“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.
“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 on
to 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.”
“How can you say that? The sacrifices to Kali, the way the Untouchables are treated. Whatever they might believe, in practice their religion is hideous.”
“You’re right. It’s not right to condemn this child because she was not born a Brahman?”
“Of course not.”
“Then is it right to condemn her because she is not born a Jew?”
“What do you mean?”
“A man who is born a gentile may not see the kingdom of God. Are we, as Hebrews, any different from them? The lambs at the temple on Passover? The wealth and power of the Sadducees while others go hungry? At least the Untouchables can reach their reward eventually, through karma and rebirth. We don’t allow any gentile to do so.”
“You can’t compare what they do to God’s law. We don’t sacrifice human beings. We feed our poor, we take care of the sick.”
“Unless the sick are unclean,” Joshua said.
“But, Josh, we’re the chosen. It’s God’s will.”
“But is it right? He won’t tell me what to do. So I’ll say. And I say, no more.”
“You’re not just talking about eating bacon, are you?”
“Gautama the Buddha gave the way to people of all births to find the hand of God. With no blood sacrifice. Our doors have been marked with blood for too long, Biff.”
“So that’s what you think you’re going to do? Bring God to everyone?”
“Yes. After a nap.”
“Of course, I meant after a nap.”
Joshua held the little girl so I could see her face as she slept on his shoulder.
When the children awoke we led them back to their families at the pits, handing them into the arms of their mothers, who snatched each child away from us as if we were devils incarnate; they glared over their shoulders as they carried the babies back to their pits.
“Grateful bunch,” I said.
“They are afraid that we’ve angered Kali. And we’ve brought them another hungry mouth.”
“Still. Why did they help us if they didn’t want their children back?”
“Because we told them what to do. That’s what they do. What they are told. That’s how the Brahmans keep them in line. If they do what they are told, then perhaps they will not be Untouchables next life.”
“That’s depressing.”
Joshua nodded. We only had little Vitra to return to her father now, and I was sure that Rumi would be happy to see his daughter. His distress over losing her had basically been the reason he had saved our lives. As we came over the sandstone rise we could see that Rumi was not alone in his pit.
Rumi stood on his sitting rock, stark naked, sprinkling salt on his erect member as a large humpbacked cow, which nearly filled the rest of the pit, licked at the salt. Joshua held Vitra so she faced away from the pit, then backed away, as if he didn’t want to disturb the moment of beefy intimacy.
“A cow, Rumi?” I exclaimed. “I thought you people had beliefs.”
“That’s not a cow, that’s a bull,” Joshua said.
“Oh, that’s got to be your super-bonus abomination there. Where we come from whole cities get destroyed for that kind of thing, Rumi.” I reached over and put my hand over Vitra’s eyes. “Stay away from Daddy, honey, or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.”
“But this is my wife, reincarnated.”
“Oh, don’t try that one on me, Rumi. For six years I lived in a Buddhist monastery where the only female company was a wild yak. I know from desperate.”
Joshua grabbed my arm. “You didn’t?”
“Relax, I’m just making a point. You’re the Messiah here, Josh. What do you think?”
“I think we need to go to Tamil and find the third magus.” He set Vitra down and Rumi quickly pulled up his loincloth as the child ran to him. “Go with God, Rumi,” Joshua said.
“May Shiva watch over you, you heretics. Thank you for returning my daughter.”
Joshua and I gathered up our clothes and satchels, then bought some rice in the market and set out for Tamil. We followed the Ganges south until we came to the sea, where Joshua and I washed the gore of Kali from our bodies.
We sat on the beach, letting the sun dry our skin as we picked pitch out of our chest hairs.
“You know, Josh,” I said, as I fought a particularly stubborn gob of tar that had stuck in my armpit, “when you were leading those kids out of the temple square, and they were so little and weak, but none of them seemed afraid…well, it was sort of heartwarming.”
“Yep, I love all the little children of the world, you know?” “Really?”
He nodded. “Green and yellow, black and white.”
“Good to know—Wait, green?”
“No, not green. I was just fuckin’ with you.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tamil, as it turned out, was not a small town in southern India, but the whole southern peninsula, an area about five times the size of Israel, so looking for Melchior was akin to walking into Jerusalem on any given day and saying, “Hey, I’m looking for a Jewish guy, anyone seen him?” What we had going for us was that we knew Melchior’s occupation, he was an ascetic holy man who lived a nearly solitary life s
omewhere along the coast and that he, like his brother Gaspar, had been the son of a prince. We found hundreds of different holy men, or yogis, most of them living in complete austerity in the forest or in caves, and usually they had twisted their bodies into some impossible posture. The first of these I saw was a yogi who lived in a lean-to on the side of a hill overlooking a small fishing village. He had his feet tucked behind his shoulders and his head seemed to be coming from the wrong end of his torso.
“Josh, look! That guy is trying to lick his own balls! Just like Bartholomew, the village idiot. These are my people, Josh. These are my people. I have found home.”
Well, I hadn’t really found home. The guy was just performing some sort of spiritual discipline (that’s what “yoga” means in Sanskrit: discipline) and he wouldn’t teach me because my intentions weren’t pure or some claptrap. And he wasn’t Melchior. It took six months and the last of our money and we both saw our twenty-fifth birthdays before we found Melchior reclining in a shallow stone nook in a cliff over the ocean. Seagulls were nesting at his feet.
He was a hairier version of his brother, which is to say he was slight, about sixty years old, and he wore a caste mark on his forehead. His hair and beard were long and white, shot with only a few stripes of black, and he had intense dark eyes that seemed to show no white at all. He wore only a loincloth and he was as thin as any of the Untouchables we had met in Kalighat.
Joshua and I clung to the side of the cliff while the guru untied from the human knot he’d gotten himself into. It was a slow process and we pretended to look at the seagulls and enjoy the view so as not to embarrass the holy man by seeming impatient. When he finally achieved a posture that did not appear as if it had been caused by being run over by an ox cart, Joshua said, “We’ve come from Israel. We were six years with your brother Gaspar in the monastery. I am—”
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