Costume Not Included (19 page)

  The main room was furnished only with a rough wooden table and two equally utilitarian stools. Some shelves against one wall held pots and bowls of unglazed pottery, and an iron cauldron was hanging from a frame fashioned from the same metal above the hearth. A charcoal fire was smoldering beneath the pot.

  Chesney took in the sparse furnishings at a glance, noticing also a shepherd's crook that leaned against the wall beside the door, which was of rough planks indifferently nailed together. "No carpenter's tools?" he said.

  "No," the householder said, "my family's always been in sheep."

  "But this is Nazareth?" Chesney said. "And you are Jesus?"

 
 

 
 
 

Chesney's mind formed the name as he had always known it, but when he heard his voice speaking it, what emerged from his lips sounded more like
Joshua
, only with a Y instead of a J. Also, the vowels sounded strange. He tried saying it again, more slowly, but still what he heard was something like
Yesh-wa
.

  However it sounded, the man nodded his head. "That's me," he said, then gestured generally towards the huddle of mud-walled houses and sheds visible through the open door. "And out there's Nazareth, for what it's worth."

  "I thought you were a carpenter. Everybody says so."

  "No, definitely sheep. A carpenter would starve in Nazareth. There's no trees." He gestured upwards, where poles as thick as Chesney's wrist held up the ceiling of mud and woven reeds. "Even the roof beams had to be brought up from Gaza."

  "But you are the Messiah?" Chesney was coming to understand that he had not stepped into the pool of light he had been expecting. "I mean, you talked about casting out demons."

  Understanding dawned in Joshua's face. "Oh," he said, "I see. You've come to the wrong one. You want the other part of me." When he saw that the young man was still floundering, he added, "The divine part."

  Chesney sat down on one of the stools. He looked to Xaphan for a moment, before he realized that the demon was studiously ignoring the conversation. "I thought you were supposed to be like… a blend."

  There was a clay jug on a shelf and a wooden cup on the table. Joshua stepped past Chesney and got the container, poured a stream of dark liquid into the cup and handed it to his visitor. Their fingers touched and the young man felt a brief sensation, not electric but some kind of energy, pass through him.

  "Drink up," said the bearded man, upending the jug. A spill of the contents ran down from the one side of his mouth into his beard. Chesney sniffed the contents of the cup; it smelled like sour wine, and when he tasted it, it was even sourer than it smelled.

  The other man sat down too. "A blend," he said. "Well, in the end, that's how it worked out. After they had that big confab at Nicaea. So now he's up in Heaven."

  Joshua wiped his mouth and said, "At first, after the Romans nailed me up and I died, I was up there, too. Just like anybody else. But down here they kept working on the story, especially the Greeks, who were always eager for half-gods and virgin births. Finally, and it took hundreds of years, they got it all worked out the way they wanted it – I mean the bishops and the emperor; they talked it all over for days, made up their minds."

  "What happened?" Chesney said. The wine tasted better – not actually good, but better – on a second sip.

  "Somewhere along the way, they'd decided that my body had come back to life and gone up into Heaven, wounds and all. How they worked that out, I never did understand. But suddenly, the new reality came into effect. I was in Heaven, but I was made of flesh. Worse, they had decided that I was Himself, or at least one part of the Lord, who was now a trio. Blasphemy, but the Greeks and Romans were writing the new books, and that was now the way it had to be."

  He drank from the jug again and shook his head. "I had become an anomaly – one of their words, of course – a leftover. An angel came to see me and told me that I was – how did he put it? – 'being let go.' Next thing I knew, I was here, back where I'd started." He drank a little more from the jug then said, "Oh, and I was just myself again. Look." He showed Chesney his hands. "No holes."

  "The Council of Nicaea," Chesney said, more to himself than to the other man, "where they put the Bible into its final shape." Courtesy of his mother, he had received a very thorough grounding in the history of the early church before he'd decided that he didn't believe half of it.

