Small Gods (12 page)

“Our young friend is not a good sailor,” said Vorbis.

“Him! Him! I’d know him anywhere!”

“Lord, I wish I wasn’t a sailor at all,” said Brutha. He felt the box trembling as Om bounced around inside.

“Kill him! Find something sharp! Push him overboard!”

“Come with us to the prow, Brutha,” said Vorbis. “There are many interesting things to be seen, according to the captain.”

The captain gave the frozen smirk of those caught between a rock and a hard place. Vorbis could always supply both.

Brutha trailed behind the other three, and risked a whisper.

“What’s the matter?”

“Him! The bald one! Push him over the side!”

Vorbis half-turned, caught Brutha’s embarrassed attention, and smiled.

“We will have our minds broadened, I am sure,” he said. He turned back to the captain, and pointed to a large bird gliding down the face of the waves.

“The Pointless Albatross,” said the captain promptly. “Flies from the Hub to the Ri—” he faltered. But Vorbis was gazing with apparent affability at the view.

“He turned me over in the sun!
Look at his mind!
”

“From one pole of the world to the other, every year,” said the captain. He was sweating slightly.

“Really?” said Vorbis. “Why?”

“No one knows.”

“Excepting the God, of course,” said Vorbis.

The captain’s face was a sickly yellow.

“Of course. Certainly,” he said.

“Brutha?” shouted the tortoise. “Are you listening to me?”

“And over there?” said Vorbis.

The sailor followed his extended arm.

“Oh. Flying fish,” he said. “But they don’t really fly,” he added quickly. “They just build up speed in the water and glide a little way.”

“One of the God’s marvels,” said Vorbis. “Infinite variety, eh?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the captain. Relief was crossing his face now, like a friendly army.

“And the things down there?” said the exquisitor.

“Them? Porpoises,” said the captain. “Sort of a fish.”

“Do they always swim around ships like this?”

“Often. Certainly. Especially in the waters off Ephebe.”

Vorbis leaned over the rail, and said nothing. Simony was staring at the horizon, his face absolutely immobile. This left a gap in the conversation which the captain, very stupidly, sought to fill.

“They’ll follow a ship for days,” he said.

“Remarkable.” Another pause, a tar pit of silence ready to snare the mastodons of unthinking comment. Earlier exquisitors had shouted and ranted confessions out of people. Vorbis never did that. He just dug deep silences in front of them.

“They seem to like them,” said the captain. He glanced nervously at Brutha, who was trying to shut the tortoise’s voice out of his head. There was no help there.

Vorbis came to his aid instead.

“This must be very convenient on long voyages,” he said.

“Uh. Yes?” said the captain.

“From the provisions point of view,” said Vorbis.

“My lord, I don’t quite—”

“It must be like having a traveling larder,” said Vorbis.

The captain smiled. “Oh no, lord. We don’t eat them.”

“Surely not? They look quite wholesome to
me
.”

“Oh, but you know the old saying, lord…”

“Saying?”

“Oh, they say that after they die, the souls of dead sailors become—”

The captain saw the abyss ahead, but the sentence had plunged on with a horrible momentum of its own.

For a while there was no sound but the zip of the waves, the distant splash of the porpoises, and the heaven-shaking thundering of the captain’s heart.

Vorbis leaned back on the rail.

“But of course
we
are not prey to such superstitions,” he said lazily.

“Well, of course,” said the captain, clutching at this straw. “Idle sailor talk. If ever I hear it again I shall have the man flog—”

Vorbis was looking past his ear.

“I say! Yes, you there!” he said.

One of the sailors nodded.

“Fetch me a harpoon,” said Vorbis.

The man looked from him to the captain and then scuttled off obediently.

“But, ah, uh, but your lordship should not, uh, ha, attempt such sport,” said the captain. “Ah. Uh. A harpoon is a dangerous weapon in untrained hands, I am afraid you might do yourself an injury—”

“But
I
will not be using it,” said Vorbis.

The captain hung his head and held out his hand for the harpoon.

Vorbis patted him on the shoulder.

“And then,” he said, “you shall entertain us to lunch. Won’t he, sergeant?”

Simony saluted. “Just as you say, sir.”

“Yes.”

Brutha lay on his back among sails and ropes somewhere under the decking. It was hot, and the air smelled of all air anywhere that has ever come into contact with bilges.

Brutha hadn’t eaten all day. Initially he’d been too ill to. Then he just hadn’t.

“But being cruel to animals doesn’t mean he’s a…bad person,” he ventured, the harmonics of his tone suggesting that even he didn’t believe this. It had been quite a small porpoise.

“He turned me on to my
back,
” said Om.

“Yes, but humans are more important than animals,” said Brutha.

“This is a point of view often expressed by humans,” said Om.

“Chapter IX, verse 16 of the book of—” Brutha began.

“Who cares what any book says?” screamed the tortoise.

Brutha was shaken.

“But you never told any of the prophets that people should be kind to animals,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about that. Not when you were…bigger. You don’t want people to be kind to animals because they’re animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be
you
.”

“That’s not a bad idea!”

“Besides, he’s been kind to me. He didn’t have to be.”

“You think that? Is that what you think? Have you looked at the man’s
mind?
”

“Of course I haven’t! I don’t know how to!”

“You don’t?”

“No! Humans can’t do—”

Brutha paused. Vorbis seemed to do it. He only had to look at someone to know what wicked thoughts they harbored. And grandmother had been the same.

“Humans can’t do it, I’m sure,” he said. “We can’t read minds.”

