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

then coaxed him to his feet.
    Joy embraced Joshua and kissed him on the lips, hard and long. He didn’t seem to be trying to push her away.
    “Hey, we had better go, Josh,” I said.
    Joy held the Messiah at arm’s length and said, “You are always welcome here, you know that?”
    Josh nodded, then climbed on his camel. “Go with God, Joy,” he said. As we rode through the gates of the palace the guards shot fire arrows that trailed long tails of sparks over us until they exploded above the road ahead: Joy’s last good-bye to us, a tribute to the friendship and arcane knowledge we had all shared. It scared the bejeezus out of the camels.

    After we had been on the road awhile, Joshua asked, “Did you say goodbye to Vana?”
    “I intended to, but when I went to the stable she was practicing her yoga and I didn’t want to disturb her.”
    “No kidding?”
    “Really, she was sitting in one of the postures you taught her.”
    Joshua smiled. It didn’t hurt anything for him to believe that.
    The journey on the Silk Road through the high deserts took us over a month, but it was fairly uneventful, except for one attack by a small group of bandits. When I caught the first two spears they flung at me and flung them right back, wounding the two who had thrown them, they turned and ran. The weather was mild, or as mild as one can expect in a deadly and brutal desert, but by now Joshua and I had traveled so much in this sort of harsh country that there was little that affected us. Just before we reached Antioch, however, a sandstorm whipped up out of the desert that left us hiding between our camels for two days, breathing through our shirts and washing the mud out of our mouths every time we took a drink. The storm settled enough to travel, and we were at a veritable gallop in the streets of Antioch when Joshua located an inn by impacting with its sign on his forehead. He was knocked back off his camel and sat up in the street with blood streaming down his face.
    “Are you hurt badly?” I asked, kneeling beside him. I could barely see in the driving dust.
    Joshua looked at the blood on his hands where he had touched his forehead. “I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt that badly, but I can’t tell.”
    “Inside,” I said, helping him to his feet and through the door of the inn.
    “Shut the door,” the innkeeper shouted as the wind whipped through the room. “Were you born in a barn?”
    “Yeah,” said Joshua.
    “He was,” I said. “Angels on the roof, though.”
    “Shut the damn door,” said the innkeeper.
    I left Joshua sitting there by the door while I went out and found shelter for the camels. When I returned Joshua was wiping his face with a linen cloth that someone had handed to him. A couple of men stood over him, eager to help. I handed the cloth to one of them and examined Josh’s wounds. “You’ll live. A big bump and two cuts, but you’ll live. You can’t do the healing thing on—”
    Joshua shook his head.
    “Hey, look at this,” one of the travelers who had helped Joshua said, holding up the piece of linen Joshua had used to wipe his face. The dust and blood from Josh’s face had left a perfect likeness on the linen, even handprints where he’d gotten blood from his head wound. “Can I keep this?” the fellow said. He was speaking Latin, but with a strange accent.
    “Sure,” I said. “Where are you fellahs from?”
    “We’re from the Ligurian tribe, from the territories north of Rome. A city on the Po river called Turin. Have you heard of it?”
    “No, I haven’t. You know, you fellahs can do what you want with that cloth, but out on my camel I’ve got some erotic drawings from the East that are going to be worth something someday. I can let you have them for a very fair price.”
    The Turinians went off holding their pathetic swath of muddy cloth like it was some kind of holy relic. Ignorant bastards wouldn’t know art if you nailed them to it. I bandaged Joshua’s wounds and we checked into the inn for the night.

    In the morning we decided to keep our camels and take the land route home through Damascus. As we passed out of the gates of Damascus on the final leg home, Joshua started to worry.
    “I’m not ready to be the Messiah, Biff. If I’m being called home to lead our people I don’t even know where to start. I understand the things I want to teach, but I don’t have the words yet. Melchior was right about that. Before anything you have to have the