Lamb

by Christopher Moore

  “Thieves,” he said to us breathlessly as he passed. Then he went to a little girl with a withered arm who had been waiting beside Judas.

  “Pretty scary, huh?” Joshua said to her.

  She nodded. Joshua put his hands over her withered arm.

  “Are those guys in the tall hats coming over here?”

  She nodded again.

  “Here, can you make this sign with your finger?”

  He showed her how to stick out her middle finger. “No, not with that hand, with this one.”

  Joshua took his hand away from her withered arm and she wiggled her fingers. The muscle and tendons had filled out until it looked identical to her other arm.

  “Now,” Joshua said, “make that sign. That’s good. Now show it to those guys behind me with the tall hats. That’s a good girl.”

  “By whose authority do you perform these healings,” said one of the priests, obviously the highest-ranking of the group.

  “No master—” Simon began to shout but he was cut off by a vicious blow to the solar plexus from Peter, who then pushed the Zealot to the ground and sat on him while furiously whispering in his ear. Andrew had come up behind Judas and seemed to be delivering a similar lecture without benefit of the body blow.

  Josh took a little boy from his mother’s arms and held him. The boy’s legs waved in the air as if they had no bones at all. Without looking away from the boy, Joshua said, “By what authority did John baptize?”

  The priests looked around among themselves. The crowd moved in closer. We were in Judea, John’s territory. The priests knew better than to challenge John’s authority under God in front of a crowd this size, but they certainly weren’t going to confirm it for Joshua’s sake, either. “We can’t say at this time,” said the priest.

  “Then I can’t say either,” said Joshua. He stood the little boy on his feet and held him steady as the boy’s legs took his full weight, probably for the first time ever. The boy wobbled like a newborn colt and Joshua caught him and laughed. He took the boy’s shoulders and helped him walk back to his mother, then he turned on the priests and looked at them for the first time.

  “You would test me? Test me. Ask me what you will, you vipers, but I will heal these people and they shall know the word of God in spite of you.”

  Philip had moved up behind me during this speech and he whispered, “Can’t you knock him out or something with your methods from the East? We have to get him out of here before he says any more.”

  “I think we’re too late, John,” I said. “Just don’t let the crowd disperse. Go out into the city and bring more. The crowd is his only protection now. And find Joseph of Arimathea too. He might be able to help if this gets out of hand.”

  “This isn’t out of hand?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  The inquisition went on for two hours, with the priests concocting every verbal trap they could think of, and Joshua wiggling out sometimes, and blundering through at others. I looked for some way to get Joshua out of the Temple without him being arrested, but the more I looked, the more I noticed that the guards had moved down off the walls and were hovering around the gates to the courtyard.

  Meanwhile the chief priest droned on: “A man dies and leaves no sons, but his wife marries his brother, who has three sons by his first wife…[and on] The three of them leave Jericho and head south, going three point three furlongs per hour, but they are leading two donkeys, which can carry two…[and on] So the Sabbath ends, and they are able to resume, adding on the thousand steps allowed under the law…and the wind is blowing southwest at two furlongs per hour…[and on] How much water will be required for the journey? Give your answer in firkins.”

  “Five,” Joshua said, as soon as they stopped speaking. And all were amazed.

  The crowd roared. A woman shouted, “Surely he is the Messiah.”

  “The Son of God has come,” said another.

  “You guys aren’t helping,” I shouted back at them.

  “You didn’t show your work, you didn’t show your work,” chanted the youngest of the priests.

  Judas and Matthew had been scratching out the problem on the paving stones of the courtyard as the priest recited, but they had long since lost track. They looked up and shook their heads.

  “Five,” Joshua repeated.

  The priests looked around among themselves. “That’s right, but that doesn’t give you authority to heal in the Temple.”

  “In three days, there will be no Temple, for I’ll destroy it, and you nest of vipers with it. And three days after that, a new Temple shall be built in honor of my father.”

  And then I grabbed him around the chest and started dragging him toward the gate. The other apostles followed the plan and moved around us in a wedge. Beyond that, the crowd pressed in. Hundreds moved along with us.

  “Wait, I’m not done!” Joshua yelled.

  “Yes you are.”

  “Surely the true king of Israel has come to bring forth the kingdom,” one woman shouted.

  Peter smacked her on the back of the head. “Stop helping.”

  By the sheer mass of the crowd we were able to get Joshua out of the Temple and through the streets to Joseph of Arimathea’s house.

  Joseph let us in and led us to the upper room, which had a high arched stone ceiling, rich carpets on the floors and walls, piles of cushions, and a long low table for dining. “You’re safe here, but I don’t know for how long. They’ve already called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.”

  “But we just left the Temple,” I said. “How?”

  “You should have let them take me,” Joshua said.

  “The table will be set for the Passover feast of the Essenes,” Joseph said. “Stay here for supper.”

  “Celebrate the Passover early? Why?” John asked. “Why celebrate with the Essenes?”

  Joseph looked away from Joshua when he answered. “Because at the Essenes’ feast, they don’t kill a lamb.”

