Small Gods (4 page)

Fri’it’s nervous click was like a whip-crack.

“We have given them our word—”

“There is no truce with unbelievers,” said Vorbis.

“But there are practical considerations,” said Fri’it, as sharply as he dared. “The palace of Ephebe is a labyrinth. I know. There are traps. No one gets in without a guide.”

“How does the guide get in?” said Vorbis.

“I assume he guides himself,” said the general.

“In my experience there is always another way,” said Vorbis. “Into everything, there is always another way. Which the God will show in his own good time, we can be assured of that.”

“Certainly matters would be easier if there was a lack of stability in Ephebe,” said Drunah. “It does indeed harbor certain…elements.”

“And it will be the gateway to the whole of the Turn-wise coast,” said Vorbis.

“Well—”

“The Djel, and then Tsort,” said Vorbis.

Drunah tried to avoid seeing Fri’it’s expression.

“It is our duty,” said Vorbis. “Our holy duty. We must not forget poor Brother Murduck. He was unarmed and alone.”

Brutha’s huge sandals flip-flopped obediently along the stone-flagged corridor toward Brother Nhumrod’s barren cell.

He tried composing messages in his head. Master, there’s a tortoise who says—Master, this tortoise wants—Master, guess what, I heard from this tortoise in the melons that—

Brutha would never have dared to think of himself as
a prophet, but he had a shrewd idea of the outcome of any interview that began in this way.

Many people assumed that Brutha was an idiot. He looked like one, from his round open face to his splayfeet and knock-ankles. He also had the habit of moving his lips while he thought deeply, as if he was rehearsing every sentence. And this was because that was what he was doing. Thinking was not something that came easily to Brutha. Most people think automatically, thoughts dancing through their brains like static electricity across a cloud. At least, that’s how it seemed to him. Whereas he had to construct thoughts a bit at a time, like someone building a wall. A short lifetime of being laughed at for having a body like a barrel and feet that gave the impression that they were about to set out in opposite directions had given him a strong tendency to think very carefully about anything he said.

Brother Nhumrod was prostrate on the floor in front of a statue of Om Trampling the Ungodly, with his fingers in his ears. The voices were troubling him again.

Brutha coughed. He coughed again.

Brother Nhumrod raised his head.

“Brother Nhumrod?” said Brutha.

“What?”

“Er…Brother Nhumrod?”

“What?”

Brother Nhumrod unplugged his ears.

“Yes?” he said testily.

“Um. There’s something you ought to see. In the…in the garden. Brother Nhumrod?”

The master of novices sat up. Brutha’s face was a glowing picture of concern.

“What do you mean?” Brother Nhumrod said.

“In the garden. It’s hard to explain. Um. I found out…where the voices were coming from, Brother Nhumrod. And you did say to be sure and tell you.”

The old priest gave Brutha a sharp look. But if ever there was a person without guile or any kind of subtlety, it was Brutha.

Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

The Citadel had a lot of underground. There were the pits and tunnels of the Quisition. There were cellars and sewers, forgotten rooms, dead ends, spaces behind ancient walls, even natural caves in the bedrock itself.

This was such a cave. Smoke from the fire in the middle of the floor found its way out through a crack in the roof and, eventually, into the maze of uncountable chimneys and light-wells above.

There were a dozen figures in the dancing shadows. They wore rough hoods over nondescript clothes—crude things made of rags, nothing that couldn’t easily be burned after the meeting so that the wandering fingers of the Quisition would find nothing incriminating. Something about the way most of them moved suggested men who were used to carrying weapons. Here and there, clues. A stance. The turn of a word.

On one wall of the cave there was a drawing. It was vaguely oval, with three little extensions at the top—the middle one slightly the largest of the three—and three at the bottom, the middle one of these slightly longer and more pointed. A child’s drawing of a turtle.

“Of course he’ll go to Ephebe,” said a mask. “He
won’t dare not to. He’ll have to dam the river of truth, at its source.”

“We must bail out what we can, then,” said another mask.

“We must kill Vorbis!”

“Not in Ephebe. When that happens, it must happen here. So that people will
know
. When we’re strong enough.”

