Lamb (18 page)

“No.”

“I’d be doing you a favor.”

“You don’t want to hurt them now, do you?”

The demon laid his ears back and bowed his enormous head. “No. I don’t want to hurt them.”

“You’re not angry anymore,” Joshua said.

The monster shook his head, he was already bent nearly double in the narrow passage, but now he prostrated himself before Joshua and covered his eyes with his claws.

“Well, I’m still angry!” Balthasar screamed. Joshua turned to see the old man covered with blood and dirt, his clothes torn from where his broken bones had ripped through them on impact. He was healed now, only minutes after the fall, but not much better for having made the trip.

“You survived that fall?”

“I told you, as long as the demon is on earth, I’m immortal. But that was a first, he’s never been able to hurt me before.”

“He won’t again.”

“You have control over him? Because I don’t.”

Joshua turned around and put his hand on the demon’s head. “This evil creature once beheld the face of God. This monster once served in heaven, obtained beauty, lived in grace, walked in light. Now he is the instrument of suffering. He is hideous of aspect and twisted in nature.”

“Hey, watch it,” said the demon.

“What I was going to say is that you can’t blame him for what he is. He has never had what you or any other human has had. He has never had free will.”

“That is so sad,” said the demon.

“One moment, Catch, I will let you taste that which you have never known. For one moment I will grant you free will.”

The demon sobbed. Joshua took his hand from the demon’s head, then dropped his tail and walked out of the narrow passageway into the fortress hall.

Balthasar stood beside him, waiting for the demon to emerge from the passageway.

“Are you really able to do that? Give him free will?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

Catch crawled out of the passageway and stood up, now just ducking his head. Great viscous tears rolled down his scaled cheeks, over his jaws, and dripped to the stone floor, where they sizzled like acid. “Thank you,” he growled.

“Free will,” Balthasar said. “How does that make you feel?”

The demon snatched up the old man like a rag doll and tucked him under his arm. “It makes me feel like throwing you off the fucking cliff again.”

“No,” said Joshua. He leapt forward and touched the demon’s chest. In that instant the air popped as the vacuum where the demon had stood was filled. Balthasar fell to the floor and groaned.

“Well, that free will thing wasn’t such a great idea,” said Balthasar.

“Sorry. Compassion got the better of me.”

“I don’t feel well,” the magus said. He sat down hard on the floor and let out a long dry rasp of breath.

Joy and I came out of the passage to find Joshua bent over Balthasar, who was actively aging as we looked on.

“He’s two hundred and sixty years old,” Joshua said. “With Catch gone, his age is catching up.”

The wizard’s skin had gone ashen and the whites of his eyes were yellow. Joy sat on the floor and gently cradled the old man’s head in her lap.

“Where’s the monster?” I asked.

“Back in hell,” Joshua said. “Help me get Balthasar to his bed. I’ll explain later.”

We carried Balthasar to his bedchamber, where Joy tried to pour some broth into him, but he fell asleep with the bowl at his lips.

“Can you help him?” I asked no one in particular.

Joy shook her head. “He’s not sick. He’s just old.”

“It is written, ‘To every thing there is a season,’” Joshua said. “I can’t change the seasons. Balthasar’s time has come round at last.” Then he looked at Joy and raised his eyebrows. “You peed on the demon?”

“He had no right to complain. Before I came here I knew a man in Hunan who’d pay good money for that.”

Balthasar lingered for ten more days, toward the end looking more like a skeleton wrapped in old leather than a man. In his last days he begged Joshua to forgive him his vanity and he called us to his bedside over and over to tell us the same things, as he would forget what he’d told us only a few hours before.

“You will find Gaspar in the Temple of the Celestial Buddha, in the mountains to the east. There is a map in the library. Gaspar will teach you. He is truly a wise man, not a charlatan like me. He will help you become the man you need to be to do what you must do, Joshua. And Biff, well, you might not turn out terrible. It’s cold where you are going. Buy furs along the way, and trade the camels for the woolly ones with two humps.”

“He’s delirious,” I said.

Joy said, “No, there really are woolly camels with two humps.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Joshua,” Balthasar called. “If nothing else, remember the three jewels.” Then the old man closed his eyes and stopped breathing.

