Lamb (12 page)

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.”

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.