“I don’t mean
reading
them, I mean
looking
at them,” said Om. “Just seeing the shape of them. You can’t
read
a mind. You might as well try and read a river. But seeing the shape’s
easy
. Witches can do it, no trouble.”

“‘The way of the witch shall be as a path strewn with thorns,’” said Brutha.

“Ossory?” said Om.

“Yes. But of course you’d know,” said Brutha.

“Never heard it before in my life,” said the tortoise bitterly. “It was what you might call an educated guess.”

“Whatever you say,” said Brutha, “I still know that you can’t truly be Om. The God would not talk like that about His chosen ones.”

“I never chose anyone,” said Om. “They chose themselves.”

“If you’re really Om, stop being a tortoise.”

“I told you, I can’t. You think I haven’t tried? Three years! Most of that time I thought I
was
a tortoise.”

“Then perhaps you were. Maybe you’re just a tortoise who
thinks
he’s a god.”

“Nah. Don’t try philosophy again. Start thinking like
that and you end up thinking maybe you’re just a butterfly dreaming it’s a whelk or something. No. One day all I had on my mind was the amount of walking necessary to get to the nearest plant with decent low-growing leaves, the next…I had all this memory filling up my head. Three years before the shell. No, don’t you tell me I’m a tortoise with big ideas.”

Brutha hesitated. He knew it was wicked to ask, but he wanted to know what the memory
was
. Anyway, could it be wicked? If the God was sitting there talking to you, could you say anything truly wicked? Face to face? Somehow, that didn’t seem so bad as saying something wicked when he was up on a cloud or something.

“As far as I can recall,” said Om, “I’d intended to be a big white bull.”

“Trampling the infidel,” said Brutha.

“Not my basic intention, but no doubt some trampling could have been arranged. Or a swan, I thought. Something impressive. Three years later, I wake up and it turns out I’ve been a tortoise. I mean, you don’t get much lower.” Careful, careful…you need his help, but don’t tell him everything. Don’t tell him what you suspect.

“When did you start think—When did you remember all this?” said Brutha, who found the phenomenon of forgetting a strange and fascinating one, as other men might find the idea of flying by flapping your arms.

“About two hundred feet above your vegetable garden,” said Om, “which is not a point where it’s fun to become sapient, I’m here to tell you.”

“But why?” said Brutha. “Gods don’t have to stay tortoises unless they want to!”

“I don’t know,” lied Om.

If he works it out himself I’m done for, he thought.
This is a chance in a million. If I get it wrong, it’s back to a life where happiness is a leaf you can reach.

Part of him screamed: I’m a god! I don’t have to think like this! I don’t have to put myself in the power of a human!

But another part, the part that could remember exactly what being a tortoise for three years had been like, whispered: no. You have to. If you want to be up there again. He’s stupid and gormless and he’s not got a drop of ambition in his big flabby body. And this is what you’ve got to work with…

The god part said: Vorbis would have been better. Be rational. A mind like that could do anything!

He turned me on my back!

No, he turned a
tortoise
on its back.

Yes. Me.

No. You’re a god.

Yes, but a persistently tortoise-shaped one.

If he had known you were a god…

But Om remembered Vorbis’s absorbed expression, in a pair of gray eyes in front of a mind as impenetrable as a steel ball. He’d never seen a mind shaped like that on anything walking upright. There was someone who probably
would
turn a god on his back, just to see what would happen. Someone who’d overturn the universe, without thought of consequence, for the sake of the knowledge of what happened when the universe was flat on its back…

But what
he
had to work with was Brutha, with a mind as incisive as a meringue. And if Brutha found out that…

Or if Brutha died…

“How are you feeling?” said Om.

“Ill.”

“Snuggle down under the sails a bit more,” said Om. “You don’t want to catch a chill.”

There’s got to be someone else, he thought. It can’t be just him who…the rest of the thought was so terrible he tried to block it from his mind, but he couldn’t.

…it can’t be just him who believes in me.

Really in me. Not in a pair of golden horns. Not in a great big building. Not in the dread of hot iron and knives. Not in paying your temple dues because everyone else does. Just in the fact that the Great God Om really exists.

And now he’s got himself involved with the most unpleasant mind I’ve ever seen, someone who kills people to see if they die. An eagle kind of person if ever there was one…

Om was aware of a mumbling.

Brutha was lying facedown on the deck.

“What are you doing?” said Om.

Brutha turned his head.

“Praying.”

“That’s good. What for?”

“You don’t
know?
”

“Oh.”

If Brutha dies…

The tortoise shuddered in its shell. If Brutha died, then it could already hear in its mind’s ear the soughing of the wind in the deep, hot places of the desert.

Where the small gods went.

Where do gods come from? Where do they go?

Some attempt to answer this was made by the religious philosopher Koomi of Smale in his book
Ego-Video Liber Deorum
, which translates into the vernacular roughly as
Gods: A Spotter’s Guide
.

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?

And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn’t in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to thinks like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.

This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn’t looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts’ Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.

So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

And yet there seemed to be a lot of lesser gods around the place. Koomi’s theory was that gods come into being and grow and flourish
because they are believed in
. Belief itself is the food of the gods. Initially, when mankind lived in small primitive tribes, there were probably millions of gods. Now there tended to be only a few very important ones—local gods of thunder and love, for example, tended to run together like pools of mercury as the small primitive tribes joined up and became huge, powerful primitive tribes with more sophisticated weapons. But any god could join. Any god could start small. Any god could grow in stature as its believers in
creased. And dwindle as they decreased. It was like a great big game of ladders and snakes.