“He dead?” I asked.

Joshua put his ear to the old man’s heart. “He’s dead.”

“What was that about three jewels?”

“The three jewels of the Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.”

“Sounds wonky,” I said.

“Compassion,” Joshua whispered, nodding toward Joy, who was silently crying over Balthasar.

I put my arm around her shoulders and she turned and sobbed into my chest. “What will I do now? Balthasar is dead. All of my friends are dead. And you two are leaving.”

“Come with us,” Joshua said.

“Uh, sure, come with us.”

But Joy did not come with us. We stayed in Balthasar’s fortress for
another six months, waiting for winter to pass before we went into the high mountains to the east. I cleaned the blood from the girls’ quarters while Joy helped Joshua to translate some of Balthasar’s ancient texts. The three of us shared our meals, and occasionally Joy and I would have a tumble for old times’ sake, but it felt as if the life had gone out of the place. When it came time for us to leave, Joy told us of her decision.

“I can’t go with you to find Gaspar. Women are not allowed in the monastery, and I have no desire to live in the backwater village nearby. Balthasar has left me much gold, and everything in the library, but it does me no good out here in the mountains. I will not stay in this tomb with only the ghosts of my friends for company. Soon Ahmad will come, as he does every spring, and I will have him help me take the treasure and the scrolls to Kabul, where I will buy a large house and hire servants and I will have them bring me young boys to corrupt.”

“I wish I had a plan,” I said.

“Me too,” said Josh.

The three of us celebrated Joshua’s eighteenth birthday with the traditional Chinese food, then the next morning Joshua and I packed up the camels and prepared to head east.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right until Ahmad comes?” Joshua asked Joy.

“Don’t worry about me, you go learn to be a Messiah.” She kissed him hard on the lips. He squirmed to get loose from her and he was still blushing as he climbed onto his camel.

“And you,” she said to me, “you will come to see me in Kabul on your way back to Israel or I will put such a curse on you as you’ll never be free of it.” She took the little ying-yang vial full of poison and antidote from around her neck and put it around mine. It might have seemed a strange gift to anyone else, but I was the sorceress’s apprentice and it seemed perfect to me. She tucked the black glass knife into my sash. “No matter how long it takes, come back and see me. I promise I won’t paint you blue again.”

I promised her and we kissed and I climbed on my camel and Joshua and I rode off. I tried not to look back, once again, to another woman who had stolen my heart.

We rode a half a furlong apart, each of us considering the past and
future of our lives, who we had been and who we were going to be, and it was a couple of hours before I caught up with Joshua and broke the silence.

I thought of how Joy had taught me to read and speak Chinese, to mix potions and poisons, to cheat at gambling, to perform slight of hand, and where and how to properly touch a woman. All of it without expecting anything in return. “Are all women stronger and better than me?”

“Yes,” he said.

It was another day before we spoke again.

Torah! Torah! Torah!

WAR CRY OF THE KAMIKAZE RABBIS

We were twelve days into our journey, following Balthasar’s meticulously drawn map, when we came to the wall.

“So,” I said, “what do you think of the wall?”

“It’s great,” said Joshua.

“It’s not that great,” I said.

There was a long line waiting to get through the giant gate, where scores of bureaucrats collected taxes from caravan masters as they passed through. The gatehouses alone were each as big as one of Herod’s palaces, and soldiers rode horses atop the wall, patrolling far into the distance. We were a good league back from the gate and the line didn’t seem to be moving.

“This is going to take all day,” I said. “Why would they build such a thing? If you can build a wall like this then you ought to be able to raise an army large enough to defeat any invaders.”

“Lao-tzu built this wall,” Joshua said.

“The old master who wrote the Tao? I don’t think so.”

“What does the Tao value above all else?”

“Compassion? Those other two jewel things?”

“No, inaction. Contemplation. Steadiness. Conservatism. A wall is the defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That’s why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can’t be free without action.”

“So he spent all that time teaching us the Tao so we could see that it was wrong.”

“No, not wrong. Not all of it. The compassion, humility, and
moderation of the Tao, these are the qualities of a righteous man, but not inaction. These people are slaves to inaction.”