“Will we ever be strong enough?” said a mask. Its owner clicked his knuckles nervously.

“Even the peasants know there’s something wrong. You can’t stop the truth. Dam the river of truth? Then there are leaks of great force. Didn’t we find out about Murduck? Hah! ‘
Killed in Ephebe
,’ Vorbis said.”

“One of us must go to Ephebe and save the Master. If he really exists.”

“He exists. His name is on the book.”

“Didactylos. A strange name. It means Two-Fingered, you know.”

“They must honor him in Ephebe.”

“Bring him back here, if possible. And the Book.”

One of the masks seemed hesitant. His knuckles clicked again.

“But will people rally behind…a book? People need more than a book. They’re peasants. They can’t read.”

“But they can listen!”

“Even so…they need to be shown…they need a symbol…”

“We have one!”

Instinctively, every masked figure turned to look at the drawing on the wall, indistinct in the firelight but graven on their minds. They were looking at the truth, which can often impress.

“The Turtle Moves!”

“The Turtle Moves!”

“The Turtle Moves!”

The leader nodded.

“And now,” he said, “we will draw lots…”

The Great God Om waxed wroth, or at least made a spirited attempt. There is a limit to the amount of wroth that can be waxed one inch from the ground, but he was right up against it.

He silently cursed a beetle, which is like pouring water onto a pond. It didn’t seem to make any difference, anyway. The beetle plodded away.

He cursed a melon unto the eighth generation, but nothing happened. He tried a plague of boils. The melon just sat there, ripening slightly.

Just because he was temporarily embarrassed, the whole world thought it could take advantage. Well, when Om got back to his rightful shape and power, he told himself, Steps would be Taken. The tribes of Beetles and Melons would wish they’d never been created. And something really horrible would happen to all eagles. And…and there would be a holy commandment involving the planting of more lettuces…

By the time the big boy arrived back with the waxy-skinned man, the Great God Om was in no mood for pleasantries. Besides, from a tortoise-eye viewpoint even the most handsome human is only a pair of feet, a distant pointy head, and, somewhere up there, the wrong end of a pair of nostrils.

“What’s this?” he snarled.

“This is Brother Nhumrod,” said Brutha. “Master of the novices. He is very important.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to bring me some fat old ped
erast!” shouted the voice in his head. “Your eyeballs will be spitted on shafts of fire for this!”

Brutha knelt down.

“I can’t go to the High Priest,” he said, as patiently as possible. “Novices aren’t even allowed in the Great Temple except on special occasions. I’d be Taught the Error of My Ways by the Quisition if I was caught. It’s the Law.”

“Stupid fool!” the tortoise shouted.

Nhumrod decided that it was time to speak.

“Novice Brutha,” he said, “for what reason are you talking to a small tortoise?”

“Because—” Brutha paused. “Because it’s talking to me…isn’t it?”

Brother Nhumrod looked down at the small, one-eyed head poking out of the shell.

He was, by and large, a kindly man. Sometimes demons and devils did put disquieting thoughts in his head, but he saw to it that they stayed there and he did not in any literal sense deserve to be called what the tortoise called him which, in fact, if he had heard it, he would have thought was something to do with feet. And he was well aware that it was possible to hear voices attributed to demons and, sometimes, gods. Tortoises was a new one. Tortoises made him feel worried about Brutha, whom he’d always thought of as an amiable lump who did, without any sort of complaint, anything asked of him. Of course, many novices volunteered for cleaning out the cesspits and bull cages, out of a strange belief that holiness and piety had something to do with being up to your knees in dirt. Brutha never volunteered, but if he was told to do something he did it, not out of any desire to impress, but simply because he’d been told. And now he was talking to tortoises.

“I think I have to tell you, Brutha,” he said, “that it is not talking.”

“You can’t hear it?”

“I cannot hear it, Brutha.”

“It told me it was…” Brutha hesitated. “It told me it was the Great God.”

He flinched. Grandmother would have hit him with something heavy now.

“Ah. Well, you see, Brutha,” said Brother Nhumrod, twitching gently, “this sort of thing is not unknown among young men recently Called to the Church. I daresay you heard the voice of the Great God when you were Called, didn’t you? Mmm?”

