the Untouchable women had done a pretty good job as long as no one bothered to count fingers.) Through Kali’s stone legs I could see the priests tying each of the children on the trunk of a wooden elephant. As soon as the bonds were tight, each priest drew a bronze blade and held it aloft, ready to strike off a finger as soon as the high priest gave the signal.

I struck the tip of my torch on the edge of the altar, screamed for all I was worth, then threw my sari off and ran up the steps as the torch burst into dazzling blue flame that trailed sparks behind me as I ran. I hopped across the array of goat heads and stood between the legs of the statue of Kali, my torch held aloft in one hand, one of my severed heads swinging by the hair in the other.

“I am Kali,” I screamed. “Fear me!” It came out sort of mumbled through my fake teeth.

Some of the drums stopped and the high priest turned around and looked at me, more because of the bright light of the torch than my fierce proclamation.

“I am Kali,” I shouted again. “Goddess of destruction and all this disgusting crap you have here!” They weren’t getting it. The priest signaled for the other priests to come around me from the sides. Some of the female acolytes were already trying to make their way across the dance floor of decapitations toward me.

“I mean it. Bow down to me!” The priests charged on. I did have the crowd’s attention, though unfortunately they weren’t cowering in fear at my angry goddessness. I could see Joshua moving around the wooden elephants, the guarding priests having left their posts to come after me. “Really! I mean it!” Maybe it was the teeth. I spit them out toward the nearest of my attackers.

Running across a sea of slick, bloody heads is evidently a pretty difficult task. Not if you’ve spent the last six years of your life hopping from the top of one post to another, even in ice and snow, but for the run-of-the-mill homicidal priest, it’s a tough row to hoe. The priests and acolytes were slipping and sliding among the goat and human heads, falling over each other, smacking into the feet of the statue, one even impaling himself on a goat’s horn when he fell.

One of the priests was only a few feet away from me now, trying not to fall on his own blade as he crawled over the mess. “I will bring destruction…oh, fuck it,” I said. I lit the fuse on the severed head I held in my hand, then swung it between my legs and tossed it in a steep arch over my head. It trailed sparks on its way into the black goddess’s open maw, then disappeared.

I kicked the approaching priest in the jaw, then danced across the goat heads, leapt over the head of the high priest, and was halfway to Joshua at the first wooden elephant when Kali, with a deafening report, breathed fire out over the crowd and the top of her head blew off.

Finally, I had the crowd’s attention. They were trampling each other to get away, but I had their attention. I stood in the middle of the boulevard, swinging my second severed head in a circle, waiting for the fuse to burn down before I let it sail over the heads of the receding crowd. It exploded in the air, sending a circle of flame across the sky and no doubt deafening some of the worshipers who were close.

Joshua had seven of the children around him, clinging to his legs as he moved to the next elephant. Several of the priests had recovered and were storming down the steps of the altar toward me, knives in hand. I pulled another head from my garland, lit the fuse, and held it out to them.

“Ah, ah, ah,” I cautioned. “Kali. Goddess of destruction. Wrath et cetera.”

At the sight of the sparking fuse they stopped and began to backpedal. “Now that’s the sort of respect you should have shown before.”

I started whirling the head by the hair and the priests lost all semblance of courage and turned and ran. I hurled the head back up the boulevard onto the altar, where it exploded, sending a spray of real severed goat heads in all directions.

“Josh! Duck! Goat heads!”

Joshua pushed the children to the ground and fell over them until the pieces settled. He glared at me a second, then went on to free the other children. I hurled three more heads into different directions and now the entire temple square was nearly deserted but for Joshua, the children, a few injured worshipers, and the dead. I had built the bombs without any shrapnel in them, so those who had been injured had been trampled in the panic and the dead were those who had already been sacrificed to Kali. I think we pulled it off without killing anyone.

As Joshua led the children down the wide boulevard and out of the temple square, I covered our exit, backing down the boulevard, my last explosive head swinging in one hand, my torch in the other. Once I saw that Joshua and the children were safely away, I lit the fuse, whirled the head around and let it fly toward the black goddess.

“Bitch,” I said.

I was out of sight when it exploded.

Joshua and I got as far as a limestone cliff overlooking the Ganges before we had to stop to let the children rest. They were tired and hungry, but mostly they were hungry, and we had brought nothing for them to eat. At least, after Joshua’s touch, they weren’t afraid, and that gave them some peace. Josh and I were too jangled to sleep, so we sat up as the children lay down on the rocks around us and snored like kittens. Joshua held Rumi’s little daughter, Vitra, and before long her face was smeared with black paint from nuzzling his shoulder. All through the night, as he rocked the child, all I heard Joshua say was, “No more blood. No more blood.”

At first light we could see thousands, no, tens of thousands of people gathering at the banks of the river, all dressed in white, except for a few old men who were naked. They moved into the water and stood facing east, heads raised in anticipation, dotting the river as far as the eye could see. As the sun became a molten fingernail of light on the horizon, the muddy surface of the river turned golden. The gold light reflected off its surface onto the buildings, the shanties, the trees, the palaces, making everything in sight, including the worshipers, appear to have been gilded. And worshipers they were, for we could hear their songs from where we sat, and although we could not discern the words, we could hear that these were the songs of God.

“Are those the same people from last night?” I said.

“They would have to be, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t understand these people. I don’t understand their religion. I don’t understand how they think.”

Joshua stood and watched the Indians bowing and singing to the dawn, looking occasionally to the face of the child that slept on his shoulder. “This is testament to the glory of God’s creation, whether these people know it or not.”