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

going to help either. I did have my newfound skill as a sex educator, but somehow I didn’t think there’d be call for that on a two-month trip with fourteen men and one homely woman. So what could I do, what skill had I to gentle the road to Kabul?
    “If someone in the caravan croaks I’m a great mourner,” I said. “Want to hear a dirge?”
    Ahmad laughed until he shook, then called for Kanuni to bring him his satchel. Once he had it in hand, he dug inside and pulled out the dried newts he’d bought from the old hag. “Here, you’ll be needing these,” he said.

    Camels bite. A camel will, for no reason, spit on you, stomp you, kick you, bellow, burp, and fart at you. They are stubborn at their best, and cranky beyond all belief at their worst. If you provoke them, they will bite. If you insert a dehydrated amphibian elbow-deep in a camel’s bum, he considers himself provoked, doubly so if the procedure was performed while he was sleeping. Camels are wise to stealth. They bite.

    “I can heal that,” Joshua said, looking at the huge tooth marks on my forehead. We were following Ahmad’s caravan along the Silk Road, which was neither a road nor made of silk. It was, in fact, a narrow path through the rocky inhospitable highland desert of what is now Syria into the low, inhospitable desert of what is now Iraq.
    “He said sixty days by camel. Doesn’t that mean that we should be riding, not walking?”
    “You’re missing your camel pals, aren’t you?” Josh grinned, that snotty, Son-o’-God grin of his. Maybe it was just a regular grin.
    “I’m just tired. I was up half the night sneaking up on these guys.”
    “I know,” said Joshua. “I had to get up at dawn to fix one of the saddles before we left. Ahmad’s tools leave something to be desired.”
    “You go ahead and be the martyr, Josh, just forget about what I was doing all night. I’m just saying that we should get to ride instead of walking.”
    “We will,” Josh said. “Just not now.”
    The men in the caravan were all riding, although several of them, as well as Kanuni, were on horses. The camels were loaded down with great packs of iron tools, powdered dyes, and sandalwood bound for the Orient. At the first highland oasis we crossed, Ahmad traded the horses for four more camels, and Joshua and I were allowed to ride. At night we ate with the rest of the men, sharing boiled grain or bread with sesame paste, the odd bit of cheese, mashed chickpeas and garlic, occasionally goat meat, and sometimes the dark hot drink we had discovered in Antioch (mixed with date sugar and topped with foaming goat’s milk and cinnamon at my suggestion). Ahmad dined alone in his tent, while the rest of us would dine under the open awning that we constructed to shelter us from the hottest part of the day. In the desert, the day gets warmer as it gets later, so the hottest part of the day will be in the late afternoon, just before sundown brings the hot winds to leach the last moisture from your skin.
    None of Ahmad’s men spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, but they had enough functional Latin and Greek to tease Joshua and me about any number of subjects, their favorite, of course, being my job as chief camel deconstipator. The men hailed from a half-dozen different lands, many we had never heard of. Some were as black as Ethiopians, with high foreheads and long, graceful limbs, while others were squat and bowlegged, with powerful shoulders, high cheekbones, and long wispy mustaches like Ahmad’s. Not one of them was fat or weak or slow. Before we were a week out of Antioch we figured out that it only took a couple of men to care for and guide a caravan of camels, so we were perplexed at why someone as shrewd as Ahmad would bring along so many superfluous employees.
    “Bandits,” Ahmad said, adjusting his bulk to find a more comfortable position atop his camel. “I’d need no more than a couple of dolts like you two if it was just the animals that needed tending. They’re guards. Why did you think they were all carrying bows and lances?”
    “Yeah,” I said, giving Joshua a dirty look, “didn’t you see the lances? They’re guards. Uh, Ahmad, shouldn’t Josh and I have lances—I mean, when we get to the bandit area?”
    “We’ve been followed by bandits for five days now,” Ahmad said.
    “We don’t need lances,” Joshua said. “I will not make a man sin by committing an act of thievery. If a man would have something of mine, he need only