Metaphor was lost on Brutha. He remembered hearing the voice of his grandmother. He hadn’t been Called so much as Sent. But he nodded anyway.

“And in your…enthusiasm, it’s only natural that you should think you hear the Great God talking to you,” Nhumrod went on.

The tortoise bounced up and down.

“Smite you with thunderbolts!” it screamed.

“I find healthy exercise is the thing,” said Nhumrod. “And plenty of cold water.”

“Writhe on the spikes of damnation!”

Nhumrod reached down and picked up the tortoise, turning it over. Its legs waggled angrily.

“How did it get here, mmm?”

“I don’t know, Brother Nhumrod,” said Brutha dutifully.

“Your hand to wither and drop off!” screamed the voice in his head.

“There’s very good eating on one of these, you know,” said the master of novices. He saw the expression on Brutha’s face.

“Look at it like this,” he said. “Would the Great God Om”—holy horns—“
ever
manifest Himself in such a lowly creature as this? A bull, yes, of course, an eagle, certainly, and I think on one occasion a swan…but a
tortoise
?”

“Your sexual organs to sprout wings and fly away!”

“After all,” Nhumrod went on, oblivious to the secret chorus in Brutha’s head, “what kind of miracles could a tortoise do? Mmm?”

“Your ankles to be crushed in the jaws of giants!”

“Turn lettuce into gold, perhaps?” said Brother Nhumrod, in the jovial tones of those blessed with no sense of humor. “Crush ants underfoot? Ahaha.”

“Haha,” said Brutha dutifully.

“I shall take it along to the kitchen, out of your way,” said the master of novices. “They make
ex
cellent soup. And then you’ll hear no more voices, depend upon it. Fire cures all Follies, yes?”

“Soup?”

“Er…” said Brutha.

“Your intestines to be wound around a tree until you are sorry!”

Nhumrod looked around the garden. It seemed to be full of melons and pumpkins and cucumbers. He shuddered.

“Lots of cold water, that’s the thing,” he said. “Lots and lots.” He focused on Brutha again. “Mmm?”

He wandered off toward the kitchens.

The Great God Om was upside down in a basket in one of the kitchens, half-buried under a bunch of herbs and some carrots.

An upturned tortoise will try to right itself firstly by sticking out its neck to its fullest extent and trying to use
its head as a lever. If this doesn’t work it will wave its legs frantically, in case this will rock it upright.

An upturned tortoise is the ninth most pathetic thing in the entire multiverse.

An upturned tortoise
who knows what’s going to happen to it next
is, well, at least up there at number four.

The quickest way to kill a tortoise for the pot is to plunge it into boiling water.

Kitchens and storerooms and craftsmen’s workshops belonging to the Church’s civilian population honeycombed the Citadel.
*
This was only one of them, a smoky-ceilinged cellar whose focal point was an arched fireplace. Flames roared up the flue. Turnspit dogs trotted in their treadmills. Cleavers rose and fell on the chopping blocks.

Off to one side of the huge hearth, among various other blackened cauldrons, a small pot of water was already beginning to seethe.

“The worms of revenge to eat your blackened nostrils!” screamed Om, twitching his legs violently. The basket rocked.

A hairy hand reached in and removed the herbs.

“Hawks to peck your liver!”

A hand reached in again and took the carrots.

“Afflict you with a thousand cuts!”

A hand reached in and took the Great God Om.

“The cannibal fungi of—!”

“Shut up!” hissed Brutha, shoving the tortoise under his robe.

He sidled toward the door, unnoticed in the general culinary chaos.

One of the cooks looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Just got to take this back,” Brutha burbled, bringing out the tortoise and waving it helpfully. “Deacon’s orders.”

The cook scowled, and then shrugged. Novices were regarded by one and all as the lowest form of life, but orders from the hierarchy were to be obeyed without question, unless the questioner wanted to find himself faced with more important questions like whether or not it is possible to go to heaven after being roasted alive.

When they were out in the courtyard Brutha leaned against the wall and breathed out.