“You worked as a stonecutter, Josh,” I said, nodding toward the massive wall. “You think this wall was built through inaction?”

“The magus wasn’t teaching us about action as in work, it was action as in change. That’s why we learned Confucius first—everything having to do with the order of our fathers, the law, manners. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won’t break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon. That’s what Balthasar was trying to teach me.”

“I’ve said it before, Josh—and you know how I love bacon—but I don’t think bacon is enough for the Messiah to bring.”

“Change,” Joshua said. “A Messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. Balthasar once said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as a conservative hero.’ He was wise, that old man.”

I thought about the old magus as I looked at the wall stretching over the hills, then at the line of travelers ahead of us. A small city had grown up at the entrance to the wall to accommodate the needs of the delayed travelers along the Silk Road and it boiled with merchants hawking food and drink along the line.

“Screw it,” I said. “This is going to take forever. How long can it be? Let’s go around.”

A month later, when we had returned to the same gate and we were standing in line to get through, Joshua asked: “So what do you think of the wall now? I mean, now that we’ve seen so much more of it?”

“I think it’s ostentatious and unpleasant,” I said.

“If they don’t have a name for it, you should suggest that.”

And so it came to pass that through the ages the wall was known as the Ostentatious and Unpleasant Wall of China. At least I hope that’s what happened. It’s not on my Friendly Flyer Miles map, so I can’t be sure.

We could see the mountain where Gaspar’s monastery lay long before we reached it. Like the other peaks around it, it cut the sky like a huge tooth.
Below the mountain was a village surrounded by high pasture. We stopped there to rest and water our camels. The people of the village all came out to greet us and they marveled at our strange eyes and Joshua’s curly hair as if we were gods that had been lowered out of the heavens (which I guess was true in Josh’s case, but you forget about that when you’re around someone a lot). An old toothless woman who spoke a dialect of Chinese similar to the one we had learned from Joy convinced us to leave the camels in the village. She traced the path up the mountain with a craggy finger and it was obvious that the path was both too narrow and too steep to accommodate the animals.

The villagers served us a spicy meat dish with frothy bowls of milk to wash it down. I hesitated and looked at Joshua. The Torah forbade us to eat meat and dairy at the same meal.

“I’m thinking this is a lot like the bacon thing,” Joshua said. “I really don’t feel that the Lord cares if we wash down our yak with a bowl of milk.”

“Yak?”

“That’s what this is. The old woman told me.”

“Well, sin or not, I’m not eating it. I’ll just drink the milk.”

“It’s yak milk too.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“Use your own judgment, it served you so well in the past, like, oh, when you decided we should go around the wall.”

“You know,” I said, weary of having the whole wall thing brought up again, “I never said you could use sarcasm whenever you wanted to. I think you’re using my invention in ways that it was never intended to be used.”

“Like against you?”

“See? See what I mean?”

We left the village early the next morning, carrying only some rice balls, our waterskins, and what little money we had left. We left our three camels in the care of the toothless old woman, who promised to take care of them until we returned. I would miss them. They were the spiffy double-humpers we’d picked up in Kabul and they were comfortable to ride, but more important, none of them had ever tried to bite me.

“They’re going to eat our camels, you know? We won’t be gone an hour before one of them is turning on a spit.”

“They won’t eat the camels.” Joshua, forever believing in the goodness of human beings.

“They don’t know what they are. They think that they’re just tall food. They’re going to eat them. The only meat they ever get is yak.”

“You don’t even know what a yak is.”

“Do too,” I said, but the air was getting thin and I was too tired to prove myself at the time.

The sun was going down behind the mountains when we finally reached the monastery. Except for a huge wooden gate with a small hatch in it, it was constructed entirely of the same black basalt as the mountain on which it stood. It looked more like a fortress than a place of worship.

“Makes you wonder if all three of your magi live in fortresses, doesn’t it?”

“Hit the gong,” said Joshua. There was a bronze gong hanging outside the door with a padded drumstick standing next to it and a sign in a language that we couldn’t read.

I hit the gong. We waited. I hit the gong again. And we waited. The sun went down and it began to get very cold on the mountainside. I rang the gong three times loud. We ate our rice balls and drank most of our water and waited. I pounded the bejezus out of the gong and the hatch opened. A dim light from inside the gate illuminated the smooth cheeks of a Chinese man about our age. “What?” he said in Chinese.

