Small Gods (7 page)

I’m on my back, and getting hotter, and I’m going to
die
…

And yet…and yet…that bloody eagle had dropped him on a compost heap. Some kind of clown, that eagle. A whole place built of rocks on a rock in a rocky place, and he landed on the one thing that’d break his fall without breaking him as well. And really close to a believer.

Odd, that. Made you wonder if it wasn’t some kind of divine providence, except that you
were
divine providence…and on your back, getting hotter, preparing to
die
…

That man who’d turned him over. That expression on that mild face. He’d remember that. That expression, not of cruelty, but of some different level of being. That expression of terrible
peace
…

A shadow crossed the sun. Om squinted up into the face of Lu-Tze, who gazed at him with gentle, upside-down compassion. And then turned him the right way up. And then picked up his broom and wandered off, without a second glance.

Om sagged, catching his breath. And then brightened up.

Someone up there likes me, he thought. And it’s Me.

Sergeant Simony waited until he was back in his own quarters before he unfolded his own scrap of paper.

He was not at all surprised to find it marked with a small drawing of a turtle. He was the lucky one.

He’d lived for a moment like this. Someone had to bring back the writer of the Truth, to be a symbol for the movement. It had to be him. The only shame was that he couldn’t kill Vorbis.

But that had to happen where it could be seen.

One day. In front of the Temple. Otherwise no one would
believe
.

Om stumped along a sandy corridor.

He’d hung around a while after Brutha’s disappearance. Hanging around is another thing tortoises are very good at. They’re practically world champions.

Bloody useless boy, he thought. Served himself right for trying to talk to a barely coherent novice.

Of course, the skinny old one hadn’t been able to hear him. Nor had the chef. Well, the old one was probably deaf. As for the cook…Om made a note that, when he was restored to his full godly powers, a special fate was going to lie in wait for the cook. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was going to be, but it was going to involve boiling water and probably carrots would come into it somewhere.

He enjoyed the thought of that for a moment. But where did it leave him? It left him in this wretched garden, as a tortoise. He knew how he’d got
in
—he glared in dull terror at the tiny dot in the sky that the eye of
memory knew was an eagle—and he’d better find a more terrestrial way out unless he wanted to spend the next month hiding under a melon leaf.

Another thought struck him. Good eating!

When he had his power again, he was going to spend
quite some time
devising a few new hells. And a couple of fresh Precepts, too. Thou shalt not eat of the Meat of the Turtle. That was a good one. He was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. Perspective, that’s what it was.

And if he’d thought of one like Thou Shalt Bloody Well Pick up Any Distressed Tortoises and Carry Them Anywhere They Want Unless, And This is Important, You’re an Eagle a few years ago, he wouldn’t be in this trouble now.

Nothing else for it. He’d have to find the Cenobiarch himself. Someone like a High Priest would be bound to be able to hear him.

And he’d be in this place somewhere. High Priests tended to stay put. He should be easy enough to find. And while he might currently be a tortoise, Om was still a god. How hard could it be?

He’d have to go upwards. That’s what a hierarchy meant. You found the top man by going upwards.

Wobbling slightly, his shell jerking from side to side, the former Great God Om set off to explore the citadel erected to his greater glory.

He couldn’t help noticing things had changed a lot in three thousand years.

“Me?”
said Brutha. “But, but—”

“I don’t believe he means to punish you,” said Nhumrod. “Although punishment is what you richly deserve, of course. We
all
richly deserve,” he added piously.

“But
why?
”

“—why? He said he just wants to talk to you.”

“But there is
nothing
I could possibly say that a quisitor wants to hear!” wailed Brutha.

“—Hear. I am sure you are not questioning the deacon’s wishes,” said Nhumrod.

“No. No. Of course not,” said Brutha. He hung his head.

“Good boy,” said Nhumrod. He patted as far up Brutha’s back as he could reach. “Just you trot along,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be all right.” And then, because he too had been brought up in habits of honesty, he added, “Probably all right.”

There were few steps in the Citadel. The progress of the many processions that marked the complex rituals of Great Om demanded long, gentle slopes. Such steps as there were, were low enough to encompass the faltering steps of very old men. And there were so many very old men in the Citadel.

Sand blew in all the time from the desert. Drifts built up on the steps and in the courtyards, despite everything that an army of brush-wielding novices could do.

But a tortoise has very inefficient legs.

“Thou Shall Build Shallower Steps,” he hissed, hauling himself up.

Feet thundered past him, a few inches away. This was one of the main thoroughfares of the Citadel, leading to the Place of Lamentation, and was trodden by thousands of pilgrims every day.

Once or twice an errant sandal caught his shell and spun him around.

“
Your feet to fly from your body and be buried in a termite mound!
” he screamed.

It made him feel a little better.

Another foot clipped him and slid him across the stones. He fetched up, with a clang, against a curved metal grille set low in one wall. Only a lightning grab with his jaws stopped him slipping through it. He ended up hanging by his mouth over a cellar.

A tortoise has incredibly powerful jaw muscles. He swayed a bit, legs wobbling. All right. A tortoise in a crevassed, rocky landscape was used to this sort of thing. He just had to get a leg hooked…

Faint sounds drew themselves to his attention. There was the clink of metal, and then a very soft whimper.

Om swiveled his eye around.

The grille was high in one wall of a very long, low room. It was brightly illuminated by the light-wells that ran everywhere through the Citadel.

