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

the money back because the angel scared him, you know that?”
    “So his kindness allayed his fear as well as benefiting us,” Joshua said. “All the better. Do you think the priests sacrifice the lambs at Passover for better reasons?”
    “Oh, right,” I said, having no idea what one had to do with the other, wondering still if tigers didn’t object to having their penises powdered. (Keeps them from chafing, I guess, but that’s got to be a dangerous job.) “Let’s go find this old crone,” I said.

    The shore of the Onrontes was a stream of life and color, textures and smells, from the harbor all the way into the marketplace at Antioch. There were people of every size and color that I had ever imagined, some shoeless and dressed in rags, others wearing expensive silks and the purple linen from Tyre, said to be dyed with the blood of a poisonous snail. There were ox carts, litters, and sedan chairs carried by as many as eight slaves. Roman soldiers on horseback and on foot policed the crowd, while sailors from a dozen nations reveled in drink and noise and the feel of land beneath their feet. Merchants and beggars and traders and whores scurried for the turn of a coin, while self-appointed prophets spouted dogma from atop the mooring posts where ships tied off along the river—holy men lined up and preaching like a line of noisy Greek columns. Smoke rose fragrant and blue over the streaming crowd, carrying the smell of spice and grease from braziers in the food booths where men and women hawked their fare in rhythmic, haunting songs that all ran together as you walked along—as if one passed his song to the next so you might never experience a second of silence.
    The only thing I had ever seen that approached this was the line of pilgrims leading into Jerusalem on the feast days, but there we never saw so much color, heard so much noise, felt so much excitement.
    We stopped at a stand and bought a hot black drink from a wrinkled old man wearing a tanned bird carcass as a hat. He showed us how he made the drink from the seeds of berries that were first roasted, then ground into powder, then mixed with boiling water. We got this whole story by way of pantomime, as the man spoke none of the languages we were familiar with. He mixed the drink with honey and gave it to us, but when I tasted it, it still didn’t seem to taste right. It seemed, I don’t know, too dark. I saw a woman leading a nanny goat nearby, and I took Joshua’s cup from him and ran after the woman. With the woman’s permission, I squirted a bit of milk from the nanny goat’s udder onto the top of each of our cups. The old man protested, making it seem as if we’d committed some sort of sacrilege, but the milk had come out warm and frothy and it served to take away the bitterness of the black drink. Joshua downed his, then asked the old man for two more, as well as handing the woman with the goat a small brass coin for her trouble. Josh gave the second drink back to the old man to taste, and after much grimacing, he took a sip. A smile crossed his toothless mouth and before we left he seemed to be striking some sort of deal with the woman with the goat. I watched the old man grind beans in a copper cylinder while the woman milked her goat into a deep clay bowl. There was a spice vendor next door and I could smell the cinnamon, cloves, and allspice that lay loose in baskets on the ground.
    “You know,” I said to the woman in Latin, “when you two get this all figured out, try sprinkling a little ground cinnamon on it. It just might make it perfect.”
    “You’re losing your friend,” she said.
    I turned and looked around, catching the top of Joshua’s head just as he turned a corner into the Antioch market and a new push of people. I ran to catch up to him.
    Joshua was bumping people in the crowd as he passed, seemingly on purpose, and murmuring just loud enough so I could hear him each time he hit someone with a shoulder or an elbow. “Healed that guy. Healed her. Stopped her suffering. Healed him. Comforted him. Ooo, that guy was just stinky. Healed her. Whoops, missed. Healed. Healed. Comforted. Calmed.”
    People were turning to look back at Josh, the way one will when a stranger steps on one’s foot, except these people all seemed to be either smiling or baffled, not annoyed as I expected.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “Practicing,” Joshua said. “Whoa, bad toe-jam.” He spun on his heel, nearly turning his