“It’s very powerful magic all right.” I checked over my shoulder to see if Joshua was paying attention. He was hugging his coffee beans and mumbling to himself as he had for the whole trip. Praying, I presume.
“Tell me how it’s done,” Joy said. “I asked Joshua, but he’s just chanting and looking stunned.”
“Well, I could tell you how it’s done, but you have to tell me what’s going on behind the ironclad door.”
“I can’t tell you that, but perhaps we can trade other things.” She pulled the tail of her turban away from her face and smiled. She was stunningly beautiful in the moonlight, even in men’s clothes. “I know over a thousand ways to bring pleasure to a man, and that’s only what I know personally. The other girls have as many tricks that they’d be willing to show you too.”
“Yeah, but how is that useful to me? What do I need to know about pleasing a man?”
Joy ripped her turban off her head and smacked me across the back of the head with it, sending a small cloud of dust drifting into the night. “You’re stupid and you’re blue and the next time I poison you I will be sure to use something without an antidote.”
Even the wise and inscrutable Joy could be goaded, I guess. I smiled. “I will accept your paltry offerings,” I said with as much pomposity as an adolescent boy can muster. “And in return I will teach the greatest secret of our magic. A secret of my own invention. We call it sarcasm.”
“Let’s make coffee when we get home,” said Joshua.
It was some challenge to try to drag out the process of how Joshua had returned the guard’s sight, especially since I hadn’t the slightest idea myself, but through careful misdirection, obfuscation, subterfuge, guile, and complete balderdash, I was able to barter that lack of knowledge into months of outrageous knob polishing by the beauteous Joy and her comely min
ions. Somehow, the urgency of knowing what was behind the ironclad door and the answers to other enigmas of Balthasar’s fortress abated, and I found myself quite content pursuing the lessons the wizard assigned me during the day, while stretching my imagination to its limit with the mathematical combinations of the night. There was the drawback that Balthasar would kill me if he knew that I was availing myself of the charms of his concubines, but is the pilfered fruit not sweetened by the stealing? Oh, to be young and in love (with eight Chinese concubines).
Meanwhile Joshua took to his studies with characteristic zeal, fueled in no little bit by the coffee he drank every morning until he nearly vibrated through the floor with enthusiasm.
“Look at this, do you see, Biff? When asked, the master Confucius says, ‘Recompense injury with justice, and kindness with kindness.’ Yet Lao-tzu says, ‘Recompense injury with kindness.’ Don’t you see?” Joshua would dance around, scrolls trailing out behind him, hoping that somehow I would share his enthusiasm for the ancient texts. And I tried. I really did.
“No, I don’t see. The Torah says, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ that is justice.”
“Exactly,” said Joshua. “I think Lao-tzu is correct. Kindness precedes justice. As long as you seek justice by punishment you can only cause more suffering. How can that be right? This is a revelation!”
“I learned how to boil down goat urine to make explosives today,” I said.
“That’s good too,” said Joshua.
It could happen like that any time of the day or night. Joshua would come blazing out of the library in the middle of the night, interrupt me in the midst of some complex oily tangle of Pea Pod and Pillows and Tunnels—while Number Six familiarized us with the five hundred jade gods of various depths and textures—and he’d avert his eyes just long enough for me to towel off before he’d shove some codex in my hand and force me to read a passage while he waxed enthusiastic on the thoughts of some long-dead sage.
“The Master says that ‘the superior man may indeed endure want, but the inferior man, when he experiences want, will give into unbridled excess.’ He’s talking about you, Biff. You’re the inferior man.”
“I’m so proud,” I told him, as I watched Number Six forlornly pack her gods into the warmed brass case where they resided. “Thank you for coming here to tell me that.”
I was given the task of learning
waidan,
which is the alchemy of the external. My knowledge would come from the manipulation of the physical elements. Joshua, on the other hand, was learning
neidan,
the alchemy of the internal. His knowledge would come from the study of his own inner nature through the contemplation of the masters. So while Joshua read scrolls and books, I spent my time mixing quicksilver and lead, phosphorous and brimstone, charcoal and philosopher’s stone, trying somehow to divine the nature of the Tao. Joshua was learning to be the Messiah and I was learning to poison people and blow stuff up. The world seemed very much in order. I was happy, Joshua was happy, Balthasar was happy, and the girls—well, the girls were busy. Although I passed the iron door every day (and the niggling voice persisted), what was behind it wasn’t important to me, and neither were the answers to the dozen or so questions that Joshua and I should have put to our generous master.