Vorbis had made a point of that. The inquisitors shouldn’t work in the shadows, he said, but in the light.

Where they could see, very clearly, what they were doing.

So could Om.

He hung from the grille for some time, unable to take his eye off the row of benches.

On the whole, Vorbis discouraged red-hot irons, spiked chains, and things with drills and big screws on, unless it was for a public display on an important Fast day. It was amazing what you could do, he always said, with a simple knife…

But many of the inquisitors liked the old ways best.

After a while, Om very slowly hauled himself up to the grille, neck muscles twitching. Like a creature with its mind on something else, the tortoise hooked first one front leg over a bar, then another. His back legs waggled for a while, and then he hooked a claw on to the rough stonework.

He strained for a moment and then pulled himself back into the light.

He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet. He had no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly because he was thinking. Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.

Anyone could go to the Place of Lamentation. It was one of the great freedoms of Omnianism.

There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His
disapproval
. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was
right
that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.

But there were always the improvident, the stupid, and those who, because of some flaw or oversight in this life or a past one, were not even able to afford a pinch of incense. And the Great God, in His wisdom and mercy as filtered through His priests, had made provision for them.

Prayers and entreaties could be offered up in the Place of Lamentation. They would assuredly be heard. They might even be heeded.

Behind the Place, which was a square two hundred meters across, rose the Great Temple itself.

There, without a shadow of a doubt, the God listened.

Or somewhere close, anyway…

Thousands of pilgrims visited the Place every day.

A heel knocked Om’s shell, bouncing him off the wall. On the rebound a crutch caught the edge of his carapace and whirled him away into the crowd, spinning like a coin. He bounced up against the bedroll of an old woman who, like many others, reckoned that the efficacy of her petition was increased by the amount of time she spent in the square.

The God blinked muzzily. This was nearly as bad as eagles. It was nearly as bad as the cellar…no, perhaps nothing was as bad as the cellar…

He caught a few words before another passing foot kicked him away.

“The drought has been on our village for three years…a little rain, oh Lord?”

Rotating on the top of his shell, vaguely wondering if the right answer might stop people kicking him, the Great God muttered, “No problem.”

Another foot bounced him, unseen by any of the pious, between the forest of legs. The world was a blur.

He caught an ancient voice, steeped in hopelessness, saying, “Lord, Lord, why must my son be taken to join your Divine Legion? Who now will tend the farm? Could you not take some other boy?”

“Don’t worry about it,” squeaked Om.

A sandal caught him under his tail and flicked him several yards across the square. No one was looking down. It was generally believed that staring fixedly at the golden horns on the temple roof while uttering the prayer gave it added potency. Where the presence of the tortoise was dimly registered as a bang on the ankle, it was disposed of by an automatic prod with the other foot.

“…my wife, who is sick with the…”

“Right!”

Kick—

“…make clean the well in our village, which is foul with…”

“You got it!”

Kick—

“…every year the locusts come, and…”

“I promise, only…!”

Kick—

“…lost upon the seas these five months…”

“…stop kicking me!”

The tortoise landed, right side up, in a brief, clear space.

Visible…

So much of animal life is the recognition of pattern, the shapes of hunter and hunted. To the casual eye the forest is, well, just forest; to the eye of the dove it is so much unimportant fuzzy green background to the hawk which
you
did not notice on the branch of a tree. To the tiny dot of the hunting buzzard in the heights, the whole panorama of the world is just a fog compared to the scurrying prey in the grass.

From his perch on the Horns themselves, the eagle leapt into the sky.

Fortunately, the same awareness of shapes that made the tortoise so prominent in a square full of scurrying humans made the tortoise’s one eye swivel upwards in dread anticipation.

Eagles are single-minded creatures. Once the idea of lunch is fixed in their mind, it tends to remain there until satisfied.

There were two Divine Legionaries outside Vorbis’s quarters. They looked sideways at Brutha as he knocked timorously at the door, as if looking for a reason to assault him.

A small gray priest opened the door and ushered Brutha into a small, barely furnished room. He pointed meaningfully at a stool.

Brutha sat down. The priest vanished behind a curtain. Brutha took one glance around the room and—

Blackness engulfed him. Before he could move, and Brutha’s reflexes were not well coordinated at the best of times, a voice by his ear said, “Now, brother, do not panic. I order you not to panic.”

There was cloth in front of Brutha’s face.

“Just nod, boy.”

Brutha nodded. They put a hood over your face. All the novices knew that. Stories were told in the dormitories. They put a cloth over your face so the inquisitors didn’t know who they were working on…

“Good. Now, we are going into the next room. Be careful where you tread.”

Hands guided him upright and across the floor. Through the mists of incomprehension he felt the brush of the curtain, and then was jolted down some steps and into a sandy-floored room. The hands spun him a few times, firmly but without apparent ill-will, and then led him along a passageway. There was the swish of another curtain, and then the indefinable sense of a larger space.

Afterward, long afterward, Brutha realized: there was no terror. A hood had been slipped over his head in the room of the head of the Quisition, and it never occurred to him to be terrified. Because he had faith.

“There is a stool behind you. Be seated.”

Brutha sat.

“You may remove the hood.”

Brutha removed the hood.

He blinked.

Seated on stools at the far end of the room, with a Holy Legionary on either side of them, were three figures. He recognized the aquiline face of Deacon Vorbis; the other two were a short and stocky man, and a very fat one. Not heavily built, like Brutha, but a genuine lard tub. All three wore plain gray robes.