  Now the pool of light was reforming around him. This place, this little house in Nazareth, was from an older draft of the continuing story. The man across from him had been a sheep farmer, like just about everybody else in the tiny village. He'd become a preacher and a wonderworker, doing some faith-healing and casting out demons. Then he'd gone up to Jerusalem and fallen afoul of the authorities, ending up being crucified by the Romans.

  He'd arrived in Heaven and settled in. But back on Earth, his story had continued to evolve and intensify as his disciples kept spreading the word about what he'd done and what he'd said. Years went by, then decades. Other people got involved – people who could read and write, instead of the group of illiterates who had begun to follow Joshua in his wanderings around the Galilee. The stories and sayings, augmented now by tales of walking on water, raising the dead, confounding Satan, began to be written down. The texts were passed around, so they could be added to and rewritten by believers who had their own particular slants on the issues.

  After three hundred years of literary fervency, there were many conflicting biographies and gospels. Joshua the itinerant preacher had become Jesus the Christ, and more than that, he had become first the son of God, then he'd been promoted to the rank of God himself. Or a coequal part of a divine trinity, along with the original and his holy breath.

  Of course, this led to disputes among the faithful, some of which were conducted by passionate argument, others by knives and clubs and arson. Meanwhile, the Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the empire after seeing a vision that said converting to the hitherto-despised cult would bring him victory in one of the civil wars that Roman politics regularly threw up. The emperor called all the warring factions together at Nicaea, a Greek city in Asia Minor, and they thrashed out which of the competing texts would go into the authorized Bible, and while they were at it, they established the true nature of the Christ.

  It would have been then that the original version would have become unuseful – indeed, Joshua would clearly have become an element of a soon-to-be discarded draft of the evolving big story. So an angel had eased him out of Heaven. Chesney wondered if the process was similar to what happened at Paxton Life and Casualty when a fired employee put his odds and ends into a cardboard box and was escorted out by a security guard. And the former Messiah had wound up back in Nazareth.

  While Chesney had been running this scenario through his mind, Joshua had been watching him, throwing occasional glances at Xaphan. Finally, the bearded man showed a worried expression and said, "So, have you two come to take me somewhere else?"

  The question confused Chesney. "Such as where?" he said.

  Joshua cast a meaningful glance at the dirt floor, then at the demon. "Special assignment, you said."

  Light dawned again in the young man's mind. "You think we've come to throw you out of here? No, no, no." He was shaking his head. "No, I came to find out what happened to you. And to…" he gestured toward the door, "your world."

  Relief showed on Joshua's face. "Well," he said, "what happened to me, you can plainly see. What happened to the world, I have no idea. All that my neighbors know about is sheep and gossip. And it's always the same gossip, because it's always the same day."

  He paused as if expecting Chesney to pose a question, but the young man had already had the experience of watching Melda's favorite Bill Murray movie. In fact, he'd seen it three times since they'd become a couple, although when he'd tried to point out the irony in that situation he had discovered that it had somehow eluded his girlfriend.

  Seeing that his visitor intended no response, Joshua said, "Do you understand? Every morning I wake up on that pallet over there, eat some lentil porridge then put the sheep out to pasture. I can watch the sheep or I can visit the neighbors, but they're always doing and saying the same things.

  "The first few days, I didn't notice. Then one day I decided I'd slaughter one of the yearling lambs and have a feast. I invited a few of the neighbors, and they brought some bread and wine and olives, and we had a good time. I saved a couple of honey-barley cakes for breakfast and went to bed. In the morning, the cakes were gone…" – he paused for effect – "but the lamb was back in the fold!"

  Chesney nodded. "And when you tried leaving the village?"

  "I took the Roman road that runs to Jerusalem. I walked all day. When evening came, I wrapped myself in my cloak and slept under a bush. When I woke up, I was right there!" He pointed at the rolled-up sleeping mat and shook his head. "Another time, I sat up all night. When morning came, I let the sheep out then went to visit Mordecai, over there. We had the same conversation we always have, but I couldn't tell if it was day repeating itself, or just him.