Before we knew it a year had passed, then two more, and we were celebrating the passage of Joshua’s seventeenth birthday in the fortress. Balthasar had the girls prepare a feast of Chinese delicacies and we drank wine late into the night. (And long after that, and even when we had returned to Israel, we always ate Chinese food on Joshua’s birthday. I’m told it became a tradition not only with those of us who knew Joshua, but with Jews everywhere.)
“Do you ever think of home?” Joshua asked me the night of his birthday feast.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“What do you think of?”
“Maggie,” I said. “Sometimes my brothers. Sometimes my mother and father, but always Maggie.”
“Even with all your experiences since, you still think of Maggie?” Joshua had become less and less curious about the essence of lust. Initially I thought that his lack of interest had to do with the depth of his studies, but I then realized that his interest was fading along with the memory of Maggie.
“Joshua, my memory of Maggie isn’t about what happened the night before we left. I didn’t go to see her thinking that we would make love. A kiss was more than I expected. I think of Maggie because I made a place in my heart for her to live, and it’s empty. It always will be. It always was. She loved you.”
“I’m sorry, Biff. I don’t know how to heal that. I would if I could.”
“I know, Josh. I know.” I didn’t want to talk about home anymore, but Josh deserved to get off his chest whatever it was that was bothering him, and if not to me, to whom? “Do you ever think of home?”
“Yes. That’s why I asked. You know, the girls were cooking bacon today, and that made me think of home.”
“Why? I don’t remember anyone ever cooking bacon at home.”
“I know, but if we ate some bacon, no one at home would ever know.”
I got up and walked over to the half-wall that divided our rooms. There was moonlight coming through the window and Joshua’s face had caught it and was glowing in that annoying way that it sometimes did.
“Joshua, you’re the Son of God. You’re the Messiah. That implies—oh, I don’t know—that you’re a Jew! You can’t eat bacon.”
“God doesn’t care if we eat bacon. I can just feel it.”
“Really. He still feel the same way about fornication?”
“Yep.”
“Masturbation?”
“Yep.”
“Killing? Stealing? Bearing false witness? Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, et cetera? No change of heart on those?”
“Nope.”
“Just bacon. Interesting. You would have thought there’d be something about bacon in the prophecies of Isaiah.”
“Yeah, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“You’re going to need more than that to usher in the kingdom of God, Josh, no offense. We can’t go home with, ‘Hi, I’m the Messiah, God wanted you to have this bacon.’”
“I know. We have much more to learn. But breakfasts will be more interesting.”
“Go to sleep, Josh.”
As time passed, I seldom saw Joshua except at mealtimes and before we went to sleep. Nearly all my time was taken up with my studies and helping the girls maintain the fortress, while nearly all of Joshua’s time was spent with Balthasar, which would eventually become a problem.
“This is not good, Biff,” Joy said in Chinese. I’d learned to speak her language well enough that she seldom spoke Greek or Latin anymore. “Balthasar is getting too close with Joshua. He seldom sends for one of us to join him in his bed now.”
“You’re not implying that Joshua and Balthasar are, uh, playing shepherd, are you? Because I know that’s not true. Joshua isn’t allowed.” Of course the angel had said he couldn’t know a woman, he hadn’t said anything about a creepy old African wizard.
“Oh, I don’t care if they’re buggering their eyeballs out,” said Joy. “Balthasar mustn’t fall in love. Why do you think that there are eight of us?”
“I thought it was a matter of budget,” I said.
“You haven’t noticed that one of us will never spend two nights in a row with Balthasar, or that we don’t speak with him beyond what is required for our duties and lessons?”
I had noticed, but it never occurred to me that there was something out of the ordinary. We hadn’t gotten to the chapter on wizard–concubine behavior in the book yet. “So?”
“So I think he is falling in love with Joshua. That is not good.”
“Well, I’m with you on that one. I wasn’t happy the last time someone fell in love with him. But why does it matter here?”