“We are here to see Gaspar,” I said. “Balthasar sent us.”

“Gaspar sees no one. Your aspect is dim and your eyes are too round.” He slammed the little hatch.

This time Joshua pounded on the gong until the monk returned.

“Let me see that drumstick,” the monk said, holding his hand out through the little port.

Joshua gave him the drumstick and stepped back.

“Go away and come back in the morning,” the monk said.

“But we’ve traveled all day,” Joshua said. “We’re cold and hungry.”

“Life is suffering,” the monk said. He slammed the little door, leaving us in almost total darkness.

“Maybe that’s what you’re supposed to learn,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“No, we wait,” said Joshua.

In the morning, after Joshua and I had slept against the great gate, huddled together to conserve warmth, the monk opened the little hatch. “You still here?” He couldn’t see us, as we were directly below the window.

“Yes,” I said. “Can we see Gaspar now?”

He craned his neck out the hatch, then pulled it back in and produced a small wooden bowl, from which he poured water on our heads. “Go away. Your feet are misshapen and your eyebrows grow together in a threatening way.”

“But…”

He slammed the hatch. And so we spent the day outside the gate, me wanting to go down the mountain, Joshua insisting that we wait. There was frost in our hair when we woke the next morning, and I felt my very bones aching. The monk opened the hatch just after first light.

“You are so stupid that the village idiots’ guild uses you as a standard for testing,” said the monk.

“Actually, I’m a member of the village idiots’ guild,” I retorted.

“In that case,” said the monk, “go away.”

I cursed eloquently in five languages and was beginning to tear at my hair in frustration when I spotted something large moving in the sky overhead. As it got closer, I saw that it was the angel, wearing his aspect of black robe and wings. He carried a flaming bundle of sticks and pitch, which trailed a trail of flames and thick black smoke behind him in the sky. When he had passed over us several times, he flew off over the horizon, leaving a smoky pattern of Chinese characters that spelled out a message across the sky:
SURRENDER DOROTHY
.

The entire two-story structure that was the monastery was fashioned of rough stone, none larger than could have been lifted into place by a single man. The rear of the building was built right into the mountainside. The structure seemed to have been built under an existing overhang in the rock, so there was minimal roofing exposed to the elements. What did show was made of terra-cotta tiles that lay on a steep incline, obviously to shed any buildup of snow.

A short and hairless monk wearing a saffron-colored robe led us across an outer courtyard paved with flagstone through an austere doorway into the monastery. The floor inside was stone, and though immaculately clean, it was no more finished than the flagstone of the courtyard. There were only a few windows, more like arrow slits, cut high in the wall, and little light penetrated the interior once the front door was closed. The air was thick with incense and filled with a buzzing chorus of male voices producing a rhythmic chant that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once and made it seem as if my ribs and kneecaps were vibrating from the inside. Whatever language they were chanting in I didn’t understand, but the message was clear: these men were invoking something that transcended this world.

The monk led us up a narrow stairway into a long, narrow corridor lined with open doorways no higher than my waist. As we passed I could see that these must be the monks’ cells, and each was just large enough to accommodate a small man lying down. There was a woven mat on the floor and a woolen blanket rolled up at the top of each cell, but there was no evidence of personal possessions nor storage for any. There were no doors to close for privacy. In short, it was very much like what I had grown up with, which didn’t make me feel any better about it. Nearly five years of the relative opulence at Balthasar’s fortress had spoiled me. I yearned for a soft bed and a half-dozen Chinese concubines to hand-feed me and rub my body with fragrant oils. (Well, I said I was spoiled.)

At last the monk led us into a large open chamber with a high stone
ceiling and I realized that we were no longer in a man-made structure, but a large cave. At the far end of the cave was a stone statue of a man seated cross-legged, his eyes closed, his hands before him with the first fingers and thumbs forming closed circles. Lit by the orange light of candles, a haze of incense smoke hanging about his shaved head, he appeared to be praying. The monk, our guide, disappeared into the darkness at the sides of the cave and Joshua and I approached the statue cautiously, stepping carefully across the rough floor of the cave.