Lamb The Gospel According to Biff Christs Childho - By Christopher Moore Page 0,59

wounded bandit.

"Move, Joshua," Ahmad said, holding the lance at ready. "This must be finished."

Joshua looked around him. All of the bandits and all of their animals were dead. Blood ran in rivulets in the dust. Already flies were collecting to feast. Joshua walked through the field of dead bandits until his chest was pressed against the bronze point of Ahmad's lance. Tears streamed down Joshua's face. "This was wrong!" he screeched.

"They were bandits. They would have killed us and stolen everything we had if we had not killed them. Does your own God, your father, not destroy those who sin? Now move aside, Joshua. Let this be finished."

"I am not my father, and neither are you. You will not kill this man."

Ahmad lowered the lance and shook his head balefully. "He will only die anyway, Joshua." I could sense the guards fidgeting, not knowing what to do.

"Give me your water skin," Joshua said.

Ahmad threw the water skin down to Joshua, then turned his camel and rode back to where the guards waited for him. Joshua took the water to the wounded bandit and held his head as he drank. An arrow protruded from the bandit's stomach and his black tunic was shiny with blood. Joshua put his hand gently over the bandit's eyes, as if he were telling him to go to sleep, then he yanked out the arrow and tossed it aside. The bandit didn't even flinch. Joshua put his hand over the wound.

From the time that Ahmad had ordered them to hold fire, none of the guards had moved. They watched. After a few minutes the bandit sat up and Joshua stepped away from him and smiled. In that instant an arrow sprouted from the bandit's forehead and he fell back, dead.

"No!" Joshua wheeled around to face Ahmad's side of the caravan. The guard who had shot still held the bow, as if he might have to let fly another arrow to finish the job. Howling with rage, Joshua made a gesture as if he were striking the air with his open hand and the guard was lifted back off his camel and slammed into the ground. "No more!" Joshua screamed. When the guard sat up in the dirt his eyes were like silver moons in their sockets. He was blind.

Later, when neither of us had spoken for two days, and Joshua and I were relegated to riding far behind the caravan because the guards were afraid of us, I took a drink from my water skin, then handed it to Joshua. He took a drink and handed it back.

"Thank you," Josh said. He smiled and I knew he'd be all right.

"Hey Joshua, do me a favor."

"What?"

"Remind me not to piss you off, okay?"

The city of Kabul was built on five rugged hillsides, with the streets laid out in terraces and the buildings built partly into the hills. There was no evidence of Roman or Greek influence in the architecture, but instead the larger buildings had tile roofs that turned up at the corners, a style that Joshua and I would see all over Asia before our journey was finished. The people were mostly rugged, wiry people who looked like Arabs without the glow in their skin that came from a diet rich in olive oil. Instead their faces seemed leaner, drawn by the cold, dry wind of the high desert. In the market there were merchants and traders from China, and more men who looked like Ahmad and his bowmen guards, a race whom the Chinese referred to simply as barbarians.

"The Chinese are so afraid of my people that they have built a wall, as high as any palace, as wide as the widest boulevard in Rome, and stretching as far as the eye can see ten times over," Ahmad said.

"Uh-huh," I said, thinking, you lying bag-o'-guts.

Joshua hadn't spoken to Ahmad since the bandit attack, but he smirked at Ahmad's story of the great wall.

"Just so," said Ahmad. "We will stay at an inn tonight. Tomorrow I will take you to Balthasar. If we leave early we can be there by noon, then you'll be the magician's problem, not mine. Meet me in front at dawn."

That night the innkeeper and his wife served us a dinner of spiced lamb and rice, with some sort of beer made from rice, which washed two months of desert grit from our throats and put a pleasant haze over our minds. To save money, we paid for pallets under the wide