  "I came back and took a nap. When I woke up…" His hand gestured at the pallet, and his shoulders executed an elegant shrug.

  Chesney had seen enough. He stood up, Because he had been thoroughly trained by Letitia Arnstruther, he said, "Thank you for your hospitality. "We should be getting back."

  "Stay and have another cup of wine," said the man. "Where is it you come from?" He seemed anxious to prolong the encounter, and even Chesney could understand why. "Not Heaven, or you wouldn't have that." He indicated the demon. "But you say you're not from Hell. So what does that leave?"

  "The world," the young man said.

  Puzzlement clouded Joshua's face. "But the world has ended," he said. "Not the way I expected, to be sure, but it has definitely come to an end."

  Chesney did not want to have to explain. Despite the efforts of experts in his childhood, he had never become adept at anticipating other people's emotional reactions to the things he said and did. But even he could recognize that for Joshua to learn that he was trapped in a discarded draft of a divinely written book would not be a positive experience. On the other hand, he thought, the man would wake up tomorrow and probably put the whole thing down to a bad dream.

  He sat down again and accepted the refilled wooden cup. "It's a long story," he said.

  "Good," said the other man. He repositioned himself on the stool so that his back was against the table, crossed one knee over the other and interlinked his fingers on his lap. "Let's hear it."

  Joshua was an intelligent and motivated listener. As a storyteller, Chesney was used to being told to skip over what most people thought of as too much detail, but Joshua kept interrupting him to have some event in the story amplified or put into context. It had been midafternoon when the young man and his demon had arrived in Nazareth; by the time he had told the full tale of his adventures and undertakings, the sun was disappearing behind the hill he had appeared on.

  He finished with, "And so I had Xaphan bring me here so I could see for myself what had happened to you."

  Joshua was silent for quite a while, chin sunk upon his chest, arms folded across the end of his beard. He extended his legs, crossed one ankle over the other and regarded his calloused feet as if they had become a disappointment to him. Finally, he heaved a sigh that contained more than a hint of dissatisfaction and said, "Another book. Well, that makes sense, I suppose. And this time some of you know what's going on. I wish that had been the case back when I was walking the roads."

  "I think," said Chesney, "that at that point in the writing process, he wasn't ready to let the characters in on the nature of the story."

  "Huh," said the other man. He looked at the demon, which had drifted out into the yard, then back to Chesney. "That thing had the power to bring you here?"

  "Yes."

  "And presumably the power to take you away again."

  "Presumably."

  Joshua looked around the darkening room, at the dying embers in the hearth, the rolled-up pallet in the alcove. "Then how about," he said, "you take me with you?"

  And suddenly, Chesney was in a pool of light. He asked Joshua a question, and the prophet's answer was, "Why not? It beats what I'm doing now."

  "Don't be a wise guy," said Xaphan, when they put the matter to the demon.

  "Whatever I want you to do," Chesney said, "that's what your orders are."

  "Long as you don't break the rules."

  "This doesn't break a rule. Hell isn't fighting Hell."

  "Yeah, but–"

  "No yeah-buts," said the young man. The situation had become clear to him the moment Joshua of Nazareth had said,
take me with you
. "You're covered," he told the demon.

  Xaphan subsided. "You're the boss." The fiend clamped its weasel jaws around its Churchill cigar and blew smoke out of its slitted nostrils.

  "They didn't do that when I used to cast them out," said Joshua.

  "It's another long story," said Chesney. "You'll see when we get there. The main thing is, do we have a deal?"

  "Oh, yes," said the bearded man. "I'm happy to do it. It will be like old times."

  "Not quite," said Chesney. "A lot has changed."

  A sad smile appeared within the whiskers. "That's all right. So have I."

  "Anything you want to bring with you?" Chesney said.

  Joshua shook his head, then said, "On second thought." He picked up the shepherd's crook from beside the doorway. "In case I need to earn a living," he said. "Being a prophet never paid much."