Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

lungs after so many years in the mountains. We passed into the valley of a wide, muddy river, and the road became choked with people passing in and out of a city of wooden shacks and stone altars. There were humped-back cattle everywhere, even grazing in the gardens, but no one seemed to bear them any mind.
    “The last meat I ate was what was left of our camels,” I said.
    “Let’s find a booth and buy some beef.”
    There were merchants along the road selling various wares, clay pots, powders, herbs, spices, copper and bronze blades (iron seemed to be in short supply), and tiny carvings of what seemed to be a thousand different gods, most of them having more limbs than seemed necessary and none of them looking particularly friendly.
    We found grain, breads, fruits, vegetables, and bean pastes for sale, but nowhere did we see any meat. We settled on some bread and spicy bean paste, paid the woman with Roman copper coin, then found a place under a large banyan tree where we could sit and look at the river while we ate.
    I’d forgotten the smell of a city, the fetid mélange of people, and waste, and smoke and animals, and I began to long for the clean air of the mountains.
    “I don’t want to sleep here, Joshua. Let’s see if we can find a place in the country.”
    “We are supposed to follow this river to the sea to reach Tamil. Where the river goes, so go the people.”
    The river—wider than any in Israel, but shallow, yellow with clay, and still against the heavy air—seemed more like a huge stagnant puddle than a living, moving thing. In this season, anyway. Dotting the surface, a half-dozen skinny, naked men with wild white hair and not three teeth apiece shouted angry poetry at the top of their lungs and tossed water into glittering crests over their heads.
    “I wonder how my cousin John is doing,” said Josh.
    All along the muddy riverbank women washed clothes and babies only steps from where cattle waded and shat, men fished or pushed long shallow boats along with poles, and children swam or played in the mud. Here and there the corpse of a dog bobbed flyblown in the gentle current.
    “Maybe there’s a road inland a little, away from the stench.”
    Joshua nodded and climbed to his feet. “There,” he said, pointing to a narrow path that began on the opposite bank of the river and disappeared into some tall grass.
    “We’ll have to cross,” I said.
    “Be nice if we could find a boat to take us,” said Josh.
    “You don’t think we should ask where the path leads?”
    “No,” said Joshua, looking at a crowd of people who were gathering nearby and staring at us. “These people all look hostile.”
    “What was that you told Gaspar about love was a state you dwell in or something?”
    “Yeah, but not with these people. These people are creepy. Let’s go.”

    The creepy little brown guy who was dragging me through the elephant grass was named Rumi, and much to his credit, amid the chaos and tumble of a headlong dash through a leviathan marshland, pursued by a muderous band of clanging, shouting, spear-waving decapitation enthusiasts, Rumi had managed to find a tiger—no small task when you have a kung fu master and the savior of the world in tow.
    “Eek, a tiger,” Rumi said, as we stumbled into a small clearing, a mere depression really, where a cat the size of Jerusalem was gleefully gnawing away on the skull of a deer.
    Rumi had expressed my sentiments exactly, but I would be damned if I was going to let my last words be “Eek, a tiger,” so I listened quietly as urine filled my shoes.
    “You’d think all the noise would have frightened him,” Josh said, just as the tiger looked up from his deer.
    I noticed that our pursuers seemed to be closing on us by the second.
    “That is the way it is usually done,” said Rumi. “The noise drives the tiger to the hunter.”
    “Maybe he knows that,” I said, “so he’s not going anywhere. You know, they’re bigger than I imagined. Tigers, I mean.”
    “Sit down,” said Joshua.
    “Pardon me?” I said.
    “Trust me,” Joshua said. “Remember the cobra when we were kids?”
    I nodded to Rumi and coaxed him down as the tiger crouched and tensed his hind legs as if preparing to leap, which is exactly what he was doing. As the first of our pursuers broke into the clearing from behind us the tiger leapt, sailing over our heads by half again the height of a man. The tiger landed on the first two men coming out of the grass,