  Tuesday

  We all slept that night in the upper room of Joseph’s house. In the morning Joshua went downstairs. He was gone for a bit, then came back up the stairs.

  “They won’t let me leave,” he said.

  “They?”

  “The apostles. My own apostles won’t let me leave.” He went back to the stairway. “You’re interfering with the will of God!” he shouted down. He turned back to me. “Did you tell them not to let me leave?”

  “Me? Yep.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I sent Nathaniel to Simon’s to fetch Maggie. He returned alone. Maggie wouldn’t talk to him, but Martha did. Temple soldiers had been there, Josh.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, so? They were there to arrest you.”

  “Let them.”

  “Joshua, you don’t have to sacrifice yourself to prove this point. I’ve been thinking about it all night. You can negotiate.”

  “With the Lord?”

  “Abraham did it. Remember? Over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He starts out getting the Lord to agree to spare the cities if he can find fifty righteous men, but by the end, he talks God down to ten. You can try something like that.”

  “That’s not completely the point, Biff.” Here he came over to me, but I found I couldn’t look him in the eye, so I went to one of the large arched windows that looked down on the street. “I’m afraid of this—of what’s going to happen. I can think of a dozen things I’d rather do this week than be sacrificed, but I know that it has to happen. When I told the priests that I would tear the Temple down in three days, I meant that all the corruption, all the pretense, all the ritual of the Temple that keeps men from knowing God would be destroyed. And on the third day, when I come back, everything will be new, and the kingdom of God will be everywhere. I’m coming back, Biff.”

  “Yeah, I know, you said that.”

  “Well, believe in me.”

  “You’re not good at resurrections, Josh. Remembe
r the old woman in Japhia? The soldier in Sepphoris, what did he last? Three minutes?”

  “But look at Maggie’s brother Simon. He’s been back from the dead for months now.”

  “Yeah, and he smells funny.”

  “He does not.”

  “No, really, when you get close to him he smells spoiled.”

  “How would you know? You won’t get close to him because he used to be a leper.”

  “Thaddeus mentioned it the other day. He said, ‘Biff, I believe this Simon Lazarus fellow has spoiled.’”

  “Really? Then let’s go ask Thaddeus.”

  “He might not remember.”

  Joshua went down the steps to a low-ceilinged room with a mosaic floor and small windows cut high in the walls. Joshua’s mother and brother James had joined the apostles. They all sat there against the walls, their faces turned to Joshua like flowers to the sun, waiting for him to say something that would give them hope.

  “I’m going to wash your feet,” he said. To Joseph of Arimathea, he said, “I need a basin of water and a sponge.” The tall aristocrat bowed and went off to find a servant.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” Mary said.

  James the brother rolled his eyes and sighed heavily.

  “I’m going out,” I said. I looked at Peter, as if to say, Don’t let him out of your sight. He understood perfectly and nodded.

  “Come back for the seder,” Joshua said. “I have some things I have to teach you in the little time I have left.”

  There was no one home at Simon’s house. I knocked on the door for a long time, then finally let myself in. There was no evidence of a morning meal, but the mikveh had been used, so I guessed that they had each bathed and then gone to the Temple. I walked the streets of Jerusalem, trying to think of some solution, but everything I had learned seemed useless. As evening fell I made my way back to Joseph’s house, taking the long route so I didn’t have to pass the palace of the high priest.

  Joshua was waiting inside, sitting on the steps to the upper room, when I came in. Peter and Andrew sat on either side of him, obviously there to ensure that he didn’t accidentally skip down to the high priest and turn himself in for blasphemy.

  “Where have you been?” Joshua said. “I need to wash your feet.”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a ham in Jerusalem during Passover week?” I said. “I thought it would be nice, you know, some ham on matzo with a little bitter herb.”

  “He washed us all,” Peter said. “Of course we had to hold Bart down, but even he’s clean.”

  “And as I washed them, they will go out and wash others, by showing them forgiveness.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “It’s a parable. Cute. Let’s go eat.”

  We all lay around the big table, with Joshua at the head. Joshua’s mother had prepared a traditional Passover supper, with the exception of the lamb. To begin the seder, Nathaniel, who was the youngest, had to ask a question. “Why is this night different from every other night of the year?”

  “Bart’s feet are clean?” said Thomas.

  “Joseph of Arimathea is picking up the tab?” said Philip.

  Nathaniel laughed and shook his head. “No. It’s because other nights we eat bread and matzo, but tonight we only eat matzo. Jeez.” He grinned, probably feeling smart for the first time in his life.

  “And why do we only eat the matzo on this night?” asked Nathaniel.

  “Skip ahead, Nate,” I said. “We’re all Jews here. Summarize. Unleavened bread because there was no time for it to rise with Pharaoh’s soldiers on our tail, bitter herbs for the bitterness of slavery, God delivered us into the Promised Land, it was swell, let’s eat.”

  “Amen,” said everyone.

  “That was pathetic,” said Peter.

  “Yeah, was it?” I said angrily. “Well, we sit here with the Son of God, waiting for someone to come and take him away and kill him, and none of us is going to do a damn thing about it, including God, so forgive me if I’m not peeing all over myself about having been delivered out of the hands of the Egyptians about a million years ago.”

