Lamb The Gospel According to Biff Christs Childho - By Christopher Moore Page 0,23

door. "Don't try to lock me out, I'm taking a key with me. Not that I need it or anything, being an angel of the Lord."

"Not to mention a fuckstick."

"I don't even know what that means."

"Go, go, go." I shooed him through the door. "Godspeed, Raziel."

"Work on your Gospel while I'm gone."

"Right." I slammed the door in his face and threw the safety lock. Raziel has now watched hundreds of hours of American television, you'd think he would have noticed that people wear shoes when they go outside.

The book is exactly as I suspected, a Bible, but written in a flowery version of this English I've been writing in. The translation of the Torah and the prophets from the Hebrew is muddled sometimes, but the first part seems to be our Bible. This language is amazing - so many words. In my time we had very few words, perhaps a hundred that we used all the time, and thirty of them were synonyms for guilt. In this language you can curse for an hour and never use the same word twice. Flocks and schools and herds of words, that's why I'm supposed to use this language to tell Joshua's story.

I've hidden the book in the bathroom, so I can sneak in and read it while the angel is in the room. I didn't have time to actually read much of the part of the book they call the New Testament, but it's obvious that it is the story of Joshua's life. Or parts of it, anyway.

I'll study it later, but now I should go on with the real story.

I suppose I should have considered the exact nature of what we were doing before I invited Maggie to join us. I mean, there is some difference between the circumcision of an eight-day-old baby boy, which she had seen before, and the same operation on the ten-foot statue of a Greek god.

"My goodness, that is, uh, impressive," Maggie said, staring up at the marble member.

"Graven image," Joshua said under his breath. Even in the moonlight I could tell he was blushing.

"Let's do it." I pulled a small iron chisel from my pouch. Joshua was wrapping the head of his mallet with leather to deaden its sound. Sepphoris slept around us, the silence broken only by the occasional bleat of a sheep. The evening cook fires had long since gone to coals, the dust cloud that stirred through the city during the day had settled, and the night air was clean and still. From time to time I would catch a sweet whiff of sandalwood coming from Maggie and I would lose my train of thought. Funny the things you remember.

We found a bucket and turned it upside down for Joshua to stand on while he worked. He set the tip of my chisel on Apollo's foreskin and ventured a light tap with the mallet. A tiny fragment of marble flaked away.

"Give it a good whack," I said.

"I can't, it will make too much noise."

"No, it won't, the leather will cover it."

"But I might take the whole end of it off."

"He can spare it," Maggie said, and we both turned to her with our mouths hanging open. "Probably," she added quickly. "I'm only guessing. What do I know, I'm just a girl. Do you guys smell something?"

We smelled the Roman before we heard him, heard him before we saw him. The Romans covered themselves with olive oil before they bathed, so if the wind was right or if it was an especially hot day you could smell a Roman coming at thirty paces. Between the olive oil they bathed with and the garlic and dried paste of anchovies they ate with their barley, when the legions marched into battle it must have smelled like an invasion of pizza people. If they'd had pizzas back then, which they didn't.

Joshua took a quick swipe with the mallet and the chisel slipped, neatly severing Apollo's unit, which fell to the dirt with a dull thud.

"Whoops," said the Savior.

"Shhhhhhhh," I shushed.

We heard the hobnails of the Roman's boots scraping on stone. Joshua jumped down from the bucket and looked frantically for a place to hide. The walls of the Greek's bathhouse were almost completed around the statue, so really, except for the entrance where the Roman was coming, there was no place to run.

"Hey, what are you doing there?"

We stood as still as the statue. I could see that it was the legionnaire that had been with