The Deliverer Read Online Free PDF Page B

circle, trying to decide what to do.
    Eventually, Satan ceased to be entertained by my predicament and dispatched one of the other demons who caught me by the tail as I flew past and then dragged me back to His Awfulness. The next thing I knew, it was Satan who was holding me by the tail, seething into my upside down face.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who I was to find,” I whimpered.
    “Why do I let you live?” he snarled at me.
    I know a rhetorical question when I hear one, so I didn’t answer, but, oh, how I would have liked to tell him what I thought about the way he ran things. Just once I wished I could stand up to him. I wished anybody would, but nobody dared. He slammed me to the floor and continued berating me, belittling every single thing I’d ever done as if I’d never once gotten anything right. I wanted to remind him how over the centuries of human history I had an exceptional track record for being right. Not that he would have cared anyway.
    “Find Moses, you idiot,” he steamed. “Who else did your pitiful mind think I meant? He’s living in the desert with the Midianites.”
    “Oh, I really doubt that, sir,” my mouth uttered before my brain engaged. “Not that you could be wrong, you understand, but it’s quite unlikely Moses would still be alive after forty years or we would have surely heard something from him by now. And as for living with the Midianites? Highly doubtful, if you please, sir. They don’t like Egyptians, and they don’t like Hebrews, so there you go. Whoever Moses thought he was or claimed to be, it wouldn’t matter. No one of either race could have lasted long with the Midianites.”
    It was Tammuz who hissed at me and said, “If you had been doing your job, imbecile, you would know Moses is married to Zipporah, the daughter of a Midianite priest.”
    How could I have missed such a thing? Tammuz interacted on a regular basis with the territorial principalities over Midian, and if something strange was going on in their territory, they would be sure to know. One of those demons must have come across Moses somewhere in the desert lands and reported it to Tammuz. I needed to think of something fast.
    “But what of it?” I blurted out as if Tammuz’s news flash were no news at all. “If Moses married the daughter of a Midianite priest, there must have been a religious ceremony of some kind.”
    “And so?” Satan asked.
    “And so it could not have been kosher, so to speak. Moses would be in violation of the no-god-but-Yahweh rule or at least complicit in the goings-on.”
    They all looked at me as if I hadn’t finished a sentence, so I knew they hadn’t put the obvious two and two together.
    “If Moses had ritual with another god,” I spoke slowly so they’d understand, “it means he abdicated, flunked the test, jumped the fence, whatever you want to call it. He’s forfeited his opportunity to be the deliverer.”
    It was as if I hadn’t said a word.
    Once Satan made up his mind about something, he wouldn’t change it regardless of evidence to the contrary or even if it was in his own interest to do so. Why? you ask. Well, let me just tell you it wasn’t because he was always right or even usually right. The extraordinarily stupid idea of rebelling against God to start with and getting all of us tossed out of paradise into the ghetto of the second heaven ought to be proof enough of that.
    No, the reason Satan never changed his mind was because God never changed His. Never mind the simple fact that God was always right, always thinking ahead, always moving the earth forward through time (though toward what I do not know), while Satan was rarely right. He spent most of his time wasting everyone else’s and overreacting to the last thing that happened. This whole manhunt was a case in point. But nothing would do except for me to launch out on a pointless search for Moses.
    “And if I find him?”
    Satan glared, and I tried again. “ When I find him”—