  “You’re forgiven,” said Joshua. Then he stood up. “What I am, is in you all. The Divine Spark, the Holy Ghost, it unites you all. It is the God that is in you all. Do you understand that?”

  “Of course God is part of you,” James the brother said, “he’s your father.”

  “No, in all of you. Watch, take this bread.” He took a matzo and broke it into pieces. He gave a piece to everyone in the room and took a piece himself. Then he ate it. “Now, the bread is part of me, the bread is me. Now all of you eat it.”

  Everybody looked at him.

  “EAT IT!” He screamed.

  So we ate it. “Now it is part of you, I am part of you. You all share the same part of God. Let’s try again. Hand me that wine.”

  And so it went like that, for a couple of hours, and I think that by the time the wine was gone, the apostles actually grasped what Joshua was saying to them. Then the begging started, as each of us pleaded for Joshua to give up the notion that he had to die to save the rest of us.

  “Before this is finished,” he said, “you will all have to deny me.”

  “No we won’t,” said Peter.

  “You will deny me three times, Peter. I not only expect this, I command it. If they take you when they take me, then there is no one to take the good news to the people. Now, Judas, my friend, come here.”

  Judas went to Joshua, who whispered in his ear, then sent him back to his place at the table. “One of you will betray me this very night,” said Joshua. “Won’t you, Judas?”

  “What?” Judas looked around at us, but when he saw no one coming to his defense, he bolted down the steps. Peter started after him, but Joshua caught the fisherman by the hair and yanked him back off of his feet.

  “Let him go.”

  “But the high priest’s palace isn’t a furlong away,” said Joseph of Arimathea. “If he goes there directly.”

  Joshua held his hand up for silence. “Biff, go directly to Simon’s house and wait. Alone you can sneak by the palace without being seen. Tell Maggie and the others to wait for us. The rest of us will go through the city and through the Ben Hinnon valley so we don’t have to pass the priest’s palace. We’ll meet you in Bethany.”

  I looked at Peter and Andrew. “You won’t let him turn himself in?”

  “Of course not.”

  I was off into the night, wondering even as I ran whether Joshua had changed his mind and was going to escape from Bethany into the Judean desert. I should have known right then that I’d been had. You think you can trust a guy, then he turns around and lies to you.

  Simon answered the door and let me in. He held his finger to his lips, signalling me to be quiet. “Maggie and Martha are in the back. They’re angry with you. All of you. Now they’ll be angry with me for letting you in.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged. “What can they do? It’s my house.”

  I went directly through the front room into a second room that opened off to bedchambers, the mikveh, and the courtyard where food was prepared. I heard voices coming from one of the bedchambers. When I walked in, Maggie looked up from braiding Martha’s hair.

  “So, you’ve come to tell me that it’s done,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes and I felt as if I would break down with her if she started sobbing now.

  “No,” I said. “He and the others are on their way here. Through Ben Hinnon, so it will be a few hours. But I have a plan.” I pulled the ying-yang amulet that Joy had given me out of my tunic and waved it before them.

  “Your plan is to bribe Joshua with ugly jewelry?” asked Martha.

  I pointed to the tiny stoppers on either side of the amulet. “No, my plan is to poison him.”

  I explained how the poison worked to Mary and Martha and then we waited, counting the time in our imaginations, watching in our mind’s eyes as the apostles made their
way through Jerusalem, out the Essene gate, into the steep valley of Ben Hinnon, where thousands of tombs had been carved into the rock, and where once a river had run, but now was only sage and cypress and thistles clinging to the crevices in the limestone. After several hours we went outside to wait in the street, then when the moon started down and the night made way into early morning, we saw a single figure coming from the west, not the south as we had expected. As he got closer I could tell from heavy shoulders and the moon shining on his bald pate that it was John.

  “They took him,” he said. “At Gethsemane. Annas and Caiphais came themselves, with Temple guards, and they took him.”

  Maggie ran into my arms and buried her face in my chest. I reached out and pulled Martha close as well.

  “What was he doing at Gethsemane?” I said. “You were supposed to be coming here through Ben Hinnon.”

  “He only told you that.”

  “That bastard lied to me. So they arrested everyone?”

  “No, the others are hiding not far from here. Peter tried to fight the guards, but Joshua stopped him. Joshua negotiated with the priests to let us go. Joseph came too, he helped talk them into letting the rest of us go.”

  “Joseph? Joseph betrayed him?”

  “I don’t know,” said John. “Judas was the one that led them to Gethsemane. He pointed Joshua out to the guards. Joseph came later, when they were about to arrest the rest of us.”

  “Where did they take him?”

  “To the palace of the high priest. That’s all I know, Biff. I promise.”

  He sat down hard in the middle of the street and began to weep. Martha went to him and cradled his head to her breast.

  Maggie looked up at me. “He knew you would fight. That’s why he sent you here.”

  “The plan doesn’t change,” I said. “We just have to get him back so we can poison him.”