“I can’t tell you. But there has been more commotion coming from the house of doom,” said Joy. “You have to help me. If I’m right, we have to stop Balthasar. We’ll observe them tomorrow while we adjust the flow of Chi in the library.”
“No, Joy. Not library Chi. The stuff in the library is too heavy. I hate library Chi.”
Chi
or
Qi
: the breath of the dragon, the eternal energy that flows through all things; in balance, as it should be, it was half yin, half yang, half light, half dark, half male, half female. The Chi in the library was always getting fucked up, while the Chi in the rooms with just cushions, or with lightweight furniture, seemed well adjusted and balanced. I don’t
know why, but I suspected it had a lot to do with Joy’s need to make me move heavy things.
The next morning Joy and I went to the library to spy on Joshua and Balthasar while we redirected the library’s Chi. Joy carried a complex brass instrument she called a Chi clock, which was supposed to be able to detect the flow of Chi. The magus was noticeably irritated as soon as we entered the room.
“Must this be done now?”
Joy bowed. “Very sorry, master, but this is an emergency.” She turned and barked commands at me like a Roman centurion. “Move that table over there, can’t you see that it rests on the tiger’s testicles? Then point those chairs so they face the doorway, they lie on the dragon’s navel. We’re lucky someone hasn’t broken a leg.”
“Yeah, lucky,” I said, straining to move the huge carved table, wishing that Joy had recruited a couple of the other girls to help. I’d been studying feng shui for more than three years now and I still couldn’t detect the least bit of Chi, coming or going. Joshua had reconciled the elusive energy by saying that it was just an Oriental way to express God all around us and in all things. That may have helped him toward some sort of spiritual understanding, but it was about as effective as trained sheep when it came to arranging furniture.
“Can I help?” Joshua asked.
“No!” shouted Balthasar, standing up. “We will continue in my quarters.” The old wizard turned and glared at Joy and me. “And we are not to be disturbed, under any circumstances.”
He took Joshua by the shoulder and led him out of the room.
“So much for spying,” I said.
Joy consulted the Chi clock and patted a cabinet filled with calligraphy materials. “This most certainly rides on the horn of the ox, it must be moved,” she pronounced.
“They are gone,” I said. “We don’t have to pretend at this anymore.”
“Who is pretending? That cabinet channels all the yin into the hall, while the yang circles like a bird of prey.”
“Joy, stop it. I know you’re making this stuff up.”
She dropped the brass instrument to her side. “I am not.”
“Yes, you are.” And here I thought I’d push my credibility a bit, just to see. “I checked the yang in this room yesterday. It is in perfect balance.”
Joy dropped to her hands and knees, crawled under one of the huge carved dragon tables, curled up into a ball, and began to cry. “I’m no good at this. Balthasar wants us all to know it, but I’ve never understood it. If you want the Elegant Torture of a Thousand Pleasant Touches, I can do it, you want someone poisoned, castrated, or blown up, I’m your man, but this feng shui stuff is just, just…”
“Stupid?” I supplied.
“No, I was going to say difficult. Now I’ve angered Balthasar and we have no way of knowing what is happening between him and Joshua. And we must know.”
“I can find out,” I said, polishing my nails on my tunic. “But I have to know why I’m finding out.”
“How will you find out?”
“I have ways that are more subtle and crafty than all your Chinese alchemy and direction of energies.”
“Now who’s making things up?” I’d lost most of my credibility by dragging out the arcane-Hebrew-knowledge-for-sexual-favors ruse until I had actually claimed credit for receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments as well as constructing the Ark of the Covenant. (What? It’s not my fault. Joshua was the one who would never let me be Moses when we were kids.)
“If I find out, will you tell me what is going on?”
The head concubine chewed at an elegantly lacquered nail as she thought about it. “You promise not to tell anyone if I tell you? Not even your friend Joshua?”
“I promise.”
“Then do what you will. But remember your lessons from
The Art of War
.”
I considered the words of Sun-tzu, which Joy had taught me:
Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby, you can be the director of the opponent’s fate
. So after considering strategy carefully, running and rejecting the various scenarios in my head, working out what seemed a nearly foolproof plan, and making sure the timing was perfect, I went into
action. That very night, as I lay in my bed and Joshua in his, I called forth all my powers of subtlety and mysteriousness.